His voice echoed around the room, but there was no answer except a tiny scuffing sound to the right of the fire.

“Who’s there?” he called, wondering whether it was just a mouse.

Kreacher the house-elf crept into view. He looked highly delighted about something, though he seemed to have recently sustained a nasty injury to both hands, which were heavily bandaged.

“It’s the Potter boy’s head in the fire,” Kreacher informed the empty kitchen, stealing furtive, oddly triumphant glances at Harry. “What has he come for, Kreacher wonders?”

“Where’s Sirius, Kreacher?” Harry demanded.

The house-elf gave a wheezy chuckle.

“Master has gone out, Harry Potter.”

“Where’s he gone? Where’s he gone, Kreacher?”

Kreacher merely cackled.

“I’m warning you!” said Harry, fully aware that his scope for inflicting punishment upon Kreacher was almost non-existent in this position. “What about Lupin? Mad-Eye? Any of them, are any of them there?”

“Nobody here but Kreacher!” said the elf gleefully, and turning away from Harry he began to walk slowly towards the door at the end of the kitchen. “Kreacher thinks he will have a little chat with his mistress now, yes, he hasn’t had a chance in a long time, Kreacher’s master has been keeping him away from her—”

“Where has Sirius gone?” Harry yelled after the elf. “Kreacher, has he gone to the Department of Mysteries?”

Kreacher stopped in his tracks. Harry could just make out the back of his bald head through the forest of chair legs before him.

“Master does not tell poor Kreacher where he is going,” said the elf quietly.

“But you know!” shouted Harry. “Don’t you? You know where he is!”

There was a moment’s silence, then the elf let out his loudest cackle yet.

“Master will not come back from the Department of Mysteries!” he said gleefully. “Kreacher and his mistress are alone again!”

And he scurried forwards and disappeared through the door to the hall.

“You—!”

But before he could utter a single curse or insult, Harry felt a great pain at the top of his head; he inhaled a lot of ash and, choking, found himself being dragged backwards through the flames, until with a horrible abruptness he was staring up into the wide, pallid face of Professor Umbridge who had dragged him backwards out of the fire by the hair and was now bending his neck back as far as it would go, as though she were going to slit his throat.

“You think,” she whispered, bending Harry’s neck back even further, so that he was looking up at the ceiling, “that after two Nifflers—”

“I was going to let one more foul, scavenging little creature enter my office without my knowledge? I had Stealth Sensoring Spells placed all around my doorway after the last one got in, you foolish boy. Take his wand,” she barked at someone he could not see, and he felt a hand grope inside the chest pocket of his robes and remove the wand. “Hers, too.”

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<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
It was a mark of the seriousness of the situation that Hermione made no objection to the smashing up of the Transfiguration department.	\|	Harry heard a scuffle over by the door and knew that Hermione had also just had her wand wrested from her.

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