Juliet's Tomb

Chapter One

In the blue fogged morning, the train station took a quality of its own—an eerie aura that chilled the girl who stood before it like an icy mist. She dragged her beat-up leather trunk to the loading area near the front of the train and brushed back the strands of stringy red hair that clung to her forehead. Her parents stood a few feet away, chatting with Lily's godparents, Ronald and Hermione. She tried not to let it bother her that none of them had so much as hugged her goodbye. It was her last year of Hogwarts, after all, and the whole send-off ritual must have grown very old to them by now. Lily waved one last time in their direction but received only an absent nod from her mother, who seemed to be caught up in the set-up of one of Ron's elaborate jokes. A moment later they all burst into laughter. Lily sighed and heaved her trunk up the train stairs and into the passage. If she was careful, she might be able to snag an empty compartment before running into any of her classmates.

The thought had hardly crossed her mind when two Gryffindor boys barged out of a nearby compartment, chuckling over a fanged Frisbee in their hands. Their laughter died on their lips at the sight of Lily.

The shorter one nudged his friend. "Look here, it's Lily Potter," Lily recognized the pair as Kobalt and Rookes and she took a step back, her hand slipping into her pocket for her wand.

"Going for your wand, are you?" Kobalt shot her a bitter grin. "Go ahead! Cast the Imperius me. I know you're just itching to try it out."

She said nothing, but her fingers seemed to twitch around the handle of her wand on their own accord.

The other boy's blue eyes never moved from Lily's, as if he was half-afraid she really would attack at any second. "I swear, Potter, if you so much as cast a lumos…"

There was something to the look in his eyes, as if he were truly terrified of her. She slipped her wand back into her pocket. "Enough," she said, lifting her trunk and trying to push past them. "There's no point in losing points for Gryffindor this early in the school year."

Kobalt wouldn't budge. "And some Gryffindor you are. Let me guess: you had your father donate a new Quidditch pitch just to keep you from getting re-sorted into Slytherin."

Lily clenched the spine of the book she held in her other hand. "Leave my dad out of this."

Kobalt didn't seem to hear her. "If you were anyone else's daughter, you'd be in the Ministry for questioning after all the interest you've shown in the dark arts these last six years. But of course, since your name's Potter, you get to practice all the nasty spells you want, don't you?" He took a step closer until Lily could just make out a hint of stubble that had begun to grow on his chin. His eyes darted down. "What's this?" His hand flashed like a snake as he grabbed the book she held. "A History Of Magic. Funny, I almost expected it to be a copy of You-Know-Who's diary.

Lily snatched the book back. "You don't know what you're talking about."

The boy smiled at this. "No, I don't. But you do, don't you? I bet you know plenty about You-Know-Who, and not just 'cause your dad killed him."

Lily could feel the rage burning in her throat. "I said, leave my dad out of this."

Kobalt didn't seem to have heard her. "You don't look anything like him, you know. In fact, I reckon your mum must've been screwing someone on the side to have—"

At that point, everything happened very quickly. Lily whipped her wand out of her pocket in one fluid movement, just as her dad had taught her to do, and spoke the very first spell she could think of.

Kobalt hardly had time to reach for his own wand before the orange light streaked towards him, hitting him squarely in the chest. For a moment, all three students stood completely still. Then, just as suddenly, Kobalt's face began to elongate, short grey hair sprouted on his face and a moment later long ears shot up out of the top of his head. He opened his mouth and let out a loud bray. Rookes looked absolutely stricken.

"Don't worry," she said, feeling a little sorry for his friend. "It's just the Midsummer Night's curse. It should wear off in an hour."

"What do you mean, 'should'?"

"On rare occasions, the effects of the spell are known to last longer." She smirked. "You know, if the recipient was already a complete and total ass. "

Not wanting to wait and see if they would retaliate, she lifted up her trunk and hurried into a nearby compartment. Fortunately, it was empty. She sunk into the seat. What had she been thinking? Sure, Kobalt had said some pretty hurtful things, but cursing him? She sighed.

Her dad was a sensitive subject. When people looked at her, all they saw were the millions of little ways that she was nothing like her father. Merlin, by her age Harry Potter had met the woman he was going to marry, had saved the school on multiple occasions, and was just about to defeat the darkest wizard to ever live. Lily, on the other hand, had recently learned how to cook scrambled eggs.

And then there was her interest in the dark arts, something that never would have appealed to her father. The problem was, Lily couldn't really help her interest. In classes, she would try to bite her tongue, but her curiosity spurred her on, asking questions that left her professors nervously clenching their wands. Sometimes she earned herself a note home to her parents. At first, she was shocked—why wouldn't anyone give her a straight answer? Why did her professors skirt around questions of spells that induced comas or reanimated the dead, even though such things certainly did exist? Why did they refuse to discuss more than mere defensive charms? Why did they ignore the more dangerous potions? Why did they pretend that they couldn't hear her when she asked about certain book or a certain wizard?

When he learned of it, her father had looked very unsettled. Jaw tight, he sat her down, and polished his glasses several times before finally telling her about his own experience with the dark arts. He told her stories of men whose dreams of power led to their downfall, stories of the dark wizard he had destroyed, but these stories no longer held the same power over her. Voldemort had been dead a long time—long before her birth-and she couldn't help but feel that the whole idea was something of a fable—a wonderful myth that she had known her whole life.

And yet, ever since the end of the war twenty-six years ago, no one would even approach the subject of more complex spells. Too dangerous, her teachers spit out, and slowly Lily gained the reputation of being a trouble-maker, a dark witch in the making. It had not earned her very many friends, especially as a Gyffindor.

More students were climbing on board now, and Lily could hear them as they dragged owl cages, trunks, and textbooks past her compartment. Occasionally, someone would duck a head inside, but the moment they saw her, they quickly darted away. Some of them seemed afraid of her.

Lily sighed. It wasn't a thirst for power that fueled her interest in the dark arts—that's what no one seemed to understand. It was simply a hunger for knowledge—a hunger that could not be satiated by watered-down lessons and Ministry-approved books. If that hunger led her down a crooked path, so be it. There was much in the world to discover, and Lily would learn it all. Even, she thought with a pang of sadness, if it meant losing a couple friends along the way.

She stretched her legs out on the empty seat across from her and stared out the window at the last students bidding their families goodbye and boarding the train. Deep purple clouds stood out against the crimson evening sky and quite suddenly, she felt very much alone. She desperately wished she could just escape, sometimes. Just pick up and go somewhere where no one knew her as Harry Potter's trouble-making daughter.

Absently, she examined the cover of A History of Magic to be certain those boys hadn't damaged it. It appeared pristine, and she began to read it for the seventh time, enveloped in the story of a history long past.

When the train finally lurched to a stop, she wordlessly picked up her things and carted them out to where the castle loomed in the distance. No one around her spoke a word in her direction—even the Slytherins sneered as they past her—but for once, she didn't notice. Her mind rested on something else, something she hadn't observed before in her textbook, and if it were true…

Sometimes, witches and wizards would disappear completely from the timeline, only to reappear sometime later. The author, Bathilda Bagshot, paid very little attention to these anomalies, but Lily realized that after virtually every instance, the subject in question would return with a wealth of knowledge seemingly unheard of for his time period. Some defeated their opponents with spells that had not yet been invented and others returned with lost, ancient relics. Bagshot speculated that these subjects spent years abroad, studying or inventing, but Lily suspected otherwise. Yes, perhaps they traveled, but not across hills and plains, but across the very fabric of time. Time-turners could only bring someone back so far, but if there were another means of traveling, the implications were huge. A small smile played across her face and it lasted all through the Welcoming Feast and into the wee hours of the morning.