Chapter 32
Taylor really wanted to ditch everything, grab her wand and try the new spells. The book had a lot of useful sounding ones even if several of them she already knew from spying on later year classes, but the ones she didn’t know looked really cool. But alas, she was forbidden from practicing at home.
Instead, it was time for movie night. Her mum had rented Home Alone for them to watch.
Taylor prepared the VHS player while Xeno tried to poke at everything.
“Is that what you call a teevee?” he asked. He didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “I heard it eats muggles’ brains. How fascinating!”
Taylor watched from the corner of her eye her mum guiding the wizard away from the buttons and towards the couch.
“You sit there, and don't touch anything,” she said with her stern voice.
Once Taylor was done, she huddled with the others on the couch.
Xeno, as it turned out, was a horrible movie guest. He commented on everything, all the time.
The tape static, the wizard was sure it was Nargles infesting the magical box. Kevin’s ability to survive alone in his house was the work of instinctual magic, even though there was no magic at all in the movie. The wet bandits, surely weren’t bandits, but investigators trying to find out about the Gillyweed trafficking, and wet bandits was their code-name. How did he come to that conclusion? Taylor had no idea. Not even phone calls escaped his commentary.
“And that’s why they should have taken a two-way mirror with them,” Xeno said after Annette had to pause the movie for the nth time to explain what a telephone was.
After the movie, Taylor fed Nap and Arabelle, then hurried to her room. She got into her pajamas, ready for bed. She hadn’t worn those before, and the silk felt really comfortable. Luna arrived soon after, already dressed in her silk pajamas and carrying a pillow.
“What about your dad?” Taylor asked.
Luna just shook her head and crawled into the bed.
“Have you ever had a pillow fight?” Taylor asked.
Luna shook her head again.
Taylor smiled, grabbing a pillow. She hadn’t ever had a pillow fight either, but she knew the basics.
“Me neither,” she said, then threw the pillow at Luna.
Despite her serene nature, Luna proved to be nimble and a quick study. She ducked out of the way, and after narrowing her eyes, threw her pillow, scoring a hit on Taylor’s nose.
“That’s cheating,” Taylor said. She grabbed the fallen pillow and threw it again. “I’ll get you this time!”
She didn’t. Luna had an uncanny ability to duck under pillows that left Taylor baffled. Taylor also wasn’t having the best of times trying to predict where Luna would move to. She had, without even realising it, been using her bugs to keep track and see where people would move. Now that the house had no bugs whatsoever, she was having trouble following her friend’s movements.
The pillow fighting soon delved into wrestling, then pillow fighting again. Their squeals and laughs got louder and louder.
“Girls,” Annette said, with an exasperated smile on her face. “It’s time to sleep, we don’t want to keep the neighbors awake until morning.”
“Sorry mum.” “Sorry Mrs. Hebert.”
Annette shook her head.
“None of that, Luna. Call me Annette.”
Luna nodded.
Taylor’s mum left, and Taylor decided the game was over. But she was still holding a pillow, it would be a shame to lose the opportunity… so she hit Luna in the back of the head. While Taylor was feeling very proud of herself, Luna tackled her into the bed and started tickling her.
Three minutes later, Annette was at their door again, glaring.
“Sleep, now!”
Xeno only stayed the night of Christmas Eve. He left the morning after, saying there was a lot of work to do on the special Quibbler edition. He was also annoyingly secretive about what the article was about.
“I’ll send you a copy when it is ready,” he said.
The day after Christmas, Annette rounded Taylor for that conversation she knew was coming. Luna was busy watching cartoons with Nap and Arabelle.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the attacks?” her mum asked.
“I didn’t want you to get worried,” Taylor admitted, not looking her mum in the eyes.
“Sweetie, of course I’m going to worry. There’s been an attack on school grounds! What if it was you that had been attacked?”
Taylor stayed silent while her mum paced.
“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
“Yes,” Taylor said, and before her mum could ask, she added. “But it was because I couldn’t put it into the letters.”
Annette nodded. She walked closer to Taylor and hugged her.
“I think Luna knows about my secret,” Taylor said, her voice muffled by her mum’s clothing.
“Did she see you playing with the bugs?”
Taylor shook her head. “No, but she’s very smart. She called me a HereSeer, because she noticed I always know things I shouldn’t.”
Annette sighed.
“I also had to stop a huge nest of giant spiders from killing us.”
“You what?” Her mum’s voice rose a notch.
And so Taylor recounted the whole story about the Heir, the spiders fleeing the castle, meeting a centaur (they’re so cool, mum!), tracking down the giant spider and learning the horror lives under the castle. Taylor had to explain who Salazar Slytherin was, and how Snape was the head of the Slytherin house. From there, she couldn’t help but whine about Snape bullying students and picking on her and Luna, and how she had to hold back the bugs to avoid another ant incident.
“Taylor, is this Snape the one you often complain to me about in your letters?”
Taylor nodded.
“Can you tell me what he has done? I’ll complain to the school.”
Taylor tilted her head. “Mum, I’ve told you everything in the letters.”
“Sweetie, you barely sent me any letters. After the first one, I spent months waiting until you started sending them again.”
“Mum, I sent you letters every day,” Taylor said, still not understanding what was happening.
“You did?”
Taylor nodded. “You answered them every day. I have your letters in my trunk.”
Annette opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Can you get them to me, please?”
Taylor did so. She grabbed all the letters and gave them to her mum.
Annette read them one by one, her face turning uglier with each letter she read.
“I… don’t remember writing any of those,” she whispered.
She got up, hurrying to the living room. Taylor followed, watching as her mum opened a drawer and picked up a stack of letters. Then she went up to her room, with Taylor on her heels. There, from the nightstand drawer, she picked up another letter. The first one Taylor ever sent.
“I kept this one here, because it was your first letter.”
Taylor looked over the letters and her mum was right. Aside from her first one, all the letters she’d sent in the first months were missing.
“Did anything strange happen to you?” Taylor asked.
Annette opened her mouth, closed it. She closed her eyes. “About a month ago, I was late for work, but when I got there, Miria said I had taken the day off.”
Taylor waited, while her mum was still thinking.
“I sent a letter to the school because you were complaining about your professors, and their response didn’t make any sense to me. Their letter said I had contacted the school several times before, but I don’t remember doing it.”
Taylor hugged her mum. The only conclusion she could come up with was that someone, probably from the school, came to her house, stole her mum’s letters and erased her memory.
But why? Was it because her mum sent letters to the school? Had her mum discovered something that people didn’t want her to know? Could wizards make people forget things? No, that was a dumb question. Of course they could. Otherwise magic wouldn’t be a secret.
It made no sense why anyone would do that, and it made Taylor want to set all her bugs on everything. They buzzed and writhed at the edges of her mind and she had to focus so they wouldn’t start swarming towards the house.
“I want to tell Luna about my power,” Taylor said, her voice flat.
Her mum pulled away from the hug, studying Taylor’s face.
“And I blew up Snape’s laboratory because he hurt Luna.”
“You what?” Her mum’s voice cracked on the word. “Taylor. You could have- Why?”
“He hurt Luna,” Taylor said again.
“We are going to talk about this, all of it. But right now I need to- just- let me hold you for a second.”
Taylor was enveloped by a hug again, tighter this time.
It took some more time to explain why Taylor had done what she did, but aside from looking disappointed, her mum didn’t say anything.
“We need to tell the school about this monster under the castle, and this nest of dangerous giant spiders,” her mum said.
“We can’t,” Taylor said.
Her mum searched Taylor’s eyes.
“Taylor-”
“If you tell them, the Headmaster will want to know how you know all that. I’ve… been spying on the whole school.”
Her mum stood up, paced to the window and back, arms crossed. “So I’m supposed to just sit on this, knowing there’s something living under that castle that could have killed you, and say nothing, because telling the truth would get you in trouble.”
“Mum-”
“No, I heard you.” She rubbed her eyes. “But I don’t like it.”
Her mum sighed, heavy and tired.
“… and I might’ve started a legend about a comeuppance curse, to keep the bullies from hurting the other students.”
“Oh, dear,” her mum muttered.
Luna stayed the rest of the week, returning home for the New Year celebration. Taylor didn’t spill her secret yet, preferring to do it at the school. It would be awkward if Luna was creeped out and had to stay in their house after that.
As for the letter mystery, Taylor had no idea who had done it, but her primary suspect was someone from Hogwarts.
Once she was alone with her mum, they went over everything in detail. Taylor told her mum what she remembered from her letters, and they searched the house for any clues, to no avail. They did discover something else was missing. Some of her dad’s paraphernalia stored in the basement had disappeared as well.
The new year came and went, and it was time to return to the school.
This time, Taylor made sure to cover Nap’s cage, that way, people wouldn't be scared of Arabelle. Nap stayed home. The fat owl would have to fly to the school on her own instead of taking the train with Taylor. The stowaways hid beneath Taylor’s robes and she was ready to leave.
She met with Luna and her father in Platform 9¾. Luna looked like her serene self, but Xeno was smiling broadly.
“It’s the best edition of The Quibbler yet,” he said, handing over a copy to Taylor and another to Annette.
She peeked at the cover, and the subtitle certainly was catching.
THE ROT AT HOGWARTS: A SCHOOL CRUSADE AGAINST MAGIC ITSELF?
But there was no time to read, and together with other students they boarded the train, ready to return to the school.
In the days she hadn’t seen her friend, Luna had gotten better. She was almost like when Taylor first met her in this very same train. They talked, played with Arabelle, ate candies purchased from the trolley witch, The Quibbler edition forgotten.
Taylor told Luna about her mum’s lost memories.
“After I returned home, daddy took me to St. Mungo’s. He was worried about me and your mum,” Luna said. “Your mum is too young to be forgetting things. He wanted to take her to St. Mungo’s as well to check if the telly hadn’t eaten too much of her brain, but the hospital doesn’t accept non-magicals.”
Taylor scowled.
“She didn’t forget,” she muttered. “Someone made her forget. I think it was someone from the school.”
That led to another conversation about who, and why the school would want to make Taylor’s mum forget things.
Only once there was nothing else to talk about, Taylor remembered the magazine. Luna sat by her side, she also hadn’t read it yet, and both started reading.
Taylor read the first line of the article, and it was like a stone had dropped in the pit of her stomach, because she remembered writing those very same words to her mum in a letter.
Hogwarts is a magical school, mum. Why are they trying to kill all the magic from it?