Chapter 13
The darkness receded to reveal slightly brighter darkness, as luck would have it. It felt like my eyelids were being held shut by blocks of cement, but, after several minutes of intense effort, I managed to flicker them open.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you," murmured a soothing voice in my periphery, commenting on my feeble attempts to sit up.
If I had enough energy, I probably would have leapt in surprise, but, as it was, I could barely even turn my head to identify the intruder.
"Professor," I croaked, my own vocal cords feeling strange and foreign. "What am I doing here? Where am I? And what about..." I shot up, fatigue temporarily forgotten. "DID I FAIL THE TASK?"
Professor Aragon tutted disapprovingly. Slowly, he folded over a page of whatever book he had been reading by my bedside and snapped it shut, placing it on a nightstand beside the candle he had been using as a meagre source of light.
"You ought keep your voice down," he advised. "It's late, and you're in the hospital wing. We don't wish to wake the nurse. She deserves to rest."
"How am I still alive? Who won?"
"The answers to those questions are quite enticing, I assure you," Aragon began, and I instantly knew he wasn't going to tell me. "But you need sleep to recover from the trials of the day. Here," he handed me a goblet full of a swirling, opalescent potion, "drink up."
"Come on, professor," I whined, reduced to an annoyed child. "Have mercy. It would take you all of two seconds to just give me a straight answer for once."
"The answers will still be waiting in the morning, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who would love to tell you themselves," he stressed kindly, raising the goblet pointedly to my lips.
Grumbling so he knew I disagreed, I took a long drought of the potion nonetheless. The effect was immediate, and my brain felt like it was instantly stuffed full of cotton. I could barely hold a thought, but I attempted pestering the professor again. "Will you tell me now?"
He grinned his amusement at my tenacity, shaking his head. He rose up, taking the cup from my hands before I could drop it and placed it on the nightstand.
"Tomorrow," he repeated, snuffing out the candle to submerge us in total darkness. I was getting tired of darkness.
III
When I awoke again, to my severe disappointment. I found neither him nor his book by my bedside. In his place, however, were my other four favourite faces in the world.
"Are you insane?" Damon began the moment he saw my eyes peak open. "Even I wouldn't pull a stunt like you just did during the task. Of all the half-baked schemes we've pulled off, that takes the cake. Your supposed to be the reasonable one of this group of hooligan evildoers!"
"The next time you try and kill yourself, I hope your plan is less complicated," Lyra criticised, jumping on the bed next to me. "Jokes aside, though," Lyra continued soberly, "I was terrified! If I had to face that-that... what was it called again?"
"A cockatrice," Cassius offered.
"Yeah, I'm sure that if I had to go up against that thing I would have done what the Durmstrang Champion did."
Damon snickered, but Cass nodded in agreement.
My interest piqued. No one had yet mentioned how the other champions got through and I was curious.
"What did Frey do?" I pressed when no further information was forthcoming.
"On first name basis with him, are we?" Damon inquired, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.
I laughed, my soul lighter than it been had in weeks, despite having nearly become a snack for a terrifying monster only a day earlier.
"It's not like that," Cass defended me heatedly. "They're just friends."
My brother spoke up from where he had been sitting quietly in the corner.
"You should have done what he did," he said, not nearly as happy as his companions. "Then you wouldn't have gotten hurt."
"Oh, come on, Tom," Damon protested. "You have to admit that what your sister did was by far the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life."
"I don't care if it was cool!" Tom stood up, his fisted hands trembling. "Who cares if it's cool if she dies because of it?"
Thomas flung around and stomped purposefully out of the hospital wing, brushing past the harried looking nurse.
"Hold on, Tom!" Damon yelled after Thomas's receding form. "It was only a joke."
"He'll come around. He's only worried," Cass reassured me, squeezing my hand with both of his own. "After all, its not like they can make the next task more dangerous than that."
"Unless they use ten cockatrices," Damon offered, sounding far too hopeful for my liking.
Lyra, on my same wavelength, smacked him upside the head.
"At least pretend you don't want her to die!" She shook her head in exasperation. "Anyway, since you asked, the Durmstrang boy took one step into the arena, saw the cockatrice, and promptly surrendered the match."
"He did what?" I gasped at the injustice. "I didn't know that was even an option!"
Had I known I would have made some very different decisions... I guess what he said about not caring if he lost was true.
"Can you believe he still got eight points for that?" Damon shook his head in disbelief. "All from his Headmistress, but still. She said some nonsense about how knowing when to cut your losses and give in is an important life skill. I've never heard such a load of bullocks in my life."
"The other guy, the pretty one I plan on marrying from Beauxbatons," Lyra clarified, much to Damon's horror, "he got the most points. He just transfigured a couple of rocks into weasels, because apparently the one thing immune to the cockatrices killing magic is a weasel."
"It was really quite awful," Cass said, shuddering. "The cockatrice crushed one of them with its tail, ate another one, and impaled a third, but the last one managed to get the egg in the end."
I cringed in disgust.
"I'm glad I missed it."
"Yours was by far the most exciting, thought," Damon assured me, as though I for some reason needed reassuring. I was just happy it was over. "Like, when the thing charged you and you didn't move I thought you had finally lost it, but then you-"
"You don't need to give me a play-by-play, Damon," I informed him, laughing at his dramatic reenactments. "In case you didn't notice, I was there, too."
"Oh, were you?" he said a little too innocently. "Can't say I noticed."
"What happened after I passed out?" I looked to Cassius for answers, as he was the only one on task of the lot. "The last thing I remember I was falling. How come I wasn't flattened?"
"You can thank Professor Aragon for that," Cass replied. "We were all too distracted with the shrieking monster being electrocuted above you to realize that you stopped moving as you fell."
"Yeah, sorry about that," Damon interjected.
Cassius continued, "Aragon noticed, though. He did something with his wand to slow you down before you hit the ground-"
Lyra cut in excitedly. "He slowed you down and then all of sudden he was right there, to catch you before you became a grease spot on the ground, as though he Apparated!"
"You can't Apparate within the grounds," I reminded her.
"Maybe so, but he was pretty fast," Damon acknowledged thoughtfully. "Wonder how he did it."
"Yeah, you wouldn't think he was actually a powerful wizard when he acts like such an airheaded fool all the time," Lyra agreed. Her eyes took on a dreamy quality as she looked off in no particular direction. "Not to mention the fact that he's so handsome, at least when he doesn't have potion stains all over his robes."
Damon looked affronted. "He's like twenty years older than you!"
She rolled her eyes at his blatant jealousy. "I didn't say I was going to court him or anything, though, on second thought, if he did ask, well, never say never..."
"You have horrid taste in men," Damon exclaimed, scandalized.
"Come on, Alice. Back me up here," she said defensively, pulling on my arm.
"Oh no. Keep me out of this."
Cassius cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Anyway, You were falling, and it all happened so fast that no one saw the tail graze your arm. I guess we were all too distracted with everything else that was going on. It was spectacular to watch, and terrifying, at the same time. No one realized you couldn't move. Well, no one accept the professor. While we were all sitting back, watching the cockatrice screech and flail, he whipped out his wand and slowed you down mere feet before would have hit the ground.
"I don't know how he did it, because you can't apparate on the grounds, but he was suddenly just there to catch you. I don't think anyone really realized you were in such bad shape until then, except for him, of course. Your body drooped lifelessly in his arms, and for a second we were all certain you were dead. You should have heard the way Lyra screamed."
"I don't scream!" Lyra interrupted defensively.
"Honestly, with the expression on the professor's face, I was almost more afraid of him than the cockatrice. Then, he vanished the same way he had appeared in the first place, taking you with him. I guess he took you to his office to make a potion to counteract the effect of the cockatrices magic before it was too late. I heard the nurse say he stayed with you all night to make sure you didn't die in your sleep. You're lucky it only grazed you through your robes, or else you would have surely died instantly.
"Meanwhile, the the cockatrice shook off the effects of the lightning and was angrier than ever. It charged the judges."
"That was objectively my favourite part about the whole task. I would pay good money to see the expression on that Malfoy bloke's face again when he saw the cockatrice flying right at him." Damon got a dreamy, far off look in his eye. "Priceless."
"Wait, the cockatrice attacked the judges?" I laughed, regretting it when spots in my chest tugged painfully.
"Oh, yeah. Gave them a taste of their own medicine if you ask me, sending something like that after you in the first place." Damon shook his head in disgust. "That's probably why they didn't give you the most points, I reckon. Well, that, and the fact that that Malfoy is a prat. Can you believe he only gave you a four?"
Lyra nodded her head vigorously in agreement. "I'd like to see him try and do better against that beast." Raising her eyebrows as though she had just remembered, she smiled viciously and added, "Oh, wait, he did and he screamed like a little girl!"
I snorted, a grin forming at the edges of my mouth, despite myself. "He did not."
"He did," Cassius confirmed, chuckling quietly. "I heard the screams myself."
"I personally wish we could have a portrait to immortalize that moment." Damon looked off wistfully. "Perhaps if we describe it to an artist with enough detail..."
Lyra abruptly paused in her laughter to look at me, wide eyed. The jerking movements reminded me of a puppet being manipulated by strings.
"You're not offended, are you?" she asked tentatively. "He's your uncle, isn't he?"
I shook my head slowly, choosing my words with special care. Guess there was no point in not coming clean anymore. The whole world knew of the Malfoy family's disgusting little secret: two children born from a muggle of all things.
"He's not my relative in any way that counts. He'd sooner see me dead than Champion, I'm sure."
"That's what I thought," Lyra trailed off awkwardly, unsure of what else to say on such a sensitive topic. Her eyes darted around the room until, finally, landing on a glint of silver shining on my night stand. She took it, holding it up to the light curiously. "So this is the clue then? The thing you nearly died to obtain?"
Pulling it from her hands, Damon examined the egg closely. "Wonder what it does."
Cass, looking bemused, took it from Damon and placed the chain around my neck for safe keeping.
It was roughly the size of an apple, though much heavier. I held it at different angles, trying and failing to keep the disdain from showing on my face.
"This thing better not hatch into a baby cockatrice." I narrowed my eyes at the offending item. "If it does, I swear I won't hesitate to feed it to the giant squid and there's nothing anyone could do to stop me."
"Oh, just imagine it, a little baby Cockatrice. sleeping on your pillow while you're in class," Damon cooed, barely containing his mirth. "Him coming down with you to breakfast riding on your shoulder. You rocking him lovingly in your arms as you carefully feed him a bottle—"
He was cut off by my pillow flying at his face. Hard.