"The most important thing about this mission," Albus Dumbledore had said, sitting behind his desk in the office in the high tower at Hogwarts, "Is that, regardless of whether we gain a legilimens, as we hope to do, we must not have our plans be spoiled ahead of time."

"But the moment Evans goes to talk to Snape, he'll know what we're planning when he looks into her mind," James said.

"Occlumency," Dumbledore murmured.

"I don't know occlumency," Lily stammered, looking 'round the other three with confusion.

Dumbledore looked at Frank.

"Well, they - they give a bit of a course on it in the second year's cirriculum at the Auror Training Center," Frank said, "But me being only fair at the practice doesn't help Lily knowing it! I certainly couldn't teach it in a single day, it takes months of practice and that only results in the pathetically shabby level that I'm at with it..."

"What if you were Lily?" Alice asked.

Frank looked confused.

"Polyjuice?" Lily asked.

"Absolutely not," James and Frank both said at the same time.

"Hang on," James said, turning 'round to Frank, "I know why I don't want you to do it, but --" He paused, then, "Why don't you want to be my wife, Longbottom?"

Alice snorted. 

"James, honey?" Lily tapped him so he turned to look at her. "You know how we always talk to Sirius about thinking about how something sounds before he says it?"

"I should think that would work very well, on the contrary to both of your objections," Dumbledore said, inserting himself into the conversation before James's thick brain had worked out what he'd said that had sounded wrong.

"You do?" Lily looked at Dumbledore.

"But I wouldn't know how to be Lily!" Frank objected, "And Snape's obsessed with her for years, he'd notice instantly if I was her."

"Exactly," Lily said.

Dumbledore rubbed his beard thoughtfully, then said, "There is a wizard - a graduate of Ilvermorny, some time ago now - who used his magic to delight hundreds of thousands of muggles by creating moving pictures. I have seen much of his work and I must say it is truly enthralling to be caught up in the most charming stories which he weaves with his moving pictures. There is one in particular he made in which a very loud and recognizable duck is forced to hire a stunt double for himself to attend a date he has with a very lovely female. This double - a charming mallard - must woo the female for the loud duck..."

"Sir?" James's head was tilted to one side.

"I apologize. I'm rambling. My point is that the charming duck know what to say to the female duck because the loud duck whispers lines into the charming duck's ear so he can respond to the female the way the loud duck would... Thus, fooling the female into believing the rouse." He paused, smiling between the four of them as though this absurd summary was the answer.

Surprisingly, Frank said, "Hearing ears."

"What?" James looked at Frank.

"The Prewetts have invented this very interesting little device, it's called Hearing Ears. There was a lot of talk about how amazing their natural connection to one another is, being twins, the way they can feel one another --"

Lily looked over at Frank, then bit her lip and looked distracted for a moment as he spoke.

"-- and Moody asked them if they could come up with a way for other aurors to have a similar connection. They're still working on it, but I've been apprenticing under Fabian lately and he has created Hearing Ears. They're sort of prosthetic ears that go over one of your own ears - magically molds itself to look just alike to your real ear, near to undetectable - and the other person puts on the mate to it and they can hear everything that the other can. And so they can be used sort of the way Muggle Walkie Talkies are used, but completely silent to any others in the room - only the two ears can hear what's on the other end."

"That's brilliant," Alice remarked, surprised.

"It's like Moody always says, Fabian and Gideon could really do some amazing things if they applied themselves move," Frank shrugged.

"So with this device," Lily said, "If I had on the matching ear, I could hear what Sev says to you?"

"And you could tell him what to say to make it convincing," James said, nodding, and he looked up, meeting Dumbledore's eyes. "Just like the loud duck to the charming duck in Walt's cartoon."

"Precisely," Dumbledore smiled.

"Alright," James said. "So once she's talked to Snape, then what?"

"Then we catch ourselves a vampire," Dumbledore replied. 

"What's the purpose of catching the vampire?" asked Frank.

"Information," Dumbledore replied. "And to put into place not one... but two... spies."

"Aren't we the spies?"

"You will be forging the path."

"Who are the spies?" James asked.

Dumbledore smiled, "You need only know what you need to know. The fewer people who know the full plan, the better. Your part tonight will be to create the confusion that enables our spies to infiltrate both the headquarters of Voldemort and the halls of the Vampires to gain information upon what we are going up against, what the plans are, where alliances truly lie, and what it might take us to reroute those alliances to our favor."

"Alright," Lily said, "And how do we do that?"

"Once we have our legilimens," Dumbledore said, "Then, we do the catching."

"And what's the plan for that?" James asked.

Dumbledore said, "Highgate Cemetery has long been associated with Vampires, even in muggle lore, and for good reason - there have been many legitimate sightings of them coming and going at the gates... or near to them. Directly beside the gates of Waterlow Park, which is contained within the same area as the Cemetery, there is an establishment by the name of the Sanguini's Vino Rosso Extrodinaire, nestled and unnoticed by muggles. Sanguini's is a terribly expensive Italian bistro, tucked between a Dry Cleaner's and a General Store. The unwary visitor who happens upon the establishment who is not their preferred clientele would likely pay for their faux pas with their life. You see, the truth is that Sanguini has no vino russo on hand, but rather, the bottles that Sanguini's sells is --"

"Blood?" Alice guessed, pale, eyes wide.

Dumbledore smiled, "One must be careful when they order a bottle of red at Sanguini's."

James made a face of disgust.

"It is there, at Sanguini's, where the plan first commences - before the meeting with Severus Snape and Antonin Dolohov, the vampire Matija Blagojevic always stops by Sanguini's..."

Sanguini's was just as dismal as Lily had pictured it when Dumbledore had described it. And so it must be on the face of it in order to keep the interest of muggles and non-Vampires from venturing too close. Even from outside, the place was dirty and musty looking, the windows fugged with untellable grime. A small wood sign creaked over the door, caught in a chilly breeze, a painted wine glass, spilling blood red droplets, one of which formed the apostrophe in the name Sanguini's.

Lily was loitering quietly, in the shadows just a few steps down Duke's Head Yard, which cut between the buildings across from Sanguini's, trying to stay close to a pool of light created by the round bulb of a street lamp to the left of the tunnel's opening, but not actually be illuminated by it. She was fairly sure there were a couple of bats hanging in the tunnel above her and the thought creeped her out.

The street was largely quiet - the pub to the right was shut down for repairs and the row houses lining the streets were mostly already occupied so that people were not crowding the streets here at that hour of the evening. Somewhere, one of the houses windows was open and someone inside was practicing playing a saxophone so that horrid, shaky attempt at music was assaulting the streets. A bookshop at the corner was just closing up, the proprietor locking the doors before walking away down the road the opposite way. 

Across the road, Lily could just see the form of James, sitting on the bench at a bus stop under a street lamp, bent forward and reading a muggle newspaper. Each time James turned the page, he would shake out the paper, and look about as though checking for the bus and Lily would feel his gaze land upon her instead before he glanced at his watch and turned back to the paper.

Then a figure was emerging from the gates of Waterlow Park, a man wearing black trousers and a black vest over a dark purple-red shirt. Lily stepped into the light of the street lamp, looking down at a bag that hung from her arm, pausing to dig 'round in it. This being James's sign, he folded his paper and stood up, stepping 'round the bench and walking nearly directly into the man. They stumbled as James ricocheted into him and looked up, meeting the man's eyes.

Red-brown, they stared back at James in annoyance. "Watch where you're going," the man said in a rough tone, a deep slavic accent.

"Oh beg pardon, I am sorry," James said. He paused, tilted his head, and said, "I feel as though I've seen you somewhere before. Have we met?"

The man scowled, "No, I cannot say that we have. Excuse me." He went to step 'round James, but James had cast aside his newspaper and drawn his wand and as the man came even to him, James's arm shot out 'round his chest and pulled him back into him, quickly slipping his wand to the man's throat. "Unhand me or I shall make you wish that we had not met even this once," Matija Blagojevic demanded.

But James had already whispered the stunner and Matija Blagojevic went limp against him, sinking back against James's chest. 

Lily ran across the road, clicking the button on the deluminator that Dumbledore had given to them so that the light of the street lamps flew into the device as she went, the road cast into darkness, the space behind the bus bench completely cast in shadow. The tinny whining of the practicing saxophonist still warbled through the air and Lily cast her eyes about for anyone who might've been looking through windows in the flats over the street on the side she'd been standing on.

"There wasn't anyone," James said in a hushed voice. "I was keeping a watch."

"I thought you might've been too busy sneaking glances at me," Lily teased.

"I mean when you see a hot witch you can't help but have a look or two," James murmured, and he winked at her, even as he lowered Matija Blagojevic to the ground so the vampire lay spreado out on the pavement.

"Arse," she murmured.

James grinned.

Lily bent down, grabbed hold of Blagojevic's hair, and used her wand to sever the hair from the top of Bagojevic's head, shoving the fistful of hair into handkerchief, which she folded and pushed into her pocket.

"Mobilicorpus," Lily whispered and magic lifted the man from the pavement.

James was busy digging into Blagojevic's pockets for personal items, duplicating them as he found them, and tucking them quickly back into the pockets precisely as he'd found them. Six sets of each item - a pocket watch, some coins, a couple small vials that Lily suspected might be blood, some keys, a small scroll of parchment with the address of a pub just up the road - the very pub he and Lily had gone to see Snape a few nights before - and a small book of English-Bulgarian translations. They moved just within the gate of Waterlow, ducking off the main path into the bushes there while he was working at duplicating the things so that by the time he'd finished, Lily had dropped Blagojevic down onto the grass.

"Do you see the portkey?" James asked, then hissed, "Lumos."

"Dumbledore said it would be just here..." Lily looked about in the brush. "Oh, here it is." She stood up, an empty Lemon Sherbert wrapper on the tip of her wand.

"Does he think of nothing but sweets?" James asked, shaking his head.

"I don't know that he does," Lily answered, and she lay the apparently discarded sweets package upon the chest of Blagojevic, shaking it free of the end of her wand.

James checked his watch as he bent and carefully moved Blagojevic's hand to lay across the portkey, closing his hand 'round the sweet package.

"Will the stunner hold long enough?" Lily worried when several moments had passed.

"Evans, please, do you think I cast a weak stunner?" James asked, a smirk to his mouth.

Lily looked up at him. "I feel like you're trying at an innuendo but I'm not sure precisely what you're getting at, Mr. Potter," she said regally.

James chuckled.

Then with a sudden cracking sound, the vampire had disappeared, the portkey having activated as it was set to do at every quarter hour, sending Blagojevic off to wherever it was Dumbledore had scheduled the portkey to transport him to.

"Alright," James said, "That went quite well. Very smooth. And look at that. We've some time to spare before we meet the Longbottoms." He held up his wrist for her to see his watch.

Lily nodded, "Very efficient."

"What shall we do for the extra few minutes, Evans?" James asked.

Lily stared at him.

His eyes glinted.

"That's hardly enough time to snog you as much as I should like to do, Mr. Potter," Lily said primly. "We'll have to save it for later, when we have more time." 

"Is that so?" he asked.

She laughed.

"What about just one kiss?"

"Alright, just one," she said.

She got up and pecked him like a bird on his cheek and he said, "Oh that's hardly a kiss, Evans..."

"It'll have to do. We have polyjuice to take." She turned to the stone wall of the park and reached into her bag, pulling out several vials of the goopy brown potion, uncorking them, and dropping a couple of the hairs from the handkerchief into them so that they bubbled and popped. She restoppered them and turned them over, watching the hairs disappear in the liquid. It changed colors before her eyes, each one turning the deepest shade of burgundy. She turned 'round and looked at James, holding one out.

James took it and held it up to his wand light, frowning, "Ugh. He doesn't look like he'll taste very good."

"Wonder if he thought the same thing when he saw you?" She said evenly.

James laughed loudly.

Lily elbowed him, "Shhh!" she hissed.

"Evans -- you can't just make a joke like that and expect no reaction --" James said, still laughing, though far more quietly than he'd started off.

"Here, get changed," she said, pulling two sets of clothes from her bag.

He stripped of his own clothes quickly, folding them up and hanging them to her so she could tuck them in her bag. She was doing the same, both being careful to stay hidden behind the park wall and the bushes, though there was nobody beyond them to see them. Lily stared at James as he undressed, and her eyes couldn't help but take in how good he looked in the pale amount of light they had, how the shadows cast around his muscles, made them look even more defined... She bit her lip.

"Alright, Evans?" he asked, seeing her looking.

Lily flushed, "Alright, Potter."

"You sure about whether we have time for a snog?" he asked, eyebrow raised, a come hither smirk playing about his mouth.

"Positive," she said firmly.

They finished changing and Lily shoved their clothes into her bag as James struggled with the clothes that were too small on him - he couldn't button the vest  yet, he'd have to wait 'til after he'd changed - and she struggled with the same ones on her being too big, holding up the waist of the trousers with her fist.

James uncorked his vial. "Cheers."

Lily laughed and drank hers as he threw his back.

A moment later, one Matija Blagojevic waved for another of him to follow as they slipped back out of the gates of Waterlow Park. One of the Matijas held out their arm and clicked the button of the deluminator to release the light back into the street lamps.