The Golden Wand [Harry Potter/Percy Jackson]

Chapter 13: A Midnight Attack

Annabeth POV:

They came at midnight.

Usually, I would have been prepared for anything. I always slept with my wand tucked under my pillow. I couldn't leave anything to chance nowadays, not after what I have experienced in the past. But at Hogwarts, in the Competitors common room where everything is luxury and the company is comforting, I let my guard down.

Perhaps I had allowed Draco Malfoy to change my water into something stronger, perhaps I had got a little carried away with the dancing and celebrating and perhaps I had gone to bed just a little more tired than usual. I hadn't slept with my wand by my head.

I didn't hear them open the door to my dormitory and creep over to my bed. I hardly felt it when they slipped a bag over my head. Finally, I woke when they lifted my body and carried me out of the room. I started to scream, to thrash against my constraints. I didn't know who they were. I couldn't see anything.

"Stupefy," I heard a man whisper. Everything went dark.

***

When I woke again, a faint light was streaming through the bag around my head. My hands were tied behind my back. I was sat on a cold, hard wooden chair. I didn't scream - I wouldn't allow myself to show fear or confusion.

In between my tied hands I held my wand. How it had got there, or why, I did not know. But I knew it was mine from the way a sort of energy seeped out of it and into me. The feeling calmed me.

"Relashio," I mumbled. I felt the bond around my wrists slip and fall to the ground.

With my now-free hands I removed the bag from my head and sat up from my chair. I squinted against the dim light of the room - not that it was much of a room. I was standing at the crossroad of four connecting corridors, each identical with black walls, ceilings and floors that all faded into darkness. A single light-bulb shone weakly above me, providing the only light there was.

Where am I?

I lay my wand flat in my palm. "Point Me," I demanded, expecting the wand to point North like a compass. Instead it began to spin, one way and then the next in a sporadic motion. It sped up in my hand, spinning with such a force that it became a blur. I had to throw it on the ground to get it to stop.

Great, I thought. Some people kidnapped me, placed me in a creepy, dark room and not even my wand knows where I am.

I thought about using the revelio charm to determine whether there were any charms or curses vexing this place and my powers, but just the uncomfortable tingle in the air told me that strong magic was in place. I had to get out of here.

"Lumos."

I randomly selected a hallway and began to run down it. After ten minutes of running I settled into a fast walk, aware of the fact that I might need to conserve my energy for... for what I didn't know. There were no twists and bends in the hallway, no corners to turn or endpoint in sight. It was so long and endless and dark that I began to feel like giving up.

Don't give up, don't be a disappointment. I wasn't quite sure if the voice in my head was my own or a memory of my real mother that never loved me.

"Lumos Maxima!" I yelled in frustration after another twenty minutes of walking, fed up at the ridiculously long tunnel that presented no freedom. The darkness did not evaporate around me as it should; as the light erupted from my wand I was overcome by fear and panic. The black, murky darkness that coated these walls was not shadows... it was spiders. Tens of thousands of spiders all around me, illuminated from the light that escaped my wand. Their red eyes stared straight at mine, their legs fought against the tide to scuttle towards me.