He'd been walking for hours. He should have known right away that being offered the chance to tour America with the Dursleys while they went on vacation had been too good to be true, but he'd tamped down his instincts in favor of deluding himself that the offer had been made out of the genuine kindness of their hearts. That, combined with the alternative of staying with the crazy cat lady that lived down the street had made his decision pretty quickly.

Of course, he still hadn't yet quite grasped the concept that if something happened that was too good to be true, it usually was. He'd probably have been infinitely better off with Mrs. Figg and her twenty cats.

He squinted, holding up a numb hand to peer through the pouring sheets of rain. Were those houses over there? Maybe. Every so often he could see a spark of sunlight through the thick clouds overhead, but it was only barely enough to let him know it was daytime. Teach him to fall asleep while someone else was driving... he'd woken up face-down in a muddy ditch off the side of an empty road.

And to add insult to injury, all the candy that he'd smuggled out of Dudley's stash was gone, leaving him with empty pockets in the middle of nowhere. He sneezed, launching his too-large glasses off onto the sidewalk by the road. He was coming down with a cold, too.

There were houses, he noted as he dropped to his knees and scrambled for his glasses. The rain was starting to let up enough for him to tell that he was in the middle of a suburb somewhere. He was too tired and cold and wet to care much about the details.

Someone carefully set his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. He looked up, following the trail of the arm to the body it was attached to.

He saw golden horns.

"Welcome to Endsville."

xxx

That had been about six months ago. Harry still didn't know what had prompted Mandy to drag him out of the rain and into her home. He'd learned enough about her to know that altruism wasn't exactly a defining facet of her personality. She wasn't kind. She simply didn't do things out of the goodness of her heart. All of the pink and bright flowers were like a form of deceptive camoflauge, hiding a poisonous viper. Her own parents were terrified of her, which was actually a good thing because it meant that they didn't put up a fuss over his moving in.

So why then?

She'd taken him in, fed him, gotten him clothes and a pile of cushions to sleep on, and so far hadn't asked anything of him in return. And while the clothes were secondhand and cushions on the floor at the foot of Mandy's bed might cause some to turn their nose up, Harry had only ever worn Dudleys castoffs before, and slept on the bare floor under a thin sheet in the cupboard under the stairs. For him, it was like a little slice of paradise.

And he couldn't help but wonder what prices he'd end up paying for it.

xxx

A.N.

Another teaser, yay!