Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans, nor do I own Harry Potter or any of the characters associated with the two. Teen Titans is © of DC Comics, Harry Potter is © of J.K. Rowling, and Warner Brothers holds © over both of them.

Author's Warning: This is a crossover fic. :Watches people close the window.: Ahem. Those of you who do not like crossovers may leave now. The rest of you, I invite to continue on…

Summary: Trigon has returned, and Voldemort has joined him as a minion. Drawn by strange dreams, Raven must involve herself in the problems of others, including one Harry Potter, who is once again being plagued by strange nightmares. This year at Hogwarts, Harry and his friends are going to be pitted against their most difficult task yet. Destroying a force that even the Dark Lord himself fears won't be easy…

Harry Potter and the Demon's Wrath, or; Year Seven and Negative One-Fourth

Chapter 28 – Interrogation

"Raven and Malfoy aren't here," Harry observed, gaze taking in the greenhouse and students around him as he tried to clip the dead branch from the fairy rose he was pruning. Hermione jabbed him in the side with her finger, tugging the pruning shears from his hand just before he clipped one of the plant's thorny buds instead.

"If you want to get into the Auror's program, you'll pay a little more attention to your assignments and less to what other people may-or-may-not be doing," she chided, handing the shears back to him.

"Knows he's got you for that, doesn't he?" Ron asked, removing a branch from his own bush and throwing it into the pile in the middle of the table.

"Yes, well, he won't have me when he writes his N.E.W.T.s, and I definitely won't be there for the Auror aptitude tests," Hermione replied. Harry glanced at her bush, shimmering with happiness at how well it had been pruned. Neville's looked similar. Harry's own didn't look much perkier than it had when the class started.

"You're assuming the Ministry's back to normal by the time we graduate," Harry said grimly. "D'you think it's going to be? 'Cause I don't." He didn't look at Hermione as he said it, preferring to continue to study the rest of the class, and avoiding Professor Sprout's gaze as he did it.

Hermione made a distressed noise. Ron hit his shoulder. "Try some confidence, mate. Looks better on you."

"Yeah, yeah," Harry muttered. "Where do you think they are?"

"Raven hasn't been around all day," Hermione said, matter-of-factly. Harry nodded, having noticed that.

"Malfoy was, though," Ron said. "Slimy git. What's it matter where he's gone off to?"

"You see?" Hermione asked Harry, reaching across him for the watering can. He passed it to her.

"Ask her at dinner where she was if it's bothering you so much, Harry," Ron said. His eyes were on Neville as their dorm-mate snipped a branch from the middle of his bush, motions painstakingly slow.

"What if she's not there, either?"

"Why wouldn't she be? Gotta eat, right? Hell, just ask her out already, mate. At least then the keeping up with where she is all the time will make a little more sense."

"Ronald!" Hermione exclaimed as Harry sputtered.

"What? Nothing wrong with a bloke asking a girl to Hogsmeade, is there? Honestly, mate? Thought you were snogging her already."

"Ronald Weasley! Harry is not and is never going to even consider doing anything with that girl!"

Harry gave Seamus and Padma Patil, sitting at the next table over, a tight smile. "Would you two keep it down?" he asked out of the corner of his mouth. "Ron, you're about to get stabbed by your bush."

Ron let out a shout as he retracted his hand from the buds that were starting to close in on it. Hermione looked smug. Harry just shook his head, returning his attention to the bush in front of him, completely unwilling to continue to humour Ron's assertion that he and Raven should (of all things) date.

Returning to consciousness didn't bring with it the sort of awareness Raven might have hoped it would. Then again, even the bare knowledge that she was still alive satisfied her for the moment. At least until she realised that wherever she was she wasn't alone, and the reason she couldn't see had more to do with an external force than with it being exceptionally dark.

She was physical again. Had somehow made it beyond the wards around the cabin and back into her body - and whatever she was lying on was hard. Flat enough that it couldn't be the forest floor; smooth enough that she probably hadn't been returned to the castle just to collapse on the stone; hard enough that it couldn't be a bed. Quick deduction, and the familiar feeling of two presences pressing in on her, suggested she was still in the cabin. She'd been discovered by Draco and Snape – not that big a surprise, especially compared to still being alive.

Wary because despite having figured out where she was, there was no way of determining just how she would be received – she could only assume it wouldn't be well – Raven opened her eyes. Less than a moment later, Snape had moved to stand over her. Draco sat in a chair on the other side of the cabin, looking at her with a mixture of worry and distaste.

"I begin to think your nuisance outweighs your usefulness," Snape drawled. Raven gave him an irritated look.

"Since my usefulness was never to your cause, I can see why you'd think so," she replied. Draco snickered, drawing her gaze over to him for a brief moment when the waves of fear he was emitting faded a little. She could only study him for a moment, though, before Snape brought her attention back to him.

"I wouldn't recommend you continue with the smart comments," Snape said. "As I'm sure you're aware, you've led yourself into quite the tight place."

Raven rolled her eyes. This man spoke as big as any villain she'd ever met; that he actually thought it might intimidate her was actually a little insulting in itself.

"Tell me," Raven said, figuring it was easier just to use this to her advantage if Snape wasn't planning on letting her out of here. "If I'm such a problem, why not let me die?" That she now owed this man - and possibly Draco as well - her life was more than a little unsettling.

"As I said," Snape replied, withdrawing so he was looming above where she lay on the rug by the fireplace rather than leaning in close, and letting Raven sit up. "You have a quantity of usefulness that can't be dismissed out of hand."

Someone above him wanted her for something. Voldemort and Trigon wanted her, and no matter who else he was working for - and he had definitely proved to her the last time they'd met that he was working for someone else - Voldemort's wishes were crucial.

When Raven didn't immediately respond, Snape turned to Draco, head tilting toward the door. "To class, Draco, before you're missed by too many."

She could just make out the blonde's frustrated expression around Snape's figure.

"When—"

"Now," Snape interrupted.

Draco rose, his upper lip curled. "Yes, sir," he scowled. He gave Raven a dark look as he pulled on his cloak and stalked out, letting the door slam behind him.

Raven, already aware of what he'd been going to ask, looked back at Snape as the man lowered himself into the chair that Draco had vacated.

"Sit," Snape ordered, pointing her toward the other one. Raven levered herself up from the floor and obeyed, feeling the shift in energy as Draco passed through the wards around the cabin. "Talk."

She raised an eyebrow. "About?"

Snape sneered at her. "I see little point in you trying to make yourself out to be stupid." The man was so tense and guarded that she could scarcely read anything off of him at all. Was this the control training in Occlumency gave him? Maybe she should have been encouraging Harry toward this instead of teaching him what she had been.

"Why did you help me, back at Christmas?"

"I was under orders," Snape answered curtly.

She gave him a flat look. "You warned me not to tell anyone you'd been there. You're lying."

Snape studied her for a long moment, something sparking in his black eyes that she couldn't read, being completely blind in regard to what he might be feeling because her powers just weren't working on him. It was frustrating, to say the least.

"My motives are none of your concern. You've been out here before. Who were you following?"

"Draco," she said shortly. She didn't like where this conversation was starting to go, not in the least, but maybe by keeping her answers brief and having Snape ask all of the questions, she could learn more about him than he was learning about her. Maybe.

"And what interest could you have in Draco?"

"I don't think that's your business," Raven replied.

Snape's wand was out and pointed at her in a flash. She groped at her pocket, not finding the slim piece of wood stored there, glaring when Snape pulled it from the folds of his robe with his other hand. She didn't need it – and putting up any pretence of needing it was probably pointless when he already knew something of who and what she was – but all the same, Raven had become so accustomed to using it to disguise her in this world that for a moment she felt confused. When had she come to actually rely on it?

"I think," Snape said, sounding dangerous, "That you'll find your answer is inadequate."

"Do you know why he has gaps in his memory?" Raven asked. Snape already knew she'd been spying on them – there was no point in dancing around the topic as though she hadn't been here.

Snape crossed his arms, his wand dangling from his fingertips, not at the ready but still angled toward her. Her wand had disappeared into his robes again. "I have my suspicions," he replied.

Not for the first time, she wondered what they were playing at, attempting a civil conversation.

"And?" she prompted.

He narrowed his eyes at her, that sense of danger spreading to his eyes as he tried to intimidate her into feeding him her own thoughts. She didn't say anything.

"Where do your loyalties lie, Miss Roth?" he asked, instead of answering.

"With my team."

That narrowed eyed look didn't disappear.

"Your team," he murmured. Not a question, just an echo as he contemplated the words. She let him. There was no hidden meaning there, and if Dracona had been telling Voldemort and his Death Eaters as much as she expected, then Snape already knew just what she meant.

"The Order?" he asked finally.

"I'm here at their request," Raven replied. Again, something that Dracona knew.

"But you don't consider yourself a part of the Order?"

Was he baiting her? He didn't know nearly enough about her to be successful at it.

"Is there a point to this interrogation? You wanted to know about Draco," she reminded him.

One of Snape's hands had drifted upward and he was outlining his lips with a fingertip, the gesture contemplative. "So I did," he agreed. "But my question, first."

"I'm a consultant," she replied. It was as good a word as any, and not really at all the truth since she was definitely here to do all of the work while the Order dealt with their actual enemy.

As though everything had come together in his mind, Snape's hand dropped from his mouth. "Gaps in memory are the most telling signs of possession."

"They are," Raven agreed. She'd long ago figured out that Trigon was possessing Draco. Maybe Snape knew why.

"Draco isn't acting entirely under the orders of the Dark Lord," Snape explained.

Raven let her eyebrows climb at this information. He was acting so differently now from how he had been when she'd been in that cell, and Raven still didn't know what to make of it.

"And you are?" she asked.

Snape stood. "Go to the Headmistress' office. Tell her you need to speak with Albus Dumbledore concerning his final wish. She'll know enough of what you mean to leave you alone. Then return here tomorrow after sunset."

"Just tell me," Raven ground out. "I don't have the time or the patience to go on some wild chase after information I don't need."

Snape looked down at her, his expression so unaffected she didn't know what to think. "Your decision. Now go, I have things to do."

The sudden dismissal shocked her enough that Raven rose from her chair before she'd fully registered what she was doing.

"You have my wand," she said blandly.

He bared his teeth at her in a smile that was more of a sneer than anything else. It looked painful – she knew the feeling. "So I do," he said, and extended it to her.

She wrapped her hand around the handle, taking it and tucking it away in the pocket in her school robe.

"You don't need it," he said when she was halfway to the door. There was a bit of a question in his voice, even though he'd experienced her power first hand.

"Whether I do or don't isn't your concern," she said shortly, pushing open the door and letting it fall closed behind her as she descended the cabin's porch steps.

It was only when she was already surrounded by the close press of the forest that she realised she'd been able to pass through the wards without any problem.

Author's Corner

Okay, here's the deal. You've already noticed that this chapter is dramatically shorter than any that have come before it. 4000-5000 word chapters have been a huge burden on me lately, so I'm cutting down the chapter length on this and all future chapters in the hope of getting the story out more quickly. It's entirely a perception thing, but it's a really big deal in my head.

In addition, this story is giving me a lot of trouble right now. So while I'm hoping the shorter chapter lengths are going to go toward helping me get it finished and out for you guys to read, I make no promises. I made the shortened chapter decision to stop me from placing this story on hiatus and making it a backburner project altogether, even though it really made me feel like I was giving in. :P

In the meantime, if you like Buffy I recommend you check out my newest project, "Prosopopoeia" which is getting weekly postings because I have a huge chunk of it already written and in backlog. :)

Completed September 24, 2011