"Norbert! Here — who's a good dragon — "
Draco dangled a piece of meat in front of the small dragon's snout, doing his best impression of someone who was totally comfortable with this and not at all nervous about the teeth.
The dragon looked at him. Looked at the meat. Snapped for it with slightly more enthusiasm than Draco had been prepared for.
"There you go —"
"Careful," Hagrid said, from across the room, approximately four seconds too late to be useful.
Norbert had found the edge of Draco's finger. Draco yelped. Norbert, startled by the yelp, let out a small burst of flame that did nothing helpful to anyone's blood pressure.
Kevin, sitting with Hagrid by the fire, waited for the smoke to settle.
"He's going to be enormous," Kevin said.
"Oh, enormous," Hagrid agreed, with the expression of someone who finds this entirely delightful rather than logistically problematic.
Harry was watching Draco try to recover his dignity from across the room. "You sure about this?" he said quietly.
"About what specifically?"
"Him." A nod at Draco, who was now trying to let Norbert smell his hand as though he'd been doing this for years.
"He's twelve," Kevin said. "He's been told his whole life that the world has a hierarchy and he's near the top of it and everyone who disagrees is inferior. That's not a character flaw, it's an education." He watched Draco shift back slightly as Norbert leaned in with interest. "He's perfectly capable of being better than that. He just needs to meet someone who isn't impressed by it."
"Scarface," Draco said, from across the room, not looking up from the dragon, "I can hear you."
"I know," Kevin said. "I said it loud enough."
Draco's ears went red. But he didn't argue, which was its own kind of data.
Kevin snapped his fingers — a small spark, carefully aimed — and caught Draco on the back of his robes. Draco yelped and spun. Norbert, startled again, unleashed a much more impressive burst of flame this time and got Draco's hair.
The subsequent pandemonium was significant.
Kevin laughed until he couldn't see clearly.
Later, while Harry, Ron, and Hermione clustered around Norbert and Draco worked on restorative spells for his singed fringe, Kevin settled back in with Hagrid.
"Uncle Hagrid," he said, at a lull in the conversation, "there are unicorns in the Forbidden Forest, aren't there?"
"Few, yeah." Hagrid topped up his mug. "Why?"
"I was reading about them. Magical properties. The blood especially — extraordinary stuff. Extends life, supposedly."
Harry's head came up from across the room. So did Hermione's.
"Where'd you hear that?" Hagrid said, not quite sharply, but with a different quality of attention.
"Creature properties textbook. It mentioned that unicorn blood keeps someone alive even if they're close to death — but there's a terrible cost for killing one to take it."
Hagrid nodded, slowly. "Half-life, they call it. Dark magic, taking a unicorn's blood by force. Cursed life. Not worth it."
"Right. But it sounded like it had been done. Recently." Kevin kept his tone curious, nothing more. "Has there been anything like that in the forest?"
The room had gone quiet.
Hagrid set his mug down. The change in his expression was visible — the open warmth closing slightly, a heaviness settling in.
"Few weeks back," he said. "Found one dead. Silver blood everywhere. Someone'd killed it." A pause. "And yesterday — found fresh silver blood on the ground. Another one hurt."
The silence was different now.
Harry looked at Kevin with an expression that said: you knew to ask that.
Kevin did not look like someone who had known anything. He looked like someone receiving new information and finding it troubling.
"Uncle Hagrid," he said, "all five of us are here and we want to help. Let us come with you tonight. You said yourself — we took down a troll. Five extra pairs of eyes in the forest are better than one."
"Absolutely not," Hagrid said. "Children in the Forbidden Forest — "
"To help you specifically," Kevin said. "Not wandering. With you. Your call on everything."
Harry jumped in. "We can handle ourselves. You know that."
Hagrid wavered. Kevin watched the calculation — his discomfort with risk to children against his genuine worry about whatever was hunting in his forest, and the knowledge that he hadn't been able to handle it alone.
"Draco too," Kevin said, glancing over. "No getting out of it."
Draco met his eyes. Understood, from the look, that there was no negotiation here. "Fine," he said, with the dignity of someone accepting rather than agreeing.
Hagrid led them in with his crossbow and a lantern that threw orange light onto the fog threading between the trees. The forest absorbed sound differently at night — the rustles and movements of it closer and less traceable, the dark between the trunks absolute.
Kevin held Hermione's hand. He'd picked up a crowbar over Christmas from a Muggle hardware shop — solid iron, good heft, the kind of object that solved problems that magic couldn't — and had it in his free hand.
Hagrid and Fang took one trail. The five of them took another.
Harry led without being asked, which Kevin noted as character development.
The dead unicorn was silver-white in the dim light, extraordinary even in death. The shape crouched over it resolved slowly from the shadows — cloaked, hunched, moving with a feeding intensity that made Hermione's grip tighten and Draco take an involuntary step backward.
Harry grabbed his forehead. The scar.
Ron breathed: "What is that?"
The shape turned.
"Go," Kevin said quietly, and then hooves were thundering and a centaur burst from the treeline and the shape recoiled and swept away into the dark like smoke finding a crack.
They stood in the clearing and let the silence come back to them.
Firenze. The centaur stood enormous and calm, reading them each in turn, and when his eyes found Harry they stayed there.
He explained it without softening it: the cloaked thing was Voldemort. What remained of him. Unicorn blood kept him tethered to existence, barely, insufficiently, expensively. The cost was a cursed half-life — but the alternative, for something that refused to die, was worse.
Harry went very still. Kevin watched him process it.
The puzzle was assembling itself in Harry's mind — not all of it yet, not the full shape, but enough. The Philosopher's Stone. Flamel. Voldemort, alive and seeking. The pieces were laid out and the picture was coming.
Hagrid came crashing through the undergrowth shortly after, read the situation, and got them out.
In the Gryffindor common room, the fire burning low, Harry paced.
"It's Snape. It has to be Snape. He's been working for Voldemort this whole time — getting the Stone, finding a way through the protections — "
"Harry." Kevin was on the sofa. Hermione had settled beside him with her feet tucked under her, and he was absentmindedly turning the ends of her hair between his fingers while he watched the fire. "What do you actually know, versus what you're inferring?"
Harry ran through it — the limp on Halloween, the jinx during Quidditch, Fluffy's corridor.
"Right," Kevin said. "And what do you know about what would happen if Snape wanted the Stone and had access to it already?"
Harry stopped pacing.
"He'd have taken it," Hermione said quietly, from beside Kevin. "Immediately. Months ago."
"So," Kevin said, "either he's very patient and strategic — "
"Or," Harry said, "he isn't the one trying to take it."
The fire popped. Ron, sitting on the floor, had gone thoughtful.
"Dumbledore leaves sometimes," Kevin said. "He's not always in the castle. When he's gone — " He looked at Harry. " — whatever protection his presence provides goes with him."
Harry sat down heavily. "How do you know all of this?"
"I read a lot." Kevin paused. "And Hagrid didn't find that dragon egg by accident. Someone knew what would work on Hagrid and made sure it was available."
Harry went white.
"Someone pumped Hagrid for the Fluffy information," Kevin said. "Through the egg. Hagrid didn't know he was being manipulated — he's too trusting and too proud of his creatures. But someone figured that out."
"We have to tell Dumbledore — "
"Tell him what, exactly? That you figured out his plan?" Kevin looked at him. "He knows, Harry. He's five steps ahead of all of us. The question isn't whether to tell him — it's what you do with the time you have before he needs you."
"Before he needs me?"
Kevin didn't answer that directly. He went back to looking at the fire.
"Get stronger," he said. "Both of you." He glanced at Ron. "All of you. And ask Hagrid who gave him the egg. That conversation matters."
He nudged Hermione. "Bed."
She unfolded herself from the sofa, gave Harry and Ron a look that was sympathetic and firm in equal parts, and followed Kevin to the dormitory stairs.
Harry sat in the empty common room, looking at the fire.
Before he needs me.
He thought about that for a long time.
The next morning, Harry was at Hagrid's hut at seven. The egg conversation took five minutes. Music, Hagrid said. Play him a tune. Sends him right off. And the man in the pub — large hood, didn't show his face.
Clue acquired.
Dumbledore departed the castle three days later. Kevin heard about it from Hermione, who'd heard it from Percy, who had heard it from McGonagall's tone of voice during a brief exchange in the corridor. The school felt slightly different without him — not less safe, exactly, but like a building when the person who keeps the boiler running has stepped out.
Kevin had been having a quiet week. Snape had left him alone. The potions work was in a good rhythm. He'd been sleeping properly.
The System spoke on a Tuesday evening, in the library, without warning.
[Ding! Mission issued.] [Assist Harry Potter in defeating Voldemort — crippled form — tonight.] [Mission Reward: Constitution +10, Magic +10.]
Kevin looked at the notification.
Looked at Hermione across the table, her quill moving steadily through an essay.
Looked back at the notification.
Tonight, he thought. All right then.