The fact Harry's birthday was only a few days away was sprung on Harry rather suddenly by Ron when they were once again going through books in the Black Family Library.
Hermione was off visiting libraries, both Magic and Muggle, in her efforts to find artefacts of the Founders, discover the hiding places of the Horcruxes, and a dozen other projects she was working on.
Her latest efforts had Ron and Harry spending more time with their heads in books than ever before, and it was starting to get to them both again, despite Harry's new-found determination. Ron appeared to find Harry's dedication to be an annoying change that made the dark haired man far too serious, and seemed to be looking for a distraction to tempt him away from his 'Hermione-like' pursuits.
"What are we going to do for your birthday?" Ron asked him, rather unexpectedly, while balancing precariously on a chair to reach the higher parts of the bookshelf.
The question caught Harry by surprise, since he had not thought about it; had never thought about it in fact.
"Dunno," admitted Harry. "Hadn't thought about it; it's never been an issue before."
"We could have a party or something," Ron suggested.
Harry laughed bitterly. "Ron, last year is the closest thing I have ever had to a party. It was great, but I am not going to miss something I have never had. Besides, I hardly think now would be a good time to organise a big get together of all my friends, what with Voldemort's cronies keeping an eye out for me and all."
"Well I reckon the three of us should do something at least," said Ron reaching up to a pale green book. "I know, we can have a dinner party!" he proclaimed in a posh, put-on voice. "Here is just the book for it, 'Muggle table Manners and Etiquette for Formal Occasions' - seems a bit out of place in this library though."
He grabbed at the dusty book but instead of coming out of the shelf, it only moved slightly, as if resisting him. With a grunt of surprise, Ron pulled the book harder. It moved more and gave out a loud 'CLICK'.
The section of shelf next to Ron suddenly moved inwards and slid to the side, disappearing into the wall.
"Whoa," said Ron, taking the words from Harry's mouth.
Behind the now missing section was a small room containing a desk and several loaded bookshelves.
Harry left the forgotten morbid history book he had been reading fall from his hands, and rush to join Ron to explore the room. Taking a dusty book off the shelf, he felt his face flush bright red as he read the title. The subject matter was something he did not have a great deal of experience with, and wasn't planning on gaining in the near future, at least not in the manner described by the title.
"Blimey!" Ron said, hastily putting a book back on the shelf like it had burned him. "Old man Black must have been a bit of a pervert I reckon!"
"I'll go up and ask his portrait one day," Harry laughed, picking out another book with pretty much the same results. "Er, maybe we shouldn't go telling everybody about this."
"No. I think that's probably a good idea, especially not Hermione," Ron agreed, continuing to take books and browse through them. Harry started browsing the spines, looking for anything that might be useful. While the every shelf was loaded with what Harry considered to be very inappropriate sounding titles, every now and then one that sounded a bit more useful came up; like the one called 'Barely legal Dark Arts'.
"Harry, look at this!" Ron suddenly exclaimed.
Harry abandoned his search and reluctantly joined his excited friend, not really sure if he wanted to see what he had found. The volume Ron was holding looked positively ancient and the title on the cover was not one of the more lurid or descriptive ones that kept causing Harry to blush.
"'Enhancing you abilities through Blood Magic', come on, Ron. You can't be serious!" he laughed. "I don't think you need to go to those sorts of extremes, mate."
"No, you git," Ron protested, clouting Harry on the arm. "There is section here about becoming an Occlumens."
Harry began to read over Ron's shoulder.
The Potion of Memory Enhancing, when combined with the Ritual of Concentration, will imbue the participant with the ability to develop protections from mind violating magic such as Legilimency and Veritaserum in a manner similar to the ability of a skilled Occlumens to occlude his mind.
"Wonder why it is in the hidden section?" asked Ron.
They flicked through a few more pages and found out why. Some of the 'enhancements' were of a very personal nature.
"This is excellent," Ron said, wandering off to start searching the shelves again. "I wonder if there are others like it here, but a bit more subtle."
"Ron, did you read the ingredients for the potions in this book?" asked Harry, who was concentrating on the memory potion.
"Not closely. Why?"
"What do you reckon they mean by 'Fifty drops of the purest Life's Waters'?"
"Dunno. Sounds like they didn't want to just come right out and say what the ingredient was and made up something to give you a hint. Some of those old buggers were a bit daft, like calling Flobberworm spit 'Golden Ichor' and stupid stuff like that."
Harry thought about it as he flicked through a few of the other potions and found the ingredient listed in many of them in varying quantities of up to about a cup, if he was reading the archaic measurements correctly.
Life's Waters, he thought. Well the title of the book was 'Enhancing you abilities through Blood Magic', so it was most likely blood of something.
Purest Life, he wondered. Was it unicorn blood? That would be bad, since drinking Unicorn blood had very dire consequences, not to mention being very Dark magic. Voldemort had been killing unicorns in the forest and drinking their blood to gain strength, but it was not something Harry would even contemplate.
He decided he would ask Hermione next time she visited. If anybody knew, it would be her, and she could be trusted to keep it to herself.
Then it hit him; Hermione - Purest Life. Can they be talking about a girl's blood - A particular type of girl?
"Ron," he said, looking for his friend who, unnoticed by Harry, had gone silent.
Ron, startled by Harry calling him, quickly shoved the book he had opened back onto the shelf, nearly dropping it in his haste.
"Yes? What? What have you found?" he stuttered, trying to cover up his interest in the book he had just jammed back onto the shelf, but blushing brightly.
Harry showed Ron the potions and voiced his suspicion. Ron blanched, but agreed it was a possibility, but they were still going to have to ask Hermione.
"Harry, this is Dark magic!" she protested, when he showed her the room and the book, over Ron's objections that she would make them dispose of the secret library's contents 'with undue prejudice'.
"Why?" he asked her. "There is nothing evil in it; it doesn't require any sort of sacrifice."
"It requires blood. Blood from a virgin girl! Any magic that stoops to that sort of level is definitely not sitting in the Light. There is always a cost for using that sort of magic, a cost that is nothing anybody would normally want to pay. It wouldn't surprise me to find this book is on the Ministry banned list."
Harry blushed as she spoke; he couldn't help it, even though he had suspected that was what it meant when it referred to using blood.
"Hermione, if it helps me learn Occlumency, I'll take the risk and pay the price. I can't see anything wrong in the ritual. It's not like Voldemort splitting his soul to become immortal!"
"And where do you think you are going to get the blood from?" she asked.
Harry just looked at her. "Well, I thought, maybe, you could, you know, help?"
"Oh no," she said. "I will not help you perform a Dark ritual. That's how it starts; this is probably how most Dark wizards started."
"First, it's a simple, 'innocent', little spell to help with your memory, then a small animal sacrifice to increase a power, next a magical animal to get a bigger or different increased, and then before you know it you are murdering your enemies to split your soul and become immortal. It's addictive Harry, and it's wrong!"
"Come on, Hermione," said Ron. "You can't honestly believe Harry is going to go Dark on us."
"He won't mean to, Ron. Look around this house. Look at how the Blacks turned out. With the exception of Sirius, they all went bad. Do think it is a coincidence that they had a library full of dark magic and they all went bad?"
"How can you be sure they didn't collect the books because they were Dark to begin with?" Harry challenged.
"Because the books have been here for generations," she replied, picking one randomly from the shelf. "Look at the dates in them; they are mostly older than my great grandparents! What are you staring at?" she asked, seeing the expression on their faces.
Their eyes were fixated on the book she was waving around. Ron looked like he was going to choke, and Harry just felt very embarrassed.
Hermione turned the book over and read the title. Her face flushed.
"Oh my," she said, seemingly unable to take her eyes off the cover.
Ron and Harry looked at each other, then in silent agreement, Disapparated, leaving Hermione holding a book that would never have been allowed in Hogwarts, not even in the restricted section.
After that, Harry bugged Hermione about the ritual until she got angry and threatened to burn the book if he didn't stop.
They had found a lot of volumes of interest in the library, most of them delving deeply into aspects of topics nobody would ever think to try and research. Cataloguing and sorting the books turned into quite an education for Ron and Harry – Hermione having excused herself from the task for unspecified reasons.
Some of the spell books contained powerful magic that could be useful, although most of them were discussed in ways completely repulsive to somebody not conditioned to accept the Dark Arts as a normal, everyday part of life.
"You don't think that she, er, can't help you, do you?" asked Ron, disgustedly tossing a volume about the use of house-elves in offensive spell development aside.
"What do you mean?" asked Harry, pausing in his writing. He was using charmed Muggle ballpoint pens he had bought on his first shopping trip to copy spells into one of the notepads he had picked up, omitting the darker bits. Both items would probably have once caused Mr Weasley to arrest him - the pens never running out of ink and the notepad having many more pages than should have been able to fit in the slim volume along automatically updating an index. "She has never failed at learning any spell or potion. Look at how she took to Apparition tag."
"No, I mean can't, with the blood, you know," said Ron, struggling to make Harry understand what he was worried about. "Krum…"
"Oh," said Harry. "OH!"
"No, definitely not. She's too smart for that."
"Yeah," agreed Ron, with a strange sigh of relief. "That's what I thought."
Harry thought Ron sounded just a little too certain, so he decided to bait him a bit.
"Of course, he was a famous international Quidditch mega-star, and an older man…"
Ron's face darkened.
"No," he said, shaking his head. "Not a chance."
"But I overheard a few other girls saying…"
"No," repeated Ron, his tone final.
Harry left it at that, although he couldn't keep the smile from his face.
"I want to go to Godric's Hollow soon," he told them at dinner. "Remus replied to my letter and he is coming over to take me in a few days."
There was no logical reason for him to go but, every since Dumbledore's funeral, he felt a need to visit the graves of his parents. It had been pushed into the background for a while, but now he felt the strange urge even more than before.
"We're coming too," said Ron, once again failing to swallow before taking part in a conversation, and once again getting scolded by Hermione for it.
"Really, Ronald, you have the table manners of an animal," she snapped, not looking up from her book. "I'll stay here and do more research."
"No you won't," Ron told her, after making an exaggerated swallowing noise. "You need a break, so you are coming with us."
"Don't be silly, Ron. I have far more important things to do. Er I mean, ahh," she stammered to a stop, looking at Harry. "I mean…"
Knowing he was playing on her emotions after the ill worded outburst, Harry gave her his puppy dog eyes. "Please? It would mean a lot to me."
"Okay," she said reluctantly, "but only because you asked nicely, not because you gave me that pathetic look."
"Works everytime that look, doesn't it?" Ron asked him.
"Yep," Harry laughed, "just about."
That night, Harry had particularly vivid dreams of Dumbledore and Sirius both dying at the same time. Sirius fell through the veil while Dumbledore was stuck down by Snape's green curse. It made no sense, but it hurt never the less. Some time after midnight, he gave up sleeping and went downstairs to make a hot drink, hoping it would help to relax his overwrought mind.
Noticing a light on in the library, he went in and found Hermione asleep at the desk. She was surrounded by books and was resting her head on an open one.
Harry gave her shoulder a gentle shake.
"No, Harry," she mumbled, without waking. "I am not going to make that potion for you."
Harry hadn't mentioned the potion again after she had gotten angry at him about it, but it seemed to still be on her mind.
He leaned down and blew his breath gently in her ear. She stirred and rubbed her ear, sticking a finger alarmingly deep inside of it, but then went right back to sleep. Harry tried shaking her a bit harder. This time she sat up abruptly, and yelped in surprise.
"Harry!" she said. "I didn't see you come in. Please don't sneak up on me again; you gave me such a fright."
"Hermione, you were asleep," Harry said patiently.
"No I wasn't. I was just looking up the Arthurian Hallows from mid-European folk legends"
"Hermione, you were asleep. I had to shake you twice."
"Well," she admitted. "I may have just dozed off for a second or two."
Harry laughed and passed her the hot chocolate drink he had made.
"Drink this then go to bed," he told her.
She opened her mouth to protest, but shut it again when she saw the determined look on his face. He smiled and made sure she finished the drink and left the library empty handed to go to bed. As he rose to get another drink, he noticed the book she had been sleeping on.
It was the one containing the Occlumency ritual.