By the time Iain climbed back into his bedroom through the window, he looked far more bedraggled than he had when he jumped out.
And a lot sneakier.
"I never left the room. I was in here sleeping the whole time!" Iain had only just begun hypnotizing himself when he saw Little Skeleton not far away.
It was lying on top of the wardrobe, its two hollow black eye sockets fixed on him, jaw slightly open, with the unmistakable posture of asking, Where did you go?
"I didn't go anywhere!" Iain scrambled up from the floor and brushed grass and dirt off his pajamas. He plucked half a dry twig from his hair and tossed it into the rubbish bin.
"Stop staring at me with those enormous doll eyes." Knowing his explanation would not survive even basic logic, Iain instantly switched to a different story.
"I just went outside to take a crap in the wild. A normal toilet simply can't handle my output." It was an excellent excuse, except for the fact that his voice came out much higher than usual.
He sounded guilty as hell.
He even reached out and grabbed Little Skeleton after it jumped down from the wardrobe to keep staring at him.
"Your silent scrutiny is deafening."
The guilty young wizard seized the skeleton by the skull and physically turned its head toward the wall.
There was a faint click from the neck bones as Little Skeleton's head rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Its body still faced Iain, but its face was now pointed the other way.
It did not move, nor did it protest. It simply stood there quietly like a puppet too tired to resist being posed.
"There. Don't keep staring at me. I'm afraid you've installed hidden cameras in those eye sockets. I already told undercover cops before, if you hide a camera in a bird's nest, that still counts as surveillance."
Iain was the sort who always feared his own tricks would one day be used against him, so he took precautions against Little Skeleton and began pacing around the room, clutching his hair.
"There were no witnesses."
The young wizard was clearly in high spirits now, but also deeply anxious over having killed Quirrell. His muttering was so quiet it sounded like he was confirming things to himself.
"And it was self-defense. He tried to kill me. Avada Kedavra was practically brushing my nose, and this nose is so perfect it could go to Hollywood and make a living as a mold model!"
"My hand only cast that spell because it had to protect my life. No, wait. I blew Quirrell up with explosives!" Iain seemed to be searching for a legally sound excuse for himself, or perhaps manually editing his own memories.
A lie told to yourself a thousand times would eventually become truth.
"Exactly! I used explosives! Not an Unforgivable Dark Arts curse! No one saw me use Dark Magic, which means I never used Dark Magic!"
"I don't even need some advanced inequality proof for this. A basic equation already settles it!" Iain's eyes lit up, delighted by his own brilliance.
But.
He was too smart to ignore one crucial fact.
"Voldemort's remnant knows what really happened. And who knows if he'll start blabbing everywhere, making up stories even I'd know never happened!"
He stood there in silence for about three seconds, then reached some kind of grim decision.
"Damn it. Even if everyone knows Tom's a pathological liar, for the sake of my spotless reputation, I need to find him and kill him before he gets his power back!"
Iain's attitude was astonishingly resolute. He had no desire to make an enemy of the Dark Lord, but the Dark Lord had the potential to ruin his name forever. Voldemort was the one choosing to stand against him.
Little Skeleton's head was still turned toward the wall. Yet somehow it had found a blank sheet of paper and a pen, a quill pen Iain had bought in Diagon Alley.
The ink had not even dried yet.
Pinching the quill awkwardly between finger bones, Little Skeleton scrawled a crooked line of words across the paper.
The handwriting looked like that of a child just learning to write, shaky, uneven, each letter different in size. But it was legible. And it was obvious that if it still had flesh on its hands, its penmanship would probably have been rather elegant.
[Who do you want to kill?]
Iain glanced at the paper Little Skeleton was holding up, snatched it away, tore it into pieces, and stuffed them into his own mouth.
"Don't be silly."
Speaking around shredded paper in the most primitive paper shredder imaginable, his tone sounded like someone soothing a child who had asked the wrong question.
"I'm such a kind person. I've never even dared kill a chicken in my life. Otherwise why would I go to all the trouble of persuading chickens and ducks to sacrifice themselves voluntarily?"
Iain thumped his chest and made the solemn promise.
Little Skeleton's head remained aimed at the wall. Its jaw clicked softly once. No one knew what that click meant.
"Let me think."
Iain began pacing again.
Death Eaters bore Voldemort's Dark Mark, and Voldemort now bore his own termination curse mark. So if Voldemort could use his mark to locate the Death Eaters, then maybe he could do something similar in reverse.
"That'll require some advanced magical technique!"
Iain crouched down and dragged his suitcase out from under the bed. He released the sealed Dark Scripture, also known as the old witch upperclassman's diary.
"Upperclassman! Beautiful upperclassman!" Iain flopped over his desk, chin resting on the diary's edge. "I'd like to ask you a purely academic question."
The diary's pages stayed blank for a moment. Then handwriting slowly appeared, elegant and unhurried, just like always.
[Go on.]
"So, hypothetically speaking. If a certain small animal got hit by your modified lighting charm by accident…"
"But it didn't die. It ran away. And I... I mean a friend of mine with talent on par with my own... feels bad, thinks the poor little animal is suffering, and wants to track it down and put it out of its misery. Is there a spell for that?"
The mutated lighting charm, the one that acted like industrial-strength daylight, had come from the mysterious upperclassman. So Iain assumed that if such a technique existed, she would certainly know it.
And perhaps she did.
The diary went silent. The writing paused for a long time, long enough that Iain thought it might not respond at all. Then new words slowly appeared, more slowly than before.
[You killed someone?]
"No!"
Iain's voice jumped half an octave, then hastily dropped again.
"A small animal. I said a small animal. Anyway, I can swear that whatever I killed was absolutely not a person!"
Quirrell had probably died the moment he found Voldemort in the first place. There was no way an adult wizard could get wiped out by a little wizard casually shining a Lighting Charm on him.
So there was only one logical explanation. That had been some magical puppet created by Voldemort, bait meant to lure a young wizard into corruption through a staged encounter.
Strong-willed as ever, Iain swore he would never let Voldemort get his way. Starting today, even if someone beat him to death and smashed his backside flat, he had merely learned a solar illumination spell from an elderly witch.
The diary fell silent again for a moment.
It did not press further.
[I can tell you how to erase loose ends. No one is more practiced at that than I am. But before that, I know you awakened a new ancient magic.]
[Let me see it.]
One of the pages turned with a soft rustling sound. Even shut inside a suitcase, it had somehow been aware of what was happening outside.
"No problem!"
Iain agreed at once. If a knowledgeable senior was willing to help him figure out what a spell did, he would only be grateful. After all, she was one of the extra brains he had obtained entirely through his own skill.
He activated the magic.
"!!!"
Little Skeleton immediately dove into the tunnel in the floor.
That faint membrane of light appeared around Iain's body once more. Starlike motes spread outward from it, scattering through the air, and once again nothing seemed to happen.
After enveloping more than half the room, it vanished completely.
"Upperclassman, did you figure anything out?"
Once the casting was over, Iain hurriedly looked toward the diary.
But the notebook that had been floating in the air moments ago now lay on the floor as if it had simply… fallen asleep.
It was incredibly still.
As though…
it had lost every trace of magic and mystery.