Little Bird

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Draco

            We waited a full two weeks before choosing to reenter the Room of Requirement. I put it off for as long as possible by taking extra time finding a list of spells to fix the damaged inside of the cabinet, and whenever Eve would carefully suggest that we go back to try them, I would make up some sort of excuse to wait even longer. I just wanted to take as much time as we could to fix the cabinet, because that meant putting off the task for as long as we could. After what Eve had told me about her parents, I'd wanted to keep her out of all this even more than before—but she wasn't having it.

            So eventually she convinced me to finally give up on waiting and making excuses, and we finally went back to the Room of Requirement one Saturday afternoon. I was bent over in the opening of the cabinet with Eve perched on an abandoned piano stool slightly behind me, the borrowed spell book resting on her knees. The weather had turned significantly cooler as winter loomed closer, so I'd given her my suit jacket to wrap around her shoulders. It was warm in the doorway of the stuffy cabinet, however, so I had to roll up my shirt sleeves as I crouched in front of the charred wood with my wand stretched out in front of me.

            "Damn it," I cursed loudly as the spell I tried caused sparks to fly up near my face, jumping back to avoid losing my eyebrows. As I turned around, feeling for any singed hair, I realized Eve was trying to cover her smile with one hand and balance the book with her elbow at the same time.

            "Sorry," she grinned, trying but failing to hide the fact that she was giggling. "That was a close one."

            I rolled my eyes, but her smile was infectious and I ended up grinning too. "Yeah yeah, go ahead and laugh. That spell was shit—I think it made it worse."

            Eve craned her neck to peer past me, seeing the damaged wood inside of the cabinet and shrugging slightly. She flipped through the spell book again, looking for another page we'd marked after we'd borrowed it from the Restricted Section late at night. "Let me find another. One of these has to work."

            "This is stupid," I complained, running one hand through my hair messily as I went over to sit beside her on the piano bench. "We've already tried at least five by now. I'm going to end up with no eyebrows left."

            I had been serious, but Eve laughed anyway. It was almost easier to laugh; what we were doing was so serious that it made it slightly less unbearable. She found another page I had dog-eared last week, and I leaned closer to read it over her shoulder. Pointing to the description, Eve said, "This one sounds right, yeah? It says to mend any magically damaged artifact."

            "That's what the last one said," I told her dryly, but I was already standing up to try it. "Alright, walk me through it."

            So Eve explained to me word for word how to perform the spell, a process that was more complicated than anything I'd tried before—probably because the spell wasn't strictly legal. It took me a few tries to finally get it, and Eve had to get up a few times just to fix the position of my arm. But when the tip of my wand finally sparked blue and glowed against the damaged wood, I knew I must have done it at least partly right. As the blue haze faded away, Eve got off the bench and came over to me to see if it had worked.

            "It looks a little better," I said uncertainly, because the deepest corner of the cabinet still had a charred, ashy look to it. "Do you think I did it right?"

            "Yeah, I think so," Eve told me, glancing down at the book again. "It looks right. Maybe it's just not powerful enough."

            "Great," I sighed, stepping back and stuffing my wand back into my pocket. My back was aching from bending over before the cabinet for so long, and I wanted nothing more than to close it and finally stop testing spells that were mostly just useless.