The Death Eater [HARRY POTTER]

13

"Thank you, Daphne, for sending Draco to help me during the Yule Ball," Calla said quietly, the next time she had the pretty Slytherin girl in her glass. She had already thanked Draco, and now she was paying her dues to the mastermind behind her escape. Merlin knew that Draco would have never come after her of his own volition. It just wasn't something that he would do.

"What?" Daphne glanced up, looking away from her work for a moment. She almost seemed confused by Calla's words. "I'm sorry Professor, but I don't know what you're talking about. I left the ball a bit early to go to bed. When I left Draco and his friends were laughing about something."

Calla was genuinely confused, as she remembered what Draco had told her that night. He had specifically said that Daphne had noticed her in distress, and had sent him over to save her. Draco wasn't one to lie, at least not like that and not to her. He would start a nasty rumor about Potter occasionally, but most Slytherins did that. Calla thought about it for another long moment, before she shook her head once and smiled gently down at her student.

"I must have misunderstood him, then," Calla corrected herself, before took a step back. "You're coming along very nicely with your essay, though. Keep up the good work."

Calla spun on her heels and paced back to her desk, something which her students thought looked particularly Snape like. It wasn't often that Calla's students compared her to her father anymore, truthfully she was a much better teacher than he ever would be, but there were always those moments were they were reminded that she actually was his daughter. A couple of Gryffindor students had even invented a story at one point that Calla wasn't actually Severus' daughter, that no woman would be stupid enough to sleep with him. According to the theory, Severus had found Calla in an alley, and brought her home because he had a new potion that he wanted to try out on her. Calla had always thought that story was particularly entertaining, both because her father did actually occasionally test his potions on her when she was much younger and because the Gryffindors had to look past the startling similarities between her and her father.

Even though Calla sometimes hated it, even she had to admit that she was a slightly more feminine carbon copy of her father. She certainly had his nose, and his high cheekbones. She didn't have the same eye color as he did, Calla assumed it was one of the few traits that she got from her mother, but aside from that she spoke like he did, walked like he did, and looked a lot like he did. It was so bad when she was much younger, as she got older she seemed to grow into her face more so that she wasn't nearly as unapproachable as her father was, that younger Slytherins would avoid her because they could never be certain that she wasn't her father. Calla had always been much sorter than her father was, but when she had been out of class she had developed the nasty habit of curling up in a black blanket while she sat in the common room and if she and her father weren't side by side, she looked like him sitting on the couch in his cloak.

With a slightly unnecessary flourish, sometimes Calla didn't even realize that she was doing it, Calla sat at her desk and reclined thoughtfully in her seat, folding her hands in her lap and looking halfheartedly across the room to see if any of her students looked like they needed help.

******

"Hello, Headmaster Karkaroff," Calla didn't even need to turn around to smell the cheap cologne that was wafting from the former death eater. "Is there something that I can help you with?"

Igor stopped walking for a moment, probably wondering how Calla had known he was there because he didn't announce himself in any way. However he soon continued walking, and came to stand behind Calla, placing a hand on her shoulder. 

"I believe you can, Miss. Snape," Igor purred, lowing his head so that his face was very close to hers. Calla could hear every one of his ratting breaths as it left his lungs, and the sounds almost instantly began to grate on her nerves, but she ignored it for the moment. Instead of moving away from the man in disgust like she wanted to, she turned her own head so they they were nearly nose to nose. Then she let a practiced smile slide onto her face and she heard Karkaroff catch his breath.