"Okay." Bella munches her cookie. "Let's go in."

"Good plan."

Feral unhugs from Bella and packs up the basket to bring it back to the kitchen. It's light enough by now that he can manage it himself.

Bella goes to the library to see if she has missed any Dementor or Patronus books (she hasn't) and then to muse on what exactly she did to make her Glowy Person, and then to brainstorm about extermination procedures. (Sherlock could probably use a nap.)

After a little while, Feral comes looking for her.

Here she is, tapping the end of her pen on her notebook. "Hi, Feral."

"Hi," he says, flopping into the nearest chair. "So are we gonna go kill things or what?"

"I'm making a list of things I need to find out before we start. And I don't think we'd better do it during school, and can you even find things like 'whatever Dementor is nearest within the continental United States'...?"

He shrugs. "I dunno. I know I can find a person, or a place, but not a thing, like a book or something. I don't know if I can find Dementors or not. I don't think I can find you the nearest one, like that, but does it actually matter if you get the exact specific nearest Dementor or not?"

"Crossing international borders is complicated and long trips require more packing. There are an estimated fifty wild dementors in the whole world - I think the one I killed must have followed us specifically, or it'd be too weird to find one again so soon - so there's maybe a handful in the States at any given time, and you fly fast but going a couple hundred miles an hour is still a day trip if we have to go to Denver, let alone Boston."

"I should figure out how fast I actually am, probably," says Feral. "It didn't take me all that long to get to your place, either time, but I wasn't really paying attention to how long. And I've never seen somebody quote miles per hour on how fast Thestrals fly."

"I don't remember what time it was you got to Renée's, but it was a little before dinnertime when you got to Charlie's, when did you leave?"

"I don't really remember," he says. "How far is it, anyway?"

"It's like eight or nine hundred miles, I think."

"Okay, that's far," laughs Feral. "It didn't feel like nine hundred miles. It just felt like - some flying."

"But like when you left had you had lunch already?"

"Maybe?" he hazards. "I think so. But I don't eat lunch at the same time every day in the summer, so that could've been anytime between ten and four. And I don't know how long after lunch I left."

"Well, I'm in the eighth grade now, I can leave campus on weekends, let's see how long it takes to get to - oh, Santa Cruz? We can go over the water so nobody much will see me flying, that's allowed on brooms as long as you have plenty of altitude so it should be allowed on you. And get lunch and time our way back."

"Sure!" says Feral. "It'll be fun!"

"Although I should probably see if I can learn an invisibility charm of some kind since we'll have to go overland to find Dementors, probably."

"Yeah, good plan."

"Is the finding the sort of thing you could experiment with without actually going anywhere? Sit in your room, be like 'okay which way would I go if I were about to squeeze out the window and look for Bob The Nearest Dementor, and how far away is it'?"

"Yeah, no problem," he says. "Well - I can't tell distance exactly, like, I didn't know it was eight hundred miles to your dad's place. But I can tell whether one thing is closer or farther than another thing."

"Okay. We'll time to Santa Cruz and then you can compare Bobs against Santa Cruz."

He laughs. "Sure."