The instant the explosion crashed into his ears, Harry froze completely for a single, disorienting second.
He thought, in that first fraction of a moment, that he must have simply imagined it.
There was no way, surely, that an actual explosion could go off somewhere inside Hogwarts in the dead of night—he must have misheard something, some trick of the wind and the slamming doors, or else—
Almost in that same instant, standing together on the second-floor landing, Harry and Ron still crouched beneath the Invisibility Cloak, and Hermione still faintly shimmering with her own Disillusionment beside them, all three turned simultaneously to look toward the door on one side of the entrance hall that led down to the cellar level.
'That old wooden door must have finally met its end,' Harry thought rapidly, 'battered apart at last by the raging wind outside.'
Unfortunately, no.
Worn as it genuinely was from decades of use, the cellar door proved considerably sturdier than any of them had first assumed.
Under the continuing, howling gusts it simply kept banging repeatedly against its frame—clack, clack—with no sign of actually giving way, while the deeper, more ominous echo of that first explosion still lingered somewhere, drifting unsettlingly through the empty, silent halls of Hogwarts in the dead of night.
Unlike the others, who'd all turned instinctively toward the cellar noise, Elune stood perfectly still on the last step leading up to the second-floor landing, the hem of her nightgown gathered casually in one pale hand, her faint eyebrows lifting with focused interest.
From the very first instant of the sound, her own eyes had already been fixed steadily up, toward the third floor specifically.
'Something had happened there.'
The silence held for perhaps four or five full seconds before sharp, sudden clarity finally flared in Harry's green eyes—he realised, all at once, that something was gravely, genuinely wrong.
"Yes—"
Hermione, who had been holding her own breath without quite noticing, let it go again in a rush. She turned her head sharply, eyes fixed now on the floor above them.
Crash!
Several boxes of the newly purchased candy toppled to the ground behind them, entirely out of control, the impact of Harry's sudden movement having jostled them loose.
"How rude—and here I thought these were gifts, meant for us!"
All manner of sweets spilled out from the shattered boxes in a colourful cascade, rolling everywhere across the stone steps, several of them tumbling further down into the darkened Great Hall below.
The little vampire glared, genuinely put out by the mess, at the retreating backs of the three now racing up the stairs—Harry, Ron, and Hermione—until all three vanished around the bend in the staircase.
Only then did her sulky expression shift, taking on a distinct and unmistakable note of private delight.
Humming a light, unbothered tune to herself, Elune calmly began gathering up the scattered candy from the steps, entirely unconcerned by whatever chaos was apparently unfolding somewhere above her.
"Third floor!"
Harry called out, tearing the Invisibility Cloak fully from his own body and clutching it in one fist, sprinting up the remaining stairs as though his own life depended on the speed.
'What in the world could have caused that explosion—and who exactly was responsible for it?'
They burst together onto the third-floor corridor, and a wild, unexpected gust of wind struck all three of them full in the face at once, forcing Harry to narrow his eyes hard against it—
'Movement, or the aftermath of it, somewhere on the third floor. It has to involve the guests Professor Watson invited something's happened to them, or been done to them.'
It was, Harry considered rapidly as he ran, entirely possible.
He knew already that Professor Watson had specifically arranged for the visiting guests' quarters to be located on this same third floor, precisely so he could reach them quickly if any trouble broke out.
But of all possible nights for something to go wrong, tonight was, cruelly, the one night Professor Watson wasn't even present at Hogwarts, having left for the Ministry hours earlier.
Then again—Professor Dumbledore, at least, hadn't left the school after the evening's banquet had concluded.
If it was simply Hagrid's ferocious younger brother who'd caused some kind of accidental chaos in his sleep, that particular problem could still likely be brought under control without too much difficulty.
That's what Harry told himself, running hard. But some vague, persistent instinct told him, even as he formed the reassuring thought, that the explosion hadn't actually come from an out-of-control Grawp at all.
"Oi, Harry!"
Ron gasped out from close behind him, wheezing hard for breath after the exhausting night already behind them.
"Don't you think—maybe we should properly think this over first—whether we really ought to go getting ourselves involved in trouble like this, tonight of all nights?"
"What are you even talking about, Ron!"
Hermione's voice cut sharper than the shrill wind screaming through the exposed corridor around them.
"I'd bet something's gone genuinely wrong with the exchange delegation—of course we should go and help them!"
"But how exactly are you planning to explain any of this to the professors—caught wandering the castle this late at night, with a vampire and a pile of candy boxes in tow, Hermione, on top of everything else!"
Ron panted the words out between ragged, effortful breaths, still running.
Overhead, the hazy moonlight briefly broke free of the wind-driven clouds scudding past, and pale light spilled down across the corridor again, as if it too were chasing determinedly after the three of them.
As the world around them brightened once more with that returning light, something waiting in the deeper darkness ahead seemed, for just a moment, to retreat further into shadow.
The three of them, running full tilt down the corridor, skidded to an abrupt halt.
In the hollow, empty corridor there was nothing now but the crackle of the wall torches burning steadily and the ongoing noise of the wind pressing against the high windows and beneath both of those sounds, their own three sets of ragged, exhausted breathing.
The blast's aftershock had cracked the surrounding stone doorframe with jagged, black-edged fissures spreading from a central point; scattered rubble and small chips of broken stone still littered the corridor floor beneath it.
Whoever had actually caused the explosion was no longer present at the scene—but it was equally clear they hadn't escaped the encounter entirely unscathed.
Harry's eyes landed on the base of the wall across from the damaged doorway.
Mottled, dark bloodstains marked the pale stone floor there, unmistakable even in the uneven torchlight.
Clearly, whoever the culprit actually was, they had been thrown backward by the force of the blast and had struck the stone wall opposite hard—genuinely hard enough that they'd coughed up blood in the impact.
"This is—"
Hermione's shocked murmur pulled Harry's own gaze away from the pool of drying blood left behind by the fleeing criminal, back instead toward the specific door the criminal had evidently failed to force open despite the explosion.
"The Student Safety Office," Harry murmured, reading the small nameplate beside the damaged frame. "Professor Watson's office."
"Who could it possibly have been—"
Ron's eyes went wide with rising fear.
Before the sound of any further hurried, scrambling footsteps could reach them from elsewhere in the castle, the little vampire they'd left behind on the stairs arrived first, having apparently abandoned her candy-gathering.
Catching sight of the nameplate reading Student Safety Office, Elune's thin brows arched again with fresh interest, her lips were pursing thoughtfully, she seemed, if anything, in an even better mood now than she had been over the candy.
Elune gave a small sniff through her nose, and just as easily as she'd spotted the nameplate, she spotted the blood spattered across the corridor floor. Something subtle and difficult to read flickered through the deep red of her eyes as she took it in.
"Mr. Potter, and—"
Professor McGonagall appeared before them abruptly, wrapped hastily in a plaid dressing gown thrown on over her nightclothes, her spectacles were sitting slightly askew on the bridge of her thin nose from the speed of her own arrival.
Her stern, sweeping gaze moved across each of their faces in turn—Harry, then Ron, then Hermione—lingering a moment longer than the others on Elune, before finally settling on the damaged doorframe itself.
Her own breath was coming noticeably quicker now in the aftermath of a hurried run through the castle.
Snape emerged from a patch of deep shadow further down the corridor like something conjured directly from it.
He scanned the whole scene meticulously—the cracked frame, the bloodstain, the four students gathered—then looked directly at Harry, the corner of his mouth were curling into a faint, familiar sneer.
"Why exactly are you here, Potter?"
"Why exactly are you here?"
Harry demanded in return, his brow furrowing deeply at the man's tone.
Unlike Professor McGonagall, whose own quarters were reasonably close by, Snape's office was located down in the dungeons—he genuinely couldn't have arrived at the third floor this quickly through any ordinary route.
Unless, of course, he'd already been lurking somewhere nearby well before the explosion occurred.
"I believe," Snape said softly, "it's you who ought to be answering that particular question first, Mr. Potter—"
His dark eyes flicked deliberately to the Invisibility Cloak still draped over Harry's own arm, then down further, to the grass stains and dried mud visibly caked across his shoes.
"Why are you here at all, Mr. Potter? Only a single week into term, and already finding the days too dull for your taste—can't wait even that long before you go stirring up some fresh attention for yourself, as usual?"
McGonagall's own brow twitched sharply at that. She shot Severus a quick, warning glance before turning back to face Harry directly, her eyes were stern but notably less accusatory than Snape's had been.
"That noise just now—was that caused by the three of you?"
"No, Professor McGonagall, it wasn't us. We only came running because we heard the sound."
Harry glared back at Snape as he answered, refusing to let the man's implication go unchallenged.
"Ah. Heard it all the way from the Gryffindor dormitories, did you, and simply came running to investigate out of the goodness of your hearts?"
The mockery in Snape's expression deepened visibly at that.
"I'm hungry—"
An unexpected voice spoke up abruptly, cutting cleanly across the increasing tension. It was Elune.
She wore an expression of utter indifference throughout, as though the whole confrontation barely registered as interesting to her.
"So, I dragged the three of them along with me to go find something to eat. Watson told me that I could always go to Miss Granger if I ran into any trouble here—is that not permitted, then?"
Harry glanced sideways at her, genuinely startled—he hadn't remotely expected the little vampire to speak up on their behalf, given how little regard she'd shown for their exhaustion all evening.
"Something to eat?"
McGonagall eyed Hermione next with suspicion.
"Is that actually true, Miss Granger?"
It was, technically true—though exactly where they'd gone looking for that food, several miles away in Hogsmeade, Elune had left unspecified. Luckily for all three of them, McGonagall didn't press the question any further in that particular direction.
"That's exactly right, Professor McGonagall—"
Hermione nodded quickly, a fresh blush was colouring her cheeks at the half-truth.
McGonagall seemed to relax slightly at the confirmation. She turned instead to Elune and offered what was clearly meant, in her own way, as a kind, welcoming smile.
"You're new to Hogwarts, Miss Gangero, so you may not yet know all our particular rules. Students aren't permitted to leave their dormitories after nightfall under normal circumstances. If you ever need something like this again after dark, you may go directly to Bryan instead—ah, but he's not here at the castle today, of course—"
McGonagall's expression turned grave once more as the reminder brought her attention back to the actual crisis at hand. She drew her wand and approached the damaged office door with careful steps, tapping the bronze door handle gently with its tip.
A faint, rippling shimmer of light passed briefly over the cold metal handle in response, then faded away again, settling back into ordinary stillness.
"It's clear, Severus—"
McGonagall straightened up fully, letting out an audible breath of relief.
"Someone attempted to break into Bryan's office while he was away from the castle tonight. Fortunately—"
She turned her head toward the drying bloodstain the fleeing culprit had left behind on the opposite wall.
"—they didn't succeed in the attempt."
"I share your assessment entirely, Minerva—"
Snape said, his own gaze drifting lazily toward Harry once more.
"Though the actual culprit may well still be somewhere quite close by, even now—"
Harry knew exactly, precisely what Snape was implying with that particular phrasing, but he swallowed down the rising urge to argue back and said nothing further.
McGonagall, for her part, hadn't thought to properly question why the three of them had been out wandering the castle so late in the first place—because she had, no idea they'd actually slipped all the way off to Hogsmeade and back.
Snape, though, had clearly already worked out considerably more of the truth.
"Did you happen to see anyone suspicious while you were out patrolling nearby tonight, Severus?"
"The only suspicious people I've seen tonight, Minerva, are standing right here in front of us."
Snape looked slowly over the assembled three of them and gave a cold, thin little laugh.
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