Minutes before a call for the celebration was scheduled to sound, Luca and his five roommates stood bare-chested in the empty space left in the middle of their dormitory. The boys had solemn expressions on their faces as Junfeng distributed evenly among them six black orbs taken from a slap-sized bag he held in his hand. The half-naked collective exchanged glances and nodded knowingly to each other, after which they gulped down the pills in unison. Black fur immediately started growing over their skin, perfectly covering them in an imitation of a werewolf pelt. Their hide started shaking, feet stomped, expressions of constipation on faces of all of them.
“Aooo…” Nathaniel first of them to howl and start jumping around, followed by Bennet, Tolkien, and Junfeng, the duo of Luca and Winnetou left in the competition. Winnetou shook more and more as the boys passed him in their chaotic vent of excess energy delivered by the compressed coffee drops, he eventually roared and rammed into standing perfectly still Luca, who closed his eyes and ran occlumency with unmatched determination while his muscles contorted independent of his command. On the ground, the boy ignored his roommate’s jumps over his body and endured the initial minutes of high they were experiencing. In the end, the five of them had to poke and kick him awake, Luca lost in his mind.
“Awesome! Remember to eat one candy every two hours or the fur recedes.” Junfeng sent a thumbs-up to panting the heaviest of them Luca, an effort needed to stay motionless triumphed over the exertion of his roommates who hopped dozens of times on and over the formerly made, now disheveled beds. Six werewolves split down at the Wampus common room to find their childhood friends from before attending Ilvermorny or their interest cliques. The room before the night of thirty-first of October was full of children and young adults in costumes or under charms as it was last year, years before, and long after Luca graduates.
“Who is this dirty rug?” Miranda high-fived his outstretched hand as she sat on their sofa with legs up on a small table, girl went with ‘The Godfather’ suit and bow tie, did something to her sticking out hair and combed it backwards to slip inside her collar, held a cigar in the corner of her mouth, prop transfigured by someone else. Next to her, Nadine in Marilyn Monroe’s famous white dress, the beauty of which got partially ruined by ordinary velcro-strapped sports shoes on her feet, sat posing as a gangster and his companion lady.
“It’s-a me, Luca.” the boy sat on the side of Nadine, prompted by her smile and pat on the furniture.
“No words of praise? I think they’re both great outfits, my pick.” Abigail opened her mouth as she hovered behind the sofa, sticking her head in between the girls, the ghost girl moved to stick her head between Luca and Nadine after he sat down.
“Em, not to rain on your parade, but how is this supposed to fit the theme? Look around.” Luca turned his eyes to see a multitude of scary monsters or mythical creatures, not a single other person in the room with a suit or a dress on.
“Yeah, we didn’t want to call you out on the mismatch since the choice was yours, won fair and square.” Nadine tugged on her skirt and implied the living pair lost some sort of a gamble to dress that way.
“Unique, it’s supposed to be unique!” Abigail defended herself. “There isn’t another occasion to put on a costume, so do it on Halloween.” the ghost girl stubbornly bit her lip and hit Luca on the shoulder, which turned into a massage of his new fur with her eyes opened wide. “I can touch this too, memories of petting Max come back… He was a black schnauzer, so adorable and loyal, just like you.” Abigail talked gibberish again, Luca’s and Nadine’s helpless and sympathetic eyes met. The boy after a year of interacting with the ghost girl, figured out a question he always wanted to know an answer to, but didn’t dare to mention, could as well be asked before they go to the dining hall.
“Alright, tell us how you died, if you want.” Luca inquired, he threw his usual carefulness in interacting with the ghost girl away. She compared him to a dog, all gloves went off, even if he did try to imitate one for the night.
“You know my name is Bagley, right?” Abigail’s head strangely froze, focused on the boy’s face, both her hands continued to stroke his arm up and down.
“That idiot who wanted to ‘liberate the means of production’ and got betrayed by her no-maj assistant paid off by some capitalist?” Miranda threw out a bombshell, she apparently heard about the ghost girl’s story before.
“If you insist on simplifying my murder, kind of, yes.” Abigail sulked with her cheeks puffed.
“So, what’s your obsession? Also, tell us more about what were you doing, Miranda is probably incapable of remembering anything extra.” Luca asked with interest what regret anchored her to the world of living.
“Hey, I already know a lot! But yeah, a children’s book that features Bagley as a joke is all I know, cool we sit with someone who made history.” Miranda got excited to have a celebrity friend and leaned over Nadine while pulling her legs on the sofa.
“Nothing to say, unless you promise a hundred hours of hugs.” Abigail bargained for her fix, Luca groaned and quickly brought the number down to ten, his bottom line. “Ten is fine! My obsession is to establish Marxism over America.” the ghost girl stated in a plain voice, the girls reacted like it was nothing extraordinary in opposition to Luca’s violent change of expression hidden under his temporary fur, his voice cracked.
“You can’t be flippin’-flopin’ serious?” the boy’s considerable mental faculty didn’t help, the information processed and absolute confirmation of Abigail’s craziness he suspected from the moment they met almost fried his brain. How was a witch in contact with the ideology and went to spread it to no-maj world?
“What’s Marxism?” Nadine asked innocently.
“Oh, you’re interested? Splendid!” Abigail cheered up, interrupted by Luca’s downwards punch on her head that sent her down the floor.
“Don’t ask, the word doesn’t exist!” Luca soaked himself in cold sweat, what if the ideology spread and wizards gathered a crusade to seize the means of production like Abigail did? Father scaremongered him about ‘Red Threat’ his entire childhood and praised the current American system up to the skies, the system that bankrupted his family eventually, but Luca’s brainwashing persisted despite that. His imagination spun out of control as the girls looked at him quizzically until Abigail came back in a couple of seconds.
“What was that for?!” the ghost girl retaliated by stepping on Luca’s hair from above, or trying as she couldn’t actually move them.
“Never mention Marxism again in front of them, or I will permanently smack you down like a whack-a-mole. Next topic, murder.” Luca categorically prohibited her from infecting Miranda and Nadine.
“We will research it on our own then, you can’t stop us!” Miranda got into her rebellious mood and the boy knew his intervention came to nothing, he glared up at the ghost girl with malice, his shining ruby eyes frightened onlookers.
“Forget about this Mixism, alright?” Nadine grabbed Miranda’s shoulder and pleaded sincerely as she saw Luca was serious in his will for them to stay ignorant.
“Hmph, whatever. A random no-maj sent a bullet through your stomach?” Miranda agreed with her friend’s plea and looked blatantly at the splash of silver on Abigail’s blouse and high-waisted long skirt visible because the ghost girl floated in front of them, out of Luca’s potential striking range.
“I was leading a protest against child labour in mines of Wyoming when my assistant pulled out a pistol and shot me as I stood on a stage to give a speech. Really can’t fathom why Wizarding World all think of me as funny and kooky, do they want no-maj children to die miles underground at the age of seven for nickel a day? We should do something about it.” Abigail spoke with sadness.
“Were both your parents wizards, what’s the situation with Bagley family today?” Luca understood her sentiment but needed to expand the background of the ghost girl to envision her situation when she felt the need to go to the no-maj world to preach Marx before communism was even a thing anywhere in the world, the boy knew she died in the eighteen-nineties at the age of twenty-one, Fontaine asked her about it one Sunday.
“I was the only child, both wizards. Cousin continues to live in Boca Grande, I go to his birthday parties. He looks pretty bad, last living relative I knew as a teen.” Abigail was ready to tell the group whatever they wanted from the start, it wasn’t anything taboo in her mind.
“Boca…?” Luca started to get interrupted by Miranda who knew what that was.
“Wizarding village at the southernmost tip of Florida, Dad takes us boating there every second summer. How it felt to die?” she slipped in her own question to the ghost girl.
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“Obviously painful and desperate, what revelation did you expect?” Abigail shrugged, she didn’t have any insights into the process besides what anyone could think of. “I don’t remember what happened during the time of transition to a ghost, but after that, I learned that my killer and the owner of the mine who hired and threatened him got the punishment they deserved after a team of enforcers investigated my missing case, a lifetime behind bars. They must have spread my way of death as a farce between themselves before a journalist picked it up, and now everybody knows. I went to haunt people who hired and supervised children to work there, almost getting myself in trouble with MACUSA, luckily my victims were too scared to tell anyone. I did achieve my small goal of getting that mine to be operated exclusively by adults.” the ghost girl reminisced about what she did around and after her death.
“Why did you go out to the no-maj world at all though?” Luca still stayed skeptical of that mystifying for him behaviour.
“No-maj lives are so short, and they worked fourteen-hour days with no vacation, nothing! In comparison, wizards are lazy and pampered, we can get everything we want with a wave of a wand, and even then, our ancestors were too poor to make ends meet in Europe and had to immigrate here, just like the oppressed no-maj masses…” Abigail got fired up and proclaimed those problems loudly for the young wizards dressed as monsters around them to hear clearly, a lot of doubtful at first, turned emotional faces indicated that Wampus house members listened to her earnestly. The tirade got obstructed by a sound of opening notes of Funeral March that chased the youthful masqueraders out of the common room, Luca extended his arm for Nadine to hold him and Miranda on both sides, and the trio joined the long queue before exit doors somewhere at the end of it.
“Good for you Abi, I agree with your goals. Shame that there were no protection rings back then.” Nadine sighed at the fate of her friend and supported her efforts.
“Think I can send you to Afterlife for good if I shatter the statue made from petrificus?” Luca’s thoughts turned a dangerous for the population of specters' corner, which earned him an elbow put between his ribs that belonged to Nadine.
“Yeah, that’s a worthy cause to sacrifice for, those bastards shouldn’t laugh at you.” Miranda also admired her ghost friend who hovered behind them now.
“Thanks, and don’t try it on me, heartless mongler.” Abigail tried to freeze Luca’s neck, but his fur stopped her palm strike. The procession walked through one of the corridors that led to the dining hall, Luca’s ears picked a familiar calling from behind, so the boy stopped and looked back.
“Rrrau, meow, rrr…” anxious Ringo nimbly weaved between the young wizard’s legs and made an ear-piercing hubbub at the top of his little lungs, as if warning Luca of something.
“What’s going on, somebody dared to bully you?” agitated Luca asked the cat that stopped right at his feet and humanely pointed behind with his paws and entire body language. At this moment, a ruckus erupted in front of Luca and his group. Wampus members accustomed to disputes settled by the use of wands didn’t think much of it at first, but the cries and shouts got overwhelming until a wave of people reported in roars like while playing the game of telephone.
“Attack, foreign attack!” information spread throughout the line of Wampus students from the front, Luca and his girls were one of the last to know as they turned their gazes previously captivated by Ringo forward and went on their tip-toes to observe. With no hesitation, Luca slapped his trousers to send magic into a specific set of woven runes, conjuring a school uniform on his upper body, which moved the stretched pocket with his belongings to around his stomach, his wand from belt to his cuffs, as the outfit he got gifted was designed to do, and yanked the tentacle out in preparation to head back. His mind flashed as he remembered Makris triplets leading the procession, transfigured into half-men, half-man-eating gorillas with blood on their faces, girlfriends tied with a rope all over getting grilled over an illusion of a bonfire back in the common room, which assured Luca as most of the older Knight’s were at the front naturally, his job to secure the back if attackers circle the castle’s corridors to come from there. Just as he figured all this out, a shadow jumped above heads of students ten rows ahead of him, followed by cries of pain and flashes of charms those around there fired.
“Intersections…” Luca muttered as he ran to the place where an unidentified creature wrecked havoc, the boy couldn’t stand the time needed to get at the point of accident and leaped up with help from his left hand that pushed on a shoulder of the nearest male student, still a considerable distance from there, he nonetheless got a visual on the target and thanks to his brief but exceptional quidditch carrer, the boy fired a beam of red at the rampaging thing. Unlike the tickling spells from other young wizards, Luca’s dense and abundant magic pierced through the creature’s resistance and it’s armour, a string made of plain blueish metal that absorbed part of rainbow-coloured splashes students sent at the attacker, the clever measure clearly made specifically for this operation, targeted at young wizards with undeveloped magic powers, usless against adults and Luca.
Wampus students worked on the same impulse as he had after the initial shock and went forward to where the attack happened en masse, he had to ram into various witches, vampires, and zombies to get them out of the way. It wasn’t a long way, he had to push down six people before he passed the wall of students who sent spells that kept hitting ugly, bones-thin, bipedal creature with ferocious dog’s or wolf’s face, covered in mostly grey-ish fur, a werewolf that was already motionless among screaming from pain kids scratched by it. Luca ignored whatever the souroundings shouted about and the bleeding colleagues, he didn’t know any healing spells, and ran to the three-way-intersection where two more werewolves were busy biting the bodies of students overturned by their leader wherever they could, to chants of spells from desperately outputting at them another wall of little wizards, all lower in height than Luca. The boy quickly sent two more accurate red beams at them and saw more werewolves incoming vaguely from the direction of the castle’s main entrance the corridor eventually led to.
“Protego!” Luca rapidly sent his barriers to unravel in the corridor until he stacked ten of them, thinking that they ought to hold for a while, he turned to see a student with dull eyes who pointed his wand at him and muttered softly, a beam of red splashed and his protection ring activated. Luca froze for a second, he didn’t expect a backstab like that, only to see more and more people randomly stunning their colleagues who at first reacted just like he did and fell in incomprehension onto the stone floors. The second red beam had to splash onto his barrier for the boy to snap out of it, and start sweating like a ray of sunlight in the previous second busy trying to melt the sands of Sahara into glass fell onto him miraculously, ‘what if it was Avada and I didn’t have my ring?’, Luca didn’t dare to think anymore, a red beam flew and in turn stunned the student who attacked him before Luca could take action.
“Make them unconscious, fight back!” Nadine who only managed to catch up with him was the one yelling, Miranda behind her because she wore formal shoes for men to complete her outfit, which made her run awkwardly. Abigail flew overhead only to get stopped by Luca’s barriers, she went into the wall to harass the werewolves stuck on the other side the boy stopped from approaching the crowds, the ghost girl seemed to have an idea on how to help.
“Listen to her, gather, senior years to the front! Don’t take this place, you’re a first-year at a glance! Kneel, let others aim over your bodies!” Luca yelled, whatever chaos in the corridor, it seemed that the real threat came from werewolves. “You stay here and try to coordinate the blockade, get people who can cast a barrier, magic of kids doesn’t harm them!” Luca ordered Nadine and Miranda, happy in his heart that nobody but a couple of first-years ran away or lost their heads in panic after initial confusion, Wampus students dealt with the emergency as well as anyone could hope for and swiftly got rid of abnormally behaving colleagues. Luca cast the last barrier and sprinted to the back over motionless bodies, screams particularly intense over there.
And he was right to be worried, in subconscious order of age and hierarchy the probability of first years half-politely, half out of awkwardness, to leave the common room last turned extremely high, the trembling little sheep who knew only how to fire a feeble grey spell out of their wands no match for werewolves that kept tasting their blood. Luca witnessed a werewolf standing up with his fangs covered in blood from the body of a student who howled in pain, lunged to the side, and leaned to take a bite again of a student crying as she curled up into a fetal position. A half-naked boy covered in black fur, recognized by his headband as Winnetou, ran up and managed to put his wand inside the occupied wolf’s ear, stunning one of the attackers only to have another one jump on him from the side.
“Stupefy!” Luca hit the mutt in his chest mid-air, Winnetou rolled in the direction of his rescue, boys briefly locked eyes to acknowledge the presence of each other as Luca fired at the speed of a manual-trigger pistol, his throat strained to the limit, in the direction of werewolves that approached continuously from the distant crossroads on the path Wampus students traversed a minute before. Easily cleaning them up from nearest to furthest, he couldn’t help but notice the eyes of the dogs seemed to be filled with sadness and lack of hope, their movements kind of reluctant if not counting their leaders who rushed in eagerly.
“Quite a coincidence that I practiced putting wand into ears for a year…” Winnetou whispered absentmindedly to himself as he stood next to Luca, the boy who overheard it had to roll his eyes in annoyance as he secured this corridor too with barriers behind the last of fallen students, he discovered a patch of black fur there and trotted to check on it.
“Bennet! Wake up!” Luca shouted at his roommate who lay in a small puddle of his own blood, bitten on his forearm and scratched on his chest, a sad wooden stump left of his wand still clutched tightly.
“I’m not asleep…” he turned out to be conscious with closed eyes, Luca didn’t know what to do with him, the only medical knowledge he heard about to not let the patient fall asleep or they automatically knock on Heaven’s door.
“Move to the walls, wounded in front of you!” repeated instructions coming in the voice that belonged to one of the Makris brothers made the boy look back, he saw two of the triplets coming with their wands ready, leading dozens of upperclassmen that left people every couple of steps to take care of the bitten.
“What happened in the front?!”, “Good job!” Luca’s and one of the brother’s statements overlapped, the second brother explained while someone dragged Bennet away from the barriers.
“There are wizards holding ground who prevent us from going to the dining hall, there must be a battle going on there! Other houses probably got attacked too!” this knowledge presented Luca with a choice on whether to try and help the dining hall or the house of Thunderbird which lived in a tower on their side of the castle, closest to their present location.
“Grab this, the most important is to secure the corridor!” Luca quickly handed over his short spear to Winnetou and war hammer to one of the Makris brothers, taking out and gulping down flask after flask of enhancers until none were left as he finally wielded his sword in one hand, wand in the other. The boy blinked and the world presented itself differently before his eyes as the potions kicked in.