The Petrified Muggle-Born and the Ghost (IV)

In the corridors, students were heading for the Great Hall in groups. Their steps were quick, their gazes wary; everyone watched everyone else, everyone suspected everyone else. No one knew who would be petrified next, or when and where that thing would appear.

But everyone knew it was still there.

It was still in the castle. In the walls. In the darkness. In everyone's fear.

And what worsened that panic was the strange incident coming from Hogwarts Kitchen.

Those little creatures who wore clean tea towels, stooped and bent over stoves for a thousand years, had never cried. But that morning, a Pixie delivering bread from the kitchen to Hufflepuff Common Room had eyes as red as if they had been burned with cigarette butts, its long, thin fingers trembling endlessly against the edge of the tray.

Breadcrumbs fell in a soft shower, like a tiny, grayish-white snowfall.

The Hufflepuff students were the first to notice something was wrong. Their common room was closest to the kitchen, and their prefects went there every morning to confirm the breakfast arrangements.

Because that red-eyed Pixie could not hold it in before the prefect. It crouched in a corner of the corridor, gazing up at the ceiling with huge, bloodshot eyes and letting out broken, intermittent sobs.

"Dead... all dead..." Its voice shattered into fragments, every word seeming squeezed from the gaps between them. "Forty-seven... roosters... forty-seven... heads... heads were... were crushed..."

The news was like a basin of cold water thrown out from Hufflepuff Common Room. It spread through the corridors, flowed into Ravenclaw Blue Quarter, washed over Gryffindor's red fortress, and finally seeped into the depths of Slytherin Silver-Green Quarter.

This was not a cat. Not a Muggle-born first-year student. Not a pure-blooded Hufflepuff second-year. Not Gryffindor's ghost.

These were forty-seven