Chapter 8
The Biting Envelopes
Nate chewed on the inside of his cheek as he tried to think of the best way to inform the British Aurors that he had been played by three men who may not even exist. If they even would believe him, that is. He had a very distinct feeling that somehow, this would be made out to be his fault.
The three of them had taken this trip with the intention of making it as quiet, short, and private as possible. But when the Ministry elevator took them from the International Floo station to a floor filled with empty offices, it was very clear that there was no hope of that happening. They had though it would have meant they would either wait until Monday �”Tuesday in New York City�”and come back, or they would somehow find out where they lived and deliver the bad news to their home. At any rate though, it was something that they had been sure they would be able to put off for a little while at least.
But when Lorelei had screamed bloody murder for Nate to run back out into the alley, he hardly expected it to be because Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley had found them, Mr. Weasley loaded down with at least a half-dozen very large shopping bags. And just like if they had come to their homes, he got to deliver the messages of his profound stupidity to their whole families as well.
“To start with, how did you even know where to find us?” Mr. Potter asked, starting the conversation for Nate. “There’s no one at the Ministry on the weekend.”
“Yeah, we noticed when we got there.” Lorelei stood to her feet, adjusting Rae to rest on her hip. Lorelei had made her…disappointment about the empty office quite vocal, especially after the complication of taking Floo after Floo to travel on the International Network, all the while touting a very cranky five-year-old.
Nate shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Well, we were, but when we got to the Ministry entrance, we found out it was actually Saturday here instead of Friday�””
“International dateline,” Lorelei said in a taunting manner.
“Right. And…” Nate suddenly laughed nervously, “you know what’s really funny? We actually weren’t looking for you guys when we came here. Lorelei was having a hard time getting Rae out of bed, so I promised her if she came with us, we would take her to a wizard candy store. But we couldn’t find one, so we brought her ice cream to keep her happy while we asked for directions…”
Nate’s snickering died off when he noticed that Mr. Potter’s and Mr. Weasley’s expression were as far from amused as could possibly be.
“But you don’t care about any of that, right?” he ventured to guess, getting the very distinct feeling that small talk and procrastination was not going to work for very long.
Lorelei bounced impatiently from side to side, and Rae’s eyes took on a bored, glassy look as she blinked sleepily. “Tell them about the letter,” she told him in the manner someone might use to talk a preschooler into doing something.
“Letter?” Mr. Potter remarked. “What sort of letter?
Nate couldn’t help but cringe a bit at the sudden push. Leave it to Lorelei to antagonize a situation when she didn’t have to deal with it herself.
“Yeah, about that,” he said. “That’s what I came to talk to you about. I finally got another letter from the Skat-place.”
That was what finally seemed to perk the interest of the two British Aurors to the point where they might actually take what Nate said seriously. As though Nate had come all the way to London in the dead of night just for a social call!
“They said that if we wanted to, we could visit the school by means of Floo,” Nate explained. “So we did.”
Mr. Potter became more and more interested, while Mr. Weasley just looked pained from the heavy sacks strung over his arms. Their wives, however, stood off to the side, perfectly lost and confused.
“There actually is a school?” Mr. Weasley asked, finally dropping his handful of shopping bags to the ground when the weight got to be too much. “An actual, physical building that you were able to go to?”
“Yeah.” Technically, it wasn’t a lie.
Mr. Potter nodded slightly. “Oh, so then Mr. Weasley and I will be able to visit the school for ourselves.”
“You can’t!”
Everyone in the group jumped at the sudden response and turned in the direction of the source. Lorelei shrieked her response and darted forward to make herself an active part of the conversation.
Both of the British Aurors appeared quite shocked at Lorelei’s sudden outburst. Mr. Potter raised an eyebrow over the rim of his glasses and Mr. Weasley blinked rapidly in surprise. “Why not?” Mr. Weasley finally spoke.
Lorelei didn’t even pause as the lies spun from her lips. “The letters were only supposed to be seen by students; people who are actually going to the academy,” she told them smoothly. “If either of you two showed up, Nate and I will probably get into a lot of trouble.”
“And you really want us to start our school year at a new school on a bad foot?” she asked them, an almost light tone to her voice.
“We? Us?” Harry asked, noting the change in tense. “Miss Macalister, will you be attending the Skat-Hatokha Academy as well?”
“Why not?” she said, draping a casual arm around her best friend’s shoulder. “I have plenty I could learn as well. And if they’ll take Nate, they’ll probably take anybody.”
Nate stood on the sidelines and watched his best friend tell lie after effortless lie to the British Auror. She made up details flawlessly, from the date of the first day of school to why their supply lists had yet to arrive. It was all that Nate could do to keep his mouth from hanging opening in dumbfounded shock as Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley shook their hands and wished them well as they sent them on their way.
Lorelei smiled sweetly as they said their good-byes, in a way that was so out of character, it was frightening. The only course of action Nate could see was getting Lorelei as far away from those men as possible before she talked them into an even deeper hole than she already had.
All the way down the alley way Nate dragged Lorelei by the crook of her arm with Rae at her heels, rushing to gulp down the rest of her remaining ice cream. Plastered across Lorelei’s face was a contented, accomplished-looking smile. After what seemed like an endless maze of twists and turns, and a wall of shifting bricks, accompanied by a very fun game of ‘I don’t know the password’, Nate finally recognized the place where they had exited out to Diagon Alley in the first place: the Leaky Caudron. Normally, Nate would never have been allowed to go into any place that served alcohol�”another lovely condition of his probation�”but since they weren’t even in the United States, and the pub also a popular stop on the Floo Network, Nate imagined it must have been an exception.
Besides, laws were different in Britain. According Lorelei, in Europe, if you could see over the bar, you were old enough to order a drink. Of course, he couldn’t be sure just how true this was.
“Are you freaking insane?” he finally had to ask her, taking a handful of Floo Powder from his personal supply.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Lorelei replied with fake innocence as she followed him into the fire place, taking his hand and then taking Rae’s.
“You just lied to a cop!” Nate tried to explain to her, raising his closed fist. “Which is bad!”
Suddenly, Nate cringed as he began to notice all the faces that were suddenly staring his direction. Saving the trio from further scrutinization on behave of the pub patrons, Nate shouted out the British International Floo Station and let the Floo powder drop to the hearth floor, green flames shooting up around them. As soon as they stepped out into the crowded Floo station, their conversation resumed as though it had never been interrupted.
“Mr. Potter’s not a cop!” Lorelei argued as they made their way to another empty fireplace. “And lies? How was it exactly that I lied Nate?”
“There is no Skat-Hatokha!” Nate took out another handful of the shimmering powder. “There is no school for either of us to go to this fall!” Green flames shot up once again, this time bring them to the International Station in the American Department of Magic in Washington D.C.
“Lorelei, my tummy hurts,” Rae whined. The little girl was not used to taking any form of Wizarding travel, and the numerous channels necessary for international Floo travel was not a good place to start. Lorelei led the group over to one of the stone benches in the middle of the station and took her little sister into her lap once again.
“Lorelei!” Nate shouted, this time not caring about all the strangers who were staring.
“We don’t know that Skat-Hatokha doesn’t exist, Nate,” Lorelei said, smoothing Rae’s tangled hair off of her damp forehead. “We have been receiving some pretty official looking letters from people who say we have a place at a school, and even allowed us to visit the actual physical structure where they say it will be. At worst, we are just the innocent victims of a highly elaborate fraud scheme.”
Nate rubbed at his forehead as another headache induced by big words set in. It was the same with all lawyer’s kids; Lorelei had sat at her father’s knee, learning all about legal jargon the way other children might learn treasured family stories, right up until the date of her parents’ divorced. Then the family court system and Lorelei’s own personal attorney taught her even more. All Nate understood about the laws was that you do bad things, you go to jail.
“Feeling better, sweetie?” Lorelei asked her sister, both of them standing to their feet when the little girl nodded.
“But, Lore,” Nate argued as they made their way back to the series of fireplaces along the wall, “what do we do when one of them eventually does come back and we’re still hanging around New York City?” Because whether it had been done intentionally or not, Lorelei was now in just as deep as Nate was.
“They’re not going to check on us again,” Lorelei answered smugly. “We’re halfway around the world. Neither of them are going to bother dropping in if they think everything is fine.”
“We came all that way!” Granted, it had been a very long and annoying trip, leaving Nate wanting nothing more than to barf his lunch into anything that would sit still long enough. All the same, it was hardly an impossible or far-fetched idea that Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley would come looking for them again.
“They have lives, Nate,” Lorelei reasoned, leaning against the back of the fireplace so though she were auditioning for a part in a movie. “We don’t.”
Nate took up the last of his Floo powder to the hearth and they stepped out into New York City. At least, they had asked to be sent to New York City. It was just another very long hall of fireplaces in a room with no windows, dozens of witches and wizards rushing in and out of the flames. There would only be one stop left.
“So your ingenious plan,” Nate tried to understand, “is just to let the lie sit, let everyone in the world go about their lives, and hope the every little detail of this investigation just goes away.”
“That is my plan, yes,” Lorelei answer, leading the way into the last fireplace. “And don’t you dare stand there and tell me you could have come up with a better one!”
Nate grumbled under his breath as he followed his friend into the fireplace, but on some level, he knew she was right. At the very least, Nate knew he would never be able to come up with a convincing lie right on the spot. It was one of the leading reasons behind every scrap of trouble he had ever been in.
And so, the last trace of Nate’s personal supply of Floo Powder went into the fire and green flames engulfed them. This time, however, they were greeted by the sight of a chubby teenage in penguin pajamas falling off the couch screaming, his bowl of Fruit Loops going flying through the air.
“Hi, Graham,” Nate greeted his milk-drenched friend as he stepped out of the fireplace.
Grasping at the couch cushions, Graham pulled himself up to meet them face to face, his cereal bowl balanced lopsided on his head like a hat. “You two could at least ask before you use my fireplace for your Floo thing!” he growled, brightly colored loops leaking down his cheeks.
Nate couldn’t help but snicker. “And miss this?”
The moment Harry and Ginny arrived home, Ginny rushed straight for the door, throwing it open as though there were someone after her.
“Ginny!” Harry called after her as soon as he stepped into the house himself. Ginny froze where she stood, but she did not turn around. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Finally turning to face her husband, Ginny’s face was plastered with an expression of pretend naivety. “I don’t know what you mean.”
But Harry wasn’t fooled, and he hadn’t forgotten.
“At Diagon Alley, when Rae called Hermione ‘the pregnant lady’?” he reminded her. “I’m fairly certain I could guess, but I’d still like it if you would tell me yourself.
Ginny stared down at the kitchen floor, fidgeting with her fingers. “I’m pregnant. I just found out yesterday.” Ginny’s eyes peered up through her red orange fringe. “Surprise!”
The confession had Harry taken slightly aback and inhale a little more deeply than usual. Even though he had had a pretty good idea that this was the answer, it was still a bit of a shock to hear it said out loud.
“Ginny, why wouldn’t you tell me?” he asked, still somewhat overcome by shock.
Ginny threw her hands to her side and looked up to the ceiling. “I don’t know. We just heard about Ron and Hermione, and James is still so young…” Ginny’s voice trailed off as her eyes shifted back to meet her husband. “I just didn’t know whether this was good news or not.”
Harry stepped forward and wrapped his arms around his wife’s shoulders. “Ginny, of course it’s good news,” he assured her.
Although Harry was not about to deny that he himself had not even considered the possibility of having a second child in the here and now. Little James was already such a handful, and he had not even reached the Terrible Twos. Harry and Ginny were both attempting to advance their careers, which, of course, took time and effort. And then there was Teddy, who Harry had already worried would have too much of his godfather’s attention taken away from him after James was born. How would the little boy react to the news that the Potters were having a second baby?
“How…” Harry stopped himself when he realized how stupid he was about to sound. “When did this happen?”
Ginny’s face pinked slightly and she began chewing at the corner of her mouth.
“I think it was the night before you were about to leave for New York City,” she told him. “We didn’t know how long you were going to be away, so we…”
Ginny’s voiced trailed off before she could go into any more detail, but Harry had a pretty good idea of the incident that Ginny was referring to. He himself could feel a fair bit of blood rushing to his face as he began to further recall.
But eventually, Harry brought his arms around his wife’s shoulder, hugging her gently, holding his forehead to hers.
“We should really go get James,” Ginny said, her face pointed downward, though she made no move to break the embrace.
“We will,” Harry assured his wife, patting her back reassuringly. “Eventually.”
Ginny brought her gaze up to meet her husbands, bright brown eyes shiny, and the faintest hint of a mother’s glow on her face.
“We’re going to have two of them soon, aren’t we?” Harry reasoned. “I think for now, it would do us a world of good to just have a few moments to ourselves.”
Ginny sighed and rested her head against Harry’s chest. “You know, it really isn’t just ourselves now,” she whispered faintly.
Harry sighed and nodded his head. “I suppose I’ll have to get used to that sort of thinking again, won’t I?”
“Mail call!”
Nate looked up from the couch, making sure to take his feet off the coffee table the moment his mother came through the door. Surprisingly, Nate was the first person his mother tracked down, handing him a very thick parcel, wrapped in brown paper and sealed tightly. There was no return address; only a seal he could not recognize.
“My, Nate, you certainly seem to be becoming popular these days,” his dad said as he made it in from the kitchen. He was sweaty and held onto a water bottle for dear life, but it was easy to see that he had not been exercising. More like he had gone to the parks so he could observe the morning fitness routines of the young woman of the neighborhood: blonde college students running together in tight spandex, hippie chicks doing yoga and stretching to the sun and for anyone else who wanted to watch. And then there were the teenage girls who would play their music as loud as they could and dance in a way that seemed to be just to find out how much energy it was possible to burn.
Before anymore dirty imaginings could be associated with his father, Nate snatched the brown wrapped parcel and sidestepped his way out of the living room. The writing on the wrapper had had it addressed to ‘The Messy Bedroom Facing the Backyard’ and there was no return address, so he could only guess who this little present was from. Nate rushed to get to his room, snatching the telephone on his way up. He already knew that whatever it was that had been sent to, he would need his best friends’ input very soon.
Slamming his bedroom door shut behind them, Nate kicked scattered pieces of dirty clothes out of the way to clear an open spot on the floor. When he finally tore the paper off the parcel, it was several letters all bound together, dropping heavily to the floor. These new letters were sealed in deep brown envelopes, with that same seal and written in all-gold letters. It was all over official looking. Granted, all the letters Nate had been sent before had been official in a sense, but these were doing a much better job of looking it. While the envelopes didn’t have any smoke coming from the edges and he saw no bright red paper, chances were very good there was going to be some sort of little surprise for him, courtesy of the Wizarding world.
Nate began spreading each letter across his floor, as so get a better look at them. But to his surprise, none of these letters were addressed to him. They didn’t even have the real names of anyone on them: Dean of Students, Professor of Wandwork, Professor of Potions, Professor of Herbology, Professor of Defensive Magic, Professor of Shamaism…on and on and on, each of these letters seem to have a very clear idea of who they belonged to, even if they didn’t seem to have any names for them to go on.
Why they had been sent to Nate, he had no idea. Was he expected to find all these supposed people? He doubted it had been a mistake, seeing as every other letter he had gotten from Skat-Hatokha had been very deliberate. And whoever it was that was sending these things care of Skat-Hatokha, he had to give them credit. It had taken the British Ministry of Magic three weeks to follow their actions, but it had only taken Skat-Hatokha three day to follow theirs.
“NATHANIEL JACOB RIVERS!!” a sudden shout came from the bottom of the stairs
Nate cringed at the easily recognizable yell coming from his father and a feeling that another sort of letter from another school had come in the mail today. “What D+ in History?” he yelled out.
Through not being grounded (and most likely the grace of God), an hour later, Nate found himself out in his tiny backyard. Standing on top of the picnic table, Nate kept an eye out for who he was waiting for.
“You made it!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet as Lorelei strolled into his backyard.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, throwing her things onto the surface of the picnic table. “What’s up?”
Nate sunk back down to his seat and began gathering up the pile of letters and pushing them in Lorelei’s direction. “Take a look at what came in the mail this morning,” he told her, picking one of them up and holding it in front of her face.
Lorelei snatched the envelope right out of his hand and read the address mere inches away from her nose before taking up another one from the pile.
“Care of Magical Creatures…” she read aloud, continuing to fish out even more letters still. “Voodoo…Practical Integration…Divination…”
“They’re class subjects,” Nate told her. “You know, at Wizarding schools.”
“I could have guessed that.” She set down all the envelopes except for one, turning it over in her hands. “What do they say?”
“I don’t know,” Nate admitted. “I haven’t opened any of them yet. It not like I want to be Professor of…Home and Hearth Magic,” he read off yet another of the envelopes.
Lorelei allowed her own collection to drop back into the pile, except for one, which she thrust in Nate’s direction.
“So open one,” Lorelei prompted. “They were sent to you, after all.”
Shrugging his shoulders and agreeing without a second thought, Nate took the letter, beginning to tear at the envelope with his index finger. When a sharp pain traced across his hand in a straight line, his subconscious mind scolded him for not expecting some sort of surprise from a magical object, no matter how ordinary it might seem on the outside. His second instinct was to scream, loud, with Lorelei clamping her hand over his mouth to keep from attracting attention, still holding tight even as Nate’s teeth sunk into her skin.
Despite the excruciating and surprising pain, Nate did manage to peer down and see what had happened. Biting harder at his best friend’s hand, though she still did nothing to pull away, he pinched at the flaps of the envelope to lift it up. Through the blood, he could make out a fine layer of very sharp little teeth, like someone might see on a piranha. And now, Nate never had to get bitten by a piranha, because he imagined it would be a lot like this. But there was a very sick part of him that could not help but admire the ingenuity of the envelopes and how they kept unwelcome readers from opening them. Especially since he couldn’t vocally express anything he was feeling.
Finally, though, Lorelei did pull her hand away, angry red teeth marks tracing across the pale flesh, though Lorelei did not appear pained in the least. Nate, however…
“GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!”
Nate probably should have considered how Lorelei would respond to the challenge under such duress. Before he had time to react to the situation, Lorelei grabbed a stick up off the ground and wacked the bleeding patch of skin were the envelope had its teeth sunk in. It did absolutely nothing to help the situation; in fact, the impact seemed to make the teeth sink in deeper.
“OW!” Nate yelled at the sudden sting. “LORE, WHY?”
Of course, Nate could hardly be considered any more intelligent when he started hitting his own hand against the picnic table…more than once. Why, oh why, was it a human’s instinct to fix something by first whacking it with something?
“Calm down,” Lorelei finally ordered him. “Let me see it.”
Nate strained to hold still as Lorelei took hold of his hand, the envelope flopped around like a piranha out of water. She too pulled the envelope as far apart as she could, the tiny white teeth around the edge still perfectly visible and blood continued to pump from Nate’s hand. But this time, Lorelei seemed to do nothing more with the letter, though she stared intensely at the point where the teeth and skin met. At long last, the teeth let go of Nate’s hand and Lorelei held it away with two pinched fingers. The flapping ‘jaws’ of the envelope folded back into place, and aside from the small traces of blood along the flap, nothing appeared disturbed or out of place.
“How did you do that?” Nate gasped, both from surprise and the still-lingering pain as he cradled his hand against his chest.
Lorelei shrugged, but began a somewhat rambling explanation about finding the place where two points met and breaking the link; an explanation that made no sense to Nate. Then again, push came to shove, he could never really explain how most of his inventions worked either, most of which his brother, Carter, argued that violated the very laws of physics. Things all just fell together, and that was the way it had always been.
“Go inside and take care of that hand,” Lorelei told him as she moved away from the picnic table, “and then go get your shoes.”
“Huh?” Nate gaped with his mouth hanging open.
“Well, we can’t keep these things here,” Lorelei reasoned. “It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen, or a visit from the Department of Magic if a Muggle finds them. Worse yet, what would happen if your parents or your brother found out you have them?”
That last point was all it took to convince Nate, as he pushed himself up off his seat and rushed to the patio door. Lorelei strolled casually behind him, a small grin gradually spreading wider and wider across her face.
“What?” he asked cautiously. Lorelei smiling could be either a good thing or a bad thing.
Lorelei turned to him with that same smirking grin. “It’s starting to look less and less likely that Skat-Hatokha isn’t real, isn’t it?”
“Here, have this letter of employment,” Nate said, passing the letter to the tattered-looking man on the sidewalk, “complementary with your free sandwich.”
The man snatched the sandwich eagerly, and then reached for the letter as an afterthought. But as soon as the letter left Nate’s hand, the homeless man yelped as the row of tiny teeth along the flap of the envelope snapped down on his fingers before scrambling away and throwing the letter to the wind. Then, as though by magic (what was he thinking ‘as though’?), the envelope flew straight back to Nate’s hand and landed in his open palm. Just like it had done five times before that afternoon.
Behind him, Lorelei groaned loudly, “Nate, I don’t think this is going to work. How many more of New York City’s homeless are going to have to suffer before you can get that through your thick skull?”
Nate knew he should have been offended by his best friend’s words, except for the fact that they were true.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to just hand them out to anyone we see,” Lorelei reasoned as she stepped closer to join Nate at his side. “I think we have to actually give them to people who would probably be able to do the job on the letter.”
There was only one problem with that sort of reasoning from Nate’s prospective.
“Lorelei, the only wizards I know are my brother and my probation officer,” he said to her. “And I don’t think either of them would be willing to take us up on the offer.”
Lorelei shrugged her shoulders, indifferent. “So we’ll just find someone else.”
“Oh, really?” Nate remarked. “And just how many wizards do you know?”
Nate should have known better than to issue such a challenge, especially as that same smirk from before began to once again spread over Lorelei’s face.
Nate cringed away as a five-year-old hacked directly in the direction of his eyes. He was sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair that was sticky for some reason Nate was not willing to guess.
“Lorelei! That funny-looking kid coughed on me!”
“No one likes a whiner, Nate,” Lorelei told him as she scrolled her way through a sheet on a clipboard.
The place Lorelei had chosen to go ‘Wizard Hunting’ was hardly spectacular: the West Seneca Free Clinic, exactly three blocks from the Macalister apartment.
“How do you even know about this place?” Nate asked as he continued to shift in his chair, staring around the over-crowded waiting room. “Your family has enough money not to need to go to a free clinic.”
“Me and Rae used to come here a lot when we were younger and Delia wasn’t around,” she explained, shuddering as the old man beside her blew his nose loudly into a Kleenex. “They didn’t need insurance, I never had to worry about the bill, plus we could walk there. It was all around just easier in the long run.
“Besides,” she went on to say as she filled out the last of the form, “every now and then, something comes along that needs to be treated, but you don’t necessarily want on your medical records. In this place, you don’t even have to tell them your real name.”
Lorelei left her seat momentarily to hand the form in to the overtired nurse standing guard at the exam room door. While she was away, Nate continue to observe his surroundings: already sick people crammed together like sardines, small children fighting over germy toys in the corner, a fuzzy television set tuned into a baseball game, and the overpowering smell of chalky medicine, latex, and disinfectant. He still had difficulty believing he and Lorelei were not the only witch and wizard for miles.
“Rivers and Macalister!” the nurse called out over the crowd, signaling them into the exam room. Lorelei and Nate left the disgusting waiting area without a backwards glance, being shut up in the pure white exam room.
As a whole, Nate had noticed that Wizarding society loved to brag about how much better they were than Muggles. Magic could fix everything that made Muggle life such a hardship, and that Muggles were metaphorically just sitting in piles of their own filth the way they lived their lives. Nate couldn’t even imagine what a member of Wizarding society would be doing here. Aside from him and Lorelei, of course.
Soon enough, however, Nate was distracted from his musings as the door flew open and the doctor let himself in. Right away, there was nothing about the man that seemed particularly magical. He wore a white coat, scrubs stained with various bodily fluids, and a distinct dead-eyed expression. Yes, a very typical example of the American medical industry.
“Okay, before we begin, let me lay down a few ground rules,” the doctor said to them in a fast-paced tone. “I will be prescribing you no opiates, no sleeping pills, and no medical marijuana. There will be no notes getting you out of gym, chemistry, or home ec, and if you came in here and wasted my time just because you didn’t feel like attending school today, I swear to God, I will shove a half-dozen very large needles into the most sensitive parts of your body.”
As soon as he finished his speech, he looked back and forth between the two teenagers and drew his own conclusions. “Let me guess. Girly wants to go on the pill?”
“No!” Lorelei snapped before Nate could respond himself.
The doctor turned his attention to Nate. “Then you want to go on the pill?”
“I’m not a girl!” Nate snapped this time.
“Then get a haircut, Shirley.”
It was, at this point, taking Nate everything he had to keep from searching the room for a scalpel and going straight for the throat. He turned his gaze towards Lorelei to see if his friend had already beat him to the punch. But in a most uncharacteristic manner, Lorelei held herself perfectly composed, letting no amount of her natural aggression show. “You’re a wizard,” she finally said coolly.
The doctor looked up from his chart, but he hardly appeared overcome with shock or guilt as most people did when confronted with a secret.
“No drugs for you,” he finally said, looking back down at his chart. “You’re clearly already on something pretty strong.”
Without warning, Lorelei lunged smoothly at the doctor, not to attack him, but to dig into his coat pocket.
“Whao, honey!” the doctor exclaimed. “I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be legal for at least a few more years!”
Then, a small smile came to Lorelei’s lips as she found whatever it was had been looking for. Finally, she extracted a long wooden rod that had been concealed in the doctor’s pocket.: a wizard’s wand.
“Please don’t make me make a really dirty ‘wood’ joke,” she pleaded, but with no real begging in her tone.
The man snarled down at Lorelei, but nothing could take away the joy of Lorelei’s victory, no matter how small it was. The doctor snatched back the wand and deposited it back in his pocket. Nate could not help but notice how the pocket appeared much too shallow to have concealed the long rod. And yet, somehow it did.
“Alright,” the doctor relented, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s all this about?”
“Relax, doc,” Lorelei assured him first. “My friend and I are wizards too. No need to call in the Department on any silent alarms.”
The doctor actually did relax slightly, although he still appeared quite on edge and suspicious of the two teenagers in his exam room.
“Actually, we’re here because we have something for you.” Nate reached into his pocket and extracted one of the thoroughly crumpled envelopes. “Here you go.”
Please don’t bite, were the last words that went through Nate’s mind as the doctor took the envelope from him. But to his extreme shock, once the letter was gone from his hand, nothing happened. The doctor turned it over and over in his hands, but he wasn’t bitten or snapped at like everyone else had been. “What is this exactly?”
“It’s an invitation,” Nate told him, “to accept a teaching job…at the Skat-Hatokha Academy of Magic.”
The doctor raised an eyebrow when he did not recognize the name. “We’re new,” Nate explained.
Still, the doctor turned the letter over in his hands as though he suspected it might be poisoned. “And what would I be teaching exactly?”
Lorelei spoke up. “Why don’t you try opening it and reading it yourself?”
The doctor glared up at Lorelei for her snide remark, but she did not allow herself to be intimidated by a stare-down, for which Nate was very grateful. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could have come up with answers that still sounded convincing. But it worked; the doctor finally tore the envelope open and began reading the letter, something Nate had not been able to do himself.
“Potions,” the doctor read. “Tempting, but I still have to wonder what this…‘new school’ of yours is doing sending its own students out to deliver these letters. Don’t they have any adult employees that can do this? Maybe every owl in the United States died off while I wasn’t looking?”
“Summer homework,” Lorelei answered sarcastically. “Are you going to give us an answer or no?”
The doctor took turns sneering at the both of them, looking almost as though he were watching a tennis match. “And can you give me an acceptable reason why I should?”
Suddenly, the same tired-looking nurse who had been guarding the doorway threw the door open, a frantic looking on her face.
“Dr. Leslie,” she shouted at him, “whatever you are doing in here, finish up fast. We have a food poisoning case in the waiting room, and it’s a spewer! And they’re saying they just came from the Thai restaurant down the street, so we can certainly expect more on the way!”
The doctor, now known officially as Dr. Leslie, slowly turned his head back to Nate and Lorelei, and then back down to the letter he had just opened.
Finally, he asked, “Is there a way for me to be able to contact you when I do make up my mind?”
Lorelei and Nate looked at one another, not really having any answer to give. “We don’t know,” Nate finally confessed. “The board of directors just kinda contacts you when they want to talk to you.”
“It’s an evolving system,” Lorelei finished quickly as Dr. Leslie met them with a less than believing gaze. For a long time, the three figures stood in complete silence, the echoing sounds of the waiting room buzzing in the background.
“It worked,” Nate said, starring into the plate below him. “It actually frickin’ worked!”
After the sun had gone down, Nate and Lorelei found themselves sitting in Bernie’s 24-Hour Waffle Hut, a well-known New York City hub for wizards both local and visiting. Given their latest victory, Nate found himself oddly craving the company of other magical folk.
Dr. Leslie actually seemed to be seriously considering the prospect of the teaching job that Skat-Hatokha had to offer him. He had not outright accepted or declined the job offer, at least not to Nate’ or Lorelei’s knowledge, but he hadn’t straight away called the department to have the two teenagers hauled in.
“Why twenty-four hours?” Lorelei asked, stealing the food-filled fork from Nate. “Who actually wants waffles at eleven at night?”
“It’s really more for the wizards coming in and out of here,” Nate told her, taking back his fork. “All the different time zones, after all.”
Lorelei offered a small shrug, taking his word for it, and taking up her chipped cup of coffee.
Sitting in Bernie’s, Nate couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of satisfaction, No matter what, he could always count on the fact that he knew at least a little bit more about the Wizarding world than his best friend did. Lorelei didn’t even know how to find Bernie’s. It was a feeling that Nate should have felt guilty about having, but at the same time, it made him feel slightly less like a Muggle than Lorelei was.
“Should you two really be out this late?”
Nate quickly turned to his side, met with the form of a very beautiful woman; thick dark hair and bronze skin, black high heels and smoky leggings. Her face was lined and shaded perfectly with her make-up, and her bright eyes stared down suspiciously at the two teenagers. “Do your parents allow you two to be out together unsupervised?”
“No one asked you, lady!” Lorelei snapped.
The pretty woman flinched back slightly, but she did not leave. She didn’t even look away. Her attention remained very much focused on the small collection of letters resting on the tabletop.
“What are these you have here?” she asked, reaching for one of the official brown envelopes.
“Don’t touch it!” Nate shouted.
But the woman was not screaming and she was not in pain. Taking a cautious step back from the teenagers, her fingertips pinched at the edge of the envelope. It wasn’t biting her, wasn’t attacking her; it was just an ordinary envelope.
And blatantly ignoring the fact that it had gotten him into trouble so many times before, Nate began pulling words out of nowhere. Not the same as lying, just his mouth getting a head start of his brain. “Can you tell me your name, ma’am?”
“Vanessa Montoya.” She still wouldn’t let go of the envelope.
“What a coincidence!” Nate went on, faking surprise. “We have been looking for you all day!”
“You have?” she asked, raising her arched eyebrows.
“Yes!” Nate insisted. “My associate and I are messengers hired to deliver…that envelope to you.”
Lorelei’s eyes widened a bit at being pulled into the conversation, but didn’t say anything, seeming much more interested in being entertained by the situation in front of her. And Nate felt no obligation to stop. Lorelei had already put herself into this whole mess, and she had no right to complain about Nate further weaving on the tale.
The woman at their tableside remained somewhat skeptic. “They why didn’t you just deliver it to me at work?”
Nate shrugged his shoulders. “Hey, if the school wanted the job done professionally, they would have hired professionals. But they didn’t; they hired us.” Nate couldn’t help but feel a bit proud of himself for how much more effortlessly he was able to spin these tales on such short notice. True, it was not something that a person should be proud of, but he still could deny the feelings.
“School?” the woman asked, noting who Nate said it was that was employing them to deliver all these letters.
“The Skat-Hatokha Academy of Magic,” Lorelei told her, interested in seeing the reaction.
Surprisingly, however, the woman known as Vanessa Montoya offered a small smile and an expression sounding almost like recognition. “Oh, I see.”
Using one of her manicured nails, she sliced the envelope open and extracted the parchment inside. She took a few moments to read silently to herself before looking back to the two messengers in the booth. “Well, this is most certainly one of the most interesting messages I have ever received. Thank you so much.”
And with that, she hoisted her purse over her shoulder and Vanessa Montoya left the waffle restaurant, still reading the letter. Nate breathed a sigh of relief and Lorelei sulked from the lack of a show. “We’re out of coffee,” Lorelei finally said, reaching for their coffee urn. Nate wondered how this could possibly be since she was the only one who had been drinking it. The girl had a problem.
Still, Nate followed her to the counter, where Franco the head cook was wiping the counter. “Yo, waffle-jockey!” Lorelei shouted at him. “We need a refill of your crap-tacular coffee!”
Nate cringed slightly as Franco looked up to face her. He had already learned from experience that you never ever mess with those whose job was to handle your food. And he had a feeling Franco was going to be making sure that Lorelei learned this lesson quite well. But in the way that Nate expected.
The cook regarded the two of them with a very smug expression. “You’ve never heard of Vanessa Montoya.”
Another thing Nate had come to learn over the years; cooks, clerks, and anyone who worked minimum wage heard every single word you and your friends said to one another, even when you thought they weren’t listening.
Lorelei snatched another envelope from the stack and dangled it in front of him. “This little baby right here says we have.”
Franco regarded her for a second, then snatched the letter out of her hand. Nate was half convinced Lorelei had just given it to the man out of spite and she wanted to see him get bit. But, once again, the Biting Envelopes had deemed this particular person fit to possess one of these officially-looking letters, and he was able to open it without a huge production. While he was distracted, Nate took Lorelei by the arm and led her out of the restaurant before she could do or say anything that would land them right back where they started with the waffle cook.
Once they were back out on the sidewalk, Nate extracted the rest of the envelopes. “I suppose we really are expected to do the hiring for the Skat-Hatokha place,” he reasoned. “I just wish we could actually read these things for ourselves so we could have a better idea of what we are dealing with.”
“I have a feeling we wouldn’t want to know anyway,” Lorelei told him as she walked by his side.
“How do you figure?”
Lorelei set in with her legal jargon once again. “From a legal standpoint, the less details we know, the better. It makes us far less culpable in the long run.”
“So now you don’t think Skat-Hatokha is real?” Nate ask, starting to feel a bit panicked. “You said this morning that getting these letters proved that the place is real!”
Lorelei shook her head. “We know very little for sure.”
Nate was getting ready to pull his hair out from the lack of straight-forward answers he was getting from his right hand. Just get to the point already!
“We have a place that for all intensive purposes will be a school (despite all the faces Nate was make to the distinction). We have teachers hired and coming at a set date, so most likely students will be coming after that. This Skat-Hatokha School is coming whether we like it or not.”
Instead of Nate feeling better, though, he was starting to feel his stomach tighten into a very uncomfortable knot. Other kids? he hadn’t even considered that possibility yet! What was he going to do when that point in time finally came?
“And we can either get out of its way….” Lorelei’s expression became slightly more devious. “Or we can ‘accidentally on purpose’ pull a few strings of our own.”
The longer Nate knew Lorelei, the more he suspected she might one day grow up to be a criminal genius. This whole Skat-Hatokha thing only served as a medium for her. If only she could be certain whether or not she was Italian. She would have made an excellent addition to the mob.
Nate split the stack in half and pushed one pile into Lorelei’s hands. “These can be your responsibility.”
There were certain mornings one went into work, and they knew it was going to be a miserable day the moment they walked through the door. For Harry, today was one of those days. Though when he first arrived at the Ministry of Magic, he couldn’t be sure just what kind of fresh torture this would be. Perhaps there was a mass prison break at Azkaban last night and he would now get to spend the rest of his week chasing escaped criminals all over Britain. Given all had been involved with in the past few weeks, however, such a task might have come as a welcome break to all the ‘official’, intercontinental business he had been involved with.
But it was the receptionist at the Aurors office that offered Harry his first clue as to what might be waiting for him. “Mr. Potter, you have someone from the American Department of Magic here to see you,” she said, pointing vaguely down to the end of the office. “I told her to wait at your desk.”
Of course! he thought grimly to himself. Harry could only imagine what little surprise this visitor might have for him. If it was another reporter, though, Merlin help him, he was going to throw her out of the Ministry himself! Despite the fact that the whole Boy-Who-Lived image had certainly been lost after he became a father, that still didn’t stop the sleazier reporters from following his coattails and snapping pictures at the most boring details of his life, much like the Muggle celebrities in various tabloids.
In the Ministry, they were more or less safe from any real danger or retribution, but Harry was certain the moment one of those vultures actually did follow him home, he was going to hex them back to the Second War and back again!
However, when Harry finally did arrive on the scene, he saw Ron was standing beside his desk, frantically conversing with a young woman who looked just barely out of school sitting in a chair in front of his desk, tapping her fingers against her knees. She answered him nervously in a high-pitched voice, her movements quick and flinty like a hummingbird. And as nervous as Ron would get whenever he got into an argument, this young woman was much worse. Her hair and even the material of her robes shook with her and her movements.
“Hello,” Harry finally said, getting the pair’s attention. “Can I help you with something?”
“Mr. Potter!” the young witch exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “I’m sorry if I’m appearing so frazzled, but I have been running all over creation today catching up with all of Miss Montoya’s contacts. And there are a lot of them!”
Harry’s eyes widened when he recognized the name. “Miss Montoya? Vanessa Montoya?” The young woman nodded, still anxiously smoothing her hair. Harry then pressed, “What? What has happened?”
All kinds of possibilities were going through Harry’s head. He had been an Auror long enough to know that whenever an official government employee was the one sent to deliver news, it was bound to be horrible. An assassination, a mass terrorist attack, some American Dark Lord that no one had informed him of…
“Miss Montoya is no longer an employee of the American Department of Magic,” the young woman told him, “as of nine thirty-seven Eastern Standard Time.”
Harry’s eyes went wide as he blinked back surprise. It actually took him a few moments to recover from the initial shock, it finally dawned on him as to just how serious the situation actually was.
“Excuse me?” he finally asked, his voice catching slightly.
“I am so sorry you had to be told like this,” the young witch continued, flinching back slightly as though she were afraid any anger Harry might be feeling was going be taken out on her, “But Miss Montoya’s resignation was quite sudden and, frankly, very unexpected. The Department of Magic’s International Relations Office has been doing its very best to make sure all her contacts are informed and compensated as well as can possibly be.”
At first, Harry felt somewhat relieved that the news was not one of the more horrible scenarios that had been circling in his mind. But then, he suddenly recalled that it was Vanessa Montoya who had been the one to meet them at the British Wizarding Embassy; it was she who was the one who had likely been the one who had all the proof they were ever going to need that the whole Skat-Hatokha mess was nothing for anyone anywhere to get up in arms about. Everything had been so quiet lately, at least in terms of what the Aurors Office had been asking him and Ron to do in investigating. But chances were, now that Vanessa Montoya had left the American Department of Magic under ‘suspicious circumstances’, someone was going to trudge up the cold investigation once again.
Apparently, this was something that had already occurred to Ron, which was why he was so nervous when Harry had first arrived. When Harry finally glanced over in Ron’s direction, his friend was already trying to come up with some alternative explanation.
“Maybe it’s just temporary,” Ron suggested. “Maybe it’s just some sort extended leave. She might very well come back.”
The young woman from the American Department of Magic shook her head, keeping her eyes cast on the floor. “No, not the way she quit.”
The young witch’s eyes went wide as well, as though recalling some horrid memory of exactly how Vanessa Montoya had gone about leaving the American Department of Magic.
“I should go,” the young woman said suddenly, gathering her jacket up in her arms. “I still have many, many places to go and people to find.”
And with that, the little representative rushed away in a shuffling sort of run, shoulders clenched as though she were now afraid of being cursed from behind, leaving Harry and Ron still very much in a state of shock and quite certain that they were now going to have a very large mess to clean up.
Harry Potter and the Skat-Hatokha Reaction by OliveOil_Med
Chapter Notes: Ginny finally spills her own short-lived secret to Harry, while Nate is given a rather vague task from the Skat-Hatokha board of directors.
Thanks go out once again to Holly and Jo-jo!