“I’m sorry.” Harry Potter poked a finger into his left ear and wiggled it. “I must have misheard you. You’re what?!”

“I am your father, Harry,” Voldemort repeated, calmly.

Harry gaped at him. “You’re crazy!” he said, then remembered who he was talking to. “Well, crazier,” he amended.

“I’m afraid not, Harry,” Voldemort said. He smiled, in what was presumably supposed to be a beatific way, but which in actual fact just stretched his face muscles out like one of those creepy paintings. Harry shuddered.

“No, you’re wrong,” he stated. “After all, we look nothing alike. Not least of which because I have a nose . . . and hair.”

“But just think,” Voldemort purred, “you could make yourself live forever as I have, and then you could look this good too!”

The thought was just too much, and Harry fainted.

“Just a dream, it was just a dream,” Harry chanted to himself before he’d even opened his eyes. “Oh, please, Merlin, let it just have been a dream.”

Slowly, he cracked open one eyelid. Voldemort was still sitting on his throne – which was actually just a fallen tree trunk deep in the heart of the Forbidden Forest – smiling at him.

Nope, not a dream then.

Harry pulled himself up with the help of a handy-dandy nearby tree. He had to get out of here. Voldemort was certifiably . . . okay, Voldemort had always been certifiable, but now he’d crossed a line – or two – or three . . . heck, he’d just jumped merrily over the cliff of insanity.

Luckily, before Harry had to hurt himself thinking of a way out, help arrived in the dubious form of his potions professor.

“Professor!” Harry gasped, for once absolutely delighted to see the man, and threw himself at Snape. Oh, yeah! “Save me!”

“Sorry, Potter.” Snape neatly sidestepped and approached Voldemort, leaving Harry to fall flat on his face. “I’m not here to save you. I’m here visiting family.”

“Nuh-bluh-mmmrf-phooey,” Harry said, spitting out a mouthful of dead leaves.

Snape and Voldemort raised identical, politely incredulous eyebrows. “What was that, Potter?” Snape asked.

“You have family?” Harry repeated.

“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know?” Snape gave him a positively evil grin, one that made Harry’s insides turn cold and shrivel up. “Tom here is my brother.”

“Your . . .” Harry looked from one man to the other . . . thing. “But that would make you . . .”

For the second time that afternoon, Harry fainted.

“Potter. Potter!” Something slapped Harry’s face. “Potter, wake up!”

“Since he’s actually a Riddle, perhaps you might try that?” Voldemort suggested. He sounded very close, much closer than he’d been before. Harry cracked open an eyelid again.

“AGGHHHH!” Snape and Voldemort were both barely half an inch in front of his face.

“He’s awake,” Voldemort told Snape, pleasantly.

“Pity,” Snape replied, and smoothly rose to his feet. He crossed over to a nearby tree trunk – one that wasn’t being used by Voldemort – and took out a handkerchief to dust it off before perching himself on it.

Harry lay still, trying to get his heart to stop beating at a hundred miles an hour.

“But, if you’re Snape’s brother, then that makes him my uncle,” Harry said, hoping someone would tell him he was delusional.

“That’s correct, Potter,” Snape agreed. He looked smug. “You may call me Uncle Severus.”

For a second, Harry thought he’d throw up. “I’d rather not, thanks,” he muttered. “So how does that work? Since there’s got to be, what . . . fifty years between you?”

“Meh.” Voldemort lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “My father had an unfortunate accident with a time-turner that had fallen into a reversal potion. Apparently he disturbed my mother whilst she was brewing an incredibly complicated love potion.”

“I see,” Harry said, although he didn’t think he did. “So . . . what happens now then? Are you going to carry on trying to kill me?”

“Of course not, Harry!” Voldemort sounded scandalised by the very idea of it. “At least not until I’ve gotten my spare!”

Harry looked at him blankly.

“What?” Voldemort sounded surprised. “You’ve never heard the saying about having ‘an heir and a spare’?”

For the third time that afternoon, Harry fainted dead away.