December 24, 1993
Arkham, Massachusetts | Miskatonic Valley Magical Cooperative
'Twas the night before Christmas, and Tom Riddle – or rather Harrison Evans (who had chosen the name because it amused him to appropriate the families of 'his' child and the woman who had borne her) – was walking off his irritation at being told in no uncertain terms that he was not to do any work the following day. According to the head of his department – Applied Metaphysics – the University was taking the day off for Christmas, no exceptions.
Neither the fact that Harrison did not celebrate Christmas nor the argument that it was absurd for a Dark Arts College – even one that was hidden within a muggle university – to accommodate a holiday celebrating the birth of a Light Lord had swayed the administration, and when he had complained to his fellow researchers, they simply seemed resigned – though most of them had known that this interruption to their schedules was imminent, and had planned their experiments accordingly. It was they who had told him that the labs and the library would be completely locked down, and that Security would be enforcing their day off.
It sounded slightly ridiculous even to think it, but Harrison hated being forced to do anything, including taking a break from the punishing schedule he had set for himself over the past few months. He had let it go rather than continue to complain and risk sounding like a petulant child in front of his co-workers, but that didn't mean he was pleased to find himself essentially kicked out of the lab and his office. He didn't even have access to the books he needed to continue working on his more theoretical projects, which was incredibly frustrating.
Plus, it wasn't as though he could go anywhere and actually enjoy the time off: everywhere remotely entertaining, from the all-night coffee shop where he was slowly driving the baristas mad with his impossibly exacting espresso-drink orders to the clubs and public centers he had taken to visiting in order to legilimantically 'mainline' and assimilate the popular mentality of his new twentieth-century 'peers' was also closed for the holiday.
Harrison had only just thought that he hadn't even seen another person out on the streets in nearly an hour's walk, when he realized he was being followed.
No. Stalked.
It was subtle, the sense of being tracked through the shadows. He rather doubted that he would have noticed it at all, had he not spent considerable time relying entirely on mind magics as his sole interaction with the world around him. But there was a distinct hint of an intelligence – not human, or not entirely so – following him, giving off the faintest hint of hunger and need.
Unlike the filthy muggles who had occasionally stalked him through London in his youth, he was certain that the hunger of this pursuer was more literal than carnal, and he suspected it would be slightly more difficult to turn the tables in his favor. The muggles, after all, had responded easily to his instinctive compulsions, and they had paid most dearly for their impertinent attempts to attack him.
Most vampires, on the other hand – and he was certain that it was a vampire – were quite good at resisting such mental attacks.
On the other hand, like most predators, vampires tended to be lazy, and he could easily give the impression of being too difficult and dangerous a target to attempt, simply by drawing attention to the fact that he knew his stalker was there. After all, most creatures which could sense a shadow-walker were far more dangerous than vampires.
He spoke casually, without breaking stride: "I would advise you, night walker, to hunt elsewhere this evening."
To his surprise, the vampire responded, rather than slipping away at his bluff. She addressed him by name as she stepped out of the shadow of a looming oak. "Mr. Riddle? I did not recognize you until you spoke. Why am I not surprised to find that you have made your way to the University, even after all these years?"
He recognized her, too. She hadn't changed much since the last time he had seen her, at the end of his fifth year at Hogwarts.
It was a rather unpleasant shock, he found, coming face-to-face with someone who had known him before creating the horcrux. He had thought all ties with his former life most effectively severed after his re-embodiment, and was displeased to realize that he felt quite threatened when it became apparent that this was not the case. He covered quickly.
"Lady Margolotta? You really are a vampire?" It had been rumored, of course, that the strict and unnerving one-time Hogwarts librarian had been a Dark Creature, but he hadn't truly believed it, nor given her much thought since entering the diary.
She smiled, far more genuinely than he had ever seen as a student. "Indeed. Armando was very kind to allow me a place at the school – or perhaps rather canny. He was ever the Ravenclaw, and I had lifetimes of knowledge to share with him. Though of course when Dumbledore took his place, he would not stand for me to remain."
Tom scowled genuinely at the mention of his old nemesis. "He's an idiot. You, McKinnon, and Turner were the best that school had to offer."
The vampire laughed. "I find it ironic that you would name those among us who were least fooled by your act, save Dumbledore himself, as your favorites among the staff."
"I appreciate intelligence," he admitted, sounding out the interaction and attempting to construct a plan.
"As do I. There is a reason I kept my silence as I observed your exploits in the Castle, at least when they did not involve stealing from my domain." Another smile softened her words, inviting him to reminisce as she apparently recalled the incident of his "borrowing" a trunk-load of books over his first summer away from the school. That was, after all, the only time he had ever been caught stealing from the library.
He could use that: he could not simply let the vampire leave, and potentially spread word that Tom Riddle was alive and well in the Americas. It would hurt nothing to play along while he decided how to deal with her. Accordingly, he groaned. "That was over fifty years ago! I was twelve. Will you never let go my youthful transgression?"
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. Walk with me," she demanded imperiously. He offered his arm and she pulled them together, peering closely at his face. Whatever she saw or didn't see there must have confused her, for she asked suddenly, "What have you done to yourself, Mr. Riddle?"
"Beg pardon?"
"This," she motioned at his body with her free hand, urging him to move with the one linked through his own arm. "Your heart beats. You breathe. I mistook you for human, at a distance. But you give off no human warmth, and you react to my presence more like one of my brethren than one of the living. You have done somewhat unnatural to retain your youth. What is it?"
Tom rolled his eyes. If he reacted more like a vampire than a human, it was, he suspected, because he was himself one of the dangers of the night, not a potential victim, even here in Arkham. (He was acutely aware that he was not the most dangerous person in any given room at Miskatonic, but he was far from harmless.) And in any case, he knew he had little to fear from a vampire who was now clearly projecting curiosity and interest more strongly than hunger. No, his problem was how to eliminate the threat she posed to his identity, not to his person. It was true, though, that his body temperature was far lower than it ought to be, regulated by custom-designed enchantments rather than the life-spark that maintained his base functions.
(There had been a few minor issues once the initial magic-high of creating his body wore off, most of them related to the basilisk life-spark, he thought – the operation of legs and eyelids, and an uncomfortable dissonance between his actual metabolism and the metabolism he had expected to have chief among them – which had drawn into question whether his foundational assumptions about its compatibility had been quite… correct. He was concerned enough that he had implemented a back-up plan, binding of his life to the blood he shared with Mary Potter, though he hoped he wouldn't need that safety net. He rather doubted that unexpectedly and violently possessing the girl would incline her to recognize their relationship favorably. Also, in such an event, he would be stuck in the already-occupied body of a teenage girl. Again. And he would really rather not, regardless of how tolerable his heir was compared to Ginevra Weasley.)
"To be called unnatural by a vampire, my night is complete," he observed drily.
"I never claimed to be otherwise myself, Mr. Riddle."
"Please, call me Tom."
"As I am Margolotta. We immortal creatures of the dark cannot stand upon ceremony with each other, after all," she replied, equally drily. "Tom, then. What have you done to slip the influence of time from your body? It is like nothing I have seen before, and I have seen many things in my time."
Unless he was entirely mistaken, there was a degree of flirtation in her tone. Good. Flirtation meant she wasn't about to vanish out of his reach, and any chance he had of controlling the situation required keeping her close until he resolved the issue of her potential to speak of him.
"It is a rather long story," he hinted, teasingly. Her smile confirmed that she was on the hook, and he pressed further, pretending false disinterest in her further company. "And I am rather disinclined to share it. Anyway, Margolotta, weren't you on the hunt?"
The vampire waved her free hand dismissively. "The Hunger is eternal. It can wait. Besides, in case you had not noticed, the pickings are rather slim this evening. I would much rather spend my night… persuading you to give up your secrets than wandering the cold looking for a convenient meal which may never come."
Tom grinned. "So confident, milady, to think that you could have all my secrets from me in a single night. Tell me, what sort of persuasion did you have in mind?"
"Oh, I'm sure I can think of something. I have learned many inventive techniques for… convincing men to part with their secrets over the years."
"Ah, but I am not a man," Tom reminded her smirking broadly. "I am an immortal creature of the dark, like yourself."
"We shall see," the vampire laughed, a trace of challenge in her tone. "If I lead you through the shadows, can you follow?" she asked more soberly.
Tom shrugged, a plan taking shape as he realized that she most likely intended to take him somewhere secluded to question more inventively and at greater length. "Let's find out."
Entering the shadows was terribly uncomfortable, simply because he felt utterly out of control, as though he was falling sideways as he slid into another plane, pulled and guided in some way he did not entirely understand by the presence of the vampire's insubstantial hand on his equally insubstantial arm. Still, now that he had done it once, he was confident he could do it again. Like apparition, the hardest part of shadow-walking was said to be finding your way out of and back into your own universe.
There was nothing in the shadow-space, save for an impression of vast expanses of darkness moving within the utter black of it. It was both slightly disconcerting and utterly familiar, though he could not have said why or how. Then Margolotta whispered to him, invisible and nigh-intangible. He understood her, he felt, very much in the same way he understood Parsel, as though she was not truly speaking, but he was hearing her nonetheless through some twisted quirk of magic – as though hearing was the closest sense the magic could approximate for this communication.
*Perhaps you are truly a shadow-creature after all, young Tom, to be so aware under the dark. To find your way, you must think on the confluence of events you desire to attend, and then pull yourself back into the world. Follow me.*
Rather at a loss as to what 'confluence of events' he should think of, he focused on the thought of emerging out of the shadows with the vampire, as she had done when he first noted her presence. A feeling of purpose and direction took root within him. He seized it and, ignoring the sense of near-belonging he felt in the shadow world, thrust himself back into his own plane, as though completing an apparition.
They were in a darkly-lit sitting room, the few lamps serving only to emphasize the darkness that surrounded them, casting the shadows the unlikely pair had stumbled from. He could just make out the vampire's evaluating expression as she breathed, "Well done," and offered him a glass of wine.
After that, things moved quickly. It was not the first seduction Tom had taken part in – there had been a brief period in his fifth year when he had been determined to discover what, exactly, all the fuss was about with sex, and experimented accordingly – but it was certainly the strangest. For one thing, the teasing and flirting and even the sex itself had a more pressing end-goal on both sides than simply the act itself. And for another, Margolotta was, as she had implied, far, far more experienced and skilled than Tom, or any of the girls and boys with whom he had previously amused himself, not to mention stronger and faster, and quite a lot more flexible. Neither was she opposed to a bit of rough play, on either side, as he discovered to his delight.
He had done a very thorough job of re-creating his body – all of his knowledge of human anatomy, as well as his own form had gone into it – and it reacted as the body of any twenty-three-year-old male might when faced with the prospect of a night of debauchery. He did, however, manage to keep his head well enough that he did not detail the method by which he had accomplished his apparent eternal youth, despite the vampire's many temptations. And he dared say that he acquitted himself well enough, eliciting moans of pleasure to match his own involuntary reactions. This was all to the good, as pleasing the vampire was necessary in order for the plan he had devised to succeed.
In the end, they struck as one, at the moment Margolotta lost herself to orgasm: she forgot herself, burying her fangs deep in the flesh of his neck. He, though startled and more than a little distracted by the bite, managed to take advantage of the momentary weakness in her mental defenses, driving himself deep into her memories.
To his disappointment, he found that she had spent the three-hundred-odd years of her life with far more interest in philosophy, history, literature, and poetry than the Dark Arts. He would have taken the knowledge for himself if she had spent more time on anything useful, but as it was, he simply swept the learned information aside. Then there were whole rooms of her past (she used a sprawling manor-house to organize her mind) that he could not comprehend, simply because the memories were strongly filtered through vampiric senses, which he had no grounds to interpret. Other skills, including languages she had learned in her travels and physical abilities like swordplay and horseback riding, were too complex for him to steal wholesale without sending himself into mental overload.
(A fact which he had not been pleased to discover, the first time he attempted to learn Russian through legilimency, and with which he had been recently re-acquainted in attempting to acquire a random muggle's skill at kick-boxing. Adding insult to injury, he had only realized that he have to practice to form the muscles to use such physical skills with any degree of success after he had recovered from the several hours' black-out which followed the assimilation process.)
He did, however, learn, as he ransacked his former librarian's mind, that she had acquired a small treasure-trove of methods of acquiring and maintaining immortality and youth over the years. It was a pet interest, apparently. Many of them, of course, he was already aware of, given the research he and his alter ego had done in the years following the creation of the horcrux, but there were some few he had not previously known, including a very interesting Chinese spell to force one's body to conform to the expectations of one's mind, intended to allow one to look only as old as one felt. These he appropriated, ruthlessly cutting them from her memories and assimilating them into his own, that he would know them as thoroughly as she had, along with what he suspected were memories of learning to walk the shadows, to dissect at his leisure and perfect that skill, now that he had the knack of falling into and out of that particular plane.
The rest he discarded, leaving her mind in complete disarray as he withdrew. She had long-since disengaged from his neck, but she could not force him out with occlumency, nor physically repel him, not when he had taken her so thoroughly. She lay curled in upon herself, keening slightly and holding her head against the pain of the mental attack. He smiled to see her near-catatonic state. Not only was it always amusing to demonstrate to those who thought him an easy mark that he was anything but, but it would make the next part of the plan much easier if she was unable to fight back. If he was any judge, it would be at least an hour before she was able to focus well enough to attack him.
Her death had been assured the moment she had recognized him, for he could not afford to be tied to Tom Riddle before he was ready to deal with Tom Riddle's enemies, and the manner of it when she had tempted him with lifetimes' accumulated knowledge. Obliviation, admittedly, would have been more subtle, or a compulsion not to discuss him with anyone, but the former held no guarantee that she would not stumble across him again sometime in the future, under circumstances less amenable to alteration, and compulsions could not be placed unobtrusively in the mind of an occlumens (which, of a surety, she was, even if she didn't use it to conceal her superficial emotions – any vampire who wasn't could never work around humans for any length of time).
She had to go.
He slipped from the bedroom and took the letter-opener from the desk in the sitting room. It was the work of moments to attune it to his magic with blood-runes, and only seconds thereafter to imbue it with the power necessary to cut through the curse tying the vampire's mind and life-spark to her undead flesh.
She was still lying on the bed when he returned. There were tears leaking from her closed eyes, he noticed, much as blood seeped from his still-wounded neck. She managed to open them, ever so slightly, as he pinned her in place with a freeform spell. Confusion, betrayal, and overwhelming pain flickered incoherently across the surface of her mind.
"Goodbye, Margolotta. If it is any consolation, I do like you, truly. I simply cannot trust you, and my secrets must be kept."
Fear joined the other emotions she was freely projecting as she caught sight of the letter-opener, but only for a moment. He was not opposed to causing others pain (quite to the contrary, in fact), but this particular death was not about his own gratification: it was damage control. He pierced the one-time librarian's heart with a single thrust, slipped cleanly between the left third and fourth ribs, and destroyed the magic that maintained her life by the simple expedient of tearing it apart from within. The Vampire Curse was a delicate thing, fine-tuned and powerful, but all too easy to upset if one could get close enough to its host to disrupt it.
She died quietly, almost relaxing into it, he thought. He supposed it was a relief from the pain he had caused her, attacking her mind so thoroughly. When he was certain she was truly dead, he took her wand to muddle his magical signature and began systematically removing all traces of his presence from the apartment.
It had turned out to be an altogether more interesting and productive evening than he had expected, he mused as he worked. If nothing else, he had been given the keys to the art of shadow walking, and that was no mean gift.
Merry Christmas to me, he thought with a grin.