Declan Alectric checked his cell phone the moment he made it into the hall outside of Oliver Kent's room. "Shit," he hissed under his breath, twisting his wrist for the time on the face of his old leather watch. "Shit, shit, shit," he muttered, looking around the room for some neutral space to accept the face time request that filled the screen, his phone vibrating in his palm.

The timing couldn't have been worse for this. What an idiot he'd been, staying like he had when he knew he was on a time crunch.

God, if he found out now his whole plan would be sooo screwed.

Declan hurried down the stairs and out the door of the Inn, ignoring it when Rita Skeeter called his name in her sticky sweet tone, and hurrying 'round the outside of the Inn to the woods just beyond.

The incoming call had directed to voicemail, dropped, and been re-dialed twice now.

Declan skidded into a small clearing of trees, glanced around to be sure there was nothing location specific around him. He screwed up his face, feeling his features change and twist, his hair color drain and he gasped as he became himself again.

He accepted the call with a swipe of his thumb, holding the phone up.

"There you are! Finally! Where on earth are you?"

Declan sighed heavily. "I'm sorry, I'm on my way, alright, something came up is all and --"

"Well where are you now, and I'll come disapparate you home? You're missing the party."

"I'm almost there," he lied.

"Your Gran is really concerned, she thought you were just upstairs, you know. You have to tell people when you leave. This sneaking out business has really got to stop..."

"I know, I'm sorry."

"Later on, can we talk about what's going on? Why you've been sneaking off? I know your Gran can be a little... overprotective... but you're her whole world. She doesn't want to lose you, you know? I don't either, for that matter. We love you very much, and we just want you to be happy. Maybe if we talk about whatever it is that's going on, I can help you. We can talk to Gran together about it."

Declan nodded absently. "Alright, sure. Yeah. I'm almost there, okay? I'm hanging up!"

"Okay but --"

"Byyyyyy-eeee!" Declan slid his thumb over the screen again quickly and shoved his phone in his pocket before he reached under his shirt for the time turner.

The beetle in his pocket was in for a very strange ride indeed.

Viktor Krum couldn't stop thinking about mermish. It hadn't taken long before he figured out the connection between the golden egg and what Fleur Delacor was doing with all those books. The shrieking sound was the way the Mermish spoke - like a dolphin or a whale. But Fleur had checked out every volume on Mermish - there were surprisingly few in the Hogwarts Library, especially since one of the largest undisturbed community of them, protected by the Headmaster of Hogwarts. If anywhere was to have an abundance of information on them, it ought to be here.

Viktor paced. Back and forth and back and forth, a furious classical record playing on the phonograph, his fists balled as he moved to the thunderous music that seemed to match his mood. Through the window, he caught glimpses of the Beauxbaton carriage where it sat out on the grounds at Hogwarts, the students slipping in and out as they went about their days...

He could see the paddock, too, the one where the beautiful winged horses that pulled the carriage stayed, running about and tossing their pale manes. They fascinated Viktor, of course, and he had stood and watched them for hours at a time before. They'd been the only living beings at Hogwarts he'd been interested in spending time with before he met Hermyone. Hermyown, who had shown him the book about the horses that still sat on his night stand, who he fiercely wished he could ask about the Mermish voices in the golden egg... But they'd been instructed to figure it out alone, and if even Fleur wasn't approaching him to help or to encourage helping Harry Potter...

Of course, Harry had done better than Fleur at the first task, hadn't he? Maybe Fleur had given up the idea that Harry even needed help from the older champions after he'd so spectacularly performed the first. He had taken out Voldemort as a baby, after all. Maybe the kid had powers no one guessed at. The Goblet was no ordinary object, after all, the Goblet of Fire had to have known what it was doing.

At any rate, he hadn't dared to ask Hermyone and as for asking Fleur... well. Viktor had thought about just going to the Beauxbaton carriage, knocking on the door, and asking to see Fleur. It his father ever saw him at it, though, so soon after the incident with Viktor's supposed girl in the closet... Oskar would assume it had been Fleur, regardless of Viktor saying it hadn't been and who knows what would happen then? Oskar would be probably just as angry about it being Fleur there as he would have been over Aleksander. An "enemy" or a boy - either way was a sin against everything his father held sacred, and his son would be severely sorry for either, it he found out. So that was entirely out of the question.

He paused, peering out the porthole window at the carriage now, or more specifically the paddock of the huge winged horses that stood behind it. The Hogwarts groundskeeper was pouring the single malt whiskey the horses drank into the trough, his huge hands hoisting the gigantic barrel up as he emptied the third one they'd drank. The man was nearly as huge as Maxime herself, Viktor thought, watching.

It struck him light lightening.

He grabbed his coat and fur and pulled them on hurriedly, shoving his feet into his boots, rushing out onto the deck and across the plank onto the grounds. His feet crunched through newly fallen snow as he rushed across to where the groundskeeper was pushing the empty barrels back toward the large barn-like structure that must be where Hogwarts kept the Magical Creatures. Viktor patted his palms together against the cold, his exposed nose burning with the frigid air, breath puffing around the thick furs in clouds.

He hated the cold.

He had to jog to catch up to the grounds keeper, following the trail of the barrel in the snow and the booted prints that left craters behind. The shoes were thrice the size of his own foot and he marveled at them as he approached the moleskin-coat cladded man, who was singing a pub song quietly under his breath.

"Her brow like the snowdrift, her throat like a swan, her face the fairest e'er the sun shone on... that e'er the sun shone on..." the groundskeeper hummed a few bars of the song whose lyric he must have forgotten, and finished, "I laaay me dooon and dee..."

"Excuse me," Viktor said, falling into stride beside him.

The groundskeeper looked up in surprise to see Viktor and he blinked at him through the thick beard, an unexpected smile turning his cheeks up. "Why hello there, Mr. Krum, it's a real treat teh meet yeh."

"Hello," Viktor said.

"Names Hagrid," he told Viktor, extending a positively ginormous palm, "The keeper of the grounds and keys at Hogwarts, and the head of the Care of Magical Creatures! And that there is Fang."

Viktor looked around, having not known there was anyone else there, and saw a boarhound standing a few feet away in the snow that he hadn't noticed, snuffling about and carrying what was possibly an entire tree branch about.

"Don't yeh worry, he ain't vicious," Hagrid said, seeing Viktor's eyes widen at the sheer size of the dog. "As docile as anything, he is. More like to lick yeh ter death than anythin' else!" He chuckled deep in his belly.

Viktor thought that Hagrid reminded him of how grandparents ought to be; not how his was, mind, but how they ought to be.

"What can me and Fang do for yeh? E'rything alright on board yeh ship?" Hagrid asked. "Been tryin' ter feed the Kelpies round the other shore so they ent too close as ter be distruptin' the waters... Has ol' Nigel been botherin' yeh? I can make up summat for him if yeh need me ter be havin' a talk wi' him. Likes toast, yeh see... Some students way back started at givin' 'im toast an' ever since he's been a bit turned to beggin' for it, but he don't mean no harm, jus' gives a bit of a scare if yeh ain't used to seein' them giant tentacles..."

Viktor squinted, trying to keep up with Hagrid's thick accent. "Nigel? Tentacles? Hogwarts has a Kraken?" He thought of the horrid pages of the books about the prior Triwizard Tournament tasks he'd read.

"Oh no, not a Kraken - jus' a giant squid."

"Oh." Viktor wasn't sure what the difference was, but he made a mental note to bring toast to the task if it turned out to be kraken or giant squids.

"He's the most harmless thing in that lake, honestly, yeh don't need to be worryin' about him none," Hagrid said, then flushed and muttered, "Shouldn't've said that, I should not have said that..." and started off toward the barn again, pushing the barrel. Fang followed, dragging his branch.

"This what I wished to speak to you of," Viktor said, walking briskly beside Hagrid, "What else is in the water? Besides... Nigel?"

"Oh LOADS," Hagrid said, his interest in creatures activating, "Plenty of yeh normal sort - fish and the like - but a lot of magical creatures as well." Hagrid's hands rolled the barrel along. "Grindylows and Singin' Seaweed... Kelpies, as I said, but they mostly are rehomed to natural habitats once they've grown big enough. Mr. Scamander comes for'em and takes them away in his suitcase ter lochs all over the country. The matin' pair stay and lay their eggs here. Mr. Scamander reckons Hogwarts ter be one of the most prolific hatcheries left in the world!"

Viktor had all he could do not to ask more about the water horses, but he had a task to think of. "What about merfolk?"

"Eer. Yeah, we do got some mermish," Hagrid nodded. He looked at Viktor, and the expression in his beatle-black eyes told Viktor he was bang-on with the suspicion that the task would in some way involve the merfolk. The groundskeeper had stopped rolling the barrel and turned to look at Viktor squarely.

"Do you speak Mermish, Hagrid?" Viktor asked.

"I don't, an' I don't reckon many do," Hagrid replied. "Terrible hard to try an' translate above water, see," he said carefully.

"How do people talk to them?" Viktor asked.

Hagrid pointed at the water. "Well, when Dumbledore or Mr. Scamander have done, they go up ter the shore and stuck their heads right in. It ain't so much that yeh need to translate the words, yeh see, it's just the voices ain't quite pitched right for above ground, yeh see." Hagrid stared at the water, then looked back to Viktor. "Yeh can un'erstand 'em when they can be heard proper-like."

"Underwater," Viktor said.

Hagrid nodded, "Underwater."

It was after midnight, the bells in the Bell Tower chiming over the grounds. Viktor Krum hugged his golden egg to his chest and stepped out onto the deck of the Durmstrang ship. The wood planks were cold, frosted with a thin layer of ice where mists had settled and frozen to the wood. His bare feet ached from the cold, and he grit his teeth. His breath rose from his nose into the air as he walked across the deck, clad in no more than his bathing trunks. He marveled at how blue the air and the moon made his bare chest look, how pale he was compared to the flush of the golden egg, which seemed warm against his skin, as though it had absorbed a bit of the dragon fire within its shell.

Viktor reached the rail at the stern, where the port and starboard met in a V, and he put the egg down on the railing. Bending over the rail, he looked down at the dark blue-black surface of the water, at the chain of the anchor where it disappeared into the inky black below. His wand was stuck into the waistband of his shorts in a holster he'd belted around his waist. He shivered, breath loud and trembling as he rested his hand against the wand.

He would either solve the mystery of the egg tonight or plunge to his demise in the water. He calculated the distance to the shore. So long as he wasn't frozen, getting back to the shore was a quick swim. He was good at swimming back home in Bulgaria, where it was warm and swimming was sensical. Swimming in winter in Scotland was the maddest thing he'd ever done, however.

Viktor gripped the rail of the ship, and carefully pulled himself up onto it, balancing shakily. He bent and lifted the golden egg to his chest, hands trembling as he used one arm to hold it and the other to open it. The shell peeled back, and with a gulp of air, Viktor jumped from the railing and into the lake.

He dropped quickly through the water, the blackness closing around his head as he shot through the water. The egg, however, glowed bright turquoise and opal and gold under the water and bubbles rose up from the epicenter, and instead of screaming, a song - beautiful in a haunting way - erupted from the bubbles all around Viktor.

Come seek us where our voices sound,
We cannot sing above the ground,
And while you're searching ponder this:
We've taken what you'll sorely miss,
An hour long you'll have to look,
And to recover what we took,
But past an hour-- the prospect's black,
Too late, it's gone, it won't come back

Viktor's lungs burned and he rose to the surface, breaking into the air with a gasp. The cold was even worse than it had been before he'd jumped in and his teeth chattered. But the song - the song! He'd been right, Hagrid had been right. The clue was a mermaid song. Viktor ducked under several times until he was confident he'd memorized the song, then he started swimming toward the shore. His limbs screamed in protest, the water so cold he felt he might never be warm again.

He was nearly to the shore when he saw a figure on the land under a big tree, silhouetted by the moonlight.

Hagrid stood, waiting for him as he reached the shore, as he lifted his sore body from the water, trembling from the cold that was marrow-deep. Viktor clung to the egg, holding it hard against his chest, the only source of heat he had.

"Yeh'll catch yeh death of frostbite doing that - an' at midnight, of all times,"  Hagrid rumbled, and he shook out a thick robe, quickly wrapping it around Viktor. The groundskeeper put an arm around him, "Come on, we'll get yeh warmed up...I got some stew I jus' made up, pipin' hot; sommat that'll stick ter yeh ribs an' warm yeh right up..."

Viktor was too cold to form words, so he followed Hagrid silently across the grounds toward the cozy little hut that sat at the edge of the forest, smoke rising from the chimney, promising relief from the biting cold.