Disclaimer: My house belongs to the bank, my work belongs to my boss and my money is always confiscated by my wife. And Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling... Damn...

Cold blood

By LaCroix

Intro - A bad day

Madam Pomfrey was having a bad day. Her nerves were still frayed from the worry she had endured after the last message announced the impending death of a student. Thank Merlin Mister Potter had somehow managed to rescue Miss Weasley while killing Slytherin's beast. They both were here in the hospital wing, under influence of a mild calming draught. As usual, Mister Potter had managed to accumulate the most injuries.

Her musings were interrupted by a trill. Looking up from cleaning potion flasks, she noticed that Fawkes was still sitting at Mister Potters bedside. Since the mythical bird had brought the kids and Professor Lockhart, he hadn't left there. Right now, Fawkes repeatedly bumped his head against Harry's right upper arm, and then looked at the Nurse. He repeated that motion, and trilled again. Finally, the Nurse relented and went over to check the arm.

With a complicated wave of her wand, a representation of the cartilage and the bone manifested above the sleeping boy. With a well-practiced eye she looked over it, finding nothing out of the ordinary. A second later, her brow furrowed for a moment and she gave a wave at an area which seemed slightly off, magnifying it.

"Oh, there!" She muttered as she saw it. There was a small puncture in the bone where he had been bitten.

"Thank you, Fawkes. I would have missed that for sure." With a few flicks and waves, she cast a bone knitting charm at this. "That's it, done!" She exclaimed, and corrected her prognosis to an overnight stay for observation and a return to class after breakfast.

Only complicated fractures would have called for a bone removal and Skele-grow. The bone-knitting charm would liquefy the bone for half a second, make it intermix and then re-solidify. Of course, the result was not a natural, porous bone, but a very dense material. But it worked and Mother Nature would replace all that bone that area within a few years, anyway.

That charm took care of the puncture and the tiny cracks around it in a second, and Pomfrey shot Fawkes a smile, thanked him, and left to report to the headmaster. The bird kept staring at her until she left, still trilling frantically, but Pomfrey didn't listen. It gave a last, frantic screech just before the matron left, but she was already mentally wording her report to the Headmaster, and didn't notice.

Fawkes took a last, long look at the boy in the bed, and with something akin to a shrug, it jumped up and disappeared in a fireball.

By eight o' clock next evening, Harry Potter was back in his dorm.

By eight thirty, all spiders had abandoned Gryffindor Tower.

******

AN:

DerLaCroix cackled insanely as he looked at what he had just done. He finally had reached the divine epitome of cruelty - posting a text that was nothing but a cliff-hanger.

He smiled at the idea of the pain this would cause the minions, until a stray thought stopped his good mood.

How am I going to top this?

*****

This is a premature post to tide you over the lack of updates in RTB, where because of this pesky thing called real life, there will be a slight derivation from posting schedule. Also, I am currently only able to upload files in *.html format instead of the *.doc files I used to do, which is annoying like hell, because it eats all the dialogue apostrophes. Sadly, the support staff doesn't reply to my mails, so I don't know how long this will take.

This fiction will be updated from time to time, as it is currently shy over the 24k words mark and evolving into something bigger while RTB grows like cancer.