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When Neville Longbottom was born, his parents knew he was not like other wizarding babies.
For one, the sun was shining, and a light drizzle coaxed a rainbow out of the sky to land perfectly inside his mother’s delivery room. Neville came out of the womb looking like a cherub, which had concerned the healers at St. Mungo's greatly.
“Where are his teeth?“ they murmured. “Why isn’t he chomping at any of us! Oh, his poor mummy. We didn’t even have a lightning storm today.”
Their concern was valid: wizarding infants were always born on blood moons or during hurricanes, and with full sets of teeth to boot. A lucky few born to mighty wizards and witches (which Frank and Alice Longbottom were) even possessed either a dastardly goatee or a full head of hair at birth. Newborn Neville had none of those things—he only had a gummy smile, dimples, and soft curls an angel would envy.
And while many a healthy wizarding baby would claw their cots to shreds and chew on cactus leaves, shrieking and wailing all the day long, Neville would sleep an uninterrupted eight hours a night, and wake only after his parents had finished their breakfast and their morning smiting and blighting. Then Neville would coo in patient, considerate tones—in melodic singsong, even—until his nappies were changed and they’d given him his curdled milk with a small morning star pacifier. (He liked the metal spikes, at least.)
But worst of all, any time Alice took her son out to the park, birds would suddenly appear, stars would fall from the sky, and vibrant flowers would sprout to line the path where they walked. Alice would make quick work of turning the swallows and sparrows into carrion crows and jackdaws, burning the stars to lumps of meteoric coal, and withering the wisteria with wuthering winds.
Alas, her baby was too sweet for the Muggle girls in town not to notice. They followed Neville all around (“Oh, what an angel! What a dream come true!”) until she and Frank lost their patience and cursed each of them to spend a week as grotesque stone gargoyles to decorate their increasingly busy statue garden.
Suffice to say, Frank and Alice were very worried for Neville. They loved him as all witches and wizards loved their young, but all the signs pointed to one thing: Neville had not a stitch of blackness in his magic. Even worse than being a Squib, he was turning out to be a warlock of the whitest variety, with his whiteness growing increasingly worse with every birthday.
Now, Neville knew all this. He’d caught on quite early that he was different from other wizarding children. Draco Malfoy, for instance, had by the age of six sported a nefariously blond moustache, which he had a habit of twirling whilst sweeping his cloak about and plotting new ways to torment his house-elves. Draco treated Neville with derision, as did the other boys, Theodore Nott and Blaise Zabini. Because when Neville tried cursing things, delicate flowers tended to flourish. When he wanted to double double, toil and trouble, he always got a hearty, edible stew in the cauldron, no matter what noxious and dubious ingredients he put in. House-elves liked Neville too much for him to torment them… and besides, his only childhood friend, Hermione Granger, would not approve.
Hermione was another anomaly in the magical community, but only in the sense that she was born to Muggles. From their playdates, it had become abundantly clear to the Longbottoms that she was, in fact, a witch, and something of a prodigy at that. When Neville’s parents broke the news to Dr. and Dr. Granger, they’d taken it with a stiff upper lip (for it certainly explained her teeth and wild hair), and devoted all their efforts to ensuring that, if their daughter was going to be a witch, she would be a proper black-magicking one.
Neville was happy for Hermione, if a little envious. It was his dearest wish to be a black sorcerer. But every bit of evil seemed too evil for him—even trying to trip some Muggles while they jogged by the Longbottoms’ house resulted in him unintentionally repairing the concrete pavement his father had taken great pains to crack. His lack of blackness was the unfortunate reason he wouldn’t be attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with Hermione and the rest of the wizarding children.
“What if you took a familiar?” Hermione suggested before she left for school. Familiars were, after all, extremely important to magic folk. Hermione’s own familiar was a cantankerous half-kneazle named Crookshanks who, despite his orange coat, was deeply, deeply, black.
“I'll keep an eye out,” Neville promised.
That’s how Neville found Trevor.
He had later that year accompanied his parents to the woods behind their home. He lured and collected amphibians in the pond while Frank and Alice hunted for an invasive species of tree snake on broomstick.
“Morsmordre!” his father whispered gleefully, conjuring grey stealth clouds that engulfed him and his wife as they flitted about, snatching unsuspecting reptiles from the high-up branches.
It was a nifty spell, Neville thought. Cast at full strength, Morsmordre could conjure a cloud of smoke that could kill. Cast with some effort, the cloud could serve to scare or intimidate. Cast without conviction, it was meant to disguise. Neville picked up a bug-eyed toad as he looked on. If he tried the spell, what was the worst that could happen?
“Morsmordre,” he uttered, squeezing the toad as he wishfully gazed at the trees.
Then, the unthinkable happened.
The heavens darkened. The wind whirled into a tempest. A dark cloud coalesced into a skull, and out of the skull’s mouth slithered a serpent of smoke and lightning. The serpent wound itself through the trees, and the lightning and thunder crashed on and on.
“Oh, no!” Neville cried through the din. “Dad! Mum!”
There was nothing he could have done. When smoke cleared, the trees were sizzled to a crisp, and with them, presumably, the invasive tree snakes. Frank and Alice were nowhere to be found.
With trembling hands, Neville held on to the toad all through being rescued by firemen and then being questioned by the police. Only after his gran, Augusta, came to sort out the paperwork did he look down at the amphibian in his grasp.
Had he done black magic?
Was this toad the source of all his black power?
Neville named the toad Trevor and moved in with Augusta, who had been a fearsome sorceress in her day. Even in her old age, she was terrifying. She was chiefly responsible for the annual measles outbreaks in their area, not to mention some truly baffling meteorological occurrences in the town surrounding Longbottom Heath.
The house itself stood alone on a high hill. Though the copper vanes on the Gothic roof attracted lightning on a daily basis, the house was dreary and dark, with a path lined with thorny hedgerows and dead elm trees from which Augusta’s familiars, a colony of bats, hung. The floors creaked and the ceilings leaked, and the water well in the garden housed a petulant ghost child.
In other words, it was Neville’s absolute dream home.
“It may take you a while to adjust to life in Longbottom Heath,” said Augusta, “but a proper familiar will help ease the strain. How about a nice hyena?”
“I like Trevor, Gran,” Neville replied good-naturedly. “He’s very dark.”
Augusta only sniffed. She knew, of course, that he was white. She didn’t seem to mind, though she never could bring herself to say the word. Neville wondered if she had taken him in because she suspected, as he did, that he was responsible for his parents’ disappearances. Witches and wizards didn’t generally relish in parricide, but it was an undeniably black act.
Not a hint of black magic spilled from Neville’s fingers in all the time he lived with his gran, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Now and then, he would select a tome from his grandmother’s vast grimoire and recite some black spells aloud, Trevor safely in his pocket. His familiar seemed disinterested in participating, however, which was how he had slowly but surely rid Longbottom Heath of all its cobwebs, repaired its creaky floors, and cleared the windows so the sunlight actually got in. In a fit of temper, the ghost child walked into the light, and the well sprang fresh water anew. It was rather ghastly business, but Augusta didn’t make a peep until the bats fled the revived elm trees outside.
“I’m dying, Neville,” she told him one bright, sunny morning. “Without my familiars, I haven’t got much time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I hadn’t meant for the elms to flourish quite so much.”
“It’s not your fault. When I die, Longbottom Heath will be yours. I daresay it will end up looking… quite… normal when I go, but do try to wreak some havoc, dear. You'll find you have everything you need in this house to do great things.”
At Augusta’s behest, Neville became an apprentice under Xenophilius Lovegood, the nutty warlock who owned the village apothecary-slash-bakery-slash-flower shoppe. Not only did the shoppe lack a general theme, it also was devoid of a sign and a proper storefront. That's why it was only known as The Shoppe. Its proprietor was knowledgeable about a great number of things, and it was Augusta’s hope that some of his darkness would rub off on Neville via this unorthodox schooling.
Neville's job was to source elixir ingredients from the nearby forests. The woodland creatures made his job significantly easier, though the darkness did not always stick to his bounty. Often, the fickle fungi in his loot turned into irresistible blooms that Xenophilius sold at nearly unreasonable (and therefore nearly evil) prices.
The supplies and flowers were more than enough added value for Neville to secure a full-time job at The Shoppe, a post he continued to hold through all his schooling years.
Theirs was quiet work—it was astounding what oddities Muggles’ eyes could glaze over in the face of pretty flowers and freshly baked croissants, which came courtesy of Xenophilius’s daughter, Luna.
Luna was the other reason Augusta had sent Neville to work at The Shoppe. It would be difficult for Neville to ever find a witch to marry—“But who knows?” Augusta said. “You could find some happiness with the Lovegood girl. She’s pretty. Even if she is, you know…”
White.
Neville had never seen Luna as more than a sister, but they certainly were kindred spirits. Like him, Luna was indeed a white witch, and baking came as effortlessly to her as her hordes of male admirers did.
Unlike Neville, however, Luna didn’t have any black aspirations. A kooky sort of lass, she was content to sing the buttery dough into submission, bake it to perfect flakiness, then feed it to her many, many suitors. All handsome fellows, each had gained at least a stone since they’d begun calling upon her.
Luna also had a touch of the Sight.
“Fret not, dear Neville,” she told him blithely, “for you shall summon your Darkness someday.”
Neville thought it was a pretty lie, but it made him feel better nonetheless.
It was Luna who told Neville to clock out early one day.
“It’s time,” was all she said.
She did not need to expound.
Neville raced back to Longbottom Heath, where he found his frail grandmother lying on her velvet chaise, sticking pins into her favourite voodoo dolls. It had been years since Augusta told him she was dying, but now that he was a man, it seemed she was truly ready to go.
“Say your goodbyes, dear,” Augusta said by way of greeting.
“But I would miss you,” Neville said. “Couldn’t you live forever?”
From Neville’s shoulder, Trevor croaked in agreement.
Augusta smiled. “Immortality does suit me, doesn’t it? Well. The demon realm should be nice this time of year.”
The demon realm, of course, was where the blackest of the black went when they died. If Augusta’s ghost friends were to be believed, it was supposed to be a wicked good time. Hip ’n’ happening, as it were.
She issued her last words to him in a hacking cough. “That toad would be better in one of your stews, my boy. Imagine if you just opened it up—” Cough! Cough! COUGH!
“Gran!” Neville cried. There was still so much he wanted to tell her!
It was too late. Right then, at one hundred and sixty-nine years of age, Augusta kicked the bucket.
“Gone too soon,” Neville murmured. He loved his gran dearly, but he wouldn’t have stewed Trevor for the world.
After the funeral, Neville took some time off to get his affairs in order. Augusta had indeed left him everything—Longbottom Heath, all her galleons, her feather-adorned hats, and her mysterious repertoire of evil escritoires and accursed armoires and grim grimoires that he hadn’t often had reason to touch. (The special sautoires, though, were enamelled cast iron. Those he used for cooking daily.) It would take an age to sort through them, so he told Xenophilius not to expect him back for some time.
One day, Neville happened upon some curiosities in Augusta’s favourite cursed armoire. Among them were a worn leather hat, a scrying mirror of lustrous obsidian, a family of mice, and a knobby old wand.
The scrying mirror would come in handy for his excursions, and the mice were welcome to stay. It was the wand that captured his attention.
White warlocks had no real use for wands—their magic simply seeped out of their bodies, uninvited, to do good in the world. But it occurred to Neville that maybe, just maybe, if he channelled some of his magic through the craven piece of wood, it could come out of the other end at least a few shades darker.
He squeezed Trevor gently in one hand and thought of something simple and naughty. A prank, like conjuring a snake.
“Serpensortia,” he whispered, envisioning a long, black viper bursting from the wand’s tip. The spindly thing gave a sputter and a bang, and then—
“Hiss?”
Out from the wand's end sprang a most beautiful opalescent snake, looking shifty and disoriented by its surroundings. Bits of egg and membrane were still stuck to its soft scales. A hatchling!
“Hullo,” Neville greeted it. “Dreadfully sorry. I seem to have pulled you from something important.”
It gave him an unblinking stare before slithering up and into the depths of Augusta’s armoire to make itself cosy. Or perhaps to hunt the baby mice. Neville felt sorry for the creatures who had made themselves comfortable there first.
“You can’t stay there, I’m afraid,” Neville said, jostling Trevor to get to the snake. But just as he reached inside, an unseen force knocked him on his arse, and the armoire doors shut on their own accord.
The cabinet began to shake violently, hinges creaking and wood groaning with a force that Neville was powerless to contain.
He backed away just quickly enough that when its doors finally flew open with a loud BANG!, he was a safe distance from what lay within.
The pretty snake had transformed.
Coiled in Augusta’s armoire was a black, armoured, heavily-fanged basilisk, still a dizzy juvenile from the looks of it. If Neville ever had any doubt, at its base lay the family of mice, all turned to stone.
The mutated serpent shook its head before locking eyes with Neville.
Had the basilisk been a few years older, Neville would have been petrified then and there. Already he felt the tingle in his eyeballs. But the snake, seemingly infuriated by its youthful impotence, hissed menacingly and escaped through one of the broken windows.
“That’ll be a spot of trouble,” Neville told Trevor cheerily.
But like the mice in the closet, Trevor had turned to stone.
Un-petrifying his toad was a simple matter to Neville; locating the baby basilisk, not so much. News had begun to spread about stone mice and chicks and squirrels making sudden appearances in the neighbourhood parks. The townsfolk believed it to be the work of some type of environmental artist-slash-vigilante, but Neville knew his little basilisk was on the move. Augusta would have loved it, and for a time, Neville felt proud. Evil, however accidental, was still evil—and an exceedingly rare feat for him.
Trevor must have helped somehow, so Neville gave him extra helpings of flies and wrigglers in the days that followed. But not too many—Trevor had always had a sensitive stomach, and sure enough, he suffered from a tender tummy in the aftermath that Neville couldn’t seem to heal.
Beyond that, all was not well at Longbottom Heath. The incident with the armoire was the first of several strange occurrences that Neville had done nothing to influence. Something was clearly amiss in his ancestral home: claw marks began appearing on the walls, a deep sinkhole collapsed in the garden, and things started to go bump in the night. While Neville typically adored such creepy occurrences, he wondered if the house missed its former mistress. Without a handle on the artefacts in his care, he missed her, too.
That’s when he got the idea to try and reach his gran in the beyond.
On a night when the Veil was thin, he invited Luna and Hermione to Longbottom Heath to help him summon Augusta.
They held hands around some corpse candles and a ouija board and closed their eyes. Neville recited the necessary vespers, and they waited.
And waited.
Hermione was the first to lower her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said, wincing. “The sun is rising. Witching hour is long over.”
In hindsight, Hermione probably hadn’t been the best person to invite. She’d written Neville from Hogwarts over the years about her disdain for Divination, and summoning ghosts was its equally nebulous sister. Hermione had little faith in practice that couldn't be proven or repeated.
In other words, she had the spirituality of a brick.
Luna smiled up at Neville, light shadows under her clear blue eyes. “You and I are too white to summon such dark forces, and Hermione here scares away all the kindly ones.”
“Thank you, Luna,” Hermione said, clearly flattered. “You make lovely, lovely croissants.”
Neville sighed. “Gran wasn’t the most spiritual witch, but she liked to perform seances with me on dark and stormy nights. Perhaps my presence accounted for her mixed results.”
Neville had, for instance, spoken to his grandfather, Lionel, a few times over the years. But mostly he sat while Augusta gossiped with her coven of deceased friends as they called in from the beyond. Though he had hoped his parents would appear, they never had.
“There, there.” Hermione patted his hand. “I love what you’ve done with the place, though.” She dusted her jeans off and made her way to one of Augusta’s darkest grimoires. “Draco’s family has a wonderful library, but this is impressive in other ways.”
Yes, Draco Malfoy, the dashing, moustachioed villain of Neville’s childhood had apparently seduced Hermione Granger with promises of dark tomes and a bit of nookie between his family’s stacks. Neville wasn’t going to judge—what woman could resist a man who could smite and blight like Draco Malfoy could?
“Is there a title you’d like to borrow?” Neville offered.
“Could I? For purely academic purposes, of course.” Hermione gathered two armfuls of books, explaining, “Some of these are even more sinister than the titles in Draco's family library! Augusta has a wonderful selection on necromancy.”
“Necromancy?” Neville’s ears perked. “That’s the very blackest of magics.”
“Isn’t it great? Of course, no one’s succeeded at bringing anyone back to life lately, unless someone created a Horcrux. And even then, their return would be neither here nor there.”
Neville shuddered. Horcruxes were the most awful type of magic because they necessitated murder, and also shattered the caster's soul into pieces. It was said that only the cruelest would ever be able to create a Horcrux, because that would mean there was no room in their heart for love.
“Have you tried bringing anyone back from the dead?” Luna asked.
“I have, but to no success. Back at Hogwarts, we’ve this ghost named Sir Nicholas. The kids call him Nearly Headless Nick, because his murderers botched it when they didn't whack his head clean off. There’s nothing he would like more than to come back to life so he could be decapitated properly.”
“You mean he wants to live so he can die all over again?”
“That’s what makes it so low-stakes.”
“I don’t suppose Gran would want to be brought back to life,” Neville ventured.
Hermione thought about it. “It'd be much more difficult if she hasn’t returned as a ghost. At the very least, it would take some time.”
Time that Neville might not have. As if to underscore this reality, the house quaked, dropping little lizard bones from the ceiling’s exposed beams onto Hermione’s hair.
“I understand,” Neville said anyway.
“Do you know where she decided to spend her afterlife?”
“Yes—the demon realm.”
(Witches and wizards got to decide these things. Much like Muggle retirees in America tended to flock to Florida, magical folk often chose to go to the demon realm.)
“A demon summoning may be just the thing,” Hermione said. “Who knows? I may just find something in these books. Well then, bye!”
Neville cleaned up after his failed seance. The house quake had also dislodged several more books from their shelves. He picked up what was once a bright red tome and flipped it over.
The Abridged Necronomicon: Summoning the Old Ones is Easy as 1-2-3!
The Necronomicon was an ancient and evil book containing most everything one might want to know about the dark beasts and spirits of the beyond. Not that Neville knew much about the original. This particular edition promised to edify him in a friendly manner, however: the embossed comic art depicted a leathery face stretched over the cover, which was perhaps an homage to the original Arabic text. Even better, this book was an English edition.
Necromancy was certainly too black for Neville. But what if this book contained another way to summon his Gran? She counted as an Old One, right?
The steps outlined in The Abridged Necronomicon were easy enough to understand. As advertised, it read like a manual and lacked much detail, but Neville couldn't complain. He might not have been able to follow along otherwise.
Augusta already had everything he needed in her stores, so Neville needed only to wait until the next blood moon to make his first attempt. Upon the wooden floor of Augusta’s sitting room, he copied the book’s illustration and foreign etchings in lapis lazuli. He spaced some tallow candles apart as evenly as possible, and placed the elemental offerings in the designated corners of his diagram.
He took Trevor in his trembling hands and began to chant.
He slowly walked widdershins and recited the ancient tongue-twister over and over, thinking of his grandmother’s small frame and her pointy hats. Just when he was about to repeat the call for a fourteenth time, something happened.
The shutters on the windows flew open, and gusts of wind from outside extinguished all the candles on the floor. But the room didn’t stay dark for long—the elemental offerings glowed where they lay, pulsing a slow and ever-brighter tattoo.
The room burst into light, and Neville threw his arm over his eyes. Just as suddenly, the light collapsed in on itself, right in the middle of the summoning circle.
Neville dared to take a peek. As his eyes adjusted slowly to his surroundings, he witnessed a black fog creep in, its tendrils reaching out like feelers to map the room. In the very centre, it glowed a purple so deep and malevolent that his heart began to pound.
The glowing sphere began to take shape—it was small, and held the petite form of a woman.
Had he succeeded?
Neville squinted and took a step closer.
Two slender arms stretched out, and a high-pitched yawn filled the room.
Then a sharp, irritated, female voice snapped, “Who dares summon the Demon Queen?”
The smoke cleared. Standing before Neville was a beautiful woman with raven hair and acid, peridot-green eyes. She had two petite horns that curved delicately up and out from her forehead to frame a gleaming black crown that was nearly too large for her. She wore a translucent black sleeping robe—so translucent, in fact, that Neville could see… well, everything beneath it. From behind her, an irritated demon tail whipped back and forth.
She looked the very definition of dark, and she was absolutely breathtaking.
He swallowed hard. “You’re not my gran.”
The demon raised her brow high beneath her fringe in obvious derision. “Who are you,” she demanded, “and why have you summoned me?”
Neville stared.
“Answer!” she shrieked in discordant polyphony. Outside, thunder boomed before lightning flashed, underscoring her ire.
“I-I’m Neville,” he said. “Neville Longbottom. I’m afraid there’s been a mix-up.”
"A mix-up." The demon scoffed. She studied the floor, taking note of Neville’s diagram and meagre offerings. “That’s what you call using a very specific ancient diagram to summon the darkest being in the multiverse? Insolence! I should reap your soul for this!” She cracked her tail like a whip.
“I’m very sorry. I genuinely don’t intend to waste your time. The book said ‘Summon the Old Ones’ and I thought… well… you’re not exactly old, but my gran certainly was.”
“Old indeed. Lucky for you, I’m fairly new to this. And, it seems, so are you.” The demon’s tone was insouciant, but her stare was penetrating—which is to say she looked Neville up and down, but it felt as though she was also peering at him from the inside out. Her gaze lingered at his crotch, which he awkwardly concealed with his hands.
“Tut,” she said. “I see what the matter is. Have you always been…?”
Neville let out a small sigh. “White? Yes, unfortunately.”
“Fascinating.” She drew the word out, circling him as she continued her inspection. “It makes no sense. How were you able to perform such a craven act of magic?”
“I read it. In a book.” At Neville’s feet, the pages of The Abridged Necronomicon flipped and flapped in a most pathetic manner.
“Did you receive assistance?”
“I acted alone.”
The demon chewed on this for a moment. “That should not have been possible.”
“I suppose I did fail,” Neville replied modestly. “Like I said, I was trying to—”
“Summon your gran, yes, yes.” She waved her arm dismissively. “Gran this, gran that… Who is your grandmother, anyway?”
“Augusta,” Neville said. “Augusta Longbottom.”
“Augusta… Oh, you mean Auggie!” The demon rocked with enthusiasm.
“You know one another?”
“Oh, she and I get on like a house on fire!”
Neville relaxed. Making friends with the Demon Queen? That sounded like his gran, all right.
“She mentioned she had a grandson… she never mentioned he was cute.” The demon draped herself upon the nearest armchair and rested her head lazily upon her palm. In her other hand, she conjured a cocktail glass filled with a deep crimson liquid. Neville was certain it wasn’t wine.
“P-pardon?”
“Shush now, I’m deciding if I should eat you or have my way with you.” She sipped on her blood beverage.
Neville felt lightheaded as all his own blood rushed south. Was it black magic that his pants should go so tight at the prospect of his demise?
Still, self-preservation prevailed. “I’m not certain I’m your type.”
“Oh? And you know this how?”
“For one thing, I can only do white magic. For another, we hardly even know each other. What’s your name?”
The demon hissed. “How DARE you.”
“I apologise… Y-your Majesty.” He bowed at the waist quickly. How had he forgotten? “My gran taught me better than to ask a demon for their name.” Indeed, it was in very poor form. Knowing a demon’s name meant having dominion over them, which was not on Neville’s bucket list of Black Acts. What would he do with an enslaved demon anyway? He could barely request things of a house-elf.
The Demon Queen approached him, and lifted a dainty finger to his chin so he would look her in the eye. Her acid green stare was hypnotising. “Satisfy me this: what do you want to summon Augusta for?”
“Oh! I seem to have conjured a juvenile basilisk that’s currently wreaking havoc on the small wildlife in the area… And this house–it was her house, you see–seems to be mounting a protest against me.”
“Curious… a white warlock?” she muttered. She pondered and pondered some more. “I need to look into that.”
If Neville were ever to make a request of her, now would be the time. “If I may be so bold… Would you please tell Gran I say hello?”
To his immense relief, she chuckled. “I should reap your soul where you stand and send you to the barren plain. But I won’t.”
He nodded, dropping his eyes to the floor as she rose from the armchair. “Thank you.”
“Consider this your lucky day, Neville Longbottom.”
She vanished in a sulphuric puff, and Neville ran off to the bath to deal with yet another snake—not a basilisk, thankfully, but one of the frustrating, common trouser variety.
Neville didn’t dare ponder why the beautiful Demon Queen had spared his life that night. In fact, he didn’t dare breathe a word of his encounter with the fiery demoness to a single soul. But keeping dark secrets was not in his nature, and his magic retaliated against him. For days afterwards, he went to bed and woke up in clouds of dandelions, with little birds singing at his window sill.
Trevor, who was still feeling poorly, was not impressed.
Still, Neville had other things to worry about. In the weeks following his brush with death (if he took death threats from attractive lady demons seriously, which he did), the little basilisk escapee had taken down a manner of significantly bigger wildlife: a variety of mustelids, foxes, and even a large fawn. All signs pointed to the mythical reptile developing at a rapid pace, whereas the books in Neville’s library had said that basilisks were slow-growing beasts.
Ordinarily, Neville might have been chuffed. But as it happened, he was able to understand the unspoken language of animals, and many a woodland creature had turned up at his doorstep to make their grievances known. Soon, he was playing host to a menagerie of animals that any fairytale princess or dryad or nymph would envy.
But while he was able to placate the animals, he could do little to stop his tender heart for feeling even sorrier for the Muggle parents around town whose children became the basilisk’s next victims.
As far as Neville was aware, the basilisk hadn’t eaten anyone yet. But it had left six children petrified on their school playground during their Friday recess.
The police had drawn their chalk lines and put up their Do Not Cross signs around the perimeter, but they tired of their stakeout eventually. Neville snuck into the playground at night to undo the basilisk’s curse. He spared some time to admire the sight. He thought the children made for a charming sculpture set, all frozen mid-scream in time. It was only a wee shame that he had to turn them back so soon.
Suddenly, and out of nowhere, a painted mouth leaned over his shoulder and whispered, “Boo.”
“Egad!” Neville cried.
He whirled about to find the Demon Queen hovering at his height, smirking at the shock on his face. “Hello, Neville Longbottom.”
She glowed a phosphorous hue in the moonlight, which reminded Neville of a lovely, toxic fungus he’d once harvested. She was fiendishly beautiful as before, but somewhat unwelcome now.
“Respectfully,” Neville managed, his heart hammering in his chest, “what are you doing here?”
“I was hoping to catch you in a moment of Darkness. But when I saw that you were about to bless all these children back to life, I feared I was bound for disappointment.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “Yes, well. I hear temporary art installations are all the rage in London and Paris. Beauty is fleeting, and all that.”
“Sure, but a temporary fixture could never be as iconic as, say, the Pazuzu statuette.”
“The what?”
“You mean the who. Pazuzu? Bigshot Mesopotamian demon?”
Neville shook his head.
“He’s in the Louvre. Or maybe you’ve seen The Exorcist?”
Still no.
“Never mind,” the demon sighed, rolling her neon eyes. “You really are something else.”
“How did you find me?” Neville asked.
“Once you summon a demon, they can always find you at will.”
That made sense to Neville. Her presence, not so much. “Slow night in the demon realm?”
“In a way. The realm is never truly busy. The job is to maintain chaos, as you know.”
“I don't know, no.” Neville wondered if he had what it took to keep up with such an afterlifestyle. It certainly sounded exciting, but he rather liked the peace on most days.
They fell into a silence, which was not so much awkward as it was pregnant. The Demon Queen seemed to still be waiting for something to happen, so Neville asked, “Were you waiting for something to happen?”
“Yes, actually.” She tutted. “It’s not too late. Smite these children! Blight them! Blast them to smithereens!”
“I can’t do that!”
“Why not? You have some blackness in you, right? I command you to show me.”
“I mean I actually can’t… I can’t do black magic at will,” Neville admitted. “I can’t do it on purpose.”
For a moment, he wondered if he would if he actually could. The answer was probably still no.
“Then what circumstances need to be present for you to do it by accident?”
Neville immediately thought of Trevor and then tucked the thought away. There was no telling what the Demon Queen would want from his familiar. Why did she even want to know? “Two counts of black magic in a span of a decade isn’t exactly a great sample size,” he said by way of apology.
“Fair enough,” the demon conceded, conjuring another cocktail. It glowed a pale, mysterious grey in the moonlight. “Well, ignore me. I’ll just watch you do your thing, then.”
Neville flushed from the roots to his hair down to his toes. It was embarrassing enough to be caught doing white magic by any of his wizarding pals. But to be scrutinised by the spellbinding Demon Queen? It was too much to bear.
“Go on,” she goaded. “Do it.”
“I won’t. Not until you leave.”
“Then I guess I'll be forced to withhold the message Auggie wanted me to pass along? Or maybe I’ll just reap your soul and be done with it.”
A shiver ran up Neville’s spine. He was also hit by emotion the way a white warlock rarely is, and grappled with his embarrassment mixed with envy and admiration for the demon. What devilish machinations! What vile schemes! He had no choice, then. He steeled his bollocks, turned to where the stone children stood, and began to sing.
Singing was the whitest of magics, and whatever a witch or a wizard sang with the goodness in their heart always came to be. In a soft tenor, Neville crooned a soothing little tune about wiggly toes, and happy hands, and how nice it was to jump and play and go to school. As the children’s limbs began to limber up, he sang about waking up in the morning, eating cereal, and being nice to other kids. He sang of how much the stone children were missed by their families and especially by their pets. By the end of his song, he had before him six reanimated, teary-eyed children, all bewildered and wanting to go home to their mummies and daddies. He gave each of them a little pat on the head and sent them on their way.
Behind him, the Demon Queen did a slow clap.
Cheeks still burning, he turned to face her. There was nothing quite so bad as being so blatantly white before a devilishly attractive woman. “I was hoping you would leave.”
“It was rather sickening to watch, but I couldn’t look away.”
Neville shrugged. “It’s not as exciting as anything you must see on a daily basis, but it’s what I do.”
“More’s the pity.”
Neville shuffled his feet. “So… what did Gran say? Did she have any advice about the house?”
“The house?” The Demon Queen drummed on her chin with razor-sharp talons. “The house, the house… Nope!” she said, popping the P.
“Then…?”
“This is what she wanted me to pass along.” She crooked her finger. “Come closer.”
Neville took a tentative step towards her.
Her smirk grew deeper. “Closer!”
He took another.
The demon made a mighty leap towards him, startling him greatly, and planted a light smack on his cheek. “Mwah! That’s it. Ta!”
With a POOF!, she was gone.
If Neville thought that was the last he’d see of the Demon Queen, he was once again mistaken.
It had been even less than a week since her visit when she once more darkened his door.
“Hello, Neville Longbottom.”
This time was probably even more inconvenient than the last, because she hadn’t so much darkened his door as she had his roof, where he was precariously perched, doing repairs. At her appearance, the little birds and squirrels that had gathered to keep him company promptly scattered in a cacophonous, panicked din. The purple flowers that had bloomed in his roof gutters wilted. Above them, the clouds went eerily grey.
Today the demon wore a skin-tight crimson leotard that was simply too flimsy for the weather she’d ushered in. (On the other hand, Neville was infinitely glad he’d bundled up.)
“Back to reap my soul?” Neville asked cheerily.
She gasped a big pretend gasp. “How’d you know?”
“The way you’re poised to shove me off the roof is rather telling.”
She smirked. “Aren’t you getting bold?”
Indeed, Neville was feeling quite audacious. Longbottom Heath’s massive copper weathervane had called down a whole lightning storm of its own accord the night before, and he’d nearly been electrocuted through the cracked shingles above his bed. After spending all night dodging lightning up and down the third floor of Longbottom Heath with Trevor in his grasp, he felt both wired and invincible at once.
“Perhaps,” he said mildly, putting his tools away. “Allow me to start over. What can I do for you today, Your Majesty?”
That made her smile, and her fangs glinted in the sunlight. “I’d like you to tell me how you rained lightning down upon the roof last night. That was very black magic. A touch old-fashioned, but impressive nonetheless.”
Neville shrugged. “I didn’t do it. The house did.”
“So you lured me here under false pretences?” The demon sighed. “If you’d wanted to take me out on a date, you could have just asked.”
“I—what?”
Neville felt a rustle in his coat, and Trevor made his presence known with a long, slow croak.
The demon’s face brightened as she reached for the toad. “Oh, you brought me a snack! All is forgiven.”
“Trevor is not a snack!” Neville cried in dismay. He snatched Trevor away from her slender hand. “He's my familiar.”
This seemed a most ludicrous revelation to the demon. “Who would take a toad as a familiar?” she demanded.
“I would. Trevor is...” Scenes of Trevor-induced, accidental black magic flashed through Neville’s head, and he changed due course: “He’s my friend.”
The demon sighed. “What a waste of a delicacy. He would make a very fine cursed elixir, at the very least.” A thought seemed to occur to her, and a sly smile came over her face. “I assume, if he is your familiar, that he is the source of your inexplicable darkness?”
Neville made no reply, and that seemed like enough of an answer to her. “I’ll give you a fine reward in exchange for the toad,” she declared.
He shook his head, pocketing Trevor once more. “I must respectfully decline. Besides, Trevor has a sensitive stomach. I don’t see what you would want from a toad like him.” Neville also knew better than to make deals with a demon.
“I can think of a few things. Name your price.”
He pretended to give it a mighty think. “What if… you told me your name?”
The demon blinked, then threw her head back and cackled. Neville had never heard a more wonderful sound, gleeful and manic as it was.
“Oh,” she said, fanning herself, “you got me. You’re Auggie’s boy, all right. I go by many names, none of which would bind me to you.” She pointed at the gutter flowers she’d wilted a few moments ago. “Bring one of those blooms back to life. Whatever it turns out to be is the name you may call me by.”
A bold gamble. A name like Rose or Lily would be far too mild for a Being like her; a name like Petunia or Begonia or Rafflesia or Birthwort would be equally unfit. But Neville did as she asked, and in the gutter bloomed a single, brightly coloured…
“Pansy?” he asked. A surge of energy coursed through his veins, as though he’d spoken some deep truth that now fed his very heartbeat.
“Pansy.” The Demon Queen tried it out. “Frightfully trite, don’t you think?”
“Er…”
“I like it,” she decided.
“Okay. Pansy it is.”
“I’ve told you my name, now you must hand me your toad!” Pansy the Demon Queen cried triumphantly.
“No fair!” Neville protested. “It’s not even your real name.”
“It was worth a shot,” she said with an insincere sigh. “Until next time, Neville Longbottom.”
The next thing Neville knew, Pansy had vanished.
“That was close, Trevor,” he said. “She could have eaten you!”
He peered into his coat.
Trevor had made a doody in his pocket.
Neville should have known that calling a demon by name would increase the chances of seeing them more often.
Pansy had seemingly decided to make it her business to pop by if there was even the slightest possibility that he would attempt black magic. Whether it was because one corner of his home had mysteriously sunk in mire (which he had magicked into a lovely pocket garden), or because some neighbourhood boys thought it an exhilarating prospect to play ding-dong ditch at the wrought iron gates, Pansy would come.
“Those kids could have used a bout of boils on the arse. Or a good haunting in your belfry,” she complained when Neville let the boys off the hook.
“My gran’s bats are long gone. The belfry is purely decorative now—and besides, the bats preferred the elm trees along the drive. Back when the trees were dead, that is.”
“You’re no fun.”
“So you keep saying.”
And still she returned, each time with a new idea for bedlam. Soon, he felt like he’d become good enough friends with the Demon Queen that he could ask her personal questions—as personal as the Demon Queen’s pet could get away with, anyway.
For example, when he asked, “Pansy, how old are you?”
She answered, “I’m not sure. I was around your age when I bartered my soul to the old Demon King.”
“Is that how you became the Demon Queen?”
“Yes. I summoned him one day with a book exactly like yours. And then we swapped places.”
“That easy, huh?”
“It did necessitate death on my part.”
“A dastardly deal,” Neville said admiringly. “Where is the old Demon King now?”
“Oh, he retired in Florida. He’s human again, you see. A sorcerer.”
“Of course.”
These days, the old Demon King, who now went by the name of Bob, amused himself with taunting Florida men into acts befitting world headlines—a fun fact that made Neville smile.
He found he liked getting to know Pansy this way. Her stories spawned in him more and more questions still. On another day, he asked, “Why did you want to become the Demon Queen?”
“I really don’t recall,” she said airily, but he got the sensation that that wasn’t entirely true.
“I didn’t think there were things beyond even the Demon Queen’s knowledge.”
She smirked. “Oh, and you know everything? I can see into your heart, you know.”
“What do you see?”
Pansy wrinkled her nose as she surveyed him. “Only goodness, I’m afraid,” she tutted.
But he could tell, despite her bared fangs, that she was teasing. “A pity, indeed.”
On slow days when Neville could only impel a vigorous breeze at worst, Pansy had questions of her own.
“Have you ever even wanted to do black magic?” she asked him after he passed up the chance to make the local fishmonger’s entire catch go rotten. He’d had books to return to the town’s public library that morning, and it would not do to visit whilst smelling of decayed seafood.
(The Muggle townspeople couldn’t see Pansy, yet they gave her and Neville a wide berth as they walked through town, as though they could detect something wicked coming their way.)
“Oh, yes,” Neville replied genially. “Every day. It’s my dearest wish.”
“It doesn’t seem like it. If I were the wish-granting sort, I would make you a black wizard in exchange for your toad.”
“Oh, no you don’t.”
Pansy had been oddly honourable about Trevor; not once had she tried to take him from Neville by force. While Neville still kept his familiar safely in his pocket whenever she visited, she had given neither him nor Trevor any cause for worry.
“Why do you want him so badly anyway?” Neville asked. “He’s just a toad.” And I’m just a white warlock, he wanted to add. Inquiring after Pansy’s interest in Trevor was a thinly veiled question for her seeming interest in him. He was beginning to wonder why, after days and days of her witnessing absolutely nothing from him in the blackness department, she still hadn’t gotten bored of visiting.
It couldn’t be that she simply found him cute.
“I have my reasons,” was all she deigned to say. “I'm the one asking the questions here. Why do you wish to do black magic?”
Neville shrugged. “You’ve met my gran, and maybe my parents, too. Their magic was always very black, and wicked stylish. Part of me just wanted to make them proud. But I’ve always longed to understand the black arts.”
“You summoned me, didn’t you?”
“I suppose.” Neville grinned.
“Still, you’re going to have to dig into better reading material than”—Pansy peered into his rucksack with her All-Seeing Power before he could do a thing about it—“Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding.”
“It’s a great book,” Neville said, feeling defensive, “with a great movie adaptation!”
And while she didn’t disagree, Bridget Jones was the first book he chucked into the return bin once they reached the library.
Pansy reappeared before him as she never had before, with her horns and tail invisible and her skin rather matte. She had changed her garb, and was now dressed in a crisp white blouse tucked into a tight leather pencil skirt. Framing her green eyes was a sharp pair of cat-eye spectacles, as if they would help her stick out any less in a small-town Muggle library.
“Hullo,” Neville said. “Can the Muggles see you?”
“Shhhh.” She winked. “We’re in a library.”
He followed her aimlessly down the aisles, as demons’ pets were wont to do, and watched as, in a most official manner, she began rearranging the books, pulling them out of their shelves and sticking them into crannies where they didn’t belong.
“Hey!” Neville whisper-yelled. “Stop that.”
“It’s just a bit of mischief,” Pansy said. “No one’s going to die.”
“Yes, but someone worked awfully hard to arrange those books, and you’re making their life very difficult.”
“Someone’s got to.”
“No,” Neville said hotly, returning the books to their proper shelves. “No one’s got to. What’s the point of all this chaos?”
Pansy appeared to give it some thought before answering, “There is no good without evil. Chaos gives man something to overcome.”
“But must everything be difficult?”
“It builds character. Though, some things are evil for evil’s sake.”
“Like you?” Neville asked, dreading the answer.
“Like me,” Pansy nodded solemnly. “And I believe you could be, too. You still want to be a black warlock, don’t you?”
Neville wasn’t prepared to confront his philosophy on magical morality, but the library seemed to demand it of him. “What if I want to be black, but I don’t want to be evil? I’d say most black witches and wizards aren’t truly out to cause harm, even if they are wired to do magic that can harm.” He thought of his parents, who had blasted and withered and cursed and deuced, but never at the expense of truly serious things like human life.
Pansy sighed and stomped away irritably, and Neville felt his true failure articulate itself in his soul. As much as he wanted to be a dark magician, he would never be one, because he inherently couldn’t understand one.
But then Pansy turned to face him, brimstone burning in her eyes. The library lights shuttered. Books and paper flew everywhere. The old librarian screamed in the distance, breaking the library’s principal rule of silence.
“You dare spit on the tenets of black magic?” Pansy cried in her multitude of voices. “You dare flout the Cause of Chaos?”
Neville averted his eyes from her. In her fury, she was indeed the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld. She could smite him right there and he would die a happy warlock, but then how would he explain to his gran how and why he died, assuming he could even enter the demon realm?
Later, he would wonder where he plucked the courage to reply, “I dared to try and have a dialogue.”
Because conversing with the Demon Queen, regardless of whether or not they agreed, was nice. And, Neville realised, he liked nice. Their chats made him ponder a little less over why, of all the people on the planet, he made such a curious case study to her. It seemed he had crossed a line, however, and he still wasn’t certain what line that was.
“I will have your toad for that!” she shrieked.
Trevor, hitherto tucked into Neville’s breast pocket, croaked in knowing despair as Pansy rose into the air and swept towards them in a flurry.
Neville sidestepped her at the last moment and jerked around, only to witness the Demon Queen vanish into a violent, violet cloud of luminiferous aether.
Neville did not see Pansy after that. He played their last conversation over and over in his head, wondering if he had, indeed, gone too far. He always wound up concluding that no, he had not. Xenophilius had taught him that demons were touchy and unpredictable—perhaps this was one such example.
Pansy left the library in shambles, and the scene made the news. The police sketch artist’s rendering of his face was frighteningly accurate, and while he had been able to evade capture, he hadn’t been able to evade Hermione Granger. The news somehow reached her ears even as she was vacationing in France, and she sent him a disguised Howler that he opened whilst feeding some stray ducklings by his garden pond.
The ducklings had been terrified, and Neville got an admonishing bite on the shin from their mother.
All in all, it was a fine mess. Neville was so stressed over it that in the days that followed, he conjured fluffy bunny rabbits and marshmallows and cotton balls and little budgerigars in his sleep. Needless to say, he did a lot more tidying as of late.
A few days after the incident, however, the library was mysteriously set to rights, and people acted as if nothing had happened. Some careful outings and probing conversations on Neville’s part confirmed that they had no recollection of the big library blow-up. Not even Xenophilius or Luna down at The Shoppe knew what he was on about, and he had told them the whole thing!
Curious. It had to be Pansy's doing.
And still, she did not show. For weeks and weeks, she did not show.
Neville missed her, but he wouldn't simply summon her if she didn't wish to be near.
He went to bed nightly with sorrow, trying to accept that he would never see her again.
Evil, however, never slept.
Whilst Neville had been distracted, mooning over the Demon Queen, the basilisk made its first human kill.
Discovered by the edge of the town’s canals was the stone corpse of a man named Boris Stringkett—a shady sort of fellow who had been wanted by the authorities for several counts of pet theft and animal trafficking. While the town denizens rejoiced for the safety of their pet dogs and cats and tortoises and lovebirds and gerbils, Neville was more concerned by the state of Mr. Stringkett’s body. The Daily Prophet had printed no photos, save for the area where the body was found. But the accompanying article had described his corpse as “mangled by an unidentified animal, with cement poured over top”.
Neville set out to investigate.
Lucky for him, all his tidying had recently led to a nifty discovery. He had found in one of Augusta’s heavy wooden trunks a fine wizard’s cloak. It was a dashing article of clothing—the kind Serious Warlocks wore in the olden days. In a moment of indulgence, Neville threw it over his shoulders and checked the mirror. He was greeted by the sight of only his floating head.
“Cor!” he exclaimed. He had found an invisibility cloak! And a mighty good one, at that!
The item in his possession gave him the confidence to stride into the morgue and straight towards Boris Stringkett’s cold locker. A quick peek confirmed that the basilisk was to blame for his demise. The corpse reeked of dark magic—and not the nice sort. Mr. Stringkett indeed had a massive chunk taken out of his side, and if Neville had to wager a guess, it would be that the basilisk had first maimed the man with its very pointy teeth, and then turned him to stone while he was still alive.
He suppressed a shudder. Black magic achievement or no, that snake needed to be stopped. And Neville had to be the one to do it.
Neville had little experience in hunting snakes, let alone freakishly fast-growing basilisks, but this was where his gran’s collection of Nasty Things came in handy.
He dug up the obsidian scrying mirror and the knotty old wand from months ago and arranged them upon his desk. When he was satisfied, he took the wand in his hand, placed Trevor on his lap, and squinted into the dark, dark glass.
Scrying mirrors were finicky things, and true enough, this one took some getting used to. At first, it kept pointing Neville to random creatures in the wood that he might find interesting—like a den of sleeping foxes and their newborn kits—or perhaps to some brushed brass weighing scales on sale at the Diagon Alley Apothecary.
Neville soon realised that he needed to focus with great specificity on his target; simply identifying his basilisk as “a creature with scales” was no good. Picturing a basilisk in his mind’s eye didn't work either. The mirror only showed him a great many basilisk hideouts all over the world. That meant he was still doing something wrong.
He let out a rare puff of pique. Why hadn’t his gran taught him how to use any of her dark equipment?
Well, he knew why. He just hadn’t expected the reality to sting quite so badly.
Just then, Trevor gave a distressed gasp. Neville had, in his dissatisfaction, unwittingly squeezed him too hard.
“I’m sorry, bud!” Neville cried, equally afflicted. “I didn’t mean to—”
Suddenly, Neville’s head flung itself backwards. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and his mouth dropped open. Out from his lips fell a stream of half-conscious words.
Neville had fallen into a trance.
A trance is much like a nap a witch or wizard takes while they are awake. It’s trickier to get into than, say, nodding off on a public bus, but once a person falls into one, it feels like seeing everything beyond one’s body while being unable to wiggle one’s toes.
It was this mystical trance that finally unlocked the key to the scrying mirror. Neville saw, with spooky specificity, just how the basilisk looked (terrifying and dark, like the average basilisk), how large it had grown (exponentially, unlike the average basilisk), and where its nests were located. There were six nests all in all, and Neville would need to find and destroy each one along with the serpent that had built them.
Between the prospect of doing that alone and staying in this trance forever, Neville didn’t know what was more terrifying.
He didn’t know how or when he drifted into a true slumber, but he awoke the next day with a crick in the neck, and several pots of leprechaun gold surrounding him.
Surrounding those pots of gold were some very irate leprechauns.
Was it because he had hit some sort of jackpot? Whatever the reason, his magical subconscious had a sense of humour, he supposed.
But Neville had no time to waste. He packed up everything he thought might be useful—the mirror, the knobby wand, some yummy trail mix, his fancy cloak, and Trevor—and set off.
Finding the first nest was easy. The blue tits in the area were happy to snitch on the nefarious basilisk, and showed Neville the hideout’s location for him to deal with. He offered them some seeds from his trail mix for their trouble, then he got to work.
He found that, no matter how hard he waved that magic wand, it would not obey his command to set the grasses in the nest on fire. So, he got Very White Indeed. He knelt close to the ground and sang a tune about the cleverness of roots and what a dream it would be to meet the sunlight—and lo! Out from the nest sprouted a great English oak. Not a sapling, no, but a fine and mighty specimen! It lifted the evil contents of the nest, bones, hay, twigs and all, up into its branches, effectively destroying the lair.
Neville made quick work of the other five, but the basilisk itself managed to elude him all day.
Knowing he stood little chance in the dark, he called it quits and went home.
As he soaked his feet in a tub of hot water and lavender, he considered that it was probably for the best that he’d left off where he did. Growing massive trees was exhausting, and if the basilisk’s dark nests were that difficult to destroy, what more the basilisk itself?
An errant memory of Pansy popped into his head. He missed her—she would have known what to do. If she were in a good mood, maybe she would have even smote the basilisk herself.
No. Neville snapped out of it. She would have relished in the serpent’s crimes.
He headed towards the scrying mirror, Trevor in hand. He had just enough left in him to make another attempt at finding a tool that would help. With any luck, his exhaustion would lend himself more easily to a trance.
A gentle squeeze of Trevor and a half-snore later, he had an answer! Only, it made little sense.
The mirror showed him that ugly leather hat, the same one he’d seen in his grandmother’s armoire months ago. Back then, he had thought to donate to charity, but changed his mind. He was no fashion guru, but even he knew that the hat was awfully ugly. No one would deign to use it, so he had decided to keep it.
He pulled himself to his feet and padded his way to the cursed closet.
Inside, of course, was the hat. It was terribly old-fashioned, and the more he looked at it, the uglier it seemed. It must have sat in that closet, hunched, for a century before he found it. Its creases were so set that it looked like it had a face.
Ha! Neville thought. A hat with a face. What if it could talk? That would be a fine trick indeed!
But how in Merlin’s name was this thing supposed to help him slay a basilisk? Neville was too tired to think. He picked up the hat and put it on...
...and felt something heavy and hard drop down upon the crown of his head.
“Ow! Bloody ow!” Neville grabbed his skull as he doubled over in pain.
Had the hat taken some sort of revenge on him?
He looked at the thing, which had rolled on its side on the floor, face up.
Protruding from its underbrim was a glinting piece of silver inlaid with rubies. It was clearly a hilt to some weapon, though the blade was still hidden inside the hat. Neville pulled it out, and to his surprise, the blade kept getting longer and longer. In his hand was not a knife, as the hat’s length suggested, or even a small scimitar—it was a big, big sword!
“Whoa,” Neville whispered reverently. “This looks goblin-made!”
“It is,” said a croaky voice.
Neville swung the sword around. “Who goes there!”
“It is I, you fool. The hat.”
“Oh!” Neville picked up the hat, apologising profusely. “I don’t suppose you’re one of those all-knowing hats, are you?”
“I'm more of a mind-reader. I also agree that I am rather ugly.”
Neville had the grace to blush.
“But,” the hat continued, “I have been keeping this sword for someone worthy. It belonged to the great wizard, Godric Gryffindor!”
“Cor,” Neville said. He didn’t dare question why any great wizard would keep a sword in an ugly hat, or how his gran came to have it in her possession. This was immensely convenient, and he had a beast to slay. “How does it work?”
“Goodness,” exclaimed the hat. “Didn’t you go to Hogwarts?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Do you at least know how to wield a blade?”
“I garden, and I’m pretty handy with a scythe?”
The hat sighed. “The Sword of Gryffindor comes to the brave who have a mighty need. I suppose you fulfil the basic requirements.”
“Are you saying I am worthy of wielding it?” Neville said, hope suffusing his tone.
“That's what I was getting at, yeah.”
Confidence restored and snacks replenished, Neville set out to hunt the basilisk the next day. It had taken some wheedling on his part, but he also managed to convince the hat to accompany him on his little trek. He’d also learned that the hat was a she, and that her name was... Hattie.
Hattie was not, as Neville had initially thought, the Sorting Hat of Hogwarts infamy—she was his twin. “Godric rather fancied himself a haberdasher,” she explained. “Personally, I think his talents lay in bestowing sentience upon mundane objects.”
Neville silently agreed. Perched upon his head, Hattie certainly knew what he was thinking, but it still wasn’t very nice to voice that particular opinion out loud. (She had also stowed away Gryffindor’s sword, which she could plonk upon his noggin any time she wished.)
Hattie was a genius invention, designed not for stereotyping schoolchildren, but for assisting with navigation. Back when maps were merely doodled estimations, hats such as she were instrumental in getting great wizards and witches from point A to point B.
“Make a left tither, lambkin,” she croaked. “Cross that babbling brook, then head due east.”
They were making some progress—Neville had found some shedded basilisk skin snagged on some jagged rocks in one area, and some fresher-looking tracks along the way. But it seemed they were also going in circles, because Neville recognised a mushroom-covered stump from when he had walked past it twice before.
“I hate to ask,” he said, “but are we lost?”
Hattie harrumphed. “We most certainly are not. A serpent of that size cannot hide in very many places, but it is not impossible.”
So the basilisk was around here somewhere. Neville simply had to find it.
As he made to circle the wood another time, the sky darkened and the birds fled from the trees. His heart thudded laboriously... until the comforting smell of fire and brimstone filled the air.
Could it be?
Neville whirled around. Floating mid-air, with a skewer of grilled eyeballs in her hand, was none other than the Demon Queen.
“Hello, Neville Longbottom.”
“Pansy,” Neville breathed. He instinctively patted his breast pocket just to make sure Trevor was there. The toad gave a reassuring croak.
“What,” she said, nose wrinkled, “is that ghastly thing on your head?”
Hattie squeezed Neville’s cranium but said nothing. It was probably because she knew who Pansy was, but Neville didn’t like that her feelings were hurt.
“This is Hattie,” he said.
Pansy scowled. “Your hat is named… Hatty?”
“Hattie, and yes. She’s been helping me.”
“She?”
Neville poked his hat, and Hattie grunted a hello.
“I see,” Pansy said. “My apologies, madam.” She took a bite of her skewer and turned to inspect their surroundings. In a bored tone, she said, “I’m sorry too, Neville Longbottom, for the way I left before.”
“It’s all right,” Neville said. And he meant it. Pansy had cleaned up her mess. She was here now, and that’s all that mattered.
“You’re a ways away from home,” she remarked.
“I’m hunting the basilisk.”
“For do-goodery, or for sport?”
“A bit of both, I suppose.”
There were a hundred things Neville wished to say to her. He wanted to know where she’d been, and to confirm if she had been responsible for restoring order to the library. But seeing as he had been wholly unprepared to ever encounter her again, he blurted, “Why have you come back?”
Yellow carnations sprang at his feet, which often happened when he was feeling embarrassed.
“I’ve decided to help,” Pansy said begrudgingly. That wasn’t really an answer, but Neville wasn’t about to complain.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, I was going to go this way—”
“How do you catch a predator?” Pansy asked.
“Pardon?”
“How. Do you catch. A predator?”
“Uh… with bait, I suppose?”
“Bingo.” Pansy snapped her fingers smartly. She took her skewer, which had only one eyeball remaining upon it, and wedged it into the ground. Then she whistled loudly, at higher and higher a pitch that Neville’s ears were pained by its shrillness one second, but were unable to hear it the next. By the time Pansy un-puckered her mouth to smirk at Neville, he didn’t know what had happened. He thought nothing had happened.
But then he heard the sounds of scurrying.
Basilisks don't scurry, he thought dubiously.
Hundreds of tiny feet skittered across the high grass, loud squeaks accentuating their approach. Then Neville saw exactly what Pansy had summoned: a horde of rats from all corners of the wood!
“Gah!”
“Close your eyes,” Pansy commanded, a devilish gleam in her own green ones. Neville obeyed, and after what felt like hours (but in reality was probably only the work of a minute), Pansy said, “Now open them.”
Neville’s jaw dropped. “Is that…?”
“Yep. A rat king.”
Which, of course, did not mean rodent royalty, but a mass of smelly, filthy rats, tangled together by their wormlike tails. It was an exceedingly rare, black sight—a naturally occurring phenomenon, or so Muggles thought. The rats strained against the knot their tails had gotten caught in, but that only made the tangle worse. They squealed in anguish.
“That’s cruel!” Neville cried, lurching forward to free them.
“That’s bait!” Pansy insisted, grabbing his hand to stop him.
Neville stood at attention at her touch, which was cool and electric.
“Just how did you think you were going to catch this little basilisk of yours?” she challenged him. “With children? Or perhaps you’d like to waste perfectly good meat from the butcher. Personally, I am not opposed to either. But this is rather stylish, no?”
Neville supposed she was right. It wasn’t to his tastes, but the rat king did carry some… twisted panache. Not to mention, Pansy was ridding the community of diseased vermin. Of that fact, he did not remind her.
“Come on,” said Pansy, pulling at his hand. She hadn’t yet let him go.
“Where are we going?”
“To lie in wait.”
“That’s okay,” Neville said, gently tugging his hand free. He mourned the loss of contact, but he had a job to do. “I’m ready to do this.”
He took Hattie off his head and reached inside for his cloak.
Pansy’s eyes widened at the sight. “Is that…?”
“It’s an invisibility cloak,” Neville said fondly. “Isn’t it neat?”
The Demon Queen smacked her forehead. “It’s not just any invisibility cloak, you dolt, it’s the Invisibility Cloak! Where did you get that?”
Neville hadn’t the foggiest what she was talking about. “This? Um, gran had it tucked away in a wooden chest.”
Pansy sighed sardonically. “Oh, and next thing I know, you’ll tell me you have the Elder Wand, too.”
“I don’t know much about wands,” said Neville, fastening the cloak over his shoulders, “but I did bring one, just in case.” He reached into the hat—no easy feat when he and it were both invisible beneath the cloak—and pulled out the ugly, gnarled instrument. “Here it is!”
He gave it a quick brandish, and some toadstools exploded into flames nearby.
“Hey, watch it!” Pansy shouted. The irritation on her face morphed into a sincere look of terror when she beheld the wand in Neville’s hands. “Th-that’s the Death Stick.”
“Huh?” Neville looked at the wand. It didn’t look very deathly.
“And the cloak and your bloody toad—Bob's bollocks, Neville Longbottom!”
Before Neville could ask what Trevor had to do with it, a loud hiss and the sound of slithering halted them both in their tracks.
“Hide!” Neville told Pansy, as though the demon queen would fall prey to something as trivial as an overgrown basilisk. But she looked so aghast, so shaken, and even paler than usual, and she only nodded faintly before backing slowly away.
Neville threw the cloak over his head, counting on the logic that if he were invisible, then the basilisk couldn’t meet his gaze, and therefore couldn’t turn him to stone.
Shakily, he looked up at the monster of his making. The basilisk had grown to full size, and now measured a cool fifty feet long, give or take. Its girth was equally fearsome—it looked like it wouldn’t fit through the average doorway if it tried. But worst of all was its large, spiky head, which bore soulless, orange eyes and rows upon rows of long, pointy, venomous fangs.
How on earth had this thing managed to hide for as long as it had?
The basilisk tasted the air with its cursed, forked tongue, and suddenly Neville understood why Pansy had selected rats as bait: they collectively reeked of rotting sewage and garbage and muck, enough to mask Neville and Trevor’s presence nearby.
Indeed, the basilisk made a direct line for the rat king, and Neville saw his chance. He dug into his hat and pulled out the sword, and once the snake struck, so did Neville.
“HAIIYAAAH!” he bellowed, stabbing the basilisk between its eyes. The sword emitted a blinding white light when it met its mark, and Neville had to release its hilt to shield his eyes.
He stood paralysed as the beast gave a mighty shriek of pain, thrashing and flailing and gnashing its teeth.
“What are you doing!” a voice shrieked. It was Pansy again. “Get over here, get over here!”
Neville blindly followed, and once his retinas recovered, he was able to witness the basilisk’s demise from a safer distance.
Its head wavered this way and that before finally collapsing over the pile of petrified rats.
The Sword of Gryffindor vanished.
The basilisk was dead.
“That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen you do,” Pansy deadpanned later, when Neville’s heart rate had slowed and he got to clean up somewhat. “Though it’s not half as black as I might have hoped.”
Neville chortled. “I know you’re joking. I mean. You’re joking, right?” The stress of the day had indeed taken its toll, and in spite of the basilisk carcass lying not thirty feet away, Neville had found himself surrounded by garlands of vines and trilling robins and curious fawns. Even a little hedgehog had waddled by to sit at his feet next to Trevor.
“No,” Pansy said. “I’m bewildered beyond belief.”
“I'll take that as high praise.”
Pansy only gave him a look. It was not like the look she’d given him when they first met—not the all-knowing one where she peered all the way down his trousers for her amusement. It was a troubled stare.
“Is something the matter?” he asked.
“The matter?” She snorted derisively. “Well, I thought I had you figured out. But how is it that the whitest warlock I have ever seen could become the Master of…” She trailed off, looking ill. Her horns trembled a little, too.
“Are you all right?” He frowned. “Wait, the Master of what?”
“The Master of Death! It’s you, you fool!” Pansy squeezed her temples with one hand. “Oh, Augusta is going to get it!”
“Hold on.” Neville frowned. He was unsure what to do in the event of a Demon Queen’s meltdown, so he just did what he would have done for any other person.
He conjured her a cup of hot chocolate.
“Thank you,” Pansy said, still sounding distressed. Demons, like wizards, could not weep, but if she could, Neville was almost certain she would. She sighed, taking a swig of her hot chocolate. “This is good, actually,” she said, voice uncharacteristically small. “Could you add those little fluffy things? The marshmallows?”
Neville was happy to oblige.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You know what the worst part is?” Pansy said. “You don’t even want to be a black magician. You like the magic, you like the vibes, but clearly you treasure your do-gooding and your woodland creatures and your bloody plants much more.”
“It’s true,” Neville realised. He wouldn’t have bothered with the basilisk if it weren’t.
“And yet,” Pansy said emphatically, “you somehow have in your possession the three darkest items anyone could only dream of combining.” She counted off her fingers. “The Elder Wand. The Invisibility Cloak. The Resurrection Stone. The Deathly Hallows they’re called. And the one who unites all three becomes the Master of Death! Which of course you’ve proven by slaying a basilisk…”
Neville still didn’t follow. “The cloak is neat. The wand is… well, it’s seen better days, and I don’t think it likes me very much. And I have no idea what you mean about a stone. I’m hardly a master of anything, and—”
“Your toad! Your bloody toad. It swallowed the Resurrection Stone! That’s why any time you so much as give him a wee jostle, black things happen!”
Was that true? Trevor had a sensitive stomach because he’d swallowed… “What’s a Resurrection Stone?”
“It’s an item that allows you to bring people back from the dead—or send them through the veil.”
“Oh,” Neville said. The implications were vast, and they were varying degrees of depressing. “So… I did kill my parents?”
“Afraid so.”
“I used the Death Stick and the Stone to curse the basilisk into existence.”
“Highly likely.”
“And now that I have all three…”
“I reckon you could be as dark as you want, if you set your mind to it,” Pansy said glumly.
Neville still didn’t understand how it worked. “Did Trevor attract dark magic whenever he had a stomach ache?”
“That, I’m uncertain of.”
“Oh. So… you knew about Trevor? All this time?”
“It took some time to confirm it, but yes.”
“And… that’s why you kept returning.”
She didn’t answer.
The clearer things grew to Neville, the sadder he got. All of Pansy's outrageous flirting was only to coerce him to give Trevor up. Realistically, he knew better than to place hope in her sincerity, but it still hurt. “Can I ask you just one more question?”
“Shoot.”
“What would the Demon Queen want with these three silly things? You’re already all-powerful. The darkest creature in all existence.”
It was Pansy’s turn to laugh, but it was hollow and sorrowful. “I’m not.”
Neville was too tired for her games. “I beg you, please just tell me what you mean.”
“I mean, I’m not the darkest creature in all existence. I’m a fraud.”
“Are you not the Demon Queen?”
“I am. But I never wanted to be the Demon Queen. All I ever wanted was to be black. You understand what that's like. I only wanted the Stone because… because that blasted old Demon King tricked me into taking his place so he could fuck off to Florida.”
“Bob?”
“Yes, bloody Bob. He didn’t even make me a black demon, not really.” Pansy sighed. “Neville Longbottom?”
“Yeah?”
“Never make deals with a demon.”
“I haven't made one yet.”
That made Pansy smile a little. “Neville Longbottom?” she said again.
“Yeah?”
“I’m exactly like you.”
“You mean you’re…?”
“White. Or, I was white. So white, in fact, that my parents hid me away for years. But being a grey Demon Queen has been so terrible that I actually want to return to that life. Can you imagine!”
So that’s why she wanted the stone. Come to think of it, Neville had never actually seen her do anything truly nefarious. Even her outburst at the library didn’t count.
Pansy wasn’t done. “I’m so half-baked it’s embarrassing. My horns are tiny. My tail should be at least two feet longer. And I don’t even have wings!”
“So you haven’t got some… I don’t know, some enchantment or some glamour on to bamboozle me into thinking you look this beautiful all the time?”
Her smirk was positively devilish. “You think I’m beautiful?”
“Sorry.” Neville felt his cheeks heat up.
“I could transform my head into snakes, if you're into bamboozlement.”
The snake heads sounded very appealing, but… “You’re beautiful as you are.”
“You dare bamboozle the Demon Queen?”
“I don't dare,” Neville said. More seriously he added, “There’s nothing wrong with being a white witch. Or a grey demon, for that matter.”
“I know that now. You’re the very best of our sort, Neville Longbottom.” Pansy paused, and then snickered. “You know what’s unhinged? I told you my real name to see if you’d try and assert dominion over me. It would have made a convenient excuse to quit my job, and you were nice. Hell, you haven’t once tried to tell me what to do.”
No wonder he’d felt it in his heart when he said her name for the first time. “I don’t want to own you, Pansy,” he began.
“More’s the pity.”
“I want to care for you,” he finished. “I do. Care for you, I mean.”
Pansy blinked at him.
Now or never. Neville took her hand. “You might be the Demon Queen. You might possess white magic, like me. But what other white or grey witch has ever become the bloody Queen of the demon realm? You’re… chaotic and ambitious and infuriating. And cute.”
“None of those are flattering descriptors. Except the first.”
“They’re all true.”
“I could say the same about you. You unwittingly united the Deathly Hallows. You’re the first and only white wizard who’s become the Master of Death! It’s laughable! It’s insane!” Pansy began cackling, and Neville joined in. She grabbed his face. “I like you so much, Neville Longbottom. It’s really embarrassing.”
“You do?” Neville couldn't believe his ears.
“I do,” Pansy said.
“She really do,” interjected the all-knowing Hattie, who had apparently been eavesdropping nearby.
“Do you believe me now?” Pansy laughed before launching herself into his arms and kissing him. She kissed him and kissed him. And kissed him some more.
Around them, a little sun shower misted a perfect rainbow into existence. The birds sang a pretty melody. The grass grew greener, and the rat king and the basilisk vanished. A patch of wildflowers bloomed, and butterflies flitted from flower to flower. It was good, their magic. It really was.
“I like you too,” Neville said, wrapping his arms around her. “Now… would you tell me about this Master of Death business? Would I really be able to harness the powers of darkness to do my bidding?”
Pansy scowled a tiny scowl. “Why?”
“Because. If I could just reach my gran like I’d wanted to in the first place, I think she would be very willing to take your place as Demon Queen. Then you could do whatever you want.”
Pansy’s scowl turned into a little smirk. She bit her lip.
“What?” Neville asked.
“Shush,” she said softly. “I’m deciding if I should eat you or have my way with you.”
Neville laughed. He’d heard that before, but now he could take her nice threats a bit more seriously. “And then can we summon Gran?”
Pansy laid her head on his chest and snuggled closer. “Yes, Neville Longbottom. Then we can summon Augusta.”