There wasn't much time left.

Heart thundering like a drum in his chest, the wizard tore down the alleyway, parchment clutched tightly in his clenched fist. Above the rhythm of his frantic footsteps, his ears strained with everything he had to hear the sounds of pursuit coming from behind. He couldn't hear anything, but that meant nothing. They'd find him- they always did. And then...

He redoubled his efforts, chest heaving like a pair of bellows, eyesight blurred by sweat. Faster!

The alleyway ended- was that a pop he could hear?- and he turned off onto the street where his house was, running, feet leaden underneath him.

"McKinnon! Stop!" A curse whizzed over his ear, singeing his hair, and he swore fervently under his breath. Stopping wasn't an option at this point. He needed to make sure that the letter was safe...above all else, that.

The front gate- he fumbled with the latch and spinted up the pathway, ramming the door open with his hip and making for the study. No time for waiting, not with them so close on his tail. How had they found him? He'd been so careful up to now...

The parchment was crumpled and singed, but he flattened it with one hand, scrawling a quick message across the bottom in biro- no time for a quill- and folding it up small, tight. He withdrew a wand from his pocket as the front gate clanged, and touched his wand to it. With a blast, it vanished in a whirl of smoke, spinning off into the aether. He'd done it. He'd done it.

He was still smiling when the front door burst open.

"Quick! We're going to be late!" Tom thundered down the stairs, feet clattering peals of thunder down the stairs. His feet paused outside the door, and then a tentative knock sounded on the wood. "Catrin? You in?"
"Mmm?" Catrin turned her cheek sideways so that her skin could be toasted by the pleasantly warm slate roof. The door opened; she heard Tom taking in the empty room, the open window, and putting two and two together.

"Catrin! Come down off the roof! We're going to be late!" And then, "It's not my friends we're visiting!"

"I'm coming." Catrin scrubbed a hand through her riotous hair and slid off the roof, feet landing square on the windowsill as she ducked underneath the lintel to meet her cousin's astonished eyes square on.

"You...on the roof? Catrin, that's really dangerous!"

"Yeah. I've done worse." And then, as Tom's mahogany-brown eyes widened, "Come on! Tom! I'm joking!" She suppressed a sigh as she grabbed her rucksack from where it weighed down her duvet. Tom and her didn't exactly see eye to eye; hadn't since he'd come back from New Zealand at the end of her second year, with his awkward opinions and even more awkward way of acting around her, his new cousin, his unwanted new foster sister.

"Well. Portkey in five."

"Thanks."

Tom smiled awkwardly into the silence and then left, shutting the door with a decisive snap behind him. Catrin sighed deeply, and turned once, taking in the room that had, for a year now, been hers. She hadn't left her mark on it: it could be any person's room. The stacks of textbooks and potions ingredients that had been cluttering up her room were safely packed away into her trunk, and her cat, Bryn, had been scooped out, hissing, from underneath the bed. There were no posters on the walls; no games. It was as if she was scared to move in properly. Perhaps she was.

And now she was off to the Burrow, to see her extended family. Of sorts. She hadn't seen the Potters- or the Weasleys- since the end of term last June, but a leap of pleasure jumped in her at the thought of seeing Fred, James and Teddy again. It was Harry who had suggested the idea of coming to visit, of course: the famous Harry Potter, her grandfather's godson. Grandfather...the word still sounded weird, even in her head. A new relation.

"Catrin, cariad?" That was Hestia, her aunt, at the door.

"Yes, coming." Catrin took two steps to the door, paused, reached under the bed, withdrew a sack very like the ones wizards usually used as purses, and stuffed it into her bag just as Hestia opened the door.

"You good to go?"

"Yes."

"Nervous?"

"A bit."

"You'll be fine. They'll love you at first sight." She smiled. "I did."

Catrin smiled and ruthlessly quashed her misgivings. Greying, blue-eyed and kind, her aunt was everything she'd hoped for since meeting her family- and then some. She'd taken her in when nobody else would, after a year of living off the streets when her mother had died. Even if Tom could be standoffish sometimes, Hestia was a rock.

"Ready for the Portkey? It's in my office. I'll just go and get Tom." Catrin nodded, cast one last look around her room- she wouldn't be coming back here, as Hestia was bringing her trunk direct to the train station- and left, crossing the tiny landing of the tiny cottage into her aunt's paper explosion of an office. Parchment, empty tea mugs and broken quill ends lay everywhere in a kind of hotchpotch, the wood of the bookshelves and desks peeping through occasionally, and a vase stuffed with summer's last burst of wildflowers lying on the windowsill. Beyond those, the vibrantly green Carmarthenshire hills rolled into the distance underneath a brilliantly blue sky. Catrin heaved a sigh; she wouldn't see her homeland, Wales, for another six months now.

Idly, she picked up a sheaf of papers. They were mostly old Order stuff, as far as she could tell- lists of dates, lists of people, lists of finances. Her aunt had never been good at paperwork-it was a longstanding joke in the family- and Catrin often teased Hestia that she could fight a Dark Wizard, but a pile of parchment would utterly defeat her. She heaved a sheaf of notes from the desk- just to see how many more were underneath- and her heart stopped.

Lying underneath was an envelope, and, peeking out of the top, a sheet of paper embossed with a coat of arms. Although Catrin wasn't exactly an expert when it came to Houses and crests, she knew this one extremely well, because it was on a necklace she'd inherited from her mother. The Black family crest- her family crest. Three ravens, a sword, a motto. Toujours pur. Well, it wasn't in Welsh, that was for certain.

Heart thudding heavily in her throat, she reached out a hand for the envelope-

"Catrin!" Her aunt bustled into the room in a whirl of cloak, and stopped dead when she saw what she was holding. "Put that down!"

"But-"

"Down!"

"It's my-"

"Give it here, Catrin!" Shocked, Catrin looked up. Hestia had never shouted at her before, so what was it about the letter that had made her start?

Her aunt took the opportunity to snatch the parchment out of her niece's unresisting hand. "This should have gone weeks ago." She muttered to herself, fishing out her wand and an unbroken quill stub. Quickly, she dipped it in the almost empty pot of ink on the desk and scrawled a hasty address on it. Catrin peered around her shoulder, and made out the word Potter, just as Hestia straightened up and touched her wand tip to the parchment. It vanished in a flare of acrid smoke, and the two were left in an uncomfortable silence.

"That was for the Order."

"Okay." Catrin gritted her teeth: she'd find out what was in the letter, even if she had to dig through all of Harry Potter's mail to do so. It concerned her; she was sure of it, and cold dread curdled at the bottom of her stomach. Whatever it was, it couldn't be good, and neither was the look that her aunt was giving her. Not for the first time since coming here, she felt suddenly alone, adrift. Why didn't adults ever tell her anything?

"What's in that letter?"

But just as Hestia frowned, blue eyes narrowing, the door flew open. "Mam! The Portkey!"

"Oh, no. Where is it? Ah, here we are-" Hestia fished out a battered, rather chipped tea mug from the morass of paper on the desk and held it out.

Tom raced into the room in a blur of shirt-and-jeans, and slapped his hand onto the cup just as it started to glow blue. Catrin looked up just in time to be yanked backwards into a haze of thrashing limbs and a spinning that made up seem down and back seem forwards. She forced her eyes open against the nausea and the howling wind just in time to feel her feet connect, hard, with the hard packed earth ground.

They were there.