The Golden Wand [Harry Potter/Percy Jackson]

Chapter 41: The Sixth Trial

Annabeth POV:

I woke up in my dorm room in Goode. The beds were empty and made neatly, just as the girls and I had left them before we arrived at Hogwarts. I smiled at the familiar sheets, heart aching for this to be real - I missed Goode a lot, for it was my home. There was the fiery red sheets of Clarisse's bed, the emerald green of Katie's, the light green of Juniper's, the striking blue of Thalia's, the grey of my own. Reyna, Piper, Calypso and Hazel lived across the hall from us.

I walked towards the door, opened it excitedly... but instead of a corridor, I walked out into blinding sunlight and gasped. I stood in a field of corn, the open blue sky and its burning sun streaming down on me. I squinted my eyes and raised a hand to cover them. That's when I saw the figure. 

"Where's Percy?" I asked it, without hesitation. I didn't see the hooded figure as a threat; I didn't feel scared. 

"Your task is simple: Find the key, return to Hogwarts. You have until noon on Christmas Day, or you will fail," replied the figure, and I straightened myself up in thought. I stared at the figure for a moment more, feeling its hidden eyes heavy on mine, and then - as if satisfied by my silence - it vanished with a hiss. 

Find the key, return to Hogwarts. I thought. So this was the long awaited sixth trial - I should have seen it coming. Find the key - what could that mean? Was it Percy, perhaps? Or was that just wishful thinking?

With a somewhat hesitant step I walked back into the dorm room to search for a clue. The first thing I noticed was a rucksack and my Yankees cap sitting on my bed where I had been a moment before. I crossed the room in four long strides, picked up the hat and smiled as I saw a note attached to it:

Can't go anywhere without this, can you? From your sponsors - Sally, Paul and Estelle.

I attached the cap to a loop on my jeans and kept on searching. Almost immediately, I noticed the blueprints stuck to the walls beside my bed were wrong; my prized possessions, my passion projects, these blueprints were my designs for rebuilding the American Ministry of Magic - in particular the department of the League of Olympians - which had been badly damaged after Luke's attacks two years ago. The American Minister himself had allowed me to lead the project in redesigning the building and I had been working on these blueprints every day ever since; therefore, I knew instantly they were wrong. 

The bottom left blueprint showed part of a different building - a medieval design, the walls made of dark, rustic stones. There was a diagram displaying the angle of an iron bar jutting from the stone. I knew what this diagram showed - it was Azkaban. Getting closer, I saw a tiny message scribbled in ancient runes on the bottom right of the poster. I translated these runes in my head: Cell 4.56.73. 

So I had to go to Azkaban. The problem was: where was I? And how did I get there?

I reached out for the poster, yanking it off of the wall. As soon as my fingers closed around the edge of the blueprint the walls of the room started to shake. It sounded like a thousand boulders were bashing in to the side of the building, trying to break into the room. I jumped away from the throbbing wall just as a crack appeared where the poster had just been. I thrust the poster into my rucksack, pulled out my wand and ran to the window to see what was attacking me; there was nothing, just the field of corn as it shook furiously in what looked like torrential wind. 

Karpoi, I thought. I knew the creatures only too well, having heard what they could do from Piper and Percy. Usually, they were ugly things, which is why I was glad they had chosen to be invisible in this moment. 

That's when the door burst open, and it flew two karpoi, looking like disgusting green-potato-baby-cupids. Their hair looked like popcorn and their teeth were gnarled. I grimaced away from them and held my wand up higher.