Half-Blood Prince?

Wiltshire lay in southwestern England, vast and sparsely populated, insignificant administratively enough that government MPs had discussed abolishing the county. On the other hand, it was also widely recognized as the place on Earth where crop circles appeared most frequently. Every year, countless UFO sightings drew crowds of crop-circle enthusiasts.

Now and then, one or two muddled residents would insist they had personally seen aliens, ghosts, mysterious figures who appeared out of nowhere clutching little sticks, or some other supernatural creature. Yet within days, they would flatly deny it all, completely forgetting what they had said and running reporters in circles as though it were some prank.

After enough incidents like that, it was no longer news.

On a late-August morning, dawn had barely broken. A pale strip of light flickered on the distant horizon, roadside lamps went out one after another, more cars gradually appeared on the roads, and neighborhood streets and outlying villages slowly woke.

A hungover man woke by the roadside. The morning breeze, damp with dew, jolted him awake, and he vaguely saw a figure in the distance carrying a hamster cage. The figure seemed to nod and smile at him before vanishing with a boom amid a trembling sound in the air.

The man froze in fright. After several dazed seconds, he came back to himself, rubbed his eyes, and looked again at the empty space ahead. He could no longer tell whether it had been a hangover-induced hallucination or a half-awake dream.

Wiltshire's wizarding villages were not hard to find. Amid the dull black-and-white outlines, the Muggle-Repelling Charm-enchanted countryside gave off a hazy glow. The only problem was that the estates built by those Pure-blood Families stood too far apart. Loren had never been to Malfoy Manor, so he had to follow the house