Chapter One:

Nightmares

Everything was blurring together in a flash of images, melting from one moment to the next...The young teen was sitting in the stands around an intimidating-looking maze, people chatting happily around her while she only felt dread...She was walking through a far-too-quiet Hogwarts, people all around her with heads bowed...She was rounding a corner to see two figures lying on the ground in front of her, one moving feebly while the other was unnervingly still...She was in the Hogwarts Great Hall, void of all decorations and a simple black coffin sitting in the center...Flashes of images and figures rising from the black...Shifting, changing, from one familiar face to another, each one pale and lifeless...Her family, mother and brother, aunt and cousin, uncle-in-law...Her friends, Alain Pelland, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Susan Bones, Hannah Abbot, Harry Potter—

Elizabeth's eyes flew open, briefly confused as to where she was. For a few moments, she stayed still on her bed, feeling a chill through her. At first, she thought it was from the dream, but then she realized her violet quilt had ended up in the floor due to Elizabeth's rough sleeping and the chill was the summer night air against the sweat on her skin.

Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Martin sat up, reaching for her nightstand to grab her glasses and push them on, her dark room coming more into focus. She was back in her small bedroom, safe and familiar. The same bed with a nightstand and lamp, the same wardrobe by the door, the same desk and chair under a window, the same Quidditch and band posters, and pictures of friends that she'd hung up over the faded flowery pattern of her walls...

Elizabeth looked down at her tangled sheets and quilt and straightened them back out. She knew she wasn't going to get back to sleep now, so instead she stood up and brushed back some of her brown hair—which was now sticking to her forehead from the sweat—and made her way towards her bedroom door.

"What if she's right, Grace? What if—"

"No."

Elizabeth froze at the sound of two people talking in the other room. She stayed as still as she could, ear pressed to the door. Elizabeth's mother, Grace Martin, was talking with her sister and Elizabeth's aunt, Ginger. Elizabeth had just returned home from Hogwarts with her brother two days before. Barely a week since the murder of one of their friends...And Elizabeth's mother refused to believe the truth.

"Grace..."

"Ginger, no," Grace said, "Don't you remember what it was like? I'm not going to take this. I lost Alexander to Death Eaters. I...You can't understand. Coming home from work and finding the Dark Mark above my house...Rushing inside and finding Alexander lying dead in the front room...I was so terrified, and I couldn't find Lewis. I screamed and searched...Do you know where I finally found him? Hidden in a kitchen cabinet. Alexander had heard the Death Eaters coming and hid him. If Alexander hadn't done that..."

Elizabeth shuddered a little at the thought. To imagine that she could have lost her brother as well as her father before she was even born...She couldn't imagine not having Lewis around—even though he, like their mother, refused to believe the truth behind Cedric Diggory's death.

Elizabeth sighed softly, trying to tune out her mother and aunt's quiet argument. Barely a week before, One of Elizabeth's friends—Lewis' best friend—had been killed by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Elizabeth's best friend, Harry Potter, had been the real target. Grace and Lewis refused to believe that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was behind the murder. They were holding steadfast to the story that the Daily Prophet had posted that morning: Cedric's death had been an accident, due to poor security measures put into place by Hogwarts' headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, during the Triwizard Tournament's third task.

Elizabeth had no idea what the Daily Prophet was trying to achieve, passing off Cedric's death as an accident due to Dumbledore's poor action. Elizabeth knew differently. She believed the story Harry came back with. She knew the truth, no matter what the papers were saying. She just wished that her mother and brother would believe it too.

"I should get going," Ginger said in the other room, "It's late, and Xavier has to work tomorrow. I really should get back and help him with Ursula so he can get on to bed."

"Will you two be by for dinner tomorrow?" Grace asked, and Elizabeth could hear the two sisters' footsteps across the wooden floor. They moved too far from the hallway now for Elizabeth to hear what they were saying.

As quietly as she could, Elizabeth rose to her feet and made her way to her bed. She knew her mother liked to check up on them before bed herself, so Elizabeth pulled off her glasses and put them on her nightstand, crawling back underneath her quilt. She wouldn't be able to leave her room for another hour, give her mother time to get to sleep. So she decided she might as well pretend to get some sleep.

'Pretend' was an accurate way to describe Elizabeth's ability to get some sleep the last week. Any time she closed her eyes, she kept seeing flashes of images, mostly of Harry and Cedric lying on the ground outside that maze. However, she also kept seeing images from a reoccurring nightmare she'd had for several days leading up to her friend's death.

The bedroom door opened and Elizabeth closed her eyes quickly, pretending to sleep even though her back was to the door already. A few seconds passed and she heard the door close and footsteps head off down the hall. Elizabeth sighed and sat up again, putting on her glasses, her mind still on the nightmare that woke her up, and the nightmare she'd had before Cedric's death...

Elizabeth frowned as she got out of bed, heading to her desk and leaning against it to look out at the darkened garden on the other side. She could faintly make out the shape of a gnome scurrying out of a hole towards the row of tomato vines. They'd need to degnome the garden again soon.

Elizabeth shook her head. Even watching a gnome couldn't clear her head of her dream. It was that nightmare that had been weighing heaviest on her. She hadn't told anyone about it, not even her friends, but that dream had practically predicted Cedric's death. Elizabeth was sure of it. And the reason she hadn't told anyone about it was simply because she couldn't.

Hermione Granger, for one, thought fortune-telling was nonsense. Stern and brainy, Hermione, with her bushy brown hair, had a very logical mind. If the evidence wasn't right in front of her, she didn't believe it. She would just roll her eyes and tell Elizabeth it was only a coincidence.

Ron Weasley—Elizabeth's tall, red-haired friend and only one among the four to grow up in the wizarding world like she had—was honestly a bit afraid of the whole thing, even if he didn't act like it. He didn't like Professor Trelawney—the Divination teacher at Hogwarts—that much, but when presented with true fortune-telling, he tended to get wide-eyed and pale.

There were Elizabeth's fellow Hufflepuffs, but the dreams were something that felt a bit too personal. Besides, they were all Hufflepuffs, like Cedric had been. Telling her House that she'd foreseen the death of one of their own and hadn't stopped it...No, she couldn't tell them. She'd been an outcast within her own House once already and it was an experience she didn't want to repeat.

There was also Alain Pelland, a French boy Elizabeth had made friends with at the Triwizard Tournament. The only problem with that was that he was, well, French. He lived in France and it would take weeks to get a response. Besides, Alain, despite how good of a friend he was, was the type who was never really good at giving advice. He was someone to vent to and he'd listen patiently and help you through it.

There was no way she could talk to her family about it. Her mother and brother believed the story that it was Dumbledore's fault—even if by accident—that Cedric was dead. Aunt Ginger had enough on her hands raising a one-year-old and working at the Ministry of Magic monitoring the Trace.

The only of Elizabeth's friends she would consider talking to this about was Harry Potter. He was always very understanding of the fact she'd sometimes get odd senses of dread before something horrible would happen and he would take her seriously on the matter. There was only one problem with telling him about this.

She knew Harry blamed himself over Cedric's death. He was dealing with having to actually watch Cedric die, and watch helplessly as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named returned to power...Elizabeth knew Harry had to be going through a lot with that, and the last thing she wanted was to add to it by bothering him with her own problems.

So this was something Elizabeth had to deal with on her own. She had started taking Divination lessons at Hogwarts two years ago because she thought it'd be fun to predict the future. The reality of it, however, was something Elizabeth would gladly give up. She'd learned from the feelings of dread she got that knowing something was going to happen only made it worse—and her nightmare prediction was something Elizabeth never wanted to relive, but she had a sickening feeling that it wouldn't be her only dream to come true.

Elizabeth shook her head, looking down to her desk. A picture sat on the corner of Elizabeth with Harry, Ron, and Hermione, sitting together in the shade of a tree next to the lake on Hogwarts grounds. Elizabeth, Ron, and Harry were chatting happily while Hermione had her nose in a book, but the little figure occasionally looked up, giving her own opinion. Elizabeth noticed the small figure of herself kept looking to Harry far too much...

Even now, months after this picture was taken, Elizabeth felt the heat rise to her face. Had things really been that obvious? She wished she could go back to that time. A time when struggling to understand her feelings for her best friend had been the worst of her problems. Now, she struggled with a gift she didn't want and events that she wished never had happened. More than once, she found herself envying Hermione. The girl was Muggle-born. She could go home and escape the world of magic for a few months.

Elizabeth shook her head. There was no point in obsessing over this, yet her mind kept bringing it up constantly. She wished she could find some way to make her mind focus on something else instead.

Yawning loudly, Elizabeth knew she needed to get some sleep but the threat of nightmares made the idea very unappealing. Still, Elizabeth couldn't stay up all night. Slowly, she made her way to her bed, putting her glasses on the nightstand again and curling up under her covers for a third time that night. She stared, vision blurred, at the dark shape that was her wardrobe nearby. Why couldn't anything be simple anymore? She found herself missing the days when their problems revolved around thinking a teacher was after the Philosopher's Stone, or Harry was hearing voices no one else could, or believing a man who'd escaped Azkaban wanted to kill her friend...Things seemed much more simple then.

It was hours before Elizabeth could finally fall asleep, and yet again that was riddled with nightmares of screaming crowds and the sight of Cedric's dead body outside that maze, a body that shifted and changed to still-alive friends, yet lifeless in the nightmare...