Hermione Granger pulled up her fishnet stocking and attached it to the black garter belt clip that hugged her waist a little tightly. The tug of the stocking felt very satisfying, until the clip gave way with a sproing and the stocking ended up halfway down to her knees again.

"Blast."

She cursed at the clip, and with a wave of her wand – but wait. She didn't have a wand any more. She had thrown it as far away as she could as she had kicked the side of the rustbucket car that had broken down on the side of a West Virginia backroad over six weeks ago. The snow had been falling gently, the car had been steaming, and Hermione had been miserable as she desperately tried to get it going again with magic.

But magic and cars rarely go well together. She could remember the wilfulness of the Anglia that Harry and Ron had tried to fly to Hogwarts, and there was no doubt in her mind that the magic they had used (and that Arthur had applied beforehand) had turned the car from a transport device to a raging killer. Her own car, purchased with the few dollars she had managed to gain once she had landed in the US, had worked for a week before giving up the ghost and stranding her in the back end of Dead Coal County.

Now she was stuck in Sebastianne KY, population 28 000, not counting the bodies still stuck down the local coal mine after the big explosion back in 1973. The town had been thriving then, twice the population and three times the disposable income. Now, it was a dump, with $2 shops and Fast Loan offices lining the main street, second hand car yards on every road leading in, and even the Walmart was looking run down and depressed. Work was hard to find, and as an outsider, Hermione had applied at all the local stores, the diners, the cleaning corporations and the railway yard. Only one bar had offered her work, and on the basis of that, Hermione had found a place to stay in a rooming house a few blocks away.

Now, though, she was trapped. The bar's work had rapidly diminished – it turned out they had hired her only to cover another staff member's holiday, and at the end of that time, she was told that her services were no longer required. It's also possible that the slap she'd given the owner when he'd grabbed her bum had contributed to her loss of employment.

And that had left just one option. She needed money to either buy a new car, or get a bus ticket out of there. No-one else would hire her – she had little experience and no qualifications that meant anything out here. There was only the Macafee joint out on the road to Louisville. The only qualifications they required of her was long legs, the ability to wrap those legs around a pole, and the willingness to wear very little at all while she was doing it.

Hermione grabbed a needle and thread, and quickly sewed the suspender clasp back to the garter belt ribbon, as one of the other dancers came into the dressing room.

"Hey Paula. Cold crowd tonight."

"Not surprised. I almost froze walking here." Hermione smiled at Suzy, the only person there who had shown her any friendship. "How many?"

"About four. Ted's in his usual spot."

"Blast." Hermione had a particular dislike for Ted Macafee, whose hands would not stay where they were supposed to. But as he was the owner's son, the bouncers ignored him as he attempted to paw the girls as they gyrated on the stage in front of him. "Who else?"

"Fred Wells and Joey Spratt are at a back table again. Can't think why they bother, if they're not going to watch us. I did my best splits for them tonight, and they didn't even look up." Suzy was sweet on Joey, but Hermione had a feeling that the mechanic's preferences lay more towards dime store clerks. Co-incidentally, Fred was a dime store clerk. "And some new guy. Never seen him before. He's at the side, just watching."

"Sounds harmless, then. Hopefully he'll be in a buying mood, though. I could do with a change in my luck." Hermione snapped off the last of the thread, and returned the needle to the thread reel.

"Yeah – what is it now? Eight?"

"Nine."

"Nine? What?" Suzy held up her hand. "You broke that mirror at your old school, then you lost your parents, then your house burned down. Then that old boyfriend of yours tried to kill you… I still can't believe you got out of that one."

"Well, I couldn't prove anything." Hermione shivered, thinking of how close she had been to death. She hadn't told Suzy, but the 'breaking a mirror" was actually 'destroying the Room of Requirement'. She didn't like superstition at the best of times, but the run of bad luck had started from that day, and nothing else in the Battle of Hogwarts seemed likely to have set off the series. And as for losing her parents – all the information she had had about where they'd gone to in Australia was lost when her house in the little village of Duckbush had caught fire. She still suspected that it wasn't an accident, but it had forced her to move in with Ron, despite not wanting to really.

And then, one day, she'd walked into her bedroom and been attacked by a double set of Bludgers. She'd barely made it out of there alive. It might have been an accident, but she was starting to feel rather paranoid by then. "But then the bank closed my accounts – that's five." Gringotts had never forgiven her for setting their dragon free. "There's that photo of me hugging my best friend that they put in the local paper. Claimed it was an affair, and I had to leave. Six."

"And your luggage got lost on the way here, that's seven. Honestly, Paula, did you piss off a powerful witch or something? I've never heard of anyone having as much bad luck as you. They probably put a curse on your car."

"Probably. That was number eight. And Frankie coming back to Hobson's Bar when we all thought she was going to go back to her mum's place – I'm counting that as nine."

"Then there can't be much more." Suzy grabbed a towel and headed for the shower in the corner of the room. "These things come in streaks – I read it in the Dispatch. Madame Avalonia says that a streak of bad luck must be allowed to run out, or something really bad will happen to you that will be all the bad bits put together at once."

"Right."

"And I think you must be nearly at the end, because it wasn't three, or seven, so it must be thirteen. You need to be careful, Paula."

"And I need to get out there and get some money. Let's see if that new man is good for any." Hermione stood, kissed Suzy on the cheek, then picked up the gold lame wrap she always wore on her way to the stage, and headed out. Her sequinned bra was firm against her breasts, and not likely to slip if someone tried to manhandle her, and her bikini bottom was similarly reinforced, not to mention a double-layer. Some of the notes the patrons tried to slip inside it were downright filthy.

Only the high heels still caused her an effort. She could walk steadily most of the time, but a slippery floor or unevenness made her unbalanced and prone to tripping. Hermione-Paula stepped carefully out into the main room as the barman hit the CD player button for her usual music. Slightly blinded by the lights, she gyrated inside the cape, giving a hint of what might lie beneath. She ignored the back table where Fred and Joey seemed lost in each other's company, deftly avoided Ted's groping hands, and swayed as she approached the stranger's table. Slipping the cloak down slightly to give him a view of her rounded breasts in the padded bra, she was rewarded with the sound of an intake of breath.

"Got him." She smiled to herself as she passed by, letting her leg brush against his. Hermione was about to turn and mount the stairs to the tiny stage where the pole stood ready, waiting for her agile rotations, when her foot caught on a nail sticking slightly out of the floorboards. In a moment, she was staggering, and the edge of the cloak caught under the other foot and completely unbalanced her. The next thing, she was sitting down very heavily in the lap of the strange client, barely missing the table edge and a more serious injury.

"Ooof!"

"Oh. Sorry, mister. You saved me from another piece of bad l…" Hermione's words ran to a halt as she realised that the dark stranger whose lap she had fallen into was none other than ex-Hogwarts Headmaster and secret double agent, Severus Snape.