Despite the Calming Draught wearing off considerably by this point, Valerie felt the most serene she had been all task while she walked with Joey's hand in her own. She imagined this was what it would feel like were Shane still alive and she walking with him through Jarrell Cove State Park.

But then suddenly his hand in hers grew stiff and lifeless, causing the Wampus to spin around and look at him. But rather than find the hopeful No-Maj boy (of whom she had had a growing suspicion of regardless) there was a dummy. A dummy. And then came the words of a complete stranger who had the audacity to be beaming at her like some Cheshire Cat. Her wand hand nearly forgot itself and for the briefest of moments had thrust her wand so it was pointed right between the woman's eyes.

Congratulations? She could feel all the rage she had managed to ignore resurfacing ten fold and with just the most subtle flick of the wrist she could send a hex at this woman. Stinging, perhaps. She deserved it. They all did. Bleeding the goodness out of a No-Maj and making a mockery of her ancestry.

The dummy, Joey, was no longer simply that. It was a pawn.

Somehow finding it in her to lower her wand, the sixteen year old snatched the bottle away from the woman with an ugly sneer and welcomed the feeling of being pulled from the navel. She had traveled all the way across the Atlantic to be made a mockery of? May her Calming Draught hold just a little bit longer...