He is warmth, hope, light.

But even a small ray of light can do no more than show me the darkness in my own soul.

He will never love me.

It was with a hardened heart that Harry looked at the Slytherin table the next morning, and in particular at the one girl who, as usual, had taken a seat at the very end of the long table, excluded from the other Slytherins. Yesterday he had thought of her as his girlfriend, believed that he knew her, at least a little bit. Now that notion struck him as nothing more than sheer mockery. The bitter truth was that he had no idea who, or what, Daphne Greengrass really was.

It took all his self-control not to rush straight to the Slytherin table and confront her. What terrible secret was she hiding from him? Who had he gotten involved with, whose affections had he enjoyed over the past few days? Certainly not that of the sweet, if somewhat lonely, schoolgirl he had previously thought Daphne to be.

"Harry, you must at least eat a little," Hermione's voice sounded beside him.

He let out an exasperated groan. "I already told you, I'm not hungry."

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Hermione and Ron exchange a worried look – of course his two friends were worried about him, he had to look terrible, after all. After returning from the Forbidden Forest, he hadn't been able to get a wink of sleep that night; and that after already getting so little sleep the previous nights.

"Here, Harry," Ginny then said. "I've made you some toast with jam. At least take a bite and I'm sure you'll –"

Now it was too much for Harry. "I told you I was fine," he shouted, slamming both fists down on the table. Heads were turning towards them from everywhere. "Just leave me alone!"

And with that he jumped up, before walking out of the Great Hall with quick steps. He knew he was behaving irrationally and unfairly and that his friends did not deserve such treatment, but he could not help himself. He was angry! Angry at the world, angry at Daphne and her lies, and most of all angry at himself.

What kind of shit was this that he had gotten himself into? As if he didn't have enough to worry about with the fight against Voldemort and the hopes of the entire wizarding world. No, now his girlfriend turned out to be some kind of monster who was secretly creeping into the forest and slaughtering bunnies!

Because of course she was. It would have been too much to ask for something nice to happen in his life. No, not in the life of Harry Potter, the frigging boy who lived, the fucking Chosen One. Everyone was allowed to live their lives as they wished, only he was the bloody pawn of greater powers, only there to be used and deceived.

He knew he was wallowing in self-pity at that moment, and that knowledge only made him even angrier.

So deep was Harry in his tumultuous thoughts that he didn't realise where his legs had carried him until he suddenly heard Snape's sneering voice.

"What is it, Potter? First in the classroom for once?"

Harry looked up. Sure enough, he had walked up to the third floor and was now standing directly in front of the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom, and next to him was his most hated teacher in the entire school, his pale face framed as always by his greasy black hair. As if his day couldn't get any worse.

"Your teaching is just so unsurpassable, I wouldn't want to miss a single second of it," he said.

Snape snorted contemptuously but otherwise remained silent as he opened the door to the classroom. Harry entered behind him, noticing that a row of straw dolls had been set up in front of the dark curtained windows. He wondered what they were for as he sat down in his usual seat, but surely they would find out soon enough.

After another five minutes, the rest of the students gradually joined them, including Ron and Hermione. His two friends took their seats next to him, still giving him worried looks. Yet they did not speak to him, and Harry ignored them. Later he would apologise to them for his behaviour, but for now he had neither the strength nor the nerve to do so.

The last student to arrive in the classroom was Daphne. Her, of all people. Harry's whole body tensed when he saw her again and his hands clenched into fists. She looked even more terrible than he did. Her normally already unusually pale face was almost snow-white today, which made her red eyes and dark circles stand out all the more.

Before his emotions could get the better of him, Harry quickly turned his head away. And then Snape began the lesson.

"Last week we covered the fight against Inferi," Snape said, his black eyes scrutinising them disparagingly, especially Harry, who returned his gaze darkly. "Even though the vast majority of you should pray every day never to encounter these creatures, as you would in all likelihood not survive this battle. Today we are going to deal with even more horrific creatures. These too joined the Dark Lord at large in the last war, so you had better assume that they will follow him this time as well. They were his teeth in the night, the warriors in the darkness, and responsible for some of the worst massacres of both wizards and Muggles in these years of horror: Vampires."

Some students caught their breath, and all at once the classroom was even quieter than before. Snape was feasting on the students' shudders, if the slightly upturned corners of his mouth were any indication. Vampires had to be truly fearsome opponents, Harry realised.

"Vampires may not carry wands," Snape continued, "but they are magical creatures through and through. As undead beings, similar to Revenants or Dementors, they are extremely difficult to defeat and impossible to kill by conventional means. Even the Killing Curse is ineffective against them. The only means of killing a Vampire at night, that is, when they will attack you, is with a well-aimed wooden stake straight through the undead heart of the Vampire. Fortunately for you, wizards considerably more intelligent and gifted than you once invented a special spell for that purpose."

And with that, Snape suddenly sped around, pointing his wand at one of the straw dolls and shouting, "Lignovertia!"

A wooden stake about the width of a hand shot out from the tip of his wand to pierce the straw doll exactly where a human heart would have been.

"The spell may look simple, but don't be fooled. It is only effective if it hits the Vampire directly in the heart. Unlike most other spells and curses, it is therefore of utmost importance that you aim correctly, not only at your opponent's body, but right at his heart. A narrow miss in this case means your death instead of the Vampire's death. A most gruesome and painful death, I might add."

Snape pointed to the remaining straw dolls. "Stand in front of one of each of the dolls, ten paces in front of it, and practise the spell. I repeat, Lignovertia. Of course, in combat your opponents would not simply remain motionless while you tried to aim, but with moving targets your performance would probably be even more abysmal than I already expect."

A fair amount of commotion ensued. Lined up, the students tried to pierce the hearts of the straw dolls, but only a very few succeeded. While most of them managed, after a few attempts, to make the wooden stake shoot out of the tip of their wand, aiming was a completely different challenge. Reluctantly, Harry had to admit to himself that Snape had been right about it. Countless wooden stakes pierced various parts of the straw dolls' bodies, except for the heart, if they didn't miss directly and shattered against the wall.

All the more pleased Harry was with himself when, after a few minutes, he was the first to succeed in piercing the heart, a feat that would have earned him twenty points for Gryffindor with any serious teacher. Snape, however, skilfully ignored his achievement as he strode between them, looking as much like an overgrown bat as ever.

Meanwhile, Harry watched Daphne out of the corner of his eye. Her nightly excursion seemed to have left its mark on her too, for her hands were shaking so badly that her wooden stakes flew far past their target. It was only thanks to the fact that she was a Slytherin that Snape didn't bawl her out in front of the entire class. Their classmates, however, weren't so inhibited.

"What's wrong, Greengrass?" he heard Pansy Parkinson sneer. "Are you even too dumb to hold your wand properly? You truly are the most pathetic witch I've ever seen."

At her words, not only Slytherins laughed, but also students from other houses. Until yesterday, Harry would have been furious at Parkinson's words and might even have jeopardised the secrecy of his relationship with Daphne in the process, but as it was, all he felt was a strange, numb sense of inner emptiness.

Daphne endured the taunts with stoic calm, but Harry knew her well enough by now to notice how her shoulders shook and her jaw clenched.

Finally, the lesson came to an end.

"Put your essays on Inferi here on the desk," Snape said as the students were already packing up their stuff. "And by next week, I expect two rolls of parchment on Vampires, with special appreciation of their strengths and weaknesses and the various tactics to fight them."

Harry took his essay out of his bag, and as he did so, unnoticed by those around him, he tore a small piece from a blank sheet of parchment. On it he scribbled quickly:

'I'm meeting Dumbledore tonight, so no meeting.'

After putting his essay on Snape's desk like the others, he turned towards the classroom's exit. Daphne had almost stepped out by then, so he caught up to her with quick steps. At the door, he deliberately bumped into her, much harder than was probably necessary. Daphne crashed to the floor and looked at him with a surprised, even startled expression on her face, but Harry simply hurried on without giving her another glance. What he wanted, he had accomplished, and that was to slip Daphne the piece of parchment with his message.

He would uncover her secret and see behind the mask of the innocent schoolgirl, at any cost. Never again would he be lied to like this. Never again would he be so naïve.

"Are you sure about that, Speaker?" asked Merlin hours later. "Of course, all naivety runs the risk of being ridiculed, but it does not deserve it, I tell you. For in all naivety there is also unsuspicious trust and proof of innocence, and is it not in this that the hope of this world lies?"

Harry heaved a heavy sigh. That evening he had crept out of the castle, returning to the little clearing in the Forbidden Forest to which Merlin had led him the previous night – Daphne's bone-strewn lair. And now the snake, who seemed to love playing philosopher, was lying on a stone next to him. He himself had put on his Invisibility Cloak to wait for Daphne under an old oak tree. She had to come here again eventually, after all, Merlin had said she did every few days. And then he would finally find out what exactly she was doing here ... and to whom he had been about to lose his heart.

"I have no choice," he answered the snake in Parseltongue.

"You always have a choice."

"Even if it hurts?"

"Then even more so. For this is what I advise you, Speaker: if you have a choice between nothingness and pain, choose pain. Always. It is better to be naive and long-suffering than hopeless."

"And you're telling me this with all your life experience as a snake?"

Merlin gave him a long look. "Wisdom comes in many different forms. And some ends even the very wise have not yet foreseen."

To this Harry answered nothing more. He turned his gaze upwards, to the stars and the bright moon in the night-black sky, losing himself in their distant shine. And before he knew it, he was overcome by tiredness, the price he had to pay for all those sleepless nights lately.

Imperceptibly, the moonlit night dawned into morning, and when Harry woke again, he was alone.

Daphne had not come that night.

And so he went to the clearing in the forest each of the following nights to wait for the moment when she would finally return there. Meanwhile, he blocked all her wishes for a meeting, even though the messages she sent him by owl sounded more and more desperate.

Harry, are you all right? You don't answer me anymore. Has something happened?

...

Harry, please tell me at least what's bothering you. I'd like to help you, if you'll just let me.

...

Harry, are you ignoring me on purpose? Have I done something wrong? Please answer me. I promise I can change if you just tell me what's wrong with me.

...

Harry, please talk to me, or at least write to me if you don't want to see me anymore. Anything but this silence. Please. You are breaking my heart.

But Harry ignored her messages, even though he couldn't deny that it pained him to read her words, especially her last message.

Why, actually? After all, it was she who had lied to him, who had deceived him! Why was he the one feeling guilty now?!

It was the fifth night of Harry's watch when the moment finally arrived, even though he almost didn't recognise Daphne at first. The girl who emerged from the darkness of the trees looked nothing like the girl he had laughed and cuddled with.

Daphne was dressed in a pitch-black hooded cloak that covered her entire body from head to toe. Only her pale hands were visible in the starlight, and in them, she carried a dead squirrel. It was a picture like something out of a storybook, only that Daphne was not the princess, but the evil sorceress.

She walked right past Harry into the clearing, but she didn't notice him, as he was still hidden under his Invisibility Cloak, and he was covering his mouth with his hand so as not to make a sound. And that was probably not the worst decision, for what was now unfolding before his eyes was nothing less than a nightmare. A nightmare that squeezed his heart like an icy fist.

With only the moon and Harry's pounding heart as witnesses, Daphne knelt down in the middle of the clearing. She raised her head, and to Harry, it almost looked as if she were praying. Then, however, she suddenly drew her wand, pointing it at the dead animal in her hands. A cutting sound rang out, and Daphne lifted the sliced squirrel to her lips. Greedily, she began to drink its blood.

The slurping sounds she made were so disgusting, so utterly inhuman, that Harry almost threw up, but he could not take his eyes off it. He had to see it, had to watch what was happening, if only to be able to report on it later.

Daphne drank more and more of the animal's blood until her chin and the entire front of her cloak shimmered in red. And when she had finally finished her blasphemous act, after a terrible eternity for Harry, and when there was probably not a single drop of blood left in the poor animal's body, she let it fall to the ground. Yet blood continued to drip from the sides of her mouth onto the grass below.

Harry gripped his wand and was about to rise when he saw Daphne raise her blood-covered hands to her face. She stared at them for a moment, dumbfounded, before suddenly tears slid down her pale cheeks. Daphne was crying, Harry realised. She was crying, and her tears were even getting worse. She curled up on the forest floor while her body trembled in a violent spasm of tears.

But why was she crying? And for whom?

And why did her tears hurt him so much?

Confused and also shocked, Harry rose from his place under the oak tree. Wand firmly in hand, he stepped towards the still weeping Daphne. It was only when he had almost reached her that she finally heard him. She looked up, and horror gripped her tear-streaked face.

"H-Harry?!" she stammered, "W-What –"

He pointed his wand directly into her face now, suppressing all the feelings of affection he had ever felt for her, that he still felt for her even now, for reasons he couldn't explain. At least, he tried. "Who are you? What are you?"

Daphne's eyes widened. "I ... I ..."

"Who are you, Daphne?" he asked again, louder this time to drown out his own pounding heart. "Is that even your name? Have you just been lying to me all this time?"

Another bout of tears gripped Daphne's petite body. She hid her face in her blood-stained hands, smearing her pale face with obscene red. The sight pained Harry's heart, and he was about to reach out to Daphne when suddenly he heard her voice, barely more than a breath on the faint wind.

"Please kill me..."

Harry blinked in confusion. "What?"

Daphne raised her head, and Harry now looked right into her blood-red eyes, clouded with tears and reflecting the wan light of the moon. "That's why you're here, isn't it? I'm a monster and deserve to be struck down." Before he could think what to say in reply, Daphne continued talking, "Kill me! Be done with it! At least then this will all be over..."

"What do you mean?" asked Harry after a moment's hesitation.

"I'm a monster! And I can't stand it anymore. All of this." And with that, Daphne raised her blood-covered hands. "You're a goddamn hero, aren't you? Your job is to kill monsters like me!"

All at once Harry just felt miserable. What a fucked up situation they'd got themselves into here. "I'm not a murderer," he said. "I would never kill you. I thought about handing you over to the teachers or the Ministry, but now..." He let out a sigh. " Now, I just want to understand, Daphne. Who are you? Is Daphne even your real name? Why do you sneak into the Forbidden Forest at night and drink the blood of dead animals?" He pointed at the dead squirrel at her feet. "Where does that even come from? Did you kill it?"

Daphne sobbed. "Why are you making this so hard for me, Harry? Please just kill me and –"

"No. And now answer my questions. What is your –"

"Of course my name is Daphne!" she suddenly cried, glaring at him with sparkling eyes. "I have never lied to you, Harry!"

"Of course you –"

"No, I never lied to you. Not to you. Never. I didn't tell you everything, but –"

"That's the same as lying," Harry called. "I trusted you, Daphne. How could you do this to me?!"

His hand with his wand was shaking so badly by now that he doubted he would be able to hit Daphne should she decide to attack him now. However, she only looked at him with her teary eyes.

"I never meant to harm you!" she cried, "or hurt you. I only wanted to –"

"Then tell me the truth. The truth, Daphne. No more lies, no more excuses. Tell me everything."

Daphne fell silent. She looked at him with wide eyes, shimmering like rubies in the night, and Harry saw a myriad of different emotions slide across her face – anxiety, pain, longing. Then, however, she turned away to look at the ground. "The truth, you say … all right, I'll tell you the truth. My story. The story of the girl Daphne..."

Pulling her legs to her chest, she began to talk in a trembling voice, "It's best I start from the beginning, almost anyway, because that's as far back as I can remember. Or rather, what my mother, my foster mother I mean, remembers, because I was just a baby then. I've already told you how she found me in the ruins of a Muggle village. After that, Athena and Cygnus Greengrass took me in, and they raised me and loved me as if I were actually their daughter and not just a foundling. Or maybe I was a replacement for their first daughter, who had been born dead a short time before, I don't know. But that was when my story began, with the maternal instinct of a healer and the love of a lonely father. Then, after two years, my mother became pregnant again and this time the birth was successful. I now had a little sister, Astoria. I don't really remember all that because I was so young at the time. But we were a happy little family, I remember that for sure, like so many other families in the time of peace you gave us, Harry. We were just a normal, ordinary family."

In the meantime, a slight breeze had set in, blowing some of Daphne's dark strands of hair out of her hood, but she didn't seem to notice, too absorbed was she in her own narrative. Her eyes had taken on a glassy glow, as if she were looking far into the past. And Harry just let her keep talking, listening carefully. Very carefully.

"Until two things happened that were to change everything forever," Daphne went on. "Astoria and I were one heart and soul back then, we were always together, did everything together. But at some point, I noticed that I was different from her in some ways, even considering that we were only stepsisters. Because while Astoria loved to play in the garden and the fields around our property during the day, I realised quite early on how uncomfortable I was with bright light, especially that from the sun. Strange, isn't it? Probably I should have realised it already then, for what child with a pure soul prefers darkness to bright day? But I didn't let it show, for Astoria's sake and so as not to draw even more attention to my otherness. Even then, the other children often made fun of me because of my eyes."

Daphne slumped her shoulder, and Harry had to suppress the impulse not to take her in his arms and comfort her.

"One evening my parents had guests," Daphne continued in an absent voice. "Some colleagues of my parents, at least my Aunt Helen was there too. She's not really my aunt, she's my mum's best friend, although I have the feeling she never liked me very much." She shook her head. "There were many different dishes that night, but one in particular had caught my eye, a dish I'd never seen before: blood soup. Astoria almost threw up just looking at it, but my mouth was watering. I asked for seconds after seconds until I had finally eaten the whole soup. That evening I felt so good, but soon ... soon I noticed myself craving it again. I begged my parents until there was finally blood soup again, but it was not the same as the first time. I soon realised that my hunger, my thirst was for something else. Not blood soup, but real blood."

At her words, Harry shuddered. He could imagine only too well what would come next.

"Some day I couldn't take it any more. I had to quench my thirst. By all means, otherwise I would probably have died. At least that's how it felt to me. So one night I sneaked into the chicken coop of a nearby Muggle farm. I killed one of the chickens with a big stone and drank its blood. It was as divine and delicious as anything I had drunk up to that time..."

At her last words, Daphne's voice had taken on an almost dreamy tone, but then a sudden jolt went through her body and she continued briskly.

"But I had to leave quickly because the other chickens were making such a racket that the Muggles were awakened. I just managed to escape, return home and wash the blood off my hands and face, so no one noticed anything. That night I slept happier than I ever had before, and my thirst was quenched. At least for a while. Because at some point it returned, even worse than before. Much, much worse. I knew I couldn't go back to the chicken coop, because the Muggles had certainly taken new precautions. Therefore, I went to a nearby forest. It ... it wasn't as easy to get prey there as it was in the chicken coop, but eventually I managed to catch a squirrel."

She nodded to the dead squirrel on the ground. "One like this. I cut it open with a sharp stone and drank its blood. But it was still alive then. It was horrible. Since then ... since then I make sure the animals are really dead before I drink their blood." She faltered. "And then, eventually, I turned eleven. My Hogwarts letter came and I left the home of my childhood..."

"What's the second thing?" asked Harry after a moment's quiet. Daphne gave him a puzzled look, so he continued, "You said that two things happened that changed everything forever. The first was you starting to thirst for blood. What was the second thing?"

"That was the blood curse that Astoria was diagnosed with," Daphne said in a low voice. "Since then she has had to be careful not to overexert herself, and our days of playing and running around were over..."

A heavy silence fell between them, both deep in their respective thoughts. Harry eyed Daphne. Her story answered some of his questions, but he still didn't know what she was.

"But that only explains why you sneak here at night," he said. "It doesn't explain why you have such a thirst for blood in the first place. Are you ... are you a Vampire?"

Daphne shook her head slightly. "I wondered the same thing when I came to Hogwarts then and did some research in the library. Especially after our first Transfiguration class. Do you remember that?"

"Yes, but what is your point?"

"That time McGonagall changed from a cat back into a human in front of all of us. It made quite an impression on us at the time, but for me it was also, I can't describe it exactly, eye-opening I suppose. Until then I didn't know that people could turn into animals. And after that I couldn't ignore it anymore, this twinge and pull in my body that I've felt since I was a little kid, this urge to soar into the sky." She turned her head back to him, looking him straight in the face. "I can turn into a bat, Harry..."

Harry's eyes widened at her words. "Then you were the bat then, weren't you? I always wondered what happened to it."

"Well, now you know," Daphne said.

"Yes, I do." That was information that he needed to process. However, now was not the time. "So you're a Vampire, are you? I read they can turn into bats."

Daphne gave him a wistful smile. "I see you are not so far with your essay for Snape. Because it's true, Vampires can turn into bats, but besides that, they cannot walk in the sunlight. And perhaps you have already noticed, but I do not turn to dust in the sunlight, even though the bright light makes me uncomfortable. And one more thing distinguishes me from Vampires – may I?"

She glanced at her hand, and Harry nodded. He no longer believed there was any danger from her, at least not to him.

With that, Daphne brought her hand to her mouth. Harry saw the flash of a pointed tooth, and blood, as black as the night, poured from the wound Daphne had made.

Black blood?

"My blood is black," Daphne confirmed quietly. "In all the books I've read in the library, the Restricted Section included, there was no mention anywhere of creatures with black blood. Even the blood of Vampires is said to be red. And I didn't always have black blood either. Only since ... I got older. " She shook her head. "No, whatever I am, I am not a Vampire. At least not a pure one..."

"What do you mean?"

Daphne shrugged her shoulders. "I've thought about it a lot, you know. Maybe I am a Vampire after all, just ... different. Maybe it has to do with the magic that covered the ruined village when my mother found me. At least she told me about traces of very dark magic there. But it doesn't matter. I accepted a long time ago that I will probably never know what exactly I am..."

Harry took a deep breath, massaging his temple. That had been an outrageous story, but he believed Daphne. However, that didn't mean he knew how to act now.

"But, Daphne," he said, and she looked at him with such a dispirited expression that it hurt his heart. "If you've known all this for so many years, why have you never confided in anyone? Why didn't you tell anyone?"

Why didn't you tell me?

"You think what I did was wrong?" asked Daphne, her voice perfectly calm, neither accusing nor defending, more resigned, Harry thought. "Because I can't say for myself. I don't know if my behaviour was right or wrong. I only know that you cannot expect a happy ending in a tragedy."

"You think your life is a tragedy?"

"I can't confide in anyone, Harry," Daphne said, not answering his question. "They would disown me, I know it. Even my parents. I'd be kicked out of Hogwarts and have to give up my wand. Then I'd really have nothing..."

Harry shook his head vehemently. "I can't believe that," he said. "I can't imagine your parents would do that to you. They love you, after all. And you can't help what you are."

Daphne looked at him, and in her eyes he could almost see something like hope flashing. "So you won't turn your back on me either? We're still a couple?"

Harry opened his mouth, but no words came out. He didn't know what to say, and Daphne's face hardened.

"That's what I thought."