章節 280: The Stowaway

"Do you want us to leave?" said Hermione gently.

"No, it's fine," said Astoria quietly. "You were Oleandra's friends, right? You've got as much a right to hear how she died as I do."

An indescribably expression appeared on Harry's face the moment she said those words.

"Hang on," Harry said slowly. "What do you mean, she died…?"

Hermione and Ron looked at Harry, their concern evident in their eyes.

"You brought her back in your arms," Astoria said, her voice trembling slightly. "Her body was as cold as ice; her heart wasn't beating. She was definitely dead. We held her funeral and buried the body not long after."

"That can't be," Harry said firmly. "She told me to bring her back! She told me she was still alive!"

Evidently, Harry was experiencing survivor's guilt. Illogical as it was, he felt guilty that he had survived a terrible ordeal, and that Oleandra hadn't; and this was compounded by the fact that he had promised Sirius that they would look after each other. In Astoria's eyes, he had deluded himself into believing that Oleandra was still alive.

"Harry…" said Hermione pityingly.

"What do you mean, she told you to bring her back?" said Ginny, raising an eyebrow. "How could she have asked you to bring her body back if she was already dead?"

"It'd be easier to understand if you started from the beginning, innit?" said Ron.

Harry described that when he and Voldemort had fired spells at each other, their wands had connected, since they possessed cores originating from the same Phoenix: Dumbledore's Fawkes. They owned sister wands, so when they were forced to fight each other, a beam of golden light had come out of them and linked them together.

Balls of light appeared in the middle of the stream, and Harry had instinctively pushed them away from him as best he could. Somehow, Harry had managed to win the reversed tug of war, and forced Voldemort's wand to spit out the spells it had cast in reverse.

"Priori Incantatem, I think Dumbledore had called it," Harry explained. "Anyway, it spit out the silver hand he had just made for Wormtail—"

Astoria gave a quick glance in Ginny's direction, since she distinctly remembered Ginny talking at length about silver hands last summer, but was only slightly surprised when she showed no reaction whatsoever. This wasn't the time to be discussing magic, after all.

"But then, Voldemort's wand started spitting out ghosts, or something like that," Harry continued. "First, a woman I'd never seen before; and then, an old man, a Muggle, I'd only seen him once before in my dreams; then, Bertha Jorkins, I recognized her from her picture; and finally, my parents…"

Harry's story seemed unbelievable to Astoria, but she kept on listening.

"It was his victims, the people he'd killed with the Killing Curse," Harry said, as if this made perfect sense to him. "They helped me get away from Voldemort, and the woman, the first one to come out of his wand, she told me that Oleandra was still alive, and to take her body with me before I touched the Portkey."

"So, you think my sister's still alive… because a ghost told you so?" said Astoria, unconvinced.

"Dumbledore said they weren't ghosts," Harry quickly said. "Reverse echoes, he called them. And since Oleandra didn't appear among them, she has to be alive," he insisted.

"Harry…" said Hermione hesitantly. "There's no coming back from the Killing Curse, and you told us Voldemort himself used it to kill her."

"But…" said Harry, who was now feeling slightly troubled. "I didn't die…"

An awkward silence fell over Ron's small room, but everyone was thinking the same thing: not just anyone could replicate the Boy Who Lived's feat of surviving the Killing Curse.

"Thank you for telling me all this," said Astoria, trying to keep her voice calm. "But it's getting late, and I haven't finished cleaning the cobwebs in the stairs."

"I'll help," said Hermione quickly, and they both exited the room, leaving the others to explain to Harry just what it was the Order of the Phoenix actually did.

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Meanwhile, Oleandra was still very much alive. However, she was, for lack of better words, completely and utterly lost. But to figure out just how she had managed to get herself into such a predicament when she could Tree-Port to any of her marked acorns within her sensing range, one must return a few hours back into the past:

Now, Oleandra hadn't had a single clue as to which cemetery she'd been buried in, but neither had it mattered, since she had Tree-Ported away to one of her marked acorns in London. From there, she had managed to steal a wallet containing enough Muggle currency for the bus fare to Folkestone by relying on Fairy magic; but that had been the easy part!

Incidentally, by that point, she had performed enough underage magic outside of Hogwarts to get her expelled and have her wand snapped into halves (or fourths). But the Ministry never ended up sending anyone after her, reinforcing her idea that she had lost the Trace when she had briefly died.

In any case, Oleandra's plan to cross the English Channel to France was to employ the Channel Tunnel, which had opened to the public in her third year at Hogwarts. Unfortunately, since it directly connected England to the very foreign country of France, it was well guarded by the Muggles.

In order to use the tunnel, she had opted for what she had considered to be the simplest solution: first, she waited for a tourist to get ready to leave the Eurotunnel parking lot, then she had thrown an acorn marked with Berkana into the car's trunk as its driver was storing some purchases inside it… and hoped that he wouldn't notice her throwing nuts at his car (thankfully he didn't).

Without a wand, Oleandra's options were somewhat limited...

After giving the car enough time to finish crossing the Channel, Oleandra had Tree-Ported to the acorn, right before it left her sensing range. The plan had worked perfectly, but now that she had illegally travelled into France, she just had to hope that the driver would stop for lunch somewhere before her skin turned completely black and blue from being tossed about inside the car's trunk.

Hours passed. Oleandra tried to make good use of the time by practising the Unlocking Charm wandlessly, but unfortunately, nothing came of it. Being stuck in a car trunk in pitch darkness during a wild ride was definitely not an environment conducive to magical learning, she quickly learned. And after nearly biting the tip of her tongue off when the car hit a particularly nasty pothole, she wisely decided to stop mouthing incantations under her breath.

But after what had seemed like hours, the car finally came to a stop, which finally brings our story back to the present. As one can plainly see, Oleandra was completely and utterly lost in a foreign land, having spent an unknowable amount of time in the trunk of a moving car.

A few tense seconds passed between the car door slamming shut and the sound of footsteps drawing closer, but fortunately, nobody came to check on the trunk. Oleandra wouldn't have to knock out anybody, much to her relief.

With a quick Elhaz, Oleandra unlocked the trunk, before gently lifting herself out of her prison. She was free to leave… in the man's car. She certainly wasn't going to walk from wherever here was to wherever the forest of her ancestors was, she rationalized to herself. She'd report seeing a missing car to the police when she was done with it; no harm done.

Keeping low, Oleandra circled around the car to the driver's side, and found that the window had been left open, and the door, left unlocked. Too easy! She settled herself in the driver's seat and spit out some blood into her hand (from when she had bit her tongue) and drew a concealing rune on the windscreen. The car would now look like a completely different one!

"Hagal," she whispered, putting her index to the ignition.

A spark of electricity jumped from her fingertip to the ignition, and the car's engine roared to life. Magic disturbed delicate Muggle electronics such as capacitors, resistors, transistors and all sorts of semi-conductor-based technology, but car batteries and spark plugs were anything but complicated.

For instance, a car's modern on-board entertainment systems probably wouldn't work near Hogwarts, but its engine was steeped deeply enough in classical physics that just having it near the ambient reality-altering properties of magic wouldn't affect its normal use.

But as long as the car ran, she had no problems with it. Thanking her lucky stars than Ginny had taught her how to drive, Oleandra put her foot to the pedal and drove away. She had a lot of ground to cover, but first, she had to figure out where to go.