Hermione Granger walked across the CalSci campus, squinting at the bright Los Angeles sun. To the outside observer she looked like any other harried graduate student, but there was much more to Hermione than met the eye. She was a witch. Seven years had passed since she had graduated from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Seven years since Lord Voldemort had finally been defeated by Hermione's friend, Harry Potter. Seven years since the wizard war.

She glanced down at the engagement ring on her finger. It wasn't terribly expensive, and to the eyes of a non-magical person, a muggle, it didn't look much like an engagement ring at all. But to Hermione it was the most beautiful thing in the world. Her fiance, Ron Weasley, had saved his auror wages for six months in order to buy it for her.

She could still remember the day he proposed. She had been at the Burrow, his parents' home, where they were temporarily residing. Hermione had been helping his mother prepare dinner by chopping onions while Ginny, Ron's sister and Harry's wife, was busy examining her reflection in the mirror.

"I don't think I'm showing at all!" she exclaimed unhappily.

Mrs. Weasley crossed to her and touched her tummy gently with her wand. It immediately grew out to make her look quite pregnant. "Don't get in too much of a hurry. Before too long, you'll look like this!" She touched her daughter's tummy again and it shrank to its usual size.

"Mum!" Ginny protested. "I don't think that's good for the baby!"

"It's all right," Hermione soothed. "It's just an optical illusion. Nothings happened with your baby. When's Harry coming back, anyway?"

"Next weekend. He's got two more games before he comes home," Ginny answered. Harry had decided, after fighting Lord Voldemort for most of his youth, to retire to a more relaxing and enjoyable occupation, and was now the seeker for the Tornados Quidditch team. Quidditch was the favorite sport among magical folk, and Harry was the top seeker and most popular player in the whole league.

When Harry went professional, he decided he wanted to be known only for his Quidditch playing. He had forced the teams to agree not to refer to him as The Boy Who Lived in any of their advertisements. One of the public relations reps for the team had tried so hard to overcome the spell and call him that in an article he was penning that his quill had suddenly grown fangs and chased him around his office, gnashing its teeth and growling. He had since taken to dictating all of his press releases while standing at a safe distance outside his office, shouting at the quill.

Ron had run in yelling, "I did it! I did it! I'm an auror! I passed all my training!" He scooped Hermione up and spun her around, causing quite a fuss involving a rather sharp bewitched butcher's knife and bits of chopped onion.

"I knew you would be!" Hermione exclaimed, wrapping her arms around him once they were no longer in mortal peril from the knife. Ron, of course, was a shoo-in to be an auror, one of the Ministry of Magic's highly trained agents. After all of the times Ron himself had faced Voldemort, they would be insane not to accept him.

"Marry me!" he said, his eyes wide with excitement. "Come on, say you will!"

"Oh, Ron," Hermione sighed. "Of course I will." The ring had come a few months later.

One evening Hermione awoke from her room in the Burrow to find Ron missing. She shuffled downstairs and found him sitting in the kitchen, brooding. "What's wrong?" she asked, sitting across from him.

"Nothing," he replied. Hermione wasn't going to be put off that easily by the man she had fought along side, laughed with, buried the dead with. She just watched him until he was ready to tell her. "Okay, it's just... the Ministry's wrong."

"About what?"

"The Death Eaters," he said, referring to the name that Voldemort's supporters had given themselves. "The ministry says they're all gone. Locked up in Azkaban. But they're wrong. Look at this." He lowered his voice substantially and showed her a piece of paper. It was neatly printed as if it had been done on a muggle computer rather than written out with a quill and parchment. It looked like a bit of a class schedule but the only part that could be made out was "CalSci - Dr. Larry Fleinhardt - P562 - Nuclear Physics".

"CalSci!" Hermione said. "That's a muggle university. In America. What does it mean?"

"We found it when we were cleaning out a house owned by one of the Death Eaters. We were trying to clear it of any objects pertaining to dark magic. But I found this. His daughter, Nikka Fowling, was never prosecuted properly. Her whereabouts are unknown."

"So you think this Nikka Fowling is in America?"

"I think she's going to try to learn nuclear science."

Hermione shook her head. "Well, there's nothing wrong with witches studying at muggle university, is there? Look at me. I'm starting at University of London studying aerodynamics for the Haywood Broomstick Company. Doesn't make Nikka a death eater."

"Her mother's a Death Eater. Her father's a Death Eater. And we have three eye-witness accounts that she was there at the battle in the Department of Mysteries and escaped. But all of the eye-witnesses are Death Eaters themselves, so the ministry refuses to listen to them." He leaned closer to Hermione. "Voldemort may be gone. The fact that Harry's scar has completely disappeared is proof enough of that. But the Death Eaters remain. And some of them are just chomping at the bit to take over his reign of terror. She's one of them. Believe it."

Hermione was frightened by the look in Ron's eyes. Ron was always the one with a quip or a joke. To see him so serious and passionate was completely out of character. "I believe you," Hermione whispered in return. "But what are you going to do about it?"

"Dunno. I've got to go to America, that's for certain. But the ministry won't send me, they say all the Death Eaters are gone. And we don't have any money."

Hermione thought for a moment. "No, we don't have any money. But the Haywood Broomstick Company does." Hermione smiled and her face lit up. "Listen, when I applied for the job to study at a muggle university, they went crazy. I mean, I did do very well at Hogwarts." That was probably the understatement of the year. Hermione had received the highest marks of any student in over fifty years. "If I asked to be sent to this," she glanced at the paper, "CalSci, I bet they'll do it. I bet they'll do it in a heartbeat. And put us up in an apartment to boot."

"Really?" said Ron, looking much cheerier.

"Definitely," Hermione responded. "Here, I'll send an owl first thing in the morning. I'll bet we have their answer by tomorrow afternoon."

Ron grinned broadly. "Smashing. You're dead clever, you know that? No wonder I'm marrying you!"

They both stood and Ron wrapped an arm around her. Hermione smiled at him slyly. "Jury's still out on why I'm marrying you, though."

He led her upstairs. "Must be my rugged good looks."

"Yeah. That must be it."

Hermione smiled to herself at the memory, turned left into a classroom, and sat down at the back. Oh, if these people only knew what she was capable of. Then again, one person knew. And Hermione was only too aware how dangerous that person was. Her smile faded. She took out her paper and pen. For the next hour there would be no more thoughts of Death Eaters or spells. For the next hour she was just another muggle trying to get an education. This was the easy part. The hard part would come later.