Potter's Girl / Butterfly Effect.

48. Dolores Umbitch

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT;

DOLORES UMBITCH

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Cassie did not achieve very much sleep during her first night back at Hogwarts – the oh-so comfortable bed that she had spent most of her nights in since she was twelve seemed to poke into her back like nails, so much so that she actually checked if somebody really had put nails under her sheets.

"You look really angry," Hermione was saying to Harry when Cassie took her seat at the breakfast table. The brunette looked to her in surprise, her eyebrows raised. "And you – did you not sleep well?"

Cassie grunted glumly in reply.

"Seamus reckons Harry and Cassie are lying about You-Know-Who," supplied Ron, biting into a sausage he had speared with his fork. "They had a go last night."

   "Lavender thought so, too," said Hermione with a sigh, looking to Harry with sympathy. Cassie faintly remembered hearing the shrill wails of Lavender from her shower. Whatever Hermione said must have been brutal...

   "Been having a nice little chat with her about whether or not Cass and I are lying, attention-seeking prats, have you?" said Harry loudly.

   "No," said Hermione calmly, "I told her to keep her big fat mouth shut about you, actually." (yes, brutal) "And it would be quite nice if you stopped jumping down Ron's and my throats, Harry."

   "Sorry," said Harry in a low voice, though he was cut off by Cassie, who exhaled a guttural gasp.

   "This bloody newspaper!" she exclaimed, suddenly full of adrenaline. She held that morning's edition of the Daily Prophet in her hands, her grey eyes scanning it intently. "Why, I ought to–"

   "What's it say?" said Ron loudly, setting down his fork and peering over the newspaper.

Cassie laid it flat across the table for Harry and Hermione to see as well;

Cassidy Lupin – friend or foe?

Cassidy Lupin, fourteen, of Hogwarts, is infamous across its stoney interior as the girl who stole the Boy-Who-Lived from Muggle-born witch, Hermione Granger —

("You did not steal my heart!" said Harry hastily.)

– though is there more to Cassidy than meets the eye?

Over the summer holidays, Rolf Scammander, of the Daily Prophet, writes, the Ministry received the single letter that has taken over all Wizarding newspaper companies country-wide; the letter claiming Cassidy Lupin is actually the daughter of notorious and dangerous serial killer, Sirius Black. The Ministry fact-checked this statement; everything came to be true.

Cassidy Lupin, now legally known as Cassiopeia Orion Black–

("How on earth did they know my middle name?")

–claims to have no insight on her devious father's whereabouts, though an unnamed inside source promises that she has been in contact with him since the spring of 1993.

   Cassie did not read further; she had gathered enough information. "How much do you want to bet the unnamed inside source is your brother, Ron?" she said sourly, crumpling up the paper and tossing it across the table. "Honestly, I– I ought to write to them, this very second!" She ripped a piece of parchment from her bag and began scrawling furiously – though, in her anger, the letters ended up being random scribbles that made no true sense. She groaned.