"I could ask the same of you," the cool, haughty voice said. 

Harry recognized her as being in Jane's year, the Slytherin girl with the dramatic black-and-white streaked hair, which was currently tumbled in long damp ringlets around a sculpted face that might have been beautiful if not for the arrogant twist to the mouth. 

"This is the Shrieking Shack!" Jane said. 

"Doesn't seem very haunted," Devona said dismissively. "Besides, even if it were, my family's manor has nine hundred and ninety-nine ghosts. So a few more noisy spooks aren't going to bother me. But you didn't answer me, Janie-Jane. Who's your boyfriend?" She said the last word in a sneering sing-song. 

Slowly, Harry stood to his full height and turned so that the glow of the fire illuminated his face. His hair was still back from his brow, and he was sure that his scar had to be blatantly visible. 

"I guess that'd be me," Harry said in a deceptively casual voice. 

Beside him, Jane shrank in on herself with despair. "Harry, no," she moaned. "No, don't …"

But Devona Stormdark's reaction was beyond priceless. She actually tottered back a few steps, and might have fallen on her backside had she not collided with a wall. A stammered bit of nonsense spilled from her lips. She looked like the only thing keeping her from tearing out of the house howling in terror was the fact that her unhinged, rubbery legs could barely hold her upright. Blasé about ghosts, all right … but coming eye to eye with Harry Potter?

"Huh … hah …" wheezed Devona, like someone having an asthma attack. 

Like Malfoy, she came from old pureblood money and lots of it. Her clothes were always a cut or two above even the best-dressed students at Hogwarts, and she was fond of ostentatious antique jewelry, each piece with a history and a Dark history at that. Harry remembered Blaise Zabini saying that Devona's grandfather had been a Death Eater, and dimly recalled Sirius once mentioning that the Stormdarks were related to and intermarried with the Malfoys. 

"That's it," Jane said in a dull, hopeless voice. "They'll know. Now what'll I do?"

"You haven't done anything wrong," Harry said. "You –"

As Devona recovered her wits, a cruel, cruel light gleamed in her indigo eyes. Jane saw it, and took a step toward the other girl. Harry put out a hand to stop her, but Jane pushed it aside. 

"Let me talk to her," she said. "Please. Let me try."

"All right," Harry said, not liking it at all. He stood back, crossing his arms. 

"Devona –"

"Oh, Jane! Jane, Jane, Jane!" Devona's tone was mirthful and rich with scorn. "I never would have guessed. You and Potter? Potter? You're in love with him; I can see it in your face. And you call yourself a Slytherin!"

"What will it take, Devona?"

"What … oh, you have got to be joking! What will it take? To win my silence? You think you can bribe me into keeping quiet about this?" Devona laughed. "Even if I were as poor as Theodore Nott was, there still wouldn't be Galleons enough in all the world! This is too good, Jane, too precious by half!"

"You can't tell anyone," Jane said desperately.

"I'll tell everyone!" she crowed. "I've been waiting for years to find something to distract Draco Malfoy from that abrasive sow Pansy Parkinson, and this will be just the thing. When I deliver this tasty tidbit of information to him, he'll forget all about her."

"No!" Jane cried. 

"I don't know what the Gryffindors will think of your boyfriend there," Devona continued, clearly enjoying herself now that she had bounced back so quickly from the initial shock and fright. "Probably overlook it the way they overlook all of the great Harry Potter's flaws and failings – they've been kissing his arse so long they must like the flavor by now. You, though … you'll never be able to show your face in Slytherin House again!"

Harry bridled, but kept quiet with a Herculean effort. 

"I'll do anything you say," Jane said. "Anything, Devona, if only you won't tell."

"What I don't understand is how you could stoop to this!" Devona rolled her eyes theatrically. "A move so stupid and emotional, they'll probably re-Sort you into Hufflepuff!"

"You have to listen to me!"

"Oh, no, no, no," Devona said. "It's too perfect, Janie. I only ducked in to get out of the weather. But news this good is worth risking a case of the sniffles. I'll just go, and leave you two to your little love nest."

Sweeping her heavy, crushed-velvet robes around her body, she went for the door. Her smoky, mocking laugh rang to the splintery rafters. 

"Devona!" Jane went after her. 

Harry started to follow Jane, but she stopped him in his tracks with a heartbroken, imploring look. 

"She won't," he said. 

"I have to try!"

"Jane –"

With a miserable sob, she rushed down the hall. Harry cursed and slammed a fist into the wall. A chunk of plaster cracked away, shedding pale dust on his feet. 

It was done. Everything was ruined. He had lost his eyes and ears inside Slytherin House, lost any hope of ever knowing what was going on with their Dark Arts Club … but that wasn't the worst of it. 

The worst of it was Jane. Devona was right. She'd never be able to show her face in Slytherin again, would be shunned by all her former friends. If she did have to stay in that House, her life wouldn't be worth a bent Knut. If she did get swapped to another, even to Gryffindor, no one would ever trust her. She was in for years of a living hell, always the outcast, always hated. 

She'd probably have to leave school altogether, and then what? Back to the parsonage? Back to the Muggle world, to the vicar who had underlined the passage about not suffering a witch to live?

He should have known something like this would happen. It didn't hurt him at all, but he should have realized the risk Jane was taking. The risk he was putting her in. Once again, here he was, putting his friends at risk!

He cursed some more as he stuffed sweets back into Honeydukes bags and hurried to the Shrieking Shack's front door. He had no idea what he would do, only the driving urge that he had to do something. 

The hail had stopped, and early night had fallen, but the storm raged on. As he opened the door, it was yanked out of his hand and off its hinges by a sudden hurricane gust. Harry ducked away from the splinters and watched as the door cartwheeled end over end down the hill. The rain was blowing so hard it was almost horizontal. 

The building quivered as another bolt of lightning struck the rod in the roof. The thunder was immediate and ear-splitting. In the dazzling flash, Harry saw Jane and Devona partway down the hill, near the leaning skeleton of an ancient oak tree that tilted out over the foaming torrent of Hogsbrook. 

Something in their stances, even in that brief momentary glimpse, sent adrenaline pumping through his veins. He dashed into the storm without a second thought, running toward them through the sheeting rain. 

Another enormous celestial explosion was so bright that it cast his shadow on the slippery rain-matted grass. 

"Jane!" he shouted, but again, the wind and thunder robbed his voice of any volume. 

She was on her knees in front of Devona, her head bent back, rain pounding at her defenseless, upturned face. Devona loomed over her, right hand holding Jane by the neck, the left leveling a wand right between Jane's eyes. 
Jane's own wand hand was held stiffly down and out to her side as she tugged futilely at Devona's choking grasp with the other. 

More lightning, stitches of it jabbing the black cloth of the sky. Harry, running fast as he could, saw Devona's triumphant, hideous sneer. He saw Jane's features relax, her eyes close in a gesture of resigned acceptance. 

"Leave her alone!" he roared, unheard in the storm. He plunged down the hill at breakneck speed. One misstep and he would break his neck, then slide all the way down and into the floodwaters of Hogsbrook. He drew his wand. 

Devona leaned close and said something to Jane. Harry didn't have to be close enough to hear, or able to read lips, to know it was probably a taunting good-bye.

Closer now, almost on top of them, Harry shouted, "Expelliarmus!"

Keyed up as he was, the spell leaped out of him with what felt like ten times its usual potency and half his usual discriminatory aim. Both girls' wands popped out of their hands and spun off into the grass. 

Half a second later, the sky erupted in jagged white fire. The iron rod atop the Shrieking Shack split asunder, sending dull-red spears of glowing metal whirling through the night. One landed near Harry, still so hot that the wet ground smoldered and the rain boiled away in hissing steam. 

Another bolt struck the leaning tree. 

He saw it happen. Saw the stark black limbs and branches outlined in electric-purple light. Saw the trunk explode and burning wood shoot high into the air like a fireworks display. 

Saw a massive branch, spiky with sharp dead twigs, slam into Devona and Jane and knock them both flying. Backward. Down the hill. Tumbling like carelessly tossed broken dolls off the edge of the muddy embankment and into the raging current of the brook. 

Harry was on his hands and knees without knowing how he got there, perhaps hammered flat by the concussive thunder-blast. Ears ringing, eyes dancing with garish after-images from the lightning, a metallic ozone taste in his mouth and his glasses feeling fused to his head, he scrambled up and raced the rest of the way to the shattered remains of the leaning tree. 

It blazed defiantly in the downpour, a gigantic torch. Harry ran under it, through falling embers, an arm over his face. He came to the edge, skidded, almost went over himself, and stopped. 

Below him, Hogsbrook swept along, a ferocious cataract. He scanned its choppy surface with mounting panic, seeing neither of the girls, seeing only storm debris in the surging flow. 

He ran downstream toward Hogsmeade, yelling until he was hoarse and felt like slivers of glass had lodged in his throat. Ahead was the bridge, the surface of the water by now so high it was churning over the planks. He spotted something hung up there, caught against it, and was spurred on by frantic hope. 

A waterlogged branch. Nothing more than that. 

"Damn it, no!" 

Harry ran around the bridge, saw a deep eddying whirlpool where the streambed curved. There, just for an instant, was a sudden splashing, a head breaking the surface, a last-ditch gasping for air. 

"Jaaaaane!" He charged in, knee-deep, and the force of the water almost tore his legs out from under him. He could barely keep his footing. 

The head had vanished. The fire was too far behind to let him see anything. He was in waist-deep now and shaking with the exertion of resisting the inexorable current. They would be all dark robes and dark hair swirling in the dark, dark water … how could he possibly –

And then, a pale flicker, a white hand drifting palm-up. There and then gone, not much bigger than a Golden Snitch, but Harry lunged for it and seized it with unerring accuracy. 

It felt cold, and slack, and lifeless. 

Harry's feet skidded on submerged stones. The current swept him four yards downstream and into water up to his chest. He battled the current, never letting go of that hand. 

"Harry!"

His head snapped up and around. Ron was on the bank, looking scared half to death but resolute. Behind him, in that screaming yellow raincoat and red belt, was Luna Lovegood, looking interestedly attentive. 

"Ron!" Harry stretched out an arm. 

"Hang on!" Ron waded in, slipped, went to one knee. 

"Careful, Ron!"

"I … I can't reach …"

"Just a little farther," urged Harry, straining toward Ron's hand. 

"Here!" Luna whipped off the belt of her raincoat, snapped it around a fence post and drew it taut, then wrapped the end around her wrist and seized the back of Ron's robes with her free hand. "I've got you, Ron!"

Ron's eyes met Harry's and Harry could read his thoughts – trust their lives to Looney Lovegood? But what choice did they have? Ron inched deeper into the brook, leaned way out, and his fingers touched Harry's. 

"A little more!" Harry said through clenched teeth. 

The wind rose again in a furious howling gale, flapping Luna's raincoat out to either side of her like large yellow wings. Harry's feet – numb by now, like blocks of ice – slipped again. He threw himself toward Ron in one final desperate move. If it failed, he would be carried downstream and that would be that. 

But Ron caught his wrist in a tight grip. "There! Got you! Pull, Luna, pull me back!"

"Don't let go," Harry said.

"Won't happen," Ron assured him. 

Together, he and Luna pulled Harry toward shore. Harry kept hold of that pale, motionless hand, and once he had gotten his feet under him again, he dragged the body to the surface, and to the shore. Ron helped him carry her, Luna helped them both. They all stumbled up the sloping bank and collapsed in the dubious shelter from the storm offered by a hedge. The rain was still coming down in buckets but it felt almost warm after being immersed. 

Luna lit her wand. Harry, almost afraid to look, levered himself up onto his knees again beside the girl he'd hauled out of Hogsbrook.

Dark hair … no streaks of white. 

It was Jane. 

He turned her onto her back. She was ghostly pale, her lips tinged blue.

"That's Jane Kirkallen," Luna said in a voice that sounded only mildly surprised. 

"Is she …?" Ron asked. 

Harry shook her. Jane's head lolled. 

"Jane? Jane!"

"I don't think she's breathing," Luna said. 

"Don't say that!" Harry shouted. He gathered Jane up in his arms, feeling how cold she was, how limp and heavy. "Jane, come on, Jane! Wake up. Breathe! Somebody … where's my wand? I lost my damned wand. Somebody … somebody cast the Awakening Charm!"

"I'll do it," Ron said, aiming his wand at Jane. "Ennervate!"

Harry, holding her, felt the jolt of revivifying power tingle through her. She jerked, coughed up a lungful of water, and began shuddering all over. Her hands rose, clawed fitfully at the air, then dropped into her lap. Her head fell against his shoulder with a soft thump. 

"Jane?"

Her eyelids fluttered.

"Jane, talk to me." Harry stroked her face. "Please."

"Harry?" she said weakly, and coughed again. 

Fierce exultation swept through him. "You're all right!"

"Harry … you're crushing me," Jane said.

He realized he had tightened his embrace, that he was crushing her against him, and that both Ron and Luna were watching. Ron grinning half-enviously, Luna with a vaguely bemused expression. 

"Sorry," he said, but only loosened his hold instead of entirely letting go. 

"What …" Jane's eyes opened wide. "Devona!"

"Devona Stormdark?" Luna asked. 

"I didn't see her," Harry said. "I almost didn't see you. She …" He glanced helplessly at Hogsbrook. 

"What happened?" Ron said, the grin suddenly wiped off his face. 

"They were by the tree," Harry said, indicating the still-burning oak skeleton – and astonished to see how far away it was, how far downstream he had run in his panicked chase. "Lightning hit it, and knocked them both into the brook."

"You mean she …" Ron trailed off and bit his lip as he looked at the roiling, speeding water. 

Harry sensed Jane's troubled gaze on him. He looked down into her eyes, trying to tell her wordlessly that he wasn't going to mention anything more, not yet. He didn't know what had transpired there between Jane and Devona in those last few moments, but it must have been ugly. 

"I didn't know you two knew each other," Luna said, her attention shifting from Harry to Jane. She seemed unperturbed by the probable fate of Devona Stormdark, but it was hard to tell with Luna. 

"You can't tell anyone, all right?" Ron said. "It's … well, kind of a secret."

"Even if I told someone, who'd believe me?" shrugged Luna. 

"I mean it, here," Ron persisted. "You can't tell anyone. Come on, Luna. Please."

"You don't need to beg, Ronald," she said. "I won't tell."

"Thanks, Luna," Harry said. 

"But we'll have to think of something to say," she continued. "People saw that explosion. We did, didn't we? And we weren't half paying attention."

Ron nodded, and Harry couldn't be sure in the darkness, but he thought Ron had gone beet-red. 

"And they'll want to know about Devona," Luna added. 

"We tell mostly the truth," Harry said. "I saw them go into the brook, I tried to save them, and could only find Jane. You two helped me pull her out. We just … leave out the rest. All right, Jane?"

"You … you didn't even know who it was you were fishing out of the river," she said. 

"Exactly."

"Our wands …"

"Up on the hill," he said. "Mine … who knows? I either dropped it there, or it's on its way to the Atlantic Ocean by now."

"I'll go look for them," Luna said. "Ron will go to the village and bring back help. Maybe there's still a chance to find Devona. And Jane looks like she could use a Healer. Sorry, Jane, but you do look dreadful."

"Where'm I going?" Ron asked as she tugged him to his feet. He looked like he was not sure what to make of a decisive, quick-thinking, fast-acting Luna. 

"I'm going up there by the Shrieking Shack. It's horribly haunted, you know, but I have it on good authority that ghosts can't stand it if you sing the goblin song. You're going to the Three Broomsticks or anyplace there are a lot of people, to tell them about Devona and bring back a Healer and a search party."

They set off, Luna breaking into song, Ron rubbing his head in disbelief. 

"How are you doing?" Harry asked Jane. He was still holding her, still stroking her face, but now she turned her head away. 

"Harry … you should have let me go."

"What? That's crazy, what are you saying?"

"It's no good. I … I can't go on like this. All the deception, and the betrayals!"

"So you want to die, is that it?" Harry shook his head. "I don't think so, Jane. Not on my watch."

"You can't save me every time, Harry."

"Try me."

"You can't save me from myself!"

"There's nothing wrong with you."

"You say that, but –"

"I say it because it's true."

"I killed Devona!"

"Jane, I was there. I saw what happened. She had you at wand's point, she had you by the neck. I don't know what you two were saying to each other, but she was the one who was trying to hurt you."

"But I –"

"Maybe she wouldn't have been out there in the first place if not for you, okay," Harry said brusquely. "But that makes it as much my fault as yours. The rest of it, the lightning bolt and the water … none of us had any control over that. You can't blame yourself for this. I won't let you."

"You … you're crushing me again," she said. "Maybe you should –"

"No," Harry said.

"Ron will bring others," she said. "They can't find you holding onto me like this."

"I'm tempted to let them."

"Harry, we can't! That was the … Devona … the whole thing …"

"All right," he said. "Just … first …"

"What?"

"This." 

He kissed her.

Jane went still as a statue, and Harry thought for certain that she was going to slap him so hard his eyes spun in his head like pinwheels. But then she kissed back. They were both drenched and in the middle of the pouring rain, but somehow it didn't matter this time. 

When it broke, he let go of her and she sat there looking stunned, touching her own lips with trembling fingertips as if she could not believe what they had just done.

"We … really shouldn't …"

"So what?" Harry said defiantly. "We shouldn't. We both know that. We did it anyway. And don't you dare regret it, Jane, because I don't."

She bowed her head for a while, then raised it. "You saved my life, Harry. Thank you. I … I hope that you never regret that, either."

"I really wish you'd quit saying stuff like that."

"See the little goblin, see his little feet," Luna sang, skipping back into view with her unbelted raincoat flying back in the wind, puffer fish swinging from her earlobes, and a cluster of wands held in one hand like a strange bouquet. "See his little nosey-wose, isn't the goblin –" she stopped singing. "Oh, here you are! I found three. Which one is whose?"

"Mine," Harry said, claiming it.

"And that one's mine," Jane said, taking hers. 

"So, the song worked?" He tried not to smile. 

"Perfectly," Luna said in all seriousness. "I didn't see a single ghost or hear anything but the wind and thunder."

"That's great," Harry said. "Good to know."

A few minutes later, Ron showed up at the head of an excited mob. The storm had lessened enough for them to venture out, especially with a tale of an emergency like this. Most of them were students, and the sight of Harry and Luna sitting there with a very wet and bedraggled Jane left them boggled with astonishment. 

Nadine Zellis and Tiberius Flint pushed in and took charge of Jane, shooting suspicious glares at Harry and Luna. She told them in a shaky, stammering voice that she and Devona Stormdark had been up by the Shrieking Shack, trying to shelter from the storm under the oak, when it had been struck by lightning and they'd fallen into the brook. She said that the next thing she knew, someone was pulling her out. 

"You saved a Slytherin?" Dennis Creevey asked Harry in what was perhaps intended to be an undertone. 

"Oh!" Hermione huffed. "And I suppose we should just let someone drown because they're Slytherin?"

"I didn't mean it like that," Dennis said, abashed.

"Besides," Colin said, trying to be helpful, "he probably didn't know she was Slytherin until he got her out of the water."

At the same time, Millicent Bulstrode was saying, "Ugh, saved by a Gryffindor, I'd rather have drowned!"

"Saved by Potter," Tiberius Flint said, and made a face. 

Ron had also gotten Madame Rosmerta to send an urgent owl up to the school, despite the weather, and moments later a bunch of teachers arrived. Hagrid and Firenze, the two most durable beings among them, each led a search party of adults and seventh-year volunteers down the opposite banks of the Hogsbrook.

Madame Pomfrey checked Jane over, commended Ron for his adept use of the Awakening Charm, and had her sent up to the hospital wing with her Student Apprentice, Lavender, while she stayed behind in case her skills were needed when Devona was found. Jane went with no protest, accompanied by Nadine Zellis. 

"Oh, and here's this," Luna said, holding up Devona's wand. "I found it caught up in some driftwood."

She turned it over to Professor Snape, who pocketed it with a thin-lipped scowl. Harry noticed that many of the Slytherins were sticking close to Snape, and muttering amongst themselves. 

"—grandfather was a Death Eater," Harry heard one of them say. 

"Her uncle, Damien Stormdark, is married to Draco's Aunt Lucrezia," someone else said. 

"It's true, isn't it?" Pansy wailed, wringing her hands. "Someone's killing the descendants of Death Eaters! Oh, Draco! What if they come for you next?"

"Enough," Snape said, his voice like the sudden crack of a whip. "Mr. Malfoy is perfectly safe, as are the rest of you. What happened here tonight is nothing more than accident and misfortune, I assure you. And for all we know, Miss Stormdark will turn up fine and well –"

A hue and cry went up from three hundred yards or so downstream, and flurries of red wand sparks fired into the rainy sky, where they were swiftly scattered by the wind. Everyone who had stayed behind now stampeded that way, Snape and Madame Rosmerta trying vainly to dissuade them. 

Firenze had found Devona, her body caught against one of the stone stanchions that supported the train tracks where they crossed the Hogsbrook. She had been removed from the water by the time the rest of them arrived, and Madame Pomfrey had covered her with a cloak, but the solemn sight of her draped body left them all silent and grim. 

"All right," Professor McGonagall said, shooing them away from the circle of wand-lights. "Back to the castle, all of you. It's very late, hours past the time you all should have been back, but the rain's let up enough. Quickly, now."

Even with the rain having let up some, it was a long wet wretched trudge through the mud up to Hogwarts. No one said much. Hermione and Ginny in particular kept shooting Harry looks, knowing somehow that there was much more to the story than what they'd been told, but Harry didn't say anything. 

He knew he should be distressed by the death of yet another student. But all he could think of was Jane. How it had felt to almost lose her, to have her be alive after all, to hold her. To kiss her. 

And yet … all the things she had said, all the points she had made. She was Slytherin. The daughter of a Death Eater. They couldn't be right for each other. Both of them knew it. Was that part of what they felt? The forbidden attraction, the secrecy, the doomed nature of any such relationship?

The daughter of a Death Eater. He wondered who her father had been. Dead long ago, no doubt, one of the many killed by Aurors – no surprise that she'd been so alarmed, then, by Tonks and Moody showing up – or even murdered by Voldemort himself in a fit of pique. Hadn't Sirius' brother Regulus died like that? Tried to back out of the Death Eaters and discovered the hard way that it was a one-way-only commitment, that was what Sirius had said. 

Harry thought about that as he climbed the steps to the entrance hall. He thought of the Death Eaters he'd met … Snape, Karkaroff, Macnair the executioner, Bellatrix Lestrange, Crabbe and Goyle Senior, Lucius Malfoy. He knew how he felt about their children. 

What if Jane had told him she was Snape's daughter? Draco Malfoy's sister? What if her father had been Barty Crouch Jr.? He had said it didn't matter. Did it? Would he still be able to care about her?

The house-elves had waited supper, an informal meal of beef stew, fresh crusty bread, and hot apple crumble. Perfect for a cold, stormy day, but once they had all dried off and changed clothes and taken their places at the long tables, all anyone could do was pick at their food. For once, it couldn't even be blamed on too many butterbeers or an overindulgence in Honeydukes sweets. 

Speaking of which … Harry started and touched his pocket. He had Jane's bag of candy in there as well as his own. Her mint truffles and Cinnamon Chews and Orange Creams and other purchases. How was he going to get them to her?

Later, up in the Gryffindor common room, he was keenly aware of Hermione and Ginny waiting with ill-concealed impatience for everyone else to go to bed so they could ask him about Jane. But Harry, reminding them that there was Quidditch the next day, suggested that his team retire early and took his own advice. 

Ron followed him up to the dormitory and they got into their pajamas. Harry was lost in his own thoughts when he noticed something, did a double take, and even rubbed his eyes to look a third time. 

"Hey, Ron?"

"What?" he yawned, getting into bed. 

Despite himself, Harry broke into a wide grin. "Ronald Bilius Weasley, is that a hickey on your neck?"

**

Continued in Chapter Twenty -- Kiss and Tell.