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Hannah sighed and turned back to Heri. "We're just worried, you know? I've never actually seen you get angry before until that Care lesson with Malfoy." Heri looked confused. "I'm fairly certain that I proved how angry I could be when I smashed his face the year before." "That was different," Hannah contradicted. "You weren't worked up when you did that. It was like you were just batting aside a fly. You weren't actually angry when you did it." "Yeah," Megan chimed in. "I didn't know your face could actually do angry."
Heri sighed and tugged at a loose curl. "I dunno really. Things just bother more lately. I get fed up quicker. Even I have a limit, y'know? I don't get why so many people seem to think I've an infinite well of patience."
"Hormones," Sally-Anne declared sagely. "We're at that age so it makes sense." Heri snorted. "Wish I could turn it off then. Being angry is exhausting." Halloween came with as much excitement and trouble as it did every year since Heri had started Hogwarts.
Despite the fact the day had been made fantastic by the fact that it was the first Hogsmeade weekend of the year, she could now say that it was tradition for things to go tits up when October 31st came rolling in.
This year, Sirius Black made his presence known by slashing the portrait guardian of Gryffindor House, thoroughly traumatising the inhabitant of the portrait.
There had been a bit of a panic when the battered portrait was discovered and that panic escalated when they couldn't locate Heri afterwards while they were gathering the students to sleep in the Great Hall. Fortunately for the professors' blood pressures, Heri was found shortly after when she wandered back up from Sir Nicholas' Death-day party — where she had been doing hands-on research for her Ghoul Studies class — with Myrtle chattering her ear off about the latest gossip.
The professors would stay vigilant for the rest of the night as they searched the grounds, but nothing came of it in the end. Classes were carried out as usual, but everyone was confused why Sirius Black had tried to break into the Gryffindor common room when it wasn't a secret that Heri was a Hufflepuff.
For a good week before the first Quidditch match of the year, the weather had been almost biblical with its thundering and pouring. In a plot that was quite like them, the Slytherin team had weaselled out of playing and shoved Hufflepuff to take their place against Gryffindor. Cedric Diggory, their new captain, was none too pleased.
As much as Heri adored Marcus, even she couldn't help but glower at him when she trudged in from having to practice twice as hard in gale-force winds. The conditions on that day owereas ridiculous. Such was the popularity of Quidditch that the whole school turned out to watch the match as usual, but they ran down the lawns toward the Quidditch field, heads bowed against the ferocious wind, umbrellas being whipped out of their hands as they went.
The wind was so strong that the player staggered sideways as they walked out onto the field. If the crowd was cheering, it couldn't be heard it over the fresh rolls of thunder. Within five minutes of kick-off, they were all soaked through and frozen to the bone. The sky kept getting darker, as though night had decided to come early. It was only her enhanced eye-sight that kept Heri from crashing into other players like everyone else was, and even then the rain still got in her eyes.
The random flashes of lightning weren't helping either. She turned, intending to head back toward the middle of the field where Cohen was fending off one of the Weasley twins, but at that moment another flash of lightning illuminated the stands and Heri saw something that distracted her completely: the silhouette of an enormous shaggy black dog, clearly imprinted against the sky, motionless in the topmost, empty row of seats. Wasn't that . . .? Didn't Professor Trelawney say—? Then something odd happened. An eerie silence fell across the stadium. The wind, though as strong as ever, was oddly silent.
It was as though someone had turned off the sound, as though Heri had gone suddenly deaf — what was going on? And then a horribly familiar wave of cold swept over her, inside her, just as she became aware of something moving on the field below. . . . At least a hundred dementors, their hidden faces pointing up, were standing beneath her.
Heri didn't hear the screams of the on-lookers when she slipped off her broom, she was lost to nightmares that tore into her when those cloaked devils surged up as if to receive her. She didn't feel anything when she was caught in a levitation spell that prevented from her cracking her head open but did nothing to impede the dementors from touching her.
She was swallowed in the screams of the dying as those wretched wraiths converged on her. Considering the reaction it could have caused, it might have been a good thing that the swarm of dementors prevented anyone from seeing the way Heri dissolved into a cloud of grey smoke in their midst.
When Heri recovered from the ordeal at the Quidditch match and was once again fit enough to satisfy Bane, she was back in the Forbidden Forest. Her phantom form — as Firenze and Bane called it — proved to be supremely useful for all the evading Bane insisted she did. They had discovered that she was intangible to physical touch, though they weren't certain if that trait also included magical touch as well.
Still, it was damn useful. There appeared to be three stages of it: corporeal — where she was merely intangible — semi-corporeal — wherein she was like a ghost in that she became translucent, colourless, and weightless — and mist — where she was a cloud of fog; the last form had the added benefit of swift travel as well.