Annabeth Chase and Things Are Getting Intense

Chapter Nineteen

A/N: This story is officially one hundred pages on google docs!

Side note: I've been playing so much Minecraft lately that I didn't think something in my oven would burn because I was downstairs and so that chunk wasn't loaded. I think I need to go to sleep.

As more weeks passed and snow started swirling out the windows, a new fun bit of gossip reached Annabeth's ears: Ron had gotten a girlfriend. Apparently he'd started dating Lavender Brown, a Gryffindor girl in their year.

Annabeth spotted them around the school a few times. Problem was, they were too busy eating each other's faces to see anything around them. People weren't exactly thrilled at this new development. Every time Annabeth saw Ron, he and Lavender were wrapped around each other so tightly it was hard to see where one person ended and the other one began.

"He's at perfect liberty to kiss whomever he likes," Hermione said one day in the library, trying and failing to appear calm. "I really couldn't care less."

Despite this, she dotted an i on the essay she was writing so hard that her quill punched a hole through the parchment. Annabeth just nodded disbelievingly and went back to deciphering a book of notable aurors. She hadn't seen anything about Bernard Ortiz yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Next to her, Harry said nothing and leaned farther over his potions book.

"Hey, Annabeth," he said suddenly, "I've been thinking about something for a while. You know how someone's written all over my potions book?"

"Don't ask me to read it for you." Annabeth glanced at his book scornfully.

She didn't like how Harry was taking instructions from someone he'd never met, who wrote mysterious notes and weird spells. It wasn't right, and one of these days something bad was going to happen. The problem was that Harry wouldn't hear of any of that. He stubbornly idolized whoever had written those notes.

"I wasn't going to," Harry muttered irritably. "just—I haven't been able to talk to you about it much, but the person who wrote this called himself 'The Half-Blood Prince'. I was wondering—"'

"If it was a demigod?" Annabeth finished. "Definitely not. The only Half-Blood princes are currently either trapped in time, being raised by wolves, or five years old."

"That's still weird," Harry muttered.

"You know what's still weird?" Annabeth said. "Taking instructions from scribbled notes in a textbook."

"Those notes work!" Harry hissed, keeping his voice down lest they be attacked by Madam Pince. "Even Vera agrees that it works!"

"I'm not denying that it works," Annabeth argued. "I'm saying that you shouldn't trust a random person you've never met, especially when it comes to magic."

Harry exhaled forcefully through his nose. "You come up with new spells all the time—"

"Because I know how it works. Seriously, 'levicorpus'? 'Levi'—levitate. 'Corpus'—body. That spell literally means 'levitate the body,' and you would have known that had you researched the etymology at all, but you don't, which is why you shouldn't be playing around with this."

"That was all in good fun," Harry insisted. "The Prince probably came up with it as a prank, and Ron ended up fine anyway—"

Hermione wrote a word on her parchment so hard that the whole thing ripped.

"Incidentally," Hermione said after a few seconds, "you ought to be careful, Harry."

"For the last time," Harry said, frustrated, "I am not giving back this book, I've learned more from the Half-Blood Prince than Snape or Slughorn have taught me in—"