Supported & Torn (HP) {Book 3 of the Wild & Free Series}

17. St. Mungo's Hospital

I was so relieved that she was taking me seriously that I did not hesitate, but jumped out of bed at once and pulled on my dressing gown.

"Follow me to the boys' dormitories, Potter," said Professor McGonagall. "You come too, Weasley." Ginny and I nodded slowly and we followed the professor out of the girls' dormitories to the boys' dormitories.

Harry was sitting on his bed, cold sweat dripping down his forehead. Ron and Rowan were looking at him, clearly terrified.

"Come, Potter and Weasley," Professor McGonagall said to Harry and Ron. They nodded, looked at me and Ginny strangely, put on some dress robes and followed Professor McGonagall out of the dormitory.

"You got the same dream, right?" I whispered to Harry as we left the common room.

"If you are talking about the snake dream; yes,"  he muttered and I nodded. We fell silent again.

I felt as though the panic inside me might spill over at any moment; I wanted to run, to yell for Dumbledore. Mr. Weasley was bleeding as we walked along so sedately, and what if those fangs (I tried hard not to think "my fangs") had been poisonous? We passed Mrs. Norris, who turned her lamplike eyes upon us and hissed faintly, but Professor McGonagall said, "Shoo!"

Mrs. Norris slunk away into the shadows, and in a few minutes we had reached the stone gargoyle guarding the entrance to Dumbledore's office.

"Fizzing Whizbee," said Professor McGonagall.

The gargoyle sprang to life and leapt aside; the wall behind it split in two to reveal a stone staircase that was moving continuously upward like a spiral escalator. The five of us stepped onto the moving stairs; the wall closed behind us with a thud, and we were moving upward in tight circles until we reached the highly polished oak door with the brass knocker shaped like a griffin.

Though it was now well past midnight, there were voices coming from inside the room, a positive babble of them. It sounded as though Dumbledore was entertaining at least a dozen people.

Professor McGonagall rapped three times with the griffin knocker, and the voices ceased abruptly as though someone had switched them all off. The door opened of its own accord and Professor McGonagall led Harry, Ron, Ginny and me inside.

The room was in half darkness; the strange silver instruments standing on tables were silent and still rather than whirring and emitting puffs of smoke as they usually did. The portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses covering the walls were all snoozing in their frames. Behind the door, a magnificent red-and-gold bird the size of a swan dozed on its perch with its head under its wing.

"Oh, it's you, Professor McGonagall... and... ah."

Dumbledore was sitting in a high-backed chair behind his desk; he leaned forward into the pool of candlelight illuminating the papers laid out before him. He was wearing a magnificently embroidered purple-and-gold dressing gown over a snowy-white nightshirt, but seemed wide awake, his penetrating light-blue eyes fixed intently upon Professor McGonagall.

"Professor Dumbledore, the Potters have had a... well, a nightmare," said Professor McGonagall. "They say..."

"It wasn't a nightmare," said Harry quickly.

Professor McGonagall looked around at Harry, frowning slightly. "Very well, then, Potters, you tell the headmaster about it."

"I... well, we were asleep..." I said and even in my terror and my desperation to make Dumbledore understand I felt slightly irritated that the headmaster was not looking at me, but examining his own interlocked fingers. "But it wasn't an ordinary dream... it was real... we saw it happen..."