A/N: I got a review! Hahaha. So I'll keep writing this for now. Not that I could stop at the moment anyway. I have a place to go with this, and I really want to get there... But I still like getting reviews... :) So please read and review

RABailey: You were my first reviewer! Thank you! I understand your feelings for some slash. But do you like any of it? And as for the names... well Aine is an actual celtic name, it's gaelic for joy, and an old girls name. As for Cairn.. well I'm pretty sure it's a word... but not a name :) Heh. I'm glad you like the story though.

Chapter 2

I stared at what could only be described as the most perfect look a like for Harry Potter ever, if perhaps an older version. Screw the movie version, he had been similar I'll grant, but standing in front of me was exactly as the books described from the hair that wouldn't stay down, to the vivid green eyes, and of course that jagged scar on his forehead. It was all a bit too much for me, and I felt my knees give way slightly. A small sag was all that alerted this myth become reality, to my state, but he noticed, and gripped my arm firmly in his.

"Cairn... Go get some butterbeer from the bar please."

It was only then that I was aware that Cairn had actually arrived there before me, and he was now jumping like a servant to do what this man was telling him. I was led rather carefully over to a table near the fireplace where I sat heavily, my head in my hands, trying to do something about the beating behind my skull.

"The first travel by floo powder is always a bit... disconcerting." The bespectacled young man smiled consolingly at me. "Headaches are quite normal. Something to drink should help."

Almost if on cue, Cairn popped up at my elbow and handed me a bottle of something, labeled as butterbeer. I would be lying if I said I hadn't wondered exactly what this strange drink would taste like, after reading the books so many times. And taking a tentative sip of the drink I nearly spit it out. It was alcoholic, if just barely, the taste though swirled along my tongue. It wasn't a bad taste, instead it was almost golden, and I had to assume that was where it got it's name. It had always been my first thought that the drink would taste like butter. But that isn't very appetizing now is it?

"Thank you Cairn..." I whispered, sipping the drink now, my shock at it's taste gone. It was certainly help drive the beating out of my head, not to mention moisten my dried tongue. At my thanks the little man beamed a smile at me, making my lips twitch slightly.

"Now that you're feeling a bit better. I suppose I should introduce myself. Whether you're aware or not, My name is Harry Potter. Pleased to meet you." He stuck out his hand, and I found myself rather dumbly shaking it. My mind was having a little trouble working. I had already reached the conclusion that he would be Harry Potter, but hearing it for certain was a completely differed kettle of fish. After a few moments of trying to get my mouth working, my teacher's side took control.

"How is this happening?"

Did I say my teacher's side? I meant my child's side... I couldn't help but look around me at the strangely empty pub looking like a child who had just gotten to meet Santa Clause and all his reindeer. This situation was just as unlikely. But if this was real, maybe Santa was as well. Childish fantasies were quick to pop into my head, but I shook them away.

Taking a deep breath, I tried to clear my head and think properly. Meanwhile Cairn and Harry just sat there quietly. It was nice of them to give me this moment to think before starting in on things I might not understand.

Grasping at the side of my personality that did research, I did what I did best and calmly surveyed my predicament. Aside from the now perfectly sane Cairn, there was now sitting in front of me Harry Potter come to life. This new being though wasn't from the movies, or even the books. The man sitting in front of me, was the Harry of the future. A future not covered in any of the books. He sat there, looking to be about 27 years old. If it hadn't been the eyes, hair and scar, would I have even recognized the man? It was unlikely. He had filled out, lost any of what remaining childish might have marked him a boy, and his face was instead all hard angles. He was as attractive as Mat, except there was far more emotion behind those eyes. His hair was as black as would be expected, tidier though then I would have expected, except for a patch at the back that stuck up a bit but with his bangs grown so long that it easily covered the scar at most times, a precaution I was sure had to do with the fact he couldn't walk around in the normal world, the muggle world, without someone commenting on him looking like Harry Potter. Funny that...

"Miss MacKinnion..." Harry started to say, making me jump out of my thoughts immediately. I couldn't help the slow smile that crossed my features, since I was older then him and here he was calling me miss. "I'm sure you want to know why I hired you."

Of course he had been the 'he' that Cairn had been speaking of.

"Cairn... He said something about a relic, and a ritual?" I said, my confidence edging back into my voice. After the years I had spent around the world, surrounded by strange and wonderful things, I wasn't going to be kept in amazement for long. "I tried to tell him I don't do rituals. But he refused to acknowledge that." I gave Cairn what I hoped was a withering glance, but he just looked a bit sheepish.

"Yes well, I gave him instructions to get you here by any means. You are quite truthfully my last hope. Every one else failed." Harry sighed, running a hand through his hair, moving his hair so that his scar was easily visible. I found myself staring at it again before I looked back into his eyes.

"You should have come to me first." I said with confidence. I knew I was the best in my field, there was no use in denying that.

"But you're also a muggle."

Perhaps I should have been a bit put off by this statement, but I had no problems with who I was. I also knew my inability to do magic didn't stop me from knowing everything to do with almost every ritual and occult relic on this planet. Muggle or not.

"Some good your wizard choices did then?" I snorted this out, and was rewarded with an amused look on Harry's face.

"Not a speck of good. But once you hear my... problem, you might see why I was loathe to involve a muggle such as yourself."

I had begun to tap my fingers on the table, getting too eager to hear what this perilous tale was that needed my immediate help. Something that would also cost twenty thousand pounds, or more, to get me over here to deal with.

Reaching into his robe, Harry pulled out a cylindrical object about a foot long. It was made out of some kind of dark wood, a reddish brown colour, and had engravings all along its surface. He placed it on the table and then looked at me expectantly.

I had an idea just seeing it what it was, but I needed to pick it up, look up close at the engravings to be sure. My hand trembled as I reached out to touch it. But if it was what I thought it was, then I had every reason to shake. I had every reason to run out of here and swim back to New York.

The marks on the wooden cylinder were definitely of the oghum alphabet, and I could read it as well as my native tongue. It read simply enough, 'The gates of death bar not'. Perhaps not as simple. This cylinder was in all likelihood a relic that I had never seen before, but which I had heard whispered enough about beneath the surface of the occult. This was a clag a' bhàis. A death bell... To further confirm my suspicions I turned it in my hands and quickly found the opening at the end. It popped open and showed that this object was indeed hollow. I placed it rather carefully back on the table and held my hands in my lap, wanting to keep their shaking out of sight of the other two.

"You know what that is." Harry Potter didn't ask a question, he made a statement, seeing in my close handling of the object, my widened eyes, my quickened breaths, and my badly covered shivering, that I indeed knew what it was.

"It is a clag a' bhàis. It was an ancient celtic object used... at least in all the stories I've heard, to raise the dead." I whispered this last out, keeping my eyes on the table in front of me.

"Do you know the ritual to go with it?" This was asked calmly, and it brought my eyes sharply up to look into the bright green ones in front of me.

The ritual...

I laughed softly, my voice sounding even slightly crazed to my ears.

"I know it. I've studied it, but I've never performed it. Aside from the fact that until now I didn't think... that..." I waved my hand at the wood object sitting, scaring me with just it's existence. "I didn't know that even existed, or had existed. Aside from that, it's wrong." I frowned. The purpose of that little object was to raise the dead, bring back something that wasn't supposed to be here. And the two men sitting across from me where perfectly aware of what they were asking.

"I am hiring you to perform that ritual for me. I need someone brought back to life."

I stood up and slammed my hands down on the table, causing Cairn at least to squawk at the suddenness of my actions. The butterbeer bottle fell onto it's side, spilling out the last of its amber liquid onto the floor. I wasn't caring, I was staring in horror at the young man sitting calmly across from me.

"Perform it? Do you even KNOW what it entails?" I grabbed the object and popped it's end off, and rather roughly thrust it under Harry's nose. "Do you see this is hollow? Do you? Do you know why?" I sneered at him. "Of course you don't, otherwise you would realize what you're asking. It's for blood. To bring some one back from the dead this has to be filled with blood. HUMAN blood. Any magic done with that sort of sacrifice is something you don't want to get involved in. It will only go bad. Bringing some one back from the dead is dangerous... You don't know what you'll get." I slammed the clag a' bhàis back onto the table, uncaring at if I had damaged it. It was telling of my mood that I didn't care about damage to a historical object.

I was a little relieved to see Harry's face pale, looking at the wooden thing on the table with a mixture of horror... and determination. Instantly I knew that what I had told him hadn't changed the black haired man's ideas. I sat down, feeling exhausted. I really regretted at that instance mydamned curiousity in using that floo powder earlier.

Of course studying the occult around the world I had come into contact with plenty of rituals to bring back the dead. Almost every society in the world had at least one, if not more. It's a telling fact about our society. We're all so scared of death that we always try and find some way to lengthen our lives, stop death, or even restart life when it's lost. Any one who'd watched movies could tell you a bit about some of these movies, but what most people didn't know was that some rituals worked. In my time around the world, I had indeed seen a few rituals that had achieved what Harry wanted. In a sense... Bile rose in my throat at the memories. Things were brought back, but they were never what any one would call human.

"You've read my books I assume?" He said suddenly, changing the subject. I ran with it though, glad to be off of the distasteful thing sitting on the table, or the horrifying memories in my head.

"Yes. How exactly is THAT possible?"

"It's rather annoying really..." Harry smiled slightly, his face regaining a bit of it's colour. "Everything in those books are, at least basically, true. The majority of events were at least told with modest verity."

"Fine okay... But why are there books? Why did you thrust your society, which I shall assume cares about it's privacy, right into the faces of the people you were trying to hide it from?" I asked the question that had been buzzing in the back of my head since this had all started. Harry Potter being a reality was forgotten. I had accepted that as truth, but I still didn't understand the WHY of it all.

"That's the annoying part actually. You see there was this reporter..." He held up his hands, shrugging. "She wasn't a witch, but rather a squib, and things weren't really going her way so... She wrote books about the life of the most famous wizard of all time." He made this proclamation about himself, a wry humour to his voice.

I coughed at this though, and smiled at Cairn who was immediately behind me patting my back as I coughed.

"You're telling me that the author is a squib?" I finally stopped the coughs to ask this amazed question.

"One with quite a flair for poetic license to..." Harry grimaced at this. "You have no idea how many times I've had to explain to people that I never had a crush on Cho Chang, and that I most certainly was not THAT bad my fifth year."

Well it did explain why the author always told me she didn't realize she was writing fantasy... It hadn't been for her. But that didn't explain the entire situation.

"But you would have stopped her. The..ministry of magic, or whatever. They would have stopped her from leaking their secrets correct?"

"It was too late. You can't do charms on an entire nation, much less the world." He smiled wistfully at that, and I didn't doubt that many times he had thought just that. "But we were lucky enough that no one would ever believe that story was true. You all immediately accepted it as a children's tale, and that was that."

My fingers began to tap against the wood of the table I was sitting at again, my brain racing over the idea that the entire world had just had the wool pulled over it's eyes. It was all rather amusing, except for the fact that I had been one of the billions to be fooled as well. And no one likes to be treated like an idiot.

"So what else?" I asked, a small note of annoyance in my voice. Harry just smiled slightly hearing it.

"As I told you, I need you to bring someone back to life."

My fingers stilled, and I resisted the urge to curl my nails into the wood. I regarded Harry with what I thought was a great deal of calm.

"You know the clag a' bhàis can only be used once. " Several names ran through my head. All the choices of people he would want back from the dead.

Lily...

James...

Sirius...

Dumbledore...

Remus...

Any of those people I would say he would want back alive, but which one meant the most to him? Which out of the five names would he tell me now, he wanted me to risk my body and probably my soul, if I had believed in it, for them to stand in front of him again? My mind raced trying to make the most likely choice. If I had to guess I would say one of his parents... After all he had gone his entire life without them, given the chance would he step across a dark boundary to bring one back?

"I now it can only be used once. I only need it to be..." Harry sighed, a pained expression passing behind his eyes. I knew in his head he was fighting the urge to cry out that he wanted all of his loved ones back from the dead. "The books got that right. She mentioned all the right names of the dead, and what they meant to me..." He shook his head before looking back at me, steel in his eyes. "I need you to bring Sirius Black back to life."

A/N:

clag a' bhàis - This is gaelic for death bell. Doesn't exist, but I liked the sound of it. But no idea how to pronounce it. Heh.

oghum - celtic alphabet, like runes almost.