Carlisle clicked his office door shut and leaned back against it, letting out a needless breath. He had just finished applying stitches to Harry's head where the fragment of metal had struck him and had now returned to his office to do some much needed thinking.

After…whatever it was Harry had done, Carlisle had frozen in awe until the boy collapsed and the smell of blood became thick in the air. Brought out of his daze at once, Carlisle had called for assistance and returned Harry to his room where he remained unconscious. Now was Carlisle's first opportunity to properly consider what he had seen.

As soon as his breath had left his lips, another interruption came with the ringing of his phone. Flashing over to his desk chair, he pulled his phone out of his coat pocket and with a quick glance at the screen, pressed the answer button.

"Alice? What's wrong?" his adoptive children rarely phoned him while at work and when they did it was usually trouble.

"Carlisle? Oh my god, you're alright. What happened? Did anyone get hurt? Why didn't you pick up?" Alice reeled off at a speed impossible for a human to understand.

"Forgive me, Alice. I foolishly left my phone in my coat pocket in my office, and I was too preoccupied to hear it where I was. You saw the scaffolding collapse, then?" Carlisle had noticed the subtle tremor in his daughter's voice and started to feel the guilt rising.

"Yes and no. I saw it but I couldn't see you anywhere. I haven't been able to see you all day. What's going on?" The anxiety was now clear in Alice's voice, and Carlisle winced at how much worry he must have put his family through. Alice had never not been able to follow any of them in her visions. Carlisle wondered if his mystery patient might have something to do with the 'glitch', for want of a better word.

"It's alright, Alice. Only one person was hurt and they are currently in my care in a stable condition," he soothed, before adding in his thoughts 'Or should I say back in my care.'

A thought then came to him. "In fact, is Edward there? I would like him to come down if he could." Why hadn't he thought of his son before? Harry was completely unwilling to provide Carlisle with any information that he could use to figure out what happened, and Edward was the perfect solution. Carlisle tried to reassure himself that it was the right thing to do.

"Edward will be there any second. He left to go find you after you didn't pick up the third time." Carlisle winced again.

"I truly am sorry, Alice. I should have had my phone on me."

"That's alright, Carlisle. I'm just happy you and everyone is ok…well, apart from your patient. Is that why you want Edward? You want him to read your patient?" Even without her gift Alice was very perceptive.

"Actually, yes. Normally I wouldn't ask of him to do this but there's something about this boy. Something…different." He really had no words to describe what Harry was, and he wasn't about to begin trying over the phone.

"Ooh I love when you get interesting people! Tell us about it tonight, Edward should be pulling up outside now, I don't want to keep you. Bye Carlisle!"

Carlisle smiled at his daughter's enthusiasm. "Goodbye Alice."

Sure enough as Carlisle returned his phone to his pocket, he heard Edward's voice speaking to the receptionist in the foyer. He made his way over to his desk and leant against it, listening to Edward make his way humanly slow down the corridor.

'I'm sorry, Edward, for worrying you all. Everything is fine, I've spoken to Alice,' he thought, hoping to put his son at ease.

Carlisle looked up as Edward opened and closed his office door in the blink of an eye. He looked back at his father with hard, black eyes and stood with his hands shoved deep within his pockets. His posture was unnaturally straight with shoulders that were stiff and unmoving. He wasn't breathing.

Carlisle just sighed and looked at his son with pity.

"Edward, if you needed to hunt this badly you shouldn't have come. I don't want to make you uncomfortable." Carlisle knew Edward's self-control wasn't quite on the same level as his, but he still had faith in his son. If only Edward had as much self-assurance.

"It's fine. What happened, Carlisle?" Edward grumbled with a voice as firm as his stance. Carlisle could tell it wasn't fine.

'Edward…'

"I said that it's fine, can't you just tell me what's going on instead of worrying about me?" he snapped back. Carlisle raised his eyebrows as if to say 'what did I tell you'.

Obviously hearing this in his father's mind, Edward made an effort to physically relax. His shoulders slumped and he leaned back against the office door just as Carlisle himself had done earlier. He closed his eyes and paused before speaking again.

"Sorry. We're going hunting tonight. I'm ok, really. Please, Carlisle, what happened this morning? Alice didn't –" Carlisle cut him off by replaying in his mind all the events of the morning, from finding Harry, to hanging up on his conversation with Alice.

Edward frowned.

"How did he do that?" Carlisle could tell what Edward was referring to: Harry's little performance.

"I don't know. I've never seen anything like it." Not even after three centuries in the world of the supernatural had Carlisle ever witnessed something like what Harry did that morning. It was both exciting and unnerving.

"He seemed to be in pain."

"Yes," Carlisle nodded. "He seemed to expend a great deal of energy. Perhaps too much."

Carlisle watched Edward's head tilt as he delved deeper into his thoughts.

"You're concerned about him." It wasn't a question.

"Of course. I hold concern for all my patients." Though this was true, Carlisle knew that Edward would see through his excuse.

"More than your standard patients, though." Edward squinted his eyes slightly as though trying to focus more on Carlisle's thoughts.

Carlisle furrowed his brow, looking into the black voids that were Edward's eyes. "That's because Harry is not a standard patient," he stated simply.

He suddenly sprang up from his desk and glided to the filing cabinet against the wall. Quick as a flash, Carlisle skimmed through them all before drawing out the one he needed, 'Potter H.'.

"I'd like you to come and see him. Speaking to him earlier, it was clear that he wasn't comfortable with sharing any information about himself. Harry says he has no recollection of what happened to him, but I think he's lying." Carlisle looked once over Harry's very empty file. The only personal information they had was his name and his nationality. Other than that the file only outlined his status within the hospital: his room number, injuries and time of admission. Carlisle needed to know more about Harry. About what he was.

"So you want me to look in his mind," Edward supplied, a smirk playing across his face. "Doesn't that go against patient confidentiality?"

Carlisle closed Harry's file and made to move past Edward to the door, not before giving him a look.

"With you, Edward, there's no such thing as confidentiality." Carlisle opened the door and moved out into the corridor. "It's the only thing I can think of to get answers. I would like to help him, if I can."


Edward followed Carlisle through the door into Harry's room and stopped in his tracks. He stiffened and turned to look at his father who just smiled.

'You can feel it as well, can't you?' he heard Carlisle ask in his thoughts.

Edward closed his eyes and continued to hold his breath, hoping to eliminate some of his senses to try understand what he was feeling. As soon as he had stepped inside, Edward had felt a strange presence in the room, not unlike what vampires felt when nearby another of their kind. Vampires could sense each other not just by their smell and appearance, but also by the power they radiated. Each vampire's was different, some more powerful than others. It was something that humans just didn't project. So why did Harry?

It was like nothing Edward had experienced. Even the Volturi didn't feel this powerful. He could see now why Carlisle was intrigued.

Edward reopened his eyes and looked back at his father who spoke.

"He smells different too. His blood doesn't smell like that of other humans," he murmured with his eyes trained on Harry.

"I'll take your word for it." Different smelling or not, Harry still had a lot of blood on him, and Edward wasn't sure he would be able to resist the temptation.

Carlisle looked back up at his son, face painted with sympathy. Drawing the attention back away from himself, Edward changed the subject.

"His injuries are strange. He wouldn't say how he got them? Isn't that suspicious?" How a seemingly ordinary teenage boy – in appearance anyway – could suffer from such devastating injuries was beyond Edward's comprehension. As well as the deep gashes covering his body, there were dark bruises mottling his skin, some of which looked days old.

Edward also noticed that none of Harry's cuts looked like they had been tended to properly. They were still stained with blood and dirt, and some of them looked like they required stitches. He knew Carlisle wasn't this careless, so it surprised him.

Walking slowly to the side of the bed, Edward traced the air above Harry's wounds, trying to count them. He couldn't. Keeping his eyes on Harry, he sensed Carlisle move to the other side of the bed.

"Nothing would work on them. Cleaning only did so much, and anything with which we tried to close his wounds failed: stitches would unravel, bandages wouldn't stick. I'm very worried they might become infected. Only the smaller ones could be covered properly. You're right; his injuries are most certainly not normal."

Silence fell on the two vampires struggling to comprehend the boy that lay on the bed between them. After a few minutes, Carlisle seemed to remember why he had requested Edward's help in the first place.

'What can you hear, Edward?' He asked his son in his mind.

Edward glanced up at his father before fixing his gaze upon the boy. Only when his father had asked about Harry's thoughts, did Edward notice there was one voice too few in his head.

He couldn't hear Harry's mind.

Edward sharpened his thoughts and focused solely on his gift, but the only voice he could hear was that of Carlisle, concerned about the faces his son was pulling. Edward tried probing deeper into Harry's mind, but met nothing but a solid wall. Seeing if it would help, he envisioned a battering ram slamming into the wall in an attempt to shatter it and get past. This only got a small wince out of Harry as his mind was assaulted over and over. Giving up, Edward pulled from his head.

Carlisle had obviously noticed Harry's reaction and voiced his concern.

"What was that? Is he having a nightmare?"

Edward just shook his head, his eyes not leaving Harry's face.

"I… don't know. I can't hear anything. I can only hear your thoughts." Hearing no response, audibly or otherwise, Edward lifted his face to look at his father. "You knew this would happen. That I wouldn't be able to hear Harry's mind," he hissed in an accusatory tone.

"I didn't know. I simply suspected," Carlisle defended. "The events of this morning suggest he has the ability to block Alice's gift and so I merely guessed the same might happen to you. Though I was hoping it wouldn't."

Black met gold as Edward held his father's gaze.

"What does this mean?"

"It means Harry is something we have not come across before," Carlisle murmured with a mixture of concern for his patient and excitement of the unknown.

Suddenly the boy on the bed began to stir.

"He's waking up. Edward wait for me in my office. I'll be with you shortly after I have another word with Harry." Carlisle immediately switched back to doctor mode and went to pick up Harry's file from where he had placed it.

Leaving the room, Edward let the doors swing shut behind him with a soft 'whump'. Even from the other side of the wall, Edward could still feel tingling through his body the power belonging to the mystery that was Harry Potter.