Title: Harry Potter and the Mystical Key
Author: CBrownJC
Disclaimers: Joss Whedon, J. K. Rowling, and their associates own both worlds. I'm just blatantly stealing from them, but only for the fun of it.
Rating: PG-13 (For Now)
Summary: Another in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Harry Potter crossover genre. A chance meeting and dark alliances lead Buffy, Dawn and the Scoobies into the world of Wizards, Witches, and assisting in the Second War against Voldemort.
Spoilers: All of BtVS, and the Harry Potter novels though Order of the Phoenix, with spoilers for Half-Blood Prince starting in Chapter Five and continuing from there. This story runs concurrent with season five of Angel the Series as well.
Relationships: The main one will, of course, be Harry/Dawn. (Look at the title of the story if you still don't get why). I've read a few Harry/Dawn fics and really like the idea of that pairing, and so decided to try my hand at one. The other main one will be Ron/Hermione. There might also be little side romances with other members of the Hogwarts students body, as well as some of the Scoobies. However, as of right now, that's a really big "might," so don't be disappointed if it doesn't happen.
Timeline: Obviously, I have messed with the known timeline of Harry Potter to make this story work. But for the people out there who really need to know this stuff: The events of Order of the Phoenix coincided with the seventh season of Buffy. Which means the events of Goblet of Fire coincided with Buffy's sixth season, and so on and so forth. So instead of the events in Harry Potter taking place sometime in the early and mid 1990s, they have taken place during the same years Buffy took place (the late 1990s and early 2000s). I've given Dawn a late birthday, like Hermione has, instead of one in the summer as most fan writers suppose she has.
Author Notes:
Right now, this story is about 20 Chapters long, though it could end up one or two chapters more or less. I'm hoping to keep it to about 20 though.
I've been looking around and reading some Buffy/Harry Potter crossovers lately, and decided to try my hand at one, because I wanted to try and avoid some things that keep bothering me about a lot of them:
1. Everyone who was dead - or thought dead - at the end of Buffy Season 7, and Order of the Phoenix will be remaining dead. There will be no bringing back to life of Sirius Black, Anya, Tara or anyone else. Willow has learned her lesson about that, and Harry is going to angst and grieve for Sirius, of course. But that's all. Spike is in LA with Angel at Wolfram & Hart, per Angel the Series. However, none of the Scoobies know he's back, as was pretty much implied on the show. The world of Angel doesn't really play much - if any as of right now - role in this fic.
2. Draco Malfoy in this story will not be fanon!Draco. Namely, he isn't going to change from being a prejudice Mudblood hater in two chapters because he's just a big softy underneath, or because he falls in love with one of the "good" guys. I'm not saying I completely rule out the idea of a Draco Redemption, or Draco Redemption stories (as I've read a few that have been done really well), but if that's the main thing you're interested in, you'll be disappointed. This story is mostly told from Harry's POV. So Draco will, for the most part, continue to be what he is in the books - one of Harry's antagonists.
Final Note: This chapter has been slightly edited to fix a few grammar mistakes.
Chapter One: Summers Night
It was only one week into the summer holidays, and as he walked along the streets of Little Whinging in the warm July afternoon, Harry Potter was already wishing for it to be over, so he could return to school.
A black-haired, skinny boy with black rim glasses that framed his bright green eyes, Harry had grown at least an inch or two more since the previous summer, when the residents of Little Whinging had last seen him. His clothes hadn't seemed to improve any from those views of him last summer, however. A baggy and faded T-shirt, faded jeans and old hand-me-down trainers were still all he ever wore.
Harry, however, had changed quite a lot since he had walked the streets of Little Whinging last summer. He felt much older than his soon-to-be-sixteen years.
Since Sirius had died, only two weeks before.
Harry Potter was a wizard, and attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And he knew he'd much rather be there right now, instead of walking around Little Whinging in the late afternoon, with nothing to occupy his mind except dark thoughts about his now dead Godfather.
The Dursleys were already making it a point to ignore him as much as possible, after the warning that Moody and the others had given his Uncle Vernon to treat Harry right while he was with them at Privet Drive this summer. The Dursleys could never treat him right, of course, so the next best, and easiest thing was to ignore him outright as often as they could. Ignoring him wasn't the same as being treated badly. Being ignored just meant he wasn't being treated in anyway directly.
On the whole, however, Harry didn't care that the Dursleys were, for their part, ignoring him. They had even stopped caring when he came back from his walks around Little Whinging. Last summer, he would get an earful if he came home only just a minute after his cousin Dudley. One day last week, he'd come home two hours after his cousin, and all his Uncle Vernon had done was snidely inform him that if he couldn't make it home in time for dinner, then he would just have to do without.
Harry didn't really take much pleasure in the afternoon and evening walks he took. Yes, it did get him away from the Dursleys and Privet Drive for a time, and there was nothing else that he had to do that could occupy his mind. He knew his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger were with the Order of the Phoenix, the group Headmaster Dumbledore had organized to fight against Voldemort. But their letters didn't contain much info about what the order was up to.
When he had been short of this type of news last summer, it had angered Harry more than anything. Now, he found himself not really caring one way or the other about what the Order was up to.
He knew he was being watched and followed by order members for his protection, but found himself not really caring one way or the other about that either. He assumed his guard detail had been changed since last summer also, so as not to draw attention to who they were, even from him.
Once in a while, he found himself wishing that Voldemort would try something to confront and kill him. It would at least get the inevitable final confrontation, that had to happen between them sooner or later, over with.
His attention was so occupied with all of his dark and jumbled thoughts, that he wasn't watching where he was going. And so he bumped directly into a person that had been walking in the opposite direction on the narrow pavement.
"Sorry," he murmured, glancing up. He had walked into a sullen looking, brown haired girl in jeans and a red top. She was around his height. She looked at him, annoyance added to the sullen expression. He didn't know her, nor had he ever seen her around Little Whinging before.
"It's okay," she said, her tone indicating more of a watch-where-you're-going, than it's-alright however. She continuing onto wherever she had been headed, brushing past him.
Harry gave her retreating form a mildly annoyed glance of his own - it was a bloody accident - before continuing on his way.
The sun was going down and it would be dinner soon, but, for the third time this week, Harry didn't feel like eating at the Dursleys. Dinner was just the same as any other time he was in the house, except more so. The only reason he was ever spoken to was an order to pass the salt or potatoes.
He had some Muggle money in his jeans pocket. More of it was hidden in the floorboards in his bedroom. He had written to Gringotts two days after the first time he'd missed dinner, asking them to take a specific sum of gold out of his vault, exchange it for Muggle currency and send it to him.
The money had arrived a few days later by Owl Post, and Harry had taken the opportunity to skip his second dinner at the Dursleys that night.
When he had come back, his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had said that he's missed dinner and would, again, have to go hungry. He had just told them he wasn't hungry and gone to up to bed.
Harry figured that if he at least ate breakfast and lunch there, he could miss the evening meals and they wouldn't wonder or care.
He headed over to a local Cafe, and took a seat by the window. He placed his order with the waitress, (a corn beef sandwich, a bowl of soup and some tea), and then sat and watched the people outside walking by, as he waited for his food.
He wondered if some of the people that walked past, that he did not recognize, might be his new bodyguards.
No one he spotted looked like they could be a witch or wizard, however. Most of his kind had become very cautious of going out now, what with Voldemort back again.
Among the traffic of people walking along the pavement, he noticed the brown haired girl in the red top he'd bumped into earlier, walking across the street. She had the same sullen expression on her face as she'd had before, as he watched her enter a small bookshop.
Some time later, as he was eating his food, he noticed Dudley and some of his friends walking by across the street as well. Dudley had told his parents that he was going out for tea with his girlfriend that day, though Harry had wondered about the truth of that. For one, Dudley did have a girlfriend, oddly enough. A skinny, Aunt Petunia-like girl with limp blond hair, named Nancy. She had come over for dinner once or twice, and Harry had seen her and Dudley snogging in the play park a few times.
However, having a girlfriend hadn't stopped Dudley from trying to chat up other girls as well, especially when he and his gang of friends were together. Harry had, unfortunately, witnessed some of those acts as well.
This line of thought led Harry to a stray thought about Cho Chang, the pretty Ravenclaw girl he had gone out with only once last term. He hadn't really thought of her at all since he'd come back to Privet Drive. That one date had been a disaster and, by the time Sirius had died, Harry knew he just didn't feel the same way about her as he'd used to.
Harry stayed in the Cafe after he'd done eating, until just after sunset. Afterwards, he headed for the local play park, near Privet Drive. It wasn't late, and he had no desire to head back to his Aunt and Uncle's just yet.
As he reached the corner, near the play park, he heard someone talking very loudly and very vulgarly that sounded familiar. Rounding the corner, his suspicions were conformed. It was Dudley, and with him, two other of his gang of friends and hanger-on's.
A high, female voice was shouting now, over Dudley's.
"Get your hands off me, you big creep!"
It was the brown haired girl again, the one he'd walked into today, and then noticed from the Cafe going into the bookshop.
Harry wondered for an idle moment if she was following him, if she was one of his bodyguards.
However, that didn't seem likely, as at the moment, she was being accosted by Dudley and the other members of his gang, and hadn't pulled out a wand or anything to defend herself with.
"Well, she's a feisty bird, hey big D?" Dudley best friends, a tall, scrawny, rat-faced boy named Piers Polkiss said. Harry knew Piers quite well, unfortunately. Dudley and Piers had been best friends since they were kids, and had been one of Harry's chief tormenters during that time, along with Dudley. Piers' main function in Dudley's little gang was to hold people while Dudley slugged them.
His job description now seemed to have been expanded to holding young girls hostage, as one of his lanky hands was gripping the arm of the brown haired girl, holding her in place on the pavement.
"That she is." Dudley smirked. He winked at the girl. "Come on then. Just tell me your name. That's all I want to know."
The girl's face was flushed red with anger. "Let. Me. Go!" She said though gritted teeth.
"Aw, she's getting' her knickers in a twist," a crab-faced boy Harry didn't know said, with a sneer. "Maybe she'd prefer Piers or me instead, Dud."
"Shut up Jack," Dudley snapped, barley glancing at the boy. He smirked at the girl. "She's just shy, aren't you?"
"Leave me alone," the girl growled, her bright blue eyes flashing with anger.
The boys laughed. "Or you'll do what?" Piers sneered.
"Better be careful," Harry said, coming up from behind them, finally making his presence known. "You don't know what some people are capable of. Isn't that right Big D?"
Dudley turned around and faced Harry, his face suddenly going red.
"Hey. Isn't that your weirdo cousin D?" Jack asked, looking Harry up and down as he walked up.
"What are you going to do weirdo? Let us pummel you?" Piers smirked.
Harry kept his eyes focused on Dudley, while he answered. "Oh, I'm quite sure something will happen before that could ever happen," he said with a big grin, mockingly. "Right Big D?" He knew Dudley would get the meaning of what he was saying. For emphasis, Harry placed his hands in his back pockets, the right one of which held his wand.
Dudley's face went from red to pale in what seemed only an instant. "You're not allowed." he said in a low voice.
"Things've change Big D. Dangerous time now. You want to try me?" Underage wizards had always been allowed to use magic in extreme, life threatening cases. This didn't qualify as one at all, but Dudley knew that the wizard that had killed Harry's parents was back. So Harry knew that Dudley really had no way of knowing if the restriction on Harry using magic outside of school had really been lifted, or not.
Harry glanced at Piers and Jack. Both looked ready to take Harry up on what he asked, Jack already pushing up the sleeves of his shirt, his hands curling into fists. Please try me. Come on guys; let's have a go . . . .
Dudley, however, looked as if that were last thing he wanted. His large face had gone from pale to a sickly green now.
Harry noticed the girl looking back and forth at this exchange between him and Dudley, but she didn't say anything.
Instead, she acted.
Without warning, she locked both her hands together in a fist and, using the force of her free arm, hauled her trapped arm back, elbowing Piers directly in the ribcage.
Hard.
There was a loud thud as the girl's elbow made impact with Piers chest. Because he had been caught off guard by her act, he promptly let go of the arm of hers that he had been holding.
This then gave the girl an even better advantage than before.
All Harry saw was the swing of her fist, and heard Piers gasping, "You bloody bin-" as her fist made contact with his face.
She wasn't strong enough to knock him flat on his back. However, Piers head did snap back with a pop! as her fist struck its target.
Harry stared open mouthed at the tableau, somewhere between surprise and laughter, as he watched Piers gasping. One arm was rapped around his chest, the other was holding his nose, and Harry could see something red beginning to seep through his fingers.
"Ma nose! Tshe boke ma nose!"
"And I'll break something else if you all don't get away from here," the girl threatened, looking around at Dudley and Jack.
Harry, chuckling, rejoined smiling at his cousin. "And I'll be more than happy to help her with that, in the way I can," Harry said, one hand still on his right pants pocket.
Dudley paused for only a moment, then took hold of Piers and hauled him forward, away from the girl and Harry, his bloated face now a high red again.
"Buth D, tshe -!"
"Move it!" Dudley snapped, pushing Piers ahead of him. They hurried down the pavement, Piers still holding a hand against his bleeding nose.
Harry couldn't stop chuckling and he watched Dudley and his friends retreat and finally disappear from view as the rounded the corner. He turned to the girl beside him, still laughing. "That. Was. Brilliant."
The girl's angry glare relaxed at his words, and she smiled a small smile.
Harry returned the gesture. "Alright?" he asked.
The girl shrugged, rubbing her arm. "I'm okay. Thanks."
They both went quiet again for a few moments, just looking at each other. The girl's long brown hair had streaks of blonde in it he noticed, giving it a bright and shiny appearance. She had a rosy pinkish complexion, and was dressed in a simple pair of jeans that flared out around her boots, and a dark red thin strap tank, with a matching light jumper tied around her slim waist, as the night was rather warm. The light from the lamppost brought out the brightness of her wide light blue eyes.
"So, are you really related to that guy?" she asked, waving a hand in the direction Dudley and his friends had run off in.
"My cousin, unfortunately."
"Has he always looked like a beached whale?"
Harry gave another snort of laughter. He didn't realize it, but in the space of few minutes, it was the first time he'd laughed in over two weeks. "Ever since I can remember."
"Then really, thanks for the help. Shamu and his gang of lackeys . . ." she shook her head, her pretty face screwed up, and she gave a mock shiver of disgust. "Eee-yah!"
Harry stuffed his hands into in his front jeans pockets. "So. You're not from around here," he noted.
She gave a short nod of affirmation. "Nope."
"From The States?"
She smiled. "Was it the accent?" she asked, exaggerating her speech, making it sound more prim and proper.
Harry's smile grew. "Pretty much."
"I'm from California," she informed him, as she sat down on a nearby park bench. "Born and raised."
He sat down next to her. She seemed nice, though he was still a little on his guard. One thing he'd learned was that you could never really know who was a supporter of Lord Voldemort. "Visiting family here?"
"Not so much." She paused. Then, gave him a rueful look. "More with the finding a new home, since the old one is now a big hole in the ground."
He looked at her, confused. "What?"
"I'm from a town in California called Sunnydale," she told him. "Or, at least, I was from there. Don't know if you've heard it on the news over here, but the town's little more than a giant hole in the ground now, which the entire place sank into."
"Oh, yeh, I have heard about that place." The news of it was, actually, on the front page of the Daily Prophet for two days straight. The collapse of the Hellmouth in Southern California had sparked a lot of interest in the Wizarding world. The Muggle papers had called it a sinkhole, and a freak accident. The Wizarding world, however, reported that the University town had sat right on top of one of the most powerful Dark Nodes on Earth. There had been much speculation about the cause of the collapse, until the conformation from the Ministry of Magic of Voldemort's return came out after the incident in the Department of Mysteries, and pretty much took everyone's attention away from it.
"So, you're moving here?" Harry asked her.
She shrugged. "Maybe. My sister - well, her boss is British, and he's, you know. Setting up his business here, and stuff, so we might be staying." Then, her voice became a low grumble. "Or, at least, my sister is."
She sounded rather bitter. "And you're not staying?" Maybe she prefers to stay in The States, he thought.
"I want to stay too," the girl sighed, tiredly. "My sister, however, wants to send my off to Italy to go to school." She shook her head. "A Boarding school, and an all girls one at that. Can you believe it?"
She sounded disgusted at the very thought of going away to school. And here, I can't wait to get away from the Dursley's and back to my school.
"I go to a boarding school," Harry told her, after a pause.
The girl looked at him, an eyebrow raised. "Really?"
Harry nodded. "Yes. It's really quite a great school actually. I like it there much more than I like being at home even."
She looked at him, searchingly. "Oh. Is - is it an all boys school?"
"No, it's girls and boys."
The girl smirked. "Well then you're school's already 100 points ahead of the one my sister wants to send me to." She sighed again, looked down at the ground and kicking a stone she noticed with one of the nice boots she was wearing on her feet. "We had a fight about it this morning, and I kind-of stormed off. We're staying at an Inn in London, but I've already seen everything there is to see there in the past two weeks. So I hopped a ride on the rail system at the nearby station, and got off at the first stop I wasn't familiar with, and just started walking. So, this is . . ." She looked around for a second. "Surry, right? The only other place I've been, besides London, is in Bath where Giles lives. And this town's called Little Whiting, right?"
"Little Whinging," Harry corrected her, gesturing toward the carbon copy homes across the street. "And you won't find much that's interesting here. Little Whinging is pretty dull and boring."
"Trust me when I say, dull and boring in a town? Nothing to regret."
Harry looked at her. She was smiling at him, almost as if she had just shared some kind of secret with him. Still, he couldn't help his contradiction in reply. "And trust me when I say Little Whinging falling into a sink hole would be an improvement."
The girl didn't take any offence, just gave a snort of amusement, and nodded in a way that let him know she understood that the town they were in was known more to Harry than her. If he said it would be improved by being swallowed into the Earth, then she accepted it.
He was surprised to find himself noticing that she was quite a pretty girl; now that she wasn't wearing the sullen expression she's had on her face when he'd first bumped into her earlier, of course.
"M'name's Harry, by the way," he held out his hand to her, suddenly feeling rather awkward, though he didn't know why. "Harry Potter."
She took his hand and shook it firmly, her bright blue eyes fixed on him, her full lips spreading into a friendly grin. "Hey, Harry. I'm Dawn."
He and Dawn (Summers, she'd told him her surname was) sat talking together for over two hours. She and her sister had just recently come to England a few weeks ago, with some of her sister's friends who also worked with her. She told him about how she'd been on the last bus that had left out of Sunnydale right ahead of the collapse.
She'd asked him if he was just staying with Dudley for the summer, and he'd told her about his parents having died when he was a baby. She, in turn, told him about her mother having passed away from a brain tumor when she was fourteen, and her dad being pretty much absent since she was a kid.
Talk of her sister wanting to send her to boarding school came up again, and he told her stories of his boarding school. Not that it was a school where Witchcraft and Wizardry was studied of course, but everything he could tell a Muggle who knew nothing of the magical world. Dawn did seem to like hearing about his school, but was only half-cheered up about her own boarding school prospects.
"It's just, I feel like Buffy - that's my sister - she's just. It just feels like she thinks the people who she's training are more important than me sometimes."
"Training?" Harry asked. Dawn had never mentioned what kind of work her sister did.
"Uh . . . yeah." For some reason, Dawn gave a start. As if just realizing what she'd said. "Yeah, training. She's a trainer. You know, for the business she works for. And everything." She glanced at her watched then, and Harry felt as if she was conscious of having almost said something she shouldn't have. "Oh is it that late? I'd better get back to the old inn, before there's a search party sent out for me." she said, quickly changing the subject.
She's covering about something, Harry thought, his eyes narrowing. He'd done such things enough times, since he'd discovered that he was a wizard, that he recognized it in Dawn's behavior.
Talking with her, he knew she couldn't have been an Auror, or one of the Order of the Phoenix members assigned to watch him that he ever saw. She was too young. (She'd mentioned that she'd turn 17 on the 1st of October.)
She couldn't be a witch. When he had told her his name, she hadn't shown the slightest shock or surprise learning who he was. Every witch and wizard in the Wizarding world knew who he was. He'd seen her looking at his scar once or twice, but again, not in the shock and surprised way most people in the Wizard world did. And she hadn't asked him about it.
He'd stop thinking a while ago that she could maybe be a Voldemort supporter. If she'd really been some kind of threat to him, he figured one of the Order members watching him would have done something by now, interrupted them, if they'd thought she was any kind of threat. And Voldemort didn't have Muggle supporters, as he hated all Muggles and Muggle-borns alike.
However, even if she was just a Muggle, she didn't seem like the type of Muggle the Dursley's were. Someone who would think that magic, and people like Harry, were weird and not "normal." She had a feel of something magical about her, even though everything about the way she talked and acted spoke of someone born and raised entirely in the Muggle world. Once or twice, however, Harry had gotten the feeling that if he'd told her about the Magical World, that she wouldn't have been surprised to learn of its existence. Though he didn't know why, exactly, she gave him that impression.
Could she maybe be a Squib? Harry wondered. Like Mrs. Figg?
Dawn looked at him, and ran her hand through her long brown hair. "Uh, I've walked around so much today, I'm a little turned around. Do you, like, know -"
He smiled. "How to get back to the rail station?"
She grinned, sheepishly. "Yeah-huh."
"Here, I'll show you," he said, rising from the bench.
"Cool, thanks."
Harry couldn't keep from smiling, something he'd rarely - if ever - done since Sirius' death. He was curious about what she had just covered about, (or for), but he'd also really enjoyed talking with Dawn. (Though, sometimes he'd felt he'd only understood two-thirds of the things she'd said, with her strange speech patterns.) More enjoyment he'd had in almost anything since he'd gotten back for summer holidays, that was a fact.
They talked lightly as he walked her to the bus line stop that would take her to the rail station, to take a train back to London. At the line stop, however, their conversation began to die out a little. And for only the second time since they'd began talking, Harry started to feel awkward again.
You might never speak to, or ever see her again once she leaves; the sudden thought shot through him like a jolt. Not only wasn't she from here, but she was a Muggle as well. Even when Harry was younger, and hadn't known he was a Wizard, he hadn't had any friends who were Muggles. Dudley had seen to that.
After he'd started Hogwarts, he'd met and made many friends, especially Ron and Hermione. All of them Wizards and Witches. After that, he'd just had no reason to look for Muggle friends, or even to meet any his own age. He'd spent most of his Summer Holidays focusing more on when he could leave the Dursley's and go back to Hogwarts, not trying to make friends with any of the other kids who lived around Privet Drive.
And because Dawn wasn't aware of the Wizard world, getting in touch with her again, if only just to talk, would be impossible to do though any magical means, like the Owl Post. Wizards - especially underage ones - were not allowed to reveal themselves to Muggles. It was only allowed in cases when a magical birth was noted in a Muggle family, like Hermione's parents, or certain people in Muggle Government, like the Prime Minister.
When she'd asked him about why he was living with the Dursleys, he'd told her about his parents having been killed when he was a baby, although he couldn't tell her the full truth of it of course. He hadn't used the lie his Aunt and Uncle had told him when he was younger, about them being killed in a car accident, however. Instead telling her the truth, that they'd been murdered, only leaving out the true nature about the man who'd done it.
Aside from Hermione, the only thing he'd really ever found to talk to most girls about for any length of time was Qudditch. He hadn't even mentioned his favorite sport to Dawn, however. She had also seemed to really listen, and understand, about having both of his parents gone. Something he didn't always think Ron and Hermione really got, no matter how hard they'd always tried to understand about it.
And, if he wanted to be able to not only talk with her again, but also to maybe just hang out with someone - giving himself something to do - while he was stuck staying with the Dusley's for the time, then there was only one thing for it:
He was going to have to ask her for her phone number.
Asking such a thing of a girl, (especially one you'd only just met), wasn't really necessary among witches and wizards, as almost all communication was done by Owl Post. And Post Owls could find anyone you wanted to send a message to, so there was never any need to ask the person where they lived, or where. Also, those wizards and witches who hadn't grown up in the Muggle world, like Ron, didn't even know how to use a phone. Harry remembered the time, before the start of his second year, when Ron had tried calling Harry at the Dursley's, and had ended up yelling over the phone at his Uncle Vernon.
Just then, the bus pulled up.
"Is this the one?" Dawn asked.
Harry checked the number. "Yeh, it is. It should take you right the station."
"Okay. Good."
There was an awkward pause again. Just ask, Harry though, working up the will.
Then, just as he started to speak, she spoke as well, also in a rush:
"Would-you-like-my-number?"
"Could-I-get-your number?"
Dawn blushed as she giggled, and Harry felt his face growing warm as well, as he broke out into a grin.
"Guess we both had the same idea, huh?" she chuckled.
"Yeh."
Her cheeks still flushed, she pulled out a piece of paper from her purse and handed it to him, along with a pen, and he jotted down his number for her. She took it back from him, ripped a piece of the paper off from under where he had written, and wrote something down herself. Then handed it to him.
"That's my hotel phone and room number. If a bossy girl answers, that's my sister Buffy."
Harry laughed and nodded. "Okay."
"Thank you for the help. See you later?"
"Yeh, see you."
Harry stood and watched as Dawn climbed up on the bus, and took a seat by the window near where he was standing on the pavement. She waved as the bus pulled away, and he waved back, watching as the bus drove off with Dawn, until it was out of sight.