Chosen & Hated (HP) {Book 2 of the Wild & Free Series}

1. The Dream

I lay flat on my back, breathing hard as though I had been running. I had awoken from a vivid dream with my hands clutched over my wrist.

The old scar on my right wrist, which was shaped like a bolt of lightning, was burning as though someone had just pressed a white-hot wire to my skin.

I sat up, one hand still on the scar. My bedroom was lit by a faint, misty orange light that was filtering through the curtains from the street lamp next the entrance of orphanage.

I ran my fingers over the scar again. It was still painful. I turned on the lamp beside me, scrambled out of bed, crossed the room, opened my wardrobe, and peered into the mirror on the inside of the door. A skinny girl of fourteen looked back at me, her bright green eyes puzzled under her untidy auburn hair. I held out my wrist and examined the lightning-bolt scar of my reflection more closely. It looked normal, but it was still stinging.

I tried to recall what I had been dreaming about before I had awoken. It had seemed so real... There had been two people I knew and one I didn't... I concentrated hard, frowning, trying to remember... The dim picture of a darkened room came to me... There had been a snake on a hearth rug... a small man called Peter, nicknamed Wormtail... and a cold, high voice... the voice of Lord Voldemort. I felt as though an ice cube had slipped down into my stomach at the very thought...

I closed my eyes tightly and tried to remember what Voldemort had looked like, but it was impossible... All I knew was that at the moment when Voldemort's chair had swung around, and I had seen what was sitting in it, I had felt a spasm of horror, which had awoken me... or had that been the pain in my scar?

Voldemort and Wormtail had been talking about someone they had killed, though I could not remember the name... and they had been plotting to kill someone else... Harry and me!

I took my face out of my hands, opened my eyes, and stared around my bedroom as though expecting to see something unusual there.

The orphanage looked exactly as a respectable girl's orphanage would be expected to look in the early hours of Saturday morning. All the curtains were closed. As far as I could see through the darkness, there wasn't a living creature in sight, not even a cat.

And yet... and yet... I went restlessly back to the bed and sat down on it, running a finger over my scar again. It wasn't the pain that bothered me; I was no stranger to pain and injury.

No, the thing that was bothering me was that the last time my scar had hurt me, it had been because Voldemort had been close by... But Voldemort couldn't be here, now... The idea of Voldemort lurking in the orphanage was absurd, impossible...

I listened closely to the silence around me. Was I half-expecting to hear the creak of a stair or the swish of a cloak? And then I jumped slightly as I heard my Bengal cat Nymeria give a faint snore on the armchair next to my bed.

I shook myself mentally; I was being stupid. There was no one in the house with me except Lucy -- my Ravenclaw best friend --, Yara -- my Muggle best friend --, the overseer and the other orphans and they were plainly still asleep, their dreams untroubled and painless.

Harry and I had been a year old the night that Voldemort — the most powerful Dark wizard for a century, a wizard who had been gaining power steadily for eleven years — arrived at our house and killed our father and mother. Voldemort had then turned his wand on Harry and me; he had performed the curse that had disposed of many full-grown witches and wizards in his steady rise to power — and, incredibly, it had not worked. Instead of killing us, the curse had rebounded upon Voldemort. Harry and I had survived with nothing but a lightning-shaped cut on Harry's forehead and on my right wrist; and Voldemort had been reduced to something barely alive. His powers gone, his life almost extinguished, Voldemort had fled; the terror in which the secret community of witches and wizards had lived for so long had lifted, Voldemort's followers had disbanded, and Harry and Liana Potter had become famous.