This is set roughly in the summer between Year Five and Year Six. It's more-or-less HBP-compatible, though since it's concurrent with the book's events, many things may change drastically... dun dun dun...

Oh, yes, and as the story opens, we find ourselves in London. This may be important.

Chapter One: Twilight at the Museum

Dr. Clara Becket leaned over her desk, her brow furrowed in concentration as she gingerly swabbed the last of the perplexing muddy red-brown encrustation from the delicate decorative hieroglyphs etched into the surface of the bronze mask before her. "I certainly hope this stuff isn't what it looks like," she muttered to herself. "Otherwise dear old Anken-netjer must have met quite a messy end." Shaking her head, she nudged a likely-looking few flakes of the stuff into a sample vial, making a note to send it off for testing. "The public'll eat it up, of course..." She set the cotton swab aside, studying her handiwork for a moment. The bronze ceremonial mask of Anken-netjer, High Court Magician and Second Vizier to Pharaoh Ra-hotep III, said to have possessed the power to shield the wearer from any harm, glinted just a trifle too brightly in the flourescent light of the cluttered curatorial office. "Bloody rubbish, I say," Clara remarked, glancing again at the little vial of reddish stuff that looked suspiciously like ancient dried blood. "Didn't do old Anken a bit of good at the end, from the looks of it." The polished bronze features of the long-dead Second Vizier of Egypt, tattooed with carved hieroglyphs, looked up at her almost reproachfully.

She yawned, leaning back in her well-worn desk chair and stretching a bit, turning to look out the small window behind her. The sun was just beginning to drop over the London skyline; the docents should have chased the last of the late visitors out and gone home themselves by now, along with everyone but the cleaning staff and Becket. "Nowhere better to be anyway," she would reply when anyone asked why she stayed late at work more often than not, and the force of her glare usually deterred any further questions about her personal life, or lack thereof.

A clatter of falling objects from the storage room outside her office startled her out of her contemplation of the smog-shrouded sunset, and she hauled herself to her feet, supposing that an absentminded intern must have left the collections-room door open again. Putting on her sternest expression for chasing wayward members of the public out of her domain, she stalked out into the room which housed the British Museum's Egyptian collection not currently on display. "This area's off-limits to the public, I'm afraid, and we've closed anyway," she called out. "You'll have to--"

"A Muggle!" The voice behind the harsh whisper was female, and as the speaker turned toward her, she saw four or five other shadows turn as well, a couple of them nearly twice her own size. Becket had no idea what a Muggle was, but she felt a nagging suspicion that it probably didn't count as street slang for "someone I'd like to shake hands with and then leave in peace." She ducked back into her office, out of sight, and crouched behind her desk listening to the cadence of approaching footsteps and wondering what to do. The intruders had gotten themselves between her and the most effective recourse, the sizeable collection of military artifacts; Clara counted herself a fair hand with a sword, having been president of the fencing club back at Cambridge and the niece of a retired Foreign Legion Major, but only if she could reach one.

The door to her office literally exploded in a shower of splinters and brilliant green flame.

Blinded by the blast, Clara stumbled backwards, wondering dully if it could be terrorists. The hand thrust behind her to break her fall encountered cold metal, and she found herself holding the mask of Ankhen-netjer as she stumbled back against her desk. A tall, slender blond woman led the charge through the still-smoking doorway, the rather cold beauty of her features twisted into a snarl as she caught sight of Clara. Lunging forward, the woman lifted a hand– Clara had time to notice that she held a thin stick of some sort– and snapped "Crucio!"

Clara felt an odd tingling sensation pass over her, through her, and past. "Get out! I've called the police!" That last was a bluff, as she had had no time for telephoning anyone, but she supposed they could not be certain of that.

The blond woman took a step backward, staring at the stick in her hand as though it had just turned into a snake. "Crucio!" she snarled in a tone of unmistakable frustration, jabbing the stick at Clara again. The same tingling sensation swept around her and faded once more.

"Is... is this some sort of joke?" Clara regarded the woman with bemused skepticism. "Alice sent you, didn't she?"

"She's holding the mask, Narcissa, it won't work!" The man behind her shoved his way into the doorway, levelling another of those funny little sticks at her. Whatever the things were, the people holding them did not look particularly jocular about it, and Clara felt her fear returning. "Accio mas-"

Clara cut him off by hurling the heavy bronze mask at him, striking him a glancing blow on the left temple. He stumbled back, stunned, and the woman lunged for the mask now rolling on the floor at their feet. Clara dove to intercept; the woman was a head taller than herself, but with her willowy build, Clara easily shouldered her out of the way, snatching the mask and rolling to her feet with it to evade the blond woman's grasp.

"Foolssss. Five of you cannot deal with one ssscrawny hisssstorian... I should not sssssuffer ssuch bunglerss to sssserve me." The voice crawled with evil, and the words seemed to twine their way around her mind and squeeze remorselessly.

Clara whirled, inexplicably clutching the mask tightly to her chest, and found herself facing a swirling blackness which resolved itself into a figure shrouded in a voluminous black robe. The hood mercifully shadowed its face, but she caught a vague impression of something both more and less tha human. Fear flashed into anger, which melded into defiance. "I'm an archaeologist, actually. Who the hell are you?" She wasted no time trying to wrap her mind around why or how a man, or something that superficially resembled one, had simply appeared in the middle of her office, ostensibly from nowhere. Later, once she had finished not getting herself killed by a pack of lunatics, she could deal with little matters of reason.

"You have ssssomething I require, Dr. Becket." A skeletally thing hand lifted in a beckoning gesture, and the light of her office reflected with a greenish tinge from faint scales as a clawlike finger pointed to the mask. "The masssssk of Ankehn-netjer. And your sssservice, perhapsss, regarding ssssimilar itemsss."

"Have you tried a research request through the usual channels, pal?" She flung the sarcasm up before herself like a shield against the pressure in her mind.

"Insssolent dirt-for-blood Muggle! Your disssresspect will cosssst you your life."

"What'll you do, poke me to death with those funny sticks? Fake magicians' wands?"

The robed figure reached out a withered hand from one billowing sleeve, clutching a wand whose tip hovered mere inches from Clara's forehead. "Avada ked–"

"Oh, rubbish," Clara interrupted. Tucking the mask under one arm like an American football player, she swung the other hand in a right hook with all the force of her fear and outrage and sheer stubborn defiance behind it. Her fist connected with a sickening wet crunch, and the man's hood flew back to reveal eerily reptilian features made all the more monstrous by their last vestiges of humanity. Clara screamed, stumbling backward, her knuckles burning where the thing's steaming blood had splattered on them.

"Kill her!"

Several of the hooded monster's lackeys leaped for her, but voices rang out from behind them.

"Expelliarmus!"

"Petrificus totalis!"

"Stupefy!"

Two of the intruders seemed to fling their sticks– wands?– away, and another froze in place and then toppled over, holding the same pose, like an off-balance statue.

The next few moments passed in a blur of shouted Latin, cries of pain and fury, and flashes of light. Clara later recalled only a feeling of being cornered, and striking out at anything that came near enough to threaten her; occasionally she felt the strange tingle as the mask disarmed a spell flung her way; only afterward did she come to understand its protection of her in that confused battle. Years later, she still woke from vague nightmares of people in robes surrounding her, clutching at her, trying to snatch something from her hand or pin her arms to her sides, while she struck at them with her fists, battered them with the mask she held, and shouted her defiance.

When at last silence fell, she found herself in the middle of the wreckage of her office, her arms held back by two sets of hands as she struggled and kicked. As her senses returned to her in the sudden quiet, she realized they had made no attempt to take the mask, and a woman's voice, older and laced with the accent of the Highlands, murmured reassurances in her ear.

"It's all right, Dr. Becket. We're here to help you. We mean you no harm. You're going to have to stop trying to hit us, do you understand?"

Slowly, as the haze of battle faded, Clara nodded; part of her mind remembered her uncle's old Legion stories of battle-madness, and understood at last what he had described. "Let me go." She had been screaming the same thing for at least five minutes, kicking and biting—she would later learn, much to her relief, that lycanthropy is not transmitted by biting a werefolf—but now she spoke the words calmly, steadily, and felt the restraining grips fall away. Turning, she found herself facing a woman about her mother's age, who offered a tired smile and held out a hand.

"Dr. Becket. Professor Minerva McGonagall."

Clara reached out and took the woman's hand, and for a moment the two regarded one another silently.

Behind her, Clara heard a man's voice mutter, "Got away, all of 'em. Apparated. Was that...?"

"Yes, Remus," said an elderly man's voice, sounding weary down to his very soul. "Voldemort."

"Had a broken nose, for Merlin's sake! I wouldn't've thought a Muggle could put up that kind of fight and live to tell about it." Another woman's voice, full of approval, and when Clara turned toward the speaker, she saw a woman slightly younger than herself, who grinned broadly at her. "You're a tough one, Dr. Becket. Muggle or no, I bet we could use you."

"But it seems that this one certainly did live." Looking up at the man now approaching her, Clara realized she must simply be hallucinating, because the kindly-looking bearded fellow leaning down to peer at her looked remarkably like the wizard Gandalf from those Tolkien movies. "Are you all right, Doctor?"

Dr. Clara Becket of the British Museum simply fainted, still clutching the bronze mask of Ankhen-netjer.

AN: Yes, I know, the hisssssing Voldemort is unbearably corny. I shouldn't drink and write.

Next time: Mr. Weasley learns about microwaves. Snape and Clara get off on the wrong foot.