Night. We had returned to the hotel quite a while ago and had a proper dinner, at least Hermione and I did. When we were supposed to be sleeping, theoretically, our parents quietly slipped out for a date with each other, leaving notes in case we woke up. But I wasn't sleeping—the feeling of someone's presence wouldn't go away.
And now, standing on the room's balcony, enjoying the weather of a pleasant Parisian night, the city lights, occasionally recalling various summer night outings from my past life—and the shards throwing in bits of their own... In short, I stood and thought about how to lure out that "something" watching me. It was clearly the spiritual entity I had sensed in the magical quarter. No evil came from it—spirits cannot lie not only in the form of information but also in the form of intentions. No, not evil—something like curiosity. The very same curiosity that forced me to follow that strange man.
Exhaling, I concentrated a little life energy in my palm. For a couple of seconds, nothing happened, but after this brief moment, a whitish mist with an almost invisible center formed from the space above my hand and feasted on this energy with pleasure.
"Well, spirit, what can I say?" I whispered quietly.
I suppose I even know what exactly attracted this spirit. The phantom experience of the elf shard suggested that the spirit was extremely exhausted, and strangely enough, life energy suited it for restoring strength. This could mean only one thing—its physical form was still alive, and its cognitive abilities, whatever they might be, were tied specifically to life in such a state.
Having absorbed the treat, the spirit seemed to exhale, like a traveler in the middle of a desert suddenly relieved of acute thirst. The sensations from the spirit became much more understandable, tangible, perhaps? Accessible for understanding, that's it! True... Still extremely primitive. Can one conclude that the creature to whom the spirit belonged is mentally more primitive than a human? It's too early to draw conclusions, as it's possible that the energy received isn't enough to resume thought processes in this form.
But even so, in all this primitivism, a cry for help was vividly felt. Who am I to refuse?
Dressing again in recently bought clothes, throwing on a light windbreaker, I checked the wand in the holster on my forearm and headed for the exit. Stopped, thought, took off the already familiar backpack—which I had grabbed without even realizing how or when—and took out a piece of paper. With a pencil, I left a message for my father on the sheet saying I hadn't disappeared but had gone for a walk... Dubious comfort, but better than nothing. What if they arrive later than I return?
Placing the note on the table, I threw the backpack over my shoulder and briskly left the hotel room. Using a light distraction charm, I slipped past the wakeful staff downstairs at the reception and went out into the street. The lights of the night city, slightly cool summer air, a light breeze, the quiet sounds of nightlife—the hotel wasn't in a residential area, after all.
Creating another small clot of life energy, I fed the spirit still hovering nearby and tried to send a thought, like: "Where?" Attempts to understand at least in which direction to move took no less than ten minutes, but I finally got information from the spirit. Having got it, I went into shock; there's no other way to put it.
The place needed was about forty kilometers west of me, with a slight deviation to the south.
"Seriously?" I asked the spirit bewilderedly, although I understood that I was not destined to receive an answer.
"Hector Granger!" Hermione's indignant voice rang out from the hotel entrance, and I turned around immediately. "Where do you think you're going?"
"Slow down on the turn, sis," I smiled, beckoning her with a gesture. "Look."
With a wide stride and an important look, Hermione, in all her "casual" glory of jeans and a windbreaker, briskly walked up to me, staring at the spirit flying around my hand.
"The spirit of a still-living and even somewhat intelligent creature," I said, following a lone car driving by with my eyes. "Craves help. I want to go and help."
"But that is completely unreasonable."
"Objections are not accepted."
"I won't let you go somewhere at night..."
"And what will you do?" I smiled, looking at my frowning sister. "You can return to the hotel, but you won't stop me."
"Sure?" she reached for her wand.
"Violation of the Statute? Underage magic? What else?"
Hermione thought, looking sternly at me.
"Then I'm coming with you."
"Just what I needed..."
"Maybe you got comfortable at Hogwarts in a year, but you haven't really seen life around you. This is too unreasonable. I'm with you."
Whatever floats your boat. I could have influenced her with magic and left, but that's a solution to the current problem, while the consequences would be extremely unpleasant and undesirable for me.
"Fine... How did the guys say it?" I pulled out my wand and held it out over the road.
"What are you doing?"
"Hitching a ride."
"What? You don't think you'll catch a car on a completely empty..."
At that exact moment, a violently purple triple-decker bus drove up to us at breakneck speed, blurring in our field of vision, and stopped dead. Hermione stared at this action in amazement, while the doors opened. The cheerful face of a guy in a cap leaned out of the bus doors, and he quickly rattled something off.
"What?" I asked Hermione.
"He says," my sister answered me without taking her eyes off the bus, "that this is the Knight Bus. A bus for wizards in trouble."
"Ah-h-h! So you ar-r-re English passenger-r-rs..." the guy mangled the words. "Come in, sit down, we take you even to edge of ear-r-rth! For r-r-ringing gold coin."
Not to waste time, I pulled my unresisting sister into the bus.
"Where go, young peoples?"
"Try to explain intelligibly," I turned to Hermione, "that we need to go about forty kilometers from here by azimuth."
A conversation began, during which Hermione tried to explain the task to the conductor, and he wanted an address or something similar. In the end, it all ended with him simply unfolding a map of Paris and its surroundings before us, and I, estimating the scale, pointed to the desired point. A moment, and the bus started abruptly, literally dropping us into the seats. We didn't even have time to settle in properly or get used to the sharp maneuvers before the bus stopped again, the doors swung open, and the conductor requested three Sickles and a couple of Knuts—I paid.
Night, road, no one around. A small forest began on the right, and a forest on the left too. The bus left, and I dragged Hermione into the forest, following the spirit. Actually, a couple of seconds later, my sister herself was walking behind this spirit, which illuminated the path enough to walk.
"How do you jump so deftly over these potholes..." Hermione complained.
"Huh? No idea."
Of course, that's not true, but you can't talk about such things. Five hundred meters remained to the target.
The distance was not easy for Hermione, and it wasn't about endurance—just some root or pothole kept popping up under her feet. Trees around, grass... In short, undergrowth.
At one fine moment, we came out onto a rather large, flat, and completely empty clearing—only grass waved under our feet. However, I clearly felt a certain barrier. Hermione tried to step off the straight line, so to speak, to step aside.
"Give me your hand..."
I took my wand in one hand, and pulled Hermione along with the other. I walked around the perimeter incomprehensible to me in a circle, looking for a place where the resistance of this perimeter to our penetration would be minimal. Lucky that I found it quite quickly, and we didn't have to wander around and about for hours.
"This is all extremely irresponsible," Hermione grumbled.
"Maintain radio silence. Without necessity—not a word."
She nodded, although it was obvious that oh, how many words she would have said in my address.
Wrapping us in neutral energy, I imagined that we were passing through invisible threads of protection, pushing them apart, but not disturbing them. Step, second, third.
The empty night clearing transformed, revealing a huge tent, like a circus one. Only it didn't sparkle with lights, and clowns didn't bustle around—a minimum of lighting fires. The spirit rushed toward the tent, and I followed it, carefully watching the space around. We slowly approached the tent closer and closer, and I was more and more surprised by the absence of sane protection. Here we are standing close to the fabric walls of the tent, but not a sound came from inside.
The spirit spinning near my hand was full of anticipation, but at the same time, sadness. Deep, ingrained sadness. Hermione and I, without saying a word, began to bypass the tent, and when we reached the entrance, we hid. I signaled with a gesture to sit down and hide, and Hermione understood it. Wrapping us in neutral magic, I made a couple of passes with my wand for show, hiding the movements themselves from my sister—completely meaningless, by the way. In my head, I imagined that we were hidden from everyone. Seems it worked.
Yes, I didn't burn with the desire to use my advantage in the form of knowledge of how one can work with internal neutral energy given its control of my level. However, now is not the situation to follow this idea. It's one thing when you limit yourself in studies, and another—in real actions.
We waited. Hermione clearly couldn't sit still. She wanted to ask something but remembered in time that she had agreed to be silent unless there was a reason otherwise. The spirit wasn't worried—it was in anticipation.
In the end, when the stars shifted a little in the sky, and Hermione lost all patience, two wizards in robes came out of the tent. They just stood by the canopy, took out a pack of cigarettes, and lit up. Once a puff, twice a puff, and now they are speaking French, but I understand them every other word. Something about cubs, or chicks, corpses, freezing, clients. Or maybe about something completely different.
Finishing smoking, the wizards threw the butts into the grass and returned to the tent.
"That's terrible," Hermione exhaled quietly.
"What did you understand?" I looked at my sister, and she was pale as chalk, and clearly ready to shed a tear or two.
"They use the half-corpse of some animal to incubate eggs... And the hatched cubs are preserved, and sold... This... This is so wrong."
The spirit spinning around my hand began to spin much more aggressively, and the feeling of sadness intensified. Sadness, along with a quite easily understood desire to "stew-stuff," as a friend of mine would say.
"Hush," I stroked my sister's head, and she sniffled. "Sit here, guard, wait for me. If you see anyone but me, no matter who, hit immediately."
"With what?"
"And with what can you?"
"Well..." distraction from the sad topic worked, and Hermione thought.
While she was choosing a spell from those she had already read and possibly even learned, I quietly pronounced:
"Flagellavertum."
I directed the tip of the whip, into which the wand turned, behind the canopy of the tent entrance, inside it. Someone, having my knowledge of magic, could say that a wand is a stupid crutch. Oh, that's not so. Now this very crutch will allow me to pass magic through it without forming a spell, but the magic exit point will be where the tip of the whip is. Otherwise, I would have to pull threads of energy there, under the canopy, change their throughput, conduct a volume of magic through them...
As soon as the tip of the whip passed behind the canopy, I directed a stream of neutral magic through the whip, imagining in my head how everyone who is conscious immediately lost it, falling flat. I poured magic into the tent for half a minute. Intensively, not sparing. I felt how all of it turns into an effect, so to speak.
"I'm going. Sit, watch, okay?"
"It's very dangerous, I'm sure," Hermione indignantly protested sluggishly.
"Everything is under control, believe me."
Abruptly moving to the canopy, I wrapped myself in magic and all sorts of concealing manipulations, penetrating inside.
Spacious room. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Several lamps on the sides and under the dome of the ceiling gave enough lighting. The first thing that catches the eye is the huge, simply gigantic body of a bird unknown to me, or something else feathered. The animal sat on the floor curled into some kind of bagel, was extremely emaciated, I would even say mummified, and this was visible even through the pretty spoiled feather cover. With chains and cables, like some Buddhist altar stone, the animal was tied and chained to the floor, showing no signs of life.
Seven wizards lay around. There was some magical equipment here, something alchemical, some huge flasks with feathered creatures inside. Big ones, the size of a large dog. All this looked unpleasant.
There was a lot of furniture—everything for comfort. Around one of the sofas there were even pots with some huge ficuses, but all this was uninteresting to me. To me and the spirit flying around my hand.
Not wasting time, I approached the huge dried-up carcass of the unknown bird. It's unclear what color the feathers were—they look dirty, shabby, and generally terrible. When I approached, the spirit reached for the giant body. Looks like it's its body. Well then...
Touching the feathers with my palm, I pressed it tighter, trying to push through to the body, but it was difficult. Besides the fact that the feathers themselves are very dense, it's unclear where the body is hiding behind them. But I managed, drowning my arm up to the elbow in the end. What a huge beast... I don't even have anything to compare its dimensions with. Imagine a pile of elephants fallen together—about that volume.
Concentrating, I began to generate, if one can say so, life energy, immediately directing it into the body without any preliminary formation. The only mental message I invested was: "Bring the animal into shape. Replenish its resources."
Time passed. I was worried. Because of this excitement, my own pulse beat rhythms in my ears.
Thump-thump.
Under my hand, I felt a distinct pulsation. Coming alive.
Pouring in another maximum that I could consciously create and pass through the body, I pulled away. I didn't even notice how the spirit flying with me disappeared. But the problem was different—some alarm charms went off. The whole tent filled with a sharp ringing. Ignoring the sleep induced by me, the wizards began to sluggishly try to come to their senses. Waving my wand, I began to throw Bombardas at the chains one after another, tearing them apart. The half-corpse twitched, moved, and the wave of neutral magic with some admixture diverging from it forced a respectful nod. Nod, turn around, and run.
Running out from behind the tent canopy, I grabbed Hermione, who understood nothing, by the hand, and said just one word:
"Run."
A powerful wind blew right in the face, almost stopping our run, but immediately changed direction, knocking us over. We got up quickly. The weather deteriorated instantly, and the wind howled so that one could go deaf. Hermione and I ran to the undergrowth.
The air shuddered with thunder. Again, and again, and again. The frequency of thunder became absurd, and lightning flashed more and more often and brighter in the suddenly rolling clouds. Behind our backs, a muffled sound of fabric tearing in many places was heard, some low pop.
We reached the undergrowth.
Torrential slanting rain poured from the sky. Lightning flashed. It seemed as if some predatory bird screamed. Hermione and I clung to the ground behind a small mound, turning back to the tent—and there is no tent. In its place, with huge wings lowered to the ground, of which there were as many as several pairs, a huge bird collapsed, tearing something with its beak. A moment, and a huge tail, by no means avian, but like a reptile's, only in feathers, whipped a wizard, breaking him into trash.
Powerful discharges periodically ran along the animal's body. A couple hit the wizards, turning them into smoky running torches. One of the wizards turned into black smoke and tried to hide against the background of the raging bad weather and black sky, but lightning ran along the animal's body, whipped the smoke with a discharge and turned it into ash, deafening us with a sharp and damn loud crack.
I was mesmerized by this spectacle, and even the strong wind and stinging drops of torrential rain could not tear me away from contemplation. Only Hermione pulled me by the hand.
"Let's get out of here!" she, soaked through, successfully shouted over the bad weather.
We didn't wait for the denouement. Lighting the road through the forest with Lumos, we ran toward the road from where we came. Somewhere there, behind our backs, lightning lashed, lashed in the sky overhead, the wind rocked the trees to a creak, pushing us in the back, and drops of cold rain prevented us from looking under our feet.
I don't know how, but we reached the road, immediately hailing with wands. The asphalt was completely covered with streams.
The Knight Bus appeared suddenly, throwing up a wall of water. The conductor leaning out of the door looked with apprehension, and recognizing us, spoke in his broken English.
"Get in quickly!"
We didn't make him wait, climbed into the bus, and the conductor was so kind as to dry us with charms.
"Back, me suppose?"
"Yes," I nodded, falling onto the seat.
The bus started abruptly.
"No, well you see such thing in your England, or where you from? I tell you this," the conductor looked out the window, along which rain drops flowed horizontally at great speed. "Thunder-r-rbird doesn't fly just anywhere."
We reached the hotel quickly. Paying, we left the bus and said goodbye to the conductor. Here, forty kilometers from the scene of action, the weather was better, but looking there, to the west, one could see the glow of many lightnings.
"Thunderbird?" Hermione asked suddenly. "I almost died of fear there!"
Looking at my sister, I only now noticed that she still has a frightened and overexcited look.
"Just you wait. World of magic, and all that..."
She pulled herself together, took a breath for a rebuke, but seemed to deflate.
"We'll talk about this later."
"Definitely. Let's go to the rooms. The adventure turned out interesting, but dangerous."
"Wizards died, Hector."
"Pfft, people always die. I'm sure they knew what they were getting into, keeping this bird on a chain and using it as an incubator..."
Going up to the rooms, we noted for ourselves that the parents were still walking somewhere. I don't know about Hermione, but I quickly took a shower and went to bed—the day turned out strange. Yes, sleep.
Blinked—morning. But the strangest thing, not counting the father sleeping without hind legs, lies in the huge white-blue feather lying next to the bed. But Thunderbirds are yellow, aren't they?
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