Who: Maja and Gerard When: Friday night Where: Just inside the main gates What: Hogwarts keeps some creepy pets
The first thing Maja saw was a grotesque face. Giant, batlike ears, distended tongue, a mouth misshapen into a horrible parody of a smile – all carved into the cold stone of the Hogwarts front gates.
She glared back at the gargoyle reflected in the narrow beam of her wandlight. Arriving after dark had not been part of her original plan, but she had scrapped the original plan after the third hour of last minute Ministry paperwork – some of which, she suspected, had been created solely for the purpose of intimidating her. Apparently not everyone at the Ministry thought that Sweden deserved a presence at Hogwarts. Maja, however, was no more intimidated by paperwork than she was by gargoyles; she made a face at the hideous thing, for good measure, and gave the password that the Secretary of Foreign Affairs had reluctantly handed over when there were absolutely no more papers left to sign. Slowly, almost grudgingly, the gargoyle slid aside and the gates opened.
It wasn’t until they had creaked closed behind her that she heard the groaning. She raised her wand a little and something stepped into the light, looking remarkably like the gargoyle she had just passed, only with less grinning and more grime. The creature was about the size of a small child, but stiff and gurgling and strangely lopsided. It stepped closer, and another one appeared behind it, and another, like a curious phalanx of boggart-induced hallucinations. Maja raised her wand and then paused. It was possible that these were just some sort of exotic British grounds animals. Not what she would have chosen, but at a place called Hogwarts, who could tell?
On the other hand, one of them appeared to be gnawing on its own foot.
They could be students, she told herself, playing a prank. Or a transfiguration lesson gone awry. She spent a moment weighing the odds of being gnawed on versus causing a diplomatic incident and losing her access to Hogwarts.
The only things Maja disliked more than threateningly gruesome creatures with their limbs falling off were threateningly gruesome creatures with their limbs falling off that she wasn’t allowed to kill. The growing mass of the creatures around her made up her mind. To hell with it, she thought, and began stunning.