The Other Witches

11. You Have Gone INCOGNITO

Von slammed the door (quietly). Everyone was staring at the floor. There were five tiny boxes on the floor in the center of the room.

Oh. Literal gifts.

"Uh, how did you guys find these?" I ask.

"Just a little snooping," replies Von. How descriptive.

I pick up the blue box tied with bronze ribbon. I shake it cautiously. It doesn't sound like anything that could spontaneously combust, so I unwrap it. Inside is a scrap of parchment, two words scrawled on it.

Legilimens. Occlumens.

"Is this some kind of JOKE?" Lucy says, a little too loudly. She too has a scrap of paper, but hers says The crystal globe shows the way of the future.

"Sounds like a fortune cookie." Ella reads over Lucy's shoulder. Her paper reads Appearances can deceive.

"Confusing fortunes if I ever saw them," Lauren frowns. "Some invisible things are right under our noses. What is that supposed to mean?"

"If these are fortunes," Von says, "mine's unfinished." She holds up her scrap. You have gone INCOGNITO. Something is strange about her expression, though. She knows something.

A memory flashes in the back of my brain.

"Von, do you mind?" I say, pulling out my wand and pointing it at her face. I look straight into her bluish-green eyes. "Legilimens!"

I see Von slipping into a room, and a black cat with white spots exiting a few seconds later. Then the image changes, and James Potter hands Von her pet cat, a slight blush on his face. Von frowns and turns on her heel, striding back down the corridor. And then I'm staring Von in the face again.

Von is a little bit red in the face, but her voice is steady. "Your eyes do something weird when you do that. The green ring on the outside of your cornea kind of covers up the brown, so your eyes turn green." Huh. My eyes are normally light brown with an outer ring of green, so I can't imagine how the change must look.

Then I notice the pattern on the overlarge cloak that Lauren draped over herself.

"Hey, Lauren," I say, "could you do me a favor and put that cloak on inside out for a second?"

"Okaaay," Lauren replies, confused. But she flips the cloak over, and when she puts it on, her body disappears.

"Whoa, invisibility cloak! Where'd you get it?" Ella says excitedly. In the torchlight, her curly hair looks turquoise.

Then I realize that it is turquoise.

"Ella! What happened to your hair?!" Lucy cries with alarm.

Wait a second. LIGHTBULB!

"Now I get it, guys. It's from this book I read. Lauren owns a copy of one of the Deathly Hallows, that invisibility cloak. Siobhan is an Animagus," I look pointedly at her, " and can turn into that cat with white spots. Ella is a Metamorphagus, so she can change her physical appearance at will. Lucy, the crystal globe is used in Divination, so you must be a Seer. And me, well, I can see people's memories, and also shut my mind to others. I'm a Legilimens and an Occlumens."

"Wow. That was what I call a revelation," Lucy starts slow-clapping for effect.

Lauren's head jerks upward. "I heard something."

"We should go." Ella gets up quickly and tiptoes out the door. Lauren follows her immediately.

You got that right, Ella.

Lucy rushes out the door after a few seconds with a quick "See ya". Von faces me in the now-almost-deserted room.

"No one will know, got it? If I find out that you told anyone..."

"Relax, Von," I reassure her, " this stays between you and me, kay?"

Von straightens up. "Well, time to go INCOGNITO, I guess." She turns into the familiar black cat and pads down the hall on silent paws.

The raven door-knocker asks, "How far can you run into the Forbidden Forest?"

I'm barely awake as I answer, "Halfway. After that, you're running out."

Hello wattpandas,

thanks for waiting!

-RedV