The Nightingale: Dorcas Meadowes
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Summary
There was a price for liberty. Bent feathers and broken wings. Yet, this was more acceptable to Dorcas than the cost of complacency. If Tom Riddle was to be her cage, then she would beat herself bloody against the bars of him, bending him just as surely as she bent herself.
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“There you are,” Tom’s voice broke the silence and made her jump. She turned to see him enter the classroom. He stopped halfway between the door and Dorcas when he saw his own body lying on the ground in front of her. His gaze never left his other self and he seemed to force himself forward with a tremendous effort.
“What are you doing?” he asked, a quaver in his voice. He took his eyes off of the body momentarily to look at Dorcas.
“Trying to defeat a boggart,” Dorcas responded darkly. “I’m not getting on at all.”
As Tom approached, the boggart gave a loud crack! But it curiously remained the same.
“What did you mean, Tom, when you said you conquer your fears by eliminating them? Do you know how to conquer death?”
“No,” Tom said, staring at the boggart in the offensive shape of his own dead self. “But I’m going to find out if it’s possible.”
“I want to help you,” Dorcas heard herself say.
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- Part 1 of The Nightingale: Dorcas Meadowes
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Summary
There was a price for liberty. Bent feathers and broken wings. Yet, this was more acceptable to Dorcas than the cost of complacency. If Tom Riddle was to be her cage, then she would beat herself bloody against the bars of him, bending him just as surely as she bent herself.
:::
People disappear all the time. A soldier vanishes on the field of battle; missing in action. A housewife fed up with the routine of her life; runaway. A child last seen playing with his mates when the streetlights come on and dinner is laid on the table; abducted.
There’s that woman pilot who took off into the great wide whiteness of the clouds, Amelia Earhart. Or the journalist Ambrose Bierce. Glenn Miller. The Lindbergh baby.
In my fifth year at Hogwarts, a boy vanished like a puff of smoke. Callum Sayre. He dated my cousin, Gemma––had proposed, I think. She wore a ring from him, anyway. And then he was gone. No trace of him was left. He just disappeared.
But he turned up twelve years later. A black and white photograph of a dead body on a London street.
People disappear all the time. Some, like Callum, reappear.
I prayed that I wouldn’t be making a similar reappearance.
Series
- Part 2 of The Nightingale: Dorcas Meadowes