Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter

Geth342: This is my sequel to The Hidden Serpent but you DON'T need to have read it to understand this.. It'll probably help but, as this is about that story being kept hidden from Holly here, you should be able to keep up. Hopefully updates will be more constant- i plan to stay one chapter ahead at all times (Chapter 2 is already written and will be released on the 11th if people want me to continue). Anyway, i hope you all enjoy this and please read and review!

Hide My Name with Fear

Chapter 1: The Sceptic and the Wizard

When the summer holidays began, two months after I had turned eleven, I realised that the only thing I knew that was actually true was that my family was weird! I don't mean just slightly odd, or only my parents. I mean every member of my family was completely and utterly strange.

For example, my grandfather. Whenever I saw him, he muttered about business and things like that and then he would look at me and demand to know where my brother was. If I told him that I didn't know (which was the truthful answer) he would start snapping at me. If I lied and said something like 'oh, he's in London', he would call me a liar and start snapping at me anyway.

It wasn't just him though. My cousins- both much older than me- acted weird as well. My cousin Sharon always looked at me suspiciously, as though I was about to mug her, even when I was four! And Jack was even worse. At family gatherings, he had a habit of cornering me and demanding to know what my brother was up to. When I became absolutely terrified, he would apologise, stay silent for a minute and then question me about Zac again. Even his three year old daughter hated me and spent all her time with her pet cat. I tended to avoid my cousins wherever possible.

Then of course, there were my parents. Great lovers of anything normal and absolutely terrified that I would one day become a criminal or something like that. At least once a week, I would receive a lecture on good behaviour in school, why I shouldn't smoke, drink or do drugs. It worked; in school, I rarely misbehaved, much to the annoyance of my friends, but it really irritated me. In addition, I had a habit of doing odd things, things which most people could not do. Whenever my parents heard about these events, they would look like they were about to cry. And sometimes…sometimes I felt like they were hiding something from me.

In all fairness, I was not exactly 'normal' either. Unlike my friends, I loved to read books. Books about anything whatsoever. I never enjoyed studying but I did enjoy learning which, I suppose, is an odd combination. I also had a habit of manipulating people. Not to do bad things but I knew how to get out of any jobs I didn't want to do, I knew the best way to get my parents to buy me something and my friends usually found themselves with the worst jobs in group work by choice. Often, I would feel guilty about this so I tried to keep it to a minimum.

However, perhaps the worst thing was the weird little quirks I came out with. For example, when I was six, I leaned too far out of my bedroom window and fell. Instead of being injured or dying, I just bounced right back up into my room. When I was eight, my dad tried to paint my room yellow, even though I preferred the colour green, and the day after he did it, I woke up to find that my room had turned green. When I was ten, I got into an argument with another girl and she slapped my face. Or, she tried. But the moment her fingers touched my face, they snapped. Every finger on her left hand was broken. People assumed that she slapped me too hard but I didn't think that was possible. But then, what other explanation was there?

I will never forget her shouting 'Holly Carew, you're such a weirdo!' as she was driven off to hospital, nor her parents arguing that I should be expelled and sent to jail. I was just lucky that fifteen kids and four teachers had seen her trying to slap me and testified that it wasn't my fault.

I had quite a few friends in primary school but there were still people muttering about how strange I was. It wasn't that I looked different- I was about average height with pale skin, slightly crooked teeth, medium length coppery brown hair and piercing blue eyes. I did have a weird birthmark on my left arm but it wasn't anything to get excited about. My mum said that it was just something from her family. But maybe it was how quickly I picked Welsh up, or the sort of things that happened to people who hurt me. Maybe it was my love of reading and the rules. Whatever it was, I was never considered 'normal'.

However, if I was strange, then my older brother was absolutely bizarre. I was born nearly sixteen years after Zac was- there are only seventeen days between our birthdays- but even with this age difference, you would have thought that I would have spoken to him fairly often. At least once every few months or something. Or at least heard about what he was up to. But no- he visited about once a month, usually at some odd hour of the night when I was asleep, and he sometimes turned up in a disguise. He never said when he was coming: he just showed up. And oddly, my parents were okay with that. If I had been them, I would have told him to at least phone.

I wasn't even sure what his job was. As far as I could work out, he ran a small business which got things for people from around the world. He worked odd hours and he did not have (and as far as I could tell, had never had) a wife or a girlfriend, which worried our Mum. He always thought about what he said and he was never fully relaxed.

But the one thing that always got me was the way he looked at me. Sometimes, he looked and acted normally with me. He laughed and joked or told random stories. But sometimes I would catch him looking at me as though he wished I was not there. A fierce look would come into his eyes and his mouth would thin, his jaw would set and if he saw me looking at him, he would look away. I thought that he might have been upset when I was born, because he had been an only child, but then, he had had eleven years to get over it. There was something else, I was sure there was. There had to be some reason why he would look at his only sister and wish that she had never been born.

Over the years, I came up with a few theories as to why we were all weird. Family accident maybe or maybe I had had another sibling at some point who had been murdered. Maybe we had come from another country and followed different customs. I knew that all of these were very weak ideas but I had nothing else to go on. I certainly did not think that magic was behind it. By the time I turned eleven, I knew that there was no such thing.

Until that one day anyway.

I had been lying on my bed, reading a book and dreaming about what I could do with my free time -for it was the first day of the summer holidays- when my Dad called my name with a note of panic in his voice. That worried me. Dad was not the sort of person who panicked very easily- that was usually my mother's job.

I hurriedly ran downstairs to the living room with my doll. I was probably too old for dolls, but this one was special. It wasn't that she looked particularly amazing- she was just an old rag doll- but she had sentimental value. She had been given to me by Zac when I was born. I always carried her around with me, because she reminded me of him. I had even called her Cariad- the Welsh for love- just to tell me that he must have loved me at some point, even if he did not now.

My parents were sitting on the sofa, looking tired and scared. When I walked over to them, Dad handed me a piece of yellow paper without a word. It appeared to be a letter but when I asked who had sent it, my parents just told me to read it. I complied silently, my eyes widening as I absorbed more and more information. According to this letter, I was a witch with magical powers and I had a place at some magical school called Hogwarts, which I was supposed to go to on 1st September from platform nine and three quarters at King's Cross. I read it first with amazement and then with disbelief. It was just too surreal.

"Nice try," I said, handing the letter back, "but tell Zac that I'm not stupid and I am going to Ysgol Coed Gwyn." I turned and began to leave the room. This was obviously one of my brother's jokes- in one of our rare, normal conversations (normal being him not glaring at me) we had gotten into a bit of an argument about the Welsh language. I thought that it was beautiful and I was glad that I would be going to a Welsh high school. Zac, on the other hand, saw no need for Welsh and said that I should go to an English speaking high school. He had joked that he would do anything to stop me from going to Ysgol Coed Gwyn. This was evidently his best attempt.

"It's not a joke." Dad said, his voice slightly less panicky. I turned around, contempt on my face.

"Dad, I'm eleven, not three. I know magic doesn't exist." I told him, now slightly annoyed. I knew my parents were over protective of me but they didn't need to reassure me that magic existed. I was old enough to accept that it didn't.

"Holly," Mum said, speaking for the first time, "it really isn't a joke. Magic exists."

"Yep, along with unicorns and vampires. Give it a break Mum." I replied before turning again. I hate it when people don't give up on a joke which has already been shot down.

"Zac went to Hogwarts."

I whirled right back around again. A merry-go-round had nothing on me. "What?" I asked in disbelief.

"Zac went to Hogwarts." Mum repeated. I stared at her.

"Sure," I said after a minute of complete silence, "because he does magic all the time. If he is magic, why doesn't he live with all these other wizards then, instead of wandering around the world? Why haven't I ever heard about this?" I smirked, pleased to have proved my point.

"Because-" Dad began but Mum shot him a warning glare before informing me that they had called my brother and that they would explain later that night and could I please leave whilst they discussed the 'situation' (whatever that was).

I was annoyed but I left and went upstairs to see if there was anything on the internet about magic. Half of me wanted to believe that my brother was a wizard, that I was a witch and that I could do magic. The other half of me pointed out that everyone knew that there was no such thing as magic and besides, witches were always the bad people in stories. When I wasn't debating between these two arguments, I thought about what my father had been going to say. Clearly, he had been about to tell me something about Zac and whatever it was, Mum didn't want me to know it.

The evening couldn't come quick enough for me. Being kept in the dark about things annoyed me and even though I was convinced that this was all a joke, I was still curious as to why my parents had joined in with it.

Finally, at about eleven o'clock, my brother appeared. For once, he wasn't in a disguise; he had his normal long coppery hair, dangling earring, and was wearing green clothes. He also looked like he had come from a jungle.

"Alright," he said in his angry voice, "what's so important that you had to drag me all the way from Peru?" His rude way of speaking to my parents no longer shocked me: he always did it if he was upset or annoyed and they never tried to stop him. Probably because he was an adult- if I had done it, I would be grounded. And if he had come from Peru, something had to be important. Maybe this magic thing was real after all…

Mum made us all go into the living room before saying, "Zac, I know it was short notice but Holly got the letter today and-"

"I see." Zac interrupted. For the first time since he had arrived, he turned to me and studied me, his blue eyes curious. "So, are you excited then Holly?"

"About what?" I asked. "I know this is your idea of a joke."

He frowned. "Yes, because I always rush from far off places just to laugh at my little sister." He said sarcastically. "Holly, use your brain."

"I am." I replied, annoyed, "There's no such thing as magic."

"Oh really?" He challenged. I nodded. Suddenly, he grabbed a stick from his shorts and pointed it at a vase. "Wingardium Leviosa." He shouted.

The vase floated. Mum and dad looked shocked and I guess I did too. My brother looked calm.

"Nice," I muttered when I finally recovered from the shock, "but I bet you tied string to it."

He rolled his eyes and then pointed the stick at me. This time, I did not catch what he said but I wasn't too worried about this because my parents had suddenly gasped and were staring at me with shock etched all over their faces. No, not staring at me. They were staring through me.

I looked down at myself and screamed. Where I had been standing, there was nothing. I held my hands up to my face except I couldn't see them. If it wasn't for the fact that I knew I was there, I would have thought that I had just disappeared.

"Do you believe me now?" Zac asked in a bored tone.

I stared at him. How could he be so calm? "W-what have you done to me?" I asked in a strangled tone.

"Made you invisible. It's a speciality of mine. Of course, unless you learn the magic for it, you can't do it. Or undo it. So, I'm going to keep performing magic until you believe me. If you still think I'm lying, well, I don't suppose your friends will notice that you're invisible." All of this was said in a casual tone with Zac inspecting his nails as though everything he said was of no importance. I glared at him. I hated how he could control his emotions so well. And why did my parents say nothing?

"Alright, fine. I believe you. Now will you put me back to normal please?" I growled. He smirked arrogantly and flicked the stick, muttering something again. Colour returned to me.

"So, are you going to accept your place then?"

I shrugged. "Well, if I really do have magic, I guess so. I mean, it would be cool to know magic." I meant it too. His little display had convinced me that magic really did exist. It definitely explained a lot about my life. And if I could learn more about it, use it more then my life wouldn't be normal (not that it ever had been); it would be special.

He smiled, a normal smile for once. "It is cool. You can do all sorts of stuff with magic. You just need the equipment for school then. You get it from London."

"There are magic shops in London?"

"If you know where to look." There was something cryptic in Zac's smile.

"Well, when can we go?" I asked, suddenly eager to buy all the equipment on the letter (which I had only glanced at).

"Not we. You." His face had become carefully blank, leaving me unsure of what he meant. "Mum and Dad can't get into the magical world easily."

"But you can." I pointed out. "Why can't you come with me? Or why can't the school send someone?"

"We've already told the school that you don't require someone to help you." Dad interjected. I didn't say anything. That still did not explain why Zac couldn't help me.

Zac sighed. "I'm…not welcome in the magical world. If I showed up with you then they would probably kick the pair of us out. I can only take you as far as the entrance."

I looked at him curiously. This was getting weirder and weirder. Not only was my older brother a wizard, he was an outcast. What had he done? I asked him this.

"Holly-" Dad said warningly, apparently feeling that this was too insensitive a question. I supposed it was- after all, I didn't know when Zac had gotten himself into trouble. It could have been the day before.

"It's alright Dad," Zac said, his attention on me although he looked at our father, "she can know. I was expelled from Hogwarts." He finally looked at me again. "In Hogwarts, there are four Houses where you spend your school life. I was placed in a House which was…at a disadvantage to the other three in the way people viewed us. When I was your age, I liked to play jokes on people. Me and one of my friends played jokes on people all the time but we knew where to toe the line. Or, we knew where to toe the line if we were in a normal House.

"When we were in our third year, we played a joke which, in hindsight, was a bit dangerous. A normal person would have been in bad trouble. Us, well, we were just expelled. My friend went to a foreign school after that but I couldn't. I had to leave and I've kind of been in disgrace. And, as you can imagine, no one was overly impressed with my new status so I try to avoid them."

"Oh." I said. There wasn't much I could think of to say in response.

He smiled. "It's okay. I'm used to it now. Anyway, we can go tomorrow. I'll show you how to get in and we'll wait for you outside."

I agreed and he began to tell me about life in Hogwarts leaving me with a sense of wonder as I imagined the Great Hall, the dungeons and the lake. He tried to explain the magical sport but it just confused me. Sports generally did. My theory was that, if you wanted the ball so badly, why couldn't you go to the sports shop and buy one? My school teachers tended to hate me when it was time for a PE lesson.

By the time he finished explaining about exams and teachers, it was about one o'clock in the morning. However, I wished for knowledge about this new world more than I wished for sleep so this did not bother me. The one thing I noticed was that Zac had not mentioned the four Houses again so I asked him about this, ignoring my parents' stifled yawns.

He looked away when I said that. There was something uncomfortable in his gaze as he listened. Eventually, he began to explain.

"There are four Houses; Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin." He began in a monotone. "Gryffindor is the House for the brave and noble. When I was there, they were the favoured House and they had a habit of rushing in to help people who didn't want help." He sounded scornful but then his expression softened. "But if anyone needs help, they'll give it. They always do the right thing." He smiled sadly and then his tone became more business like. "Hufflepuff is a House for people who like fairness and loyalty, who like to work hard. Everyone says it's an awful House to be in but it isn't. Well, mostly it's not. Some of the more inept wizards do seem to end up there though.

"Ravenclaw is for people who like to study and learn. Everyone always thought that they were just a bunch of bookworms but not all of them are. Some are just people who like knowledge." Again, that sad look flashed across his face and was quickly replaced by an impassive mask. "And Slytherin…Slytherin is one of the more complex houses. It's for people who believe in what they do and are not afraid to change people to do it. In my time, and probably now, they were seen as the worst House- completely evil. The saying was 'better a Hufflepuff than a Slytherin'. If you ask me, I wouldn't go for that House, Holly. It's as good a House as the others. It just brings trouble."

"Which one should I go for then?" I asked, slightly confused.

He thought for a moment. "Wherever you get put. A magical hat tells you where to go. I just wouldn't recommend Slytherin."

I scrutinised him for a minute. "That's where you were, weren't you?" I asked after a short silence. He looked uncomfortable and then nodded, so I continued. "So why can't I be there?"

He smiled tightly. "It's…different to what you're used to. People place emphasis on heritage and tradition. You have to think ahead to survive and be prepared to do some things."

"I can do that!" I retorted indignantly.

He shrugged. "I'm only trying to help."

I rolled my eyes, now annoyed. "Whatever. I'm going to bed." I wasn't sure whether I was actually tired or just wanted to avoid Zac's rejection from his old House but now that I had said it, I had no choice but to leave the room and go to bed. It probably hadn't been my brightest idea ever. But as soon as my head hit my pillow, I fell asleep. I dreamt about Hogwarts.

On the next day, true to their word, Zac and my parents took me up to London. Zac had changed his appearance; he now had spiky bond hair, green eyes and a long scar down his left cheek. It took us a few hours to get up to the city but soon we were walking down a London road, looking for 'the place'.

Eventually, we found it. Or, at least, Zac and I found it. An old pub was right in the middle of the street but my parents couldn't see it. They knew where it was, they just could not see it. As far as I could tell, they could only see a grey wall with graffiti on it. So Zac and I went in alone.

My first view of wizards was not overly impressive. A bunch of people in odd clothes drinking in a musky atmosphere. Apart from their odd conversations, they seemed a lot like normal people. I was disappointed.

We went into a courtyard and Zac told me how to open the wall up so that I could go to the magic world. Just before I did it though, he stopped me.

"Holly," he said, deadly serious, "when you're there, anywhere in the magical world, there's something you gotta do."

"Buy my school equipment?"

"If anyone asks you, your cousin was a wizard but he went to Durmstrang, in Bulgaria. He spent a year in Hogwarts though, which is how you know so much- you're a muggle-born."

"Why can't I say my brother did it?"

"They might guess that you're related to me," he said with a pained smile. "If you talk about me, just say that I am Peter Rotem, a muggle business man."

"The surnames?"

"I married Suzanne Rotem and took her surname but we split up."

I considered him. "You've really thought about this. I don't get why I can't say I'm related to you if all that happened was you were expelled though."

He shrugged. "Making it easier for you. People dislike expelled students." He gestured to the wall. "Now get."

I went. Quickly.