The moment she saw her best friend's name on a recommendation card dangling from the shelf a few feet down from her, Hermione Weasley's blood ran cold as ice. But no! Surely, she was imagining things. Harry's name didn't belong on a shelf at a muggle shop. And anyway, it was shelved in fiction, wasn't it? All of the books she'd ever seen about Harry had been biographies and histories, as they should be, because Harry was hardly fictional.
She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself, and then walked over to the recommendation card, trying to convince herself that she hadn't seen what she thought she'd seen. And then she took several more deep breaths once she got to the shelf itself, because she couldn't afford to have a melt-down in the middle of Waterstone's no matter how bad it was that Harry's name was screaming at her from no less than seven different book covers.
Perhaps it was a coincidence. After all, "Harry" had been the third most popular boys' name in the UK last year, and "Potter" wasn't dreadfully uncommon, either, now was it? There was no need to panic.
The titles of the books shook her still further. "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," she read softly, whispering to herself. "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Merlin, how did they know?" Because there was no denying it now. These books, these stories, shelved in the children's section under fiction, with bright covers and childish lettering – they were the truth. The real truth.
She reached for the first one with shaking fingers, flipping it around to read the description on the back. "Harry Potter has never played a sport while flying on a broomstick . . ." She skimmed the rest quickly, muttering to herself, "cloak of invisibility . . . giant – that'll be Hagrid, and he's only a half-giant anyway, silly thing. Dragon? Norbert. Dursleys – oh Merlin, they've got that bit right – owls, school . . . oh dear."
She sighed again. It sounded right. It sounded too right. But perhaps this writer – she flipped the book over to the front again – perhaps this J.K. Rowling had merely gotten lucky. After all, broomsticks? Giants? Dragons? They were pretty much stock elements so far as muggle stories about magic were concerned. And if she'd gotten Harry's aunt and uncle's names right, that didn't mean all that much, did it?
She was briefly tempted to flip through and try to find herself in the book, but of course that was ridiculous. It was just setting herself up for heartache, because if she wasn't in it, she would be disappointed, if she was in it and it was wrong about her, she'd be hurt, and if she was in it and all of it was spot-on, she'd be terrified. She put it back on the shelf and picked up the last one. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
It sent a chill down her spine, because even the title was so close to the truth, but she had to prove it. She couldn't just look at the titles and let the feeling in her spine dictate her actions. One didn't act on half information. She needed to know for sure that these books were the real story, start to finish, and not some unlucky coincidence. And even though the titles should be enough to prove it, she didn't like thinking about what it meant if there were seven full books of their lives out there, floating through muggle society. It was a massive security breach, and the implications were massive. So she'd better make sure before she freaked out.
This copy of the seventh book was a hardcover, heavy in her hand, and as she flipped it open to read the description inside the dust jacket, she was met with the words, "We now present the seventh and final installment of the epic tale of Harry Potter." She snorted. Ridiculous. What sort of a blurb was that? She'd have to check the sixth, then. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which, like the other titles, told her a bit more than she necessarily wanted to know about how true these books might really be.
The book's description sent chills back up and down her spine all over again. Voldemort's name was still not in common use, not even now, 14 years after his death. But that wasn't what made her heart stutter uncomfortably. "Ron scans the obituary pages of the Daily Prophet, looking for familiar names," it said, and she stopped reading, because she simply didn't need to anymore. Her husband's name was right there in perfectly casual print, sans last name, because obviously if they'd been reading the whole story starting when she and Ron and Harry were first years, they wouldn't need clarification about who Ron was by the time they were reading about 6th year. And that? That couldn't be allowed.
The casual bandying-about of Ron's name spoke of too much familiarity, a familiarity which was sure to extend over to her, and then – a sudden realization almost made her drop the book and she jammed it haphazardly back onto the shelf with none of her usual care.
Seizing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows again, she flipped frantically to the back, fingers shaking. "No, no, no, no, no!" Her children's names were right there, in clear, black and white print on the last page of the book. "Albus, Rose, Hugo, and Lily laughed," was the first sentence that leapt out at her from that final page, her kids and her niece and nephew, all right there for everyone to see. She skimmed the rest of the epilogue around them, noting with slight puzzlement that it was set in the future, in 2017, not 2012. Rose and Al wouldn't be starting school for another five years! Even Victoire, the oldest of the cousins, was only just finishing her first year now. But that didn't change the fact that while this Rowling person couldn't possibly know what it would be like to drop the kids off at Platform 9 3/4, he or she did know the children's names. And this book put those names out in the world for everyone to see. And that was completely unacceptable.
She put the book back on the shelf, letting her anger wash over her without even trying to stop it. It was only natural, really, for a mother to be angry with someone who had endangered her children. But more than that, it was useful. There was no reason not to be angry, not when her anger might get this problem fixed more quickly. She held herself together, stalked to the bathroom, where she wouldn't be seen, stepped into a stall, and disapparated away, arriving at her office in the Ministry almost immediately.
The wards on the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, where she worked, were quite strong, but it was not for nothing that she was called "the brightest witch of her age," and she knew exactly how to work around them when she was in a hurry. And she was certainly in a hurry now. She wanted the books taken off those shelves, and she wanted it done now, before any more muggles found out the truth than already knew it. It was one thing for her parents to know what had happened to her, to all of them, but it was something else entirely for an entire country of strangers to know it, and she was not going to stand for that. Not even a little.
Her biggest problem was that she wasn't sure exactly what to do about it, and as angry as she herself was right now, she knew her husband and their best friend would be even worse. She'd always kept the coolest head of the three of them, and she needed a plan, because if the boys found out now, they'd go off without one, and they'd make a mess of the whole endeavor.
The first part would be to confront the author – find out who "J. K." was and how he or she knew all of this in the first place. The thought that a witch or wizard would sell the most famous story of their time to the muggle presses purely for money was a depressing one, but it was also the most logical and the easiest to deal with, in some ways. She'd bring Harry and Ron along, they'd arrest the author - because while it was more a job for the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol, their positions as aurors would certainly allow them to make the arrest themselves - and in a perfect world, a world where this had been caught much earlier, that would be it. The problem would be taken care of.
But that wasn't going to be it. After she met the author, there would be the editor to talk to, and everyone else at the publishing house, and then there were distributors and book shop clerks and librarians and readers, thousands and thousands of readers – millions even, maybe, if Hermione was very unlucky. If she hadn't done so much already in her life, helping Harry defeat Voldemort all those years ago and working to reform the ministry ever since, she might have quailed at the massiveness of the task ahead. But she didn't.
Those books were a danger to her children. They were a danger to the entire wizarding world, if they led to any large number of muggles finding out the truth about wizardkind. They were probably a danger to her, though that was much less important than protecting Rosie and Hugo and the world in general. And they were a danger that would be dealt with, no matter how big a challenge that proved to be.
Sitting at her desk, she quickly wrote out three memos, explaining the situation to Kingsley as quickly as she could (because she felt the Minister probably ought to know about this too, even if she was fixing the problem on her own) and asking both her husband and Harry to come up to her office as soon as possible. If Harry's position as head of the Auror's Office kept him away, she'd just have to pick him up from his office on their way out, because after all, it was his name on all of those books and he had the best legal case for wanting them gone. Then she folded the memos neatly, making the fold lines crisp by running her fingernails across them because she couldn't afford to be anything but fast in dealing with this crisis, and sloppy paper airplanes could be downright slow, something that had frustrated her to no end when she'd started working here all those years ago.
With a flick of her wand, she sent them zipping off, fast enough to blow the rest of the memos floating down the corridor out of their way as they went off to their respective recipients, and she sat back to wait for the boys to arrive, here for their next great search. There might be more copies of these books than there had been horcruxes, but she would bet her last sickle that they were less well-protected. And easier destroyed.