He returned as steady as the Mountain Wind

Chapter 9: "The Spiders"

The following week was a mess. Most of Slytherin house was pulled out of school when the news of Draco's petrification spread. Theo tried to placate his father, but to no avail. On Tuesday Lord Nott himself stood in the door of the Great Hall, dragging his reluctant son home. After much begging – mainly from her younger sister – Daphne left the school on Friday. In the end, only fifth and seventh year snakes remained along with Blaise, Regulus, and Harry. Seeing Slytherin house vacate the castle spread the panic even further. It seemed that the families had lost their supposed immunity to the horror inside the school. Even non-pureblood supremacists started taking their children home after that and rumours of the school's imminent closing spread. When Xenophilius Lovegood took his daughter home on Saturday morning, the remaining five felt like the world was ending.

Harry was going crazy. Not knowing what he was up against...losing friends right and left. And the school...what if the school closed? He couldn't let that happen! Cedric seemed to be of a similar mind set. The prefect had caught wind of the debates within the faculty. To cancel the exams. But Cedric - with backing from the other houses – convinced the teachers to proceed with the N.E.W.T. and O.W.L exams. His reasoning went along the lines of "Why let the school stay open if you're going to cancel the exams? What use would remaining in class have?" So Cedric excused himself from the immediate snooping around and focused on keeping the morale high.

Speaking of snooping around, there had to be something that would clue them in on what the monster hidden inside the chamber was. They had finished their little investigation into the attack scenes, so the hints were all there. Now they just needed to connect them. The snakes hit the library, while the twins kept looking into other, more overlooked attacks. When they came together two weeks after the double attack, surprising circumstances came to light.

"Why would someone kill the roosters?" Harry was floored. It didn't seem to make any sense, but the rooster killings started right after Halloween. They had looked into the budget records for hours until they found the last killed rooster. 50 years ago, right when the first series of attacks started. It was too much of a coincidence to not draw a connection. But how did it fit into the picture?

"Well, this monster has to have some weakness," Regulus piqued, "and if I were a psychopathic monster handler out murdering innocents, I would destroy any threats to my murder weapon of a pet as thoroughly as possible. In this case, it would be to kill the rooster."

"But what kind of monster," Fred started, "is afraid of a rooster?" George finished.

"I read that somewhere..." Blaise muttered, "Mom has always been fascinated by lethal creatures, so I grew up reading quite a lot about them. And I remember something about the cry of a rooster being able to kill...something...a snake of sorts, I think."

"A snake!" yelled Regulus, "Of course!" he ran into the shelves only to return almost immediately with a heavy tome. The younger Black brother rifled through the pages: "It's gone. There's a page missing."

"It looks like someone ripped it out, doesn't it?" Harry wondered, before answering his own question: "Let's check the library records to find out when the page went missing."

They started fifty years ago, in hopes of maybe finding another lead. "Hey guys, check this out, our guy "Tom Riddle" checked out the book over summer the year before the attacks started." The twins pointed towards a single line that they would have overlooked, had it not been for the familiar name.

"You thinking what I'm thinking?" asked Blaise.

"Definitely. He must have been involved somehow. Or at least, he knew something."

"But he returned the book in perfect condition..." muttered Blaise.

"Because the page had only been ripped out recently," Regulus said from the other side of the table. He held the newest records. He pointed to the most recent one: "Hermione Granger."