It started out as a simple slumber party, just Neil and Harry and Mike and two of his friends, Rick and Arthur. Mrs. MacIntyre had gotten chips and dip, made a seven-layer taco dip, pizza bagels and bought five different kinds of ice cream, toppings, and waffle bowls. Neil said they could also have all the Coke they wanted or iced tea if they preferred.

They were just setting up for a rousing game of Quidditch when Mrs. MacIntyre announced that she and her husband were going out to dinner and a meeting with some clients and would be back at twelve. "Now, Mike, that means you're in charge while we're gone. You know the rules, no wild parties-"

"No drinking and no running naked through the streets, yeah, I know, Mom," finished her elder son. "Don't worry, I've got it all under control and we won't embarrass the neighbors." He aimed a friendly cuff at Neil's head. "Right, brat?"

Neil rolled his eyes. "Right. We'll behave, Mom."

But as soon as they were gone, Mike, who was a dark blond and had shifty blue eyes, reminding Harry a little of Draco Malfoy, smirked at his friends and said, "They'll be gone for at least five hours, the restaurant they're going to is forty-five minutes from here. So we'll have time to have a little fun while they're out." His two friends exchanged glances of forbidden delight. "But first, we'll play a bit of Quidditch." He looked at Harry. "Snape, you used to play for one of them fancy Brit academies, right?"

"I was a Seeker for my House team."

"Whatever. Now you can be Seeker for my team." Mike declared.

"Mike, Harry's my friend, not yours," Neil began angrily.

"Shut up, squirt, or else Mom and Dad are going to find themselves with a new lawn gnome," growled his brother. "I'm in charge and that means I get to say what goes. And right now, Snape's my Seeker."

Neil glared at his brother, but Mike cuffed him smartly about the head when the younger wizard leveled a finger at him. "Hex me, kid, and you'll be the sorriest little brother in the US."

"Like I'm not already," growled the younger MacIntyre. He looked helplessly at Harry.

Harry knew he could always refuse to play on Mike's team, but he had a funny feeling that if he refused, then he wouldn't be allowed to play at all, and he had been looking forward to a decent game for a week, ever since he'd missed the Alpha vs. Starseeker match. He wondered what was up with the older boy, normally Mike was not quite so overbearing. Harry supposed it might have had something to do with his friends being over. Malfoy had been like that, putting on a big show when he had Crabbe and Goyle nearby.

"Okay. Here's how we break this up," Mike declared. "I'm Captain and Chaser, Arthur, you're Keeper, Snape's Seeker, Neil you're the other Captain, and Rick you're the Beater for Neil's team."

Harry was puzzled. "But Mike, there's not enough people on each team for a game. How can we play?"

"That's easy. We'll play against our doubles." He waved a hand and a mirror version of each of them appeared. Mike caused two of Rick to appear so each team would have two Beaters, and doubled himself as well so they could have three Chasers. "Mirror Image spell. Illusions that look like you, sound like you, and sometimes react like you. We'll just make them wear different color robes. They'll last an hour or so." He summoned the Quidditch box where the balls and bats were stored. "C'mon, let's go."

They played for an hour and Harry had to admit it was weird seeing his mirror image flying along racing to catch the Snitch. Still, he knew how to concentrate and he soon caught the winged globe after forty-five minutes.

Then the game was over and Mike's team had won. "Not bad, Snape," said Rick. "You ought to try out for one of the varsity teams around here. You could make big bucks."

Harry shrugged, for making a lot of money had never appealed all that much to him. He had his legacy from James, after all, and his dad wasn't exactly strapped for cash either.

"Enough chitchat," Mike said. "We need to start making the food and the punch." He pointed at Neil. "Yo, little brother, that's your job."

Neil scowled. "What do you think I am, your house elf?"

"Now you're seeing the light. While you're doing that, I'm going to write a letter and then duplicate it. Radar! Where are you, you lazy bird?"

A rather old snowy owl flew out from a tree and landed softly on Mike's arm. The teenager strode inside, leaving Neil and Harry to stare after him.

Neil muttered some choice swear words before following the rest of them inside. "Harry, you know how to use an oven, right?"

Harry nodded.

"Good. Then you start on the snacks and I'll make the punch."

"What punch?"

"It's a kind my mom makes for parties. It has ginger ale, champagne wine cooler and frozen strawberries and peaches. It's really good. You can drink cupfuls and not get drunk, since it has such a low alcoholic content."

"And you learned how to make it from her?"

"Uh-huh. I watched her for as long as I could remember. It's not hard."

"Who was your brother sending letters to?"

"Nobody important. Just his friends. Probably inviting them over too."

"But didn't your dad say you could only have three friends over since they wouldn't be home?"

"Sure he did, but Mike's a teenager and of age, he breaks their rules when he feels like it."

Harry was starting to get an unusual feeling of discontent in the pit of his stomach. "These friends of his, they're wizards like us, right Neil?"

"Uh, yeah, most of them are. The few that aren't have brothers and sisters who are." He summoned the rest of the ingredients and began making the requested punch.

Harry went and got some more snacks out of the freezer. It looked like Mike was determined to have a party, come hell or high water.

• * * * * *

Ten minutes later, the friends Mike had written to began to arrive. Some of them Apparated, others used the Floo or came by broomstick. They were anywhere between sixteen and seventeen and they weren't all boys either. There were a fair number of girls too, all dressed casually in jeans skirts and tops that had revealing necklines.

One of the teenagers charmed a guitar and a set of drums and a microphone to play music. Heavy metal rock began blasting, making the windows shake.

The rest of them cheered. There were about twenty or twenty-five teenagers at the house, and Harry was sure more kept arriving every minute. He was kept busy making snacks and Neil placed the ones that were done on trays and the food disappeared in seconds. Harry felt like he was feeding a hoard of starving dragons. Not to mention this was not what he'd been expecting when he had agreed to sleep over Neil's.

"Does your brother do this a lot?" Harry queried, nearly having to scream over the music and the teenagers talking.

Neil shook his head. "Well, only when he's sure Mom and Dad are gonna be away for at least four hours. Technically he's an adult in the wizarding world, but my parents are Muggles and they don't go by that. An adult to them is over twenty-one, with a full time job and legal to drive, vote, and drink." He groaned. "I just hope nothing gets broken, like the last time."

Harry stared as a slender girl wearing nothing but a turquoise bikini strode to the center of the living room, snapped her fingers, and a table appeared. She then climbed on it and proceeded to sway and glide to the music in such a way that made Harry's heart begin to beat faster and his throat dry up. She was curved lushly, her hair flowed about her like waves of dark silk, and her face was the kind a man dreamed of, but never found in real life.

"Uh . . .Neil, who's that?" he pointed to the girl twirling and dancing. "She's . . .wow!"

Neil smirked. "Yeah, Aliyah's one hot babe, no? That's cause she's half-dervish."

"Half dervish?"

"Uh-huh. You know, a dervish is a fae species that lives to uh, drive men insane with their dancing and uh . . .you know . . .sex . . ." Neil's face was bright red. "But Aliyah's only a half-dervish, so she doesn't have the full effect." He swallowed hard. "Except when she's dancing."

Harry could certainly agree with that. All the males in the room were practically on the floor at her feet, while the girls were ignoring her or glaring at her with undisguised loathing. None of that seemed to bother Aliyah, who simply continued dancing, rotating her hips in a way Harry had always thought anatomically impossible.

"Neil, is she like, uh, Mike's girlfriend?"

Neil nearly choked on his pizza bagel. "Aliyah? Oh hell, no! If she was, Mike would be the luckiest guy on the planet as well as the one with the most death threats, since every man over the age of twelve automatically desires the dervish-born. No, Aliyah's not anybody's girlfriend, at least not that I know of."

Harry began to sample a few of the snacks while they were engrossed with Aliyah. He wasn't really hungry, since Aurelia had made an excellent dinner, but he figured he might as well eat something.

Neil brought him some taco dip and Tostidos from the table and a large cup of punch. Harry sipped the punch cautiously, but found it tasted delicious, sweet and fruity. "Hey, this is really good."

"Told you so," Neil looked smug. "Everybody likes Mom's punch. And the best part is, you can't get sloshed drinking it." He fetched himself another cup with a wave of his hand and drank it down. "C'mon, Harry. This is getting boring. Let's go upstairs and watch a movie or something. You've got SuperNintendo, right? Ever play Donkey Kong Country II?"

Harry quickly turned off the oven, all the frozen pizza bagels and cocktail franks were gone, and there was nothing else for him to make the horde of teenagers. Plus, he was sick of being Mike's personal chef, he'd had enough of that sort of treatment back when he lived with the Dursleys.

Time to beat a strategic retreat.

He swiftly followed Neil upstairs.

• * * * * * *

Two hours later, the party was still going strong, and one of Mike's friends had decided to liven it up even more by spiking the mild punch with a bottle of Buzz, which was the local slang for firewhiskey laced with a spell that made it ten times more potent than normal, it made you drunk almost immediately.

Mike didn't realize the punch was spiked until he drank some, and by then he was too sozzled to care. So was most anyone else. Only those who stuck to the soda and iced tea or had their punch before it had been doctored were unaffected.

As a result, the party grew louder and wilder, spilling out of the house and into the backyard, much to the annoyance of their next door neighbor, a crotchety old lady named Mrs. Elms.

She yelled out her kitchen window for them to tone it down, and received several catcalls, a finger, and was told to shut the hell up like the old bat she was. "Go back to bed, Grandma, and dream of the days when your husband was still alive and you were hot," shouted one obnoxious teenage boy with spiked green hair.

Mrs. Elms was incensed at the utter disrespect and rudeness. The nerve of those brats, disturbing her weekend movie night with their noise and partying. She had always said that the MacIntyre kids would be trouble one day and now she had been proven right. She didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know what was going on over there. An unsupervised party rife with drugs, sex, and alcohol.

"You kids better tone it down," she yelled. "Or else you're gonna be sorry!"

"Oh blow it out your ass, Grandma!"

Mrs. Elms gasped in fury. Then she slammed the window shut, her old wrinkled face bright with indignation. That did it, she was going to teach those impertinent whelps a lesson once and for all.

• * * * * *

Meanwhile, Harry and Neil could barely concentrate on their game with the bass pounding from the enchanted rock band downstairs and all the cheering and yelling going on. Neil was growing annoyed at the constant noise and said he was going downstairs to get some more punch and when he came back he was going to cast a Silencing spell about the room so they wouldn't have to hear any more of the celebration down below.

Harry simply nodded and wished he could cast that spell, he'd have done it already, his eardrums were taking a pounding. Five minutes went by and Neil didn't return. Frowning, Harry wondered what was keeping him. He waited ten more minutes, then decided to go down and see what was keeping his friend. Maybe Mike had commandeered him into cooking some more food or making more punch.

But when he reached the living room, Neil was nowhere in sight, in fact Harry couldn't even find Mike among the press of teens. But he did spot the punch bowl on the table. It was nearly empty and only one lone plastic cup remained.

Harry was thirsty and the punch he'd had before tasted great, so he grabbed the cup and filled it before any of the others noticed. Then he retreated to a semi-quiet corner near the front door and sipped it.

The punch tasted odd on his tongue. It was not quite as sweet, it burned the back of his throat. He coughed sharply, feeling a strange heat in the pit of his stomach. That's weird. I don't remember it tasting like this before. Maybe it tastes different when it sits there. He fished out a peach from the cup and ate it, not realizing that the fruit had been fermenting in the firewhiskey-laced punch for hours and was extremely potent.

Mmm. Now that's more like it. Sweet and . . .and . . .

He couldn't think of a word to describe the other flavor, it was dark and rich and it made him feel all warm inside. Harry took another gulp of the punch. It suddenly was very hot in here. He waved a hand in front of his face, trying to cool off.

He wondered where Neil was. They had been going to play . . . something . . .but now Harry was hot and his head was spinning . . .He decided to go outside for a breath of fresh air. Maybe Neil had done the same thing. The loud music was starting to make his head throb and he felt slightly ill.

He set the empty punch glass on the table and opened the front door. For some reason the autumn breeze felt deliciously cool on his face. He gasped, blinked, his eyes weren't working too well either, he kept seeing doubles of everything, and staggered down the stairs and onto the lawn.

In his inebriated state, Harry had no idea what he was doing or where he was going. He simply kept walking, trying to clear his head of the odd fuzziness, wondering why it was that his feet seemed determined to go in opposite directions.

His stomach felt weird, not quite nauseous, but getting there, and instinctively he sought the one person he trusted to make it better-his father. But his father was home, a part of his brain reminded him. So Harry turned his steps towards what he thought was his home, wandering down the street in a perfect drunken stagger.

Little did he know that the angry Mrs. Elms had called the police to complain about the wild party going on next door, and they were quick to respond, for teenage drinking had become a serious problem that they wished to nip in the bud.

A patrol car drove down the street, siren wailing, to pull up at the MacIntyre's driveway. The policeman didn't notice Harry walking alongside the street, almost to the intersection of the main road, totally not paying attention to his surroundings.

But a second patrol car came after the first, and this one spotted the thirteen-year-old weaving towards the busy intersection and pulled over. "Hey! Hey, kid! Where do you think you're going? You want to get run over?"

Harry looked up blearily. A hand suddenly fell on his shoulder. His befuddled green eyes encountered a strange man in a uniform. "Who're you, sir?" he asked, but it came out all slurred.

"You okay, kid?" the officer asked, peering at the boy sharply. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were three sheets to the wind, kid." He leaned down and sniffed, wrinkling his nose at the alcohol coming off Harry's breath. "Lord, kid, what've you been up to? You're too young to be drinking like this. How many did you have?"

Harry tried to make sense of that question. How many what did he have? Pizza bagels? Or glasses of punch? "Two. Jus' two."

"Two drinks?" repeated the officer in disbelief. "That's not enough to get you sloshed like this, unless you were drinking 150 proof." He took Harry's chin firmly in his hand. He had a daughter at home this one's age, he thought sadly. "What's your name, son? And where were you served the two drinks you had?"

"Harry . . .m'name's Harry Snape . . ."

"Okay, Harry. Now where were you tonight?"

His head spun crazily and for a moment he couldn't remember. He'd been flying, on a broomstick, at . . .his friend's house. "I was. . .at m'friend's . . .staying over . . .my dad said it was all right . . ."

"Who gave you the drinks?"

"Dunno. . ."

The policeman sighed. Clearly, the child was too drunk to give him answers to his questions, though he had a pretty good idea of where the kid had gotten the alcohol. The complaint had come from a house down this street, he'd probably been at that party. The officer debated on whether or not to go and help his partner corral the drunken teens, then decided his first priority was getting this one home safely.

He radioed for back up, then took the youngster by the shoulder and said, "Where were you going, son?"

"Home, sir."

"Good. That's where you should be. I'm Officer Downes, by the way. I'm a policeman. Would you like me to escort you home, Harry?" It was a rhetorical question, for Downes had no intention of allowing the boy out of his sight.

Harry thought for a minute. His brain was still fuzzy, but when he looked at the man in the blue uniform he felt a bit safer. "Okay."

"Hop in the car here," Downes said, gesturing to the black and white. "Where do you live?"

Harry bit his lip, sliding into the leather seat. Where did he live?

"Harry. Can you remember the name of your street?"

Slowly, Harry nodded. "It's . . .Whispering Winds Drive. . .on the bay. My aunt lives with us . . .55 Whispering Winds Drive . . ."

"Thanks, kid." Downes quickly ran the address through his police scanner and came up with a match, the house was owned by one Aurelia Prince-Burns, wife of a deceased Air Force Major, a private business consultant.

He glanced over at the dark-haired child, who appeared to have passed out. Downes shook his head. This kid had gotten himself mixed up with a bad crowd, sure enough. "Okay, Harry. Time to get you home, and hopefully your father won't tan your hide the way mine would've if I'd come home drunk as a skunk at eleven o'clock at night accompanied by a police officer."

He began to drive slowly up the street and down the main road to the next development.

• * * * * * *

The doorbell rang just as Severus was getting a second cup of tea prior to sitting down with Remus and discussing the very unwelcome topic of Dumbledore, who had asked Remus to please convey a message to Severus on his behalf.

"Now who in God's name could that be at this hour?" muttered the Potions Master.

Aurelia had gone to bed, as had Mia, hours ago, and he didn't want anything to disturb their rest.

He strode to the door and pulled it open to see a uniformed Muggle policeman standing on the porch, one hand resting on his son's shoulder.

"Harry? What happened?"

"Are you Mr. Snape?" asked Downes.

"I am," answered the Potions Master. "Why have you brought my son home? Did something happen at the MacIntyres?"

"Uh, you could say that, Mr. Snape. I'm Officer Downes and I found your son Harry wandering down the street fifteen minutes ago. He apparently had a few drinks at a party-"

Severus gaped. "What party? Harry, you never told me about a party." He leaned down to cup his son's chin in his hand and wrinkled his nose at the familiar stale stench of hard liquor. He would know that smell anywhere, God knew he'd smelled it thousands of times before, when Tobias had come home from the pub.

Harry blinked woozily up at his father. "Dad?"

Severus's mouth tightened. "Thank you for bringing him home, Officer. I'll take care of it from here."

Harry wondered why his dad was looking at him that way . . .like he wanted to slap him into next week or use him for potion ingredients. He couldn't recall doing anything to make his dad so mad . . .

"You're welcome, Mr. Snape. Good night," and then the officer was gone, leaving Harry standing before a very irate potions professor.

"Harrison Remus Snape," growled his father, giving him a glare that should have roasted him. "Get your backside in the house this instant, young man. Move!"

Harry winced at the tone and volume of his dad's voice. It made his head hurt even more, and somehow he had a bad feeling that he was in serious trouble.

He felt Severus's hand on his shoulder, propelling him firmly inside.