This chapter has an R-18 scene.
Chapter 55:
– Sona –
Sona was nervous. She hated admitting it, even to just herself.
Serafall Leviathan was teaching a class today. Her sister. Her lover. One of the Four Great Satans of the Underworld, a woman who could freeze an ocean solid with a thought, a woman who had personally slaughtered thousands of goblins beneath Diagon Alley without breaking a sweat, a woman who once cried for forty-five minutes because a fictional cat died in an anime.
That woman was now a Hogwarts professor.
How exactly did she find time in her schedule to do this? Sona thought, staring at the stone corridor ahead as she walked. She governs foreign affairs for the entire Underworld. She runs a television show.
The answer, of course, was that Serafall did whatever Serafall wanted, and the laws of time and logistics simply rearranged themselves around her.
Tsubaki walked at her side, calm and composed as always, her long dark hair swaying with each measured step. She had her textbooks tucked neatly under one arm and the faintest trace of amusement playing at the corner of her mouth.
"You're grinding your teeth," Tsubaki said.
"I am not," Sona replied without really thinking.
"You are. I can hear it."
Sona unclenched her jaw. She had, in fact, been grinding her teeth.
"I'm sure it will be fine," Tsubaki continued, her tone light and deliberately unhelpful. "Serafall is a capable woman. She wouldn't do anything inappropriate in a professional academic setting."
The silence that followed was deafening.
Tsubaki's lips twitched. "I couldn't even finish that sentence with a straight face…"
"No," Sona said flatly. "You could not."
I love my sister, Sona thought as they turned the corner toward the new classroom wing. I am in love with my sister. But if she shows up wearing that costume and tries to make me participate in a live demonstration of Magical Girl transformation sequences in front of forty students, I will freeze her to the ceiling and leave her there until spring…
The classroom itself was unfamiliar. It was one of the newly renovated spaces on the third floor that had been repurposed during the reconstruction, larger than a standard Hogwarts classroom and outfitted with tiered seating that curved in a gentle semicircle around a raised platform at the front. The walls were lined with glass display cases containing artifacts Sona recognized as Underworld relics but the regular students probably wouldn't know what they were—A shard of crystallized tainted magica from the Great War, what appeared to be an authentic piece of angelic scripture sealed behind warded glass, and a taxidermied creature that looked suspiciously like one of Behemoth's failed cooking experiments given legs.
Sona scanned the room.
Harry was already there. He sat in the far back corner of the highest tier, slouched just enough to look casual, with Hermione beside him on his left.
Smart choice, Sona thought, looking at the back corner. Maximum distance from the front platform. Sona climbed the tiered steps without hesitation and sat down in the empty seat on Harry's right side. Tsubaki settled in beside her.
"Hey," Harry said.
"Hello," Sona replied, keeping her voice carefully neutral.
Under the table, hidden from every line of sight in the room, Harry's hand found hers. His fingers slid between hers slowly, threading together with a tenderness that made her pulse jump. His thumb traced a lazy circle across the back of her knuckle. It was warm. It was deliberate. It was the kind of touch that said I missed you without a single word.
Sona stared straight ahead at the empty platform. Her face was perfectly composed. Her breathing was perfectly even. Her ears were burning.
Stop blushing, she ordered herself. You are a Sitri! You do not blush because a boy holds your hand. Even if that boy is Harry!
Harry's thumb traced another circle.
She blushed harder.
That was the only genuinely annoying part about being back at Hogwarts. Not the classes, not the cold Scottish weather, not even the greasy British food, which was admittedly still better than anything Kuoh Academy's cafeteria had ever produced—Sona wasn't a big fan of japanese food unlike Rias.
It was the hiding. The constant, exhausting performance of pretending that Harry Sitri was nothing more than her nephew by blood and nothing more.
Sona was Harry's fiancée. Just as officially and just as permanently as Rias Gremory. Their parents had approved. Their grandparents had blessed it. The Sitri clan's internal records listed her as betrothed. In the Underworld, a union between an aunt and nephew would raise exactly zero eyebrows. Devil nobility had been intermarrying within bloodlines for millennia. The concept of incest as humans understood it simply did not apply to a species that lived for tens of thousands of years and measured genetic compatibility in demonic energy resonance rather than shared chromosomes.
But they were not in the Underworld. They were back at Hogwarts.
This is temporary, she reminded herself. Graduation is finite. Our lives are not.
The classroom filled steadily around them. Fourth-year Gryffindors and Ravenclaws streamed in through the double doors, the noise level rising with every new group. Sona recognized most of them by now. Lavender Brown sat down in the middle tier and immediately began whispering to Parvati Patil, both of them sneaking not-very-subtle glances at Harry. A cluster of Ravenclaw boys filed into the front row with the eager, slightly terrified energy of students who had signed up for a class without reading the syllabus.
Sona caught fragments of conversation drifting up from the lower tiers.
"—heard she literally blew up a mountain during the attack—"
"—how is that possible? Are you sure it wasn't a bomb set off by those black winged terrorists or something—"
"—mate, I don't care what she teaches, have you seen her? She's the fittest woman I've ever—"
"—Harry's mum though, yeah? Damn, what I wouldn't give to let her ride my fa—"
"—I'd let her give me detention any day of the—"
Charming, Sona thought dryly.
Beside her, she felt Harry's grip on her hand tighten. Not from affection this time. She glanced sideways and caught as he stared at the cluster of boys in the third row who were discussing his mother's body with the casual entitlement of teenage boys who had never been punched in the throat.
"Easy," Sona murmured, barely moving her lips.
"I'm fine."
"You're crushing my fingers."
Harry loosened his grip immediately. "Sorry."
He's protective of her, Sona thought, watching the tension in his shoulders.
She understood the impulse. She felt it herself. Serafall was many things: absurd, theatrical, clingy to the point of suffocation, and possessed of a sense of personal boundaries that could charitably be described as theoretical. But she was also Sona's sister. Sona's lover. Sona's first and most enduring protector. And hearing some pimpled 18-year-old Ravenclaw speculate about whether Serafall's breasts were real while sitting six meters from two people who had personally felt them made Sona want to encase his entire row in ice.
She breathed. She did not encase anyone in ice.
The clock on the wall ticked past the hour.
There was no sign of Serafall.
There was no sign of Behemoth.
The platform at the front of the room remained empty. The display cases hummed with quiet warding energy. A few students began murmuring, checking the time, glancing at the door.
"Maybe she forgot?" someone whispered.
"Professors can't just forget to show up, can they?"
"This is Harry's mum we're talking about. She showed up to the tournament in a tiara and a miniskirt."
Tsubaki leaned slightly toward Sona. "She's going to do something dramatic, isn't she?"
Sona stared at the empty platform. Her sister's magical signature was already in the room. She had been in the room for at least thirty seconds. She was standing directly behind the platform, suppressing her aura to nearly nothing, waiting for the exact moment when the ambient confusion reached its peak.
Of course she is, Sona thought.
The explosion happened exactly on cue.
A detonation of pink and violet sparkles erupted from the center of the platform, accompanied by a blast of colored smoke that billowed outward in a perfect radial pattern. Silver confetti rained from nowhere. Tiny conjured stars spiraled upward and popped like fireworks against the ceiling. The smoke swirled and parted in a theatrical vortex, and standing at the eye of the storm, one hand planted on her cocked hip and the other pointing dramatically toward the ceiling, was Serafall Leviathan.
She was wearing the magical girl outfit. Of course she was wearing the magical girl outfit. The short skirt, the thigh-high boots, the ridiculous wand with the star on the end, the twin tails cascading down her back like rivers of black silk. She had added a pair of pink-tinted glasses perched on her nose, presumably to look more "academic."
They did not help.
"WELCOME!" Serafall declared, her voice ringing off the stone walls with the projection of someone accustomed to performing live combat commentary for Underworld television audiences. "Welcome, welcome, welcome to the most INCREDIBLE, most IMPORTANT, most REVOLUTIONARY class in the entire history of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry!"
She struck a second pose. More sparkles burst from her wand.
"I am Professor Leviathan! But you can call me Levia-tan! And this—" she swept her wand toward the second figure now stepping calmly out of the dissipating smoke, "—is my beautiful and brilliant colleague, Professor Behemoth!"
Behemoth emerged from the theatrical haze looking exactly as she always did—fondly exasperated but still happy to help with her king and best friend's antics.
Those two have been friends for most of Serafall's life.
Sona didn't know the whole story, but she knew that a younger and even more reckless Serafall had one day stumbled into Behemoth's large cave in the underworld. This was before Evil Pieces were even a concept so Behemoth still had the appearance of a giant scary world ending monster. And yet Serafall was able to easily befriend the beast who later became her queen and was now Serafall's beautiful blonde queen and secretary.
"Good afternoon," Behemoth said with her deceptively calming voice.
Several students shivered involuntarily.
Serafall spoke up again. "This course is officially designated as Introduction to Supernatural Cultures, Interspecies Diplomatic History, and Applied Mythological Studies, but WE are going to call it Fun Class because the real name is boring and I didn't pick it! Behe-tan picked it because Behe-tan has no sense of whimsy!" She launched into an explanation of the course syllabus at a velocity that would have impressed an auctioneer, her words tumbling over each other in a cascade of enthusiasm and references to geopolitical events that the human students had no possible framework for understanding. "—so FIRST we'll cover the Three Factions War, which lasted like forever and was super depressing but also had some really cool battles, and then we'll get into the Norse Pantheon because Odin is a HUGE pervert but also genuinely fascinating from a sociohistorical perspective, and THEN we'll talk about Yokai culture—"
Sona was shocked that Serafall was just blurting all this world changing information out, but that was what Serafall did.
"—and Greek mythology is obviously a whole THING because Zeus couldn't keep it in his pants for like five consecutive minutes, and then Shinto tradition, and then we'll do a unit on Fae courts which are SUPER complicated because the Seelie and Unseelie queens have been fighting over the same guy for like nine thousand years and honestly both of them could do better—"
Sona watched the faces of her classmates. The human students wore expressions ranging from bewildered delight to genuine confusion to a specific glazed look that suggested their brains had simply stopped attempting to process the information and switched to passive observation mode.
A Ravenclaw girl in the second row raised her hand.
Serafall pointed at her with the star wand. "YES! Question! I love questions!"
"Um," the girl said. "Could you... slow down? Please? I've only caught about every fifth word."
Serafall blinked. She looked at the girl. She looked at the rest of the class. Forty faces stared back at her with expressions ranging from fascinated confusion to mild existential crisis.
"Oh," Serafall said, deflating slightly. "Was I going too fast?"
"A bit," Hermione offered diplomatically from the back row.
Harry squeezed Sona's hand. She felt his shoulders shaking. He was laughing silently, his lips pressed together, his eyes bright with the particular delight he reserved for watching the people he loved be ridiculous.
Sona squeezed back.
Behemoth stepped forward, placed one calming hand on Serafall's shoulder, and addressed the class with the quiet authority of someone who had been managing this particular Satan for several centuries.
"What Professor Leviathan means to say," Behemoth began, "is that this course will provide you with a comprehensive introduction to the supernatural factions and species that exist alongside your wizarding society. We will cover history, diplomacy, biology, magical theory, and practical defense. The curriculum has been approved by Headmaster Dumbledore and will be examined at the end of the academic year."
She paused.
"There will also be," she added, with the faintest ghost of a smile, "occasional guest lecturers."
Serafall's eyes lit up. "GUEST LECTURERS! I almost forgot! I've already invited—"
Behemoth's hand tightened on Serafall's shoulder.
"—people who will be announced at the appropriate time," Serafall finished, her voice dropping from a shout to a normal speaking volume so abruptly that several students flinched.
Thank the Maou for Behemoth, Sona thought.
She settled deeper into her seat, let the warmth of Harry's hand anchor her, and opened her notebook to a fresh page…
– Harry –
Classes were finished for the day, and the four of us had gathered in the small office behind the new classroom. Serafall had claimed her half of the room immediately, of course. Every inch of wall space on her side was covered in Magical Girl Levia-tan posters, including the infamous tentacle one from her office back in the Underworld.
She had signed it herself. Twice.
"So! What did you think of my class, Harry-kun?" Serafall was standing right in front of me. Her hands were clasped together under her chin. Those deep blue eyes, identical to mine, were wide and sparkling, searching my face with the kind of earnest vulnerability that only came out when she genuinely cared about the answer. Every bounce made her breasts jump heavily beneath the thin fabric of her magical girl top, the round, full weight of them rising and falling in a rhythm that drew my gaze downward before I could stop it.
My eyes stayed there for maybe two or three seconds. The way the fabric stretched across her chest, the soft jiggle each time she rocked forward on her toes.
I pulled my gaze back up to her face.
Focus, Harry.
"You did a really good job," I told her, and I meant every word. I smiled at her warmly, the kind of smile that came easy around Serafall because she made it impossible not to feel something for her. "Honestly. The lesson was great. The Three Factions material was presented clearly, your visual aids were excellent, and once you slowed down after the first few minutes, the students were actually able to follow along. I think most of them were genuinely fascinated by the end of class."
Her entire face lit up. It was the full Serafall sunshine treatment. The happiness started in her eyes and spread outward until the air around her felt warmer. She looked like I had just handed her the Best Magical Girl of the Year trophy for a ninth consecutive time.
And I wasn't just being nice. The lesson really had been impressive. Once Behemoth had gently reined in Serafall's opening barrage of manic energy, the two of them had settled into a teaching dynamic that actually worked.
Underneath all the sparkles and the costumes and the suffocating hugs, Serafall Leviathan was a genuinely brilliant woman.
People forgot that. I never did.
I turned to Behemoth, who was standing near the desk with her arms folded. "And you were fantastic too, Behemoth. The way you structured the timeline and ran the Q&A sections kept everything on track. You two work really well together up there."
Behemoth gave me a single nod. "Thank you, Harry," she said simply. Then she gathered a stack of parchment from the desk and tucked it under her arm. "I'm going to begin preparing tomorrow's lesson. The section on Yokai classification needs restructuring. Several of the source texts conflate Kitsune and Inari mythology in ways that would make Yasaka take personal offense."
She walked to the door, paused with her hand on the frame, and glanced back at Serafall. The look she gave my mother could only be described as preemptive resignation. The look of a woman who had seen this exact scenario play out a thousand times and already knew what was coming.
"Please behave," Behemoth said.
The door clicked shut behind her.
The office shrank instantly. Or maybe it just felt that way because the only people left in the room were me, my mother, my fiancée, and my Bishop, and the firelight was suddenly casting very warm, very intimate shadows across all of them.
Hermione was sitting on the left couch. Her brow was slightly furrowed. A strand of bushy brown hair had fallen across her forehead. She was still in full academic mode, which was honestly kind of adorable.
Sona sat on the opposite couch, legs crossed, posture perfect, her glasses reflecting twin points of firelight. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, and she wore that carefully neutral expression that I had learned to recognize as her "bracing for impact" face.
Serafall watched Behemoth leave. She listened to the footsteps fade down the corridor until there was nothing but silence. Then she turned back toward us, and the energy in the room shifted completely.
The bouncy, eager-to-please excitement was still there in her body language. But something else had crept in underneath it. Something warmer and heavier and much more deliberate. Her lips curled into a slow, knowing smirk that started at one corner of her mouth and spread like honey across her face. She shifted her weight onto one hip. Her eyes, those deep blue eyes that could freeze armies or melt hearts depending on her mood, swept lazily between Sona, Hermione, and me.
"Well," Serafall said. Her voice dropped from its usual bright register into something lower. Richer. Huskier. "Since I did such a good job teaching today... I think that deserves a celebration, don't you?" She took a step forward. Her hips swayed with the movement, the short skirt of her magical girl outfit fluttering against her thighs. "Maybe a celebration orgy," she mused, tapping her chin with one finger like she was genuinely working through a difficult logistical problem. "Right here in the office. On the desk. On both couches. Against the bookshelves." Her smirk widened. "We'd have to be quiet, of course. Wouldn't want any students walking past the door to hear their beloved professor getting her brains—"
She let the sentence hang in the air, unfinished and dripping with suggestion.
Then her eyes sharpened. The playful warmth in her expression acquired a predatory edge. She looked at Sona first, holding her gaze for a long, deliberate beat. Then at Hermione, doing the same.
"Or maybe," Serafall continued, and her voice dropped even further until it was barely above a whisper, thick and velvety and dangerous, "some of you were such naughty students today that you need to be punished." She reached up and adjusted those ridiculous pink-tinted glasses, peering over the rims with an expression of mock severity that somehow managed to be both absurd and devastatingly sexy at the same time. "Is that it?" she asked softly. "Does Professor Serafall need to discipline her naughty pupils? I saw how you three zoned out during some parts of the lecture, like you'd already heard it before…"
That's because we had heard it before obviously…
I opened my mouth. I had a response ready. Something witty, something to deflect, something to steer this back to safer territory before it went exactly where Serafall clearly wanted it to go.
Then I looked at Sona and Hermione, and the words died in my throat.
Sona's composure had cracked in a way that I almost never saw outside of the bedroom. Her cheeks were flushed a vivid, deep pink that spread down her neck and vanished beneath her collar. She was sitting perfectly still, hands still folded in her lap, but her fingers were pressed together way too tightly. White-knuckled. And she wasn't looking at Serafall. She was staring fixedly at the fireplace like it contained the secrets of the universe, her jaw tight, her breathing just slightly too controlled to be natural.
Sona Sitri, the most disciplined devil I had ever met, the woman who had frozen Draco Malfoy's cock and balls off was squirming in her seat.
And Hermione. My Bishop. My brilliant, rational, methodical Hermione, who could dismantle a bad argument faster than most people could form one. She was blushing so hard that her ears had turned crimson. Her quill had stopped moving. Her notebook had slid sideways on her lap and she hadn't even noticed. She was biting her lower lip hard enough to leave a mark, and her thighs, pressed together beneath her skirt, shifted against each other in a small, unconscious squeeze that she probably didn't even realize she was doing.
Hold on.
I looked at Sona again. Then back at Hermione.
Are they actually turned on by this?
The naughty student and strict professor roleplay. The idea of being "punished" by Professor Serafall. That was what was making them react like this. Specifically the image of Serafall as an authority figure catching them being bad.
Of course they are, I thought, and the realization hit me like one of Behemoth's casual backhand slaps. They're both overachievers. They've spent their entire lives being the good girl. The model student. The one who never, ever breaks the rules. And now someone is standing in front of them in a professor's office offering them explicit permission to be bad.
That's... actually really fucking hot.
I looked at Serafall. She was watching me watch them, and her smirk told me everything. She had known before she said a single word. She had read both of them like an open book, the same way she read a battlefield. Instantly, completely, and with the kind of ruthless precision that reminded me why this woman was a Satan.
My mother was terrifyingly perceptive when she wanted to be.
Her eyes locked onto mine. One perfectly shaped eyebrow rose in a silent question.
Well, Harry-kun? What do you think?
I leaned back against the bookshelf behind me and let the grin spread slowly across my face.
(R-18 Start)
Serafall's own grin sharpened. "Both of you," she said, and her voice had dropped into that commanding register that brooked zero argument. The same voice she used when issuing orders as a Satan. "Put your hands on my desk. Bend over. Now." She adjusted her pink-tinted glasses and peered over the rims, the picture of a stern professor who had caught her worst students cheating. "Professor Levia-tan says so."
The silence that followed lasted maybe three seconds, but I felt every single one of them. I leaned against the bookshelf with my arms folded, watching. Waiting.
Hermione moved first. She stood up from the couch in a single sharp motion, her notebook tumbling forgotten to the cushion. Her face was scarlet. Her hands were trembling. But her eyes had that specific look I recognized, the same fierce, burning determination she got when she committed to something fully and refused to back down. She walked to the desk, planted both palms flat on the oak surface, and bent forward at the waist.
Sona stood three seconds after Hermione. She stepped to the desk and took her position beside Hermione, placing her hands flat with careful symmetry. She bent forward, and I watched the line of her spine curve downward, the hem of her Ravenclaw robes riding up just enough to show the backs of her thighs.
Two brilliant, powerful, proud women bent over a professor's desk like naughty schoolgirls waiting for punishment.
Their asses swayed subtly back and forth beneath their robes. Hermione's from nerves. Sona's from the effort of pretending she wasn't as desperate for this as her body was screaming she was.
Serafall shot me a wink over her shoulder. Then she licked her lips slowly, the tip of her tongue dragging across her lower lip as she turned back toward the two bent figures at her desk.
I expected her to go for Sona first. But Serafall didn't go for Sona.
She went for Hermione.
Serafall stepped behind my Bishop, took a fistful of Hermione's Gryffindor robes in both hands, and ripped. The heavy fabric tore apart with a loud, sharp rrrrip that echoed off the office walls, and Serafall peeled the ruined robes off Hermione's body in one clean motion, tossing them aside like wrapping paper.
Hermione gasped. "Lady S-Serafall!"
Underneath the robes, Hermione was wearing a matching set of dark red lace. A bra that cupped her modest breasts and pushed them together, and a pair of panties that were barely more than a thin triangle of crimson lace sitting low on her hips and disappearing between the round curves of her ass.
Serafall paused. She tilted her head, studying the lingerie with genuine appreciation. Her fingers traced along the lace waistband at Hermione's hip, following the delicate fabric down across the swell of her backside. "Well, well, well," Serafall murmured. "What naughty underwear for a good girl, Hermione-chan." Her palm settled on Hermione's right ass cheek and squeezed, fingers sinking into the soft flesh through the lace. "And what a nice arse. Harry-kun has good taste."
"Nnnh..." Hermione's fingers curled against the desk.
Serafall hooked her thumbs into the waistband of Hermione's panties and pulled them down. She did it slowly, deliberately, peeling the lace down over the curve of Hermione's ass, letting it catch and drag across her skin before sliding the panties all the way down her trembling thighs, past her knees, and to her ankles.
Hermione was fully exposed from the waist down now. Her bare ass, round and soft and flushed pink from the rush of blood beneath her skin, was on full display. Between her thighs, her pussy lips glistened with visible wetness.
Hermione made a small, desperate sound in her throat and squirmed against the desk.
SMACK.
Serafall's open palm connected with Hermione's right ass cheek. Not hard enough to bruise. Not hard enough to truly hurt. But hard enough to sting, hard enough to jolt, hard enough to make the flesh ripple under the impact and leave a faint pink handprint blooming across the skin.
"Ahhhn!" Hermione cried out. Her back arched. Her fingers scraped against the oak. Her hips bucked forward involuntarily, pressing her bare mound against the edge of the desk before she caught herself and pushed back.
Fuck…
That sound. That breathy, startled moan punched out of her by surprise and pleasure in equal measure.
I loved that sound.
Next to Hermione, I caught Sona's reaction. She was still bent over the desk, still in position, still fully clothed in her Ravenclaw robes. But her head had turned just enough that she could see what was happening to Hermione from the corner of her eye. Her lips were parted. Her pink eyes were dark and hazy behind her glasses. And her hips were shifting, pressing her thighs together in a rhythmic squeeze that she was clearly doing without thinking about it.
She looked almost jealous.
She wants it too, I thought. She wants it, and she's too proud to ask for it, and watching Hermione get it instead is driving her insane.
I moved. Two steps brought me behind Sona. I reached down, grabbed the back of her Ravenclaw robes in both fists, and tore. The fabric came apart with a satisfying rrrrip, and Sona let out a sharp, startled sound.
"Harry!" she sputtered, her composure cracking wide open. "What are you—those were my—"
"Quiet," I said, keeping my voice low and firm. I pulled the ruined robes off her and dropped them on the floor. Underneath, Sona was wearing simple white cotton. A modest bra and matching panties that somehow looked sexier on her than any lingerie could have, because Sona's body made everything look good. The tight curve of her waist, the flare of her hips, the round, firm shape of her ass barely contained by the thin white fabric. "Naughty students don't talk back."
Sona's cheeks burned crimson as she turned her head and gazed back at me.
I placed both hands on her ass and squeezed. My palms covered her cheeks completely, fingers pressing deep into the firm, supple flesh through the cotton. I kneaded slowly, spreading her cheeks apart and pushing them back together, feeling the heat of her skin through the fabric. Sona made a small sound between a gasp and a whimper, and her forehead dropped down to rest against her folded arms on the desk.
"Mmhh..."
That's it.
I leaned down until my lips were next to her ear, close enough that my breath ghosted across her neck. "I'm Professor Serafall's teaching assistant right now," I murmured. "And I'm here to help discipline her most disobedient student—So-tan."
"I h-hate you," Sona whispered. Her hips pushed back into my hands.
"No you don't."
"...No. I don't."
Next to us, Serafall was continuing her own brand of discipline on Hermione. I heard the sharp smack of palm meeting bare skin again, followed by Hermione's stuttered moan.
SMACK.
"Ahh! S-Sera—"
SMACK.
"Aaahhn! Nnnh, oh God—oww!" Hermione flinched at the headache that came with the involuntary blasphemy, and Serafall laughed softly.
"Devils don't say that word, Hermione-chan. That's another punishment."
SMACK.
"Haaah!" Each spank left Hermione's ass a deeper shade of pink, and each one drew a louder, more helpless moan from her lips. Her back arched deeper with every impact. Her toes curled against the stone floor. The wetness between her thighs had become impossible to ignore, a thin, glistening string connecting her swollen pussy lips that caught the firelight every time she shifted.
Then Serafall stopped spanking her.
I watched as Serafall slowly lowered herself, dropping down until her face was level with Hermione's reddened backside. Serafall paused there for a moment, her breath washing over the heated skin, and then she pressed her lips to Hermione's right ass cheek in a soft, lingering kiss. Then another, slightly higher. Then another, her lips trailing a slow, wet path across the curve of Hermione's backside, each kiss open-mouthed and tender, her tongue darting out to taste the flushed skin.
"Mmm..." Serafall moaned against Hermione's flesh, her eyes fluttering half-shut. The sound was utterly shameless. "I've always wanted to do this with Harry-kun's peerage, you know." She kissed the other cheek, letting her lips drag across the soft skin. "Especially you, Hermione-chan." Another kiss, lower, dangerously close to the crease where Hermione's ass met her thigh. "It's my right as his mother, don't you think? To play with his beautiful girls?"
"Mmmhh... S-Serafall..." Hermione's voice was wrecked. Breathy and desperate and barely coherent. Her head dropped between her arms.
Serafall looked up at me over the curve of Hermione's ass, her lips still pressed against my Bishop's skin, and the expression on her face was pure satisfaction.
She planned this, I realized. My mother was a terrifying woman.
I loved her so fucking much.
I turned my attention back to Sona, who was trembling under my hands and watching everything Serafall was doing to Hermione from the corner of her eye with an expression that hovered somewhere between desperate arousal and competitive indignation that she wasn't being kissed like that too.
I leaned down and pressed my lips to the small of Sona's back, just above the waistband of her white cotton panties.
"Hhh!" Sona's breath hitched sharply.
Your turn, So-tan.
I pulled Sona's white cotton panties down over the curve of her ass, peeling them slowly past her thighs and down to her knees. She trembled the entire way, her fingers curling tight against the oak, but she didn't say a word. Didn't tell me to stop. Didn't even pretend to want me to.
Once her panties were out of the way, I took a moment to just look at her.
Sona was gorgeous. She was always gorgeous. But like this, bent over a desk with her ass in the air and her defenses stripped down to nothing, she was something else entirely. Her pink pussy lips were flushed and glistening with arousal, slightly parted, the slick shine catching the warm glow of the firelight. Above them, her tight little asshole fluttered reflexively from the cool air of the office hitting her exposed skin, and the clenching motion sent a pulse of arousal straight through my gut.
I gripped her hips, leaned forward, and buried my face between her cheeks.
My tongue dragged a long, flat, deliberate lick across the full length of her slit, starting at the bottom and trailing all the way up through her folds. Slow and firm, tasting every inch of her.
"Aaahhhhn!" Sona moaned. The sound ripped out of her, raw and desperate, her back arching sharply and her thighs clenching against the sides of my head. Her hips bucked backward, grinding her pussy against my mouth. "H-Harry... nngh!"
There she is.
I licked her again. Slower this time, letting my tongue circle her entrance before dragging it upward to flick against her clit. Then again. And again. I settled into a rhythm, eating her out enthusiastically. No rushing. Just thorough, focused attention to every fold and nerve and trembling inch of her.
"Mmmhh... hhaahh... nnngh..." Sona's moans were quiet and clipped, broken little sounds that she was still trying to control even now.
Even with my tongue inside her, she couldn't fully let go of the composure. But her body was betraying her completely. Her thighs were shaking. Her ass kept pushing back into my face. Her juices were running freely now, coating my chin and dripping onto the stone floor between her feet in thin, glistening strings.
Right next to us, close enough that Sona's elbow nearly brushed Hermione's, Serafall was doing the same thing.
I could hear it all. The wet, obscene sounds of Serafall's mouth working between Hermione's thighs. The slick smack of lips against soaked flesh. And Hermione's moans, which were louder than Sona's, higher and more frantic, tumbling out of her without any attempt at restraint.
"Oohhh... oh fuck... S-Sera... aahhn... we shouldn't—we shouldn't be doing this..."
Hermione's voice was wrecked. Breathy and trembling and absolutely unconvincing in its protest. She was saying the words because some deeply ingrained part of her brain, the part that raised her hand in every class and followed every rule, felt like she was supposed to object. But her body was saying the exact opposite. I could hear the wet grind of her hips rolling against Serafall's mouth, the desperate little hitches in her breathing every time Serafall's tongue hit the right spot.
Serafall pulled back just enough to speak, her lips still brushing against Hermione's pussy as she answered.
"Hermione-chan," Serafall said, her voice dripping with fond amusement. "We're devils." She punctuated the statement with a long, slow lick that made Hermione cry out. "Harry-kun has a very big harem. It's perfectly normal for the women in a devil's harem to play together." Another lick, this one ending with a swirl around Hermione's clit that made her entire body jolt. "That's how our race works, sweetheart. Lucifer himself designed us to be naughty little sluts."
Serafall delivered that last line with such cheerful, matter-of-fact authority that it sounded like a passage from a textbook. A very explicit textbook that would never be approved for any classroom that wasn't being run by a woman currently eating out one of her son's lovers.
Hermione's protests died on her lips. Whatever was left of her resistance melted away completely, and she surrendered with a long, shuddering moan that echoed off the office walls.
I kept working on Sona, alternating between long licks and focused suction on her clit, feeling her thighs tremble harder against my jaw with each passing second. My hands gripped her hips, thumbs pressing into the soft dimples just above her ass cheeks, holding her steady while I ate her out.
"Hhhaahh... Harry... right there... mmmhh... don't stop..."
Then the sounds next to us changed.
I heard Serafall stand up. Heard the shift of fabric and the click of her boots on the stone. I glanced sideways without pulling my mouth away from Sona and saw Serafall grab Hermione by the hips and flip her over.
Hermione went from bent over the desk to flat on her back in one smooth motion, the move so fast and effortless that it showcased the casual, overwhelming physical strength of a Satan-class devil.
Hermione gasped as her back hit the desk, her legs dangling over the edge, her bushy hair fanning out across the oak. Before she could react, Serafall reached down and yanked her bra off with a sharp tug that snapped the clasp.
The ruined lace went flying, and Hermione's breasts bounced free. Full, round, and tipped with stiff pink nipples that were achingly hard from arousal.
Serafall's eyes swept down Hermione's naked body. Then she turned to me and Sona and winked.
She leaned back down over Hermione without breaking eye contact with me, and her tongue dragged a long, wet stripe across Hermione's left breast. She circled the nipple once, twice, then sealed her lips around it and sucked. Hermione's back arched off the desk. Serafall's cheeks hollowed as she sucked harder, her tongue flicking the trapped nipple inside her mouth, and then she moved to the other breast and gave it the same treatment. She alternated between them, licking, sucking, grazing her teeth across the sensitive peaks until Hermione was writhing beneath her.
While her mouth worked Hermione's chest, Serafall's right hand slid down between Hermione's parted thighs. I watched her fingers trail along the slick, swollen lips of Hermione's pussy, gathering the wetness there. Then Serafall pushed two fingers inside, slowly, steadily, letting Hermione feel every inch as they sank into her tight, clenching heat.
"Aaahhn!" Hermione's whole body seized. Her eyes squeezed shut. Her mouth fell open in a silent cry that became a shuddering moan as Serafall's fingers bottomed out inside her and curled. "Oh... oh f-fuck... Sera... Serafall..."
"Mmm, so tight, Hermione-chan," Serafall murmured against her breast, the words muffled by wet skin. "Harry-kun's been taking good care of this pretty pussy, hasn't he?"
I watched for another few seconds, watching my mother fingerfuck my Bishop on a desk while sucking her nipples, and felt my cock straining painfully against my trousers.
Then Sona's hips pushed back toward my face with an impatient, demanding roll.
"Harry." Her voice was tight and strained and carried the unmistakable edge of a woman who was very close to losing her patience entirely. "Focus on me."
I pulled my mouth away from her pussy, and she immediately made a frustrated sound at the loss. I looked up at her over the curve of her bare ass. She had turned her head to look at me over her shoulder, her glasses slightly askew, her cheeks burning, her pink eyes dark with arousal and narrowed with something that was half desperation and half accusation.
"I'm a naughty student," she said. Her voice wavered on the words, but she forced them out anyway, because Sona Sitri committed to things fully or not at all. "And I need to be punished."
Jesus Christ!—OW—Or, well, whoever the devil equivalent is...
I grinned. I could feel it spreading across my face, wide and wolfish and full of every filthy thought currently running through my head. "Yeah," I said, rising to my full height behind her. "You do."
I drew my hand back and brought it down hard on Sona's right ass cheek.
SMACK.
The crack of palm against bare skin rang through the office like a gunshot. The impact was hard, much harder than the teasing swats Serafall had been giving Hermione, hard enough that my palm stung and a vivid red handprint bloomed instantly across Sona's pale flesh.
"AAHH!" Sona yelped. Loud. The loudest sound I had ever heard come out of Sona Sitri's mouth outside of an orgasm. Her whole body jolted forward, her hips slamming against the edge of the desk, and her fingers clawed at the wood. Her eyes went wide behind her crooked glasses and her mouth hung open in shock.
The sound she made echoed off the stone walls and settled into a heavy, charged silence.
Then Sona buried her face in her folded arms.
"...Again," she whispered.
…A couple of hours had passed. Maybe more. I honestly couldn't be sure because the clock on Serafall's wall had been knocked off its hook by a stray elbow during round three and nobody had bothered to pick it up.
We had missed dinner. Completely, thoroughly, unapologetically missed it.
Hermione lay on her back across the right couch, one arm draped over her face, her chest rising and falling in deep, lazy breaths. She was completely naked. Her Gryffindor robes were somewhere on the floor in two ragged pieces. Her crimson lace bra dangled from a wall sconce near the door like a war trophy. Her panties were gone entirely, and I was fairly certain Serafall had pocketed them. Her skin was flushed a deep, rosy pink from her neck down to her navel, and her ass, still bearing overlapping red handprints that had deepened to a warm scarlet over the past two hours, pressed against the leather beneath her whenever she shifted. Her bushy hair was a magnificent disaster, splayed out beneath her head like a wild halo. Her eyes were half-lidded and glassy, and her lips were curved into a small, dazed smile that she probably wasn't even aware she was wearing.
She looked thoroughly, comprehensively, catastrophically fucked.
Sona was draped over the left couch in a similar state. Completely bare, her glasses folded neatly on the armrest because even in the depths of post-orgasmic oblivion Sona Sitri put her glasses away properly. Her usually perfect bob cut hair was a tangled mess against the leather cushion. Her pale skin was covered in a constellation of red marks, bite imprints on her neck and smaller breasts from my mouth, faint bruises on her hips from my fingers, and the bright, vivid handprints across both cheeks of her ass that I had put there with extreme enthusiasm and her explicit, repeated encouragement. Her pink eyes stared at the ceiling with the empty, blissed-out expression of someone whose brain had temporarily gone offline.
Neither of them could move. That much was obvious. Hermione had attempted to sit up about ten minutes ago, gotten halfway, made a sound like a deflating balloon, and collapsed back down. Sona hadn't even tried. She lay there with one leg dangling off the couch, her toes barely brushing the stone floor, breathing slowly and steadily like a woman in deep meditation. Or a coma. The line between the two was thin at the moment.
My cum leaked from both of them. Thick, white streams that seeped from Hermione's swollen, well-fucked pussy and trailed down the insides of her thighs, pooling on the leather beneath her. The same from Sona, rivulets of cum sliding from between her flushed pink lips and running down her inner thigh in a lazy path that dripped onto the floor in slow, steady drops. The office smelled like sex and sweat and the faint, lingering sweetness of Serafall's sparkle magic.
Pop!
Serafall pulled her lips off my cock with a wet, obscene sound, sitting back on her heels with a satisfied sigh. A string of saliva and cum connected her lower lip to the head of my cock for a brief second before snapping. She wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb, licked it clean, and beamed up at me with the radiant, sun-bright smile of a woman who had just had the best afternoon of her entire millennium-long life.
"That," she declared, "was AMAZING for my first day on the job!"
She was still wearing the magical girl costume. The whole thing. The boots, the skirt, the top, the ridiculous star-tipped wand that had somehow ended up tucked into her thigh-high boot at some point. She had insisted on keeping it on the entire time because, in her words, "it's hotter this way, Harry-kun."
And she wasn't wrong.
There was something deeply, profoundly filthy about the fact that Serafall had participated in everything that happened over the past two hours while still dressed as Magical Girl Levia-tan, the costume disheveled and askew but stubbornly intact.
Though the costume wasn't entirely clean anymore. Dried cum streaked the insides of her thighs, visible beneath the hem of her short skirt. White and sticky against her smooth skin, the evidence of the multiple times I had fucked her between rounds with Hermione and Sona. She hadn't bothered wiping any of it away. I don't think she wanted to.
Serafall pouted, her lower lip jutting out in that exaggerated, theatrical way that somehow always managed to look genuinely pitiful. "Too bad I can't be at Hogwarts every single day," she whined. She leaned her cheek against my thigh, nuzzling into me like a cat. "Being a Satan suuuucks. Meetings and paperwork and foreign policy and ughhh. I want to stay here and teach sexy lessons and have celebration orgies with my favorite people every afternoon."
"I don't think we'd ever learn anything then…" I shook my head and reached for my trousers, pulling them up and buttoning them while Serafall watched from the floor with an expression of deep personal offense at the concept of me putting clothes back on. I tucked my shirt in, ran a hand through my hair to at least pretend I hadn't just spent four or maybe five hours doing what I'd been doing, and surveyed the wreckage of the office.
"This was incredible," I said. "But we missed dinner completely. I can head down to the kitchens and get food for everyone. You three need to eat something."
Serafall waved a dismissive hand. "Don't worry about us, Harry-kun. I'll take care of helping Hermione-chan and So-tan clean up." She glanced at the two comatose women on the couches and her expression softened into something genuinely tender. "I'll get them sorted. Go get yourself something to eat."
Then her expression shifted. The tenderness was still there, but a thread of something else wove through it. Something that looked almost like regret.
"Although," Serafall said, drawing the word out, "I am a teensy bit sad I missed out on a really sexy opportunity tonight."
I paused mid-button. "What kind of opportunity?"
"Well..." She stood up, brushing off her skirt with practiced grace that was completely at odds with the dried cum on her thighs. "When I was disciplining Hermione-chan and So-tan earlier, there was this certain surprise I wanted to use. But it's the kind of thing I really should talk to them about first, you know? Consent and all that. Even naughty professors have standards."
"What kind of surprise?" I asked again.
Serafall blinked at me. Her head tilted slightly to one side. And then she smiled, slow and deliberate and loaded with meaning. "The kind of surprise," she said, "that got Lily Evans pregnant with you."
The blood rushed to my face so fast I felt dizzy.
Oh.
Oh.
I knew exactly what she was talking about. Devil magic could do a lot of things that human biology couldn't. Serafall had gotten Lily Evans pregnant through magical means that I had never asked for specific details about because some things about your own conception you simply did not need to know. But now, standing in a sex-soaked office with two women I loved leaking my cum onto the furniture, the image slammed into my head with zero warning.
Serafall. Standing behind Hermione. Or Sona. Using that particular ability. Taking them while I watched. Their faces, their sounds, the way they'd—
Fuck.
I shook my head hard enough to rattle my own brain. My face was burning. My cock, which had literally just been in Serafall's mouth thirty seconds ago, twitched against my thigh with renewed and extremely inconvenient interest.
Not now. Not now. Down.
Serafall watched the blush consume my face with the delighted, cat-like satisfaction of a woman who had just planted an image in my head that she knew would live there rent-free for the rest of my immortal life.
I crossed the distance between us, cupped the back of her neck, and kissed her. Deep and slow and thorough, letting the kiss linger until she melted against my chest and made that soft little humming sound in the back of her throat that meant she was genuinely happy.
I pulled back just enough to speak against her lips. "Thanks for the lesson," I murmured, "Professor Levia-tan~"
Serafall shivered. A full-body tremor that I felt pass through her everywhere we were pressed together. Her fingers curled into the front of my shirt and her breath came out shaky. "Harry-kun," she whispered, her cheeks pink, "if you call me that again I'm going to lock this door and we're not leaving until sunrise."
I grinned, kissed the tip of her nose, and stepped back before she could make good on that threat. I gave one last look at Hermione and Sona, both of them still utterly destroyed on their respective couches, and felt a swell of warmth and satisfaction and something deeper settle in my chest.
Mine.
Then I turned and left the office, closing the door gently behind me.
The corridor outside was quiet. Torches flickered in their brackets, casting long shadows across the stone walls. The faint sounds of the castle settling for the evening drifted up from below. Whatever students had been lingering after dinner had already returned to their common rooms. The air was cool against my flushed skin, and I took a deep breath of it, letting the chill clear the fog from my head.
I headed for the kitchens.
I didn't worry about my peerage wondering where I'd been. They knew. They always knew. The bond between a King and his pieces was subtle but constant, a low-frequency awareness that told them roughly where I was and what kind of mood I was in. And the kind of mood I'd been radiating for the past two hours was not exactly ambiguous. Lyra and Lyna were probably trading knowing smirks in the Gryffindor common room. Fleur had almost certainly made at least one dry comment about Hermione getting special treatment. Tonks was probably pretending to be scandalized while her hair cycled through three different shades of pink.
They'd tease me later. They always did. And I'd let them, because watching beautiful women pretend to be jealous about other beautiful women was one of the specific and unique pleasures of having the life I had.
My footsteps echoed down the empty corridor as I made my way toward the basement level. The painting of the fruit bowl that concealed the kitchen entrance was just around the next corner. I was thinking about sandwiches, maybe some of those meat pies the elves had made last week, definitely something sweet for Sona because she always craved sugar after—
I stopped walking.
My senses prickled.
I blinked.
There was a girl standing at the end of the corridor. No, not a girl. That word was too small, too ordinary, too human for what I was looking at. A woman. A being. An entity shaped like a young woman with a face that didn't belong anywhere near a damp Scottish castle corridor at nine o'clock on a Tuesday evening.
She was leaning against the stone wall beside the painting of the fruit bowl, her arms loose at her sides, her head tilted faintly to the left as though she had been studying the enchanted pear for some time and still hadn't decided what to make of it. Torchlight played across features so flawless they looked sculpted rather than born. Skin like white porcelain, smooth and luminous, without a single freckle or blemish or imperfection. Long, flowing black hair that cascaded past her shoulders and down her back like liquid midnight, so dark it seemed to absorb the light around it rather than reflect it. Delicate, pointed ears that swept back through the curtain of her hair. And eyes. Bottomless, pitch-black eyes with no visible iris or pupil, just endless depths that looked like someone had cut two holes in reality and left the void staring through.
She was the most ethereal thing I had ever seen. Like she had walked straight out of a Tolkien novel and simply decided to stay. An elven queen lost between the pages of a story she hadn't been written for.
I knew her. I had woken up next to her on that barren island in the Pacific after the Thunderbird fight. She had healed every wound on my body, climbed into my lap without asking, pressed her face against my neck, and told me I was warm. Then she had vanished like smoke.
And now she was here. At Hogwarts for some reason? As if she decided to follow after me this entire time. Standing twenty feet away from me wearing female Slytherin robes.
The green-trimmed uniform fit her strangely. Not badly, exactly, but like a costume rather than clothing. The way the fabric hung on her slender frame suggested she had put it on without any understanding of how it was supposed to sit, the tie knotted too loosely, the collar slightly crooked, the robe itself fastened with the wrong clasp.
"I'm pretty sure I'd remember if someone like you went to this school," I said.
My voice came out steadier than I felt. My heart was doing something complicated in my chest, a mixture of surprise and wariness and genuine, disarming curiosity that I couldn't quite sort into the right categories. My devil senses were reaching out toward her automatically, probing, searching for a power signature, a demonic aura, anything that would tell me what I was dealing with.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing. She registered as a total blank. A void shaped like a beautiful woman. Every other powerful being I had ever encountered gave off something, some signature, some pressure, some ambient weight. Serafall felt like standing next to a glacier. Behemoth felt like the ocean floor pressing down on you from above. Even Dumbledore radiated a sharp, electric crackle that prickled along my skin.
This girl gave me nothing. She existed in a space that my senses simply could not reach, like trying to measure the depth of a hole that had no bottom.
She glanced down at the Slytherin robes wrapped around her body, examining them with the same detached curiosity she had shown the enchanted pear. Then she looked back up at me and shrugged. "I chose to wear these clothes because everyone else was wearing them," she said. Her voice was soft and clear and completely flat. "Why is everyone wearing clothes like these?"
"Because this is a magic school," I said, taking a slow step closer. "And that's the uniform for students."
She considered this. Her head tilted slightly to the other side, like a bird examining something shiny. "I am not a student," she said.
"No," I agreed. "You're not."
Silence settled between us. The torches crackled. Somewhere far below, the house elves were clattering around in the kitchens preparing leftovers for anyone who had missed the feast. The faint smell of baked bread drifted up through the stones.
"Are you hungry?" I asked her. "I was about to get food from the kitchens."
She looked at me. Those bottomless black eyes fixed on my face with an intensity that was somehow both vacant and deeply, unsettlingly focused. "I don't need to consume food to survive," she informed me.
"That's not what I asked." I moved closer. One step. Then another. The distance between us shrank to arm's reach, and I stopped. "I asked if you were hungry. But even if you're not, what about just experiencing the taste?"
Something shifted in her expression. Barely there. The faintest crease between her brows, the subtlest parting of her lips. Like the concept of doing something for the experience rather than the necessity was a language she understood the grammar of but had never spoken aloud.
I reached out slowly, carefully, and took her hand.
Her skin was impossibly soft. Cool to the touch. My fingers closed around hers, and she didn't pull away. She looked down at our joined hands with that same tilted-head curiosity, studying the way my larger fingers wrapped around her delicate ones, and then she looked back up at me.
She didn't say anything. But she didn't let go.
I still couldn't sense a single thing from her. Not a flicker of power. Not a whisper of intent. She was a perfect, absolute zero in the middle of a castle that currently housed two Satans, multiple devil peerages, a Valkyrie Queen, and whatever the hell Dumbledore's wand was made of. And she had walked in past all of them without anyone noticing.
Past Behemoth.
Past Serafall.
Past Hogwarts' freshly upgraded, Gremory-reinforced, Sitri-funded wards that were supposed to detect a mouse crossing the grounds, let alone an intruder in the corridors.
The pieces clicked into place with a nearly audible snap, and my blood went cold.
There's no way, right?
The unreadable power level. The complete sensory void. The ability to appear and disappear without any form of detection.
It can't actually be... her?
My hand tightened around hers involuntarily, and she blinked at the pressure but still didn't pull away.
There was one way to find out. One very stupid, very direct, very Harry Sitri way to find out.
"Have you ever had pumpkin pie," I said, keeping my voice as casual as I could manage while my internal organs rearranged themselves in alphabetical order, "...Ophis-chan?" The name left my mouth and hung in the air between us like a live grenade.
She looked at me. Those infinite black eyes searched my face, and for a moment I saw something flicker in their depths. Like she was pleased that I had figured it out, or pleased that I had cared enough to try. "No," she said, with the same gentle, flat calm. "But if you say it's good, I will try it."
She didn't correct the name.
She didn't correct the name.
Holy shit. I'm holding hands with the Infinite Dragon God. The Ouroboros Dragon. The Dragon of Infinity. The being that exists in the dimensional gap between realities. One of the two most powerful entities in all of creation. Second only to Great Red himself. And I just offered her pie.
My brain went through about fifteen stages of processing simultaneously, most of them some variation of panic, and arrived at a single, crystalline conclusion on the other side.
It's a really good thing the Hogwarts elves make excellent pumpkin pie.
I started walking toward the kitchen entrance, still holding her hand. Ophis fell into step beside me without hesitation, her footsteps silent on the stone floor, the stolen Slytherin robes swishing softly around her ankles. She matched my pace exactly, neither leading nor following, simply existing at my side like she had always been there.
I tickled the pear in the painting. It giggled and transformed into a green door handle. I pulled the door open and gestured for Ophis to enter first.
The Infinite Dragon God, oldest and most unfathomable entity in the known universe, stepped into the Hogwarts kitchens to try her first slice of pumpkin pie.
I followed her in, still holding her hand, and quietly accepted that my life had stopped making sense a very long time ago and was unlikely to start again anytime soon…
– Umbitch –
Dolores Umbridge was absolutely seething.
She paced back and forth in front of the Minister of Magic's desk with the clipped, furious steps of a woman whose entire day had been one sustained, unbroken humiliation. Her squat legs carried her from the window to the bookshelf and back again, her low-heeled shoes striking the polished marble floor with sharp, angry clicks. Her stubby fingers were clenched at her sides. Her broad, flat face, which ordinarily maintained a carefully curated expression of simpering pleasantness, had abandoned all pretense and settled into something that more closely resembled a toad that had been sat on.
"Not a single student, Cornelius!" she spat, wheeling on the man behind the desk. "Not one! Not in the morning session. Not in the afternoon session. Not even the remedial session I scheduled for after dinner! I sat in that classroom for nine consecutive hours and not a single, solitary teenager walked through my door!"
She jabbed a thick finger at the air as though the empty classroom were hovering in front of her, taunting her.
"Do you know what did walk through my door? One boy. One first-year boy who opened it, looked inside, said, and I quote, 'Oh, this is the one we're not supposed to go to,' and then LEFT!" Her voice had climbed to a register that made the crystal inkwell on Fudge's desk vibrate.
Cornelius Fudge sat behind his massive mahogany desk and did what Cornelius Fudge did best: he looked uncomfortable. The Minister of Magic was a soft, doughy man in a pinstriped suit whose primary qualifications for the highest office in magical Britain were a talent for saying nothing with great conviction and an instinct for standing behind whichever person in the room seemed most likely to win. His lime-green bowler hat sat on the desk beside him like a sad party favor left over from a celebration that had ended hours ago. His fingers drummed a nervous rhythm against the armrest of his chair.
"Dolores, please," he said, raising both hands in a placating gesture that accomplished nothing. "Sit down. You're making me dizzy."
"I will NOT sit down!" Dolores shrieked. "I went to Dumbledore! I marched into his office and demanded an explanation! Do you know what that manipulative, senile, lemon-drop-sucking fossil told me?"
Fudge winced. "What did he tell you?"
Dolores stopped pacing. She drew herself up to her full, unimpressive height, squared her rounded shoulders, and delivered Dumbledore's words in a mocking, airy impression that bore absolutely no resemblance to the Headmaster's actual voice.
"'My dear Professor Umbridge, students at Hogwarts are permitted to undertake self-directed study for elective courses such as Muggle Studies. Attendance is not compulsory outside of examination periods. I'm certain your expertise will attract eager pupils in due time.'" She dropped the impression and her face contorted. "Self-directed study! As though children can teach themselves about Muggles by reading books! As though my years of experience and my direct appointment by the Ministry of Magic mean nothing!"
She resumed pacing, her arms swinging at her sides with barely contained violence.
"And do you know when the Muggle Studies examination is, Cornelius? The end of the year! One exam! One! At the end of the entire academic year! Which means that under Dumbledore's precious 'policy,' every single student is legally permitted to never set foot in my classroom until June, take a single written test, and walk out! I could sit in that room until I die of old age and no one is obligated to listen to a word I say!"
She stopped in front of the desk and planted both palms flat on the polished wood, leaning forward until her face was uncomfortably close to Fudge's.
"This was deliberate, Cornelius. McGonagall told them. That Scottish COW told every student in the school to boycott my class, and Dumbledore gave her the loophole to do it legally. They planned this. They wanted to humiliate me. They wanted to humiliate YOU."
Fudge sighed. It was a long, defeated, whistling exhalation that seemed to deflate him by several inches. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples with both hands, the bags under his eyes deep and dark enough to look like bruises.
"Dolores," he said quietly, "I'm not sure how much I can help you."
"What do you mean you're not sure?" Dolores snarled.
Fudge looked at her with the hollow, exhausted eyes of a man watching his own career collapse in slow motion and lacking the energy to run.
"I lost the vote, Dolores." The words hung in the air like a death sentence. "Amelia Bones won the leadership challenge. The Wizengamot confirmed it three days ago. She'll be sworn in as the new Minister of Magic in two months. Two months, Dolores. That's all I have left." He picked up his bowler hat, turned it over in his hands, and set it back down again. A nervous tic with no purpose. "The Board of Governors at Hogwarts has been completely restructured as well. Every member loyal to us has been replaced. The new appointees are all aligned with that woman. Selene Sitri."
He said the name like it tasted sour.
"The one who appeared out of nowhere, seized Gringotts in a single afternoon, and somehow convinced the entire financial infrastructure of wizarding Britain that she was doing them a favor. The goblins are gone, the bank is renamed, and every vault in the country is now managed by her people. She controls the money, Dolores. All of it. And anyone she doesn't like simply finds their accounts under review."
Fudge's fingers drummed faster.
"Lucius won't respond to my owls. I've sent six in the past week. Not a single reply. My sources say the Malfoy fortune has been frozen pending an audit. Half the families that used to fund our campaigns have had their accounts flagged for suspicious activity. Our entire donor network has collapsed overnight." He laughed, a hollow, bitter sound that held no humor whatsoever. "We have no money, no political allies, no board support, and in sixty days I won't even have this office. I'll be lucky if they let me keep the hat."
Dolores stared at him. The seething fury behind her eyes didn't diminish. If anything, it hardened into something colder and more focused, the unfocused rage of humiliation crystallizing into the sharp, jagged edges of a plan. "That," she said slowly, "is exactly the point, Cornelius."
Fudge blinked. "I'm sorry?"
Dolores straightened up from the desk and began pacing again, but differently this time. Not the frantic, impotent stomping of before. This was slower. More deliberate. The measured stride of a woman assembling a strategy in real time. "We need to find something," she said. "A scandal. Something major. Something happening at Hogwarts right under everyone's noses that Bones missed. Something so damning, so explosive, so publicly catastrophic that even her precious supporters won't be able to protect her from the fallout!"
She turned to face Fudge, and the smile that spread across her broad face was the most genuinely frightening thing about her. It was a wide, toadish smile that showed too many teeth and reached absolutely nowhere near her eyes.
"If we can uncover a scandal of sufficient magnitude at Hogwarts, the school that Bones swore was safe, the school she staked her credibility on after that dreadful attack, then we call for a vote of no confidence. Her allies on the Wizengamot will have no choice but to turn on her or go down with her. She loses the appointment. You remain Minister. And everything goes back to the way it should be."
Fudge sat up slightly. For the first time since Dolores had begun ranting, something other than resigned misery flickered across his doughy features. Interest. The cautious, greedy interest of a drowning man being shown a piece of driftwood.
"That's..." He hesitated, turning the idea over. "That could work, theoretically. But how? How do we find something like that? Dumbledore runs that school like a fortress. Especially now, with those new wards and that Sitri woman's security measures. We can't just waltz in and start investigating."
"We don't need to waltz anywhere," Dolores said. "I'm already inside. I'm already on the staff. All I need is the authority to act." She stopped pacing and fixed Fudge with a stare that could have curdled dragon's milk. "Use your executive powers, Cornelius. As sitting Minister, you still have the legal authority to appoint a High Inquisitor of Hogwarts. An official Ministry investigator with broad powers to inspect classes, interview students, review staff conduct, and report directly to the Minister's office. Give me that title. Give me the AUTHORITY. And I will find what we need!"
The flicker of interest in Fudge's face guttered and was replaced by something closer to nausea. "Executive powers," he repeated weakly. "Dolores, I... misusing ministerial authority like that could land me in Azkaban. Bones would have grounds to press criminal charges. Abuse of office, overreach, obstruction. Scheming to take down the next duly elected Minister… I'm not supposed to be able to unilaterally appoint an investigator to a school I don't govern. It's not technically legal."
"Nothing is technically legal until someone makes it so, Cornelius."
"But if it fails—"
"Only if we fail will it be a problem!" Dolores snapped, cutting him off with a voice like a guillotine blade. She marched back to the desk and slammed both hands down again, making the inkwell rattle and a stack of parchment slide sideways. "If we succeed, you remain Minister and I become the woman who exposed Hogwarts. If we fail, you are going to lose everything anyway! What exactly are you risking that you haven't already lost?"
Fudge opened his mouth. He looked like a fish that had been pulled from the water and was trying to remember how breathing worked.
Dolores leaned closer. Her perfume, a cloying floral scent that she applied with industrial enthusiasm, invaded Fudge's personal space like a chemical weapon. "Cornelius," she said, and her voice dropped from its shrill register into something quieter. More dangerous. "You have nothing left to lose. Give me the power. Give me the title. Give me the authority to turn every stone in that castle until I find whatever those people are hiding. And there is something, Cornelius. A school with that many secrets, that many strange arrivals, that many incidents swept under the rug? There is always something."
She straightened up and clasped her hands in front of her, resuming the posture of simpering, wide-eyed innocence that she wore like armor.
"Just give me the authority at that school," she said sweetly, "and leave everything to me."
Cornelius Fudge stared at the woman in front of him. He stared at his lime-green bowler hat. He stared at the portrait of himself on the wall that would be taken down in two months and replaced with Amelia Bones's stern, competent face.
His fingers stopped drumming. "I'll draft the decree tonight," he said quietly.
Dolores Umbridge smiled. It was the smile of a toad that had just spotted a particularly fat fly.
"Wonderful," she said. "Absolutely wonderful!"
XXX