Disclaimer: Still don't own Harry Potter or Twilight.

About an hour after his conversation with Ginny in Grimmauld Place that morning, Harry was again standing next to Ron in Professor McGonagall's office, his spirits considerably higher than they had been when he'd last left this room the night before. He'd met Ron outside Grimmauld Place before taking another Portkey to Hogwarts. Apparently, Hermione had taken the news in a similar way to Ginny – shock followed by an instant desire to help. In fact, Ron had only appeased her by showing her Kingsley's signature on the parchment that had accompanied the letter from McGonagall, thereby making it an official and highly confidential Auror mission.

Harry was wrenched suddenly back to reality by McGonagall's voice, talking to him and Ron. He arranged his features into an expression of utmost concentration and started to listen. "The first step would be to find him. We have no idea of who he has become or what to do with him, so we really just need to contain him for long enough to figure out the facts. Do you think you can do that?"

"We'll do our best. Do you know if he's still in the forest?" asked Ron.

"He should be. After you left, we cast every protective spell we could come up with around it. He shouldn't be able to get through that too easily."

After agreeing to meet McGonagall at the school for lunch, Harry and Ron quickly left the office and set out into the forest, their wands lit and at the ready.

"It's strange being allowed in here, isn't it?" said Ron after a long silence. Harry gave him a look. "All right, all right. I was only trying to come up with something to say…"

They continued to search for a couple of hours, occasionally having a sparse conversation, but despite all their efforts, the search was fruitless.

"Bloody Cedric. Edward. How hard can it be to find him?" Ron burst out eventually, kicking a tree trunk in frustration.

"He was so fast though; do you reckon he's just been running away from us?"

"OI! CULLEN! GET OUT HERE, WE WANT TO TALK TO YOU!" Ron hollered.

"What was that for? We'll never find him now," Harry snapped at his friend.

"It was worth a go, wasn't it?"

"No, it wasn't worth a bloody go, you-" Harry was cut off mid sentence by a figure dropping from a tree in front of them. Edward Cullen walked towards them. Harry stared at him in shock. He couldn't understand why he'd reveal himself to them when they'd been so far from finding him. But then again, nothing he did seemed to make much sense any more…

"Hello, Harry, Ron," said Edward, nodding to each of them in turn.

"Err… hello," Harry replied gruffly.

"Yeah, hi," said Ron, waving.

"You wanted to speak to me." It was a statement, not a question. "I heard your thoughts. And your conversation," Edward explained. Ron took a step back, looking slightly disconcerted. Harry on the other hand moved forwards, looking at Edward carefully and checking off each difference between his and Cedric's appearances in his head.

"Really, Harry, does Cedric matter anymore?" Harry jumped. This Legilimency was going to take some getting used to – it felt totally different to when Voldemort had broken into his mind when he was at Hogwarts. At least he could tell when that was happening.

"Yes, Cedric matters. You matter. You are Cedric, of course he matters," Harry said boldly, thinking to himself how he really needed a whole new vocabulary to describe a situation like this. Edward chuckled, apparently reading Harry's mind again, and Harry glowered at him. He started to wish he had paid more attention in his Occlumency lessons with Snape. Voldemort was beginning to seem like a warm-up act compared to this!

"OK, Edward," attempted Ron. "Do you think you could come up to the castle with us, please? We just want to work some stuff out, we're not going to attack you."

Edward considered, and then opened his mouth to speak. "No, not today, thanks. You'll send me to the Ministry for what I did last night. Don't lie, I know. And all I was trying to do was to find another true love – it worked on Bella to watch her sleep. She thought it was romantic."

A snappy reply rose to Harry's lips that whatever Edward had had obviously hadn't been true love, since Bella had left him. However, he bit it back, realising that Edward wasn't likely to take kindly to any implications that his precious Bella was less than perfect. Ron however didn't think so quickly.

"Are you sure her head's screwed on right, mate?" he sniggered. "Because I may not know much about girls, but I reckon Hermione would have hexed me until I couldn't sit down if I'd tried that line on her."

Edward surveyed Ron coldly, and then in a movement quicker than the blink of an eye, he turned, sprinting into the forest again. Harry and Ron glanced at each other before taking up the chase, horribly conscious that they couldn't run nearly as fast as a vampire – even a strange variety of one.

"Now look where you and your big mouth have got us, you git," Harry panted, scowling at Ron as they pushed through the undergrowth.

"If you think back, my big mouth worked pretty well when it made him jump out of that tree, didn't it?" Ron shot back in a joking tone. He stumbled over a tree root but continued to run.

"Reducto!" shouted Harry, blowing his way through a thick sheet of ivy and into a forest clearing.

Suddenly, his path was obstructed as someone landed in front of him. Edward, Harry's brain screamed.

He reacted at once to natural instinct, and raised his wand, crying, "Petrificus Totalus!" He heard his shout echoed by Ron from behind him, and the spells hit the person simultaneously.

Suddenly, Harry felt Ron's hand on his shoulder, pulling him to the ground as the two jets of light just bounced off the figure in front of them, who hopped up into a tree. Harry dropped to the floor instantly, his Auror training kicking in, and he narrowly avoided his own jinx, which hit a tree behind him instead. He picked himself up carefully, and then, with a jolt to the stomach, discovered that this person was not in fact Edward Cullen. A small girl with short spiky dark hair was peering down at him reproachfully. Harry winced internally – he had no idea who she was, but judging by the way two petrifying spells had bounced off her skin, and how she'd somehow managed to leap at them from outside their field of vision, she wasn't just your average passer-by. He took a closer look, and was startled to see that the girl had precisely the same colour eyes as Edward, with those strange golden flecked irises.

"Harry?" Ron had come up from behind. He looked over Harry's shoulder and cursed, evidently following a similar line of thought to Harry.

"Hello?" Harry addressed the girl, who didn't seem to have wanted to speak to them so far.

She looked at them in a calculating way, as if she was trying to work out whether or not she should deign to reply, and then finally opened her mouth. "Watch what you're doing with those sticks, will you?" she said, fixing the 'sticks' in question with a ferocious scowl. Ron drew his wand into his chest protectively, reminding Harry forcefully of the time in their second year when he'd got it snapped by the Whomping Willow.

"I only came to help Edward, not to have beams of light shot at me," the girl continued. "I could have ripped my dress!" She raised herself to her feet and, in an almost feline movement, jumped up onto a higher branch to survey Harry and Ron from further above.

"We're very sorry," said Harry quickly. "Umm… I don't mean to sound rude or anything, but… who are you?"

The girl again looked at him appraisingly then sprang out of the tree again to land in front of them. "I'm Alice Cullen. I'm a vampire, like Edward, and I came to stop him from doing something moronic."

Harry's heart sank. This mission was becoming rapidly more complicated – now they had not only one deranged vampire to deal with, but a second! He started to wish they had brought along extra recruits after all…

"OK, thank you-" he started to say.

However, Harry was cut off mid-sentence as Alice yelled to some point over his shoulder, "Not now, mutt! Get lost!"

Ron gave a yelp from behind him, and Harry spun, his wand raised, to see a gigantic black dog bound into the clearing. Harry's heart thumped hard and his head seemed to spin dizzily. He started forwards towards the dog. He could feel tiny spasms of hope flitting through his stomach, but he tried desperately to suppress them, knowing in his heart that the things going through his mind could not be true. Because the last time he'd seen a dog like that, it had been his godfather…

No, he thought. It's not him. Sirius is dead, you know that. He's not coming back.

The dog continued forwards and then, making Harry jump violently, its body began to stretch upwards, hair shrinking back to show tanned skin, and nose retreating into its face, until a human man was standing directly in front of the two Aurors.

Alice stepped in front of them. "Jacob," she said in what she obviously thought was a dangerous voice, "I thought I told you to wait somewhere where you couldn't do any more damage."

"Your futuristic visions not working as well as you'd like, bloodsucker?" he snarled back, looking at her in disgust. "I suppose that's to be expected when you can only see what people are planning on doing."

"Jacob…" Alice hissed, jerking her head towards Harry and Ron significantly. Harry immediately lodged the piece of information in his brain, realising it could be useful.

The new man, Jacob, turned to Harry and Ron and said, "The name's Jacob Black. Werewolf." So a wolf, not a dog, Harry decided.

"Werewolf? But we know werewolves, they're not… like you…" Ron voice trailed off. He'd probably remembered that neither was Edward a typical vampire. He gave a sigh and shrugged his shoulders at Harry, looking defeated.

Harry meanwhile was still in shock. Black. Jacob Black. Was it not enough that he looked so much like Sirius in his animal form? Did he really have to share the same name as well? He suddenly felt a slight twinge of grief, and the urge to weep, which he stubbornly held back. First Cedric, now Sirius… And in a way, Lupin, if this Jacob was really a werewolf. He wasn't sure he could cope with any more reminders of his dead friends.

"Harry?" Ron nudged him gently, bringing him back to reality. Harry shook himself, trying to get back into the mind-set of an Auror.

"Umm, yes," he said, clearing his throat to get rid of the slight shake in his voice. He looked over at Jacob. "So you're here with Edward too?"

"Yeah. He's grown on me. For a bloodsucker. Anyway, I feel bad for him. I can't imagine losing my true love…"

"Oh yes?" asked Harry politely, wondering why all of these people were so obsessed with romance.

"Yeah, Renesmee. She's still only a little kid, but when she's older… She's Bella and Edward's daughter."

Harry stared at Jacob in disbelief, and Ron made a choking noise. That was yet another thing to add to the growing list of mental things going on. Was it really acceptable for a grown man… werewolf… to be in love with a child?

"It's a werewolf thing, it's called imprinting," Jacob explained.

It still didn't sound any better to Harry, but he decided just to accept it and stay civil. "All right… Well, do you think you could help us look for Edward?"

"No!" Alice said at once. She crossed her arms. "He's our friend. We want to help him."

Harry sighed and looked down at his feet, realising the best option would be to play to Alice's sympathies. And it wasn't like he'd really be lying anyway. "He used to be our friend too; we want to understand what happened to him. I watched him die, and now he's here. Please."

As Harry had expected, Alice's resolve shattered, and within a few minutes, she had forced Jacob into agreeing with her, called Edward, and convinced him to come up to the castle with them.

Harry, not wanting Alice or Edward to burn into a crisp, had had some concerns about their safety in the sunlight, but both vampires reassured him that they'd still be perfectly normal (Ron managed to turn his snigger at this into a cough), save for some sparkling. So that was how a thoroughly bewildered Harry and Ron found themselves in Professor McGonagall's office just before lunch, explaining how they had left to find Edward Cullen, and returned with a werewolf and two vampires in tow, none of which were even remotely similar to the common definition of their species, and the latter of which looked like they'd had an accident involving some superglue and copious amounts of glitter whenever they stepped into the sun.

"Mr Cullen," said McGonagall seriously, watching Edward carefully. "I would like to reiterate what I said to you last night. I cannot have you…" She paused, searching for the right word, "…disturbing my students. However, you were once a pupil here too, and as such, I feel I have the responsibility to help you."

Edward fixed her in a gaze and sighed melodramatically. "There is nothing you can do to help me. I just need to find someone to love. I crave the companionship of Bella, but it was not to be…"

McGonagall bit down hard on her lip. Harry could see a familiar tightness in her eyes and jawline, which reminded him of the expression of polite coolness she had always worn when talking to Dolores Umbridge. Her patience was obviously wearing thin with Edward's constant infatuation with this Bella girl.

"Don't bite your lip, please. As restrained as we are, sometimes it becomes very difficult to refrain from drinking when we are faced with human blood," Edward said.

This statement didn't appear to be helping McGonagall's blood pressure. Harry could now see a vein in her neck beginning to stand out, and though she'd stopped biting her lips, they were pursed so tightly that the skin around them looked white.

The conversation continued in a similar way – Edward rhapsodising about Bella, McGonagall telling him that was all very well but he couldn't use the Hufflepuff girls as a substitute, Edward complaining with a melancholy expression on his face, and McGonagall offering to help him but being rejected. In fact, this cycle went on until they were interrupted by the arrival of a silver otter Patronus, which sailed through the window until it came to a halt in front of McGonagall, Harry and Ron, and spoke in Hermione's voice.

"Hello, Professor. I'm sorry to contact you like this, but I really needed something quicker than an owl. I've been doing some research with Ginny-" Ron rolled his eyes, "-and I think I might have worked something out. Could I take a Portkey over and tell you about it?" She sounded urgent, but Harry could hear a faint note of excitement in her voice, which he recognised well after so many years of Hermione being one of his best friends. It was a slight thrill meant she had worked something out and was practically bursting with the knowledge of it and the need to tell someone.

Professor McGonagall, while Harry was thinking this, had been conjuring her own Patronus, a tabby cat that looked very similar to her Animagus form. "That's quite all right, Miss Granger. I'll expect your arrival as soon as possible," she said, sending the Patronus off with a flick of her wand.

"Typical Hermione," Ron mumbled, quietly enough that only Harry could hear him. "Always in the library."

McGonagall meanwhile had turned to Edward, Alice and Jacob. "I think it would be best," she said, "if you three would wait elsewhere for the moment. You can use my old office, I'll take you there now."

Hermione arrived a few minutes after McGonagall returned, having shut Edward, Alice and Jacob securely in her room. She'd brought Ginny, who quickly assured Harry that James was safely at the Burrow.

Hermione took a deep breath and began to speak very quickly. "I was at the library earlier doing some research into Inferi. It's really dark magic, of course, absolutely horrible, but the theory behind it is quite interesting. Of course, I don't think Cedric has become an Inferius, we'd be able to tell, but I did notice that you have to perform the magic to animate the body very soon after the person in question died, otherwise the… I suppose you'd call it a 'spark of life'... isn't present any more and the body is useless."

"Get to the point, Hermione," Ron cut in agitatedly.

"I'm getting there, Ron. Well, it got me thinking about the circumstances of Cedric's death. He'd just died, his body was lying right there, and then Harry and Voldemort's wands connected. Harry said it brought back a sort of spirit version of Cedric, didn't you, Harry?" Harry nodded in confirmation. "So I think that echo latched onto Cedric's body, and allowed him to come back to life at a later time. Obviously since he had been killed, he's been altered quite a bit – his heart doesn't beat, he doesn't breathe, everything like that. And that has caused some mental differences too, and probably some other physical ones."

"He sparkles in the sun," Ron told her, shuddering slightly.

"He- what?" asked Ginny looking a bit dazed.

"Sparkles?" said Hermione, distracted for a moment. "Oh well, never mind. I don't know if the old body has now left its tomb or if a new one was formed, but that doesn't really matter. I think though, that if we recreated the scene where the wands connected, probably using different spells designed specifically to revert things to their original state – I was thinking of Finite incantatem and perhaps Enervate – we could get back Cedric."

Harry, Ron and McGonagall all started at Hermione, who was looking quite flushed, and quickly added, "Well, I don't know… That's just what I thought."

"Hermione," said Harry in a low voice. "You're a bloody genius, you know that?" Ron nodded vehemently.

"That does seem to make sense, Miss Granger. It must be worth a try, at least. Congratulations!" McGonagall agreed. Hermione smiled proudly.

They began to formulate a plan. Everyone agreed with Hermione on the spells to use, deciding that it was their best bet to try simply to use reversing spells. The spell to wake up victims of Stunning jinxes, and the spell to end the effects of other enchantments did indeed seem the best way to go. Ginny had just proposed that they go and break the news to Edward, when they were interrupted. Alice hurtled into the room, looking furious.

"I saw!" she yelled, pointing a finger dramatically at Hermione. "You! And him!" Her glare swivelled to fix on Harry. "You were hitting Edward with some kind of spells, he was unconscious, you'd got him raised in the air between you!"

"Miss Cullen," said McGonagall, startled. "We don't want to hurt you or Edward. We believe it is a simple procedure, we were about to ask for your consent."

"Save it," Alice said roughly, stamping her tiny foot. "I can see into the future, you know. I know what you're going to do. I told Edward and Jacob to run, they should be far into the forest by now, but let me tell you, we are not going down without a fight!"

"Have you ever fought before?" Ron asked anxiously. Ginny kicked him from behind, and Harry was tempted to follow her example. Asking the enemy about their level of experience was hardly the best battle strategy he had heard…

"We nearly did once, but we sorted it out in the end," Alice admitted. "But believe me, you do not want to mess with vampires."

"And neither do you want to 'mess with' wizards," said Professor McGonagall evenly, her fingers sketching quotation marks around the phrase 'mess with'.

"Yeah, remember our 'stick' thingies?" Ron said, gaining in confidence.

At that, Alice gave her a snarl and hurled herself out of the open window. Hermione and Ginny, unused to this, gasped and ran to look out. Alice was darting away into the forest again, completely unscathed despite the sheer drop.

"They do have a habit of doing that, don't they?" remarked McGonagall. Her voice was carefully light, but her nostrils flared.

"What do we do, Professor?"

"The only thing we can do – fight back. I think Hogwarts is about to face another battle."

"Are you sure that's not going a bit far?" Harry asked her worriedly. His memories of the last Battle of Hogwarts were not good ones…

"Yes, Potter, entirely sure. Edward Cullen will never co-operate with us now, and I'm afraid he's too much of a risk to society to leave as he is. And, if I'm totally honest with you, I do not believe that they will be hard to deal with. All we need to do is get to Edward. They don't seem hugely experienced, and while they are physically tough, they will be no match for magic."

"Blimey… You really think we can do this?" Ron said shakily.

"Yes, Weasley, I do." Professor McGonagall looked amused. "Gather up all the recruits you need. I daresay there will be plenty of people willing to help you. I'll meet you in the Great Hall in two hours' time, ready to fight."