BLACK {1} harry potter

Chapter Fifteen

Dumbledore's warning to Harry and I about the Mirror of Erised stuck. We went back to normal,—as normal as you could get going to Hogwarts—and the Invisibility Cloak stayed put underneath my bed. Of course, I knew I could never forget what I'd seen. How happy and in love my parents had been.

After that night over Christmas break, my nightmares came back. Flashes of green lights and screams were thrown back into my nightly routine.

Most nights I got little sleep because as soon as I would rest my head the lights would reappear. Some nights I would be tricked into a false sense of security when the dreams would start out with a happy family, a happy home, but they always ended in death and cursed light.

The night before Hermione and the rest of the school were scheduled to come back, I had a different dream, however. In it I saw myself in the mirror, but instead of my parents in the reflection I saw myself holding that red stone again. I couldn't understand its importance.

"You see! Dumbledore was right; that mirror could drive you mad," Ron ranted when I told them about my dreams of the green light.

Hermione was the definition of disappointed when she arrived at Hogwarts the next day. She was horrified that we'd been out at night—three nights in a row, in fact. "Sarah, I told you to look after them," she practically shrieked.

I ducked my head in shame. "What're a few nights of fun going to hurt? I mean, we weren't making much progress, anyways."

Harry nodded along. "Sarah's right! We couldn't even find anything in the restricted section."

I rolled my eyes, pushing him lightly with my shoulder. "Though, we didn't have much time to look. Did we, Harry?" He made a funny face at me in response.

Because Hermione was back now, we went back to looking in the library. We sprinted during the ten minute breaks between lessons so that we could look through a book or two before the next lesson began. But, Harry and I had even less time to look because Quidditch practices started back up.

It was especially hard because Wood had become a lot harder on the team. Even when endless rain storms replaced the feet of snow on the ground he didn't slow down whatsoever. We had more Quidditch practices than all of the other teams combined. The twins and I called him a fanatic, but Harry seemed to be on his side.

His craziness was somewhat understandable because if we won our upcoming match against Hufflepuff we would be in first place for the House Championship. It would be the first time in seven years. Besides the only times I didn't have the nightmares where when I was too tired from practices to function.

One wet, muddy practice in particular, Wood seemed more disturbed than usual. The twins and I were clowning around, which had quickly become a habit with us. Fred was jokingly pretending to fall off of his broom like I had involuntarily done in November's match. I gasped in joking anger, viewing the scene from above. When George started to flail around like an idiot I took punishment in my own hands.

I grinned as I dived quickly towards them with my broom. I laughed out loud as their eyes went so wide that I was able to see the whites of their eyes. George actually fell off of his broom then. It was a good thing that he was only a mere ten meters above the ground.

"Will you stop messing around," Wood yelled. "That's exactly the sort of thing that'll lose us the match! Snape's refereeing this time, and he'll be looking for any excuse to knock points off Gryffindor!"