The Marauders: Year Five #Wattys2017

The Undead, Eggs, and Opals

The Undead, Eggs, and Opals

James had just got his knee up on the rock to pull himself up onto the jetty and out of the cave when a hand clamped onto his ankle. The hand was ice-cold and clammy in a strange way and gripped his ankle hard, pulling him backwards toward the water. His other foot slipped on the algae covered rock, and he fell forward, falling down to the mercy of the grip on his leg, his glasses falling off so he couldn't even see it correctly, the frames bouncing off the rock and into the water.

Maryrose let out a shriek and grabbed James's arm with one hand and aimed her wand with the other. "Stupefy!" she shouted and a jet of red sparks flew over James's shoulder, striking the horrible, pale figure in the face - or what had once been a face and was now a sort of a mush of melted features... James squinted his eyes shut. It was the most horrible thing he'd ever seen. "Stupefy!" Maryrose shrieked again and she struck the thing in it's wrists and it hissed and seemed to shriek, but it's grip on James loosed for just a second... A second was all Maryrose needed. She yanked him hard and he fell forward, tumbling over her onto the rock on the jetty.

"Hurry!" she cried as the thing tried to climb out of the water.

James could only see things through the blur of his poor eyesight, his glasses lost to the ocean, and Maryrose had to guide him over the rocks and back to the beach. They ran as hard and fast as they could, kicking up rocks and sand as they went, Maryrose looking back over her shoulders at the dark that surrounded the mouth of the cave, praying that she wouldn't see the figure running after them... and her prayers were answered, they were allowed to escape off down the beach.

When they'd run halfway back to the bonfire from the cave and nothing was coming after them, she grabbed James's elbow, panting so hard that her lungs felt as though they were burning within her. "Oh my god," she sobbed, "That was terrible."

"The skin was so awful," James agreed quietly, shivering. He sat on the pebbles and rolled up the ankle of his pants to look at the place the thing had touched him but there weren't any marks, at least not that he could see without his glasses on.. But he didn't feel anything there, either. "What the bloody hell was that thing?" he asked and he squinted up at Maryrose.

"Inferius," whispered Maryrose, "I reckon."

The word sent a shiver through James and he had a distant flashback of the last time he'd heard about an inferius - the night that Derek Bell died. They'd left the N.E.W.T.s to go investigate an inferius sighting, somebody had claimed that Voldemort had awakened an army of inferius - the undead controlled by dark magic. That particular member of the undead must have drowned in the water there in the cave perhaps. James felt sick to his stomach at the thought of it. What a horrible, dismal place to die. Nobody deserved that. Not even Voldemort himself. Well. Maybe Voldemort himself did, James ceded. But nobody else.

Maryrose knelt down and inspected James's ankle. "Is it alright?" she asked, looking carefully.

"Far as I can tell," James replied, "But then again I can't really see too good without my glasses, so."

Maryrose tenderly touched the skin of his ankle and looked it over. "It looks okay," she said, then, "What about your knee?"

James had been so concerned with the flesh where the inferius had touched him that he'd completely forgotten about the pain in his other knee. When he'd been dragged back, the rock had caught the fabric of his slacks and his skin and torn it up, great red, bleeding marks covered his kneecap and the blood dripped red down his shin, staining the pants and probably his socks as well.

"Episky," Maryrose muttered, tapping her wand to the wound. It healed up instantly, but there was no getting rid of the blood stains in the fabric. Even a siphoning charm couldn't fix that.