My last. Thanks for everything, guys.

Thief.

When the map of this part of London was almost ready, Selina knew that everything she did this year would be relatively simple. The map was a magical map which would show Selina precisely where someone was when she went out on the town. It was similar to the Marauder's Map, with the same charm and transfiguration work, but this map was far more complex. Hogwarts was a large school but this part of London, with its streets and back alleys, shops, cafes, restaurants and the Underground stations which dotted every street, made it more challenging because the spells which made the original map her daddy had made with his pals to plan out and carry out their pranks were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people and cars, buses and trains that her previous iterations of this map failed.

Frustrated, Selina tried again.

Three times.

Damn it! She cursed furiously, and ran a hand through her long black hair, frustrated. How many more times was she going to find herself with this problem?

She needed the map. The map would help her plot her burglaries, help her determine if someone was inside the building when she got inside. But the stupid things kept burning up.

And then she realised that she was allowing the map to focus on a large section of the city at the same time when all she needed to do was focus on a small part of it at a time.

Selina was a witch. She was also a thief who made a good living committing heists on anyone and anything that met her fancy, using her skills in magic and using her custom made wand to commit the thefts without anyone being able to track her down. Not that they could - Selina could transform herself into a cat and use her form to slip into places and get out again without being seen, and she had already confused dozens of people with how she had managed to break into places without any signs of forced entry, and people began to suspect she was one of those burglars who managed to somehow con the house owners she met to give her a key, but none of them were missing keys.

The idea that a witch was behind the thefts wasn't even voiced, nor was the existence of magic, but then again magic did not exist to muggles.

Selina was with a gang of kids, some of them older than she was, and she was helping them break into a house. Her hands were gloved and yet she felt sweaty as she picked up the smaller items. As one of the youngest and smallest of the children in the gang, Selina was easily the quickest and she had joined after finding out another in the same foster home was also in the gang, and she made it clear she just wanted in.

Selina had been orphaned as a kid. She had lived for a couple of years with Vernon and Petunia Dursley, and she had hated the unpleasant family with every ounce of her being. Finally, she yelled, frustrated and tired with being their little servant/boxing bag/scapegoat, "If you hate me so much, then get rid of me!"

It hadn't worked.

Finally she managed to run off after school with money stolen from her stupid babysitter Mrs Figg and fled into London. She changed her name and got herself caught. She was put into a foster home.

Sure, she didn't like the teenagers running the gang, but Selina was learning a great deal from them about how to break into other people's homes and businesses. This house was the seventh place her gang had broken into and it was full of pricey electronics. Selina grabbed a few of the house owners' things, and took them out of the window to the van waiting below.

She was one of them.

Selina had grown up in the muggle world, far from her native world. While she found muggles mundane and rather boring with their two-dimensional attitudes about life and the world around them, how they were constantly in political powder-kegs about to go boom, they were pathetically easy to fool when she used her magic.

The Dursleys had claimed magic didn't exist and yet they had tried to beat the freakishness out of her. Contrary to what the old fool Dumbledore thought, they had hated her and then she had managed to escape Number 4. She had scraped a living off the streets before she had become tired of living in the cold, so she had gone to a foster home.

She was a couple of years older and had already helped burgle a dozen houses, but she had never been party to robbery before. She and the gang she had joined had forced their way into another house in South London. It was a man and a woman, and judging by their expensive rings they were both married. The wife was screaming her head off as we burst through the doors, and I was already too agitated by how forceful my 'partners' were that I smacked her in the face and she shut up.

I could tell she was already pregnant, and I was content to just leave her like that while my 'partners' roughed the husband up a bit and told us where the money in his house was. I didn't know the point behind this robbery, but I knew I didn't like the robbery angle. Fortunately I wasn't the only one, and I was concerned. But my concern disappeared quickly when two of my partners were prepared to rape the wife. I tried to get in the way of them. I didn't want the baby to be hurt, but I was slapped in the head and knocked to the side.

In my stunned state, I couldn't do anything more than watch as I watched my thuggish 'comrades' force themselves onto the pregnant wife while her husband tried and failed to stop them. I sometimes have nightmares of that night to this day, and I remember taking great delight in finding the cowards who raped that woman, and I slit their throats.

The map was working properly at last. Selina smiled at it, inwardly remembering how she had arrived at Hogwarts. She had been surprised but had quickly grown bored with all the threats of 'retribution' and adulation thrown her way for the defeat of Lord Voldemort. Selina didn't even know what happened night my parents were murdered.

Selina's time at the school was weird, but when she learnt what had happened to my parents and their friends - Remus Lupin and Sirius Black in how they had brought down Lord Voldemort, though Dumbledore seemed convinced the Dark Lord was still alive, though it was a proven fact he was dead - she was even more upset. Selina had never really given that much thought about her parents and what they had done, but it wasn't until she had first seen the inside of her trust vault at Gringotts she managed to learn about them. That's gold dust to an orphan.

Selina sat on the edge of her bed in the foster home - she was just relieved Hagrid was a moron, otherwise she would have ended up back at the Dursleys, she was just glad she had given him the slip. But she was more interested in the little books she had quickly learnt were diaries, written by her parents and put into the trust vault. Hagrid had told her that Dumbledore had wanted to tell her about her parents himself, and he had tried to take them off her, but Selina was too experienced a thief to let that happen, but fortunately the goblin who had been with them, Griphook, had put an end to his attempts.

Selina was grateful that the goblin believed she had the right to know about the parents and not letting someone like Dumbledore control her in that manner.

But it had been hard to get away from the man and make her own way back to her home, but luckily she had managed to get herself a trunk that could shrink down at the touch of a rune and slip into the pocket like a matchbox or a wallet. When she had gotten away from Hagrid, she had pressed the right rune and the whole trunk shrunk down and she put it in her pocket, and sneaked onto a Tube train to head back to her foster home.

When she arrived back she hid the trunk and took out the diaries. Now she just had to read them.

As she opened one of the books and started to read it, she quickly learnt about her mother. Lily. Such a beautiful name and for the first time in her life, she grew to know about the woman instead of listening about it from the lips of the Dursleys who'd hated her mother. She found out her mother loved the colours silver and green, and she had gone into Gryffindor house because of her sense of bravery. She had quickly been disgusted by the members of her own house at Hogwarts - she thought many of them were irredeemably thick.

Selina was just reading the entries about her mother's fifth year when she heard a knock on the door. "What is it?" she called.

"Dinner in five minutes."

"Okay," Selina replied and she stuffed her diaries away in a hidden part of the room.

Selina learnt more, as it later turned out, from the diaries her parents had stuffed into that vault than she ever learnt during her time at Hogwarts. Most of her parent's friends and families were dead, killed during the war. She also learnt that her mother, an Unspeakable which was a cross, apparently, between a secret-agent and a scholarly scientist, learnt what Voldemort had done to make himself live longer. According to the diary, the method was the use of a piece of forbidden and evil magic known as a Horcrux which was apparently a piece of somebody's soul, and the influx of magic channeled into his body through the Dark Marks on his followers arms, branded by Voldemort himself.

Lily had scanned Voldemort during a confrontation with the Dark Lord in the Ministry of Magic itself when Voldemort had come personally to raze the Ministry to the ground, and had discovered the truth about Voldemort's supposed immortality. She learnt that the Horcrux was definitely there, and that it was the amount of raw magic from his followers that kept Voldemort from dying out.

They were also responsible for giving Voldemort so much magic to burn through. From the way the words in the diary went, which were like the carefully brushed strokes on a priceless work of art, her mother described Voldemort as a savage and viciously capable fighter who was more unpredictable than the average magician.

Lily had told her husband and she had come up with a plan but with the prophecy over their heads, though neither of her parents knew of the wording but they didn't believe it despite what Voldemort and Dumbledore believed since, according to her mother, who was the expert, prophecies were flimsy and they sometimes never got fulfilled, or if they did it could be months, or even centuries away. Lily had joined the Unspeakables because she had used a Time Turner to get around her lessons, but unlike with Hermione Granger who had used the same type of magic, her mother had been more interested in branching out.

In the four years she had access to the turner, she sneaked around the school and eventually mapped the Hogwarts secret passageways, and she also stunned Peter Pettigrew, a member of the Marauder's gang Selina's dad had founded, and copied the charm and transfiguration work. Selina now had access to those same spells and used them for her heists. But this was the first time she had ever used them. Most of the places she had broken into had either been mansions, homes, single jewellery shops. What she was planning to do was on a larger scale.

She used the device to have fun, unlike Hermione, who used it to study, and unlike Hermione she often used the device to rewind time back and use the intervals to get some kip. She didn't understand why Granger hadn't done that - it was so simple and easy. Just use the turner, rewind time by about four or five hours, and use that time to unwind instead of study all the time.

Her ingenuity with the Time Turner was a clinching point for her to become an unspeakable. They had snapped her up. She quickly rose through the ranks, but it seemed as though the name of the organisation leaked even to a diary being used to send her daughter, her only child, an account of what happened. Selina had been frustrated at first because she had wanted to know if Voldemort truly was dead; she wasn't like Hagrid, who believed wholeheartedly that if Dumbledore believed Voldemort was alive then he was alive, but if she started believing the word of everyone then she wouldn't make it to a ripe old age.

Selina had promised herself to never trust anyone. That promise had allowed her to learn a great deal about life, and she had learnt how to do things normal teens rarely learnt. But it wasn't until she found one of those magical photos of her parents, and two men she was sure were Sirius and Remus though she couldn't tell them apart, fighting Voldemort himself in what was clearly the last battle of the Dark wizard's life that she believed them.

The battle was fierce. All the photos were actually memories of what her mother and father had discovered. Lily had used a method known only to those who were skilled in the mind arts to transmute the memories into photos. They even spoke whenever she tapped them with her wand. It was like having a video or DVD player installed in a book. In one of the frames Selina learnt her parents had been betrayed by one of her father's friends, one Peter Pettigrew - just looking at the weak-willed moron as he cried like a little kid for his mummy made her sneer. Her parents had never really discovered what Voldemort had done to make him betray them, but judging from the way he cried and whined he'd simply been terrified, but Selina wasn't sure if that was it.

But Pettigrew had two things that made him important to her family at the time - first, he had betrayed the Potters and his friends to Voldemort, telling the Dark bastard about finding a way to kill Voldemort and make him mortal and vulnerable, and where they would be, and secondly Pettigrew had a Dark Mark.

But the fight was intense. Voldemort had been killed while James, Remus and Sirius held him off so Lily could complete the ritual to finish him off, but Voldemort managed to overpower her dad and his friends. Selina cried silently as she watched the memories play out; her 'uncles' were the first to die, but they fought long and hard against Voldemort, and then her dad died. Her mum by that point had more or less finished the ritual, but unfortunately Voldemort managed to injure her, and so she powered the ritual with her own magic and life. The magic of the ritual entered the Dark Mark and drained the one Horcrux Voldemort had made into a magical crystal her mother had used to siphon all of the magic of the Death Eaters and Voldemort into, and when it reached a specific level of fullness the crystal exploded.

Lord Voldemort was dead. So too were his followers, the same witches and wizards who had joined him out of fear, or a desire to 'cleanse the world of the filth,' but so too were her parents and uncles. Pettigrew didn't count. And she, Selina, had been handed over to the Dursleys without a thought or concern for her mental and physical wellbeing.

Selina looked at the headmaster in surprise. She could not believe what she had just heard from his mouth, but there was no mistaking how serious he was.

"Excuse me, headmaster, but could you please repeat what you just said?" Selina asked.

"Of course, my dear girl," Dumbledore said, "Lord Voldemort is still out there, and he has many followers and supporters who would like nothing more to see you harmed, therefore I must repeat and insist you return to your family. Your Aunt Petunia has expressed joy in having you back."

Selina lifted a brow, but she said not a word. Petunia had probably been upset at the prospect of her coming back and darkening her insanely neat house, but Dumbledore didn't seem like the observant type. He probably had not even noticed her reaction. It would be just like the dozy wizard who seemed to have a screw loose in his brain.

Another of Dumbledore's faults made an unwelcome and unnecessary appearance. "Also my dear, I would like to enquire if you would like to change houses?"

"Why would I want to do that? I mean I am happy being in Slytherin," Selina replied, strengthening her occlumency barriers in case Dumbledore did something stupid. "I mean the Sorting hat said I would be doing well there, didn't you Mr Hat?"

She wasn't sure and frankly didn't care if the hat should be addressed in that manner, but it seemed to work. The hat jerked into life. "Indeed I did, Miss Potter, and if you are happy there, I will not re-sort you."

When she had read Hogwarts; A History and after hearing from Hagrid about how Slytherin was the house that spawned the most numbers of Dark Lords and Ladies, Selina had taken what he had said with a pinch of salt. Selina had spent enough time in the muggle world to know for sure word of mouth about a person, about how wonderful a politician or leader was since they could do or say something that was ill-chosen and ill-considered.

Besides, when Hagrid had made the wonderful mistake of telling her Dumbledore had dropped her off at the Dursleys, condemning her to spending some of her worst years in a cupboard under the stairs. Where was the wonderful wizard then? She didn't trust him. Now she trusted him even less because he was forcing her to go back to the Dursleys, and for trying to get her out of Slytherin when she had spent months settling in and making connections in the place, like a good snake.

Selina smiled at the hat, and while her eyes were fixed on the enchanted hat she kept an eye on Dumbledore through peripheral vision. The old wizard did not look happy that one of his schemes had failed. "Thank you," she replied.

"You are welcome, Miss Potter," the Hat said, and she had to hide a smirk when she saw the hat send a look towards Dumbledore that WAS NOT welcome.

Selina didn't say anything to Dumbledore about the Dursleys. She didn't really see the point because the man had a brain and a set of ears that was like a sieve; you said one thing and it went straight out. It was the same with what he saw; he must have personally gone to see the Dursleys, and their reactions to his presence must have been funny, but he wouldn't have recognised their reactions when he told them SHE was going.

Selina fortified the occlumency barriers around her mind to prevent Dumbledore learning about the plans in her mind to deal with this problem.

As she refined the map, she considered what else had happened during the years she had spent at Hogwarts. When she had gone to the castle, she had been sorted into Slytherin house. When she had first heard of the house she had known no-matter what she did she would have conflict with them because she had gotten the impression she would have to deal with those kids who supported the kinds of life favoured by the Death Eaters.

She hadn't expected herself to be sorted there, though she had had the sneaking guess it would've happened. She had grown up in poverty, she had been abused; in short, she was the perfect Slytherin because you develop the ambitions needed to survive and to get better, to grow and to endure. You also developed a cunning mind, observant and always coming up with plans, making connections.

How morons like Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson, Vincent Crabbe, and Greg Goyle got themselves sorted into Slytherin, Selina had no idea. None of them embodied the true traits of a true Slytherin; all of them were bullying fucks who bullied and harassed everyone that got in their way. Selina was one of their victims at first, but thence had begun to humiliated all of them.

Malfoy was a great sport - you could pile a ton of blood and mud into his bed, carry out schemes that would make him look like an idiot while at the same time fuck up whatever 'plan' he came up with, though he broadcasted his aims with boasts every chance he got so you could tell what he had in mind in advance, and he still came back for more. Parkinson was just as bad, but she was so puppy dog with Malfoy, it was sick. Crabbe and Goyle were both pure examples of how stupid wizards could get if they went too far.

It didn't take long for Selina to quickly make herself into one of the top Slytherins of the house. It helped that Professor Slughorn favoured her, though outwardly he put on the air of a fawning fan but deep down she could see his melancholy that so many people had died. And it wasn't until one night when she confronted him that he opened up….

"You gave Voldemort the knowledge of the Horcruxes?" Selina whispered in shock as she looked wide-eyed at her head of house.

Slughorn looked at her askance and shock. "How do you know about them?"

"My mother. She had left diaries in my trust vault. I found them before my first year - they weren't hard not to notice, though that moron Hagrid tried to stop me taking them for some inane reason that Dumbledore wanted to tell me about my parents himself," Selina replied, finishing off with a sneer.

Slughorn momentarily forgot the grim subject and chuckled at the sneer, the disdain was the only reason Selina didn't lash out at him. "That sounds like Dumbledore," he commented, "the old fool believes everything in life should be secret, for some unimaginable reason."

"You don't respect him," she observed.

"I respect and admire his achievements," Slughorn explained simply. "But it's not difficult to see that the man has too many flaws. One of them was to allow Tom Riddle into the school," he shook his head, the haunted expression telling as he seemed lost in his memories, memories he clearly wished he could forget.

Selina licked her lips. "Riddle was Lord Voldemort, wasn't he?"

It wasn't a difficult deduction to make the connection between this Riddle and the same tyrant who'd cut a grisly path of murder throughout the country.

Ever since she had arrived in the magical world and learnt of Voldemort, she had noticed the flinches and the way people jerked as if afraid the Dark Lord would appear before them, reaching back into life from death, and attack them. She had always found their reactions pathetic, but she had learnt to ignore them.

After the usual flinch Slughorn nodded, confirming her guess. "Yes. Tom Riddle. He was perhaps one of the most intelligent students I had ever had in my classes; always brilliant, always intuitive, and always five steps ahead. He read potions articles voraciously and he was always interested in learning all he could, but if I had known what type of mind lurked behind that polite, well-mannered visage that was charming everyone around him….. I would have thrown the evil bastard out of my classroom. He conned me, you see, into telling me about the Horcruxes. I tried to resist, but the words tumbled out of my mouth."

"He drugged you with a potion?"

Slughorn chuckled darkly. "Crystallised pineapple was always one of my vices," he commented. "Riddle took advantage of that and he used it to get the answers he sought. He was willing to know about the Horcruxes and he didn't care how he found out, but he knew if he didn't add a potion to the pineapple he handed to me as a gift then I wouldn't have told him anything."

Slughorn was silent for a long moment. "It's my fault," he said at last, remorse in his voice. "He made me reveal all I knew about those vile things; I didn't know the ritual, but I knew enough for him to get started out."

Selina decided this had to end; she was a naturally kind-hearted person, and she hated it whenever someone was in pain, and she had seen dozens of people in pain over the years. When she was in the foster home, an older girl, Nicole, had helped her adjust to her sudden environment of being alone and fighting to survive, to living in a house full of kids older and younger than herself. She had always tried to repay the favour because she had been in the same position. In the case of Slughorn she had the idea Riddle had allowed him to survive with the knowledge of what he'd revealed to make the man weep.

She wasn't going to let that happen now.

"What did you tell him?" She asked simply, not seeing any harm in asking him the question, but she altered her tone to make it clear to Slughorn she wasn't going to take no for an answer.

Fortunately Slughorn seemed….she wouldn't exactly say keen, but it was the closest word she could use to describe the manner in which he spoke, but this wasn't the time.

"He asked me about them after finding a reference to them in a book, and he asked me what they were. I told him they were a method of achieving immortality by splitting the soul," Slughorn summarised the conversation in just two sentences to get it out of the way. "I can't remember the rest - I modified my memory so no-one can see it, but I removed it."

Selina wasn't surprised by the potions master's misconception by what Horcruxes were reputed to do, not what they actually did. She had no hesitation in correcting him; just because Dumbledore liked playing around and ignoring the truth didn't mean she had to.

"Riddle asked about the possibility of creating more than one Horcrux," Slughorn went on, "and he said the number seven. That is an important number in magic, but I told him it was impossible-,"

"And he knew it," Selina interrupted.

Slughorn looked at her in surprise. "What? What do you mean? He knew making more than one of those things was dangerous?"

"I'll tell you in a second, Professor," Selina replied; she needed to know what happened next. "Does Dumbledore have any inkling of what you told Riddle?"

"More or less. Dumbledore knows I told Riddle something about Horcruxes, but he knows I wiped my memory of the event."

"You….masked your memory?"

"Riddle added another potion to the pineapple he gave me," Slughorn admitted shamefacedly. "The potion was designed to compel me to alter my memory so I would remove it, but it would keep the basic start of it to make sure I always avoided it if it came up in conversation. I removed it, sometimes I look at the memory and remember the lives that have been lost. But each time I do, I wipe the memory apart from the basics again in case Dumbledore tries looking through my mind. I don't know if the potion did that, last so long, or if its just my guilt. Dumbledore has spent the past 50 years trying to get his hands on it."

Selina looked at him in surprise, but something stood out. "Professor, if Riddle wanted to keep it secret, why would he make the potion so elaborate it would make you remove the memory and alter your mind enough so you'd forget the basics of the conversation with Riddle, why would he make you keep a small part of it so you could avoid talking about it to anybody else?"

Slughorn looked at her in surprise but Selina suddenly threw her head back and laughed. "Oh, that is brilliant," she crowed. "Oh, that is incredible."

"I fail to see what's so funny."

Selina calmed down. "What house was Dumbledore in at Hogwarts?"

"Gryffindor." Slughorn was confused.

"Exactly, Gryffindor. The house of the so-called brave, the house which looks at everything in black and white, but never in grey. The house which favours chivalry but lacking in imagination. You and I are both Slytherins, professor. We know the world is also in grey tones, that it is twisted and not righteous. Riddle's tricked you, Professor."

"W-what do you mean?" Slughorn looked at her befuddled as he tried to wrap his brain around what he was hearing. Selina realised she wasn't explaining this well enough.

"Did anything happen that year, professor?" she asked him.

Slughorn's jowly face paled. "Yes, there were a number of attacks on muggleborns. One of them was killed, but we never found out what caused the death in the first place. Hagrid was arrested for the murder and the attacks, he was turned in by Tom Riddle himself."

"Hagrid was framed. Did you tell Riddle how to make Horcruxes?"

"No. I always assumed he learnt about it after he left the school."

"He didn't. Don't you see, he knew already how to make them. He tricked you, professor. He knew that eventually someone would try to learn about how he'd become immortal, so he decided to leave clues. He knew that eventually Dumbledore would cotton on to what he had planned, but like the Gryffindor moron he is, Dumbledore wouldn't think Voldemort had actually decided to do something a bit more simple. I don't know where and when he learnt about the Horcruxes, but he found out enough about them to commit that murder and pin it on Hagrid," Selina said. "He went to you to find out if you knew about the Horcruxes, and when he realised you did, he decided to use you. It was an elaborate trap, Professor. Think it through."

Slughorn gasped after a second of thinking. "So, he knew about the ritual before he asked me, and he wanted Dumbledore to find out about the conversation I had with him?"

"Yes." Selina replied. "He only made one Horcrux. He didn't make seven of them at all, but he had pushed that conversation he had with you to set up a giant con for Dumbledore, or anybody else looking into his past, to fall for."

Slughorn looked at her in disbelief. Selina pitied him because his expression told her he was having a hard time wrapping his brain around what he was learning right now. "How do you know this?" he whispered. "How do you know about the Horcruxes in the first place?"

Selina didn't comment on the logical question and so she removed her shrunken trunk from her pocket and re-sized it and took out the diaries. "I got these from my vault. My mother wrote them," she added.

Finding the entries on the Horcruxes was easy. When Slughorn read what Lily Potter had noted down, tears welled up in his eyes at the sight of that painfully familiar writing. "Did I ever tell you why I liked your mother so much, even going as far as seeing her as the daughter I never had? It was because, unlike many of the other Gryffindors, Lily had the imagination and the common sense to look beyond for answers. Even Hermione Granger today is like the other Gryffindors, always believing one source instead of looking further. Lily, on the other hand, would never have taken Dumbledore's word for anything, not until she had looked further."

"That's why she was special," Selina whispered.

The two talked about what was in the diaries for another hour. Slughorn was shocked when he read what Lily had noted down about the Horcruxes for the sake of any grandchildren she and James would ever have if Selina had survived. "Horcruxes don't work?" He muttered to himself. "They just slice the lifespan of any idiot who uses them, or they only increase the life expectancy, but only by a few decades? What's this? Riddle used his followers for immortality? That explains a great deal. Why are you showing me this?"

"To prove to you Voldemort is dead," Selina said, hardly surprised by the question because Slytherins NEVER volunteered information like this. "Because I wanted you to know about my long term plan, which is to reveal what my mother did."

"I'm not sure its a good idea to reveal it to the magical world," Slughorn cautioned her, "the Horcruxes are taboo, and the Ministry and Dumbledore have gone to great lengths to suppress all knowledge of them; the idea a fifteen year old witch knows about them would be enough to make them go insane. The fact the Dark Marks were used to siphon magic away from the Death Eaters, well another Dark Lord could use the same plan to become immortal, so I don't think its wise for you to make it easier for them if it became common knowledge."

"I wasn't thinking of telling them magical world, professor," Selina countered. "Do you know why Dumbledore seems hellbent on keeping me at my 'relatives,'" she air-quoted the word to highlight her feelings for the Dursleys, "constantly telling me how to live my life? It's because he thinks Voldemort is still out there, even with his followers dead. He doesn't know the truth."

Slughorn looked sharply at her, but then he looked resigned. "Yes. The sounds like Dumbledore, always poking his nose into other people's lives in his quest for personal self-recognition; don't look so surprised. I've known about Dumbledore's desires for decades. He wants to be admired, but up to a point; he means well, but his inability to think beyond the chessboard where everything in life is laid out neatly for him to play his game with is his greatest weakness. He would think whatever Riddle did in what's left of my memory of that meeting with the boy was just that and that Riddle hadn't done more before or after."

"What is wrong with the Gryffindors anyway?" Selina shook her head in mock exasperation, as if genuinely confused by the Gryffindors stupidity, but was in fact not worried at all.

Slughorn smirked at her and she smirked back. They both knew she was speaking rhetorically. "I don't know," Slughorn replied playfully, deciding to play along. But then he became serious. "What do you plan to do?"

"I was planning on telling Dumbledore what was in the diaries at first, but over time I realised it would be a waste of time."

"So why would-? Oh, very good," Slughorn sighed in mock exasperation. "I should have known better than to believe a fellow Slytherin. You had no intention of releasing what was in the diaries did you? You only showed them to me to make me feel better, right?"

Selina giggled. "Of course. I knew I'd be wasting my time with the magical world, and I didn't want to make it easier for another moron to become immortal. Besides, in a few years time, Dumbledore will be seeing conspiracies with Voldemort linked to them all the time. How long do you think it will take before he is kicked out of the school?"

"Dumbledore has many friends and political influences-," Slughorn tried to say, but he caught sight of the evil smirk on Selina's beautiful face. Not for the first time he wished he had had Lily Evans in his house, but at least the daughter could see far ahead.

Dumbledore hadn't made life easy for her when it came for her to leave Hogwarts, Selina remembered when she was inside a jewellery shop late at night. She had been inside the shop only six hours before, using a disguise applied by glamour spells. As she rooted around the shop with her wand, she remembered that day.

Selina was frustrated with the calm face of the elderly wizard in front of her - not for the first time, she wondered why the man had to sit in that golden throne, and she wondered if Dumbledore was trying to compensate for something - and she glared at him. "Let me see if I've gotten this right," she said, though she already knew what he wanted her to do. "You want me to give up my career plans to become a Curse-Breaker and become an Auror instead?"

"Yes."

"Give me one good reason why I should," Selina glared at him, her eyes flashing maliciously. "And don't even dare to bring up Voldemort; the Dark Lord has been dead for nearly two decades!"

"Why do you continue to believe he's dead? I believe he is lying low," Dumbledore whispered the last few words for dramatic effect, as if worried Voldemort would appear out of thin air behind Selina.

Selina shook her head at him in disbelief - Dumbledore probably thought she was finally accepting the truth, but he was disappointed. "Oh come on! The clues have been in front of you all this time," she snapped, finally deciding enough was enough. She reinforced her occlumency barriers in case the old moron tried to re-write her memories of the current argument for his own sake. "Lord Voldemort only made one Horcrux!"

Dumbledore leapt to his feet so fast the throne was thrown back, his expression thunderous. "How do you know about those!?" He boomed.

Selina pretended to yawn at his melodrama and lifted her wand, "I, Selina Lily Potter, do hereby swear that what I am about to reveal to Albus Dumbledore is the truth, this I swear on my magic. So mote it be!"

"Lord Voldemort tricked you, Dumbledore," Selina said after she finished the oath, not even bothering to be respectful to the old wizard. "He had learnt about them long before he came back to Hogwarts. He tricked Slughorn into wiping his memory, but leaving enough clues behind for someone gullible to find it. He had no intention of making anymore Horcruxes; I don't know what the bastard was doing at the time, but he must have experienced some side-effects from making his only Horcrux, and so he marked the Death Eaters."

Dumbledore hissed in disbelief.

Selina smirked at him. "I knew that would get your attention," she gloated, amused at finally getting one over the old man. "You forced the Order into stunning them without knowing they were responsible for partly giving Voldemort the means to live longer. Tell me, if you had known, would you have ordered your precious group to begin killing them?"

"How do you know about the Order?" Dumbledore asked (Selina shook her head mentally and snorted at the rather transparent way Dumbledore tried to avoid answering the question) sternly.

"My mother's diaries. They were left in my trust vault. That brainless oaf you sent to introduce me the magical world tried to take them off me," Selina snarled; even after all this time she hadn't forgiven Hagrid for his faux pas. "What gives you the right to decide what I know about my parents? What's wrong, don't you like orphans knowing anything about themselves?! Who do you think you are!?"

Selina calmed down and spoke before Dumbledore could speak. "Voldemort conned you. He conned Slughorn. I don't blame him at all, he's a victim as much as anyone else. You have no reason to deny the fact you've wasted so much of your time all these years Headmaster, Voldemort is dead. There is nothing you can do about it. He is dead. You have no reason to interfere in my affairs. Leave me alone. My mother used a ritual on him to drain the magic from him, the Death eaters, and the Horcrux."

She was so angry, she showed him the diary with the memories in them and she marched over to him to make sure she held onto the diaries in case the old fool tried to take them from her. But Dumbledore was shocked into submission when he saw the memories and heard Lily's voice as she explained about the Horcruxes, and the knowledge the Unspeakables had about them. The old man looked shaken.

When she left, she looked over her shoulder at the still man. "For what it's worth, I can understand your vigilance," she said softly. "I also understand why you did what you've done, but look to the future and stop thinking everything is a conspiracy."

With that she left.

Selina had joined the Curse-Breakers and she had quickly made a reputation for herself for her thirst for magical knowledge. It had been seven years since she had left Hogwarts and yet no-one knew she also made a living on the side as a thief. She doubted any body would care. She wasn't sure if she was ready to get married just yet, or whether she was even the marriage type. She had never had feelings for anyone during her time at Hogwarts - many of the boys had repulsed her with their arrogance, but some had been shy and endearing, but not her type.

Apart from that, her double life of being a Curse-Breaker and a thief was going well.