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The New Dawning

Chapter Six: The Lethality of Beauty.

"Life is always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act." ~Paulo Coelho

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January 15, 2000

Little did they know, Harry Potter had little time for either of them. Between caring for a toddler (which was a full-time job in itself), trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, and remembering to eat (his clock was now charmed to remind him), he had his hands full. By the time that he had Teddy all settled in and used to the Black Manor, Paul and Seth had worn themselves out so much that the time between patrols was spent sleeping, anyways.

Harry, his gloved hand in Teddy's mittened one, made his way down the sidewalk. The little boy had been begging to go outside in the snow since they'd arrived in Washington, but this was the first chance they'd gotten – when Teddy had come to Black Manor, Harry decided that he needed to work extra hard on getting the house safe. He scrubbed the floors free of the last remaining filth, scorched Slytherin emblems off the walls, shattered the Grandfather Clock that liked to pour scalding water on you as you passed by, got rid of the last few House -Elf Heads (which seemed to be a tradition amongst the whole Black family) and even ventured into the basement. The stinging teapot had gotten him four times before he'd been able to remove it from the shelf, and he'd had his hands nearly chopped off by a pair of cursed manacles, and he was pretty sure there was a skeleton in the closet...literally. But by and by, he got the basement cleaned up and then the house was safe enough for Teddy to wander through.

Not that Harry liked him wandering, anyways. Teddy was mainly restricted to the first two floors – the basement steps now had a charm on it that didn't let anyone under eleven years old pass through it, as did the stairs to the third floor. The third floor wasn't anything bad, it was just not really finished yet – Harry had begun remodeling the house and the third floor is where he started, so there was torn-up carpet, paint buckets, hammers and nails and a screwdriver, a ladder, and so on. When it was finished, he'd have torn down most of the walls and made it into a library. There'd be a bathroom, and a fireplace in the middle of the room, with cozy chairs around it and books in the cases he planned to build into the walls. That wasn't all he had planned, though: he planned on having several walls coming out of the main foundation in a sort of pinwheel pattern that were also bookshelves.

One thing he'd noticed that every Black house had was books, and plenty of them. Some were dark arts, but he would rather have those in his possession than in anyone else's. Others were books on Animagi, Metamorphmagi, Elementmagi, and dozens of other magics that you could be born with – or had to study hard to accomplish. Hopefully when he was done, there'd be enough room for all the books from all the houses – though he may have to reinforce the floors because he was sure that that many books would weigh quite a lot.

But anyways.

They were walking down the sidewalk, he and Teddy. Teddy looked like a big blue marshmallow, but Harry found it rather cute. He had been worried Teddy wouldn't be warm enough, but knew that he shouldn't allow him to become warm enough to sweat. That was bad, but he couldn't remember why. So the boy toddled along, giggling because he was waddling like a penguin, warm but not too warm.

"What should we do today, Teddy?" Harry asked rhetorically. His godson knew a lot of words and liked to use them, but they didn't always make sense. "Should we go eat some lunch?"

"Lunch!" Teddy cheered, teetering over and falling into a snowbank. He looked up at Harry like, "what just happened?" and then struggled around to try and free his lower half from the snow. Seeing him begin to tear up, Harry pulled the boy out, cooing and telling him that it was okay.

Teddy, surprised, blinked at his godfather and then calmed down, forgetting about the incident immediately. Harry was amused, however, to see him avoid walking too close to the snowbanks after that.

"We need to find you some friends, don't we?" Harry asked quietly as they entered the diner. He ordered them lunch, and the woman behind the counter (who always seemed to be working) looked at him long and hard.

"Are you Harry Potter?" she wondered, her voice kind of rough.

Harry looked at her, surprised. "Uh – yeah – how did you..?"

"Leah Clearwater. I'm Seth's older sister," she said, shortly. "Listen, he and Paul Walker got themselves into a bit of trouble, so they're not allowed to really see their friends much right now until their punishment is over – just thought you should know that Seth's not ignoring you on purpose."

Harry nodded. "Thank you for telling me, Miss Clearwater. I hope they don't get into anymore trouble."

Leah pursed her lips and nodded, sliding the food over to him. She apparently knew about his eating disorder, because she hesitated and then said, "It's good to see you looking healthier."

Harry cracked the briefest grin and thanked her again.

– – –

January 20, 2000

Paul was half asleep. He stumbled over his own feet, falling face-first into some mud. Seth didn't laugh at him, or snort at him, because only minutes ago he'd done the same thing. They were making their way toward the clearing where they'd last met with the Cullens. Just outside it, he shifted and slid into his pants. He loved the way the snow felt on his feet, even though it melted as his skin touched it. The brisk coldness woke him up a little bit. It had been eighteen days of very little sleep – but today was the last day, Sam had said so, and that meant he could go see Harry soon!

The Cullens were already there, but he and Seth were the first of the wolves. Paul rubbed his eyes tiredly. He knew he looked a bit paler than usual, mostly because of lack of sleep, but also because as the length of time between the last time he'd seen Harry and now pushed on, the tightness in his chest began to ache and then sting, as if he was thousands of miles away instead of just around the block. He knew that he was just around the block because Leah had told him he was at the diner when she left – he almost always ate lunch there now, she said.

"Hey," Seth yawned, wiggling his fingers at the Cullens.

"What's wrong with you?" Emmett snickered.

"Been running patrol every hour on the hour for the last eighteen days. Part of our punishment," Seth responded, rolling his shoulders. "Sucks."

"That's cruel," Bella wrinkled her nose. Paul had never really liked Bella, because he thought she acted like she knew everything.

"That's what happens when you don't listen to your alpha," Paul responded. "We all know the consequences. If we behave, we'll be fine."

The rest of the wolves arrived quickly, forming a long horizontal line as they had last time. Sam began the meeting as soon as he arrived, going into detail about their latest news. The crazy woman only appeared in the clearing when she wanted to torture one of the vampires or when she wanted to rant about someone. Someone always seemed to be the same person – unnamed, undescribed, just 'the boy'. He was who they were targeting, and honestly, Paul felt bad for whoever he was. Having the wrath of fifty-two vampires (two had been killed by the crazy woman) and some sort of psycho didn't look good for him. At this rate, he would be torn into itty-bitty pieces.

"So we need to take them out," Emmett crooned, rubbing his hands together. "Fun, fun. But is there enough of us?"

"I doubt it, we got lucky last time," Sam replied. "I've been waiting on some more of the boys with the gene to shift – it seems like Cole Dane has come down with the symptoms, but other than that, it's just the fifteen of us."

Only five more people had shifted, even though there was fifty-odd vampires threatening the town. It didn't look good for La Push, as if the reservation couldn't recognize the threat it was under. It was almost sad.

"Can you call in any other vampires?" Paul wondered.

"No," Carlisle responded. "Calling in more of our kind would alert the Volturi to some kind of movement, and it's the last thing we need to remind them of our location."

"Right," Sam nodded. "Well...man, could we use some of those creatures from the myths."

Paul looked at Sam with his eyebrow cocked. "You don't even believe in the myths."

"Some of them," Sam rolled his eyes. "I believe in the one about the wizards."

"Wizards?" Rosalie scoffed. "Right."

"Hey," Jacob pointed at her. "If there are werewolves, vampires, and shapeshifters in this world – why can't there be wizards?"

"Because magic doesn't exist," Rosalie responded, nose wrinkled up as if she thought the mere idea of it was well below her.

It was at this exact moment that something came crashing through the trees, running faster than what a human should be able to. It was lithe and beautiful, and it stank of bleach.

Five minutes later it was dead, and there would only be fifty-one vampires to contend with now.