In one particular way, Harry and Luna were total opposites. Luna was so aware of everything around her that she found it hard to focus on the individual trees of the forest. Harry was the kind of kid that someday might be able to do something like track a tiny golden ball from hundreds of feet away into a storm, nearly missing the incoming creatures to which he was specifically vulnerable.
Of course, that might still be some time away, since the Weasley home quidditch games didn't even use a snitch.
They'd just finished one of their biggest games ever, three on three. Fred and George, the twins, beaters for their Hogwarts team, had split up to each play keeper. Harry and Ron had played chasers for Fred's team, while Ginny had played on the other side with one of the boys from the twins' year who lived nearby, Cedric Diggory. It had taken Harry only a few weeks to convince Mrs. Weasley to let him "train" Ginny to fly after discovering she'd been secretly practicing on her own for years.
It was a close game, but Harry's team had come out ahead, probably owing to having a better sense of when to pass the quaffle to one another. Cedric grinned at them all as they were putting the brooms away, "I know it's a year off for two of you, but if any of you are thinking Hufflepuff, we could use you on the quidditch team."
"Hey!" Fred objected, wrapping his arms around Ron and Ginny. "Stop trying to steal our siblings!"
"And honorary siblings!" George amended, putting his own arm around Harry. "The Weasleys have a Gryffindor tradition."
The blond Hufflepuff put his hands up in surrender, "It was just a thought. I guess you do need to replace Charlie."
Both twins frowned, remembering that the team still hadn't figured out how to recover from the loss of their older brother as seeker. Ron had potential to play keeper or beater someday, but wasn't really suited for the other positions, despite his showing partnered with Harry, especially not enough to get to fly as a first-year.
"We're just mad that the Slytherins aren't in a rebuilding year," Fred groused.
George added, "All the other teams are going to need to find new members this year, but not them."
"Yeah, they play rough," Cedric admitted, then noticed how late it was getting, "I guess I better get home and cleaned up for supper."
"Oh! Right!" Ron realized. "We've got to go over to Jeremy's house for supper tonight."
"Yeah, see if his mum's boyfriend is a vampire," Fred smirked, not believing it.
"Be good practice for the troll, if he is, though," George nudged Ron.
"Wait, what?" Cedric asked.
"You know, the troll you have to fight to get sorted to your Hogwarts house?" Fred explained to Cedric, widening his eyes to signal that the Hufflepuff shouldn't ruin the joke for them.
"Sure… the troll," Cedric allowed, but then insisted, "Someone's boyfriend is a vampire?"
"It's a long story," Ron demurred.
"You know how Harry is basically like a mad genius at muggle stuff?" George began, ready to tell the long story anyway.
Cedric nodded. The twins had already mentioned how Harry had some kind of intuition about how to fit in with the muggles, and knew the Weasleys had been able to visit the muggle side of town over winter holidays as long as Harry supervised their wardrobes and attitudes.
"It's not that hard, guys," Harry insisted. "You just actually pay attention to what kind of clothes they're wearing and don't act like you're at the zoo when you're around them."
"Anyway," Fred picked up the tale, "mum got comfortable enough with it that we started going further than into town. Dad's mad about the stuff, of course, loves the opportunity to see muggles in their element."
"So we actually got them to start taking us down to the Paignton Pier this summer," George continued. "All kinds of wicked stuff down there to see and do."
"Like comic books!" Harry enthused. There was a little part of him that was thrilled to get to read comics, even though he theoretically hadn't been aware of them until a few months before. "They'll just let you hang out and read them in the shop, if you don't tear them up."
"So we're in the comic shop down there last week," Ron took up the tale before the twins could take over again. "And some muggle kid comes up, sees me and Harry, and just starts telling us that he thinks his mum's dating a vampire. Asks if we can come to supper tonight and check him out."
"Why would he think you'd know?" Cedric asked.
All of them shrugged. "We're really getting a jump on Defense Against the Dark Arts class looking up the ways to find out, though," Ron admitted.
If this all sounds familiar, it's because of three reasons.
The first reason is that, no matter how much the world's population was fooled by Harry Potter becoming Harry Lovegood, destiny was not. If he was going to miss a year of Hogwarts, then dangerous and educational things would have to happen to him wherever he happened to be.
The second reason was that Harry Lovegood was a very grounding influence for Xenophilius. When his father would propose all kinds of exciting topics for the Quibbler, Harry was apt to ask him what the evidence actually was. As such, over the last year, the paper had needed to fill pages with actual investigated content that it would previously have padded with what even the editor would admit, if he was being honest, was total nonsense.
One of the pet causes of the paper was the Rotfang Conspiracy, Xenophilius' belief that that Ministry was being fought over by factions of vampires and dark wizards (who attacked the vampires by increasing the prevalence of gum disease). Unlike the more fanciful articles about magical beasts no one had ever seen, this passion project had, well, teeth.
There were, of course, dark wizards infiltrating the Ministry, as not all the former Death Eaters had been sent to prison with their dark lord's defeat. And there were also vampires trying to influence it to enact an agenda more favorable to them. While the Quibbler wasn't willing to risk libel suits by naming names, some of the articles about the Rotfang Conspiracy, with Xeno actually taking the time to check his sources, were very close to the mark. Readers took notice and wrote in. The Minister and several department heads decided that being friendly to the blood-sucking undead wasn't a good look, and made a new policy to avoid pro-vampire causes.
One vampire, Sanguini, had been working for decades on his project of swaying the Ministry. He'd even hooked a respected writer, Eldred Worple, to live with him and start working on a highly slanted biography about how nice it was to coexist with vampires. Then the grant money fell through and respected friends encouraged Worple to cut ties. Years of work, for nothing. Sanguini could think of little else but making the editor of the Quibbler pay.
The third, and most important, reason is that vampires spend more time in the muggle world than most wizards, and were quite taken by Hollywood's fascination with them. There were many vampire movies, and Sanguini had watched them all. When he relocated to Devon to try to figure out how to best hurt Xenophilius Lovegood, he noticed there was a popular tourist boardwalk nearby and hatched a plan. He'd find some delinquent kids in the area, turn them into vampiric thralls, and convince them that they were actually vampires. When he decided to make his move against Lovegood, he'd have the kids cause a ruckus to draw off any nearby aurors that could protect the wizards of Ottery St. Catchpole.
It worked well, the plan. So well that Sanguini got caught up in the plot and, when he noticed a recent arrival to one of the late night shops was a single mother with two teen sons, he got a little carried away. He told himself that, since she lived up in Exeter, it would provide even more camouflage for his observation of the nearby wizarding village if he could make the whole family his thralls and move in.
Where his plan started to unravel was that he wasn't the only one who could go to the cinema. Jeremy, the younger son, also saw the similarities to the recent film. So when he found a couple of odd boys hanging out at the local comic shop, he figured he'd risk it and ask them about vampires. When they didn't think he was weird to ask, he'd found his Frog brothers, and invited them to do the dinner scene.
Ron and Harry were, of course, totally unaware of all of this, but managed to convince Mrs. Weasley that it was a nice opportunity to meet the neighbors and prove that they could move in muggle society without too much supervision. It was a little harder to convince them that they needed to be out fairly late: the sun didn't even set until around 8:30, which was Jeremy's big clue that his potential stepdad was a vampire, as he never wanted to have supper at a reasonable hour.
Mr. Weasley dropped them off in his car around seven, briefly meeting Jeremy's mother who seemed surprised that Jeremy had been making friends but willing to accommodate the behavior. For her, it was early, since she was a night manager at a 24-hour convenience store near the pier. But she didn't have work that night, so had time for a relaxed dinner with her boyfriend, sons, and, now, her son's slightly-younger and slightly-odder new friends.
"You do not invite him in, no matter what he says," Jeremy was insisting to his older brother as Harry and Ron walked up.
"I've seen the movie too, Jerm," the older teen insisted. "Hopefully your Frog Brothers here know their stuff."
Still mystified by the muggles acting like they understood everything there was to know about vampires, and assuming the "Frog" thing was a weird muggle term that he shouldn't reveal he didn't understand, Ron held up the half-dozen heads of garlic they'd brought. "Straight from mum's garden."
"Then let's see if 'Max' likes Italian food," grinned Jeremy, as the boys took over their mother's kitchen to make dinner. It was another great surprise for her, how accommodating they were being to get to know her new boyfriend.
When Sanguini arrived, he couldn't help but smell the Italian food. He loved Italian food. It was his native food. But hopefully they hadn't used too much garlic. Even a little burned like chili peppers, but he'd spent years acquiring the taste for spicy food. When he got to the door and knocked, one of the boys just shouted, "It's open!" He'd been looking so forward to doing the "you're the man of the house" scene, too. He shrugged and let himself in. Vampires didn't actually benefit from an invitation to a muggle home in any way. That myth was just because of wizards having to allow them through wards against dark creatures.
"Right on time!" his girlfriend said, giving him a hug at the door as she emerged, dressed, from the back. "The boys did all the cooking!"
Sanguini counted six place settings in the dining room and did the math. "Four boys?"
"Jeremy made some new friends, I hope it's okay. They seem nice. One seems very familiar with working in the kitchen, and kept everyone else on task."
The vampire nodded, but things were beginning to seem extremely familiar. More familiar than he'd intended. He moved to sit at the table as the sounds of pots banging from the kitchen indicated that the meal was being dished up and brought out. The two sons he expected preceded two boys that were dressed in thrift-store clothes that weren't quite the style. And the blond-haired one carried a small bowl of what he was suddenly sure would be called "Parmesan cheese" but which was clearly shredded raw garlic. The jig was up. "Who are your friends?" he asked Jeremy.
"This is Ron and Harry," the boy introduced, calculation clear on his face.
Suddenly Sanguini recognized the son of the man he'd been staking out (pun not intended) for months. "Harry Lovegood?" he asked, hardly believing his good fortune. The opportunity for revenge right here at his fangs rather than hidden behind wards.
Everyone stopped moving, and the boys all looked wary, but Harry admitted, "Yeah?"
Sanguini's face split into a smile with suddenly far too many teeth as he stood, looming over the table, their mother backing away in surprise. She'd thought Jeremy just had an overactive imagination, talking about how she was dating a vampire. "When your father sees the scene that has been left behind, he will learn that he should not meddle in the affairs of vampires! Sanguini will feast tonight!"
A few miles away in the Weasley house, an alarm went off on a fantastical clock as the hand with Ron's name on it pointed to Mortal Peril.
Back in the house with the looming vampire, everyone froze, but Harry believed he was totally serious about the threat. They hadn't really expected the man to be a vampire, and, with misplaced trust in the Ministry, didn't think he would actually harm them if he was. Consequently, they didn't have a plan for the circumstance of, with the vampire being revealed, he decided to kill them all.
But Harry did have a pot full of shredded garlic in his hand and a deep-seated hatred of bullies and bad parental figures. Without really thinking, he screamed, "Practice troll!" and dived at Sanguini.
A ten-year-old (unaware that he's actually just recently turned eleven) has little hope against a full-grown man in normal circumstances, much less when that man is a supernaturally strong creature powered by dark magic. Harry vaguely thought maybe he was going to shove the garlic down the vampire's throat while he was surprised.
Sanguini was surprised. Prey didn't fling themselves at him. It had literally never happened before.
But his reflexes were good, and he easily caught the boy mid-charge, eye on the pot of garlic which would be a small threat to him. He was mentally shrugging and planning to bite down when his hands started to burn.
While Harry might never know of the blessing woven into his flesh and blood by sacrifice, it was explicitly designed to protect him from hostile dark magic, not unlike the force that animated the vampire who definitely intended him harm. Moreover, it had not been siphoned off to power the blood wards at Privet Drive for months, and he was actually part of two families now that wanted him around, that affection strengthening the protection forged in a mother's love.
Sanguini's hands went up like they were flash paper over an open flame.
The vampire was suddenly screaming in pain, his fangs clearly visible to everyone in the room, and Harry was free. Later, he would assume he just still had garlic on his shirt from cooking, and used his freedom to shove a handful of the garlic into the vampire's mouth, the force of it tackling the painfully distracted vampire to the floor under the small boy's body weight.
Everyone would later agree that it must have been Harry's quick thinking that caused the vampire to flash into light and dust as Harry rolled away as fast as he could. They would've had no reason to expect that it was the full-body contact with the boy that did the deed. Vampires didn't normally have that extreme of a reaction to garlic, but it was possible.
When Arthur Weasley apparated into the room a minute later, wand drawn but half-dressed, it was all over except for the questions. A silver weasel—Arthur's patronus messenger—was quickly sent off to an auror Arthur trusted, and within a half an hour the obliviation squad had shown up to handle it. Jeremy and his family would remember that his mother's boyfriend hadn't been a vampire, but that Harry and Ron had recognized him as a dangerous criminal who'd run off, pursued by police, and wouldn't be a problem anymore.
Ron and Harry were given the talking-to of their lives from Molly Weasley, and would certainly not be visiting muggles anytime soon or trying to be amateur dark creature hunters if she had anything to say about it. She was only mildly mollified by Arthur explaining that it seemed very likely that the vampire would have attacked the Lovegoods eventually anyway, and the boys were quite heroic in the circumstance.
In a small house down the road from the event, a white-haired local man noticed the red robes at the end of the block and kept his head down lest he be noticed. He wandered back into his bedroom, grumbling to himself, "One thing about living near Ottery St. Catchpole I never could stomach: all the damned wizards."