A/N: Okay so people that follow me as an author probably know that I have a story already on hiatus. I apologise about that, I will finish it, but I was writing this one first and just didnt publish it. I had a sudden burst of enthusiam for it, so now I am posting it :)
I hope you enjoy it!
Please favourite, review etc :) I'm really excited about this story! So far its one of my favourites.
Chapter 1 - Hermione.
Hermione Granger slowly walked through the fireplace as she threw the powder onto the bottom.
"Ministry of Magic". She said drearily but clearly enough to not end up somewhere completely random.
Green flames engulfed her as she was transported from the small makeshift fireplace in her studio flat, to the larger fireplace that stood in the Ministry of Magic.
She rubbed her eyes sleepily as she stepped out onto the marble flooring. Maybe she shouldn't have stayed up all night reading, but she wanted to nail her latest case. It was one of her hardest yet, and she felt as if she was getting nowhere.
No matter what she did she just couldn't find a link between everything that was going on. Some of the stories seemed sacrificial, and that just didn't sit right with her. She was working as a team on it, but she just felt more responsible to find out what was going on, also with her being team leader she felt she had to.
Hermione walked into the meeting room where she was supposed to be meeting the rest of her team, to decide what they wanted to do next. No one was there yet, so she got herself a cup of coffee before sitting down and sorting her notes out. A few minutes later, her team started arriving.
Once everyone had settled down, she began to address them with the situation at hand.
"Nothing new has been found since last week. There appears to have been no attacks or kidnappings, and everything seems quiet, and honestly that scares me. You've all heard of the muggle saying 'the calm before the storm' right? So we need to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible."
Several of the other team members nodded in agreement, the rest all just look worried. A long haired blonde woman, who Hermione knew as Tracey raised her hand as if asking to take the floor. Hermione nodded to her to let her know she could speak freely.
She tossed her hair back, and began to speak with a slight Irish accent.
"These people are all convicted death eaters, or were at least involved with Voldemort at some point. Maybe that's the link."
Hermione sat there shell shocked for a moment. How hadn't she seen it before? Death eaters, of course. It had been 7 years since the Wizarding War, and she had tried to block it all out of her mind, and now she had done that so well that she failed to notice a pattern. She scorned herself for being so stupid.
"That's it. It's got to be it. Perkins, can you go and fetch every record on all the suspicious deaths in the last 3 months please, and bring them here? We just need to be able to prove this, and work out a complete pattern so that work out what they are planning or who's next." Hermione told them.
The man named Perkins, stood up and nodded before leaving the room.
Hermione smiled at Tracey.
"Well done, what made you figure that out?"
She regretted what she had said instantly. She had forgotten that Tracey and her family used to be death eaters, but Tracey changed her ways and got put into the ministries protection program.
"Sorry." Hermione quickly apologised.
"It's okay, sometimes I forget to." Tracey replied. "Feels like I've been on the good side forever, it's nice to forget that I actually haven't." She smiled.
Perkins came back with the box of records and performed a silent spell on it to make it expand. Hermione took the box and started pouring the papers all over the table. She accio'd the long whiteboard from the back of the room and started rifling through the papers and placing pictures onto the board.
"There's method to my madness, I promise." She told the 5 other people in the room, after seeing there bewildered faces staring at her. "I'm making a timeline of when they died. Then we can see if there's a pattern. If we can work that out, we can get to the bottom of this and hopefully solve it all."
For what seemed like hours, they all worked as a team to work out time/day of death and place them into order. Eventually all the pictures were on the board and in order. A few of the faces, Hermione recognised. She tried not to let it get to her.
"Let's get some lunch and then come back to this with a fresh attitude. " Hermione suggested.
She didn't want to stop, but didn't want everyone to suffer by not eating, and admittedly her stomach was growling a bit.
After grabbing a cheese sandwich from the canteen, she sat back in the meeting room to wait for the others. She stared at the board with the board on desperately looking for a pattern. She couldn't notice a physical pattern, and there was no age related pattern.
Her team began to enter the room again.
"Yeah, they probably are just being killed by someone looking for justice."
Hermione heard the last of two of her team member's conversation as they sat down. They stopped talking the minute they saw Hermione looking at them.
"No it's okay, carry on. You may be on to something. I was thinking the same. It's almost as if someone is getting revenge." She theorised.
"Well, it looks as if someone is getting revenge, or killing off competition or something. There's no way this is all random. Every one of them has a link to the death eaters or Voldemort in some way." The woman said to Hermione.
"Okay, can you please go and get the records we have for any known death eaters. Let's see who's left on the lists." Hermione addressed the woman who had previously spoken to her, Marie Linford.
Marie nodded and left to find them.
Hermione breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed her and the team were finally getting somewhere.
It wasn't long before Marie was back with a long piece of parchment covered in names. Hermione quickly gave her instructions to read the names of the ones that weren't deceased, as the list automatically updates when someone on it is deceased. To their surprise, the number of confirmed death eaters that were still alive was very low. Most of them had been killed in the war, or were in Azkaban. There were only 10 names remaining that were neither dead nor imprisoned.
She quickly sent an air memo to Harry and waited for a response. Within minutes, Harry had apparated into the meeting room. Hermione explained everything they had found, and what they thought. He agreed, and took a copy of the shorter parchment with only the death eaters who were still alive names on.
"What's the plan then?" She asked him nervously.
"We're going to have to send ministry members to each of these addresses and have them all put into the protection program until we can figure out who's behind this. "
"Okay that sounds like the only reasonable thing to do."
Harry looked at Hermione with a look of sincerity.
"You do realise whose name is on this?"
Of course she did. It was the name of the person who had made her school life misery, and who no one had seen or heard from since the Wizarding War. Rumours were that he was hiding out at his parents house.
Draco Malfoy.