Thessa hated to lock up the newspaper office at night, even knowing that her friend Pete was waiting for her just outside. Try as she might, she couldn't stop the tremor of fear that ran through her hand when she reached for the light switch. In that first moment of darkness, when her eyes blinked into the darkness and her mind hinted at terrible things lurking in the shadows, she almost wished she had not left her wand behind when she walked away from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry all those years ago. At times like these, she missed the comfort of knowing she could defend herself with magic. She hurried across the vast empty room, stumbling a little over a lone waste basket in the middle of the floor. Finally, she was through the glass doors and out on the street, and she could breathe again.
"Whoa, sweetheart, where's the fire?" Pete drawled, coming around the corner. He linked an arm in hers.
Pete Bailey was a wealthy young American muggle spending his parents' money in London, and he was thoroughly convinced of his own American charm. He took the liberty of hamming up his American playboy act for the sake of appearances. He was obnoxious as hell, Thessa thought, and endlessly endearing.
"Do you want to swing by your apartment?" Pete asked.
"Yes, please!" she groaned, leaning on his arm as they walked to his car. "I smell of typewriter and my feet are positively killing me. There's definitely a change of clothes in order before we go anywhere."
"Yeah, you do smell pretty stale. I'd hate to be seen out with you now." His beautifully straight teeth flashed a grin at his own joke.
Thessa's shoes were off before she'd even climbed into the car. She sprawled out across her half of the front seat, wedging her stocking-clad feet beneath the break.
"So, have you tackled any torrid affairs or ghastly murders today?" Pete said.
"Nope." Thessa rolled her eyes. "Still no breakthrough. I get to cover a cheese tasting this week. What marvelous fun."
"I'm sorry, dollbaby. Don't mind if I light up, do you?" He rolled down the window to let some of the smoke out. "I don't know what to tell you but keep trying. They'll have to notice you some time, I mean, damn, it's pretty obvious you're a brilliant journalist."
"Obvious from what? From a few letters to the editor and six months worth of columns on London Cuisine?"
"Fine. Don't believe me then. But at least let me wine you and dine you until you forget to feel miserable about this, okay?"
Thessa covered her mouth with her hand to hide a grin. She loved Pete's humor, jests that balanced so delicately on the line between sarcasm and truth that they were delightfully offensive. He was so unlike the friends she'd had in the wizarding world, friends who loved with subtlety and deceit, until everyone she knew was interwoven in a giant web of secrets. Not Pete. Pete was a nice straightforward kind of guy.
They had to park the car a block away from Thessa's flat. There was no room anywhere else. She walked barefoot, feeling the cool stones scrape at the fabric of her stockings and not much caring. It was time for a new pair anyway.
When she unlocked her door, Pete stepped in ahead of her. He seemed to just understand about her fear of the dark, though he'd never asked her about it. He turned the lights on so she could walk into her own house confidently.
The red, velvet top Thessa yanked down over her head was a favorite. It was soft and comfortable, and it hugged her curves in all the right places, with the help of a sash that pulled the sides of the shirt in and tied fashionably in the back. She turned in front of the mirror and caught herself waiting for a response from the glass. An enchanted mirror would likely not have approved of the muggle blue jeans anyway, she told herself.
She kept a bar of industrial strength soap in the bathroom to scrub off the ink stains with. It left her fingers looking red and raw, but it was the only way to remove the black marks. She would have to rub in a whole arsenal of hand lotions and creams to get her skin feeling soft again. Sometimes, she thought with a sigh, life without magic was just a pain in the arse. The simple solution would have been to draw her wand and murmur a cleaning charm. But her wand was tucked away in a wooden chest somewhere on a high shelf in Albus Dumbledore's office.
Thessa could hear clanking and rattling in her kitchen- a sure sign that Pete was getting bored. She pulled out the pins that had held her waist length, chestnut hair twisted up around her head all day, and it came tumbling down in a wild mess of half curls. It would have to stay this way. Pete was probably making a mess downstairs, by now. Time to save her kitchen.
The young man was busy with the coffee grinder on her kitchen counter, a coffee grinder he had installed in her home, insisting it was a necessity for any good host. Thessa herself was allergic to coffee. From the looks of the heaping bowl of ice cream, sprinkled with walnuts, peppermints, butterscotch, licorice, and crackers, that was sitting on the kitchen table, Pete had also been through the icebox. Thessa shook her head indulgently.
"Pete, darling, if you stink up my house with that coffee, I may have to throw you out," she teased.
Pete tried to block the coffee grinder with his bulky figure and grinned innocently at her. "What coffee? Well heyyyy baby, you sure look fine."
"Nice try, buddy. Come on, get your ice cream and we'll go."
Just to be rebellious, Pete sprinkled his coffee grounds on top of his ice cream. Thessa dragged him out to the car, where he held his bowl with both hands and drove with his knees.
The warm little lanterns were glowing in the windows of their favorite pub. Pete wrapped a possessive arm around her shoulders as they slipped through the door. Inside, lanterns swayed slightly on their chains that dangled from the ceiling. They found a table near the back, where the shadows danced and flickered and did battle with the light from the fire. It made Thessa just the slightest bit nervous. That and the fact that there was no clear view of the pub's entrance from here. She settled into the hollow of Pete's arm, slung over the back of the seat, and let go of her anxieties. She was out for a night on the town with a dashing, wealthy young man. It was not a night to dwell on memories of unexpected ambush in a dark hallway of the Hogwarts castle. Memories in general were a bad plan where her life was concerned.
Pete ordered their wine with a smug grin and an exaggerated western drawl. The waitress blushed and hurried away from the table, glancing guiltily at Thessa over her shoulder. The young woman rolled her eyes.
"You big faker. You've never been in Western United States in your life. You don't even know what a Western drawl properly sounds like!"
"It worked well enough on her." Pete shrugged. "Aww, come on honey, don't be jealous."
"I'm not jealous, you great oaf of a charmer, I'm trying to protect that poor innocent girl from your wiles and deceits."
"You wanna dance?"
"Peter Bailey, you are impossible!"
It was as close to a yes as Pete would ever get, and it was good enough for him. He grabbed Thessa by the hand and dragged her out to the tiny raised dance floor. The air was thick with lazy curls of cigar smoke and the sticky feel of humid summer air. It was cooler inside than it had been out on the street, but still warm. The beat from the stereo was jazzy and seductive, and when Pete pulled her close, Thessa forgot all about men lurking in shadows.
They had to sit down again when the waitress came back. Pete protested all the way there, complaining that he was just getting into the groove. Thessa wondered how it was possible that the entire pub didn't hear him. He made a show out of pushing her chair in for her, winking at the befuddled young waitress as he did so. The poor girl looked frantically from Pete to Thessa and back again. She couldn't seem to figure out if Pete was teasing her or trying to make his companion jealous.
"Tell you what, dollface, why don't you just chuck a whole cow out here on the table. I'm sure I could clean it up nicely."
"Peter, do you have to be so vulgar all the time? Give me the menu, I'm ordering." A small fight over the menu ensued, but he let Thessa win, in the end. "My friend here would like a steak, medium rare. He'd like it even better if it were still lowing, but we can't always have what we want, unfortunately. On the side, he'd like a baked potato, loaded with cheese and sour cream and broccoli, and your baked cod, with a slice of the mincemeat. As for myself, I'd just like the oyster chowder and cornbread." She leveled him a look that said, "Bite me," snapped her menu into the waitress's hand, and crossed her arms over her chest.
"But I wanted chips with my cattle," he whimpered, pouting outrageously. "Aww, baby, you know you love me for my ignorance."
"Humph. I wouldn't be too sure about that."
"You didn't get a salad."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"If you're gonna be a wuss, you might as well get a salad."
Thessa kicked him hard in the shins under the table. "British people don't eat salads, cowboy, we eat steamed vegetables and don't you forget it."
The bells tied to the door of the pub jingled frantically, and two beautiful blondes came breezing in. Dressed in light, flashy sun-dresses, they immediately became the center of attention in the little tavern. Whether they saw Pete first or he them, Thessa was never exactly sure, but suddenly they were prancing over in their three inch heels, and Pete had an armful of girls.
"Ahhh, Bailey, what are you doing here? We thought you were still in the States!"
"Well, no, Mom and Pop sent me away for the summer. They're trying to remodel the house. What are you girls doing all the way across the ocean, huh? Did you come by yourselves? Come sit with us and tell me all about it."
"Who's this, Bail? You didn't introduce us to your lady friend."
"That's my girl, Thessa." Peter pulled up extra chairs at their table. "Thessa, meet Charlie and Julia. These chicks are old friends of the family. We went to private school together." The girls cringed on cue.
"A pleasure to meet you. Have you been in London long?" Thessa said sweetly, thanking Merlin, in her mind, that she was not a jealous woman.
"Our plane just got in a few hours ago. We came running right over here because it's close to the music hall and Charlie's favorite piano man is giving a concert there tonight. We had no idea Bailey was going to be here. Last we heard, he was staying at the beach in North Carolina."
"Well, here he is." Thessa grinned at the girls. "Maybe you can keep him from faking that horrible western accent."
"Oh, Bail, you haven't been!" Charlie took a wild swing at Pete with her handbag. "You big goose."
The two girls basked in the glow of Pete's charm. Thessa could only chuckle at the pair of them. It was the thing about the two of them, her and Pete, that made them most convenient for one another. They were close enough friends to know things about each other. She knew his favorite colors and foods and music groups. He knew her favorite writers and painters. But their relationship was not so deep that they felt any real sense of loyalty to one another. It meant that he could flirt with any woman he chose. It also meant that she never had to worry about lying about her past. He would never ask questions she couldn't answer.
After all, how exactly was a girl supposed to explain where she had been for the first seventeen years of her life, if she couldn't simply tell a man she'd spent her childhood training to be a witch? The one time he had asked, Thessa had told him she'd been to boarding school and that was all he needed to know. Pete liked that just fine. He couldn't stand clingy women.
"What do you do here in London, Thessa?" Julia asked.
"Thessa is a writer," Pete told them confidentially.
"Oooh," squealed the girls. Apparently this was an admirable thing to them. "What do you write about?"
"Cheese."
Pete insisted on walking the two girls down the street to the music hall. It was dangerous for the two of them to be running around the back alleys of London alone. Thessa had to agree. Her usual feeling of slight uneasiness was becoming more and more insistent.
They dropped the two blonds off at the hall, standing to watch them disappear in the brightly lit corridor. Thessa shivered in the warmth of the early summer evening. Pete slipped an arm around her shoulder, but she still felt chilled. Something was going horribly, horribly wrong, she was sure of it. The car was sitting in an abandoned lot under a bridge. Thessa and Pete had to walk down a long, darkened alley to get to the lot. Thessa cast a worried glance at her partner. This was beginning to seem like a very bad plan.
"Come on, sweetheart, nothing's gonna get you." He rubbed her shoulder comfortingly. "Good Lord, you're freezing."
"Petey, I'm scared."
He drew her very close, draping a wing of his suit coat over her shoulder. She clung to his hand with a vicelike death-grip.
For all her insecurities, they made it to the car without incident. Pete held her door open and helped her into the car before going around to the driver's side. It was warm out, but he put the heat on anyway.
"If you didn't want Charlie and Julia to eat with us, you could have said so," he teased.
"Pete, this isn't funny. The last time I felt like this I was very nearly murdered."
"I'm sorry. I'm trying to help, here. What do you want from me?"
"You're right, Petey. It's just an attack of nerves. I didn't mean to snap at you."
"You can make it up to me. Invite me up for coffee."
"Pete Bailey, you are incorrigible!"
He just chuckled.
They parked at the corner of the street and walked down. Thessa was rummaging through her bag for the house key when two cloaked figures sprang from the shadows.
She expected there to be blows, but none came. By the time she had recognized the subtle movement beneath their robes as the two men drew their wands, it was too late. The taller of the wizards aimed at Pete and shouted, "Crucio."
Pete crumpled to the doorstep, where he writhed with the tremors of the unforgivable curse. Thessa was barely conscious of the unbidden tears that sprang to the back of her eyelids. Her mind scrambled desperately for a way to defend herself. Unarmed, she felt so helpless. The shorter, rounder wizard raised his wand over Pete's spasm wracked body.
"Avada Kedavra," he chuckled.
Avada Kedavra, Thessa thought.
Green light streaked in three directions. One ball from the tip of a wizard's wand. The other two from Thessa's open palms. The cloaked wizards fell silently in the street.
Thessa gathered Pete's limp body up in her arms and dragged him inside. She carried him to the couch, where she laid out his body and collapsed in an exhausted heap and wept. Pete, her darling American playboy, her obnoxious, convenient companion, was dead.
There was an owl sitting on her kitchen table. It was the first thing Thessa noticed when she had pulled herself together enough to take a look around her house. And fastened to the owl's leg was a letter. A letter addressed to Miss Conthessa Abriella Dumbledore. It read something like this:
Miss Conthessa Dumbeldore,
We regret to inform you that one week ago today, your great-uncle, the esteemed Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, expired at the hands of one Severus Snape, Death Eater. Due to your great-uncle's superb job of hiding you, it was impossible to locate you until after his will and testament had been read. Unfortunately this means that we were unable to contact you with details concerning his funeral.
We have come upon terrible times, here in the wizarding world. People are no longer safe from the evils of Lord V----m--t, who has returned to power since you left us. Your great-uncle has made provisions, in his will and testament, for your return to the wizarding world. We would be delighted if you would join us here at Hogwarts as soon as humanly possibly.
Kindest Regards,
Headmistress Minerva McGonagall
Enclosed in this letter was another letter, sealed with her great-uncle's seal.
My Dear Little Girl,
If this letter reaches you, it means that I have fallen. It grates upon my ego to have to tell you this, but I no longer have the reflexes that I once did. There are so many things I should like to say to you, in this first letter in twelve years. Twelve years is far too long to go without you, my dear. Unfortunately, my time grows short.
I can explain this to you, dear, because you, if no one else, will understand. A number of years ago, I found a young boy, tainted with the dark mark of his own poor decisions, and I took pity on his lost soul. I converted the boy mercilessly, thinking myself to be a hero, but in my haste I left him nowhere to turn but to myself. And I, being human, have my limits. For fifteen years, young Severus worked as a double agent, bringing me secrets of his Dark Lord Voldemort at no little cost to his own soul. Time and again, thanks to my cursed intervention, he walked back into the mouth of the lions, put himself through mental and physical anguish. And now it seems that he and I have worked together to put our backs against the wall.
You see, young Snape has an obligation to kill me, and my days are numbered anyway. It's time for me to let this poor boy go, before he ends up like your young Wolfgang did. So I've freed him with an order to do me in when the time is right. But he needs a friend, in this cold, dark world. You've witnessed first hand what happens to a man dragged from darkness with nowhere to run. Whatever else you may hear about Severus Snape, he is no murderer. Be kind to him, Thess, if ever the two of you meet.
As for you, you must return to the world in which you belong. It has not gotten any safer, you can be sure, and the name Dumbledore still curses you, but as I grow older and wiser, I come to realize how very little safety I can ever really provide for you. You are a brilliant young witch, Conthessa. The enemies of darkness need your abilities. Even the peculiar ones. Most especially the peculiar ones. You've grown up to be a beautiful girl, regardless of the damage I've done by meddling. I'm quite proud of you.
Much Love,
Albus Dumbledore
P.S. I'm leaving you my estates and a vast majority of my possessions. You'll have to wade through the legal processes and such, as well as the possessions themselves, I apologize.
P.P.S. The sorting hat tells me you would have been a Ravenclaw if I hadn't interfered. That's what I get for thinking I know everything.