Melody Evans (she had dropped the name Potter the first chance she had upon learning of her 'fame' among the magical enclaves) looked at her homework with an adorable expression of concentration.

Upon learning she actually did have a brain, but had been forced to keep her grades down to avoid even more trouble from the fools she had been dumped on, Reborn put his considerable skills as a tutor to use and bribed the girl with lessons on Italian in exchange for not fudging her homework.

Considering the interest Melody had shown upon learning her brother was half-Italian and her mother would have stayed there if she hadn't been tricked, the bribe was more than sufficient.

"Hmm... Good, but you got two wrong," said Reborn. He gently patted her on the head, after seeing her flinch at the first sound of raised voices. If he didn't know Dino was going to drive Vernon to suicide and Petunia to the mental asylum for what they did to his sister, he might have arranged a slow and very painful accident for the abuse and neglect.

He honestly didn't know the boy had it in him, but he was rather pleased to see that Dino wasn't entirely hopeless. Apparently all he needed was proper motivation to actually act like a proper mafia boss.

Reborn had the distinct feeling that Dino's reluctance on the matter was going to vanish very quickly since he now had a little sister to protect and take care of. Now if only he could do something about the boy's clumsy nature.

Melody smiled shyly. Reborn was strange, but rather nice even if he did use her brother as target practice. The first time she saw that she had a panic attack, but when she realized Reborn never aimed anywhere fatal or permanently damaging and was simply trying to motivate Dino the only way he knew how, she calmed down.

Dino wouldn't be surprised in the least if being around Reborn for a while acclimatized his sister to the mafia. Or at least got her used to chaos.

"Redo number 4 and 10 and if you need help feel free to ask your brother," said Reborn. Fifteen minutes later Melody handed her homework back, and he nodded with approval. "You're better at this than your brother is."

Melody smiled at him.

Dino came in looking exhausted. He hated having to deal with the magicals, and the inbred morons of the English enclaves made everything worse. On the plus side, Vernon was quickly learning why it had been such a poor idea to treat his baby sister like he had. He had lost his house, his car and his reputation in short order...and that was before Dino let it slip to the neighbors exactly what his sister's condition had been when he found out about her.

"Rough day?" snarked Reborn. Dino didn't even do more than glance at him when he saw where his tutor was. Reborn had taken to acting as a buffer between Melody and her nightmares, since this was one thing he couldn't actually help Dino with. He was a 'muggle' after all.

"Just a senile old man butting his nose into things that aren't his business," said Dino with a groan. He didn't know why the headmaster of the school his mother attended was so interested in the reason her personal vaults had become active, but it pissed him off that he had to wait four very long hours before the old man was finally kicked out of the building. By now Dino firmly had the suspicion that the old man had a flag on his mother's accounts and was trying to find out who was accessing them.

Dumbledore wasn't family and from what little he had found out was directly responsible for where his sister had been placed. More to the point he had been the 'leader' of the side his mother had fought on and had been chiefly responsible for most of the 'excuses' for why she had never come back.

"Sir, there's a Remus Lupin here to see you," said Romario.

Dino quietly picked up his sister and put her in a different room, where Reborn joined them. Romario was competent enough to act as back-up, and from what little he knew of English magicals they were mostly idiots who overly relied on their sticks to fight.

Remus looked terrible, but that was to be expected of a werewolf so soon after the full moon had passed.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you put your wand or wands on the table for the moment. It's not that I don't trust you, but I'd rather not take chances when I'm not entirely sure you're the same person I contacted. The same goes for any potions outside of anything medical," said Dino apologetically.

"Perfectly understandable and I can appreciate the sensible amount of precaution you're taking since we've never met before," said Remus with approval. Moody would have liked his common sense, that was for certain. "So you have questions about Lily?"

"Just to clarify that you are the same Remus Lupin she spoke of, do you remember anything particular happening at the beginning of February with Lily was in her sixth year?" asked Dino.

Remus blinked, before realization came upon his features.

"Ah. If you are referring to what I think you are, then I helped to remove her from Hogwarts for a few days until she returned and her best friend quit having to use polyjuice to cover up the fact she was missing. She also returned the Marauder's Map to me, since we no longer needed to hide the fact she wasn't in the castle from James. I only wish Dumbledore hadn't sent me out on so many missions for the Order, or I could have prevented the travesty that occurred. I'm still not entirely sure why James actually believed the marriage was legal in the first place."

Dino relaxed slightly.

"So you know."

"I'm guessing you're the child she managed to hide from the school until you were born. I know she loved telling me what she could about her son before her memory suddenly vanished. I'm not entirely certain it was actual amnesia, or if someone got tired of her attempts to return to Italy and simply took advantage of the chaos on the battlefield to hit her with an obliviate of her memories outside England," he admitted. "By the time I knew something was terribly wrong, it was far too late to put a proper stop to the wedding without revealing your existence to the Order and James."

Dino blinked at that.

"What?"

"Your mother was a brilliant witch. However considering the amount of betrayal going on she didn't want to risk your life on the off chance someone mentioned her son to the wrong person. And while James was a good friend of mine, he was entirely too pleased at finally being able to marry the girl he had been more or less stalking for years. I wasn't about to challenge one of the few people who stood up for me despite my condition when he was one of the strongest protections I had from being branded a traitor outright and would have likely brought Sirius into it," said Remus sadly. "I do know that after Melody was born Lily found any excuse she could think of to force James to sleep on the couch or from touching her. She spent quite a bit of time with your sister, though most chalked it up to the fact that Melody was her first 'known' child."

Lily rarely let her daughter out of her sight, and everyone (except Remus) had thought it was a first time mother's paranoia combined with the way things were at the time. If Lily had survived the end of the war Remus had fully planned to help her permanently relocate out of England with her daughter. Sadly he never got the chance to do so.

"So what exactly happened to my mother?" asked Dino. He kept getting broad details, not the specifics he wanted.

"Dumbledore caught wind of some sort of prophecy involving a child born at the end of the seventh month which involved a non-specified Dark Lord. Unfortunately one of the Dark Lord's spies was also present when it was given and heard enough to give the man a general idea of who to target. There were two couples who fit the description who had children born on roughly the day specified. For some reason he went after Lily and James. I have no idea what was done or how it happened, but Melody survived a direct encounter with nothing more than a cursed scar that from what I can tell was never properly examined by healers. I do recall Lily looking into the Potter family magics which involved a lot of old and forgotten wards... James tried to use the family library so he could get off the couch and actually spend time with his 'wife'. It failed rather spectacularly because she left a bottle of good booze where Sirius could find it and he dragged James into a night of some rather embarrassing drunken debauchery which Lily used against him the second he returned home."

Remus knew most of the ways Lily had kept James from touching her because he had been the one to help supply ideas on how to keep his 'friend' firmly away from her.

Dino looked at his mother's closest friend. Sure, the man was a werewolf, but he saw absolutely no reason why he could just make a few arrangements.

"I believe you," said Dino after a moment.

Remus would have said something, but the door opened and he saw a very familiar face.

"Cub?" he said in shock. She was skinnier than he was (though he could tell she was putting on weight), and was entirely too submissive. He gave Dino a hard look. "What happened to her?"

"Dumbledore happened," Dino spat out, easily picking his sister up and letting her sit in his lap. Imagine his shock learning she was barely five years younger than he was... he would have thought she was much younger. "He dumped her on Petunia without even asking citing blood wards. Either he's an idiot or he deliberately forgot the fact that such wards require active magic to sustain themselves and in that neighborhood the only one who could have done so was her."

Now Remus was pissed. It sounded far too much like the headmaster had willfully placed the worst sort of wards to 'protect' Melody. And he knew far too well Petunia's views on Lily. Her appearance was more than enough testament to how angry she was at raising her niece.

Melody looked at him with wide eyes, before she said cautiously...

"Uncle Moony?"

Remus looked to Dino for permission first, and was pleasantly surprised when he got a nod in return. Rather than pick her up though, he merely ruffled her hair.

"Yes cub, it's me. I'm sorry I couldn't come get you myself, but there are a lot of people who don't like those with my condition and would have raised a major stink about me adopting you."

Melody looked him right in the eye, before hugging him tightly.

"I believe you Uncle Moony," she said quietly. "I missed you and uncle Padfoot."

"Where is Sirius Black?" asked Dino.

"In Azkaban. Officially he 'betrayed' the Potters, but there is no way in hell I'd believe that. Unofficially the only reason I haven't spoken up about the matter is because I have absolutely no idea who was complicit in what happened to Lily. The two of them were rather close, but I have no idea whether Sirius would have aided James in what happened if he knew the full story or even suspected it. It's entirely possible that James merely suffered from what is commonly known as the 'Black Madness', except it was discreet enough no one picked up on it."

Dino made a note to visit Black with veritaserum to get the full, unbiased story. You couldn't lie while the potion was in effect, but you retained enough control that you could keep your mouth shut and simply not answer.

"Do you have any idea what caused our mother's amnesia in the first place?" asked Dino.

"The healers all claimed it was a head wound, but the fact she specifically couldn't remember Italy or anything to do with it makes me suspect someone deliberately hit her with an oblivaite to target only those memories and gave her the light head wound to cover it. I would have asked around, except James was starting to get suspicious and I wasn't about to tempt his jealousy from rearing it's head. He was extremely territorial around Lily and even insured that she was firmly driven away from her childhood friend Severus Snape. The day Snape accidentally said the word that drove them apart, he had been having one of his rows with James for an hour before immediately running into Lily within five minutes of it."

Dino's disgust with James Potter was only going up the more he learned of the man. It sounded like he was either a Mist or possibly a Cloud that had effectively declared Lily Evans his and no one had bothered to step in and correct it. In fact the more he heard about Potter's behavior, the more it sounded like Dumbledore and the teachers had deliberately allowed the obsession to grow to unacceptable levels simply because he was a "Gryffindor" and therefor couldn't possibly do any wrong because that house was considered the "good" house while Slytherins were unequivocally considered evil.

Dino really hated the English enclaves. While he wasn't entirely welcome in the Italian ones because he was firmly mafia at this point, at least they didn't have nearly as many problems as these idiots.

"Do you know if he has a mundane address?" asked Dino.

"I'm sorry, no. We weren't exactly close and he was always resentful about the fact I never did more to curb James and Sirius...it really didn't help that Sirius almost tricked him into meeting me on a full moon," said Remus apologetically.

Dino frowned.

"Wait... Sirius Black thought it was acceptable into setting another student to meet a half-grown werewolf on the full moon? Why?"

"I never bothered to ask. I just assumed it had something to do with the fact that he had a rough summer, what with running away from the house and all. His mother wasn't exactly a...pleasant... human being," said Remus tactfully.

A lot of things weren't adding up, and some were starting to shine a light on something being very wrong with the English enclaves.

Dino noticed Melody was looking sleepy, so he picked her up properly and let her head rest on his shoulder.

"You can stay the night here, just know some of my men are going to be within sight at all times with tranq guns," said Dino evenly. Remus seemed to be the only person who was on his mother's side in this entire mess and while that bought him some leeway, he wasn't taking chances.

"Fair enough," admitted Remus. He desperately needed actual sleep and food, and if possible a proper bath. His body was in agony after another transformation.

Dino was a very polite host, even if the odd "child" beside him sent every instinct in his body into overdrive screaming "Dangerous, DO NOT PISS OFF". The fact Moony was giving this "Reborn" a wary distance said volumes that this was absolutely not a child. A curse, perhaps?


Severus Snape was not having a good month. It had started with Dumbledore asking about Lily and only seemed to go downhill from there. From what the old goat could tell, it seemed Petunia had found out about Lily's vaults and was trying to access them. The problem was that she had somehow managed to lock the Potter vaults, which meant a number of 'donations' and other payments were abruptly stopped and there was rumor of a goblin audit into who had accessed those vaults when the owner wasn't even old enough to use them yet.

The problem? Petunia was firmly a muggle and shouldn't have been able to access Diagon in the first place, much less been able to convince the goblins into doing anything with the Potter account when she would only have access to Lily's personal account.

Then there was the notice that the "Legal and Magical Guardian" of one "Melody Evans" had been changed from Dumbledore to an unknown third party. Which wouldn't have meant much, except for the fact that Lily's maiden name was Evans and with her vaults suddenly seeing so much activity since her death meant that Dumbledore was very worried about what was going on.

He didn't like unknowns and this had the potential to throw several well laid plans into the gutter with no way of ever recovering them.

Snape took a long pull of his drink. Somehow he had the distinct feeling that a lot of things were going to change very soon...some for the better.