Always In Your Shadow: Calista Snape Volume I (Snape's Daughter)

Prologue

Any of them would contribute something useful, and that was the way she had to look at it; it wasn't about the men, or whether she liked any of them. It was, purely and simply, about choosing the ones that would breed something useful into her child, so that the child could be presented to the Dark Lord, the ultimate servant. No one had ever been a Death Eater from birth; it seemed to Bellatrix that if such a child were to exist, it could only be hers.

And if, for some reason, it didn't work out; if the child was dim-witted, if the Dark Lord rejected it, if Bellatrix tired of caring for it - well, then she could raise it as fodder. A willing sacrifice was always a powerful thing, and that was the sum of it, to Bellatrix. The child would be a servant, or the child would be a sacrifice. Perhaps both, in time.

But for now, there was only the swelling of her belly, and the wand she twirled in her fingers. It could tell her now if it was a boy or a girl, but that was of little interest to her, anyway. It could tell her who had fathered the child too, but for that she'd need to cast a paternity spell on both herself and on the male, and she wasn't certain she wanted him, whichever one he was, to know. There were a few of them that might ask her to see the child, even to allow him to help raise it, that might have their own opinions on the child's usefulness, and Bellatrix wanted to keep it all to herself. When it came down to it, she didn't trust any of them to raise it correctly, to stay true to her mission. If you wanted something done right, in Bellatrix's mind, you did it yourself.

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Bellatrix gave birth to a tiny, skinny-limbed girl in the middle of a frigid, bitter March. Her skin was pale, her mouth a thin-lipped pout. Her eyes were as dark and fathomless as an oil slick, or the bottom of a deep well, and the feathery hair atop her head was jet-black, scraggly. Bellatrix called her Calista, because the name had a double meaning; it could refer to a vessel, and it also meant 'most beautiful'.

Bellatrix thought her child was indeed most beautiful; she bore enough of a resemblance to her mother to see she had the Black blood in her veins, and in the child's dark, dark eyes Bella imagined she could already see a devotion to the Dark Lord and his deeds.

Ultimately, it came about much as she had half-expected, though. The Dark Lord had no interest in a baby, no matter how extraordinary Bellatrix claimed it would be.

"Bring her back when she is sixteen, and ready to take the Mark," he had said dismissively, in his cold, high voice.

And that is what Bellatrix resolved to do; but in the meantime, there was no reason that she shouldn't be cultivated, so that she might grow to be as useful as possible. Perhaps she could not take the Mark yet; perhaps she would not, as Bellatrix had envisioned, accompany her mother to Death Eater gatherings during her formative years. But she could be taught along the way - could learn to feel pride in her wizarding blood, and contempt for those that didn't have it, or those that had sullied it through intermarrying or associating with Muggles.

And so, Bellatrix fed the baby from her breast, and recited her bloodline to the child as she did so; she put the babe to sleep with detailed accounts of her own murderous deeds, and during the day she would murmur the importance of blood purity, would describe the noble cause of preserving it.

Calista was a serious, quiet child from the beginning. She never cried much, which was just as well, because Bellatrix had no patience for it. She would look up at her mother with those dark eyes, small mouth set solemnly. When she did cry, Bellatrix would attempt to feed her; if that did not make the child stop crying, then she would simply set the child back in her cradle and ignore her, until her cries faded away into soft gasps.

As a toddler, she was briefly talkative; she'd insert gibberish responses into the pauses in Bellatrix's nighttime rhetoric, punctuating tales of torture and Muggle hunting with nonsense sounds. Bellatrix fancied that it meant the child was interested, perhaps excited to follow in her mother's footsteps. Calista would imitate her mother's voice, too, as she aged, repeating back words and phrases that Bellatrix spoke. Most would say simply that the child was learning to talk, but Bellatrix was convinced that Calista was eager to be just like her mother, in all ways.