Beyond Hogwarts cont; Chapter Thirty-Six

-=Beyond Hogwarts, cont.; Chapter Thirty-Six=-

By six o’clock, however, no one had entered the house, by magic or otherwise, and Lily was starting to get rather worried. Surely-surely the fighting couldn’t still be wreaking havoc all over Plymouth? Placing her twice-finished book aside, she stood up, fiddling nervously with her top collar-button. Stepping out of her room and onto the dim landing, she peered downstairs. Nothing. The coat-hooks were empty except for her own black one, and the only shoes sitting on the rack below her cloak were the faintly scuffed ones she had worn to the Ministry that past midnight.
   Hearing a faint pattering in the kitchen, Lily flew over to the other side of the landing’s railing. “Slenka!” she called. “Has anyone come in yet?”
   Skittering across the freshly mopped floor, Slenka sank into a short bow. “No, miss. Master is not home yet.”
   Suddenly frustrated, Lily slapped her hands fiercely against the banister. Where could he be at this hour?
   Sirius, she thought instantly. They’re best friends; he just might be.
   Whirling back into her room, she re-buttoned her collar-button, sn atched up her scarf from its heap on the footstool, wound it around her neck twice, and Disapparated, reappearing a half-second later in the organized mess lit only by daylight that was Sirius’ and Remus’ flat.
   “Hello!” she called, looking around. “Anyone?”
   A soft cough came from the bedroom to her left. “I-er-who’s there?”
   “Remus?” Lily asked, stepping over a pile of scattered magazines. “Is that you?”
   A sigh wheezed out, and the same weak voice answered. “Yes. Lily?”
   “Yes. I came to-to look for James…honestly, how can you walk in this place?-do you know where he-“
   She stopped suddenly. Remus was lying in his bed, obviously shirtless, though he had pulled his sheets as far over his torso as possible. A large gash crossed his forehead, reaching far beyond his hairline on one side. Crusted and dried blood was scattered all over his face, and his hair on the left side of his head was matted down with a reddish-brown mass. The grey sheets, too, were speckled with blood where he had grasped them, and Lily could see several cuts all along his hands and his visible arm.
   “Remus,” she whispered. “Merlin, what happened?”
   “It’s not that bad,” he lied; “they told anyone who could to Apparate home. I-it’s mostly just blood loss.”
   Swaying dangerously, Lily rested a hand against the doorframe. “Remus, is James all right?”
   Remus nodded quickly. “Yes, yes, he’s all right. Peter and Sirius are, too. They stayed to help with anyone who was wounded or-or…wounded-badly…they brought me home first, slammed a Blood-Replenishing Potion down my throat, and forced me into bed.” Trying to support himself on his elbow and failing, he settled back into his pillows with a very mulish and irritated expression on his face. “He said to tell you that he’d be home as soon as he could and not to come after him.”
   “Oh.” Lily let her arm fall to her side, feeling very predictable all of a sudden. Shaking the mood away quickly, though, she unwound her scarf and dropped it onto a chair.
   “I’m going to get some hot water and some towels,” she informed Remus, “and you are going to remove those sheets from your body so that they don’t stick to you when the blood dries.”
   Whisking out of the room, Lily ransacked the linen closet and Summoned a wide, low bowl from the kitchen into her hands. Pointing her wand at it, she filled it with steaming water, and re-entered Remus’ room to find him helplessly trying to move the sheets from his stomach.
   Setting down the bowl and towels, Lily smiled faintly. “I’ll help; here.” Moving the sheets aside for him, she earned a decidedly embarrassed grin in return. Picking the bowl of water up again, she dipped one of the towels into it, wrung it out lightly, and unfolded the towel to lie on Remus’ chest and stomach, frowning at the gash running down his left side.
   “It looks like you were fighting with pickaxes instead of wands,” she commented. “Here. This one goes on your face; don’t move it.”
   “I won’t be able to breathe,” Remus warned.
   “Of course you will. Listen, I’m going back to our house to rummage through our potions stock, all right? I’ll be back in a moment.”
   “’Kay,” her friend muttered. “I’m going to sleep. I’ll tell you what happened once you get back.”
   “I won’t ask you to, not now,” Lily said kindly. “You’re much too exhausted.”
   “Thanks,” Remus returned, meaning that one word perhaps more sincerely than he had done in years.
   Discouraged, Lily sank down on a crate of differently corked and colored bottles, her head in her hands. She had been rummaging through her admittedly somewhat meagre potions closet for about a quarter of an hour, and it had just hit her that she knew exactly where the rest of the Blood-Replenishing Potions and the antibiotics were; she had stowed them away in James’ overnight bag.
   “Ugh,” she groaned. “I’ll have to visit Severus…and he is going to kill me, waking him up at six-thirty in the morning…”
   Without bothering to stand up, she Disapparated, landing moments later on the edge of a sofa in her friend’s flat.
   “He is not going to like this…” Lily sighed, getting to her feet and smoothing out a wrinkle in her robes. “Severus!” she called. “I know it’s half-past six, but I need your help!”
   A rather exhausted voice floated out from the room that would normally be classified as an office or spare bedroom; Severus had transformed it into his own laboratory. “Lily?”
   “Yes, yes, me-hullo, how are you?” Stepping nimbly over to the door, Lily lifted her hand in a half-wave.
   “I have not gone to sleep,” Severus said dryly, dusting his hands off, “but what is it you’d like?”
   Lily sighed. “We’re out of a particular stock of potions at my house, and Remus is rather badly wounded. Is there-is there any way you could help us?”
   Severus hesitated momentarily, but he made the mistake of looking at her dreadfully worried face and had to give in. “All right. Come on in here; tell me what you need.”
   The two of them Apparated into Remus’ bedroom about five minutes later, each clutching about ten bottles of neatly labelled substances. Severus had offered to come along to help, and Lily, gratefully, had accepted his offer.
   “You were quite right,” Severus said shortly, staring at Remus, “he looks as if he’s been attacked by another werewolf.”
   “Sh; he’s sleeping,” Lily warned, setting down her armload and removing the by-now cold, wet, and formerly white towels from Remus’ chest and head. “What do you want me to do?”
   “Hand me a towel,” he ordered. “A dry one. And get that black bottle out of the stack you just set down-yes, give that to me…”
   For about ten minutes, Severus was fully occupied, though he was not exactly pleased at what he was being asked to do-though he was slightly pleased that the wounded man was Remus and not James or Sirius; he would likely have flatly refused if he were asked to help Sirius and someone other than Lily had begged him for help. Not, he thought, that Lily ever begged for anything; she simply knew how to ask for favors in a way that both flattered the person she was asking for something from and did not put her in the light of someone who couldn’t do a simple thing by herself.
   “There,” Severus finally said. “That’s the most I can do.”
   The most he could do, it appeared, was quite a bit more than what other people thought of themselves. Remus’ cuts were neatly bandaged, he was sleeping quietly, and the pale, greenish tint had left his face.
   “Thank you,” Lily whispered. “He looks-well, aside from a mummy, he looks very good.” Chancing a glance at Severus’ face, she saw a look of grim disgust on it, something she had almost expected-after all, he had, rather unwillingly, been driven to heal a Marauder.
   “Listen,” she said determinedly, “why wouldn’t you let me do this? You didn’t have to come; I’ve taken classes on this, both at Hogwarts and at the Ministry during Auror training.”
   “Because these are not commonly used potions,” Severus said shortly. “They are, as a matter of fact, deadly when administered by anyone that is not myself. I added that little quirk. Polyjuice Potion does not help, either.”
   “There is a line, Severus,” Lily grinned, “between being careful and paranoia.”
   “I am not paranoid,” he said stiffly. “I am simply exceedingly suspicious.”
   “Yes, and I have always felt this immense camaderie between James and those pickled bat brains that float around in discoloured jars in your laboratory. In addition to being paranoid, you’re also in denial.”
   “Lily, are you there?” a drained voice called from the mess of a living room. Sticking his wand inside his belt, James stepped inside Remus’ bedroom, trekking mud and snow all over the floor. “God, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I was, but there wasn’t time.”
   Lily swung around and wrapped her arms tightly around his waist, almost making him fall forwards. “You absolute idiot, not leaving any sort of word with anyone! Are you hurt, you blasted prat?”
   “Not really,” he grinned, “but I’m practically bushed. You’ve taken care of Remus, then?”
   “Severus did, actually,” Lily explained, nodding towards her friend. “He sort of had to-I packed all of the medical potions in your bag, so I had to ask him for help, and what he puts into his potions is about the equal of an alarm spell.”    “You know,” Lily said, biting her lips, “that was really quite rude. And he did help Remus when I asked him to.”
   “Yes, but he’s Snape. You heard him; he’d throw me to man-eating rats without hesitation, so I don’t see any reason not to return the favour.”
   “An alarm spell?” James asked, raising his eyebrows at the sincerely unfriendly man standing in the corner, arms crossed over his chest.
   “Yes, one of those that hurl javelins through your chest and then have several deadly side effects.”
   James snorted, and Sirius took that moment to Apparate into the room, just on top of Severus’ feet.
   “OW! What are you doing here, you GIT?!” Sirius howled, falling backwards and onto the trunk at the foot of Remus’ bed, which slid backwards until it crashed into the wall, efficiently waking Remus up and jolting his head rather painfully . “Standing right there, not caring if innocent people who LIVE in this house choose to Apparate into it-have you never HEARD of not standing in the middle of a room that doesn’t bloody BELONG to you?! Look at what you’ve done; you’ve made me wake the wounded man up, his head’s probably aching, my back’s about broken, and it’s all your fault!”
   A sort of stunned silence ensued; Lily, James, and Remus were trying not to laugh, and Severus seemed to be deciding whether to use his wand to hex Sirius into the next millennium or just to use the Muggle way and land a fist in his face. Indecision, for the moment, won.
   “Honestly,” Sirius grumbled, dusting himself off and picking himself up. “This is not my day.”
   “You-you-you-!” Severus managed, quite a bit of color mounting in his cheeks. “You’re blaming me for your inadvertent-“
   “Oh, come on,” Sirius teased, “surely you can come up with something at least a bit more pitiable?”
   “YOU COMPLETE BASTARD!” Severus finally shouted. “DO YOU THINK THE ENTIRE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND YOUR BLASTED HUMOR AND YOUR INCONSEQUENT, UNIMPORTANT WELL-BEING?! THAT IS ALL YOU HAVE EVER SEEMED TO THINK, WITHOUT CARING WHAT ANYONE ELSE AROUND YOU BELIEVES, AND IF THE DARK LORD EVER DECIDES TO COME AFTER YOU, I WILL BE FOUND AFTERWARDS MUTILATING YOUR CORPSE WITH EVERY BIT OF STRENGTH I HAVE, YOU-YOU-YOU-!!”
   “Er,” Sirius said slowly, after the rant seemed to be mostly finished, “yes, that was…somewhat less totally pathetic.”
   Absolutely no one was surprised when Severus Summoned his various bottles into his pockets with a furious hiss and Disapparated in one of the loudest pops any of them had ever heard.
   “You know,” Lily said, biting her lips, “that was really quite rude. And he did help Remus when I asked him to.”
   “Yes, but he’s Snape. You heard him; he’d throw me to man-eating rats without hesitation, so I don’t see any reason not to return the favour.”
   “I’ll talk to him later today, then,” Lily sighed. “Come on, though; tell me what happened in Plymouth. Where’s Peter?”
   “Albus kept him for something or other; he didn’t say what for,” James said, falling onto the bed next to Remus. “Merlin, I’ve almost forgotten what sheets smell like…”
   “Tell me,” Lily prodded, sitting down on the other side of Remus.
   “Well,” James sighed, “they obviously expected us there, so we were pretty much outnumbered ten to one. We-a lot of us were wounded; they all look about like Remus did. Moody’s eye-thing definitely worked to a charm for the first few hours; it kept rolling around like something possessed, but then someone sent a Severing Charm his way, and he’ll probably have to get a peg leg. Albus is all right, of course, and Kingsley…Minerva, too.” Thoughtfully, James stared into space for a bit. “I’d never known that Peter could duck that fast. He’s really quite good at it. Hardly got a scratch at all.”
   “We all have hidden talents, my friend,” Sirius grinned. “Then, of course, there is Moony, who has hidden talons.”
   “That was just bad, Sirius,” Lily groaned. “Just…no.”
   “Anyway, Eva and Frank are fine, and so are Anne and Caradoc; they’re hardly scratched. But-well, Lily, do you remember Benjy?”
   “Fenwick?” Lily asked, curious. “Yes, of course; is he all right?”
   “Well-no,” James admitted, nervously fiddling with a loose thread on one of the bedsheets. “He’s dead.”
   Slowly, Lily straightened up, staring at him. “He’s dead?”
   “Yes. He’s got to be. Dorcas Meadowes shrieked to kingdom come at about two in the morning; said she’d seen one of the Death Eaters absolutely blast him to pieces. Trying to find him was rough; all we could get together was about a basketful of…of…er, of him.”
   “Oh, that’s disgusting,” Lily said quietly, rising to her feet. “How could anyone-”
   “I know,” James answered, taking her hand in his. “But it’s what we’re fighting to prevent. Benjy knew that when he signed up.”
   He looked around at Sirius, nodded, and stood up, slipping his arm around Lily’s waist. “I’ll take her home…you can come by later for dinner-not you, Remus; we’ll send your dinner over. I-yeah. See you tonight.”
   “Find out when the funeral is,” Sirius called after him, and James waved in agreement before he and Lily Disapparated.
   There was nothing about Saturday night in the Daily Prophet on Monday, not even a small paragraph on the very last page. Lily and James spent about thirty minutes riffling through it over the breakfast table, but there wasn’t even a hint of the failed attack. Not even something in the area of: Rowdy goings-on in Plymouth Sunday morning; it seems to have been a raucous teenage party.
   “I’m guessing the new Minister doesn’t want the wizarding world to lose trust in the strength of the Ministry,” James deduced, letting the newspaper fall to the floor. “I suppose that’s somewhat intelligent, for the time being, so people won’t go into mass hysteria, but I do think that people need to know what’s going on. They can’t keep hiding this…this kind of thing from the public forever. They won’t be able to hide it from the Muggles, either, unless a meteor decides to fall on You-Know-Who’s head.”
   “I won’t deny that that would be providential,” Lily mumbled through a bite of jam and toast. “Still, it’s too much to hope for. I notice they haven’t said anything about Benjy, either.”
   “The Ministry’s assuming that he was simply in Plymouth and got curious, so he wandered into the middle of the fight and got blasted. They’ve found part of his Order badge; about three-fourths of his name was intact, and I’d like to find out what they’re thinking about what kind of society the badge came from.”
   “Just be subtle,” Lily warned, pulling a black ribbon out of her pocket and pulling her hair away from her face. “The visitation’s tonight at eight…we’ll have to take off work, but they’ll have to let us.”
   “Yeah,” James agreed. “I’m off, then. See you at lunch.”
   The visitation that night was anything but pleasant. Benjy used to spend about six hours every Saturday at an orphanage, volunteering his time to play and work with the children, and about thirty of them came, dressed in black robes, and all between the ages of one and eleven. One little girl, with chestnut braids and tear-streaked cheeks, placed a paper pressed-flower bookmark that she had made on top of the closed casket, sobbing her heart out. Once, one of the adults told Eva in a whisper, when she was new to the orphanage and had fallen out of her bunk bed, Benjy had picked her up, placed her on his lap, taken a lovely, freshly picked, bright red chrysanthemum out of his pocket, and placed it in her hair. She had meant to give her present to him that Saturday, but he hadn’t come, and it was her own impulse to bring it to the visitation.
   Both James and Lily watched the small girl with tears in their eyes as she approached and stepped away from the coffin, and when James knelt down next to her to say something in the way of comfort and she flung her arms around his neck, positively howling, Lily started crying as well. Roughly, she shoved her knuckles into her mouth to keep from making a spectacle of herself, but all that she accomplished was to allow her tears to roll down her arm instead of onto her robes.
   “I can’t see children cry,” she told Sirius dully about five minutes later, as he placed a comforting arm around her shoulders. “It just…it…it didn’t matter so much when all these adults were bawling, but that girl…”
   “Yeah, I know,” Sirius said quietly, “it’s hard. This whole thing is hard. Not knowing if you’re going to get through the next day, not knowing if you’ll come home to find your family dead…that’s happened to more people that you or I can imagine. It’s terrifying, of course it is. We’re living in one of the most terrifying times possible, but all we can do is to fight.”
   “I don’t intend to buckle under,” Lily said grimly. “I do intend to fight. I’m not giving in and sitting there, helpless, waiting-no matter what I do to help, anything will make a difference. If it prevents only one person from crying the way that little girl is, I’ll have done something worthwhile.”
   “You’re right, of course,” Peter said, dropping into the conversation and patting her arm. “It’s the way we all feel.”
   Peter couldn’t have been more correct. It had been given out that Benjy had died as a result of a surprise attack as he was flying over Plymouth with Marlene McKinnon, who agreed to play along after a good deal of coaxing. What Albus had kept Peter for was to retrieve Benjy’s broom and to shatter it to splinters; the pair of them, then, along with Kingsley, Alastor, and Marlene, then proceeded to strew the splinters over a good quarter-mile of ground. No one from the Ministry questioned Marlene’s story: that she had been flying about ten feet away from him when she saw a bright purple flash of light and was thrown severely off balance by a terrific explosion and noise; when she landed and looked around for Benjy, all she could see were a few bits and pieces. Immediately, she Apparated into the nearest pub and shrieked hysterically for a bit before the owner of the pub handed her a strong brandy and sent someone to notify the Ministry’s Emergency Squad night shift, who arrived within moments. After some questioning, Marlene was allowed to Disapparate.
   As a result, everyone at the Ministry that had even faintly known Benjy turned their entire stock of energy to help stop the rise of Lord Voldemort; everyone from the slowest under-secretary to the new Minister of Magic, Millicent Bagnold, was working their hardest and never complained about the added weight of work or the endless hours of overtime. This had been the first completely unprovoked attack; the other people that were killed were either Aurors, Muggles, or directly tied in to a top department in the Ministry. Benjy, however, was a pure-blood, and he was definitely not in an important Ministry position, so this re-emphasized the certain danger that was looming over all of England.
   Needless to say, none of the members of the Order had any wish to clear things up to decrease the more frenzied and productive atmosphere, and neither did the heads of the Ministry; the mission to Plymouth, as far as they were concerned, was a secret, and the less found out about it, the better. They simply assumed that Benjy had been hit by a curse as he was flying over the disastrous field, and that the last few Death Eaters had seen him and fired the jet of light upwards before they Disapparated, leaving the grassland empty for Marlene to land on.
   In fact, the Ministry employees were so motivated that, just two weeks after Benjy’s funeral, an owl had been captured with a letter that was not signed nor addressed but informed the reader exactly what had gone on during a top-secret meeting that had planned the official Plymouth attack and mentioned another possible promised to update frequently. The writing was quickly traced back to Damien Proditor, the fattish, middle-aged second-in-command of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. He underwent a speedy trial before he received a fifty-year sentence in Azkaban, which was as good as a death sentence; Proditor was not in the pink of health, and twenty years at the most in Azkaban prison would send him to his demise. For treason and betrayal, there were no more light punishments.
   James personally suspected that Bartemius Crouch, the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, had something to do with this: he was quickly rising in the Ministry and in the eyes of the public, and any weakness shown towards a traitor in his department would reflect unfavourably on him. After hearing his arguments, Lily agreed, remembering the pompous man that had interviewed her after James had been shot; he had looked as if his work was his only world. It had been an immense surprise to her when Arabella Figg had told her that he had a wife and son, the latter of which was now at Hogwarts.
   The flurry over Proditor’s arrest and sentencing died down in about three weeks, during which it was not uncommon for a conversation between acquaintances or friends to start with: “The Ministry’s really doing a much better job than they were; did you hear about that Proditor man?” The long-term result was that the Ministry rose a notch in everyone’s opinion, and the Daily Prophet was starting to print more articles about the effects of Voldemort than they had previously been permitted to by the Ministry, in hopes that people would either give information towards the capture of one or more Death Eaters and so that the enemy would know that most of Britain was warned much more wholly against them and were therefore better prepared.
   Eva and Frank threw a Halloween party on October 31st, to which they invited every member of the Order along with an advisement to bring lots of candy. They insisted on taking a group photograph of the Order, and after eating a quite wonderful dinner, to which everyone that could cook or bake had contributed to, they all walked, by Eva’s request as well as common consent, to the orphanage not far away where Benjy had spent some of his time. It was snowing again, though the ground was too warm for snowdrifts, and everyone arrived at the gray stone building with white, glittering, enormous flakes in their eyelashes and hair.
   It was an orphanage for wizarding children, and the decorations around the orphanage were much more cheerful and exciting than Muggle ones were. No Muggle trappings, however expensive and electronic, could include real, non-melting icicles, and nowhere could Muggle orphans find dancing Christmas ornaments hung on garlands that shook gently and gave off real snow that disappeared just before it touched the carpets. It was not a bleak, horrid, loveless place that most stories depicted orphanages as, but there was a definite no-nonsense aura about the head of the establishment, and the staff was very meagre, leaving no time for any one of them to spend particular time with the children.
   The reaction, therefore, when twenty-four people filed into the reception room with bags and bags of candy clutched in chilly, pink fists, was tumultuous. Happily grateful hands and mouths undid wrappers, chomped on Chocolate Frogs, traced over the words on the Frog cards, squeaked when packets of Ice Mice started hopping around in stomachs, howled gleefully when Pepper Imps burned the tongue, and giggled with unrestrained delight when the sacks of Fizzing Whizbees made the eaters levitate about three or four inches off of the ground.
   The visitors took the children outside to catch snowflakes and to count them, organized a round of ghost-stories, taught them how to make spiderwebs on black paper with the chalky, cold substance inside the Ice Mice, and shared roasted and salted pumpkin seeds. Reluctantly, they left at nine-thirty by request of the orphanage’s head; the official bedtime for the children was ten o’clock. As they were walking back to Eva and Frank’s house, everyone was in quite a euphoric mood, and they were all shooting rather bad jokes back and forth and laughing crazily.
   Unknown to them, they attracted the stares (and, in some case, the glares) of several Muggle passers-by, who clearly did not approve of people who swayed around public streets, emitting drunken-sounding laughter, and throwing around unintelligible, mumbled words that came out sounding like: “Qwerditch” or “Depthfeeders”.
   “That was great,” Lily sighed happily in James’ general direction, Apparating into the bedroom and pulling off her knitted cap. “Those children were wonderful.”
   “Yes, weren’t they,” James grinned, remembering the way two seven-year-old boys had begged him to Apparate home, get his broom, and teach them how to fly. “One of the best Halloweens I’ve ever spent.” He reached for her and slipped his arms around her waist. “Remember when we were cute and innocent like that?”
   “I was very rude,” Lily laughed. “When I think of our early Hogwarts years, all I remember is being despicably rude to you.”
   “You did it very well,” James said thoughtfully. “If I remember correctly, you had me convinced that you were God at one point in time.”
   “Oh?” Lily raised an eyebrow. “So you’ve stopped believing that, then?”
   “Yes,” James laughed. “I would have gone mad by now, living with God…I mean, really, I can see why God never married; he’d have permanent bruises from his wife’s abusive and physical complaints that he never spent enough time with her and too much time with those blasted mortals.”
   “Well,” Lily asked, “what am I, then?”
   “I’m betting on Athena,” James stated, kissing her nose. “Or Artemis…Merlin knows you were the lovely goddess of chastity up until the end of seventh year…”
   “I was too young. And besides, I had school to worry about!” Lily protested.
   “Yeah,” James grinned; “too young to get married at just-turned-seventeen, right? I personally maintain that you were saving yourself for me.”
   She opened her mouth to retort, but then seemed to think better of it. “Well, subconsciously, maybe…”
   James looked sincerely shocked. “Really?”
   “Yes. I think so.” Resting her chin on his shoulder, Lily’s eyes flew to an unfocused point, remembering her seventh year at Hogwarts. “I remember…I was drawing a freehand face one day, and it turned out to be yours. It scared me rather badly.”
   “Because you still thought I was a prat, or what?”
   “It scared me,” she repeated sternly, pulling back and facing him squarely. “I didn’t want to care about anyone.”
   “Oh.”
   “Yes.”
   “You know what really unnerved me?”
   “What?” Lily asked, rather curious.
   He turned a bit pink, and ran an nervous hand through his hair. “Well, one day by the lake—I think in the last term of our seventh year—we were completely alone, and I came about this close to kissing you then, but you turned away. I…well, it was humiliating, and I was pretty much devastated.”
   Amused, the ends of Lily’s mouth tugged themselves into a small smile. “Want to know something?”
   “What?” he asked, unconsciously mimicking her earlier question.
   “The second after I turned away, I was beating myself about the head for doing it, and then I convinced myself that you were only trying to tell me something, not…er…kiss me.”
   James stared. “Really?”
   “Yes.”
   “Oh, wow.”
   “’Wow’?” Lily laughed. “What’s so ‘wow’ about that?”
   “I don’t believe I was beating myself about the head for weeks about something that really wouldn’t have been a bad impulse,” he stated with a grin. “Well, let’s make up for that missed opportunity then, shall we?”
   He brushed a bit of hair that had fallen out of her braid behind her ear and kissed her. Both were entirely happy for the first time in months, and neither of them remembered anything about the shadow of dread that all England was living under; they had just spent a glee-filled evening with about forty children and their close friends, and there was nothing within miles that hinted of danger or devilry. The evening was beautiful, it was Halloween, and they were in blissfully outstanding good humours. Reality, for them, had been suspended and replaced by a time filled with relaxed, unworried, friendly, and loving wisps of laughter.