To Kill You With a Kiss

Chapter 2

"Serpentigena!" Tom Riddle spoke softly to the serpent on the door. "Make sure you remember this password, Elias," he added as the door to the Slytherin common room swung open before them.

Harry nodded silently. Serpentigena? Serpent-born? That should be easy enough to remember, my Dark Lord.

The Slytherin common room of this time was not all that different from the way Harry recalled it from his brief visit during his second year at Hogwarts. The cavernous room had the same air of refined decadence he remembered. The dark green couches were plush and opulent, and the baroque chairs were adorned with twisting serpentine carvings and rich moss-colored velvets. There were too many skulls about for Harry's liking: real skulls displayed on shelves and low tables, and silver ones woven into the tapestries, caressed by embroidered serpents. Ornate silver lamps with malachite shades cast the room in a soft green light. Glass bottles filled with liquid of an unnatural emerald hue glittered among the ancient volumes that filled the book shelves. Absinthe? No, more likely to be some vile poison... In a corner of the common room, two young wizards were playing a silent game of knucklebones with what looked horribly like real bones.

A hush fell over the room as Harry entered with Tom Riddle. Tom Riddle may be only a year older than some of these students, but he is already more than a professor in their eyes. How they look at him, these future death eaters, as if they already glimpse the Dark Lord he will become...

"This," said Tom Riddle, his voice clear in the sudden silence, "is the new seventh year student you were told about, Elias Black. I am pleased to inform you that he was sorted into Slytherin House, and I ask you to do your utmost to make him feel welcome. Mr. Black is new to Hogwarts, but not, it seems, to the study of the Dark Arts."

All at once, Harry found himself surrounded by dark-robed students who shook his hand and welcomed him. He could not keep track of all the names and faces, but some were familiar to him: Abraxas Malfoy, flaxen-haired and grey-eyed like Draco. The square-jawed and muscular Tiberius McLaggen. The haughty raven-haired Druella Rosier, so like her yet unborn daughter Bellatrix that Harry flinched.

A girl with brilliant sapphire eyes introduced herself as Araminta Meliflua. Harry thought for a moment that she looked rather sweet for a Slytherin; then he recalled with a shock why her name was so familiar to him: Sirius had once mentioned her campaign to make Muggle hunting legal.

There were several Blacks among the Slytherins. The quiet Alphard Black was in Harry's year, while Alphard's brother Cygnus and their cousin Orion were a year younger. Alphard Black. You must be Sirius' favorite uncle... Years from now, your name will be blasted off the family tree. How odd to think that some of the students I am meeting are already dead. They are only alive inside this memory. Harry took an immediate liking to Orion, Sirius' father, whose wild black curls and mischievous eyes were reminiscent of his unborn son. Cygnus, one of the knuckle-bone players, was the most handsome of the three Blacks, but there was something hard in his eyes that Harry did not care for. I can see your future daughters Bellatrix and Narcissa in your beautiful and cruel features, but how on earth will you and Druella produce the sweet Andromeda?

A pale girl was sitting by herself in the corner. She did not get up to greet him as the others did, but her dark, inscrutable eyes lingered on Harry's face. She seemed strangely familiar, but it took a moment before Harry realized who she was: Eileen Prince. Snape's future mother. Years from now, she will give birth to a murderer...

"Another Black?" Cygnus' dark eyes swept over Harry. "How exactly are you related to the rest of us, Elias? And why aren't you named after a constellation, like the other Blacks?"

I don't know the answers to your questions any more than you do, long-dead Cygnus Black. I don't know who named me. I don't even know whose memory this is, or how I came to be in it.