A/N: My first-ever story! Please Read and Review. I'll be updating about once per week. This story starts in November of Harry Potter's fifth year at Hogwarts.

Disclaimer: Nothing you recognize is mine. No money is being made.

Chapter 1: Forest and Unicorn

"Gods, Care of Magical Creatures was awful today, wasn't it?"

The speaker was a petite blonde named Pansy Parkinson. She had a cute upturned nose, but the expression on her face was habitually hard. She was not one to cross and all of us nodded in agreement with her, though I, for one, did not think Professor Hagrid's lesson had been all that bad.

Sure, it would've been nice if I could have seen the thestrels rather than just heard about them, and maybe Hagrid wasn't the most eloquent speaker in the world, but I couldn't see that he merited the amount of abuse my fellow Slytherins had been heaping upon his teaching ever since that afternoon. Of course, I'd only met the man once, and everyone else here had endured his class for the past two years, so maybe they knew something I didn't.

"I wish Professor Grubbly-Plank was staying," said Tracey Davis sadly. "Remember last year when she brought us the baby unicorns?"

A sort of collective wistful sigh echoed around the room. And, fifteen-year-old girls or not, these were not the sort of people I'd have pegged as wistful sigh-ers. I watched with interest as Pansy's hard face softened, and Tracey's eyes grew distant and misty. Even Millicent Bulstrode, the resident hag, looked halfway decent when her eyes went all wide with recalled wonder, and Daphne Greengrass (the prettiest girl in the dorm besides myself) became darn near beautiful when she let her shiny lips part like that, not that I was interested in girls or anything…. I looked around to see that Pansy had noticed me watching all of them.

"I forgot," she said, her face gone hard again, "Amber wasn't here last year. She didn't see the unicorns."

Amber is my name, Amber Lyonness. What my parents were thinking when they gave me said name, I don't know. Well… yes I do. It was my mother. She's always been one for theatrical gestures- she once confided to me that half the reason she'd married my father was because she liked his last name so much. Her own name, which she hated, was the perfectly ordinary "Mary". Her maiden name had been Smith.

And I have to admit that Amber suits me. It's descriptive. My hair and eyes are both the same rich, honey-like blend of orange, red, brown, and gold as the stone for which I am named. Sometimes in the sunlight my entire head seems to blaze golden. Right now, in the flickering firelight of the underground Slytherin common room, the red in my hair was predominant.

"No, I've never seen one outside of books," I answered Pansy. "We don't have them in America."

America. How I missed it, and I'd only been gone two weeks! Most of my discomfort was because Hogwarts and the UK were nothing like I'd expected. I felt that I was homesick nearly as much for my lost Scottish dream-world as for the Land of the Free I'd left behind.

You see, I wasn't supposed to be where I was right now; I wasn't supposed to be with these people, these companions. I wasn't a Slytherin, dammit!

I wondered again how things could have gone so badly wrong. The Sorting was supposed to have been a simple formality. My mother had assured me I'd get into her old house, Gryffindor. After all, weren't we both descendants of Godric Gryffindor through her mother's bloodline? I'd transferred over here with firm expectations of being a Gryffindor like my mom.

I even looked like a lion, what with my golden eyes and red-gold hair (which my mother used to sometimes jokingly refer to as my "mane"). Heck, my patronus was a mountain lion (not as good as a genuine African lion like my mother's, but close enough). It was unthinkable that I was now residing in the House of the Snake. I knew I was brave. So what if I told a lie or two occasionally? Doesn't everyone? What was the problem?

Maybe I hadn't killed a basilisk or single-handedly defeated Voldemort like famous Harry Potter, the quintessential Gryffindor according to my mother (besides herself, of course), but, really, not everyone in the House had "brave deeds to their name", did they? I mean, surely there wouldn't be enough basilisks to go around? And anyway, Potter hadn't even done most of those things until he got into Gryffindor. It was so unfair!

My mother wasn't currently speaking to me, convinced that I'd somehow spent the first fourteen years of my life hiding my evil, villainous nature from her and my father. Dad had contacted me only once in the past two weeks, and the conversation had been distant and stilted.

I suppose I sort of understood their attitudes. After all, they'd crossed the ocean to fight the very people whose children I was now hobnobbing with. Mother was from the UK, originally. She'd been in school here at Hogwarts when Lord Voldemort began his first rise to power, but had graduated in time to join a society dedicated to causing his downfall and fight against him.

She used to love to tell me stories of those times. She'd go on for hours, until I almost believed that I'd been there with her and her best friend, Lily Evans, running around battling the Death Eaters with Lily's soon-to-be husband and his three friends, all of whom, to hear Mother tell it, had been in love with herself. She said the only reason she hadn't married any of them was that she'd dedicated her life to fighting evil and didn't want to cheat any of "the boys" out of her fullest love. Of course, she then met my father and his irresistible last name…. Anyway, the point was that all of them had been in Gryffindor.

And now I wasn't.

I looked around at my fellow Slytherins, my expression slightly twisted by the loathing I felt for them. Unfortunately, this only made me appear to fit in there. I gave myself a mental shake; negative emotions wouldn't help me.

I had to do something, take some action, so I could stop thinking about the past. Action—something bold and heroic. Something Gryffindor-like! Yeah, that was it! Maybe if I acted brave enough, they'd see that a mistake had been made and put me in Gryffindor where I belonged.

I jumped up. "Come on, girls, what are you waiting for? Let's go!"

"Go?" Daphne echoed in amazement. "It's ten-thirty in the evening. Where on earth do you want to go at this time of night?"

"Maybe she has a boyfriend," sniggered Tracey Davis. "No, she'd hardly want us to come along for that—or would you, Amber?" The room dissolved into laughter.

Oops. I had forgotten that none of them had been privy to my thoughts of the last couple seconds. Sometimes my mind just worked too split-second fast for others to comprehend.

"I've never seen a unicorn, and I want to," I explained patiently. "So let's go." That shut them up quite effectively.

"But, Amber," Tracey ventured after a few seconds, twisting her mouse-brown hair nervously around her finger as she spoke, "All the unicorns around here are in the Forbidden Forest."

"Yes, and it's conveniently close to the castle," I said helpfully.

"Oh, this is ridiculous!" That from Pansy. "We are so not going into the Forbidden Forest at night!"

"Well, they'll hardly let us go during the daytime, will they?" I pointed out reasonably. "Our only option is to sneak out."

"I heard there are werewolves in there," came a soft and husky voice from behind me. I looked around in surprise. Millicent Bulstrode rarely spoke.

"The full moon is weeks away," I reassured her. "We won't be meeting any werewolves tonight. And they aren't supposed to be roaming around free anyway; I doubt if there are ever really any of them in there at all."

It took a lot more logic and convincing, and a little bit of bullying— I'm ashamed to say I lost my temper once or twice—but eventually the five of us were on our way to find a unicorn.

A/N: My first-ever fic! Please r&r. I'll be updating about once per week, if people review. All it takes is one review to make me happy... it can even be a stupid review, I don't care!