black and white ✰ g.w.

CHAPTER ONE

About a week and a half after arriving home for the summer holidays, Olivia Wood lied on her bed, deep in thought. The summer had been very dull so far. The adults in her family were almost never home. This part wasn't unusual; they all worked for the Ministry of Magic, meaning they were gone pretty much all day, every day. But her grandmother, Helena, didn't work, and even she was gone a lot of the time. None of them ever told the children where they were going or why they were gone, and when they asked, they brushed them off.

Before the children even arrived home from Hogwarts, it was established that none of their friends would be staying at the Village at all over the summer. This had discouraged them and told them that the holiday they were about to experience would not be very enjoyable. So far, they had been right. They were still allowed to write to their friends, but Olivia had a feeling this wouldn't last forever, so she was taking advantage of it while she still could.

She was drawn out of her thoughts by her mother, Catrina, knocking on her doorframe and then entering her room. She looked up at the woman.

"Sorry to disturb you, Livi, but you've got to start packing. We're all leaving," Catrina told her daughter.

"Leaving? To where?" Olivia questioned, sitting up. "Why? For how long?"

"I can't tell you where, and the reason why is a bit too complicated to explain right now. As for how long, we will be staying there for the remainder of the summer, so bring your school trunk along as well."

"What about the cats?" She looked over at one of her seven cats, Sunny, a calico, sleeping peacefully at the foot of the bed despite the sudden disruption.

"They'll be fine. It's just you kids that will be living there. Aunt Elizabeth will still be here enough to take care of them. Now, hurry up. Your grandpa's already in a sour mood, you don't want to go making it worse by being slow to get out there." With that, Catrina left, not allowing Olivia to ask all of the questions floating about in her brain.

Olivia quickly did as she was told. She found herself grateful she was such a procrastinator; she hadn't yet unpacked her school trunk. Without moving from her bed, using her wand, she took out the dress robes she had worn to the Yule Ball and the textbooks she wouldn't be needing for her seventh year. Then she moved on to her other trunk, neatly folding and packing all of her clothes into it, of course having to put an Extension Charm on it to fit everything. When she had finished, she put a Levitation Charm on both trunks, kissed Sunny goodbye, and exited her bedroom, making her way downstairs. Her brother, Oliver, was right behind her, and the two met their mother by the front door.

"Have you got everything?" Catrina asked them. They nodded. "All right then. Let's get going."

The three of them left the house and met the rest of their family by the large sycamore tree all of the houses of the Village surrounded. There were lots of trunks on the ground, as was expected; there were to be nine people moving to wherever they were moving to, and everyone had one to three trunks to themselves.

"All right," said David, facing his children and grandchildren, "Faustus, Fraser, and Duncan, go get your broomsticks. You'll be flying with Henry and I. Ben, Oliver, and Olivia, you'll be Apparating with Amelia, Catrina, Grandma, Blair, and Abi. Jade, you already know what to do. Come on, folks, the sun's going down."

"Hardly," Catrina muttered. The sun wasn't going down then, but it was getting close.

"Oh, ignore him. He's dramatic," Helena said, waving her hand in her husband's direction.