Mother's Mercy

Prologue

May 1st, 1976 - Wiltshire

"Sirius, get up."

"S'little bit longer, mum."

The hand on his shoulder squeezes hard and he forces his eyes open.

"Prongs?"

"Yes, you absolute berk. Now get up. Festival went to shit. You took a stunner to the arse. We need to be out of here before the Death Eaters, or worse, Molly, finds out we came."

He pushes himself up to his elbows.

"M'naked?"

"Probably doesn't even remember how," Moony teases.

"Just some pieces," Sirius groans.

Flashes.

Flint on knife. Dancing, half-naked, his chest pressed against the back of a tasty little thing; all blonde and blue eyes and bounce. Warm hands guiding his up to her breasts.

The stone wall of the chapel at his back--consecrated ground, but the Muggle rites marking it so no match for the Powers being called on tonight. The click of brass and the slither of leather, the liquid heat of her mouth, the fluttering of her tongue. Wishing he knew her name so he could shout it as he came in her mouth.

Soft thighs shaking under his palms, her clit hard and red as a ruby, set into trembling lushness--tulip petals after a rainstorm. The bow of her spine, like she'd snap if she came any harder. Her gush on his tongue, like tasting the tide. Spreading her with his thumbs to lap up as much as she'd give him.

A swat on the face and a twist of her hips to roll him off her. "That's enough of you." A pat on the cheek. "If you ever show your smug face in Brighton..." "You'll have somewhere to sit, m'lady." Another swat. His wand landing on his chest, retrieved from wherever the fuck his pants ended up. Slipping back into her bra, then her top, stealing treasures from him before tugging on bell-bottoms and Muggle heels, splashing her throat with water from the chalice, and walking away.

Realising only as her hips swayed into the shadows that he never felt a whisper of magic on her or inside her or anywhere. Realising she threw a guitar pick along with his wand--thought it was a drumstick that fell out of his pocket, maybe. Realising she was not a witch, she was a Witch--a Muggle here for her faith.

He probably met the bravest person in Britain that night: A tasty Muggle dancing skyclad with wine-splashed breasts, defenceless among a crowd of drunk, ravenous purebloods.

The bonfire leaping in the night...the crowd thinning from hundreds to three dozen. The priestess stepping into the flames. An ancient mistwalker druidess, her age marked not in wrinkles or bend of her back, but in snow-white hair plaited down to her thighs, in blue eyes bathed so long in magic they shone silver in the dark. Conjuring masks of iron and copper not with a wand but with a wave of the hand that made the runic tattoos spark and hiss across her body. Runes like that hadn't been carved into fresh skin since they gave the painted warriors the strength to throw back the Romans with spear and axe.

Drums beating and flute lilting to call volunteers for the Horned Warrior and the Goddess, to bless the land with seed and blood and leave their power upon it. Perhaps the Goddess would take a child away with her, to be consecrated here in a season or two.

There weren't any other blokes left--just the Marauders and some pureblood pricks they didn't recognize that were too drunk to move. So dozens of eyes turn to them, looking from man to man, leaning their pretty heads in close before reaching some sort of consensus.

"Him."

Remus' panicked eyes glancing from friend to friend, color gone from his face. "Don't let them. Find an excuse. Don't make me say it.". This wasn't timid groping with Marlene in the Common Room or a fumble after an hours-long chat with Lily about Muggle birth control. This was fucking a stranger at a fertility festival while the others prayed for a blessing child.

James leaping behind his wife like he was taking cover from a curse. "Lily would murder me."

"I truly would." Lily purred in the night, her hair no longer copper but crimson with the power radiating from the soil, her green eyes flickering with her own power--the spirit of Magic has always liked Lily--and something in her smirk is like curve of a sword, her hair a war banner, and the cocked brow against her pale skin like a spatter of blood on snow.

Peter shuffling behind James, shifting, then darting into the underbrush.

Lily snorting and shoving him forward.

Taking the mask with a bow and a few words of Welsh, charming it on with a flick of his wand before stripping down.

A slim hand emerges from flames and pulls him into the heat, crackle, and hunger of the bonfire. Ink-black patent leather gloves up to her bicep. Skin so pale she seems wrought from silver. Heavy breasts in his hand, firm, crowned with pale nipples hard as gems. Salty-sweet with spilt wine and sweat, shot with blue veins, like good cheese--he feasts appropriately. Dark curls past her bum, dancing across his knees, whispering across his skin. Lean sinew dancing under the skin, power in her frame, shoving him into the wood below. Long fingers around his length, pumping, her face a mystery behind the mask. An approving grunt when she mounts him--Gods and Powers, she’s perfect inside, like steel wrapped in velvet. Takes him without a shred of trepidation, and in one go. Most women didn't; some beg off entirely.

The magic swells, blurring all else into a smear of orange. He can feel nothing, think nothing. Nothing except tight-hot-slick as she rides him.

She is that wet and maybe, he thinks, as her nails dig canyons across his chest and she bucks down onto him, grinding against his pelvic bone--maybe she likes it rough. He fits into her like a key in a lock and Gods below, her magic--darker than his, the taint bleeding away the light magic he'd earned with Lily's rituals. Buried in her to the hilt, with her nails digging into his back, fucking her like he’s owed her...for tonight he is the dark madman his family wanted him to be.

War drums and the mad rush of victory. Crackling meat ripped off the bone by teeth. Moaning when she pauses, panting—she didn’t come, she’s just working that hard—opening his mouth to her plunder.

She tastes like mead.

Teeth digging into his shoulder, muffling her cries as she comes. Filling her. The reveler's magic flaring around them, an opalescent dome of magic itself.

The singing fades. The leftover drink split between the guests. The ritual was done, but she wasn't done with him.

She didn't dismount. She bore down, reaching behind her arse to cradle his bollocks.

"You fell asleep again, you daft mutt."

"James?"

Sirius lifts his head. He's still in the ashes of the fire. She’d fucked him till he passed out. He's not sure if he's impressed and wants her number or terrified and wants to ward his trousers shut.

He starts to push himself up and a chorus of bruises sing their protests. Well-used. Very well-used. He'll have to cancel that date with the clerk at the record store. Witches take a lot out of him compared to Muggles and that witch...

He's probably not going to get hard for a week.

He holds out an arm so tired and weak it feels boneless.

"Help me up, Moony."

Moony fiddles with the cuffs of his shirt and pretends not to stare at his cock. Lily's cheeks are pink--oh, he'd give her and James a redo of their last night in the castle any day of the week. James' head drops into his hands.

“Remus?”

Sirius waggles his eyebrows. Stubborn mutt. I will wear you down.

"Help me up, Moony." He sweeps his lashes like a fifth-year girl backing an older boy up against the door of a broom closet. "Please."

A huff--he can hear the wolf's amusement right along with the man's. Powerful fingers. Broad palms. Quick jerk and he's upright, if dizzy.

"What have we learned?"

"Err...”

He glances around. Fire burned out. Wine’s been drunk. His friends are dead sexy. Life is good.

“…nothing?"

Moony snorts.

Lily giggles. "For fuck's sake, James. Just load him into the sidecar. We can give him a flea dip later."

March 8, 1977 - Sheffield

Sirius rolls out of the way as Emmaline dives behind the scrap of garden wall he's hiding behind.

"Fuck!" she hisses, pressing her wand into a tear in her robes and muttering a few healing charms. "I'm fine, pretty boy. Just wasn't expecting your fucking cousin."

Everyone had hoped they'd seen the last of Bellatrix Lestrange. Ten months with no sightings, not even by the Order's spies inside the Inner Circle–maybe they finally had the common sense to lock her in a tower and throw away the key. There were whispers she got sick and was pulled back to the Lestrange Manor.

But there she is, cackling. She's right out of a Brother's Grimm story, silhouetted by the valley of homes burning behind her, half a dozen Muggles shambling mindlessly in front of her. Barty's orders to "take the gloves off" doesn't do much good when it means killing human shields.

Her wand spits emerald death, razors of silvery force, and writhing strands of purple rot. He recognizes the spell chain--her style hasn't changed--but that does fuck-all when she leads with Unforgivables and follows up with exotic curses from the family library, like this blood-rotter that sticks to shield charms and slithers through.

A cutting curse slices the rookie Sirius was training in half. He's never seen that spell before--and his mum made sure he read every book of dark magic in Grimmauld of them before he was ten. The rookie’s partner screams, wand falling from blackening fingers...her flesh rotting just from the excess energy of the curse.

Emmaline summons her by the robes.

"Fucking hell. Hold her down, Sirius. No magic."

She yanks a knife from her kit and shoves a strip of leather between the rookie's teeth.

"Sorry, kid. Bite down. Soon as we get it off, we'll get to you Saint Mungo's."

September 2, 1977 - Cambridge

The doctor's voice buzzes on endlessly, her native accent peeking through her education, her face a practiced mask--she's helped Helen through miscarriages twice before. One word loop-de-loops in Helen's mind.

Unable.

Tom's hand is the only thing anchoring her soul to her body, she thinks. They’d had it all planned. Nursery painted a pale violet--a daughter, so princess pink was right out--bag packed for the hospital. Bassinet picked after careful review of every mothering magazine in Britain. Storybooks lining the shelves.

Ready six months early, like they had been for their wedding, for graduation, for opening the practice together...for everything in their lives together.

"I'm sorry, Helen. I'll give you a minute. Do you have any questions"

Tom answers for them both, because he has to.

"Thank you, Doctor."

Hours later, when she doesn't have the water left in her body to cry, he folds her legs up and pulls Helen fully into his lap.

"Adoption, maybe?"

"Maybe," she murmurs. "We're still naming her Hermione, though."

She's older than the older children the agency has--nearly six months. Saved from a house fire, the file said. No birth certificate, no family on record, no records at all of a little girl born in the area during that period.

A little mystery.

Her curls are shaping up to be just as intense as Helen's. Her eyes aren't honey brown, though. They're iceberg blue, and in bright light, as grey and stern as a cloudy London sky.

They seem to shine like molten gold when the afternoon light falls across her little face just so. Perhaps that's just a flicker of imagination or Helen's maternal instinct kicking in. All parents are biased in favor of their children, aren't they?

May 11, 1980 - Cokeworth

Severus raises the glass to his lips, only to find it empty. He glances at the brandy--his mother's, the last bottle--and thinks better of it. A flick of the wand summons the parchment of the contract to hover in front of him while he re-reads it.

Of all the cruel ironies of this war, he's most shocked that while the Dark plans world domination, the Light has far more paperwork: Reports and essays and analysis and proposals...the detritus of a professor fancying himself a general.

He picks up the cheese knife from the tray, wipes it on his sleeve, and slices the back of his hand. With the tip of a blood-smeared wand, he signs his life away to the teaching of potions and the telling of Dumbledore's lies.

The doorbell buzzes--ghastly noise, that--and the smell of ozone and hot solder wafts into the study. A pureblood who didn't know how to work it, most likely. When in doubt, throw more magic at it. Fortunately, the builders of this row house knew more of their craft than Dumbledore does his. The wiring doesn’t catch fire inside the wall.

The visitor is not who he expected: Narcissa Malfoy, sniffling, soaked, shaking and...quite pregnant. Unexpected. He hadn't seen her since Solstice. Lucius has been insufferable all summer. Her coat is velvet, clearly charmed to throw off the water. Rain gathers into little streams, streams become rivers and, at the hem of the coat, sluice into the night.

The dour ash-grey fabric and lack of embroidery--he's never seen her at a revel or a gala without silver or gold stitched into every seam and ruffle and flourish of every gown, shawl, glove and skirt--lends a mourner's air to her that matches the red-rimmed swelling of her eyes.

"Sev-" she pants, but can’t catch her breath to finish.

"I bid you enter my home, be free of my magic and be under my protection, Lady Malfoy."

Her smile is thin as a razor, but it’s a smile just the same.

“I see that the Prince family's pride has not suffered." She jokes, exhaustion or drink or something slurring her words and ruining her diction. That’s so unlike the poised woman he knows he wonders if it's a Polyjuiced imposter.

"Your mother taught you well.”

Not even five people know who his mother was. Six, it would seem.

“Obviously. Lady Malfoy?" He swallows, hard, to clear a lump in his throat. "Are..."

She crumples and he lunges forward, catching her mid-swoon and keeping her skull from a brusque introduction to the doorframe in the process.

"...are you well?

They don't send anyone but the worst-wounded straight to me.

It takes only hot cocoa and a fireplace to transform the shivering, pallid lump that called on him just before midnight into the woman who commanded every boy's attention at Hogwarts and who, he suspects, risks turning the ballroom into a bloodbath every time Lucius sees her lay her hand on her another man's arm and laugh at his joke.

He'd be no different if he escorted Lily Evans, that is certain.

She hasn't gathered her usual manners yet--hard, perhaps, when coat, boots, and half the layers of her dress are drying over the fire--and is clearly exhausted. He isn't forced to deal with that eerie aura so many purebloods have, Blacks most of all, as if what they sprung from was more than human.

"How may I aid you, Lady Malfoy?"

She grimaces, spreads her palm across her belly and murmurs something twice--Greek, then French. House Black has its ancient roots in Corinth and House Rosier in Flanders. Scolding the babe in the way her father and mother scolded her, unless he misses his guess.

"What do you know of witchcraft, Severus? I find my husband's..." A fierce scowl on delicate lips. "Associates to be wizards, first and only. The Dark Lord would not lift a finger for me, not if it was not related to the cause. And I cannot ask this of him. I think you might know why."

She knows of the Prophecy? I thought Lucius had been pushed out of the inner circle.

"If I did know why, what would that have to do with any knowledge of witchcraft I might or might not have?"

She laughs.

"Oh, Sev. I've smelt it on you, you know, at one of the dinners. Woodsmoke, oils, herbs, soil, burnt flesh. Rabbit, unless I miss my guess. The Blacks see to it that their daughters begin the Craft in the cradle and master both it and the Work within a year of first blood, even if we never use it again."

"I'm sure my knowledge is less than yours, Lady Malfoy."

"Mmm. Perhaps. But even if I had the exact ritual, I could not perform it myself. It is one of the mother's trades."

Gods below and above.

"Is the pregnancy..." He licks his lips. Why in Circe's cruel name is he being forced to have this conversation?

She shrugs. The motion is neat, symmetrical and smooth, like all purebloods in the Dark--Narcissa's gestures are more pronounced than Lady Burke, less than Lady Travers. Different tutors, he suspects.

"It plods on, I assure you. I'm due in Late July, the healers say. My little dragon will be 'Born as the seventh month dies'," so to speak."

Salazar's balls. No wonder she looks frightened.

"I see. You wish to accelerate matters, I take it?"

She nods.

"Lucius cannot know. No one in this room, including my unborn son, can ever know."

She retrieves a scroll from her coat and hands it over.

"This ritual would suffice, I assume?"

He skims the recipe and nods.

"One of the ingredients will require some time to acquire."

"Surely these..." She huffs. "Surely Muggle women simply leave bastards on the side of the road? Not so long ago, that was the way for squibs."

Her face twists into a moue of distaste that speaks volumes about how pregnancy has changed her--her disgust was for the abandoning of a child, not for the existence of Muggles.

"No, they do not. Typically, they are born in hospitals. If the mother does not want them, they are taken to orphanages, or sometimes taken up on the spot by the childless after arrangements are made with solicitors."

A tilt of the head and a dance of a single curl of golden thread. She hums in either amusement or curiosity about the days and doings of Muggles. "I see."

"And the Muggle healers are quite careful to count the infants and see them returned to the parents they came from. Stealing one will not be easy. Live children will be accounted for at all times, and the chances of drawing attention if we were to confound or control a healer are significant. Such things routinely make their newspapers."

"The Statute."

He gestures agreeably with his tea. "Perhaps a stillborn," he muses. "Or a child not expected to survive the night. A corpse can be faked with a pig and some transfiguration."

She smiles.

"And in death, they protect another child. I think Gentle Annie would look kindly on us for mercy, in that case."

Her wand dances in the air, drawing thick, onyx-dark fog around herself and lifting her clothing off the racks it was drying on.

"I bid you good evening, Severus. Three nights before the solstice. Lucius will be melancholy with the Light powers ascendant, and I will be miserable as any Dark witch with a child. I think the first pains of birth happening 'round the bonfire should distract him nicely, don't you?"

She turns on her heel and is gone, leaving a ring of dirty water on the rug.

June 28, 1980 - Malfoy Manor

"Absolutely not, Cissa. Useful or not, Snape is not worthy of being Draco's godfather. Nott or Parkinson, one of those would be more suitable."

She smooths honeyed wisps flat across Draco's pate, wiping a smear of milk off his lips with her thumb. Nimsy hovers in the edge of the lamplight, elf-magic shimmering off her, bouncing foot to foot, wringing one wrinkled ear in her excitement.

Narcissa isn't ready to hand him over, not for one instant. Not even to the elf who raised not only herself, but her sisters and her mother before that.

"Lucius."

Her husband's sneer melts off his face when the magic she’d layered into her breath strikes his skin.

"Severus aided me with the pregnancy, at a crucial moment. Our son would not have been born healthy, and would be in great danger of sickness if not for that. He has my trust. Make his godmother whoever you like. Name the Morrigan herself as his godmother, if it amuses you. But obey me on this. Severus is Draco's godfather."

"I see." He flashes the grin that first caught her eye in the common room. "Already lost your heart, haven't I?"

She laughs, and Draco murmurs drowsily against her breast.

"Well, Malfoy men are rasher dashing."

September 12, 1982 - Cambridge

Hermione is a bit scary, her parents learn. Her tantrums are intense--once, Helen thinks she sees the lamp shaking--but mercifully few.

Like any baby, she cries for her needs--food, nappy changes, being held. But the older she gets, the clearer it becomes: She doesn't cry at the usual things.

When the neighbour's cat tore a rabbit apart in the backyard, Hermione didn't scream or cry or get sick. She stared at it and then told her mum. No "poor bunny". No sniffling. A calm question about why the cat didn't eat it.

Her intellect is sharper than they'd dared hope. They would have loved any child, even one without the curls and jaw not so unlike her husband's sharp features. They would have loved her if she was ordinary, or a bit less than ordinary, because children are to be loved.

By the time she's three, Helen suspects her little girl will one day smarter than they are, and isn't that something?

The first time her teacher calls home, it's not for fighting or tantrums. It's for taking a book from a classroom meant for older children. The first time she comes home crying, it's because another girl called her 'useless know-it-all'. Tom tells her being smart is the most amazing thing about her.

When her peers bully her in first year, and try to follow her home, she spends a Saturday with Helen, mapping a route through the neighbourhood that they can't fit through and re-doing the straps on her bookbag.

Every year, she retreats further. Gives up on having friends. Gives up on her teachers respecting her, no matter how many questions she gets right. "Little girls shouldn't question adults." Or the textbooks, apparently, as she comes home with pencilled-in corrections on her maths and history books.

They worry, but they are also charmed when she burrows into her father's study, or crawls into Helen's lap and reads The Hobbit and steals glances at whatever is in her mother's hands: Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir and Marx and faculty quarterlies.

July 14, 1986 - Berlin

Brigitte jerks upright in bed, drawing a chorus of protests from the Muggle women draped over her like blankets. Legs clunky, just wrong, barely steady enough to stagger to the chair she’d hung her jacket on and grab her wand to cast a somnus over her shoulder so they won't wake up and realise what's going on.

How long has it been since I lost control like this?

She's morphing with every step, breasts budding and receding, stubble growing and shrinking on her cheeks, legs thinner one moment and thicker another, not matching. She's not sure she'll make it to the bathroom, so she just conjures a mirror. Her skin ripples like a pond in a rainstorm and the chin-length blonde hair she's favoured for decades shifts and tangles and writhes until it's a river of curls black as raven feathers.

The eyes, though: Eyes are the proof. Pale as quicksilver, barely even a fleck of blue. Family magic sings in her veins, wicked as it gets. A debt owed to vicious things since time immemorial--one she'd thought she'd paid long ago--has been called in.

A name she’d shed in the fires of the Hundred Year's War rises up through memory. The face she abandoned when she could take no more killing ripples across her own like a hungry shadow, smothering Brigitte.

On a dark and stormy night, under the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Nymphadora Black the First awakes in a pool of her own sweat.

Long ago, in another land, a cruel sorceress was born. She was lovely, and clever. She could take the shape of anything, woo any prince or princess, ravish any stable boy or bar wench. But she was quick to anger, and nearly as quick to kill. She wielded her wand, and it spread blood like a master's paintbrush. Her knives dug and clawed and cut, and they dripped with venom no man could survive.

Her father feared her, but dared not kill her, so he put her to use on his enemies.

July 16 1986 - Little Whinging

Ding-dong!

Ding-dong!

Petunia looks up from the telly.

"FREAK!" Vernon bellows. "Get the door!"

Harry scrambles out of the kitchen, sprinting past her.

"Race you!" Chasing a white bolt with a flame-red trail--three years older and longer legs no help at all--before catching herself on a tree, wheezing. Flopping down next to Lily and looking out over Cokeworth in the valley below. "Maybe next time, Tuney."

She shakes it off. Lily is dead. Those freaks took her. Twisted her. Made her too pretty, too proud, too good for them. Too freakish.

The locks jiggle--Vernon installed half a dozen when the Indian couple moved in down the way--and the door creaks.

She reminds herself to make Harry oil it.

"Err, hello."

She creeps from her chair to hide around the corner from the front door, every hair on her neck stiff, every instinct telling her she needs to know what's being said.

"Well, well, little Blackling...don't you look the part? I see it in you, I think, yes. I..." The stranger chuckles. "A Black's hair would never be that awful, not without the Gift."

The woman's accent is posh, but not quite right. Not like Vernon's boss, but not like the priest at St. Mary's, either. A mix of London and Dublin, Petunia supposes. Almost like that scruffy-haired bum Lily brought to her wedd-

Oh, Christ.

"Send her away, Harry!"

"Yes, Aunt Petunia. Aunt Petunia says you have to go away."

The lamp next to her flickers. The door to the cupboard rattles and rattles until the latch rips free and flies off, smashing through the back window. The television skips, then goes salt-and-pepper with static, before dying with a blue pop like lightning. The glass in the windows bows and bends like a curtain in the breeze. The wallpaper...is that a face smirking at her?

"I would not cross a threshold without permission, had I any choice. Family matters require it, Blackling."

"Pardon me, ma'am, but what's a Blackling?"

"Oh, sweet boy, do you know nothing of what you are?"

"I'm just Harry."

The cackle that replies is harsh as anything the witch hunters feared or imagined. Petunia's bowels ripple.

"Just Harry? You are no such thing. You are the get of James and Lily Potter, through Dorea Black and Charlus Potter, and through a score of centuries, you are the get of thunder and chaos, the best line Magic ever birthed. Surely you've heard of Toujours pur?"

"There's no such thing as magic. Uncle Vernon says it's freakish."

"Does he?" the woman lilts.

She sounds entirely too happy about that for Petunia's taste.

"That's not important, then. What's important is that before my half-wit relatives chose that--before they married any thrice-cursed Rosiers--we had a different motto: Incorruptus, invictus, interrita. Familias ante omnia."

"What does that mean, ma'am?" she hears Harry mumble. He always mumbles around adults and one day, that shyness is going to get Vernon in trouble.

"Incorruptible, unconquerable, unafraid. Family above all."

CRACK!

Ears ringing, Petunia finds herself staring at the point of a knife, a hair's breadth past the end of her nose. A flick of the fingers would draw blood, and she'll believe Mary Wilkin's excuses for not going to church before she believes that the knife isn't poisoned. She probably wouldn't live long enough to ring the hospital.

"Legilimens."

July 17, 1986 - Ministry of Magic

Mudbloods breed like rats. Something must be done. But perhaps, not right now. The Revolution bought her time--people die in wars, and the weak die first--but if class sizes don't go back up, Dumbledore will notice. And there will be no hiding it as name after name is struck from the Book of Admittance, and it's only the names that no one's heard of before.

With Lily Evans story twined so close to Dumbledore's little messiah, stones would be overturned. Mafalda isn't Lucius Malfoy; she'd never get away with it.

The name she passed will have to be the last one. One more 'accident' happening to some poor Muggle family.

"Ms. Hopkirk?"

Mafalda jerks her gaze from the report.

It's her least-favourite intern: Annabeth Monroe.

Mudblood, no matter what her family claims. Scrying and aura-reading and blood adoption should've died out with matriarchal lines.

Michael Monroe must have done something to her. Hang Dumbledore and hang Pomfrey. "No potions, no curses. It is your own free will, dear girl. Love confounds us all, at times." If she were in her right mind, she never would have asked an Irish wizard to Hogsmeade, no matter his looks, his money or his power. Her dorm-mates must have been in on it too, since they claimed she'd wanted it. They said she'd moaned for it. For him.

Her mother was thrilled, because of course the thrice-damned harpy was. A child, at such a young age! Finally, a Hopkirk untouched by the family luck! If she'd taken the potion and lost the child, they would have realised something was amiss.

Just her luck that the bastard bitch would be heard squalling in a field by some Muggle trash, get rescued, get into Hogwarts and get into her department and have her family's blue eyes.

"Madam Hopkirk?"

"Mrs. Hopkirk," she grumbles.

Annabeth's face practically blazes with her smile. It's not a mask, not that she can see. She's happy for her: A woman who never liked her, or gave her the slightest bit of courtesy--not that she deserves any.

Thrice-damned Hufflepuffs, with mad ideas of fairness and equality and kindness for nothing.

"You got married? And on holiday, to boot. So romantic. I'm happy for you!"

"The file?"

"Oh! Right, yes." The little bastard hands over the clipboard and taps three points on the parchment with her wand. The map flares with colour, splotches of silver with blue rings spreading across it.

"It's rather unusual. Especially for a Muggle neighbourhood. I think the Department of Mysteries will want to be in on this one. The detectors nearly didn't catch it, since they're not tuned for it. It was just that powerful. Amazing. Looks too organised for accidental magic to me, Seems odd to see that in a town where there's no wizard families, doesn't it?"

"It does.”

On that scale, would have to be the product of a ritual. Probably a sacrificial ritual, to have been completed before it could be detected In Little Whinging. Why does that place ring a bell? she wonders, pausing to steel her mind against the girl. Surely that's a legilimency probe. Not even Hufflepuffs could smile so hard their eyes twinkled. That has to be a luring charm. Hasn't it?

"Good work, Miss Monroe. Thank you."

It isn't until she's halfway to the atrium she realises she praised the little slag. No time for a bath, no matter how filthy she feels.

July 17, 1986 - Hogwarts

The Book of Admittance is a proud thing, as old magical items are wont to be. Year after year, decade after decade, charms have soaked every page in magic. By watching over blood and birth, it soaks itself in maternal ferocity and paternal pride.

No child is born between the North Sea and the Channel that it does not know, nor between the rocky fjords of Denmark and the simmering volcanoes of Iceland.

All are welcome on its pages: Old blood, new blood, mixed blood, reawakened lines dormant since the time of the painted warriors and Hadrian's ill-fated campaign, the times of Camelot and Avalon. Cherished children of star-crossed love and the by-blows of rich men who claimed Muggles were beasts but raped them anyway..

Magic does not touch a thing for so long without leaving a mark. Witches are their magic, and little by little, the Book came to think, then to wonder about them and finally to feel and even to care for them.

But never before had the Book been confused by them.

Minerva snaps the Book shut, ignoring its pained whine, and leaps out of her seat. Students dive out of her way as she storms the halls. Filch scrambles into a doorway, abandoning the Yule decoration he had been ripping down.

Her wand whips up, and she spits the curse in Gaidhlig--she's always angrier in her mother's tongue--and blasts the gargoyle off the staircase.

"Out," she snarls.

Fudge squeaks like a rat caught under a cat's paw and scrambles back through the floo.

Lucius Malfoy lifts a polished brow, looking from Albus' bemused smile to Minerva's wand to the cane resting against the armchair. Maybe he realises he won't get to his wand before she can cast. Maybe he thinks of Grindelwald's War, and what happened to Narcissa's aunts when Minerva marched on Nurmengard with Albus. Maybe he thinks about that cut on his neck from the first summer of the War—she never got time to finish it. It tickles her that the fop hasn't worn anything but a high collar since his trial. He thinks of something, so he doesn't speak.

Malfoy follows Fudge.

She slams the Book on Albus’ desk and opens it, jabbing her finger down on an ever-shifting smear of fading ink. She bloody well warned him that the Dursleys were the worst sort of Muggles. Harry is James' and Lily's. The only child of her favourites.

"His name was there this morning, Albus."

"This morning?"

She lifts her chin.

"I look at the book. I count the names, every day. To...to be sure.."

"Ah. The care you put into our students is commendable, old friend."

A wave of Albus' hand brings two glasses and a bottle of scotch from the cabinet. He pours two fingers for himself, then two for her. After a moment of watching her, he pours it nearly full and slides it over to her.

"What have those Muggles done to him?" Her nails feel sharp, and she can hear the hiss in her voice.

"The wards on Privet Drive are intact, Minerva. Harry is safe."

He gestures at some contraption on his desk, whirring gears orbiting a miniature crystal ball filled with cloudy red.

Blood magic, she realises. Blood magic and divination. Dark arts, the old hypocrite.

July 22, 1986 - Little Whinging

Severus tugs on the cuffs of his jacket to straighten them. He might be more able to pass as a Muggle than the rest of the faculty put together--Charity somehow doesn't know that the 1960s have ended, and she has a Mastery in the field--but that doesn't mean he enjoys the clothing.

Never again. Never again is he going to take points from a Gryffindor, not if the risk is being overturned and owing Minerva a favour for the Scot to call in with a smirk entirely too feline for his liking.

She could do this. Her visits to Muggle-born families to deliver letters are logged by the school but Harry is barely six, so the Ministry would dismiss it as the wanderings of an adult, irritatingly law-abiding witch on a Sunday afternoon. The Hogwarts registry would not care; whatever else may have happened, Harry is not yet eleven. Even if the Ministry knows the address--doubtful, the Death Eaters in the Auror Corps haven't burned it to the foundations--her visit would set off no alarm. Potter's parents were known associates and friends, and favourites of hers. If she checked in, all that would come of it is the spoiled brat dubbing her 'Aunt Minnie' or something like that.

A chilled ripple goes down his back at the realisation that Minerva asked him to check up on Potter--told him he was 'more capable', which they both knew was a lie. He's a fair duelist, but he does not hold an Iron Wand from the Russians or a Laurel of Oak from the Prussian kings.

In a fight on an open field, he would not last five minutes and they're both well aware of it--he's had the misfortune of owing her a round in the ring after some of his snakes’ worst behaviour. He's an expert potioneer, competent ritualist and an occlumens. If this is a rescue because Dumbledore could not keep the child sa-

She's worried she wouldn't be able to keep her temper when she sees it.

He hadn't expected doubt from Minerva McGonagall, lap cat and right hand of the Great Albus Dumbledore, and heir apparent as Hogwarts Headmaster.

Severus huffs. It's not a laugh. If his students ever mistake it for one, they shall regret it.

Clamping down his surprise and straightening his mind, he turns his attention back to his surroundings.

Privet Drive is, he decides, is a core of everything wrong with Cokeworth--cruelty, drink, bad parenting--clad in a thin veneer of everything wrong with Malfoy Manor: Wasteful spending, sneering at each other over tea, and hate.

"The boy would do well with a normal upbringing, Severus. This fawning, it would turn any boy's head."

And ten years of mystery will make it seem that whatever happens was precisely Dumbledore's intention. He has never been half the plotter he thinks he is; he sets a half dozen mad plans spinning at once and hides so much that when one plan staggers blindly into success, he can claim credit while his spectacles twinkle with that damn luring charm.

It's Minerva he doesn't understand. She was here that night. She left Lily's child here? Has she finally spent too much time in her cat form and scrambled her mind?

No answers for that mystery can be found here, but perhaps he can find out what happened to Lily's boy. Five tangled curlicues traced with his wand raise a shimmering orange dome around the property. This version of the Notice-Me-Not spell is terrifyingly effective. Husbands have woken up next to ravaged corpses, having never noticed the intruder or felt the bed shift, nor heard her screams. Indispensable on raids or stakeouts.

Nothing he saw in the war, not even the Unforgivables, was as frightening as the Know-No-Evil. Killing, torture and slavery are honest at the very least. It's not as if the intent towards the victim is unclear.

And the spell was legal or close to it. Gods below and above, he knows how badly things went in that last winter after Auror Black recognized it and trained his cohorts.

He doesn't expect this to be pleasant, no matter what condition the brat is in, so surely Dumbledore would forgive him some dark magic?

"Alohamora."

As soon as he cracks the door, residual power blasts across him like the furnaces at the mill--he would know, his father once dangled him over one--and leaves a film of dark magic across his skin.

He hasn't felt an aura this cruel since he was tasked with wiping up one of Bellatrix's little messes, but this is not her magic. Hers is jagged ice, cutting and cold, sticking to the mind and peeling off bloody layers.

This magic feels cold, too. The cold is absolute; like no fire, no summer, nothing had ever created heat here.

Twining lines of white-hot anger sizzle along his collar--white magic is not so easily banished as black magic, not even by the death of its wielder. Unbidden, his offhand rises to stroke the fabric. He forces his magic into the cloth, sealing Lily's hair. For such a simple memento to react so powerfully, this must be magic as opposite as can be, dark as it gets...something he had not expected and would not know to shield himself from otherwise. Even now, she protects me in ways I do not deserve.

He casts a Supersensory Charm and every passive shield he can think of--too many, he learns when two conflicting structures collide, tossing him out into the street and onto his arse with a crack.

Less protection and more cunning it shall have to be.

He folds up his thoughts as best he can, stilling himself with three long exhalations as he focuses on the memory.

"Remember how I showed you, Sev?"

Lily's slim hand around his wrist, the other lifting his fingers into position. Her green eyes fixed on something beyond his ken, something that even then, he must have known was not his to behold.

"I see magic, you feel it. Go on."

He strokes his fingers around the inside of the doorframe and takes his cues. Cold--a sign of the dark. The mystery visitor was powerful and cast liberally to judge from the thickness of the film, spattered like blood--he risks opening an eye to check it is not truly blood. Here, the texture is rough. Here, it snags on his senses and draws blood from his finger. Here, it is so slippery stumbles and he has to catch himself on the bannister.

He felt magic like with a texture like this not an hour ago.

July 22, 1986 - Hogwarts

The clay badger on her door roars to life. Millie grunts unhappily and shoves Tonks out of bed. Before she has a hope of righting herself, she hits the floor tits- and nose-first.

"Sorry. Forgot you were, uh.."

"S'fine," she wheezes.

See if I wake her up that way tomorrow.

Tonks hoists herself up and waves her wand at her bathrobe before she answers the door to the most unexpected person possible: Severus Snape, with one of the Slytherin girls’ prefects in tow. The one with the...shite...one of the families mum didn't tell her to stay away from...Heir of House of...

The fit one. Marceline.

A mad scramble of metamorphmagy hides her blush, and a few adjustments of knots and tightening of her robe later, she's given enough of a show to torch Marceline's porcelain cheeks ruby red.

Snape politely fixed his eyes on the ceiling but even from that angle, she can tell his face has stopped working entirely.

"Can I help you, Professor Snape?" She does her best imitation of her mother scolding a patient: Chin up, look down the nose, stand up straight. "I believe it is customary to state one's business, when interrupting a lady in the boudoir."

"I bid you good day, Scion Bl-" He swallows his near-mistake then turns on his heel with a flutter of that silly, charmed cape of his.

He mistook me for mum? Brilliant!

"Twenty points from Hufflepuff, Miss Tonks!"

"For what?" She calls after him.

He pauses at the common room door and looks over his shoulder at Marceline. "For poor taste!"

Tonks snorts.

"So...coming in, or do you want to find a broom closet?"

Marcy makes a noise like a cat's squeaky toy.

July 31, 1986 - Hogwarts

Minerva pours herself a glass and toasts her fireplace before sinking into an armchair.

"Happy birthday, Harry."

He's alive, she knows it. He has to be. No matter what Dumbledore claimed when he saw Severus' report, no matter what his little trinkets say. Harry has to be alive. Because she couldn't live with herself if she'd failed Lily's family again.

POP!

"There is being someone at the door, Headmissy McGonagall."

"Who?"

"Potions-man, Headmissy."

"Send him in, Bonny."

The elf pops away and returns a moment later with a ruffled-looking Severus Snape.

"I could've walked up the stairs."

"Headmissy is saying to 'send', not to 'let'. Potions-man is not being snooping!"

She takes another sip to keep herself from bursting into laughter.

"Thank you, Bonny. You may go."

"Your quarters are..." Severus clicks his tongue and tilts his head, casting about for words--an unusually unguarded gesture, coming from him. "Comfortable."

"Yes, well, contrary to my students' expectations, I don't sleep on a lumpy rock just to make sure I'm cross when I wake up. Just as I'm sure you don't actually sleep in a coffin, no matter what my lion cubs claim."

Did Severus Snape just smile?

"Just so," he drawls.

She waves at the other armchair. A layer of dust covers it--she doesn't entertain, and she goes to Albus, he doesn't come to her--but Severus sits in it without bothering with a dusting charm.

She fills another glass and sends it over to him on a charm.

"Drink, young man. We're drinking to Harry, Lily's son."

He complies after a long look at the flames.

"I taught you, you know. I know you better than most Slytherins, as many times as you and James..." She waves off the rest. Severus deserved the benefit of the doubt more often, in hindsight.

"What can I help you with, Severus?"

He drains the glass, conjures a table beside his chair and sets it aside.

"There were details I didn't put in my report to Dumbledore. Things I didn't want him to know. I need to know if I'm speaking to Minerva McGonagall, who cried when she attended Lily's wedding and put up with a dance with Sirius Black, or if I'm speaking to Dumbledore's lap-cat."

"Since it's Harry's birthday today, and I'm halfway to pissed, I think you can assume."

He sucks in a hasty breath. "As I told the Headmaster, the Dursleys were under a compulsion to confess to anyone and everyone what they'd done to Harry. There were bloodstains on the bed in the cupboard, so I-"

"The what?"

He sneers. He knows the headmaster kept that from her.

"He slept in a boot cupboard, on a dirty cot."

Albus Dumbledore, I will strangle you with your own beard!

"As I was saying, there was blood around his cot. Not much. A few drops. A bloody nose, perhaps, his cousin admits to giving a few. But there were runic traces, too, and candles, large candles. Three of them, arranged under a cauldron filled with blood. The smell of them..."

Severus' already pale face turns ashen.

"The candles were shot through with blood, and the wicks had been charmed to burn slowly. I think we can assume the candles and the fact that Vernon and Dudley are no longer overweight are related."

"Gods and Powers. Prisoners’ candles and flesh rituals? You're certain?"

He nods.

"The more I go over the memory, the more I come to the conclusion that the whole thing--the blood-infused candles, the ritual use of human flesh, the compulsion, all of it--was meant to both punish Petunia Dursley and defeat Albus' charms and blood wards. The ritual he used was ill-prepared. Lily Evans he is not and witchcraft has never been the Headmaster's forte. Harry's blood resides at Number 4, and via the candles, it is 'touched' by the 'love' of his family. The wards will fall when the candles burn out and the blood clots. Which will take years. Until then, Albus has no idea where Harry is, but if he frees the Dursleys from this nightmare, he loses the wards and any traces he could use if he were to begin a search."

"Why go to such lengths just to take Harry?"

Severus shrugs.

"I do not know, though I agree it seems unlike my former...social club to go to so much trouble but not harm the boy. Half a dozen life sentences for the magic in the cupboard alone. I also found the body of a little boy--conjured, with some strips that were real."

Minerva chokes a sob.

"You...the Headmaster has to know!"

"He would, if I thought it was important. Carved into the box I found it in were the words 'I took what is mine' above a coat of arms close to but not quite the coat of arms of House Black. The coat was thoroughly rendered and reacted to scrying spells by unfolding into a bloody painting. Oil on canvas, in the Baroque style. Our mystery player is an artist. The hounds were grims, not hunting dogs, and the blade on the shield was a ritual dagger--unfinished iron, capped with a laughing skull cast in copper, with eyes socketed with amethysts. It had an old Latin motto, not Tojours Pur. I spoke to Narcissa, and she confirmed it was once their heraldry. They stopped using it in 1618. Given that I also felt a metamorphmagus' mag-"

"Is that why you barged in on Miss Tonks? And there were the strangest rumours about Marcie Selwyn giggling non-stop at dinner and a favour you owed her father…” She teases.

He raises a placating hand.

"It was not that the magic felt similar, Minerva. It felt exactly the same. Even more similar than your magic and the traces left by your furry alter-ego. That simply does not happen. I had…”

“I was doubting my sanity by that point. Obviously, Miss Tonks has an alibi, however risque. I suspect all metamorphs' magic is the same to the touch. Perhaps it's the same colour to magesight too, but I haven't met anyone with that gift since Lily Evans."

Minerva pours herself another glass and they watch the fire in silence for a time.

"I think it was Nymphadora Black, Miss Tonks' namesake. She was the middle daughter of Henry Black IV and his half-sister, Anne. The Blacks do that from time to time to encourage their traits--at the cost of risking the Black Madness. She was a metamorphmagus, and she is the reason we associate them with the Blacks. Extremely dangerous duelist, a gifted swordswoman and noted creature-hunter as well. Served as House Black's enforcer for a century before she disappeared the morning after winning a duel with Joan of Arc's half-sister."

"Surely she's no-" Minerva remembers an article she read in Transfiguration Treatises a few years ago. "You think this woman is still alive?"

Severus nods.

"Why not? They can change their bodies at a whim. Transfiguration of all kinds is nearly effortless for them. Reshaping one's flesh via intent...it seems like the intent to survive or the intent not to age would cause them to shift their flesh into a healthy state. With practice, it would be child's play to maintain. And if one did live that long, it would become unbearable. Generations of friends dying while you survived? The guilt alone would be crushing."

"They would cut ties, and with their abilities, they could disappear," Minerva muses. "There was an article in Transfiguration Treatises that postulated that certain mythical figures--the Green Lady, for example--were metamorphmagi with a flair for the dramatic. Age and experience makes a wizard or witch more powerful. I can't see a reason why a thousand-year-old witch couldn't pass herself off as a god to the Ancient Egyptians."

Snape chuckles.

"You can imagine my surprise when Narcissa shared the family legend that Ares and Enyo Black, metamorphs and twins, founded the house before they fled Corinth. It wasn't as if the Greek Gods were well-behaved; depraved wizards with sufficient power could well be the reason for those stories. And it does seem that the family has a penchant for changing their shape and abusing Muggle women."

"So it does. So you think a long-forgotten assassin of the Blacks' scooped Harry up, then used blood magic and human sacrifice to hide it?"

"Perhaps. Petunia had a scar on her midsection. It's possible that what was sacrificed was the potential for life. Some witches did so before contraceptive charms existed to be sure they had no children. So a variety of rituals exist for one ovary, both, the womb, and various partial butcheries. Sacrificing dozens or hundreds of children who might be is potent. The destruction of innocence amuses many a god, fae or demon."

He leans back in the chair and lets his head fall back, staring at the ceiling.

"Something else is bothering you, Severus."

"In her blatherings, Petunia complained about Harry's hair. Always growing back, she said, sometimes overnight after she cut it. Seems like an unusually specific bit of accidental magic to repeat three times, doesn't it?"

"Morgana," Minerva breathes. "Yes, I should say that's odd, Severus"

"There were no metamorphs in Dorea Black's line, we can say this with certainty for three generations prior, but there were in other Black lines. Only the gods above and below know what Lily could do."

Minerva chuckles. Magic adored her favourite student. Whatever strangeness guides magic itself was fascinated by Lily Evans. Her rituals rarely failed; and never failed catastrophically enough to dissuade her. Her already-unusual gift of magesight was later compounded by a gift for channelling leftover magic from rituals. Give her a sacrifice before a battle, and not one Death Eater could stand against her one-on-one. The one time they came wand-to-wand, Bellatrix Lestrange had a sudden burst of sanity and called on her husband for help.

A gifted sorceress, with blood sunk into these isles as far back as Minerva's ancestors and their tangles with Hadrian. What she could have been, if not cut down so young...

"He’s being tutored by a murderess of House Black who once, for reasons unknown, went on a killing spree that lasted twelve decades. I don't like our chances of finding him."

"Or her," Minera reminds him. "If they're a metamorph. Lily did mention she did a ritual to ask for the blessing of a daughter before she got pregnant. Perhaps this was just Magic’s way of honouring that. Potters are in the Roman tradition and use patriarchal descent. So James might've potioned the child to be male for a few days to complete the registration with the Ministry and Gringotts for the Potter line. He would've let the lad or lass decide as they grew."

Severus groans.

"And a child that just watched his mother's slaughter would be too frightened to manage even accidental magic, so Dumbledore would not know. I'm not looking for a boy. I'm looking for any seven-year-old child in Britain, if they're even still in Britain, who could look like anyone at all. They might look three years older or younger, at this stage of development. That is half of Miss Tonks' limit."

Minerva chuckles.

"It seems you will be looking for young Harry for some time, Severus. Consider it part of your penance for what you did to Lily."

August 11, 1986 - Cambridge

Minerva hisses at the stray. The kitten cringes, but doesn't retreat. It must have more kneazle blood than usual--all cats have some--because it seems hell-bent on staying close to her.

The bratty little thing pounces on her tail, play-biting and mewling.

Giving it up for a bad job, she turns back to the house and the witchling within.

Hermione Jean Granger, according to the Book. Daughter of Helen, naturally, and the resemblance is clear between mother and daughter.

Her name has of the spidery squiggles of ink typical of a reborn line carried by a squib, but none of the severity of penmanship the Quill uses to denote a pureblood heir or heiress, nor a tracing of their heraldry. No mark next to the name for a new bloodlines matriarch, either.

A by-blow or bastard lovechild misplaced in the chaos of the war, perhaps. She has the face of a Southern pureblood--high, sharp cheekbones, large, round eyes set in a slim face. Nut-brown, madly curling hair, but the tangles might be merely unexpressed magic--common in a promising witch her age--and that hair colour that rules out only Malfoys, Weasleys, and Longbottoms.

It's too early to tell, but she could well grow into the hips, shoulders and long limbs of a witch-born child. Femininity distilled, witches whose mothers and foremothers influenced their daughters over the centuries--their worries filling their wombs with magic, reshaping their own bodies with flashes of emotion and power, passing these traits to their daughters. A witch-born heiress of an unbroken line stands out in a crowd of Muggle-born by third year at the latest.

The girl is without a doubt magically precocious--she's twice caught her with notepad in hand, glaring at a spoon on her desk, daring it to disobey her will--and certainly a future Ravenclaw. Minerva likes to think of herself as a scholar, but she certainly never broke her books up and alphabetized them shelf-by-shelf.

A promising little girl from a Muggle house, with parents who clearly love her dearly.

Once, she took a girl like this from a home to show her the wonder of Hogwarts. Watched Lily bloom into a clever girl, a kind friend, and a fearsome witch--comfortable with dark and light, good with a wand but truly gifted in runes and rituals. After all, what did Lily care if it was 'dark' magic? She was not brought up to be afraid of it. And what did Albus think would happen in the Gryffindor dorms in the 1970s when those girls learned magic was real? Muggle women toyed with high ritual during that strange decade, and sometimes stumbled onto success. Did he think he could prevent witches from striking bonfires and working rituals just by hanging a sign that said 'restricted section' over the tracts that taught it?

Lily was a sorceress before graduation--the detentions slips alone would back her up--skilled in the wizardry, witchery, and workings alike.

Armed as she was with all three secrets, she was well on her path to being a warlock at the time of her death, behind only her husband and Frank Longbottom in duels, behind only Sirius and Minerva herself in kills during the war. Her gifts as a battlefield healer got all the ink in the Prophet, because no one wanted to admit they'd watched the white of her eyes fill with blood and seen roots sprout where she trod, or seen a single dueler's chain turn 'the heirs of respectable families' into spatters in the snow and tangles of meat. Best not to scare the sheep. Best use a tame phrase like 'clear a path to the wounded'.

Minerva took Lily Evans away, and it drove a wedge between her and Petunia that never healed. Lily's parents never got to hold their grandchild and she and James could not attend their funeral.

She will not take another gifted Muggleborn from her family without being sure she can bring them back, whole in body and mind.

August 14, 1986 - Beauxbatons

Amelie taps her wand three times on the greeting ward to her master's office.

"Enter."

The door swings open, scattering parchment off the floor. Silly old man. Atop his desk, he's carving a chunk of granite the size of a tombstone, larger than anything she's seen in her apprenticeship so far.

"Professor Weber, there's an owl for you. It's sealed with wax."

"Describe the seal to me," he instructs, never looking up from his carving.

"A skeletal cat."

"Schiesse." His wand becomes a blur, tap-tap-tap against the goblin-silver chisel in his hand. She settles herself on a stool and waits. Interrupting him is suicidal if that runestone is even partially charged.

Finally, he finishes whatever verse he was carving, dabs his brow on his sleeve and wipes the chisel clean with silk.

"Here, take over. Forms are on that drafting paper."

"Are you sure, sir?"

His smile is so broad and so earnest it turns his entire moustache upside-down. "Apprenticeships last seven years, but that doesn't mean it takes that long for a good student to learn the craft, young lady."

She hands the scroll over, picks up the chisel, and starts cutting the lines that will link the Futhark bordering the stone. It's a trap scheme, by the look of it--with the Sumerian and Egyptian rings that become ever-smaller as they orbit around each other towards the trio of halgaz runes surrounding the blood-charged sowilo in the centre, laid into a verse of the Prose Edda.

Lightning hex, invoking Thor as thunder-bringer and craftsman and telling of his ruse to retrieve his hammer. A classic. Simple enough defence, but to charge it with blood and set it inside a recursive structure and to design it to discharge explosively upon breach? She'd rather not meet whatever the wardstone's patron is worried about. That much power would fry a Scandinavian Stormwing, lightning affinity notwithstanding.

The professor laughs and tosses the scroll into the fireplace.

"Sir?"

"Did I ever tell you that I have some favours owed, from the War?"

She smiles.

"You must have left that out in your lectures about warding Nurmengard, sir. I take it one was just called in?"

"So it was. Have you heard of Minerva McGonagall?"

She narrowly avoids a deadly mistake, catching her chisel just before it touches and setting it aside with shaking hands.

"I think all witches of ambition have," she jokes.

"They called her the ghost of Leningrad, once upon a time."

And she likes to prank her colleagues with her animagus form at conferences. Of course she'd choose a skeletal cat.

"Pack your bags, Ameilie. We'll be in England for a while. Should be fun. I've never been asked to ward anything so complicated since the war, and on a Muggle home, at that!"

September 1, 1991

POTTER PANIC! BOY-WHO-LIVED BECOMES BOY-WE-LOST?

DUMBLEDORE PLAYS DUMB, REFUSES TO ANSWER QUESTIONS

November 15, 1991 - Ministry of Magic

Mirabella spots the bell on her desk shaking--the silencing charm stops it from making noise--and groans. She drops her hand into the sweaty curls of her secretary. "Hush, pet. And slow down." Hungry suckles and flicks of the tongue on her clit fade into slow, languid brushes with the flat of the tongue which she rewards with lazy scratches.

She allows a few threads of the girl's sanity to flow back across their link, purple-black flames dancing around her hand while feathers of crimson glass peek from her skin. She'll have to find room for another secretary in the budget. This one is too good a fuck to give up but also too smart to waste. If she trades off with another, feeding won't harm her.

A glance at her mirror and a flick of her wand suffices to compose herself moments before the doorknob turns.

"Mrs. Zabini."

"Vice-Minister for Education, if you please, sir. You'll forgive me if I don't stand."

I wouldn't lift a finger to honour you, you prudish old boor.

"Of course, Vice-Minister. It has been a long day, I'm sure." How easily he falls into that harmless-old-man routine of his. "Always is, this time of year. All those little wrinkles in the parchment."

"As you say, a busy time. What do you need, Headmaster? I presume it has something to do with your inability to produce your ward in time for his acceptance letter?"

His mask falls, just for an instant before he collects himself and hands her a scroll.

It's a simple enough proposal: Students who do not attend Hogwarts at eleven and have no history of severe accidental magic can transfer in at an older age, up to age eighteen. If the program is a success, it might be expanded to include aptitude testing and starting them in second or third year classes.

She tosses the scroll down on the desk. "This benefits only Muggle-borns."

"I hadn't taken you for a believer i-"

"I'm not, as you well know. I have as many interests that align with those new to our world as I do with the old guard. But I am a believer in getting an all-pureblood Board of Governors and a Wizengamot made of old men too proud of their beards to approve it. The purebloods will hate this. None of them will use it."

Pity he didn't rise to the bait.

"Not none of them. Perhaps not all could afford the ICW permits and deferral fees--though poverty is not the only factor. Molly Weasley dearly loves seeing the smiles on their children's faces at Platform 9 & ¾. It's true that I cannot see her exercising this option."

"But most could afford it and some will take advantage. I think the Greengrasses, Odgens or the Abbotts would rather see their heirs familiar with the family business--all of it possible without a wand, and requiring training in finance, patent law and goblin culture we do not provide at Hogwarts--before they're distracted with levitation charms, choosing a bed in the dormitory, and house points."

He's not wrong. And therein lies the danger of Albus Dumbledore: Even his worst ideas and his bald-faced lies like this have a salvageable, good idea hidden inside.

"Madam Bones knows criminals would target her through her family. She might well prefer to send her niece to Hogwarts as a grown witch, mature in her power and trained to defend herself. And this will also mean more Muggle-born who keep up on their education. Our world is not always as kind as it should be to such children. With the ability to choose, one assumes some will return to their world after graduation, perhaps go to university. An opportunity we have taken from them too often, in the past."

"Thus reducing the size of the 'scourge' and 'horde' that the activist Dark so fears," she replies. "Thus leaving more jobs for pure-bloods who can't find their arses with a map and a point-me charm. Thanks ever so much for making sure I'll have more idiots in my office, old man."

He smiles, seemingly unaware of her sarcasm.

"...whilst the option to go back to the Muggle world without an educational disadvantage filters those who stay, too. Only those who grab their witchhood with both hands and leave their Muggle identities behind."

Dumbledore nods.

"I think the kinder voices in the Dark would see the promise in them, don't you?"

She sighs. "Every faction is pleased, but none more than the others. I begin to see how you've spent fifty years as Chief Warlock despite being a terrible liar, having no blackmail material and no gold for bribes."

"You wound me, madam!" He jokes, grinning.

His looks are not gone, not by miles.

Pity the man is so dead set on misery and self-denial--she's sure there are still some silver-haired Danes of irreverent temper, dark-tinted magic and the appropriate persuasions...

Mira could trust him if he fucked someone. Such as she can ever trust someone in Britain besides her Blaise, that is. A man with no vices and no loved ones is a man with no weaknesses and no pressure points.

"Very well, Chief Warlock. I'll put it through, but your name will be on it. You'll go down with me if they don't like it."

"Your candour is always refreshing, Madam. Has been since you were a student, as I recall."

May 17, 1992 - Hogwarts

Tom pushes himself up to his knees, retching out something jellied, night black and wriggling that he'd rather not dwell on. Whatever it is, the strands slither away into the stagnant pools of the Chamber.

He lunges forward, slamming his own nose into the stone. Blood blooms through the water.

I hate you!

Fuck. The stupid girl. How could she possibly wrest control of this body...she should be entirely destroyed. She defied me three times. She tried to kill me. The toilet, the forest, and the fire in the common room. One cannot possess one's mortal enemy.

Obviously. Cocky prat.

I assure you, I will see you dead, blood-traitor.

You're pants at threatening people, you do realise that, right? Trust me, I have brothers.

"Miss Weasley?"

"Yes, Professor McGonagall?"

Tom forces his shaking hand back into his bookbag. She doesn't suspect a thing.

She does!

"We do expect a manner of decorum, especially from the heiresses of such storied lines."

"Yes?"

She means smooth your skirt and close your legs so Colin Creevy can't see your knickers reflecting in the window, you berk!

I knew that.

Sure. Look, you're clearly going to need help pretending to be a witch. Fifty-fifty split? And you swear on your magic--no, ours, this body's magic--not to try to wipe me out.

Don't be ridiculous.

You're not going to find a book on this. If you think you'll just stroll in the Burrow acting like this and get past my mum, be my guest. I'm sure that someone in the Department of Mysteries can sort this. I'll be back on my own before Quidditch tryouts for second year.

I'm listening...

March, 8 1993 - Hogwarts

Hagrid pushes another branch aside with his umbrella and holds it for the Ravenclaw six-years. "Mind the moss there. It's, ah..."

A prefect squawks in fright and flicks her wand. A coat of flaming oil sprays across the fallen log. The moss shrieks and gnashes crooked teeth.

"Bit grouchy, that stuff. Right! Mind yeh don't step on any rotting logs round here."

A beam of silvery light dances from the student's wand and illuminates a lumpy bundle suspended on a braid of spider silk.

"What's that, professor?"

A human arm hangs from it, hairy and pudgy and discoloured with venom. Even on half-dissolved skin, the Dark Mark is clear in the dappled runoff of late afternoon sun.

"All ye back to yer dorms!" Hagrid hollers. "Five points fer spotting that, miss."

March 9, 1993

PETTIGREW'S BODY FOUND AT HOGWARTS! BOARD OF GOVERNORS CALLS FOR INQUEST INTO HEADMASTER OVER PRESENCE OF SECRET DEATH-EATER

May 15, 1993

MINISTRY MADNESS! NEW EVIDENCE CALLS SIRIUS BLACK'S GUILT INTO QUESTION, NEW TRIAL ORDERED!

UNDER TERMS OF SETTLEMENT, MINISTRY TO PAY FOR BLACK'S TREATMENT AT ST MUNGOS.

October 31, 1993

BLACK IS BACK! LORD BLACK RETAKES HIS SEAT, DEMANDS INVESTIGATION INTO HARRY POTTER'S WHEREABOUTS.

DISOWNED MEMBERS OF HOUSE BLACK REINSTATED AT SAMHAIN SESSION OF WIZENGAMOT, LORD BLACK CLAIMS 'CHANGE WILL MAKE US STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE'

MOVE OVER, GILDEROY LOCKHEART! WATCH OUT, HARRY POTTER! STUNNING IN STUDS AND LICKABLE IN LEATHER, SIRIUS BLACK TAKES NUMBER TWO IN OUR READER'S POLL!

November 8, 1993

DUMBLEDORE UNABLE TO PRODUCE BOY-WHO-LIVED FOR HIS DEBUT! ANDROMEDA BLACK-TONKS TAKES POTTER SEAT!

PEACOCKS AND PRICKLES! SEE SOCIETY PAGES FOR PHOTOS OF LONG-OVERDUE SISTERLY REUNION AT MALFOY MANOR.

July 22, 1996 - Hogwarts

Dumbledore glances at the parchment Minerva left at his seat at the staff table. It's covered in a blurring charm that neither he--nor the Elder Wand--have yet been able to lift. Mind-puzzle locked, perhaps, something that only Minerva's memories can unlock. Blood magic would have the same effect--far, far greater, actually--but that seems unlikely. He's never seen a single hint that either Minerva knows or favours witchcraft.

And why should she?

Transfiguration is the height of wandwork, and it comes to her like breathing. One day, when the safety of this world is secure, he'll confess to her that she's far better at delicate, lasting transfiguration--the truly difficult work--than he is.

Creating a thousand granite wolves in an instant to delay and harass Grindelwald in a duel is one thing.

Creating a clockwork kitten out of beat-up silverware the elves had retired so Sally-Anne Perks wouldn't feel so alone? Animating the blasted thing so it renewed the change with sunlight and little gears lining its spine--right where a cat likes to be scratched? That is on an entirely different scale. If she hadn't done it out of maternal instinct--in the odd way that she feels that instinct--he would have encouraged her to submit her notes on the work to the ICW. One can never have too many Masteries, when one is a teacher.

The obscured parchment is a puzzle, and Minerva's a forthright woman, prone neither to drama, exaggeration, undue modesty, or obfuscation. Half her difficulties as Head of House would be eliminated if she could play down the seriousness of a prank or play up the pain of insults.

"We're all here, then?"

He startles slightly at Minerva's words. Fishing in his robes, he finds the bag of Honeydukes and pops a sherbert lemon into his mouth. He lets Minerva lead these meetings--dull as the grave, administration--and this year, there is no need for him to add anything.

"All present except for the usual...," Snape replies, glancing at the Defence Professor's empty chair, his mouth a tight line. "...oversights."

"I have it in hand," Albus assures them, glancing to Minerva. She nods tightly. Surely she'll share the name, soon? The ICW insisted that they have a say in the appointment this year in order to help protect the Triwizard Tournament and were happy to offer up researchers, Aurors, Warlocks, and Battle Sorceresses by the dozen for the post. They ranged from French to Bolivian to Persian to Moai, and were each of them beyond qualified.

But they would have taught within ICW rules on dark magic, not British law, and certainly not his standards for Hogwarts. He cannot allow that. Temptation is the first mistake, and the least reversible. Minerva said she'd managed to pre-empt that by finding a British candidate.

Sumana Patil beams at her new workmates.

"The Potions department is excited. I'm sure it will be a pleasure working together." She fiddles with a rune-carved bracelet on her left wrist, dark eyes sweeping the room.

Filius is already red-cheeked and chortling to himself. Most Potion Masters couldn't manage to whip up goblin rum, or even a ghost of it--it's closer to high alchemy than mere brewing--but the Patils are not most potioneers, as she primly reminded them the day she arrived. Most potion-making families don't have legacies that predate agriculture and the use of metal cauldrons, after all.

"Oh?" Dumbledore asks--he shouldn't tease Severus, but it's too easy. "I must say, excited suits you, dear boy."

Severus shudders in his seat. It's a puzzle. Surely he knows he won't be sacked, and now he won't need to teach anyone below fourth year. He never liked teaching. His position here is patronage and protection, more baldly than Sybil, who at leasts enjoys pretending to teach. She is taking a liking to goblin rum right along with Filius. Poppy has been incensed at having had to lay in a supply of Gut-Repairing Potion.

July 23, 1996 - Cambridge

Tom lets the satchel slide off his shoulder and land in the shoe basket by the door. There's no samples in it today. That's soft enough.

"Helen?"

He scoops up the mail from the wicker basket--it was moved from under the slot, so she's been home this afternoon. The usual mix of unpleasant, monetary, and meddling family. No doubt Aunt Tabitha wants to complain again about how it's time for Helen to have babies, already. Biological impossibility is nothing, she'll claim. They just need to find Jesus Christ. Why she thinks three demeaning instructions to upend their whole lives will work better than one, he has no idea. He might trip walking past the fireplace--some people light fireplaces in July, he'll claim--and drop the letter.

"Darling?"

He doesn't get an answer, but he hears a sob from the parlour.

Helen draws her knees up even higher, tucking her chin over them. Tom sits on the ottoman, head in his hands, one eye peeking out between his fingers. It darts from picture to picture, letter to letter...to a pair of bottles with some odd tincture in them.

"How could I forget, Tom?"

He unfolds his long frame and kneels amid the splash of photos that fell out of the packet. He starts shifting them, putting them in order.

Hermione--Their Hermione, how could she forget? She's her mother!--aged ten or eleven. Not long after the ghosts of memories she has of her daughter here end. Six photos, same place. He taps a finger to them.

"Same time. Same summer. These other girls she's with...schoolmates, maybe." He carefully flips through the letters. "Ha!"

He waves a many-times-stamped, air-mail-edged card at her. Postcard, she realizes.

"Salem, Massachusetts."

"From her?" Helen croaks.

He nods and sets it atop the pictures before moving to the next set.

He's never seen her this angry, and he's made some mistakes that lesser women might have skinned him for. Her fingers shake around the bottle of--whatever--and the handwritten letter on old-timey paper is crumpled to a speck in her right hand.

He doesn't dare ask her what it said. But he suspects this Minerva McGonagall character who mailed them this mess would be well-advised to never let Helen lay eyes on her.

She thrusts a bottle into his hands and slaps a paring knife down on the table.

"One drop on each eye, spit in it, three drops of blood go in. Then you drink the rest."

"Be serious, darling."

"I am," she snarls. "It's a potion. Yes, yes. I know. But do you know any science that could snip out our memories of our daughter--but only our daughter--and also make nine photo albums, her baby things, and the door to her bloody room disappear without our knowledge?"

"I suppose not."

He unscrews the lid.

"Cheers, love."

Their daughter is a grown woman. Their daughter went through school and then university in America. Graduate school, even.

Their daughter kept the secret for whoever took her but their daughter loved them, every letter makes that clear.

Their daughter is a witch.

She isn't the only one, either.

July 23, 1996 - Paris, France

Fleur sighs. The ordinaire women dancing tonight don't offer her much--certainly nothing to her liking. They're all primped and powdered and plucked, wearing come-hither dresses like she is. And from the dreadful flatness of the air around her--not a whiff of magic--she must be the only sorcière out on the town this side of the Seine. At least her veela hasn't tried to twist her preferences, yet. Seems she took a lesson from Fleur wearing iron jewellery for a month. Yet. There's only so much longer before the animal in her bones decides that it'll take a cock in the absence of something better.

Is it too much to ask for a gendarme or a war-witch or--Sun and Moon help her--even a foreign mercenary to walk in that door? She craves the crackle of hard magic against her skin, not just the residual miasma of charms and potions. Muscle. Danger. Someone who knows what it's like to fight, like she does.

Someone who can throw her up against the wall, lift her, keep her still for their rough han-

Her.

Her senses sharpen--eyesight first, as is her veela's wont--and the world around her slows. She can see the scratches on the brass clip for the rope as the bouncer's calloused thumb pulls it back. She can see the tattoo on the woman's wrist--darkening from one on the back of her palm as it disappears into her rolled-up sleeve--and the way a drop of sweat slides across the ink. She can see the three-tailed, eight-legged panther lift its inky head and suck the droplet from her skin before settling back into its pose.

The ordinaires like the bouncer didn't notice, of course.

He was too distracted by the way the newcomers' breasts lift the simple black henley away from her ribcage--round and high, like she'd hung two oranges on a necklace--and the breadth of her hips, the length of her legs. Fleur appreciates all that too, of course. But the cords of muscle twined around the bones of her wrist...

"Barkeep!" Fleur calls out, already calculating her path across the dance floor. No one will reach this woman before she does, no one will put their hands on her hips, no one will dance with her, no one will taste her skin...

Not even if she has to bring every ordinaire bitch here to her knees with her allure.

Hermione has, in the last six months: Knocked out a werewolf with her kit shovel, blown a man open point blank with her service revolver, led her Auror squad into a potion-trafficker's den under fire, been discharged from the Rochester Raw-Riders with honour, made the rounds of her Salem friends, finished her Radcliffe degree, tested with the ICW for a licence, undergone her trials for blood magic, dark magic, ritual magic, and necromantic certifications at Miskatonic, and slept with this witch on her first night in Paris.

She has a hunch that the witch sprawled beside her is the most dangerous. Habit forming, to be certain.

The way she kissed--all lips and tongue--rather than introducing herself. The way her slim fingers gathered Hermione's shirt up. The way she clung like a woman overboard clinging to a rope in choppy seas. The way her quicksilver hair tumbled around her milk-pale shoulders as she rode two fingers, then three, then the whole hand. The way she moaned when she dismounted. The way she rolled off, cast her indigo eyes over her shoulder, murmured an invitation, and lifted her luscious little ass off the bed.

Using wandless magic to call the strap out of Hermione's bag was impressive, she supposes. Nothing next to the heat and wet and tight--the velvet-wrapped steel--she was sinking into moments later with a groan.

She shakes her wrist and flexes her fingers to throw off some of the stiffness--The endurance of this one!--and looks back at the other side of the bed.

With the clarity of morning and a mild hangover, she's more certain than ever.

She's not normal. Those bruises that had been so lovely last night--violet ribbons and fingerprint splotches across her hips and thighs, wherever Hermione needed leverage--are gone, leaving only creamy skin behind. She sparkled with sweat last night, a shower of diamonds raining from her breasts and belly as she bounced on Hermione's cock, but her hair fans across the pillow and across Hermione's arm, perfect as ever. The cant of her hips as she walked, her height, the peculiar combination of waist, shoulders and hips--one in a million, to be sure--and the way Hermione's hands itched if they weren't on her body. Like it was a need. Like she was put on this Earth to pleasure this witch.

The odd fantasy--a flash, then gone--of this witch in her arms, plump with child. The orgasms that ripped up her spine imaging tiny, pale, sapphire-eyed faces looking up at Hermione.

The way she's certain she saw feathers in her hair. Who makes jewellery out of pearlescent crimson glass--the work so ornate enough she'd believe they could take flight--and then hides it in their hair?

Hermione drops her palm across a perfect, upturned ass.

"Morning, veela."

The surprised yelp is delicious and the scornful over-the-shoulder look--still sleepy-eyed--is très magnifique, as they say.

Fleur's veela is entirely too pleased with herself, she decides, watching Hermione flip through a bundle of papers while a now-empty coffee cup warms her fingers. Silent all morning. Not a single flash, a single imagined depravity or hot ache at the back of the skull--do this, now!--nothing. She would have slept with Hermione, regardless of her bird-brained alter-ego's intentions. Just her type: Ready to take the lead, skilled enough to make her writhe, powerful enough to make Fleur feel echoes of the orgasms in the tenderness between her legs.

What she had not expected is for them to be a good fit.

Hermione Granger is coming off her national service with the MACUSA Aurors, just as Fleur did with the Soldate Sorcière. Going to England, like she is. Going to Hogwarts, like she is. Monitoring the Triwizard Tournament, like she is. Fleur is posing as a last-year Beauxbatons student--the benefits of being veela--whereas Professor Granger will be teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts.

Single, like she is. She said she is unsure what she wants. Fleur the witch is unsure, but Fleur the veela has already named their many children.