Scout fought to focus. That was Bella returning. "Run!" he called to her, desperately.
She was already dropping to her knees by his side and pressing a clean handkerchief to the gash. "What happened? No, never mind that." She glared up at Harry. "Get help."
Harry was angsting.
"Don't just stand there."
Harry swallowed compulsively. He didn't go.
"He's dangerous." Scout warned. He thought, if he could warn Bella about Harry, at least that would be something. He could feel himself losing it.
"Sssh. Don't try to talk.. You! Give me your cellphone." The strange boy seemed to have gone into some kind of fugue state.
"I didn't mean to do it."
Bella, struggling to work out how his phone worked while keeping pressure on Scout's wound, snapped "What?"
"It was a freak accident!"
"911. Rawley Academy. Boy's Common Room. Somebody's lost a lot of blood. Yes, now. OK. ..what did you say?"
"He fell, and impaled his neck on an oar!" Even as he said it, Harry realised that thriving as a dark lord of whatever would require better lies in emergencies.
Bella gave him the world's weirdest look.
"Vampire" Scout said urgently. Any minute now, Harry would fall on Bella. Hell, he'd nearly fallen on Bella himself, and he wasn't evil.
Bella kept her eyes on Harry, who was now slowly backing away. Will believed in magic, and she believed in engineering. This couldn't be real, but Scout was so pale and weak. Where had all the blood he'd lost go? She had seen the injury. Two tiny punctures, set close together. She picked up the maligned oar. Not a drop of red was on it. She glanced wildly round the room - where was Krudsky, who knew about this stuff, when you needed him? Then she saw, in a dim mirror - absence of Harry.
Scout would have to maintain the handkerchief compress himself. Rising to her feet, Bella tilted the oar like a lance under one arm and inexorably trod toward Harry.
"I had to do it. It's like, a compulsion" he bleated.
"Not to Scout." Grace was always saying "It's in my nature" when Bella caught her doing things. It was the last worst argument to use on her.
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