Chapter Twenty-Five - Vindictive

He'd been around the room three times. At least, he thought it was three. It could have been more. It could have been less. Time had the odd habit of dilating and contracting in this place in fathomless and unpredictable ways, leaving him disorientated and cranky.

He started around the room once again (or was it for the first time?), but as his fingers slid across the walls, he knew that he had indeed already done this. Trouble was that in this instant he couldn't remember what he was looking for. Reason and memory were as malleable and ephemeral as breath here.

He stubbed his foot on a dresser that he had forgotten was pushed up against one of the walls. He didn't have to look at it to know that it was the dresser he'd had as a child. It had been an ugly, squat thing that took on a hulking, threatening appearance in the shadow of night. Somewhere in his then-immature brain, he had formed the peculiar and rather petrifying idea that he could never turn his back on this soulless piece of furniture, that if he slept with his back to it, something clawing, choking, suffocating would come for him, and he would never see it sneaking up on him until it was too late. So he would force himself to face the lumpy, ominous shadow as he lay cold and tight in his bed, for a terror seen was less controlling than one unseen. He sighed at that thought. A child's mind was more than capable of inducing its own paralysing fear without the help of outside influence. It wasn't until he was much older that he realised that reality was actually more dreadful than anything the imagination could come up with.

Was he looking for a way in or a way out? He didn't know anymore. His hands dropped to his sides. He didn't even know what he was doing here! A bubble of frustration welled up inside him, and he gave up on his search, as he knew he would, as he knew he had, and would no doubt do so again.

He turned to face the boarded-up window. Was this the exit denied him, or the entry denied others? The light slipping through the cracks in and between the boards was cold, like moonlight in winter: blue-tinged, hard-edged and brittle, like shards of frozen water. He didn't like it when it was like this. He preferred it when it was like sunlight in the first flush of summer that thawed flesh long-chilled from the barren months, light that rippled with green and gold and smelled like a beginning. He had no memory of ever smelling such a thing. Endings were all that ever seemed to crowd in on him, bitter, stark and sere, leaving his stomach nailed to the earth and an intimidating void inside him.

It was pointless to cross over to the window to try and peer through the cracks, for he never saw anything...the light was always too bright, whether cold or warm. It had been a cruel torture, this window. A chance for something... anything that would take him from this place, this place that should have been a refuge but instead was nothing more than a prison. A prison within a prison. The thought made his chest tight with a kind of claustrophobia that wrapped around him like barbed wire.

A darkness bloomed in the shadows, like an inky stain across the floor, circular, hollow, rotten. It had come back. Or it had always been here. Perhaps this was the first time...he didn't know! It didn't belong here, that much he was certain of. Not here. This was where it was never meant to be, yet it had found its way into a room that had no door.

It crept along the floor like a sickness, a sticky mouldering of substance, the very fabric of being becoming putrefied and sinking into an abyssal depth, into a compacting nothingness...an end. Yet another ending. But beyond this finality was silence, blackness, infinity. Beyond this, even emptiness was inadequate to describe the absence of all that was familiar, both hated and loved.

The room went frigid, and the light from the window faded as someone stepped in front of it.

He looked up, straight into eyes that almost saw him, eyes redder than blood, harder than stone and more merciless than life itself.

"Who are you?" he asked, knowing the answer before the words had even left his lips.

The scalding gaze passed over him, through him, and though he couldn't see it, he knew that below those eyes twisted a cruel parody of a smile that was a hair's breadth away from being the snarl that would tear his throat into a shredded mass of mortality.

"I am death."

The words plunged him back into consciousness as if he had fallen from an impossibly high place, sweating, shivering and drowning, the sheets bound around his wrists in a sodden grip like manacles, the stench of terror in his nostrils, the silence of the dead hour a canvas on which his nightmare lay stark and jagged.

It took hours for sleep to return, and when it did, it brought something as far from a nightmare as it possibly could. It made him sweat nonetheless.

McGonagall was an early riser. She always had been, ever since she had attended Hogwarts as a student. True, that was many, many years ago now, but it was a habit that had stuck even if the reason for it had long since faded away. Ellucinda Silbert had been a shockingly loud snorer. Sharing a room with her in the Gryffindor tower had been an aural nightmare until McGonagall had twigged that getting up at four in the morning meant missing the worst of the laryngeal flapping. It also meant that she had to go to bed earlier than the other girls, but since she wasn't much of a socialite, a curtailed evening never fazed her. Studying in the quiet hours of the morning was preferable to trying to concentrate in the noisy and frequently smelly chaos of the Gryffindor common room in the evenings.

So, it was a regular occurrence for McGonagall to be the first at the staff table for breakfast. She enjoyed the relative calm and silence that floated over her until the other teachers arrived.

Dumbledore was often not long to appear after her. He was always jovial and light-hearted in his conversation choices, keen not to linger on topics of a dark, dull or complicated flavour. Hooch was usually next, having been already outside to run through her self-imposed fitness regime. Cheeks flushed, hair windswept, she injected the first obvious energy into the day. Then, in varying order, came Flitwick, Vector, and Sinistra. The three of them, plus Hooch, would then launch into one of their incomprehensible analyses of the latest scandalous pap from the Daily Prophet. Well, Flitwick and Hooch did most of the talking, while Sinistra nodded a lot and Vector looked faintly surprised, as if the convoluted theories that the notorious gossip twins of Flitwick and Hooch came up with had never occurred to her. Then there would be the general mishmash of faculty members drifting in, culminating in Sprout dragging herself to the table, looking like an exhausted bloodhound with breath that could cut steel. Talking with her was dicey, at best...Sprout definitely wasn't a morning person. In fact, at times her cantankerousness rivalled that of Snape. He was likely to turn up at any point, from before McGonagall to after Sprout, but usually favouring the earlier hours. Sometimes he never turned up at all.

His integration into the faculty had been rocky. Most of the other teachers had been suspicious of this allegedly former Death Eater already. His complete non-conformity to the social niceties had added discomfort and not a little dislike to the flow of the stream of ill-will towards him. Eventually, McGonagall began to wonder if Snape deliberately set out to upset people. She'd lost count of the number of times she'd had to intervene in some fractious little squabble between Snape and another teacher. More often than not, it was the other teacher doing the outraged squawking, while Snape just stared at them with those midnight eyes and a wry twist to his mouth, looking like a spectator who had come across a half-mad primate exhibit at a Muggle zoo.

"Why can't you at least pretend to be nice at mealtimes, Severus?" McGonagall had asked him after breaking up a particularly vitriolic spat between him and Kettleburn.

Snape had simply gazed at her impassively. "Why?" he'd asked in that infuriatingly sour tone he saved for his finest moments of contempt.

"Because I'm sick of having my meal interrupted in order to stop one of the others from stabbing your throat with a fork, that's why!" McGonagall had shouted crossly at him.

Snape raised an eyebrow at her fit of pique.

"You never used to be this disruptive as a student," McGonagall steamrollered on. "Are you catching up on years of pent up frustration?"

He blinked at her. She got the impression that he was judiciously refraining from smirking at her. It was a sixth sense she'd cultivated since becoming a teacher herself.

"If you can't restrain yourself from working your colleagues up into a snit, sit next to me during mealtimes!" she shrilled. "That way I might actually be able to finish my meal in one go." She hadn't bothered to wait for his reply before marching, stiff-backed, out of the Great Hall.

Ever since then, if Snape was ever to sit anywhere at the staff table, it was usually next to McGonagall. The other teachers breathed a sigh of relief at being spared the Russian roulette of his proximity.

Truth be told, it wasn't as bad as she thought it would be. At first, she'd limited conversation with him in an effort not to get dragged into the same reactionary squabbling that the others had. McGonagall wasn't one for banal chit-chat, so she never invented reasons to talk to Snape. Silence was preferable to aimless gassing about trivialities, in her opinion. Any words they did exchange usually centred on academic matters or his eating habits. She could usually draw him out of his self-imposed taciturnity with the former, but the latter would either close him down or make him ratty, depending on his mood at the time. McGonagall found that she actually enjoyed the power that verbal switch gave her, but she used it sparingly, like a trainer disciplining a feisty animal that had its own ideas as to how it should behave.

However, that switch had lost something of its normal sting as Snape had recently decided to eat anything that came in reach of his plate. He'd also gotten jittery and even more waspish than usual. Of late, he'd radiated a dichotomous air that switched from irritated distress to cold suspicion, sometimes in the space of a minute, which McGonagall found a little unsettling. Normally, it was just cold suspicion. She tried to ignore it, thinking it was just a phase brought on by having Karkaroff at Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament. That man would try the patience of a rock, and she knew full well how the Durmstrang headmaster had implicated Snape in order to get himself released from Azkaban. It did concern her, though. Snape tended to vent his frustrations on the students, and McGonagall had already had to deal with three slightly hysterical Gryffindors who'd had run-ins with the Potions master and come off second best. It was unclear to her which event would force her to say something to him about it: another sobbing student or that wretched leg-jiggling habit of his knocking her beverage onto her lap for the third time this week.

Today, he sat next to her at lunch, staring off down the Great Hall, spinning his fork between his fingers slowly as if waiting for something. His food lay untouched on his plate. A palm-sized book sat open near his left hand. McGonagall couldn't see what it was about. Snape often read at the table, which she found somewhat rude, but as rudeness seemed to be one of Snape's permanent character traits, she'd given up on ever lecturing him about it. After all, he wasn't a student any more, and she could only reprimand him so many times without overstepping the boundaries of professional courtesy.

McGonagall had no idea what he was staring at. Perhaps it was nothing. She turned her thoughts to her afternoon classes and continued eating her lunch.

At one point, she thought she heard Snape mutter something, but before she could ask him to repeat himself, a shriek turned her attention elsewhere. Her eyes focussed immediately on a swirl of chaos at the Ravenclaw table where plates and food were flying everywhere and students were beating a hasty retreat from a particular section of the table. A few of the girls were squealing and cringing behind whatever body they could find.

McGonagall resisted the urge to sweep down there herself to find out what was going on. Technically, Flitwick, as head of Ravenclaw, had that initial responsibility, and the Deputy Headmistress was always extremely mindful of not treading on a colleague's toes. Indeed, the diminutive Charms Professor was already trotting towards the mêlée, his small hands gesticulating at his students.

"What on earth was all that about, Filius?" McGonagall asked when he returned to the staff table.

"Oh, one of the students decided to set loose a bunch of Diamond Orb spiders to scare the girls," Flitwick revealed, climbing up onto his seat.

"Who was the culprit?" asked Hooch, a gleam of interest in her golden eyes.

Flitwick shrugged. "No one owned up to it." He giggled. "Actually, it was quite funny. I think Miss Parr nearly fainted in terror!"

McGonagall thinned her lips in irritation. Flitwick was too lenient at times. She would never have let that sort of thing pass without interrogating the usual suspects. She turned away from the chortling gossip twins with a sigh.

Snape was paying no attention to what had happened. In fact, he'd started on his lunch, eyes fixed on his reading material, seemingly oblivious. McGonagall wasn't sure, but he seemed to have a ghost of a smirk on his face about something.

Gaelina picked up the teapot and emptied most of its contents into Hagrid's mug. There wasn't enough left to fill her own cup, but that was never a problem...she wasn't a big fan of tea, and Hagrid never noticed that her cup remained empty during his visits, despite the fact that he had been a regular visitor to her home in East London for the past ten years. They had met through a mutual acquaintance when Hagrid had been searching for information on quilin. Having seen the unicorns in the Forbidden Forest, Hagrid had become quite enamoured of the creatures and had heard that the Chinese unicorn, or quilin, was even more impressive. He'd set out to London and Diagon Alley heartily convinced that he'd be able to get one through his usual contact, but his optimism had been struck down almost immediately.

"Quilin?" his contact had said in a hushed yet squawking tone, and with rather round eyes that searched the Leaky Cauldron's main taproom for eavesdroppers. "You must be joking. If the Ministry caught even a whiff of a rumour I'd brought one into the country, they'd snap my wand in half."

Ever persistent when he set his mind to it, Hagrid harried the suddenly chary beast-dealer until he conceded he knew someone that might...might be able to point Hagrid in the right direction. That was where Gaelina had come in.

She was a cheerful, unassuming woman who had been unfortunate enough not to inherit any magical ability from her pureblood parents. Being a Squib was difficult, as many in the magical world either dismissed them or were rather unsure of how to act towards them. So they were stuck in the twilight between two worlds, never truly able to belong to either. It was a position Hagrid, as a half-giant, understood, being in the same limbo himself.

Gaelina had been unable to get Hagrid the quilin he was so dearly wishing for, but it was not through lack of trying. They were simply too rare and too skittish to catch, even for her most experienced connections overseas. It had taken many cups of tea and more than two plates of sticky buns to console Hagrid, who always felt disappointment very keenly.

Since then, they found that they both shared the same passion for magical creatures and could converse for hours on end on the best way to gather phoenix feathers or argue about the most effective treatment for bark rot in Bowtruckles.

Gaelina set the pale blue porcelain pot back down on the table with a faint click and smiled at the large man opposite her who was trying his best to be at ease whilst seated on one of her slender legged chairs and looming over the table like a hairy mountain.

"I must say that I was surprised to hear from you, Hagrid," she began, her short fingers gently turning her empty cup from side to side on its saucer. "I can't recall a time that you wanted to meet mid-week."

Hagrid experienced a flash of guilt at the statement. "I hope I didn' put yeh out, Gaelina," he said hastily, his saucepan-sized mug paused halfway between the table and his mouth.

Gaelina blinked her large brown eyes at him and laughed warmly. "Not at all. Your visits are always welcome." She made a tragic face. "No-one else ever wants to talk about magical creatures for hours on end, so I'm usually forced to endure tedious chitchat about weather patterns and politics." She waited politely as Hagrid threw back some tea and then began to cast his eye towards the plate of sticky buns. Gaelina pushed the plate towards him encouragingly. "And so," she began again, "what news do you bring me on this cold day?"

Hagrid picked up the smallest bun he could find on the plate. It was customary for him to do so, and somewhat pointless considering he always ended up eating all of whatever was on the plate. Gaelina never ate, claiming she already consumed more than she should, gesturing to her generously padded frame, a small, wry smile gracing her round face. She reminded Hagrid of a plump little hen sitting on her nest, calm but alert, a merry little glint in her eyes.

"Well," said Hagrid, raising the sticky bun in a toasting gesture, "things are so busy a' the school, I've had little time fer much else, to be honest. In fact, I can't stay long...got a class in an hour." He popped the bun whole into his mouth and destroyed it with a couple of chews. "Although, yeh'll never guess what I've got back a' the cabin!"

Gaelina leant forward slightly. "Surely not another dangerous creature?" she posed conspiratorially in a whisper. "I would've thought the Skrewts would have satisfied your need for danger."

Hagrid waved an enormous hand dismissively. "Nah, somethin' much better, an' much prettier than Skrewts!" He chuckled to himself and selected the next smallest bun from the frilly plate.

Gaelina pushed her clean cup and saucer to one side so she could lean even further forward. "Don't keep me in suspense, Hagrid," she prompted in a good-natured tone. "Is it rare?"

Hagrid's eyes twinkled under his bushy brows. "Oh yes," he replied, brushing a few bun crumbs out of his beard. "Very."

Gaelina's smile widened in anticipation. "Is it illegal?" she asked with the eagerness of a small child.

Hagrid laughed, jiggling the table and threatening the teapot with a possibly floor-bound destination had Gaelina not caught it deftly in her tiny hands.

"I think I've had enough of illegal animals," Hagrid chuckled, not having noticed his unintentional rearrangement of the tabletop contents. "A' least fer this year." He looked about theatrically, as if checking for eavesdroppers. It was purely for show...Gaelina lived alone. He leaned towards her, and the table creaked in agony at the weight of his arm on it. "Pewtinellas."

Gaelina's jaw dropped open slightly. "Are you serious?"

"Yeah," said Hagrid proudly, and in his moment of delight forgot his protocol and picked the biggest bun off the plate. "Two of 'em."

Gaelina sat back in her chair, one perfectly sculpted hand pressed to her ample bosom. "Oh, I would so love to see them, Hagrid!" she told him in a wistful voice. "Where did you get them?"

Hagrid finished his mouthful before answering. "Don't know," he said honestly, with a slight shrug. "A' least, I can't be certain."

He'd found the bamboo cage hanging from the rafters of his cabin after he had finished walking Fang that morning. At first he didn't see the tiny birds sitting on their perches, their silver feathers puffed up, making them almost spherical in shape except for their long tail feathers. Fang had actually been the first one to notice them, padding over to sit right under the cage, looking up with a plaintive whine. As Hagrid crossed the floor to see what had captured his dog's attention, the Pewtinellas had burst into tinkling song, startling both dog and master. In fact, Hagrid had stood there for some time, mesmerised by the cage's inhabitants and wondering where they possibly could have come from.

It was true that he didn't know for sure who had put them there, but he could make a guess, ludicrous though it seemed.

"Actually, tha's why I'm here. In a roundabout way," Hagrid explained, forgetting about the sticky buns for a few moments.

Gaelina tilted her head to one side, the heavy braid that ran down her back swinging gently with the movement.

"Remember a few years back when we were talkin' about dogs, and we had that argument about whether they were th' best animals to track somethin' down?"

Gaelina pursed her lips slightly and frowned. "I... think so," she said hesitantly.

"An' you said that Strikers were better than dogs?"

The dark-haired woman fussed with her green woollen cardigan for a moment. "Vaguely," she said, squinting at him keenly.

"Well, I was wonderin' if yeh could tell me a bit more about Strikers," Hagrid asked, raising his mug to his mouth for another slosh of tea.

Gaelina looked at him for some time, a thoughtful crease across her forehead and the tips of the fingers of one hand tapping her chin lightly. Hagrid put down his empty mug and waited expectantly. The seconds stretched out between them, and somewhere in the house, a clock chimed.

"Odd that a conversation from years ago suddenly resurfaces," Gaelina mused after an audible intake of breath. "Why would this be, Hagrid?"

"Ah, someone I know is lookin' fer one," said the half-giant, shrugging slightly and completely missing Gaelina's suddenly guarded manner.

"I see," said Gaelina, bringing her hand down from her chin and resting it on her lap with its opposite. She blinked a few times, lips pursed.

"I thought tha' perhaps you might know where t' find one," Hagrid revealed, a broad smile on his face. "After all, no-one knows more than you do about magical creatures!"

Gaelina shifted her shoulders and sniffed. "You flatter me, as always, Hagrid, but I'd be hesitant to claim that honour." She smiled slightly to take the sting out of her words. "And I'm not sure that Strikers would be happy at being described as magical creatures."

"Oh," said Hagrid, his smile fading. "I didn' mean ter–"

Gaelina held up her hand. "Of course not," she interrupted and widened her smile into something less frosty. "I'd just be careful of describing them as such. They get upset easily." She paused and pressed her lips into a thin line. "This... friend... of yours. They have need of a Striker?"

Hagrid puffed out his cheeks, scratched at his voluminous beard as he considered this question. "Well, he was askin' about 'em, but didn' say why," he admitted. "He thought I might know somethin'." He shrugged. "He kind o' brought it up out of the blue."

"Hmm." Gaelina interlaced her fingers in an effort to keep her hands still on her lap.

Time passed like a rambler on a mountain path. It was at this point that Hagrid started to notice that something was amiss, but couldn't determine exactly what. Had he said something stupid or insulting? He sincerely hoped not. Gaelina was one of the few people he could talk to for hours on end about the things that interested him, since they seemed to fascinate her just as much. She knew more than he did about magical creatures, which was a lot. In fact, she was now the one who managed to track down the more exotic species that he used in his classes at Hogwarts. He never asked her where she got them, since some of them were either illegal or extremely rare. He suspected that she managed to by-pass some of the Ministry's more stringent rules surrounding magical creatures in less than honest ways. Gaelina had effectively admitted that, being a Squib, she had little else to fall back on in terms of making a living. She had simply continued a childhood love into adulthood and saw no harm in earning an income from it. Hagrid had never felt the need to question her about it; that was her business. He looked at her nervously, noting the narrowed eyes, stiff shoulders and slightly pale face.

"I... er... didn' tell 'im much," he said. "After all, I don' know much meself."

"Do you trust this friend of yours, Hagrid?" Gaelina asked suddenly.

Hagrid blinked at the question. A couple of things concerned him. First, he wasn't sure that 'friend' was the right word, and second, something seemed to be going on here that escaped his immediate comprehension. He was the first to admit that he wasn't a person of nuance, both in its use and in its detection. He found it a double-edged sword and had no skill in wielding it, so he tended to shy away from it and employ honesty and forthrightness wherever he could; it was much simpler and less fraught with potential misunderstanding.

Hagrid decided that brevity and honesty would serve best at this moment. "Yes."

Gaelina stared at him intently. "I've known you for many years, Hagrid," she said seriously. "Your word is good enough for me." She sat back in her chair. "I think something can be arranged," she decided, "but perhaps you should tell me a bit more about your... friend." She smiled encouragingly, and Hagrid breathed easy once more.

Snape waited for a few moments before continuing the campaign.

"Is there a problem, Miss Parr?" he asked from the front of the classroom. Parr's partner, Toby Perkins, looked up at the question. Parr didn't. She continued to stare at the glass case that sat on the front table, lips pressed together tightly and a rather sickly cast to her face.

"It is not an option to answer a question asked of you, Miss Parr. Five points from Ravenclaw, unless you can prove to me that you have gone spontaneously deaf," Snape decided, toying lightly with one of the buttons on his coat.

Perkins had to jab Parr in the ribs with his elbow to get her to answer. "There is no problem, Professor," she replied reluctantly, nostrils flared to such an extent that their edges had gone almost white.

"I should hope not," Snape sneered at her. "Therefore, that being the case, you can come up here first."

Parr finally managed to drag her eyes away from the container of Hook-Backed Net Weaver Spiders. "I'm sorry?" A sheen of sweat had sprung up on her forehead, and a crease had appeared between her brows, giving her a faintly distressed expression.

Snape stared at her. "Perhaps you should practice that phrase so you can relay it effortlessly to your housemates after class in response to another five points being deducted from Ravenclaw." A hiss of irritation rose up from the students of the penalised house. "I believe I have made it clear on a number of occasions that I expect students to pay attention during my classes, in addition to evincing my disapproval at having to repeat myself unnecessarily. You will be the first to come up here and select a specimen for today's lesson." He placed both hands on the glass case and tapped it with an index finger. The palm-sized spiders inside jittered about in response to the vibrations in the glass, scarlet bodies swaying pendulously between their long, orange-speckled legs.

Parr's glare was as cold, hard and sharp as flint, though her face was beginning to go as white as her hair.

"Your hesitation is interesting, Miss Parr, and costly," Snape pointed out, drumming his fingers on the glass. The spiders rearranged themselves in response with a silent flurry of legs. "Another five points from Ravenclaw that will increase to ten if you continue to waste class time." The angry mutterings around the room increased in volume. "Surely you're not afraid of spiders?" he asked smoothly, evoking a rapid switch in her expression from distress to a spasm of suppressed choler. It came as little surprise to him that ridicule in front of her classmates would be a far stronger motivator than the removal of house points.

Parr got up, stony-faced, from her chair, and stiff-legged her way towards Snape, one hand clutching an empty, stoppered glass cylinder. The other clamped itself around the hem of her robes to keep it clear from her legs in that idiosyncratic habit which had failed to abate as the weeks had passed.

Her progress had begun resolutely, if not enthusiastically, but her pace slowed noticeably as she got closer to the front table. Snape didn't think it was possible for someone to go so pale that their skin would start to look transparent and wax-like, but Parr was proving him wrong. He wondered if any of the other students could see the tremor that was running through her, making the tips of her hair quiver. It was likely that they themselves were not relishing the thought of having to handle the arachnids.

Live spiders tended to elicit nervousness in people that dead ones failed to, but it was necessary to use live Hook-Backs for the Wound-Healing Potion that they were going to be focussing on in this lesson...the spinnerets of dead Hook-Backs lost potency with exponentially increasing degree, making the efficacy of the potion correspondingly poor.

This lesson was always a difficult one for students, especially the girls who were prone to the irritating habits of squealing and crying that Snape found particularly tiresome. And that was even before the boys decided to cause even greater distress by 'accidentally' allowing the spiders to escape into someone's school bag or down someone's shirt. Or up a skirt. The quantity of deducted house points was invariably high in the lesson which was normally left until much later in the school year when student energies were much lower and the propensity towards mischief curtailed by the impending exams. However, with the Triwizard Tournament, the usual order of things had been turned on its head, and Snape had decided to bring the lesson forward to today. Yes, of course that was the reason.

Parr stopped at the table, her eyes like two bulging duck eggs fixed on the glass case. The spiders had settled back down again, barely moving now except for the occasional twitch of a leg. Their inertia failed to reassure Parr...she seemed to be experiencing a rather marked breathing difficulty that Snape found amusing.

"Time is short, Miss Parr," he noted. "Luckily for all involved, this lesson does not go on forever, so let's subtract one point from Ravenclaw for every second you continue to waste, shall we?"

Parr's eyes did a fascinating alteration from impossibly large to incredibly narrow. Snape stared back at her impassively, picked up the glass case and banged it loudly on the table. The interior of the case turned into a blurred chaos of arachnid.

Snape smiled nastily at Parr. "Make sure you get your hands on a big one, now," he instructed. Her expression could have ignited water into a blazing inferno. "One... two... three..." He began to count out loud.

Parr's face went grey, then pink, then white again. Snape wondered if she was going to get out of the class by fainting and dimly realised that he would be rather disappointed if she took that option.

"... four... five... six..."

She unstoppered the glass cylinder and wedged the glass lid between index and middle fingers of the hand holding the container so that she could seal it back up the second the spider was in there.

"... seven... eight... nine..."

Parr sucked in a lungful of air, reached out her free hand and flipped the lid of the glass case up. The already agitated spiders came boiling out and made for the nearest cover. The class dissolved into total anarchy as the students shrieked and managed to knock over anything in their path to get away from the scuttling escapees. Bodies ricocheted off each other, the walls and the storage cabinets, and a textbook went flying across the room, hitting Perkins in the ear. Snape realised that things had gotten too out of hand for mere shouting to be of any use in regaining control of the situation.

"Immobulus!"

The bedlam stopped dead. A chair teetered on its back legs before falling to the stone floor with a crash.

Snape clenched his teeth and lowered his wand. "Imbeciles! Have you completely lost your minds? They're not even venomous!" He left everyone frozen in place until he'd returned the spiders to their glass fortress using a Locomotor spell, noting with rancour that Parr had indeed managed to grab the largest spider and trap it in her now-stoppered cylinder. He scowled at her and frowned harder when he thought he saw her move ever so slightly. Impossible. He shut the glass case with a snap.

"Finite Incantatem." Several students fell to the floor heavily. "You have thirty seconds to return this room to the state it was in prior to your childish outburst," Snape told the room stonily. "Failure to achieve this will result in something that will justify your pathetic recreancy." Threat delivered, he turned his attention to Parr, who remained standing in place, her eyes studiously averted from the glass cylinder in her hand. "It looks like I'll be suffering the dubious pleasure of your company in detention this evening, Miss Parr," he sneered, "and at the relatively cheap price of nineteen points from Ravenclaw." He nearly laughed in the face of her tight-mouthed indignation. "Here's hoping it's worth the price."