“Then I should’ve let Snape take you!” Harry shouted.

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“Harry,” said Lupin hurriedly, “don’t you see? All this time we’ve thought Sirius betrayed your parents, and Peter tracked him down — but it was the other way around, don’t you see? Peter betrayed your mother and father — Sirius tracked Peter down —”

“THAT’S NOT TRUE!” Harry yelled. “HE WAS THEIR SECRET-KEEPER! HE SAID SO BEFORE YOU TURNED UP. HE SAID HE KILLED THEM!”

He was pointing at Black, who shook his head slowly; the sunken eyes were suddenly over bright.

“Harry…I as good as killed them,” he croaked. “I persuaded Lily and James to change to Peter at the last moment, persuaded them to use him as Secret-Keeper instead of me…I’m to blame, I know it…The night they died, I’d arranged to

check on Peter, make sure he was still safe, but when I arrived at his hiding place, he’d gone. Yet there was no sign of a struggle. It didn’t feel right. I was scared. I set out for your parents’ house straight away. And when I saw their house, destroyed, and their bodies…I realized what Peter must’ve done…what I’d done….”

His voice broke. He turned away.

“Enough of this,” said Lupin, and there was a steely note in his voice Harry had never heard before. “There’s one certain way to prove what really happened. Ron, give me that rat.”

“What are you going to do with him if I give him to you?” Ron asked Lupin tensely.

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Ron hesitated. Then at long last, he held out Scabbers and Lupin took him. Scabbers began to squeak without stopping, twisting and turning, his tiny black eyes bulging in his head. “Ready, Sirius?” said Lupin.

Black had already retrieved Snape’s wand from the bed. He approached Lupin and the struggling rat, and his wet eyes suddenly seemed to be burning in his face.

“Together?” he said quietly.

“I think so”, said Lupin, holding Scabbers tightly in one hand and his wand in the other. “On the count of three. One — two — THREE!”

A flash of blue-white light erupted from both wands; for a moment, Scabbers was frozen in midair, his small gray form twisting madly — Ron yelled — the rat fell and hit the floor. There was another blinding flash of light and then —

It was like watching a speeded-up film of a growing tree. A head was shooting upward from the ground; limbs were sprouting; a moment later, a man was standing where Scabbers had been, cringing and wringing his hands. Crookshanks was spitting and snarling on the bed; the hair on his back was standing up.

He was a very short man, hardly taller than Harry and Hermione. His thin, colorless hair was unkempt and there was a large bald patch on top. He had the shrunken appearance of a plump man who has lost a lot of weight in a short time. His skin looked grubby, almost like Scabbers’s fur, and something of the rat lingered around his pointed nose and his very small, watery eyes. He looked around at them all, his breathing fast and shallow. Harry saw his eyes dart to the door and back again.



“I thought we bonded,” Annie said.

Bernie scratched his arm. “Yeah, maybe. I guess you’re okay. I don’t know. I can’t think straight. I just want to soak in some cold water or something.”

“I talked to Betty,” I said to Bernie. “She’d like to stay married, but she has some requests.”

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“I’m going to take you home and get you some salve,” Diesel said, “but first I need to know about Delvina. How’d he manage to get you and Annie?”

“I was nuts,” Bernie said. “I was trying to get to Annie, but you moved her out of her house, and I couldn’t find her. So I got this idea that maybe she left something be-hind that would give me a clue. You know, like an address written on a pad. It happens all the time on television. Prob-lem was, I broke into her house and ran into two goons who were tearing the place apart. I’m so dumb. I just walked right in on them.”

“Delvina was the original owner of the necklace,” Annie said. “We overheard him and his driver talking and pieced the story together. The necklace had a bank account num-ber engraved on the back of it. It sounded like Delvina was being investigated for tax fraud, and he didn’t want the necklace on his property, so he gave it to his girlfriend. When he found out she hocked it he almost had a seizure.”

Annie started to scratch her arm and stopped in mid-scratch and rammed her hands into her pockets. “He came really close to getting the necklace back, but for some rea-son the pawnshop owner decided to fake the robbery. So of course, Delvina came looking for me.”

“It was bad timing that I happened along,” Bernie said. “They didn’t find the necklace in Annie’s house, but since I broke in they figured I had to have some connection to An-nie. And then they were fooling around and found her number in my cell phone. So one of Delvina’s men called her and said he was me.”

“He sort of sounded like you,” Annie said. “He said he had something important to say to me. I was hoping you’d calmed down and wanted to talk. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.”

“Annie didn’t want to go far, so they set a meeting for a coffee house half a block away. When she got there, they snatched her,” Bernie said.

“Why didn’t you take your purse?” I asked Annie.