he sat and talked with Ginny, who never seemed to need as much sleep as the rest of them. Other times, he played chess with Ron, or cards with Neville.
That evening, he had reading material. He looked up as Hermione came down the steps. "Hi."
"Hi," she said, sitting next to him on the sofa. She saw that he had on mismatched socks, and she squeezed one of his big toes in greeting. "Can't sleep either?"
He yawned. "That seems to the common student condition lately. I'm just looking over Snape's notes on my Occlumency Exam. We were supposed to be discussing the results this morning when Snape was called to the infirmary."
"Let me see? Ninety-eight percent! Harry that's brilliant."
"Yeah, I suppose."
She understood his lack of enthusiasm. Tonks' disappearance was foremost on their minds. Dumbledore's absence from School had them all uneasy and on alert. Bad things happened when he was away.
There were absurd suggestions that Tonks and simply run off with Donald Bligh, but no one who knew Tonks (or Bligh, for that matter) would entertain the thought. An Order meeting had been called for Monday and then postponed.
Harry was on tenterhooks of anticipation to know what steps Moody was taking to locate his missing Aurors. Hermione leafed through Snape's highly critical, meticulous notes in silence. The Common Room was very quiet.
"Did you want something?" Harry suddenly asked.
"Yes, as a matter of fact." Hermione was unsure how to put it, so she just laid out the request, plain and simple. "Harry, can I borrow your Invisibility Cloak?"
"You're not thinking of trying to find Tonks yourself, are you?"
She gave him a look. "Of course not."
"Because as you told me before, it would be extremely foolish to do anything without consulting Dumbledore and the others first."
"Yes."
"And going off on your own would just make the rest of us worry about you"
"Harry, yes, I know that."
He nodded. "Right. Just making sure."
Puzzled, Hermione watched Harry rise to his feet, stretched for a bit, before telling her to wait. He then went up the stairs to his room and returned a minute later with his cloak.
"I'm not going to ask you why you need that," he said, pointedly. "But I' ll trust that you'll tell me if you need me."
Her boys were all grown up, Hermione realised. She suppressed the desire to burst into tears.
Impressively unfazed, Harry patted her on the shoulder. "He's a lucky boy, whoever he is."
Her head jerked up. "What makes you think it's that?"
Harry shrugged, but there was a ghost of a smile on his face. "Seems like you only break rules for boys you care about."
She honestly hadn't thought about it that way before.
Chapter Twenty-Six
What's so amazing That keeps us star gazing What do we think we might see?
Friday evening.
At five minutes pass two in the morning, Hermione slipped on her bedroom slippers, followed by Harry's cloak, and crept out of her room.
The teachers had been added to the patrol roster around Hogwarts, just as they had done in Hermione's second year, during the Chamber of Secrets fiasco. Apparently McGonagall herself had volunteered to take the corridors in the vicinity of Gryffindor House.
Hermione sincerely hoped that the Deputy Headmistress would currently be on duty because it would be easier to sneak past her, than it was to get by a young, spry, highly trained Auror. No offence to Minerva McGonagall.
Getting caught sneaking around the castle would be the start of a whole bag of trouble none of them needed, not the Aurors, not the staff and not Hermione. Not to mention the fact that she was also responsible for keeping Harry's precious cloak safe.
It was always startling to realize just how creaky and noisy the various floorboards, doors and hinges were, when you were trying to be as quiet as possible. Maybe Malfoy was right. Maybe she did lack the sneaking gene. Her bedroom slippers muffled her footsteps brilliantly however, and so all Hermione had to do was duck her head around every corner to check where the patrol was.
She counted three Aurors by the time she got to the ground floor and was one corridor away from the Infirmary.
Unfortunately, when she got there, she saw that Professor Snape was standing immediately outside the open doors of the hospital wing. He was staring into the darkness with an expression that was almost challenging. Hermione frowned.
Honestly, suspicious seemed to be the man's natural state of being.
Bugger.
She waited for what seemed like hours, though it must have only been about twenty minutes