Chapter 2
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It was harder than she thought it would be not to say anything to Mrs. Figg that day. She still couldn’t quite bring herself to feel properly guilty about the book she borrowed—and she’d return them, she swore it! —but she still felt uneasy about removing them from the room all the same. It was with no small measure of relief that Mrs. Figg started to doze off during her ‘stories’. She tended to let Azalea nap in the guest room upstairs when she did anyway, so when she rubbed at her eyes and staggered to her feet murmuring in Gaeilge about needing to rest her eyes for an hour or so, and how Azalea could either nap in the guest room or keep reading, Azalea saw her chance. As soon as the older woman shuffled from the room and up the stairs, she counted down the seconds until she heard her bedroom door close with a soft snap. She waited two minutes, then slowly got up and made her way to the downstairs bathroom, where she locked herself inside to avoid being interrupted. She pulled out both books, also using it as an opportunity for Kaaza to—well, ‘stretch her legs’ wasn’t the right phrase since she was a snake, but what else could she call it?
Kaaza curled up by her foot as Azalea sat cross-legged on the floor, flipping back to the sections she’d found earlier. In ten minutes, she read through the section in each book. They both essentially boiled down to the same thing: On October 31 of 1981, in the quiet village of Godric’s Hollow, the Dark One, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, aka You-Know-Who, descended on her family’s residence, a house under a spell called the Fidelius Charm. They were betrayed by their Secret Keeper, a former classmate and good friend of her father’s, Sirius Orion Black, who gave the dark wizard their location. He then hunted them down, killing her father first by the door, her grandmother second in the hallway after a bit of a fight, and then finally her grandfather and mother in her nursery, before finally attempting to end her own life. For some reason yet unknown, when he tried to kill her, he’d instead been destroyed, and she, Azalea, had received the strange scar that she could never remember not having. That same wizard had followers, called Death Eaters, who had used the Dark Arts to terrorize magical Britain, each firmly believing in the ideology of pureblood supremacy, the description of which sounded sort of like racism to Azalea.
Azalea let her head fall back into the door with a sigh, her eyelids sliding shut. Within the space of a few hours, her life had become severely complicated. Kaaza climbed her arm to lay across her shoulders, her tongue lightly flicking Azalea’s ear. “What troubles you?”
Azalea cracked her eyelids open an inch. “I just found out that my entire life has been a lie, issa, that I’m someone who’s supposed to be very important, but that everyone’s been lying to me and hiding things from me, and that there are evil, scary people still after me.”
Kaaza made a distressed sound and nuzzled against her cheek. “I would be troubled too, but do not worry, Azalea, if anyone tries to hurt you I will bite them then call Zazz, and Zazz will bite them.”
Azalea tipped her head in confusion. “Who’s Zazz, issa?”
“A friend. He lives nearby. He has venom.”
Azalea hummed in response to that, choosing to open up The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts again. Scanning over the table or contents again, she turned to the first entry after the introduction: Herpo the Foul. After only a few minutes of reading about his life, which included inventing a multitude of dark curses and dark artifacts, she discovered one of his other achievements: being the first person—at least the first attested or recorded—to breed something called a basilisk. Frowning down in concentration, she continued reading, her mind working a mile a minute the more she learned about the creature via an excerpt the book cited as being from Most Macabre Monstrosities.
‘…. Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly than the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents. This snake, which may reach gigantic size, and live many hundreds of years, is born from a chicken's egg, hatched beneath a toad. Its methods of killing are most wondrous, for aside from its deadly and venomous fangs, the Basilisk has a murderous stare, and all who are fixed with the beam of its eye shall suffer instant death. Spiders flee before the Basilisk, for it is their mortal enemy, and the Basilisk flees only from the crowing of the rooster, which is fatal to it.
Additionally, basilisks have three sets of eyelids that each move independently of the other. By keeping at least one set closed, they can ‘sheath’ their deadly gaze. The species is sexually dimorphic, with only the males possessing the trademark scarlet plume. Basilisks, like many other magical creatures, including giants, dragons, and wyverns, have tough, armored, magic-imbued skin impervious to both spells cast against it and external damage, although for the first weeks of their lives the hatchlings have soft, vulnerable scales...’
Azalea turned to Kaaza. “Issa, have you ever heard of a basilisk, Kaaza?”
Kaaza straightened up at once, looking at her with wide eyes. “One of the great ones? We have all heard of them, but few of us have met one of them. Do you know one of them?”
Azalea stared down at the entry with something bordering on grim determination as she got, perhaps, the worst idea of her life. “No, but I will, issa. I’ll hatch one so that they don’t have to worry about someone ever trying to hurt me again, and I won’t have to worry about living with the Dursleys, issa issa!”
With that in mind, she stood, dusted herself off, and exited the bathroom, heading back to the room from before. She put the books back where she got them, seeing others that mentioned various topics and subjects, from Rune Use for Squibs to A Thousand Herbal Remedies and More. She turned away from them, then quickly turned back to grab one entitled Magical Societies the World Over that she caught sight of at the last second. Checking the table of contents and browsing a few sections, she noted that it listed not only significant or popular locations for magicals in different countries across Europe, including libraries, hospitals, historical landmarks, vacation spots and shopping districts, but also educational institutions and residential areas.
At first she thought to grab a spare bit of that strange paper and a nearby ballpoint pen to write down the entrances to a few she might find useful, but then she thought better of it and hid it as she had hidden the others. Glancing around one last time, she quietly left the room and returned to the bathroom to study the descriptions, pictures, and maps. Eventually, squatting on the bathroom floor, she found the entrance to the downtown district of the local magical community in England, a place called Diagon Alley located in London. Yes, she thought. She could find it later. Right now, she had a different mission.
Nodding resolutely to herself, she hid the book away underneath her clothes as she had earlier with the others and coaxed Kaaza back into place, then she once more silently made her way through the house, taking care to ensure that Mrs. Figg still slept upstairs. She stepped outside onto Mrs. Figg’s back porch with two eggs nestled in her pocket, a jar in hand. The young witch eyed the small pond speculatively. “Kaaza,” she whispered, waiting until the grass snake poked her head out of the collar of Azalea’s shirt, “I need your help to catch a toad, issa.”
Kaaza unwound from her perch and lowered herself to the ground, scenting the air with her tongue. “My pleasure.”
With her friend sliding determinedly away through the low grass, Azalea took her own path to the pond. It didn’t take her long to spot a few toads, though she found she wasn’t nearly as adept at hunting as Kaaza. Five minutes later, she felt a small snout bump her ankle. She glanced down to see Kaaza with a toad hanging from her mouth. She thought it might be dead until it trembled in fear. Before she even reached for it, she solidified her will, gathering it together, and with it, plucking at something deep buried within her that rose up when she called it—two somethings, she would later come to realize. She unscrewed the lid of the small mason jar, used a gardening trowel left out in an empty pot on the back porch to scoop in a bit of dirt, grass, and leaves on top of a washcloth she’d snuck from the bathroom closet, then carefully negotiating the eggs inside without cracking them. She held the jar out to Kaaza. “Kaaza, give me the toad, issa.” Her will and that strange force flexed and coiled like a whip, snapping out at her target. “Toad, you will not move, issa.”
Miraculously, the toad didn’t so much as flinch as she grasped it where it still lay hanging between her friend’s fangs. “Let it go, Kaaza.” Somehow, she knew the thing wouldn’t try to run. Kaaza relaxed her hold on it, releasing it into Azalea’s hand. Azalea immediately stuffed it in the jar and screwed the cap back onto it. As she stared at the small amphibian, its eyes glazed over from her command, a thought occurred to her. She wasted no time collecting Kaaza, not even waiting to let her finish settling against her skin as she hurried back to the house. She thought she heard movement upstairs, so with a mounting sense of anxiety she searched for one of Mrs. Figg’s sewing needles in her craft basket. She took it to the bathroom, where she once more locked herself inside. This time, however, rather than reading forbidden information, she was actually committing a forbidden act. She dripped rubbing alcohol over the pointed end of the needle, unscrewed the lid again, and, pinning the toad under her quailing glare, deliberately pricked her finger until blood welled to the surface. She reached into the jar to smear some of it onto the eggs, then squeezed her finger until a few more drops fell onto the toad for good measure. Witches in the movies and on the tele were always using blood for something, so surely it couldn’t hurt, right?
Satisfied, Azalea closed the jar again, not taking her eyes off of the completely cowed toad pinned underneath her power like a butterfly to a board, it and both eggs covered in her blood. Recalling that Mrs. Figg had once told her that eggs needed to be warm, she willed them to be warm, for the soil and glass to be warm—because how else did you do magic besides knowing what you wanted and letting yourself have it? The whip inside of her curled in tightly against itself lashed out again to do her bidding. To her immense shock and pleasure, she felt a tingling, followed by a flood of warmth, start in her chest, flow up and out, then travel down her arms and into her hands. The glass of the jar started to heat against her palms.
Had she...had she just done magic?
Azalea stared at her own hands with wide eyes, then shook her head and pushed the jar into the massive pocket where the egg had previously rested. Used to cleaning up after herself lest she face Aunt Petunia’s wrath, she made quick work of covering her tracks. In fact, by the time Mrs. Figg emerged from upstairs, smiling brightly at her and chattering about Shepard’s’ Pie, not even Azalea could tell what she’d done.
…
Days passed with no signs of life from the eggs. She’d risked earning an irritable look from her aunt when she asked how long it took chicken eggs to hatch. After a response of “What’s it to you, little freak?” and a resulting bullshit answer that she spun on the fly about Mrs. Figg mentioning growing up on a farm, her aunt grudgingly told her that it usually took up to twenty-one days for a chicken egg to hatch, to which she had to bury her real reaction, a frustrated groan. That would be nearly a month! A month of somehow keeping the Dursleys from finding the jar, which she initially rotated between keeping in the gardening shed out back, a place usually only she visited in order to do yard work, and her own person. Usually the Dursleys didn’t deign to touch her, but she hardly wanted to risk them grabbing her and attempting to beat her—something that they’d never attempted before, oddly enough—when that could result in the jar being broken and the eggs being smashed. After only two days of that, however, she decided to give up and continually kept it on her person, hoping that would offer it more warmth. At least once a day every day she willed the jar, and its contents, warm and humid, and after she started carrying it around, she willed the jar not to shatter if dropped or struck. When Dudley tripped her, and again when he pushed her into a wall, she found herself field-testing that protection. Other than being jostled, both the jar and eggs seemed no worse for wear.
A full week after she started her experiment, the eggs moved.
Azalea discovered that if she wanted it badly enough, she could make her hand glow or her cupboard unlatch, giving her enough light to see by inside of her cupboard and allowing her freedom to roam at night, respectively. She could also make the cupboard door stick, which came in handy for when her aunt wanted to wake her up in the morning. It meant she had a few more precious seconds to hide the jar in the event that the woman ever tried wrenching the door open or dragging her out by her ankles. The young witch had taken to sleeping curled around it so that her body heat during the night might help the little hatchlings along. With the same hope in mind, she sang to the eggs every night before bed, translating any songs she knew in English or Gaeilge into the language she shared with Kaaza, who, apparently, knew actual hatching songs. According to her friend, all snakes knew the hatching songs because all snakes heard them from inside the egg. It was their parents’ attempts at drawing them out of the realm of the unborn into the world of the living.
This particular night, as she had many nights, Azalea was watching the eggs idly on and off, half of her attention on the book spread open before her and half of it devoted to singing one of the hatching songs with Kaaza, when one of them quivered. Catching the movement out of the corner of her eye, she thought she imagined it. Until it happened again, and again, and then again. She pushed the book away and sat up, suddenly fully focused on the jar. She brought the jar closer to her, pushing more warmth toward it as she did so. Kaaza, who’d been coiled into a knot on her lower back, dropped down onto the bed (more like a sleeping pallet) and approached the jar excitedly.
She nosed it, tongue flitting out to scent the air. “It is time, speaker. We must sing the final hatching song!”
Without any other prompting, they took up the words together, Azalea a second behind Kaaza’s since this was a different hatching song from the ones they’d sang previously.
She watched, fascinated, as a small snout eventually punctured through one of the eggs, poking at the opening it made. A dent appeared in the other egg as well. Azalea broke off suddenly as something occurred to her. “Hatchlings,” she said, tugging at that place the warmth always came from, that place that fueled the light and reinforced her will, until her voice thrummed with that force. “Do not open your outer eyelid when you come out of the egg, issa.”
She had no idea if they paid her any mind. Kaaza had kept vocalizing, never once faltering, and their hatch rate increased exponentially with their frenzied, furious attempts to break free from their eggs. Azalea took up singing the final hatching song again, having the presence of mind to prop her book up between the jar and her and Kaaza’s line of sight. She didn’t know how long they sang, crooning to the young serpents, but they both fell silent when two young voices called out from behind the book.
“Hatcher, where are you?”
“Hatcher, we can’t see you!”
“I am here, issa. Do you have your outer eyelids closed?”
A chorus of two affirmative answers followed. Still, she hesitated in removing the barrier between them. When she didn’t immediately fall dead, she exhaled in relief, taking the time to examine them. The deep green body of each hatchling, both smaller in size than Kaaza, glimmered like emeralds made flesh even in the low light cast by Azalea’s hand. Despite still being covered in their birthing mess, their scales had an almost iridescent quality to them, with even their silver underbellies glittering. One, she noticed, had a single scarlet plume plastered to its skull, denoting it as male. They each had a patchwork of interlocking diamond-shaped markings, filled in with an interplay of sapphire and ruby colored scales.
“Hello my hatchlings,” Azalea cooed, her eyes alight with wonder.
Both babes excitedly turned toward the sound of her voice, tongues licking out to taste the air. They stared at her through their outer eyelids, a thick pearly membrane drawn over their eyes, shielding against their deadly gaze. Azalea noted with no small amount of fascination that a dim yellow glow still escaped faintly through the mostly-opaque lids, and the membrane apparently did not hinder their sight at all. They pressed against the glass of the jar in an attempt to get to her. “Hatcher!”
Azalea reached for the jar, unscrewing it and laying it on its side so the young basilisks could crawl out on their own rather than being dumped out of it. The pair of them slithered out and went to her without hesitation, only sparing Kaaza a cursory glance. Azalea extended her arms, hands held out to them to let them get her scent. The basilisks paused, bobbing their heads about her wrists and fingers. Once they had memorized how she smelled, and gotten their fill of looking at her, they moved forward again, each pressing into one of her open palms. As soon as little pointed faces touched her skin, she felt first a tingling sensation, a mixture of what she got if she sat on her foot for too long and static electricity, radiated up her arm, down into her chest, through her whole body, even—followed by something cold and pulsing. For a second, her hands even seemed to glow, very unlike when she made the light appear, and then it was all over, as if nothing were out of the ordinary at all. For their part, the babes scrambled into her lap completely unconcerned about whatever had just happened.
Azalea used one of her discarded shirts to wipe each of them down, murmuring to them about being mindful not to nip her. When she finished, she shoved the now-empty jar behind a few boxes stacked against one of the angled walls of her cupboard, put the book she’d been reading away after she put the Shadow-Sticky Do-Not-Look feeling back onto it. Before she went to bed, she made sure her cupboard door would stick closed in the morning. As she sunk into her poor excuse for a bed and underneath her thin, threadbare sheets, the baby basilisks and Kaaza twined about her for warmth, their scales cool against her skin. She fell asleep to their quiet hisses as they settled down with her.
She didn’t notice the strange silvery crescent moon marks on her palms until the next morning.