[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Harry Potter's Life Contains Too Many Vampires, Harry/OMC, PG-13

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews! While this is the end of the current arc, I’ll pick up this series again in the future.

Part Four

“My grandson tells me that you may be interested in becoming a vampire.”

Harry bowed and nodded. Being in the throne room was as overwhelming as it had been the first two times. Harry wondered suddenly if Lord Elfric ever left the room, and what he did if he didn’t.

Well, why would he have to do anything but sit on the throne and stare into the distance if he wanted? He could have food brought to him, and he was a vampire, immortal, the way Constantine had said.

“Why are you interested in becoming one?”

“Because Constantine said—”

“You call my grandson Constantine and not Lord Constantine?”

Harry flinched and shot Constantine a glance. They’d come into the throne room together, rather than Constantine waiting outside the way he had outside Pythoness’s cave, and Harry wondered now if it had been a mistake to do exactly as Constantine told him.

But Constantine simply regarded him with those bright eyes and smiled, and Harry took a deep breath as he turned back to face Lord Elfric. “Yes, my lord. At his invitation.”

Lord Elfric stared at him with eyes that held the greater inferno of Constantine’s brilliance and seemed to ponder that for a moment. Then he nodded. “Very well. You would want to change into a particular kind of vampire, I suppose, so that your Horcrux would not die?”

“I would want to make sure that I kept Parseltongue, my lord, and the magic that lets me move around the corridors of the Court without a guide,” Harry said. He had rehearsed the words in his head on the way here with Constantine, but they didn’t sound as impressive as they had when he was the only one hearing them. Harry took a deep breath and plunged forwards anyway. “Constantine said that he had discussed turning me with you, in such a way that I would sever the connection to Lord Voldemort.”

“Why do you want to sever your connection to your lord?”

Harry hadn’t been prepared for the question, even though he thought now that he probably should have been. After all, Constantine had been baffled by that, too.

But now, the anger struck him and overflowed.

“He is not my lord,” Harry snapped. “He’s my prophesied nemesis and attempted murderer. He’s tried to kill me again and again, one time in the graveyard a few months ago, and once when I was just a baby! He didn’t even intend to make me a Horcrux. That’s what his letter said. I’m accidental.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. It wasn’t like he wanted to be a Horcrux, of course not, but at least it would have been good to know that Voldemort had deliberately made him that way and then decided he was too dangerous to live. It would have meant he was valued.

“Even an accidental heir, a lord may desire to keep around.”

Harry simply shook his head. “I’ll never forgive him for killing my parents and Cedric,” he said hoarsely. “He’s the reason I grew up where I did. And my Muggle family—” He cut himself off. He couldn’t tell them about the Dursleys. They would decide that they had to soothe him, and he—he wasn’t that weak.

“Tell me about them.”

Lord Elfric’s will wrenched at his, and Harry bit his tongue. He took a step backwards.

“Grandfather.”

Constantine’s voice was low and level. Respectful, maybe, but Harry couldn’t hear much more than warning in it. Lord Elfric tilted his head, and something silent seemed to pass between him and Constantine.

Harry noted that with one half of his mind. The other part was still fighting the compulsion Lord Elfric had put on him to speak.

“Very well,” Lord Elfric said. “Keep your secrets.”

The compulsion let him go. Harry bent over, gasping, and stood up, staring at Lord Elfric. He didn’t feel compelled to avert his eyes this time. He had to say what was burning on his tongue even if it made things worse for him in the Court. “Don’t do that again.”

Lord Elfric stared at him, and laughed. Harry shivered as the sound prickled all over his skin like splinters of ice.

“Grandfather.”

Lord Elfric’s laughter stopped. He shook his head. “You are a surprise, Harry Potter. Every time I think that my grandson has told me the last of the surprising things you have done and there are no more, you reveal another.”

“I couldn’t resist what you told me to say for much longer.”

“You resisted at all. I think you could have resisted the compulsion I put on you to be calm the other day if you’d wanted.”

Harry ended up shrugging. He didn’t want to say that he wasn’t sure of that, or that he hadn’t wanted to resist it, because he wasn’t sure what was true and he didn’t want to sound arrogant. But he was pretty good at resisting the Imperius Curse. He supposed this was just another version of it.

“At first,” Lord Elfric continued, his tone musing, “when my grandson came to me and said that he desired to marry and turn you at some point in the future, I thought he was simply infatuated. Yes, you have Parseltongue, and you are the heir of a powerful wizard, but there are many other people in the world who fit those criteria. And Constantine will be powerful enough that I need never force him into a political marriage.

“But then he told me about the way you found your path around the Court without a guide. How you recognized the Great One and knew what her name was without being told. How you had suffered so much in fourteen years of your life but still held your feet. How your power burned in you. Now I know he has made the right choice.”

Harry took a slow, deep breath. He could keep yelling at Lord Elfric about the compulsion, but he didn’t think it was the right time. “So what’s your decision? My lord.”

“You need not speak the title. I would not call it from those who do not speak with true respect in their minds.” Lord Elfric tilted his head to the side and braced his chin on his fist, the most human gesture Harry had seen him make yet. “And your resistance has ensured that you passed the final test. You are a fitting mate for Constantine, if you decide to become his. I will turn you in such a way that it destroys the Horcrux but retains its powers.”

Harry closed his eyes, and felt Constantine lean close to him.

*

“Oh, Merlin, Harry, you’re what?”

“I’m going to let them turn me into a vampire so that I can get the Horcrux removed from me without losing the Parseltongue.”

Neville flopped back on the bed in Harry’s suite and stared at him. Then he began to laugh, helplessly.

Harry gave the ghost of a smile and sat down on the chair across from Neville. Honestly, looking at it from the outside, he could see why it might strike someone as funny. He was running straight into the arms of a bunch of Dark creatures because he didn’t want to be the Horcrux of a Dark Lord.

But it wasn’t that funny when he was living it. He had to do something. The urgency had burned in him more and more the longer he thought about it. He knew that he didn’t have a good handle on the way time was passing, but Neville had said that he and his grandmother would leave for Britain a week before the new school term started. That meant Harry had a few weeks at most to do something about this.

Once back at Hogwarts, he wouldn’t have the books or access to the vampires of the Riviera Pack anymore.

“But you really mean it,” Neville said, and stopped laughing with a sigh. He sat up. “Who’s going to turn you? Constantine?”

Harry snorted. “No. I did ask, but he was incredibly offended. Something about that making him my father in the blood.”

“Huh. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Great-Aunt Agatha was turned by Obsidian, the vampire she’s married to now, after all.”

Harry smiled, glad that even Neville, who seemed so wise in the ways of the vampire Court, might have made that mistake. “I suppose it depends on how you do it. This kind of turning is going to—give me a human perspective. Make me sort of not a full vampire, you know?” he added, to Neville’s blank look. “Or maybe it’s because your aunt and Obsidian were married before he turned her.”

“You know, I think she said something about that once. How she and Obsidian married by rite of blade before he turned her.”

“See.”

“But—Constantine isn’t going to marry you when you’re just fifteen, is he?”

Neville looked terribly concerned. Harry had to swallow back a laugh of his own.

He supposed it was concerning, sort of. Especially for someone like Neville, who’d had his grandmother at his side all his life, and had an adult he could trust.

But Harry was burning. He had to do something. He had to. His anger at Voldemort had collided with his anger at the idea that he was a Horcrux. And his anger over Cedric’s death, and his anger about the prophecy, and his anger about the possible fact of the vampires manipulating him. He had to do something.

Now.

“Did you—did you tell Ron or Hermione about it?”

“I haven’t exchanged a single letter with Ron or Hermione since I got here.”

Neville blinked and shifted. “Do you think their owls couldn’t get through the wards? I know the Weasleys’ owl is pretty old.”

Harry had to snort at the thought of Errol trying to fly into a vampire Court, but he shook his head. “No, Hedwig has no problem with it. I think that they’re scared to write to me, maybe. Worried that they’re going to say the wrong thing about Cedric or Voldemort.” He shrugged the hurt away. “So I won’t tell them.”

“I sort of thought you might—send them a letter to at least warn them.”

“Why?”

“They’ve been so close to you for so long. I thought you would ask their advice.”

“This is mine,” Harry said with a fierceness that he hadn’t expected, and which almost made Neville fall off the bed. “This is my decision. No one else can help me with it. I trust them, I really do, but Hermione isn’t going to find any better solution by doing research, and Ron wouldn’t be able to help with his strategy skills. Stopping Voldemort is my job. The prophecy said so.”

“Do you think—I know that prophecies are ambiguous. Do you think that maybe you misunderstood this one?”

“It says that neither of us can live while the other survives.”

“Um. Not that ambiguous.”

Harry nodded. He also considered it telling, not that he would say this to Neville, that Voldemort hadn’t written back after the letter Harry had sent him. He probably reckoned now that there was no point in trying to manipulate Harry with sugary words when Harry knew the whole prophecy. So he was doing his best to pretend that he’d never said anything.

And preparing for war.

I’m going to prepare for war, too. Watch out, Voldemort. Watch out, “lord.”

*

“It will hurt.”

“I know, my lord. I’m prepared for that.”

“Titles, now?”

Harry half-shrugged. He was kneeling in front of Lord Elfric in the middle of a space he hadn’t seen before, but which had felt to his Horcrux-enhanced senses as if it was somewhere near the middle of the Court before they had snapped and fizzled like electrical wires and stopped guiding him. “You’re going to turn me, my lord. If I didn’t have respect for you, I wouldn’t have agreed to come this far in the process.”

Lord Elfric said nothing, but paced in another circle around Harry. Harry was kneeling on a grooved stone floor shrouded in what seemed to be the inevitable crystal fog of this part of the Court. There were soft ringing sounds coming from the fog, and sounds like someone dragging a sack across the floor.

Harry wasn’t afraid. He was far more afraid of staying Voldemort’s Horcrux and what it would mean for him than of anything that would happen during the turning ritual.

“It will mean more than a bite.”

“Yes, my lord. Constantine mentioned that.”

Constantine had described what he could of the ritual, including the place, the time—midnight in the world outside, “moonfall” in the Court, whatever that meant—and how his grandfather would have to bite Harry on the throat. But he had said he couldn’t tell Harry everything, looking away from him as if ashamed.

“I would do it if I could, but I cannot.”

“I don’t expect you to,” Harry had said, and had taken Constantine’s hand and squeezed.

The look of awe Constantine had given him had made Harry wonder what it would be like if they did get married someday.

But as Constantine had said, they would have all the time in the world to decide if that was what they wanted.

“It will include bites from others.”

Harry tensed now at Lord Elfric’s words, flickering his eyes away from him and into the mist. The dragging sounds came back to him, and he licked his lips.

“Constantine said that you would—I mean, that you would have a special relationship with me as the vampire who turned me, the way you turned Constantine’s mother in the blood. Will the other vampires who bite me have that kind of relationship with me, too?” Honestly, Harry wasn’t sure how he felt about having one “father in the blood,” let alone multiple parents.

Lord Elfric laughed, a sound that buzzed like insects crashing into a hard surface. “Did I say that the other bites would be from vampires?”

The dragging sound repeated, and two large serpents coiled into being as if called out of the mist, moving slowly towards him.

Harry stared at them with his mouth slightly open. They were glorious, something he had never expected to say about a snake. They were a brilliant silver and looked as if they might be made of metal. Their eyes were a bright green, like his, like Constantine’s. Their necks curled back as they neared Harry, and hoods flared out around their heads.

“Are they cobras?” Harry whispered, unable to take his eyes from them.

“Such words cannot define them,” Lord Elfric said. “Those words are the coinages of a later world. Suffice it to say that they will bite you, with your permission, and you will be able to keep your Parseltongue.”

Harry hadn’t spoken a lot to snakes before he had come here, and the basilisk had been a source of pain and terror to him. But these snakes reminded him of how beautiful the Sahafassa was, and he gladly extended his wrists when Lord Elfric told him in a quiet voice he should.

The snakes nosed towards him and flicked their tongues against his wrists for a moment as if testing the scent of his skin. Then their heads darted out, and they bit.

Their fangs were so sharp that Harry didn’t even feel them pierce the skin. Then he shuddered as he felt the venom pour into him, shining beneath his skin. He shivered as the pain began to penetrate him, the pain of both the bites and the venom.

“Come here, Harry.”

Lord Elfric was holding out his hand. Harry scrambled towards him and managed to stand with his help. The stone floor was tilting around him, the whole room spinning, and sometimes the grooves on the floor seemed to be above his head. Harry shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself. It was difficult to think.

“Hold still.”

Lord Elfric put no compulsion into his words the way he had tried before, but it was still easy to obey. Harry tilted his head to the side when Lord Elfric pushed gently at him. Then Lord Elfric murmured a few words that sounded like bubbles popping. They mimicked that effect, too. Harry lost track of them as soon as they were spoken.

Something sharp and piercing took him in the throat.

Harry gagged and tried to cry out. It was impossible. The world resumed its faster spin, and Harry reached up and grasped at something. It was hard and solid under his hand. He thought it might be Lord Elfric’s shoulder.

The blood poured out of him. Weakness followed it. Harry stumbled and would have fallen, but then something pressed against his mouth, so hard that he opened it. It felt like the glass lip of a Potions vial.

For a moment.

Then life poured down his throat.

It burned so much that Harry’s eyes crossed and he tried to spit it out. But he couldn’t. Lord Elfric’s hand was firm on his back. And then Harry leaned nearer and began to suck at it, because it had altered taste in a moment, from burning to brilliant, like he was drinking down a fountain of power.

The clashing fires in him stirred and plunged together. There was the burning of the venom, and the burning of death, and the burning of life, and the burning of the pain of the wounds at his wrists and throat—

Harry fell.

*

The world fractured and split apart, and there was the crystalline clarity of the moment in between.

Harry remembered being mortal. Remembered the burning anger that had caused him to send that letter to Voldemort. Remembered how much he had desired to do something that would stop himself from being a Horcrux.

He had been like that, but he no longer was.

Now, he thought of long years stretching out in front of him. He saw the strength and speed that his body would have, and knew that he could defend himself against Voldemort’s magic, if by nothing else, than by simply running away. He felt the yearning that came from the thought of his enhanced senses, how he would smell blood and see the light from the stars as it truly was.

The crystalline moment cracked and fell apart. Harry gasped and went to his knees.

He opened his eyes and there was no fog, not anymore.

“How do you feel, my son?”

Lord Elfric asked the question in a low voice, but it sounded almost like a shout to Harry. He blinked and braced his hands flat on the stone floor. He could feel the grooves, so endlessly fascinating—

“Harry?”

Right. Lord Elfric had asked him a question. Harry felt a trickle of amusement at himself, and sighed a little. Good. He had kept some human emotions, not become inhuman and hard to read like the vampires.

Lord Elfric had promised that some parts of Harry’s human perspective would remain intact. It seemed he had kept his word.

“Fine, my lord.” Harry cleared his throat.

“Call me Father.”

Tears stung Harry’s eyes like grains of sand. He hadn’t thought of that, despite Lord Elfric being the one who turned him. He had a father in the blood now.

Someone who would protect him. Someone who would watch over the progress of his courtship with Constantine, which Harry did still want, and who could tell him if he thought it was going wrong. Someone Harry could complain to.

“I feel fine,” Harry said, and stared down at his wrists. The wounds were gone as if they had never been. “Healed.”

“That is very well.”

Lord Elfric’s hand stroked his hair. Harry looked up, and then looked away. Lord Elfric was a glowing spear of light sheathed in an immortal form. Looking at him too much with vampire eyes simply wasn’t possible. Harry thought now that it wasn’t simply respect that made many of the Pack look at the floor when Lord Elfric was near.

“Thank you,” Harry whispered.

“There are no debts between family.” Lord Elfric’s hand squeezed his shoulder lightly. “Now, I think my grandson is waiting for you.”

“It’s going to be a little weird, your son dating your grandson, right?”

Lord Elfric laughed. “We think of each blood lineage as separate, Harry. You are not at all related to Constantine’s mother in the blood, and I would not have taken Constantine as my heir if he were not magically compatible with me, which is more important than who turned him. You will be fine.”

They passed through a door that turned into an obsidian circle and disappeared, and Constantine, who was clinging to the side of a basalt wall in a way Harry knew instinctively he could do too now, swung to the floor and stared at them with wide, hopeful eyes.

Harry smiled at him. “It worked.”

Constantine moved towards him with steps as delicate as a swan’s. He bent his head but did not touch his lips to Harry’s hand. “I will wait as long as you need.”

Harry smiled again. Perhaps it would be centuries, he thought.

But he had the centuries now. He was free.

The End.