JK Rowling owns Harry Potter, but y'all know that...

Chapter One

Moon Landing

~January 1, 2012.

A sky dark with night, only to be lit up over the Bay with flashes of light. Inside a house, four figures stared out the window, watching. A clock ticked in the background. The youngest, a girl, was too excited for such a late hour at a young age. She would turn four years old in a month or two.

"Three… two… one… Happy New Year!"

Cheers filtered in through the window, but the family ignored it. That was not what they had waited up for. As they watched, the sky burst with colorful fireworks reflecting into the bay… And one streak finally passed them by. Hurtling towards the earth.

"Sirius, Cassie, look! Make a wish before it's gone!" their mother encouraged.

The father looked at them and smiled before sliding his eyes back to the window. The little girl Cassie screwed her eyes shut for a moment, concentrating; Sirius stared ahead, unseeing. Both turned back to the window and watched the lights slowly peter out. "I wanna be happy," Cassie whispered under her breath. "I want Mom and Dad and Sirius to be happy. I want everyone in the whole wide world to be happy."

She kept muttering it until the mother decided that keeping a three-year-old girl ("I'm big, I'm almost four!") awake past midnight was a ridiculous idea, and left to put her to bed. Sirius followed after them.

From the living room, Scott McClare smiled. He could hear his wife's voice go higher and lower in pitch—she was either telling a story or singing a lullaby. Even gone midnight. He gave a little chuckle to himself and readied for bed when his phone rang.

When his wife got into bed a few moments later, Scott was grinning madly. "It's a nice-sized meteor, Amelia. They're not gonna touch it until the holidays are over, but someone has to set up the tape and take a few preliminary measures. They already know where it is; you'll never guess where it landed."

Cassie was up bright and early later that morning despite the late bedtime. The ground was slowly covering up under a light dusting of snow that seemed to grow the longer she stared out. Dad said they were going to go visit the shooting star and that he needed to take pictures of it for work. That was more than fine—a shooting star!

They drove out, following the bay, and came to a sandy beach leading into a forest, all covered in snow. Mom and Dad took out cameras and equipment and red tape and began to follow the long groove carved into the woods.

Sirius followed them, until he stopped right by the water. Then he slowly stepped into the water with his shoes on and continued walking until he was completely submerged. Looking back, Cassie watched her parents trekking on, going deeper between the trees. Ahead of her, Sirius was gone. Giving her lip a quick bite, Cassie took a deep breath and slowly stepped into the water behind her brother.

The water was cold at first. Freezing. There was snow glistening in her hair and her eyelashes and she was putting two feet in freezing water. She was tempted to run out, find Mom and Dad and maybe see the shooting star that Mom and Dad were so excited about. But she couldn't, not now, because the water had just gone blissfully warm, like a bubble bath. Almost like her mind was read, the water filled up with bubbles, all rainbow and shimmery. Without another turn, Cassie plunged in.

Under the water was a world bright with color, brighter than on land. Cassie found that she could breathe regularly, and the water didn't hurt at all. She was swimming deeper, past multiple schools of fish, when she felt a hard tug on her coat sleeve. It was Sirius, and he looked madder than ever.

"Cassiopeia Montgomery McClare—"

His words were muffled by the giant bubble around his head, but Cassie got the message. Out. Now. They rocketed to the surface of the water and out onto the beach. Wind whipped their hair into their faces, still dry. Mom and Dad were on the shore, anxiously calling their names.

"Sirius. Bay. McClare. You can't disappear without telling me or your mother where you are! We have to leave, but if you come really fast, you can see the shooting star for real."

Dad led them through their tracks. The farther in they walked, more and more branches littered the forest floor, increasing in size. Soon whole trees were knocked down too, all lines up in a row. Mom and Dad had to climb up and over and under them, walk across logs, but whenever Sirius came upon something, he just passed through it. Cassie tried it and learned the hard way, knocking her head on a particularly hard tree trunk. But soon they came on it. The shooting star.

It was a lot less glamorous up close. A giant rock. But Mom and Dad were happy and smiling and taking pictures again, so it must have meant something important.

"Look, Cass." Mom took her down into the giant crater where no snow fell. The air was hot. Little rock chiplets covered the ground, small and medium and larger pieces, but none compared to the giant thing that Mom stared at it now, enthralled. "Look, Cass," she said again. "A piece of the sky, right in our backyard."

She picked up two of the smaller rock chips, placing one in Cassie's hand. It was hot, and heavy, and kept pulling her back to the giant rock. Up close it was funny-looking and unlike any rock she'd ever seen before, all white with red lines zigzagging the surface. But then Mom scooped her back up over her shoulder and they were back in the car, heading home.

Later that night, Scott headed into the office with everything he'd found. His partner Andromeda Lichtenstein was busy running tests and feeding data through the machinery. She gave a whistle at one point. Scott looked at her expectantly. "Well? What is it?"

"This isn't just a regular piece of space junk. This is from an actual space rock. Look at the red webbing, the magnetic attraction. But really, look at the red webbing. What does that remind you of? That project we're supposed to be working on?"

He shuffled through his notes. "The Europa Clipper? But—ah. Wait, this is a piece of Europa we've got sitting in the lab right now?"

"Oho, yeah. This is just a little piece of rock full of Jupiter's untested radiation; imagine how much the real thing has. Good thing we're over here and not there, huh?"

All he could think of now were the little pieces of moonrock in his home, on Amelia's work table. She was trying to fashion necklaces for the kids so they could hold a piece of the sky. The weird things Sirius did today were obviously a result of all that radiation, and he told Andromeda his thoughts. She just laughed at him.

"Now you sound crazy, Scott. From your wife maybe, but not you. It's not like it's magic, right?" Andromeda paused for a minute. "Except that's how Lyra started. She would do all these weird things, and me and Robert thought, hey, we're scientists. This all has a logical explanation to it. Until one day this professor shows up and tells me that Lyra is a witch and can do magic, and she needs to go to this special school in Massachusetts for it. The nerve, right? I mean, Haley and Andrew were both perfectly fine, happy children, and now I have a witch for a daughter. It's really great, actually. She can be a real asset in the office if we ever wanted her. That, and if she ever wanted to work here. Which she might one day, she thinks it really might work out once. Can you imagine it, Scott? Me and Lyra out in the office, chatting about the newest planet sighting over cups of coffee? Scott?"

But Scott had stopped paying attention in the middle of all that. Radiation might have been pushing it, but magic… in a way, it made sense. He and Amelia would have to discuss it. Because Sirius would be great at that sort of thing. Magic…

Neither of them noticed the moonrock glowing and shaking in its cage.