This isn't a full crossover with Old World of Darkness because the lore wouldn't make any sense. So really it's more of a partial crossover solely with Vampire the Masquerade, or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines to be more specific.


The answer to that question turned out to be painfully obvious for anyone who had a taste in goth movies.

Harry had never watched any goth movies, but he had read up on the more recent history of vampire-wizard relations in Britain, and one of the more recent incidents there involved a fight that occurred at a bustling nightclub. Yes, it was quite stereotypical for vampires to hang out in and run nightclubs, but Harry supposed he couldn't complain. He was a wizard, and most wizards liked to wear robes, brew potions in cauldrons, and fly around on broomsticks.

Harry remembered the address of the nightclub, and figured it would be as good a place as any to ask where the head vampire of the country was staying. When he arrived, however, he found that there was no nightclub there, as the place where the building should have stood was occupied by a furniture store and a bakery.

Unsure of what to do, Harry decided to ask the people working at the shops if they knew what had happened to the old establishment.

Harry walked into the bakery, internally cringing at how his question would sound. "Uh, excuse me, Miss," he said, motioning towards the lady at the counter. "Didn't there use to be, uh, some kind of club here?"

The woman stared at him for a moment before answering. "Oh, yes, but it was closed down five years ago. I heard there was a nasty drug problem going on at that place. Awful business."

"Oh. Did the owners get sent to prison?"

"No, they managed to get away somehow. Rumor is, they even managed to set up shop a couple blocks from here, under new names. If I didn't know better I'd have suspected they bribed someone..."

Now, that was a promising lead.

The place the woman was referring to was a shabby little building squashed in between two giant white warehouses that seemed to serve no practical purpose whatsoever. The club only had a scratched and beat up sign near the door to identify it, and it had no windows or lights of any kind on the outside. It was definitely the kind of place where you could imagine all sorts of illicit transactions occurring, and it probably violated several fire code regulations to boot.

Of course, the place was still empty, as it was in the middle of the afternoon. Harry was forced to stake the place out as the sun slowly crawled across the sky. The invisibility cloak made the task a bit easier, as it allowed Harry to avoid people asking him why he was just sitting there, but it was still mind numbingly boring. Sometimes, he would get up and walk around the general area, but there wasn't much to see. Just more of the same looking rows of buildings that covered every street. Just more cars and pedestrians constantly flowing through the city, like water through pipes.

When the sun dipped below the horizon, the task of watching the club became far more interesting. Now there were some people streaming in at irregular intervals. Most of them were young, and dressed more than a little like junkies. Glancing at them from the shadows, Harry tried to see if there was anything distinctly odd about any of the patrons. From where he was watching, he couldn't tell, as all the people would look equally fitting in a mosh pit. Any one of them could be a vampire, really.

Circling around to the back of the club, Harry once again felt grateful for how easy many things were when you had magic.

"Alohamora."

The back door unlocked, and Harry slipped inside. He was in a badly lit corridor, where the walls were covered with large, oil colored blotches, the floor was oily and littered with little bits and pieces of garbage, and the ceiling was marred with streaks that were indicative of water damage. In dark corners of the room, insects were faintly visible scurrying about, and there was a faint, but constant banging in the background that came from the direction of rusted pipes that ran along the ceiling. The walls themselves were painted a weak shade of beige, which clashed horribly with the pronounced and sickly yellow that flickered every few seconds from lights that looked to be at least thirty years old. Bright blue lights and the sound of lousy music blaring away faintly filtered in through a heavy door at the end of the hall.

In a word, the club was uninviting.

Locking the door behind him, Harry checked the side rooms. There were a couple offices there, filled with various files and documents that Harry had no interest in digging through. The corridor branched off to several other closets and utility rooms, but there was no one hanging around there. It seemed like everyone else had gone into the main room.

That's strange. I wonder if I could lure a vampire back here for a private conversation... maybe with a note?

Harry got a piece of paper and wrote a short message on it.

Tooo any good lookin blodsuckerss out there:

Comeeon out backstage fur some reeeel fun! I got magic trick an stuff. Eeven blood pops! Just aas good as real neck!

-The Livin Boy

Harry hoped that regular people would just write the thing off as the incoherent drunken ramblings of a club patron, but a vampire would pick up on the obvious blood related symbolism. For good measure, Harry made all the letters bright red as well.

Harry then quickly slid the paper under the door, and quickly levitated it and stuck it to the other side of the wall, hoping no one would notice it due to the sheer amount of noise and sensory overload going on in the main room. He then retreated to one of the offices, took off the invisibility cloak, and waited.

It wasn't too long, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, before someone opened the main door. The brief blast of loud music was quickly cut off as the door was slammed shut. Harry stood up, but he wasn't fast enough to react when a lithe figure suddenly shot forward at a ridiculous speed and grabbed him. It was as if the person's motions were being fast forwarded while the rest of the world moved in real time, as Harry observed while he was being lifted up and shaken back and forth.

"WHAT-DO-YOU-THINK-YOU'RE-PLAYING-AT-YOU-LITTLE-PUNK?!" a nasty, high pitched voiced screamed, with each word being punctuated with Harry being rattled back and forth again.

"I can explain-"

The figure responded by throwing Harry right at one of the chairs, which was rather flimsy and fell over when he collided with it. Gasping in pain and rubbing his back (and still being thankful that he didn't end up hitting his head), Harry let his eyes refocus themselves before looking up at his attacker, who had left him alone for a moment.

It was a young woman who he didn't remember seeing enter the club, although missing her wouldn't have been difficult. She was tall and quite thin; perhaps abnormally so, looking at how skinny her arms were. Her face was covered in thick black and white makeup, and her black nails reeked of some kind of disgusting chemical smell. Of course, it was partially masked by the odor of several layers of perfume and cigarette smoke, which went together about as well as cactus quills and eyes do. Her movements tended to be rather twitchy, even when she was standing relatively still, and there was a hungry look in her green eyes that Harry normally would have associated with substance abuse. The current circumstances suggested, however, that there was only one kind of drug she was looking for.

"Well, start talking, idiot!" she said, putting her hands on her hips. "Or do I have to kick your ugly face in to make you remember how your tongue works?!"

"Well firstoffI'mawizardso-"

"ENGLISH! SPEAK ENGLISH!"

Harry sat up and took a deep breath to try and calm himself. "I'm a wizard, so you don't have to worry about me spilling your secret to the other people here."

"Prove it."

"I came in with that cloak over there. It makes you invisible, which is why you can't see part of the desk."

"Oh, really?" the vampire snapped. "Well, why does a wizard feel the need to sneak in to a place where he doesn't belong and magically stick an incriminating message on a place where anyone could read it?"

"Incriminating message? It was hardly-"

"You never know where your enemies might be hiding, moron. Now, why did you want to talk to me?"

Harry started rubbing his hands together. "I wanted to know where the, uh, head vampire is. It's because something urgent happened. Uh, what happened is that Voldemort returned."

In the distance, a muffled cracking sound could be heard.

"And why is this Voldemort guy so important that you think it would get you an audience with the local prince, huh?"

"It's what he's planning to do. Once he finishes going after us-"

Harry was cut off as the back door was loudly wrenched open.

"I'll finish dealing with you in a moment," the vampire said. "Don't scamper off, or I'll break your neck or something."

She turned and stepped out of the office, only to jump back as a flash of red light sped down the hall. Scowling, she began to move incredibly fast again and charged down the hall. There was the sound of a man crying out in pain, the crunching of breaking bones, and a large, limp body hitting the floor.

Harry timidly tried to stand up, only to be immediately accosted by the vampire again.

"So, you set up an ambush to try and kill me, huh?" she hissed, lifting him by the shoulders again.

"I didn't-"

"I'm going to kill you real slowly, you know that? One organ at a time. Starting with... with... ooh, what is that smell?"

The vampire dropped him and wandered back into the hall. Harry followed her, and found the recently deceased form of a Death Eater, complete with metallic mask. The vampire was crouched next to the body, as there was a small trickle of blood oozing out of its ear.

"This one is rich... real rich... mhmm..."

The vampire then suddenly bit into the corpse's neck. There was a revolting slurping sound as she began sucking blood from the body, like a child trying to drain every last drop of a sugary drink with a straw. Her body convulsed slightly as she did this, which spilled more blood onto the floor. She kept going for a while, to the point where Harry couldn't keep watching until she finished.

"This is the best meal I've had in weeks!" the vampire said, blood dribbling down her chin. "Real patrician blood... I haven't had that in years... what were we talking about again?"

They can taste if someone is rich and cultured just through their blood? Yeah, right. "We were talking about how I wanted to see the prince, as you called him, uh..."

"Mira. And I don't think I can just give you an audience with him on a whim. You'd have to do something for me first."

At least she's up front about it. "What did you have in mind?"

Mira stood up and curled her hands into fists. "There are these lousy freaks who keep stealing all of our customers! They keep selling their stuff so cheaply, we can't compete. So it would be great if you could just get rid of them."

"Get rid of them?"

"Yeah. Just, uh, kill them or something?"

Harry grimaced. "Look, I'm not a murderer. Isn't there some other way-"

Mira lazily threw her arms in the air. "Yeah, I'm sure there are. You could, like, get them sent to prison or use your stupid magic to curse them forever? I'm not your mother, you know. I'm sure you can think of something."

"Okay, okay. Where are these people?"

"They usually like to operate around this one place... I'll write the address down. If you want to find incriminating evidence there you should probably follow one of them back to their base of operations. No, I don't know where that is. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to clean this mess up." Mira then got up and headed to one of the closets. There was a disturbing note of boredom in her voice that suggested she was quite used to cleaning up bodies.

Harry paused for a moment to examine the dead Death Eater. It wasn't a face he recognized after pulling his mask off. Harry decided to pocket his wand, as having a spare wouldn't hurt and the man clearly no longer had a use for it. Harry decided to take the mask as well, shrinking it down so it fit in one of his pockets. Perhaps it would come in handy if he ever needed to pretend to be a Death Eater.

But there was still a burning question lodged in Harry's mind. How had the man found out where Harry was and instantly apparated there? Surely, it couldn't have been the Ministry's trace, as Harry had done more then a bit of magic the previous night without being found out. Had he accidentally passed by the man at some point? He had been wearing the invisibility cloak for the most of the day, so that seemed unlikely. There was one other possibility, but Harry didn't think it was practical.

Did he really set up the Taboo?

There had been rumors extracted from captured Death Eaters at the end of the last war, rumors that said Voldemort was working on a country wide sort of surveillance system that could track the location of anyone that said a particular word. Many people, including Harry, believed that such a project would be impossible... but if anyone could pull it off, it would be Voldemort. It was frightening to imagine, as now anyone who happened to say the wrong word at the wrong time could instantly be surrounded and killed. It also seemed that Voldemort had chosen a word to track that correlated well with his enemies, as there weren't many people that used his actual name instead of just 'You-Know-Who'. Harry hoped that the encounter was just a coincidence, but decided to be careful with what he said in the future.

"Could you move out of the way, asshole? I'm trying to clean this up."

Harry jumped out of the way as Mira starting dragging the corpse outside, with a mop in hand.

And now I have to bust what's obviously a drug operation just so I can talk to the lead vampire. This is going to be fun...

Harry wrapped the invisibility cloak around him again and slunk into another one of the back offices. He figured that if Mira was going to use him as an impromptu mercenary, the least she could do was offer him a place to stay for a few nights... although the place was in such a bad condition he wondered if renting it out to people would even be legal in the first place. For good measure, he decided to put a shield charm around himself before he went to sleep.


Harry woke up and felt sore from getting thrown around the previous day. Then he remembered what he was tasked with doing and felt like punching a wall. Of course, doing that wouldn't help anything, so he settled for mildly slapping it instead. It still stung.

Again, he thought about running away to France, and again, the image of his split head floated right to the front of his mind. He tried his old Occlumency practices of clearing his thoughts away, but that image stuck there for a much longer time then he wanted it to.

The place Mira sent him to was clearly on the wrong side of town relative to where Harry had previously been. The buildings here were in an obvious state of disrepair, with paint peeling off rotting wooden sidings, broken windows that nobody had bothered to fix, and graffiti that covered every open surface that could be easily reached on foot (although the last detail wasn't unique to this part of the city, Harry supposed). The place Harry was supposed to be watching was a particularly shabby back alley that totally wasn't suspicious at all. It even had dumpsters big enough to hide several bodies in!

Soon enough, someone sufficiently punk looking showed up and began glaring at a wall. Every now and then, he would glance around, and mutter something inaudible under his breath. Harry continued to watch him for a while, hidden under the cloak, but no one else showed up. After even more pacing, scowling, and murmured swearing, the man decided to leave. Following him, Harry kept his distance as they both went down a number of streets before ending up at a seemingly abandoned parking garage. Harry felt gratified that it wasn't an empty warehouse, at the very least.

The place was quite dark, as all the lights had stopped working a while ago, based on how decrepit they looked. The ground was cracked in several places, and several signs warned people to not enter the area in case the ceiling caved in. Harry put another shield charm around himself, although he was uncertain if it would stop several tons of concrete from squishing him into a fine paste. The man he was following must have memorized his way around, as he never stopped to pull out a flashlight or to adjust his eyes to the darkness.

Further down in the lot, someone had set up a lamp next to a whole bunch of tubes and vials and various liquids, arranged to form some kind of elaborate chemical contraption. There were a couple other people milling around, who began arguing with the man Harry was following as soon as he entered their field of vision. Harry didn't catch all the words, but he gathered that the meeting between them was not a pleasant one.

The man left after that, which left Harry wondering what the best way of dealing with the situation would be. Running straight to the police was an option, but he wasn't sure if his accounts of what were going on would be enough to warrant a full investigation. Plus, Harry didn't want to be called in as a potential witness to the crime, or worse, as a possible accomplice. Perhaps he could try and leave a trail of clues for the police to indirectly follow? Harry doubted he could pull that off in a timely fashion. Perhaps cursing the other people would be the best option. But what curse was the best to use?

As he was thinking, Harry absentmindedly kicked a rock down the sloped part of the road he was sitting on. He didn't think it would alert the other people he saw, who were busy messing with the chemicals and were probably used to the odd bit of rock moving around every now and then, but it did end up hitting a sleeping man in the shadows he hadn't noticed. Harry froze as the person shook themselves and stood up.

"What the hell? I told you guys not to-"

One of the people working with the chemicals cut the man off. "We didn't do it! The noise came from over there." He pointed to a spot near where Harry was.

The recently awoken man glanced around where Harry was crouching, but didn't seem to notice anything. Grumbling, he made some kind of arcane gesture with his hand before looking around the area again. This time, his eyes immediately focused on Harry.

The man's face contorted into a ugly grimace as he emitted a feral growl and charged up the slope at Harry, his hands reforming themselves into sharp claws as he ran. Harry tried to pull off the cloak so he could get a clean shot at the man with his hand, but wasn't quick enough to react before the man slashed at him. Fortunately, the shield he had put up pushed the man back, although the groaning sound it made when the man collided with it made Harry suspect it wouldn't last much longer.

"Incendio!" Harry yelped, sending a stream of fire right at the man's chest.

This proved to be both a wise and very unwise thing to do. It was wise because the man was actually a vampire, and the second best way of killing a vampire was with fire. It was very unwise because shooting fire around a meth lab was likely to result in an explosion. As it did when the burning vampire rolled back down the slope and right into all the chemicals.

Harry didn't recall hearing anything; he just felt a huge wave of force slamming him backwards, that left his ears deafened and his vision spinning. After a moment, he forced himself to stand up. He didn't feel any serious pains that might have indicated that his internal organs had ruptured; he supposed he had his now broken shield charm to thank for that. His ears were still quite angry with him, as now all he could hear was an awful ringing sound, and he felt like he was falling in a constantly changing direction as parts of his inner ear struggled to make sense of what had happened. He put one hand on the wall while picking up the invisibility cloak with the other, which took a few attempts to grab.

Then the ceiling began to make a horrible scraping noise.

"Oh f-f-f-"

Harry stumbled forward, trying to get outside of the lot. After a few missteps, he managed to keep himself balanced at a walking pace, before breaking out into a sprint. Behind him, a large chunk of the ceiling fell down and hit the floor, creating a huge cloud of grey dust.

"Come on-"

Now running as fast as his poorly exercised legs could carry him, Harry desperately sped up the last slope of the lot leading outside. After running a good bit farther, he dared to look behind him at the damage he caused.

Surprisingly, the whole place hadn't collapsed. The first level was still accessible and free of any new debris (though for how long it would stay that way, Harry could not guess). It seemed the major damage was done only at the lower levels, were the lab was. Harry wondered what had happened to the other people who had been down there. They had almost certainly died; which put a nasty twinge of guilt in Harry's gut. True, he hadn't meant to kill them, but his actions, accidental as they were, had doomed them all the same. The police would probably write it off as a drug brewing mishap, assuming they found the bodies.

Trying to calm his rapid breathing, Harry grabbed a wall and took a few deep breaths. They didn't help much, as his mind was still panicking over how close he had come to dying.

"Never again. Never again. Never..."

The sound of sirens growing louder in the distance shook Harry into action. He once again donned the invisibility cloak and snuck away from the lot, and back to the club.


Harry was particularly on edge while waiting for the sun to set. Constantly pacing back and forth in one of the back offices, his mind would keep replaying the scenes of the lot. The creature lunging, the bright flames and smoke of the explosion, and the roar of concrete crashing into the ground. He would have much preferred to have taken a nap, to let his mind grab a bit of rest, but his body wouldn't let him. Of course, there ultimately wasn't a definitive separation between his mind and body, but either way, he wasn't getting any sleep.

It took much longer for Mira to show up then Harry expected it to, but she did eventually come in through the back door, and she was practically skipping in delight.

"You did it!" she said. "I can't believe you actually did it! I never would have thought you would actually serve a useful purpose!"

"This isn't funny!" Harry snapped. "People actually died, you know? That's not worth celebrating."

Mira rolled her eyes. "That was the whole point! My boss was there, you know. I thought he was just going to kill you, but you did one better and got him killed instead! Now I can run this place all by myself."

Harry paused for a moment. "You mean you knew one of the people there was a vampire?"

"Duh? Of course I did! And I really thought you wouldn't have what it took to put him down. But you got him! Now he's nothing but ashes and bones!"

She punched Harry on the arm as she said this, which was probably intended to be friendly, but hurt a lot more then Harry thought it would.

"That was an accident," Harry said, rubbing his arm, which was now showing the early signs of bruising. "Well, not killing him specifically, but there were other people there who died."

"Oh, whatever. They probably would have died later in a gang fight or something. Or from overdosing. Those kinds of people just have naturally short lifespans, you know?"

Probably because of people- no, monsters like you. For a moment, Harry thought about setting her on fire as well, but decided against it. She could probably pin him faster then he could draw his wand, and it would just get in the way of his plan anyway. "Look, can I just have the head vam- I mean, the prince's address?"

"Aw, are you really sure you want to go so soon?" Mira cooed. "I could really use someone around to make more 'accidents' happen, you know? And I can tell just by looking at you that you must be pretty desperate for female company-"

"The address, please," Harry growled.

"Fine, loser." Mira grabbed a pen and began scribbling away on a scrap of paper. When she handed it to Harry, it took him a moment to decipher the cramped and loopy handwriting.

"So this guy is in one of those fancy skyscrapers?" Harry asked.

"Totally. He's, like, such a pampered little baby. But don't tell him I said that, or I'll kill you."

"Right."

Harry sighed. He had gotten played pretty badly, and now he was walking right into the figurative lion's den. There was little hope in his mind that the meeting with the prince would go as well as he hoped it would.

Still, to stop Voldemort and keep himself safe, he had to try, at the very least.