"Achoo!"
Just as she reached the doors of the Great Hall, Kate sneezed again, and immediately shot several wary glances around her.
Good — Hermione wasn't nearby. Otherwise there'd have been another lecture.
Tonight was the Halloween feast. The Great Hall had already been decorated with hundreds upon hundreds of candlelit pumpkins, a great swarm of live bats wheeling overhead, and countless orange banners rippling with flame.
Everything looked wonderfully festive.
She walked briskly toward the Gryffindor table, spotted the Harry-Ron-Hermione trio already sitting there chatting, and headed straight over.
"Hey, Kate, you're just in time!" Ron called out to her. "Harry says he went to Professor Lupin's office today and saw him actually drinking a Potion that Professor Snape gave him!"
Kate put on a curious look. "Drinking a Potion? Is Professor Lupin ill?"
"Yeah, he said he hasn't been feeling well lately." Harry nodded. "But I can't shake the feeling that the Potion Snape gave him…"
He didn't spell out the rest of his suspicions, but his face said plenty about what he thought of Snape.
Even with Kate around to defuse a good many of the clashes between Harry and Snape, it was obvious that apart from the Slytherins, students from every other house disliked the man.
He was forever docking points on any excuse, brutally strict in class, and prone to dropping nasty little remarks.
Honestly, Kate thought so too — judged purely as a teacher, Snape was pretty unreliable.
"But Professor Snape really is the greatest Potions master of the last century," she said with a shrug. "If you suspect he's using a Potion to do Professor Lupin harm, so he can steal the Defence Against the Dark Arts class teaching post — well, think about it this way. Would you ever use Quidditch to hurt someone?"
Harry blinked, then shook his head hard. "No! I'd never dirty Quidditch like that!"
"There you go, then," Kate said with an easy smile. "His achievements in Potions are a good deal greater than yours in Quidditch. Why would he use the thing he loves most to hurt someone?"
"I think Kate's right," Ron agreed with a nod. "Maybe we really are overthinking it. Professor Lupin and Professor Snape are colleagues, after all."
Though he didn't much believe Snape had any collegial warmth toward Lupin either.
"Oh, by the way," Kate said, sliding neatly onto another subject, "you did get the sweets we brought you, didn't you?"
Before Harry could answer, Ron said grandly, "You brought way too many! There's enough there to keep the lot of us going for a solid week!"
"Good for topping up your sugar after Quidditch," Kate said with an indifferent shrug, glancing around. "The Halloween feast is about to start. I'm off."
Ron looked at Hermione, who hadn't said a word the whole time, and asked, puzzled, "What's wrong? Weren't you and Kate having a great time together this afternoon? Why didn't you say anything just now?"
He'd spent the entire day hanging around with Neville and the others precisely to give the two of them a chance.
"I'm probably just a bit tired," Hermione said, smoothing her expression, brushing him off.
It was true — they had enjoyed themselves. She'd even taken Kate to the couples' tea shop, and Kate hadn't refused.
So why… why did she keep feeling that something stood between her and Kate?
Without meaning to, she glanced back at the Slytherin table. There, well within view, that white-haired figure was in the thick of some lively exchange with the blond boy sitting across from her.
Hermione's face darkened, and beneath her robes her knuckles clenched until they went white.
At that very moment, Malfoy was bickering with Kate, her expression thunderous.
Pansy, sitting beside the pair of them, had to rub her ears.
Arguing every single day was one thing, but she never once came out on top — so what was the point?
The start of the Halloween feast finally arrived, and Malfoy went quiet at last, though her eyes were still fixed viciously on Kate as she cut into her steak.
As though what she were slicing weren't steak at all, but Kate's fingers.
Kate herself had long since grown immune to those looks. She ate her way through the entire dinner as if her mind were wandering somewhere far beyond the castle, not so much as a flicker of feeling when the spectacular ghost performance began.
Only at the very end, as she filed back toward the Common Room with everyone else, did a spark of life return to her eyes.
Ten minutes later, however, they were all called back to the Great Hall.
"The professors and I need to conduct a full search of the castle," Headmaster Dumbledore told them, while Professors McGonagall and Flitwick shut every door of the Great Hall.
"For your own safety, I'm afraid you'll have to spend the night here. I want the prefects to guard the entrance, and the Head Boy and Head Girl to take charge. If anything happens, report to me at once."
He gave his wand a light wave, and several hundred squashy purple sleeping bags appeared on the floor. "Sleep well."
With that, he walked out and closed the door behind him.
Chatter erupted through the Great Hall at once, the Gryffindors passing on what had just happened to students from the other houses.
"Kate — it's Black. He broke in!"
Hermione had made her way over to her side and lowered her voice. "He got into the school during the feast, and he fought someone — nobody knows who — and the blood splattered all over The Fat Lady's portrait!"
"No idea who's brave enough to actually take on Black," Ron put in. "It reminds me of that intruder who fought the troll two years ago."
Harry, who had been staring vacantly until then, looked up. "Intruder? But two years ago Headmaster Dumbledore announced it was Quirrell—"
His words stopped short.
Kate watched his face with cool detachment, gave her wand a casual flick, and used the Levitation Charm to shift four sleeping bags into a corner near the door. "Let's lie down first."
The four of them crawled into the sleeping bags, and Hermione asked anxiously, "Are you saying the intruder back then was somebody else entirely — and now he's come back?"
"It's possible. Who else could go toe to toe with a vicious brute like Black, except that bloke who was stronger than the troll?" The more Ron talked, the more convinced he became of his own theory.
Kate said nothing and pulled her sleeping bag a little tighter around herself.
Intuition was a terrifying thing.
She'd assumed nobody would ever find out she'd been operating a clone during the feast — and here Ron had guessed it dead on with an offhand remark.
"Even if this intruder really exists, why would he fight Black? To protect the school?" Hermione raised the obvious question.
Harry drew a deep breath. "If this person really exists, then maybe he's been here all along. Nothing big happened last year, so he never showed himself."
"But two years ago, and now this year, someone invaded Hogwarts — so he stepped in. Put it that way, and he shouldn't be called the intruder at all. He should be called the Guardian."
Kate shivered.
With a name like that, why did she get the feeling that one day some old scoundrel named Link would come along and blow her to pieces?
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