Undead Secrets

A/N: Okay people, here is the new and improved Chapter 1, much better if I do say so myself!

Disclaimer: Nope, don't own a thing.

Chapter 1: A Short Introduction

September 1st, 1997

The weather was muggy at best. The sun tried shining through the haze over the city. Part of it got through and part of it didn't. It did make for a hot day. Coupled with the Atlantic humidity that was a constant presence, the day was a typical one for England. A very warm, almost hot day that promised a cool night later on when the sun said "see ya later" to the Greenwich Time Zone and went in search of another continent to blister with some cosmic plasma.

Harry sat in his usual compartment on the Hogwarts Express. It was the second to last car on the train. It was the second to last compartment. For some reason he had always felt it was his compartment.

He sat alone.

Always alone.

Every year had been the same. People never really got around to talking to him. Not on the train, not at Hogwarts. Even the trolley lady skipped him by.

Harry figured it was due to him being a little weird.

Unique might be a better word.

Unique... phttt. More like a freak of nature. He was different.

And he knew it. He had been just seven years old when something happened to him after all – something big.

Something that caused him to be unique in the world.

Unique and alone.

Harry sat in his seat looking out the window of the train as it sat waiting patiently for the students to board. Last minute hugs and kisses from parents to nervous younger students could be seen everywhere. Harry had long ago stopped longing for that sensation. It didn't help his frame of mind when the emotions associated with that longing caught up to his cranium from his heart. But, still, intellectually, he did wonder what it was like.

Harry thought back over his life. Harry was just a little one year old when he lost his parents. He heard it had taken over 12 Death Eaters to take them down; a fact that made Harry sad and a little proud at the same time. Proud to know that his parents had taken those that came after them down while protecting him, essentially giving their lives so he would live. Sad because they were gone. The ones who would have probably loved him the most in his life were gone. Just because some sick bastard had dreams of becoming an Evil Overlord.

With no other relatives to go to, Harry was shuffled around for a few days to various other families who decided they didn't need a fosterling and he was eventually stuffed into some old orphanage and forgotten. Well he couldn't really blame them – he was sort of forgettable. He could never really figure out why probably something to do with the fact that he tried to make himself invisible. Harry never knew for sure if he'd seen the Death Eaters attack his parents or not, but he suspected he had and it had left an impression in his mind. Hide. Scrunch down. Keep still. Survive.

Actually, that wasn't entirely true. He had found out several years ago that he did indeed have relatives he could have gone to. His mother's sister, her husband, and her three kids – Dudley, Doris, and David. Harry had wanted to meet them one day and did a quick reconnaissance of the place. It was ordinary. Completely ordinary. All of the family but the mother had a problem with weight control and apparently the old man had temper issues as he occasionally swatted one of his kids for not mowing the lawn faster. They should try a page out of his life – being pursued all the time was a great cardiovascular workout. Harry wasn't so sure if he'd been better off going to the orphanage than with living with him. Both locations offered unique challenges – and he wasn't sure dying from child abuse was the better option. Close, but not preferable.

Harry had found them through some snooping of old orphanage records when he'd looked for information on his parents. He'd found a memo written by a case worker saying that the Dursley's had flat out refused to allow a "freak like him" into their house. That had been the last stop before the orphanage.

Harry pretty much grew up in this orphanage; sure he went to different foster parents and homes, but for some reason they never worked out and he would always end up back at the same old orphanage. By the time he was seven he had already been through seven different foster families. Lucky seven. The magic number. Oh the irony. See it was that night, the night of his seventh birthday, July 31st, that everything took a turn for the worse. When Harry looked back on that night he wondered what his life would have turned out like if he had not run away from the orphanage. But be that as it may, he had still run away and that was ultimately the biggest mistake of his entire life. It wasn't the fact that he had run away it was what happened later that night.

He was attacked by a vampire.

It had started with the sound of a crow. The "Caw! Caw!" sound it made in the middle of the night. To a scared young boy who was hiding behind some trash cans in an alley, it was a terrifying sound. He'd noticed it was near midnight from a clock he'd seen on a building. The night had gotten quieter if that was possible. The insects had stopped making noise.

The wind had died down.

Harry tried to control his breathing, but he was nearly hyperventilating as he moved to peek around the trashcan to get a better view of the alley entrance. It was a warm night, but not overly so. Still, Harry was sweating from the fear in his stomach. A sensation told him to hide. Scrunch down. Keep still. Survive.

Sadly, it wasn't enough and a hand grabbed him around the shoulder and turned him around, pushing him up against a wall.

A man looked down on him.

A terrifying man.

"Hello, Harry," he grinned, Harry recalled. Then his incisors got longer and longer. "I've been looking for you. You did a good job running away."

He grinned and then bit Harry on the neck, piercing the jugular and began drinking.

Harry shook the vision out of his eyes. The train was starting to move.

It had taken time, Harry recalled, but he eventually found out who had bit him. Or who he suspected had bit him. It was the Crow. He'd heard that the vamp had some sort of sick pleasure in turning kids.

And hey, maybe Harry's life wouldn't be such a hellhole if he had actually turned.

Yeah. Right.

The vamp had tried to turn him but something happened to stop it and now he was stuck as some sort of human-vampire hybrid. He was still human in the one most important thing he could have – he still had his soul. So, yes, he still counted himself as human. But he was also imbued with many vampire abilities and that was just not normal. Even for wizards.

Mostly, Harry counted these as benefits. No, he didn't burst into flame at the first touch of sunlight, in fact he enjoyed being out during the day – within moderation. Harry preferred the dark as it was easier on his eyes and gave him fewer headaches. But he enjoyed the time a few years ago when he made his way to a beach and saw his first bikini. He could get to like that more.

Too bad he hadn't joined the sunbathers. But if he stayed under the sun for too long he would start getting a headache. The stronger the sunlight, the stronger the headache until it hit migraine proportions.

Plus, the pigmentation on his skin more resembled that of the chalky white of a vamp than that of a human. But that could have just been a British thing too, Harry smirked thinking back to his earlier years when he'd seen other boys in the communal shower his schoolmates shared.

No, Harry had no need for blood, nor did he like the taste and go lusting after it every second of the day. That detriment was reserved for those that had turned, thank god.

Yes, he got the strength and speed of a vampire. Okay so maybe he wasn't as fast or as strong but put it this way: he was abnormally so for a human. Probably closer to werewolf than vampire. That was only because the neurons were still firing up and down his body unlike the deadheads.

And yes he had the whole night-vision thing going on. The only problem with it was that his freaking eyes glowed in the dark which posed a little problem when he was at school. Fortunately, they only glowed in absolute darkness; when he still had nighttime light from stars or the moon, his eyes for the most part stayed normal. He got the night-vision benefit from then at that time, just that they didn't glow. It was freaky the first time he saw it happen in a darkened bathroom and noticed himself in the mirror.

That whole deal would be kind of hard to explain if somebody saw him at night, or even when the Hogwarts Express when through a dark tunnel, so he wore dark shades whenever he wasn't in class. Even at night. The few times someone had looked like they wanted to ask him why he wore them, he simply said, "Sensitive eyes," and left it at that. Nothing more ever came from it.

Harry liked having these advantages, as he liked to call them. There was just one tiny little problem with it all.

The entire Vampire community wanted him dead.

They were a bunch of wankers, no two ways around it.

Unfortunately, the entire two months he was not in school was spent fighting for his life. Either that or hiding which didn't go over too well since they usually found him anyway. Bastards.

If Harry was ever asked if he would give it all up he would say: "Hell yes" in a second but since that wasn't possible he had to live with it or die by it whichever way you looked at it.

Hogwarts was Harry's home; it was a place he could feel safe and somewhat normal. True, he was different, but then again so were all the kids he was going to classes with.

When he turned eleven and got his letter, Harry had felt something that he hadn't for a long time: happiness. He was happy that he might be spending time with people like him. He wouldn't be alone any longer.

At the age of seven he was forced to grow up and fast. So yeah, Hogwarts was his haven …but that never stopped him from sneaking out on weekends and, to be honest, he was a bit of a daredevil. Well, he hadn't started out that way, but events necessitated that he become one. He liked to test his limits. He speculated that he might have had a death wish, and if that were the case, if he was going to die he was not going to go out peacefully.

But the strangest thing was: nobody knew about it, not even Headmaster Dumbledore. Which was surprising as supposedly nothing got by that man. Well it was possible because he had the whole Voldemort problem to deal with and not to mention his favourite students.

The golden trio.

Dumbledore's attention was mostly on them: Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and the boy-who-lived himself, Neville Longbottom. The school's most well known students. Every student in the school knew their names, whispered about them in the hallways, some even stared on in awe. It was kind of pathetic really. But to their credit they never let all the attention go to their heads. They seemed nice enough.

Even though they didn't talk with him. It wasn't a big deal. Nobody talked with him. Not even the professors.

Harry James Potter.

What did anybody know of him, he wondered.

Nobody really new his name, nobody really talked to him, which suited him just fine. This way there was a lesser chance of his secret getting out.

And get out it would one day, he knew.

And when it did, it would only be a matter of time before he was locked up and studied. Or locked up, and cut open to see how he worked in the greater good for the magical community. God only knows if they'd bother to put him back together again.

Lousy healers and their hypocritical oath

No, that wouldn't do at all. It was better to be alone, to be invisible. To be alive. Surviving.

Little did Harry know that his life was yet again about to take another dramatic turn.

The train built up speed as it headed out of London for the long trek up to Scotland.

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This idea has been stuck in my head for a while now so I thought I would write it down and get it out of this mixed up brain of mine.

Peace\\//