Love Potion

A Fatiguing First Day

Ermis expertly grabbed the hissling spangledash by its neck and tail (Viper rolling his eyes all the way) and dumped it into another old trough. Amadeus awarded Creepseek ten points and Ermis nodded nonchalantly. Behind the haggard old man, Troy was doing an inaccurate but very amusing imitation of Ermis, flexing his arms massively and puckering his lips, causing Ermis to try hard to swallow his giggles. When Amadeus turned around with inquisitive eyebrows, Troy blinked and picked at the grass casually.

My eyes, however, were still anchored unmovably on Ermis. I stared him down to the number of spots on his face and inches short his trousers were, to show mismatched and holey socks. I was marvelling his pale eyes again when quite startlingly he, Ermis, Ermis Bell, Ermis Bell from the Greamelts books, looked back at me - catching my eyes, seeing me back. He tilted his eyebrow. It was bizarre. I still felt as if I was the only one watching him, following him on his adventures, reading of him. It was alarming for him to suddenly look back at me, perceive me, see me too. His lip quirked a little when he noticed my stares, but returned his attention quickly to Amadeus.

The blushes I got then did not stop as me and Persephone walked back up to the Castle, behind the rest of the students. My eyes were rigid on the back of Ermis' head. I only stopped staring when Persephone waved a freckled arm in front of me.

"Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo!" she squeaked, skipping in front of me. "You have a terrible crush on Ermis!"

"What?" I went blankly.

"You were staring at him in lesson, and you're staring at him now. You must like him, right? Have you ever actually talked to him? Careful, Pip says he has a thing for Raphina Connors... she's in the year above and she's so beautiful... I'm not sure how they got to be friends..."

I knew exactly how they got to be friends. In the third book, The Snatching of the Childs, Ermis painfully likes a girl called Maggie. Strange events are happening at the time, the disappearance of first-years. It's when Maggie's sister disappears that Ermis decides to do something about it. Meanwhile, he keeps spotting a suspicious figure with a hood. One day he follows them, and hears a scream from a classroom where he finds a strange girl with a specialty for electricity, dressed like a superhero in brown and blue. He thinks he's caught the child-catcher, but the girl explains that she's been trying to find out why the children are disappearing herself. She'd just then found the culprit, but they and the captured first-year had disappeared into thin air. She names herself Miss Electrique. She wears an enchanted mask that makes her hair blue and static, and changes her facial features. Ermis and Miss Electrique team up and become friends.

At the end of the book its shockingly revealed that the stealer of the children was Maggie, who was threatened by Prospella to do her bidding. Kept in the dungeons, the children were to be sucked of their souls and fed to Prospella to return her strength - they had to be first-years because of their youth and innocence. Being in love with her, Ermis couldn't bring himself to stop Maggie, and Maggie tries to kill him, but Miss Electrique kills Maggie before she can. It's all extremely tragic and Ermis screams at Miss Electrique that he'll never forgive her and never wants to see her again. Miss Electrique lets him punch her, but removes her mask to reveal that she is Raphina Connors. This is a strange shock to Ermis. Raphina and Ermis had had a couple of encounters earlier in the book, when Ermis is dared by Maggie to throw a stone at a window where she stood, and later he asks Raphina to pretend to flirt with him while Maggie was around, which she did for fifty silvings (magist money). Ermis used to approach Raphina a lot just to show off to Maggie, which Raphina didn't mind, just found amusing. She knew she was very pretty and 'helped a heartbroken boy'.

After her big reveal, the two didn't talk to each other, though both missed their strange friendship... Ermis not knowing it was Raphina he was friends with, an older, popular, beautiful girl, and Raphina being friends with the scrawny boy with another identity... Over time Ermis forgave her, and they became friends in their real identities. Now, I'm pretty sure the boy loves her.