B.Q Book Four: The Black Queen's War

Chapter 33: The Siege of Hogwarts

Part one of the final battle… starts… right… … … NOW!

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"The time has come, ti kras jennès mwen. Discharge your duty."

An electric shock raced up Jen's body from the sole of her foot to the tips of her hair, and she yelped as she was ripped out of foggy dreams back into reality. Sitting straight up in bed, she gasped in surprise to find the spirit of the castle standing at the foot of her bed. "Portia! What are you doing here?"

"We have trouble," the lifelike spirit said with a scowl. Simultaneous with her words, an ear-piercing wail came from the very stones of the walls and even those under her feet. "My wards have been destroyed. I cannot prove who is responsible, but we both know who it is."

When she put it like that, of course Jen did. It could only be Voldemort finally attacking the castle. He had also disabled her without knowing it. She tried to stretch out her sonar, but without the wards' assistance her sixth and primary sense reached no farther than the ten feet she had whenever she walked about in the Muggle world.

"Wuzzat?" muttered Luna as she blearily blinked her eyes open. "What's making all that noise? …Jen, who is this and why does she have color even though she's a ghost?"

"Death Eaters are attacking the castle." That knocked the sleepiness out of Luna as well as Tracey, who had also awoken. "Are there any defenses other than the wards that you can bring to bear?"

"The suits of armor are already moving into position, and I'm closing off nonessential doors. But once they realize they can just Apparate nearly anywhere they want in the castle itself, my preparations will lose their effectiveness. Now would be a good time to unleash a thousand-year-old basilisk if I still had one," Portia muttered as though to herself. Without another word, she faded away.

Jen waved her hands in elaborate patterns, which opened the drawers of her dresser and summoned trousers, blouse, and boots onto the proper parts of her body. "Get to the other Ravenclaws and get ready for a bloodbath."

"What are you going to do?"

She smiled at Tracey's question. Grabbing the sheath she had crafted for her dagger as well as a small bag, she tied both of them onto her belt. "I'm heading out too. This war ends tonight, one way or the other."

The window popped open at her command, and she flung herself through the hole into the empty air. Her flight spell caught her after only a second of free fall. Cloaking herself in shadows to minimize her silhouette against the dark of the night, she raced to the front of the castle to see just what kind of forces she and the other inhabitants of the castle would have to deal with.

…And that was a lot of zombies.

Below her and in the rapidly shrinking distance was a carpet of the undead, dashing across the grounds to enact their mindless killing. The doors of the castle would hold against a mindless horde like this, but there were witches and wizards marching along behind them who would make quick work of such defenses. Once they were inside? The benefit and terror of zombies was that they had no higher consciousness. They did not feel fear or pain. Even a tithe of this host inside the castle would cut a terrible swath through its defenders.

It was a very good thing she had already prepared herself against such an eventuality.

A tug loosened the neck of the bag, and from its bottomless depths she pulled out the yew staff she had been working on when Finnegan and Weasley tried to force their way into her workshop. This was not black magic; had it been so, she never would have let the Unspeakables and the Minister examine it so closely. It did not need to be. Just as Morgan le Fay proved fifteen centuries ago with Clarent, the raw force that came from the Powers was not the only means by which a piece of higher magic could be countered. It could also be deflected and neutralized by constructing a device specifically designed to do so. That was exactly what Jen now held in her hands. Thanks to the information she had gleaned from Elsie's ill-planned experimentations with spells that straddled the line between necromancy and soul magic, she knew how the latter was supposed to work.