survivor | HARRY POTTER

-Chapter 13-

Summer was creeping over the grounds around the castle, the sky and lake alike turning a gentle periwinkle blue, and flowers like large cabbages burst into bloom in the greenhouses. Harry and Ron had explained to Alyssa everything that had happened when they went down to see Hagrid that fateful night: how the ministry seemed to believe that Hagrid was still behind the attacks, how Cornelius fudge had carted the half giant off to Azkaban, and even how Lucius Malfoy had arrived at the scene and demanded that Dumbledore be taken down from his position of headmaster immediately. So it wasn't a surprise that with no Hagrid visible from the castle windows, striding the grounds with Fang at his heels, the scene didn't look right to Alyssa at all; no better, in fact, than the inside of the castle, where things felt so horribly wrong.

Harry, Ron, and Alyssa had tried to visit Hermione and Millie on countless occasions, but all visitors had been banned from entering the Hospital Wing. "We're taking no more chances." Madam Pomfrey told them represented severely through a tiny crack in the door, where nothing was visible but the nurse's pale and slightly wrinkled face. "No, I'm sorry, there's every chance the killer might come back to finish these people off."

Jess's body had been moved and placed in a secure place in a far corner of the grounds that wasn't accessible to students, where it would remain until the school could host a proper memorial at the end of the year. Jess's parents had been notified, and their reaction was possibly the most heartbreaking thing anyone had had to witness. Elliot, bless his tiny little soul, was so confused, and no one had the heart to tell him that his big sister was dead. Alyssa's parents had tried to drag her home immediately, and it had even gotten to the point where they had said that if the attacks didn't stop by the end of the year and the school didn't close then she wouldn't be going back in third year.

Fred had taken the news of Jess's death incredibly hard as well. He wasn't eating or sleeping, and he could often be found clutching an object that belonged to his loveable Gryffindor spitfire with tears leaking down his now constantly pale face. Alyssa hadn't been eating much at all in the short amount of time since Jess's death, and never smiled, never laughed, and always seemed to be getting thinner and thinner as the days went by. Harry, who was insanely worried about her, started pushing her to eat otherwise he would ban her from reading for a full day, but even the banter between them seemed to lose its effect. It had even gotten to the point where Alyssa had sat staring at a silver knife for hours on end, her face void of all emotion, and Harry had walked in and freaked out, even though she wasn't anywhere near the object that could harm her, despite the fact that she wanted to be.

With Dumbledore gone, fear had spread rapidly as never before, so that the sun warming the castle walls outside seemed to stop at the mullioned windows. There was barely a face to be seen in the school that didn't look worried and tense, and any laughter that rang through the quiet corridors sounded shrill and unnatural, and was quickly stifled. Hagrid had resulted in leaving a hint that rattled their already tired and grief clouded brains to no extent. Follow the spiders. Not bloody likely, Alyssa thought. One time, she had seen a spider lurking at the edge of her bedroom back on Haycock Road in London, and she had sprayed it with so much hairspray to kill it that that spider looked like it belonged in high school musical in its final moments. Despite this, however, the hint had been fairly easy to understand, yet the trouble was there didn't seem to be a single spider in the castle to follow, something neither Ron or Alyssa was complaining about. Harry, on the other hand, looked everywhere he went, helped rather reluctantly by his two friends.

They were hampered, of course, by the fact that they weren't aloud to wander off on their own, but had to move around the castle in a pack with other Gryffindor's. Alyssa had gone back to sleeping in the Ravenclaw Common Room after Jess had been killed, but she spent her days when she wasn't in lessons or in the Great Hall in the Gryffindor common room with Harry and Ron. It had even gotten to the point when if Alyssa stayed in the common for too long with the boys she would have to stay there overnight because it was against the rules to leave after six and because Harry refused to let her out of his sight, much less to wander around the corridors by herself at night when there was a killer roaming around the school. She didn't understand it, really. She wasn't exactly about to go around attacking herself. When she did stay behind in the Gryffindor common room, she would stay downstairs sleeping on the couch with Harry on the floor beside her so she wouldn't feel lonely and so that someone would be there for her when she woke up screaming from the terrors that plagued her dreams.