"You're certain?" Albus Dumbledore asked, standing in the sitting room staring at the 'magicked' wall in front of him in wonder.

"Certain." Was the response the older wizard got.

The response was tense, the speaker of the voice was stressed and anxious – all could see that.

"Well, this certainly changes a lot, doesn't it?"

"What does it change, Albus, apart from the obvious?" Mrs. Weasley asked, a dishrag wrung tightly in her hands, just as apprehensive as the rest of the room seemed to be.

"Harry Potter," The older wizard turned slightly to glance at the confused teen, sitting in the far corner of the room next to the remaining Weasley children and Miss Granger, not entirely understanding what was going on, unlike the majority of the adults who seemed to have somewhat of an idea. "It appears, was not the only child to have escaped Voldemort that frightful Halloween night of 1981."

Harry stood in an outrage, "What?" His body trembled, "There was someone else there the night my parents died?" His leg was twitching slightly, "How come this is the first I've ever heard of it?"

"Because –" Sirius spoke up, pacing the room and yanking at his hair, "No one would have wanted to hear about the man who helped kill the Potters by selling them to Voldemort, own daughter; dying alongside them!"

"Wha…" Harry blinked a few times, "You mean…?" He was feeling a bit woozy now.

"Lyra Anne Black…your God-Sister Harry. She was younger than you by six months and had been staying with you and your parents for a few weeks – Sirius and I were away on separate Order missions at the time and Kira..." Remus sighed heavily, "Kira – Lyra's mother had been killed by Bellatrix only a few weeks prior during an ambush attack in Diagon Alley. So, Lyra was staying with your family until Sirius could be reached and alerted of Kira's death." he answered as calmly as he could. The news of Lyra possibly being alive startled him. He had fully believed all these years that Lyra had died in Harry's baby room, along with Lily, when the killing curse had backfired, blowing up half of the room along with the downstairs below it. Harry's crib had only one of Lyra's shoes left in it – shredded into a few different pieces and her baby pacifier held tightly in baby Harry's fist as he shrieked, calling out partial Li-li sounds. His crib and baby mattress broke down the middle, the other half missing, looking as if it had been blown up...everyone assuming Lyra had been on that side of the crib. "Also, Lyra Black is Albus Dumbledore's great-niece – the great-granddaughter of his younger brother, Aberforth."

That had Harry sitting back down in his seat with a loud plump – not only did he have a God-Sister, but his God-Sister was also Dumbledore's great-niece? How had they not known she was alive all this time? Surely, someone should have noticed there was nobody to be declared dead, right? And what about the magical trace? Wouldn't it have been alerted that she was still alive with any accidental magic she may have done like Harry did when he was young and unaware of magic? And her name must have been on Hogwarts' list of future students from the time she was born like his had been, so why was it no longer there if she had been alive this whole time?

"Where could she be?" Sirius asked, still pacing back and forth, tugging at his hair even more aggressively than before, stopping only for a minute to stare at his family tapestry – the gold cord that was once blackened and faded out beneath Sirius' name, which Harry and the other children had never paid attention to before – it, having been so faded, blending in with the darkened background of the wallpaper – was now bright and thick like the other golden threads that connected the rest of the Black family on their family tree. The renewed gold cord, now leading down to the name 'Lyra Anne Black', directly underneath Sirius' and Kira Dumbledore's name – that having also reappeared or just having appeared for the first time on the tapestry.

"She most likely is not in the United Kingdom or southern Ireland – if she were, she would most certainly be attending Hogwarts…" The Headmaster spoke softly, more to himself than to anyone else.

"Perhaps she was brought to another family, and a blood adoption was performed?" Author Weasley suggested. A blood adoption would have been a logical choice, seeing as it would have magically altered Lyra Black's blood just enough so that she would have been able to pass any blood test to match her wizarding adopted family as well as keeping enough of her birth families' blood to a certain degree as well.

And, with the alteration of her blood, any basic magical trace of Lyra Black would have vanished unless the individual herself was tested for any lingering blood connected to the Black and Dumbledore families'. And that would be a near-impossible search, especially with no leads on where to begin. They certainly couldn't test every witch enrolled at Hogwarts, who was around the same age as what Lyra would be today. That wouldn't be ethical or very productive, since the potion to test blood relations is a complex potion, with highly potent ingredients that are not the cheapest... not to mention, if not done by an expert – could have deadly effects.

"No, no –" Dumbledore mumbled, running his fingers through his beard lost in thought. "The only ones able to perform that ritual are the Goblins themselves, and none would have gone ahead and approved it after testing her blood. They would have then known she was a Black as well as a Dumbledore… And even with Sirius having just been put into Azkaban and losing all paternal rights to Lyra, and Kira having already been dead – Aberforth or I would have been notified of it, as we would have been the next of kin."

"THEN HOW?" Sirius screamed, finally losing any composure he had left.

"Sirius!" Molly scolded at him for screaming at the Headmaster.

"Don't Sirius me, Molly!" He growled out to the redheaded woman, "That is my daughter! And I need answers to where she is! I need to know how she got to wherever it is she is now and why she is not here with me where she is supposed to be!" He laughed like a madman, shaking his head aggressively, still pacing and yanking his hair even harder than before, on the brink of ripping it all out in frustration. "I nearly died nine months ago at the Ministry as a wanted man in the public's eyes, not knowing my daughter – my Lyra – was still alive and out there somewhere! I've been cleared of all charges, I am a free man now, and I want my daughter back! I want her here with Harry, so we can be a proper family as we should have been for the last fifteen years!"

It was silent in 12 Grimmauld Place at that.

"Good grief, the new school term cannot come soon enough…" Giles spoke to himself as he sat in his den with three teenagers overrunning his home – with it still being winter break – thankfully, they were at the tail end of it now – with no school, meant it was a tad bit trickier to get access to the school library for all of them. The Library was generally always open, along with the rest of school during non-school times. It was only locked up every night at ten by janitors – the broad school wanted to keep the school open for teens who needed a place to go when school wasn't in actual session. Giles, of course, as the Liberian, had easy access any time he needed it. However, things were tenser, more so than usual with the high school principal, Synder. And Giles did not want to push it with his boss – after Synder had accused Buffy of murder with no solid proof. Of course, he had instantly assumed Giles was hiding her and essentially threatened to fire Giles on the spot for not telling him where Buffy was hiding.

So, with that, the tension between Giles and Synder was at its highest it had ever been since he had taken over for Principal Flutie, who had been killed the previous spring.

What made things even worse was the police chief grilled Synder a new one in front of the majority of the school staff and police force for accusing and trying to ruin a sixteen-year-old girls' life because of a petty vendetta he had against her. And that anger and embarrassment of being told off by a higher-up authority was now getting redirected to both Buffy and himself. So, not having the Library at the moment to avoid unnecessary drama meant the group was congregating more at his flat till they had full access to the school again. But with Joyce now knowing of Buffy being the slayer, they have also begun to gather at the Summer household a bit more as a full group..., however, they all wanted to keep it to a minimum not to overwhelm Joyce too much with all the monster talk.

Shaking his head, Giles tried to focus on the now.

Xander was on his landline, ordering a pizza for them all. Buffy was flipping through channels on his modest telly that she had informed him earlier that year was 'totes' outdated. And Willow was chattering on about all the discarded books he had lying about the den that he had been refreshing himself with over the quiet winter break. Giles had immensely enjoyed all the extra time to read for enjoyment, rather than for time-sensitive research – because of Buffy having successfully stopped Acathla. It had been calm for once on the Hellmouth.

He and Buffy had gone on patrol three times a week over the four-week winter school break and had only encountered two vampires during that span – very unusual for Sunnydale – but not shocking after the near start of the apocalypse. Most likely, with the near end nearly happening, it caused the majority of vampires and demons to hightail it out of Sunnydale till things settled down some. He predicted that things would pick up again in a few weeks or so – it was the Hellmouth after all, the supernatural will always be drawn to gather here. It was a magnet for creatures of the night and of Hell.

"Hey G-man, you want extra cheese on the pie?"

Giles sighed, taking his glasses off to clean them with his handkerchief. He realized it had become somewhat of a habit of his since coming to Sunnydale. Regularly cleaning his glasses when asked or called things, he found an insult to the English language from these zealous American teens that had somehow dug their way deep into his heart… "Regular is fine, Xander."

"Extra pepperoni or regular?"

"Again, regular is fine, Xander."

"Right-O, any other topping you guys want to add, or we good with the good old classic?" Both Willow and Buffy said they were good with whatever, and Giles singled that pepperoni and cheese were good with him. "Yea, one extra-large pizza with just regular pepperoni and cheese should do it for us – oh wait, also a side of breadsticks with dipping sauce and a two-liter of Coca-Cola for the group!"

"Oh, ask for ranch dipping sauce as well!" Willow called out as she finally found a book of spells to read that piqued her interest.

Xander nodded, adding that to their order before giving Giles' address to the pizza shop for delivery. Hanging up, Xander clapped his hands, "All right, food should be here within the hour!"

"Great, I'm starved!" Buffy replied, rubbing her growling stomach that they all could hear as she continued to flip through the channels, trying to find something they could all agree on to watch. The last time she put on the movie 'Clueless,' she swore Giles almost had a brain aneurysm from all the California valley-girl lingo, saying their take on the English language was atrocious and hurt his head to no end.

"Me too!" Willow agreed, skimming through the pages of the spellbook quickly as she did. "Alo-hoo-moor-ah…" Giles froze as he heard the spell come from Willow's mouth, not realizing what book she had picked to look through. "Huh, Giles, is this some form of Latin for spells?"

"Ah, yes, it is…"

"It's a lot different than the spells Ms. Calendar had in her notes…, ya know, the ones I found on the floppy disk from her classroom."

Giles cleared his throat, his heart dropping at the mention of the women he had hoped to have a future with – who was now gone, "That would be because it is a different form of magic than the Wiccan magic that came from Ms. Calendar's tribe of people."

"There's more than one type of magic?" Buffy asked, coming back in from the kitchen she had just gone to only a few moments prior, a glass of ice water in her hands.

"Yes, there is Buffy." Giles nodded, taking a seat on his sofa chair, having to clear a couple of books from it before he could sit – picking up his now cold tea from earlier in the day, not minding that it was now cold – finishing it off anyways. "There is Wiccan magic, which is what Ms. Calendar had known and practiced with the tribe of Wiccan's she was born into and used – and what Willow has been self-teaching herself to do from Jenny's notes she left behind. Then there is core magic, which is magic that a person is born with. Core magic is a lot more powerful and advanced than Wiccan magic and of which comes from inside one's self, meaning their 'core' inside them – whereas Wiccan magic comes from the world around them, nature, so not from themselves or their own power... Core magic cannot be taught. One must be born with it to have it."

Giles explained the two different magic's and how they differed from one another; it opening a floodgate of questions from Willow that Giles tried to tiptoe around carefully. He needed to be careful not to reveal too much of the Wizarding World and breach the International Statute of Secrecy to the three teenagers in front of him. It was a world he wasn't apart of any longer, but he couldn't help but still feel a sense of loyalty and honor to its laws and rules when it came to muggles and the muggle world. There did come the point right before the food had arrived that Giles had to tell Willow that his knowledge on core witches and wizards was somewhat limited, and he couldn't provide all the answers that she was asking questions to. He didn't want to risk slipping up and giving too much away to the teens who would legally never be allowed to know about the world that he grew up in as a half-blood.

A few hours later, as the sun was setting, Giles drove Willow and Xander home dropping them both at their separate homes. Xander bragged the whole drive how he was now $100 closer to getting his car 'back in action', before he and Buffy made their way to the cemetery, which was located three blocks away from the high school. This particular graveyard was usually the most active and where the vampires seemed to appear at the most – perhaps, because the tunnels beneath the town and school had a ground entrance located in that graveyard? It was their last patrol they had planned as Watcher and Slayer together before Winter Break officially closed, and they headed back for the new school term this upcoming Wednesday for a partial start-up week.

Giles could tell that something was up with his charge as she began to twitch in the passenger seat as he parked the car outside the cemetery.

"Do you sense something?"

Buffy pulled her eyebrows together in confusion, "No, it's not that… it's just this weird tug on my brain, but I don't think it's my slayer sense that is triggering it or anything – I don't know, it's most likely nothing and maybe just an oncoming headache?" She frowned again, the tugging inside her head increasing a bit, "Or maybe just some brain fog or something, I guess."

"Are you certain?"

Buffy shrugged at her mentor, not one hundred percent sure, "No, I'm not." She hummed, bouncing in step a little as they both got out of Giles car, the weird tugging on her brain now gone – assuming it was just one of those odd pains people randomly got for no reason at all. Pulling out her stake, as Giles pulled out his along with a wooden cross in his other hand, "But it wasn't a wiggy feeling that I was getting, so I'm not too concerned – it was just an odd feeling in my head, like a tug on it, if that makes any sense...? Like someone had a string attached to my brain and yanked on it like you would when trying to pull a tooth out for a kid... But, it's gone now, I think? Maybe I drank too much soda or something tonight, which was causing it?"

"You drank a lot more of that rubbish at school daily than you did for dinner tonight…"

Buffy shrugged, humming, "Eh, true… but again, it wasn't a bad feeling, and it's gone now, so not a real biggy, I think." Walking into the gates of the cemetery, they headed towards the center of the ever-growing greenery – a few years back, the town council had approved a budget to extend this cemetery by a few blocks. The town buying out the property and taking out any crossroads to fully expand and develop the graveyard with no interruption – fencing it all in with a seven-foot stone wall. It was one out of six cemeteries approved for expansion in the last ten years – the town needing more land to provide more plots for the dead. The other seven graveyards in the smaller city were already at max capacity and had no room to grow… granted; those seven were a lot smaller in size, never having been larger than a small-town block... No one in Sunnydale was oblivious to the high death rate the town had, which is why she assumed, was the reason for multiple approvals for expanding cemeteries throughout the city.

Buffy had a sneaking suspicion that the leaders and authorities of Sunnydale knew about the vampires and demons and did their best at controlling and protecting the residents of this town – but it wasn't their expertly –. It's hard to fight something when you aren't one hundred percent certain how to fight them and what exactly you are fighting in the first place.

Not even ten minutes into their waiting, they heard three large pops from behind them.

Buffy jumped up from her resting area against a headstone, ready and prepared for whatever fight was brought to her. However, when she was met with two older men that looked like they had just jumped out of the Lord of Rings books that Xander had been raving about the last few months – and the other looking in his early forties, or maybe late thirties possibly – she paused.

The younger one, looking a bit torn up and wild with scars all over his person, both new and old, some of them deep and some of them relatively shallow and paper-thin, that normal people wouldn't notice without enhanced eyesight as she had. The scars were scattered across his face had her hesitate from attacking right away. She didn't sense any bad in them, but she also felt something not exactly normal about them as well… they were throwing her slayer sense way off, not having sensed anything like them in the two years of her being the slayer.

Giles immediately stepped up beside her, pulling his shoulders back, taking a step forward to greet them, "Headmaster Dumbledore?" He seemed to stutter over his words, clearly not expecting the visit of these three strange men, which somewhat alarmed Buffy. Giles didn't seem fearful or worried, but he did seem alarmed and confused. And her Watcher wasn't caught off guard very often.

Buffy tilted her head in confusion, looking over at Giles with raised eyebrows, hitching her thumb up at the three men, "You know this Father Christmas guy, Giles?"

"Buffy." Giles scolded softly, clearly embarrassed for what Buffy wasn't sure – well, actually scratch that, she did know, but she chose to ignore it. He should be used to her wordage by now. She couldn't help who she was!

"Rupert, I must say this is quite the surprise. I did not expect to find you here?" The Dumblekins guy answered back to Giles, tilting his head in curiosity at the pair that stood in front of him. It was clear to the three wizards that Rupert Giles had a close relationship with the young women in front of them. However, that just furthered their curiosity and questions as to how and why? What was a wizard doing with the young missing Miss Black – at least them assuming she was the young missing Miss Black. They had indeed set their international (illegal) Portkey to take them to where the young Miss Black would be. Albus knew the potion and spell that Severus had used to modify the Portkey to take them to the kin who matched Sirius and Aberforth's blood would not lead them astray – he fully trusted his Potion's Masters, despite others saying he was foolish to do so.

"You did not?" Giles' head tilted slightly, feeling more curiosity poke at his mind. "Not to sound improper or rude, but if not, why exactly are you here? Arriving in Sunnydale, a muggle town… in California?"

"I believe we're here for what appears to be your little friend." The other Santa Claus wannabe said, pointing at Buffy with a grunt.

"Me?"

"Buffy?"

Both Buffy and Giles had spoken simultaneously. The two of them were confused about what was going on and why they wanted or needed Buffy for.

Buffy, because the two older men were dressed in robes like Merlin from an old cheesy Syfy TV movie. The other man didn't seem entirely human to her... there was just something that her slayer sense was trying to tell her about him, but she couldn't pinpoint it – not that the other two smelled completely human either…

Giles, on the other hand, was completely caught off guard.

Why was his former Headmaster, and his former Headmaster's brother, and a former classmate that he never got on well within school, here in Sunnydale – and more importantly, why were they here asking for Buffy? Surely, they hadn't discovered that she was the slayer, had they? And if they had, what use did they have for her in the Wizarding World? The slayer was a myth in Wizarding culture – a lot like the Deathly Hollows stories, which were told to children as a bedtime story to scare the 'monsters' away. They couldn't want her to fight against Voldemort and his followers, could they? She wasn't a witch. Even with her slayer gifts, she couldn't aid much in a magical war within the Wizarding World... Unless it were a physical hand-to-hand fight – Buffy would be a walking target as a muggle, she'd be at a considerable disadvantage in a wizard's battle!

So, what did they want with Buffy exactly?

AN: I will be getting surgery this coming Monday, so there may be a few weeks in delay to any updates for new chapters as a FYI... but PLEASE, feel free to leave a review and give me feedback!