Daylight || Harry Potter

Chapter Twenty-One

Unfortunately, things went south.

The Death Eaters had somehow found new allies and attacks started up again, though this time they tried attacking us from the forest. It was lucky that they hadn't accounted for the beings that lived in the forest and were more than willing to defend their home, so the forest attacks didn't last long. Still, there had been enough casualties for Chiron to establish a patrol on the camp's border. I spent my days alternating between healing in the infirmary and patrolling the border.

These attacks didn't last as long as the previous ones because the Death Eaters would retreat after only a little bit of fighting. It seemed like they were trying to conserve their energy and forces so that the monsters they were allied with wouldn't get killed off as quickly as they had the first time. Chiron also believed that they were trying to sap our energy, so he had us fight in shifts to allow us to rest.

I was on patrol with Luke, Sofia, and Brion (Chiron had apparently decided that we made a good team and usually grouped us together) during one of the calmer nights when the Death Eaters didn't really attack as much. Or so we thought, anyway.

Before the attacks had started, we probably would've been chatting up a storm together, talking about Hogwarts, about the DA, about Umbridge (though only negative things would be said about her). But tonight all four of us were just so exhausted from all the fighting, healing, and patrolling that nobody said much except to check in with each other to make sure we hadn't been ambushed.

The exhaustion was slowly starting to get to us. Sofia yawned a lot when she was tired, and I mean a lot. Yawns are already contagious, but they seemed to have even more of an effect on Brion. Brion, who was normally very chill and hard to annoy, was getting irritated about yawning every time Sofia did, which, once again, was a lot.

Luke got even more fidgety and restless when he was tired. He paced a lot, which seemed to annoy Brion just as much, if not more, than Sofia's yawning. Luke was also prone to muttering under his breath about the campers who were supposed to take over from us once our shift was over. The words he used were definitely not flattering towards them.

As for me, I was definitely not a night owl, and the longer we stayed out there, the more drowsy I became. Everything seemed hazy, like it was happening in slow motion. I was tripping over tree roots every five seconds, or at least that's how it seemed.

Finally, Luke sighed and demanded, like a five-year-old who was tired of being in the waiting room at a doctor's office, "How much longer?"

"I'm not sure," Sofia said with a yawn, which caused the rest of us to yawn and provoked a half-hearted "stop it" from Brion.

"We were only supposed to do this for, like, four hours, right?" Luke asked. He looked at me. "It has to have been four hours already, right?"

I was too tired to form words, so I just shrugged and said something like, "Mmhummnn."

Luke was unimpressed. "You're no help when you're like this."

"At least she's not whining like a toddler," Brion grumbled.

"Like a toddler?"

"Yeah." Brion made his voice high-pitched and nasally like a little kid. "How much longerrrrrr? I want to go to sleeeeep."

For some reason this was funny to me and I started giggling a bit. Luke frowned over at me. "Hey, whose side are you on?"

"I'm not... like, on a side," I mumbled. "He just sounded funny."

Luke huffed and crossed his arms. "I hope the next shift gets here soon. If they do attack soon, we won't be any help."

"It also won't be any help if we —" Sofia was interrupted by a yawn, and the rest of us yawned as well. "If we give away our position by talking too much. So let's all be quiet until they come."