IV

IV

Severus strolled slowly through the earthen passageway, letting the cool, musty air wash over his icy skin. There were no torches or candles, only the tiny pinpricks of light that were his eyes. He had always preferred the dark, even before his change, and now that he could see infinitely better in the dark than he could during the day he loved it all the more. Sounds and smells seemed heightened and more profound when the shadows crept over the world. The shadows had grown longer, the smells growing more pungent and tinged with metal, the sounds more unreal and less earthy as the years had passed him. He missed the quiet rustle of the wind through the grass, the way the nightingales would sing in the dank emptiness. It had been many years since he had felt those sensations, years that still pained him when he thought of them.

He was born in 1779 in a small hamlet outside of Oxford. His parents, Joseph and Elizabeth Snape, were peasants, poor farmers who were barely able to grow enough food to feed themselves and their three children. Severus was the oldest of the three and the only son, born five years before his twin sisters, Sophia and Georgiana. They were sickly from the day of their birth to the day they died in 1786. His mother had suffered half a dozen miscarriages between Severus and his sisters, and their death was difficult for her to manage. She seemed to waste away after their burial, and his father turned to the bottle to numb his grief and disappointment. His wife had given him but one healthy child and that one was still thin, gangly, and more inclined to spend his time with a traveling monk than in the fields.

As a child, Severus had developed the love of learning that followed him throughout his lifetime. Neither of his parents could read, having no need for it, although they were both well versed in mathematics. It was necessary to keep track of how deeply impoverished they really were. So Severus spent his mornings following after his father in the fields, pushing a plow, sowing seeds, digging up roots and weeds, and spreading manure and water. He would slip away quickly after lunch, when his father would sample a good measure of whiskey and drop into a stupor until supper, and run barefooted to the village church. The priests and visiting monks took kindly to him, amazed to see a young boy of such limited means so desperate to devour all types of knowledge. They taught him his letters, guiding him toward literacy by giving him passages of the Scriptures to copy and memorize.

His father despised the fact that his pitiful, good-for-nothing son would attain a life better than his own. He turned violent, fueled by his own self-loathing and grief, and began beating his wife. It began with Elizabeth, who was so drowned by her own despair over losing so many children that she refused to fight back. For years it continued, the beatings becoming more frequent and escalating in their ferocity until young Severus could no longer stand idly by and watch his mother so willingly submit to such a tyrant. He was thirteen the first time he stepped between his father's fist and his mother. He was twenty-one when he beat the wretched drunk to death after Joseph trampled her with the plow horse.

Severus left his childhood home the very same night after dousing the small house with what was left of his father's drink and setting it afire. The flames burned away everything that defined who he was, who he had been, and who he would have become. He spent several years wandering the countryside, spending the night in the dense woodlands and glens or preying upon the hospitality of the clergy. The night of his twenty-fifth birthday, he arrived in a village outside present day Leeds. It was there he met Madeline Gorout, the youngest daughter of the town vicar. They were married at Christmas 1814. Having what learning he had gathered on his wanderings, the vicar appointed him as schoolmaster and allowed him to use a portion of the meetinghouse as a schoolroom. It was the happiest Severus could remember being in his human life.

Although Madeline was young and healthy, she was unable to bear children. But it did not matter to Severus. He was pleased enough to love her and be loved in return. They lived pleasantly together for five years before it happened...the night of his transformation. The circumstances surrounding the arrival of the coven were blurred in his memory now, many of his human memories were buried too deeply beneath the being that he had become. He could remember running from the meetinghouse as he heard the bloodcurdling screams erupting from the small home they shared nearby. By the time he was able to break through the barred door, the leaders of the coven had drained Madeline of every drop of blood in her veins. They were on him before he could resist, tearing at him with such ferocity that he could feel nothing but a searing pain.

Time moved quickly for him after his transformation. He fled when he awoke to find his maker staring down at him, his pale skin nearly translucent in the quiet light of dawn and his fangs tinged scarlet with the blood he had taken. "Be still, my son," said his maker, careful to keep contact with his victim. "The pain will fade quickly as long as you stay with me for a while longer, then you may go as you wish, to feed or to join my coven." Severus felt such anguish, such overwhelming loneliness that he could not refuse the offer of a new family. He followed the coven for nearly a hundred years before he grew weary of the carnage and destruction they left in their wake as they traveled across the world. In early 1914, he left the coven and exiled himself to the furthest reaches of the North.

He paused in his memories, feeling with his mind for Hermione. Relief washed over him as he felt the peace radiating from her as she remained curled up, reading as if her entire being had not changed. It was astonishing how easily she slipped back into her former self, how easily she seemed to push the murderous instincts of her new life away from her. He was jealous of her ability to do so. It had taken him forty years to master his urges, during which time he discovered a new gift that his maker had passed on to him. He was able to do magic.

"You've noticed, have you?" Cedric asked through clenched teeth. He wasn't sure if he wanted to look into the younger boy's eyes. There was a dark warmth that spread through his face.

"Not that hard to miss, mate," Ron answered. He stared at Cedric for a long moment, wondering why Dumbledore and McGonagall had allowed him in the Gryffindor common room. "Every time we go in the Three Broomsticks you're there, staring at her like she's going to disappear. You watch her through the window when she's in the bookshop, but you act like you're looking at whatever it is they've got in the display. I'm not as much of a dunce as everyone thinks I am, you know."

Cedric grinned ruefully, picturing the look on Hermione's face as she slowly paced the aisles of the bookshop. He wanted desperately for her to turn that gaze of intense satisfaction and desire on him. He wanted to hold her in his arms, to feel her curls flow like silk between his fingers and her skin soft and warm beneath his fingertips. "I'm that pathetic, aren't I?"

"Nah," the redhead replied, feeling genuinely sorry for Cedric for the first time. "You've just noticed what the lot of us are too slow to realize. 'Mione's like my sister now. When they find her, if you hurt her..." He paused, arranging his face into a grimace of authority. "If you hurt her, I'll kill you."

Professor Dumbledore walked through the dungeons stealthily, his wrinkled hand gripping his wand as a precaution. In all the years that he had known Severus Snape, never once had Snape taken another's life. He had spent so long denying himself, striving to maintain his distance from everyone around him that it was unfathomable that such resolve could suddenly shatter. The headmaster was unsure of what he would do when he found them, though he hoped desperately that his assumption was wrong.

His footsteps echoed off the deserted stone corridors, his very breath seemingly amplified by the silence. He knew that he was no match for Snape's strength and speed, although he was confident they would be an even match if it came to wands. The determination that Snape poured into repressing his thirst fueled the strength of his magic to such a degree that he was nearly unstoppable.

"Headmaster," came a silken voice from a short distance further down the corridor. Snape stood in the flickering light of the torch on the wall above his head, his onyx eyes fixed steadily on the withered old man with a gaze akin to affection. "May I help you with something?"

Dumbledore's grip tightened reflexively on the handle of his wand as he faced the enigmatic being in front of him. "Severus," he replied calmly. "Where is Miss Granger?"

"Miss Granger? I'm not sure I know what you mean, Headmaster."

There was a strange look that stole over Dumbledore's usually genial features. "Do not lie to me, Severus. Neither of you appear on the map of Hogwarts. Now tell me what you have done with her."