Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all its characters belong to J. K. Rowling. I am just borrowing them. Please don't sue me.
Author's Note: Thanks to AduroWolf for the review. Sorry it's taken so long to update, but other stories have been demanding my attention for quite some time. As for how many children are in the house…
Amelia: 17 years old. Seventh year.
Shiloh: 16 years old. Sixth year.
Celia: 15 years old. Fifth year.
Ian: 14 years old. Fourth year.
Todd: 14 years old. Fourth year.
Tristan: 12 years old. Second year.
Laurel: 11 years old. First year.
Benjamin: 10 years old. First year.
Max: 8 years old.
Katrina: 4 years old.
Lydia ("Lyddie"): 3 years old.
As soon as the door closed on Artemis's heels, Amelia bounded up the front stairs and began banging on bedroom doors. "Mom's gone! Everybody front and center!" Chaos erupted behind each door after she passed.
Laurel and Tristan—a tall, lanky black boy with a buzz cut—poked their heads out of the first door she'd knocked on. "Sham-er-ram," Laurel said to her brother.
"Sheetrock," he replied.
"Twaddle!" added Benjamin—a short, skinny kid with a mop of blond hair that fell into his green eyes—as he pushed passed them and into the hall.
Amelia sighed. The Unholy Trio (as Artemis had dubbed them) had their own private language. It wasn't completely clear if they understood what they were talking about one hundred percent of the time. She opened the fourth and last door on the hall and stuck her head in. Shiloh, the second oldest in the house, sat at his desk, his head bent over a book.
"Katrina, I told you to go away," he snapped when he heard the door open.
Amelia carefully shut the door behind her. "It's me," she told him. "Mom just left."
He made a notation on a scroll beside his book and then turned to look at her. "I'm still not sure if we should do this."
"We have to if we want to find out why Mom's been so distracted lately. Please, Shiloh," she pleaded, "You know we can't do this without your help."
He sighed and pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. As the two closest in age and also the first two to join Artemis's little family, he was more comfortable with her than with anyone else in the house. "All right—but if we get caught, I had nothing to do with it."
"We're not going to get caught," she assured him as she opened the door. The Unholy Trio was waiting just outside along with Todd, the fourteen-year-old redhead, and Lyddie, a toddler whose ancestors had hailed from India. She stood on chubby little legs with her thumb in her mouth and one hand clinging to the hem of Laurel's skirt. "All right, troops," she said, clapping her hands together, "To the den. Move out!" She scooped up Lyddie and followed the rest down the kitchen stairs.
They collected Ian, the other fourteen-year-old that Artemis had once dubbed a "hell-raiser", in the kitchen where he'd been making a snack and poking through their foster mother's papers. "Mom's gonna have a bloody hard time buying us school supplies," he muttered to Amelia as they headed through the living room to the den.
Amelia swallowed but didn't say anything. She knew better than Ian how much Artemis had to stretch her finances to make them cover everything, but their mother never complained. Adding one more kid to the house would probably tip them into debt.
The den, when Amelia had moved in, had been declared a "kid-free" zone. That had lasted all of a year before she finally started to let them run in and out. It was generally an over-looked corner of the house good for studying or stealing a quiet moment away from everything else. Most of Artemis's old books were stored in here on floor-to-ceiling shelves. This room also contained the house's one mystery.
Todd dropped to the floor and carefully removed a loose board. The Unholy Trio had found this one rainy afternoon playing tag downstairs. Benjamin's foot had caught on the edge and sent him flying as well as popping the board out of its place in the floor. In the compartment beneath it was an ornately decorated chest. Benjamin, of course, had summoned his two partners in crime when he found it, and they had attempted to open it—getting themselves shocked for their efforts. Artemis hadn't offered them any explanations for what was inside the box but warned them against messing with it again. Since then, the entire household had been curious about what was inside the box. Amelia had looked at it and had figured out the spell to open the lock, but when you lifted the lid, there was a second panel made of tile. It was a puzzle of some sort, and that's why they needed Shiloh.
Todd scooted back from the hole in the floor, giving Amelia room. She took her wand out of the back pocket of her pink denim jeans. With Lyddie balanced on her right hip, she waved her wand at the chest beneath the floor, "Alohomora!" A pretty basic spell learned by most first years, but she was the only one who could put enough force behind it to make it work. Her wand shook, but she held her concentration and was rewarded a second later with the sound of the lock clicking open.
Ian reached in and opened the first lid, revealing the second lid. The tile mosaic depicted a sailboat tossed on a stormy sea while overhead a crescent moon peeped through the dark clouds.
"All right, Shiloh, this is where we need you," she said, turning to the tall, skinny sixteen-year-old standing behind her. "Any idea how to get through that?"
He shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose and peered down at it. He studied the mosaic for a moment and then sighed heavily. "I cannot believe you hadn't figured this out by now," he said, giving her a disapproving look.
Amelia frowned and shifted Lyddie to the other hip. "What is so obvious?"
"What's Mother's name?"
"Artemis, duh," Laurel replied.
Shiloh reached out and pressed the tiles that made up the moon in the tile image. There was a click, and the mosaic slid aside. "Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon."
Everybody crowded forward to get a better look. "It's just a bunch of papers and stuff," Max, who was eight, whined.
Todd snorted, "What'd you expect? Buried treasure?"
"No…" Max replied, but everyone knew he was lying.
Amelia set Lyddie down and knelt next to the hole in the floor. Carefully, she lifted out a handful of papers. "These looks like letters," she murmured. A photo that had been hidden under the papers caught her eye. She picked it up and watched as the four young men pictured waved to her. Two had black hair, one had blond, and the fourth and smallest had brown. The black-haired boy on the left—who looked to be her age—blew her a kiss as Laurel leaned over her shoulder to get a better look.
"Hey, that's Harry Potter!" Laurel exclaimed, pointing to the black-haired boy on the right. He did have glasses like Harry—who was in Todd and Ian's year—did, and he certainly looked like Harry…
"But he doesn't have the scar," Amelia pointed out. The trademark lightning bolt scar that made the famous boy-wizard so easy to identify was missing. She turned the photo over to see if there was anything written on the back. "'Sirius, Remus, Peter, and James, seventh year'," she read. "I guess this is Harry Potter's father."
"And that means that's Sirius Black who betrayed Harry's parents," Tristan pointed to the kiss-blowing boy who was now favoring them with a cocky grin. "And that's our Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher from last year!" His finger poked the blond boy in the forehead. The image's head snapped back and blinked as if it had been struck. "I didn't know he was friends with Black."
"Probably not something he'd want advertised," Ian replied as he snatched the photo from her. "If I'd been friends with the great traitor of wizarding kind in school, I wouldn't want everyone to remember." He frowned at the picture, "This must've been Peter Pettigrew. You-Know-Who blew him to pieces—all they could find was his finger…" He made an evil face at Katrina and Lyddie, and both shrieked.
Amelia smacked his arm. "Quit scaring the little ones." She found a second picture in between some of the letters she'd taken out. This one was of the same four boys outside of Hogwarts—she recognized the castle in the background. The young men were sitting in the grass: the blond one, Remus, studying while the others lounged about. The back read 'Wormtail, Prongs, Padfoot, and Moony "studying" for N.E.W.T.s'. "Weird nicknames," she murmured.
"What's that in his hand?" Celia asked. She was fifteen, very pretty, and extremely shy.
Amelia squinted at the picture, "It looks like a snitch."
"Guess Harry's not the only Quidditch player in the family," Todd, who was a Ravenclaw Beater, commented. He opened one of the letters Amelia had set aside. "'Dear Artemis, When you asked me to the Yule Ball, I hadn't been planning on going, but I'm glad I did and that I went with you, even if Prongs and Moony gave me hell for taking a first year.'"
"Mom went to the Yule Ball when she was only eleven!" Ian said in disbelief as he tried to grab the letter from Todd. Todd managed to keep the scrap of parchment out of his foster brother's hand. "Come on…who's it signed by?"
"There's no signature—just the letter 'S'." Todd held the letter out to Amelia.
She took it and looked down at the bottom. Sure enough, just a hastily scratched letter 'S'.
"You…you don't think it could have been Sirius Black, do you?" Celia whispered.
"No way!" Max yelled. "Mom was an Auror—she's got crazy, mad Auror-senses—she would have taken one look at Black and thought 'that's a future Death Eater' and probably hexed him!"
"Did they have Death Eaters when Mom was in school?" Tristan asked, his dark eyebrows knitting together.
"I don't know," Amelia answered distractedly as she started gathering the letters and pictures up. "Come on, guys, let's put this stuff away before Mom gets home."
TBC…the kids try to quiz Artemis—subtly—about who 'S' was, and the Quidditch World Cup!