All three explorers were fairly certain they heard a disgruntled "tch" from somewhere in the corner.

The flashlight beam swung toward the sound like a weapon drawn in self-defense.

Nothing strange in the corner.

Just a coat rack.

Before their nerves could ease even slightly, the ceiling fan above them started rattling, clang, clang, its rhythm suddenly speeding up.

The trembling beam swung back toward the fan.

Perched on the spinning blades was a blood-smeared rabbit plush.

They had noticed it on the living room sofa when they first came in, a dusty, lop-eared rabbit with its cotton seams splitting at the sides.

The person holding the flashlight swallowed hard and quickly swung the beam back to the sofa.

Where the rabbit should have been, there now sat a Russian nesting doll that belonged on the display shelf.

The doll's red lips were vivid and wet-looking, its expression caught somewhere between a smile and not.

"Is it just me, or — "

"Did you see — "

The three pressed their backs together, trying to confirm what each of them had seen.

Then, all at once, they felt someone tap them on the shoulder.

Their breathing stopped.

Only the fan's wind moved, stirring through their hair.

Thwap. The rabbit was flung off by the spinning blades and landed squarely in one team member's arms.

The plush's eyes were made of buttons. The buttons had fallen off. At the corner of its mouth was a smear of dark red,

"AAAAAHHH —"

A piercing shriek tore through the old house.

Moments later, the wizard and the vampire hidden in the shadows heard a Muggle car engine turn over. The Muggles crashed into a tree stump in their panicked flight, reversed at speed, and vanished to the far end of the lawn amid frantic, terrified shouting.

Click. Someone flipped the light switch.

Walter had used some vampire trick, this house had no electricity to speak of, yet the lights came back on all the same, and the drab living room was laid bare at once.

Snape looked at Lucas and the vampire.

They had arrived on the scene just moments ago and found a group of Muggles inside, treating the place like a haunt to explore.

All three of them had instinctively found somewhere to hide.

Lucas's Disillusionment Charm was flawless, honed to absolute perfection. Snape filed that detail away in silence, keeping a firm grip on Lucas's shoulder in case they were accidentally separated.

Then Walter started frightening the Muggles.

What none of them had anticipated was that the Muggles kept coming up with "scientific" explanations.

Lucas, pinned under Snape's grip, impatiently joined in the effort to manufacture an atmosphere of terror. A few Levitation Charms was all it took to set the mood precisely right. A Boggart would have been hard-pressed to match the effect.

Two childish individuals.

"There is a spell in this world called the Muggle-Repelling Charm."

Snape crossed his arms and offered his summary, quite satisfied with himself for being a dependable adult wizard.

Walter gave an unbothered shrug. "I'm a vampire. I wouldn't know anything about you wizards' spells."

Lucas spread his hands with an air of genuine curiosity. "That spell you mentioned, I don't know it either."

Snape was momentarily at a loss for words.

Fortunately, Lucas quickly changed the subject. He looked around the room, then turned to Walter. Where exactly is this manor entrance you mentioned?

Walter pointed toward the room further inside. "In the study."

Snape's hand stayed locked on Lucas.

His wand was trained on the vampire while his attention stayed alert to whatever might arise from their surroundings.

"Lead the way," he said. Short. Simple.

Walter suppressed the irritation rising in his chest and walked to the front, pushing open the corridor door.

He stopped abruptly and turned to Snape. "Regarding the manor's entrance, it would be best if just the two of us went in first." Walter glanced at Lucas. "There are parts of the exploration that aren't suitable for an underage wizard to see."

"Absolutely not!" Lucas reacted sharply.

"There's no other way around it. A very serious murder took place in that room. It isn't appropriate for an underage wizard to witness." Walter looked to Snape as though seeking his judgment.

He could see Snape's hesitation, and pressed further: "I don't want Lucas to have to face something so gruesome. He only looks mature, he's still young."

"If you're worried about Lucas, you can leave him here in the living room. There are almost no traces of magic; those Muggles walked through freely enough."

Snape weighed it for a moment.

He turned back and told Lucas: "He and I will go take a look."

Lucas was visibly unhappy. "But!"

"No buts." Snape held him in place with a single look.

The Potions Master had his limits. When it came to matters of safety, this was not like a Christmas tree or a few folding bookshelves, not something to be slipped past with a bit of maneuvering.

Lucas stopped where he was, unwilling.

He gripped the rotting doorframe and watched as Snape and Walter were swallowed by the darkness.

Argos, Lucas said inwardly, calling the raven's name.

A coil of black mist circled once around his feet, as if telling him not to worry.

Then it followed the direction Snape and Walter had taken and slipped into the cracks between the floorboards.

A portion of Lucas's attention went with it.

Argos, who knew of Lucas's preparations, held a quiet question. He had never fully understood the various things Lucas prepared for.

"The props Walter set up were all intended to trap a wizard, none of them are lethal. Why are you so on edge?"

Lucas had known from the start that every one of those traps was something Walter had prepared specifically for Snape and himself. Argos had watched with his own eyes as Lucas revised draft after draft.

When weighing the destructive potential, Lucas had accounted for every possibility.

He had even prepared a counter-curse for each individual trap.

Having gone that far, and with Professor Snape being a dependable adult wizard on top of it all, what was there left to worry about?

The question hung for a long time before Lucas finally replied: "Never underestimate the enemy."

The answer sounded reasonable enough. And yet Argos still found something faintly odd about it.

While they exchanged those words, Argos had already followed the wizard and the vampire into the study.

The lighting here was better. And just as Walter had said, this was not a place for an underage wizard to walk into.

The entire room looked like a grinding wheel of flesh and blood. Splattered gore covered every surface of every wall; the ceiling bore a heavy spread of grayish-brown spray as well.

All of it had dried long ago.

The only part of the room spared from the blood was the carpet beneath their feet, which carried a thin layer of dust but was otherwise clean.

Snape's expression was grim.

He was a full-grown adult wizard, that much was true, but even he had never encountered a scene this revolting.

By comparison, the werewolves under the Dark Lord's command almost seemed to have standards.

He examined the surroundings carefully. The study didn't hold a particularly large collection of books; the room was decorated with many small things meant to pass the time.

In the corner stood an easel. On it sat a large-format crossword puzzle. Whoever had been working on it appeared to have labored over it at length, but aside from the blood splashed across the page, half the words remained unfilled.

➤ Next: Forced Transformation

Chapter 229 - Forced Transformation

The room was, on the whole, decorated in a Muggle style.

The carpet showed signs of having been dragged. Uncertain what lay beneath it, Snape did not step onto it.

The cauldron propped in the corner looked suspicious.

But examining it meant crossing the carpet first. Snape did not move immediately.

Walter stood on the carpet with a perfectly composed expression, the earring trembling with each small movement.

Had this vampire had a pierced ear before?

Snape tried to recall. Without waiting for Walter to call out to him, he Apparated directly to the side of the cauldron.

The contents had been dry for a long time. Snape stirred with a spoon and tried to identify the curled, flaking material on the surface.

He scraped a beetle shell from the bottom, an ingredient used in brewing blood-replenishing potions.

He made further attempts, but the other materials were too severely degraded. There was nothing left to identify.

Snape set down the spoon.

The wand in his other hand had been trained on Walter the entire time.

Before coming here, Snape had specifically looked up several spells effective against vampires.

Even so, when he met Walter's eyes, he saw the vampire smiling with self-satisfaction.

Something was wrong.

Alarm bells went off in Snape's mind.

He cast without thinking.

The curse grazed Walter's earlobe as it flew past, shearing off a portion of the vampire's ear.

The earring on that side fell to the floor.

A faint clink, it landed on a section of bare floor not covered by the carpet.

The severed piece of earlobe rapidly dissolved into black smoke, leaving only the earring behind.

"Hss!" Walter clutched the earlobe in pain.

But the fury on Walter's face shifted quickly into a satisfied smile, because Snape, who had just been casting spells at him, was now curled on the floor.

Snape had begun to undergo some kind of forced transformation.

A moment later, the disagreeable wizard in black robes was gone.

A black panther lay in his place.

Walter pressed a hand to the ear. The flesh had not grown back.

The vampire bent down in a mixture of fury and shock, picked up the fallen earring, and pinned it to the lapel.

Then Walter inverted up onto the ceiling and, from behind the chandelier, retrieved a crystal cube.

The shopkeeper's merchandise was expensive, but reasonably useful.

Once Walter had gotten what was wanted from all this, there would have to be an opportunity to look into that shopkeeper's background.

Walter turned the cube over, watching the panther across the room, still unable to adapt to its new bodily structure, its fur standing fully on end.

Midnight.

Christmas Eve had passed. Christmas Day had arrived.

The wooden clock on the study wall suddenly ejected a small foal. The horse's head had been twisted off, and bloodstains marked its body.

Walter walked toward the wall where the clock hung.

Guarding against the panther lunging, but, to Walter's surprise, the black shape sprang up suddenly and, without any hesitation, bolted into the pitch-dark corridor.

Walter had no intention of giving chase.

The manor had not yet opened, and Severus Snape was still needed alive.

The vampire walked to the wall beneath the clock. The body suddenly became parallel to the floor — just as Walter had hung inverted from the ceiling before — and stood steadily on the wall itself.

Walter walked smoothly along the wall until reaching the clock, then bent to fiddle with its hands.

Anyone who walked normally into this room would have seen Walter clinging to the wall like a spider.

The chandelier's light and shadow stretched the silhouette into a shape with a thick trunk and long, spindly limbs.

The vampire's long fingernails deftly manipulated the hands.

Finally Walter twisted the mechanism of the ejected foal, rotating the horse's body one hundred and eighty degrees.

Midnight had just passed.

The entire house began shedding fine dust. The rooms divided like a Rubik's cube into uniform cubic sections, and then — in a manner the eye could not comprehend, the spaces rearranged themselves.

Argos split in two. One half followed the panther.

Snape had only just worked out how to move four legs in sequence. Like a streak of black lightning, he barely cleared the corridor as it began to warp around him.

Whatever mechanism Walter had triggered, the corridor running from the study to the sitting room had been stretched out.

Snape was not yet accustomed to braking with an animal's body.

The panther was running flat out, the end of the corridor rushing toward him, the sitting room entrance where they had first come in looming ahead.

His mind commanded his body to slow down and brake. His subconscious still thought he was human.

The front two legs stopped. The back two skidded in place. He tripped over himself and went careening toward the decorative moulding at the corridor entrance.

Lucas had been left behind in the sitting room, idly picking at a protruding wood splinter on the doorframe, and leaned out at precisely that moment.

A cushioning charm.

The panther felt itself smash through it, and then crashed into an adult wizard.

The two of them tumbled together in a heap and rolled squarely into one of the newly partitioned cubic spaces.

Lucas wrapped both arms around the panther. The space around them compressed to the extreme, restricting all movement.

They were trapped in a one-cubic-metre space, forced to curl tightly together.

The space lurched and rolled violently, like a building block tumbling down a staircase from the second floor to the ground. After a terrifying bout of weightlessness and jolting, it finally stopped.

"Lumos."

In the darkness, a point of light shot from the tip of Lucas's wand.

The space confining them disappeared.

Faint, flickering light illuminated the surroundings.

Lucas saw a pitch-black shadow lying beside him.

Through Argos's perspective Lucas knew everything that had happened, but the Lucas who had been waiting in the sitting room should not have known any of it.

The panther, badly disoriented by the violent tumbling, couldn't get to its feet. It retched dryly several times, completely unable to adapt to an animal's body, the whole experience profoundly wrong.

Lucas tried placing a hand on the back of the panther's neck, felines generally enjoy being touched there.

Seeing the panther was occupied with adjusting to its body and had no time to resist, Lucas stroked it absently to soothe it.

The Lumos drifted around them in a dim arc.

The room no longer resembled the Muggle-styled interior of the old house at all. They appeared to have entered the manor proper, and now stood somewhere designed like a garden.

Bare, withered branches reached through the hazy light like hands groping up from a grave.

In the centre of the garden stood a fountain, and at its centre a large metal sculpture.

A horse rearing back mid-whinny, frozen at the instant of a sharp halt, front hooves raised high, the movement captured well.

The sculpture appeared to be bronze. Normally a piece like this would have an armoured knight mounted on it.

Lucas looked around. Nothing for the moment.

Something pressed down on the shoe. Lucas looked down and met a pair of wild animal eyes.

A quiet little exclamation of admiration, kept entirely to himself.

One of the panther's paws was planted on his shoe. It was trying to dodge the hand Lucas kept wandering around its neck, but it was genuinely unfamiliar with this animal body.

The attempt to pull away looked like reluctant invitation.

Snape was extremely anxious.

He had made many preparations for this expedition. He was still carrying a Portkey on him.

But the sudden transformation had thrown all his plans into disarray.

Lucas was only a second-year student.

The panther's tail lashed in irritation. Snape hadn't even registered he now had a tail.

Lucas was slightly distracted by the dark shape shifting about. A dry cough, then the question came directly: "Mr. Walter?"

The paw pressed down harder on his shoe.

A soft, very heavy weight bore down on the top of his foot.

The panther hadn't put its full weight on him, but if Lucas stayed oblivious much longer, that could change.

"Professor Snape?" Lucas asked tentatively.

The panther's tail went still.

It looked stiffly at Lucas, then nodded, earnest and reserved.

"Ah!" Lucas appeared thoroughly flustered.

At this point Snape couldn't ignore another problem: why had Lucas secretly taken an Ageing Potion again? Lucas had turned back into a twenties-something appearance.

Snape watched Lucas crouch down. Lucas was still cautious, casting an Armour Charm on himself first, then levelling his gaze with the panther's.

Under Snape's gaze, Lucas extended both hands. One went up: "You are a panther with intelligence."

Then the other: "You are Professor Snape who has been transformed."

If Snape could change back into a human right now, he swore that no matter how Lucas begged him, there was absolutely no chance of that boy ever becoming his apprentice again.

But a moment later he pulled himself out of the embarrassment and irritation. Rational thought reasserted itself over the emotions the animal body had amplified.

This was a necessary step. Snape did his best to convince himself.

The panther arched its back, the atmosphere dropping sharply, and batted down the hand representing "Snape."

"It really is the Professor!" Lucas grabbed one of Snape's paws and knew when to stop.

"I'm sorry, I need to verify once more — did we eat apple pie today?"

A nod or a shake of the head.

The panther shook its head. Its tail drooped all the way to the ground.

Lucas watched Snape with a tense expression. "You were hit by a Transfiguration curse? Were you attacked? Did Walter attack you?"

Too many options at once.

But Snape didn't need to answer. He turned his head toward the dark shape on the far side of the garden.

A suit of armour had appeared out of nowhere and stood there without moving.

➤ Next: Cheating on the Exam