Author's Notes: Don't expect such quick updates in the future, but I wanted to get something out. Also, Steve Wandell is from Supernatural. He was a hunter murdered by Sam when he was possessed in Season 2, I think. Hopefully, you know what Daniel Elkins is. For those of you who've asked, Mini-Jack is slang for Jack O'Neill's clone. He ended up stuck at fifteen (with all of the original's memories) thanks to a mistake and was essentially released into the population and never seen again on any Stargate series. Talk about wasted potential. See ending notes about other matters.


Chapter 2


Hermione wasn't really sure what woke her up, but could only later assume it had been her magic attempting to protect her. She was only one of several patients in the room, although privacy curtains did ensure that the other patients neither bothered her nor even saw her. The occasional chatter during the day was a bit annoying, but Hermione could tune it out.

Unsure of why she'd woken, Hermione reached out with her senses. The only form of wandless magic she had any real skill in was the mind arts. Hermione was a natural occlumens. Legilimency was a bit more difficult for Hermione, but infinitely easier than apparition or what Hermione could only call telekinesis, which Tamar had insisted she learn even if she attempted no other form of wandless magic. How Harry had had such difficulty learning occlumency she didn't know. It was so easy for her, but she supposed that not everybody could have natural occlumency shields.

Her magic touched the minds of the four other patients in the room and slid off them once she'd confirmed they were not the reason for the disturbance Hermione had felt. She stretched her legilimency probe out farther, encompassing first the floor, and then the entire hospital. On that scale, it was impossible to differentiate one person from another, but it was possible to narrow down where the disturbance was… or in this case was not. It took a bit of time and a lot of patience, but Hermione managed to exclude the people technically within the hospital. The disturbance was in the parking lot, it seemed.

Tentatively, Hermione withdrew her senses from the hospital and focused it on the parking lot. There was no way Hermione would be able to go past surface thoughts at this distance without eye contact, but hopefully surface thoughts would be enough. Thankfully she was on a much weaker pain killer now that actually allowed her to think properly. Hermione had been a bit surprised to realize that her collarbone was broken and her wrist fractured, leaving her left arm both in a cast and a sling. Hermione touched the disturbance's mind only to jerk back in shock.

There was a person possessed by a demon in the parking lot.

Hermione reached out again, touching the mind tentatively. It was focused on something, someone in the hospital. A hunter, Hermione realized. The demon was after a hunter in the hospital. She pressed gently, delicately slipping into the demon's mind. Normally, such a thing was incredibly dangerous, but the pentagram tattoo above her heart made it impossible for her to be possessed by a demon, meaning it could not use her legilimency probe to follow her back to her body and possess her. Hermione managed to catch the name Steve Wandell before slipping out of the demon's mind. Even if it couldn't use her probe against her, she'd no desire to spend more time in its mind than absolutely necessary.

With a name, Hermione searched the hospital once more, starting with the emergency room and then the ICU, as they were the most likely places a hunter would be. It was easy enough to find a person if you knew their name. The man was not in either, so she moved on, giving a general sweep of the hospital. Hermione was a little stunned when she found the man in the maternity ward. Oh… his daughter had just given birth.

She contemplated removing the I.V. from her arm, almost dismissing the idea before she realized that if she got into the middle of a fight it could be used against her. It took her but a moment to properly remove the I.V. Hermione went to stand, only to stop short. For the first time since awakening in this hospital, she realized she was much smaller than she should be. A glance down was enough to confirm that underneath her hospital gown her breasts and hips were gone. Instead of the body of an adult, her body was now that of a child.

Was this a result of her interference with that rune array? No… the array didn't do that. It did something else… it… it transported whoever was standing in it from one dimension to another. Hermione felt the blood drain from her face. She'd been transported to an alternate dimension.

Focus. She had to focus. After the demon was dealt with, she could figure out exactly what had happened and where Marcus and Adrian were.

Hermione found a pair of pajama bottoms in the small closet built into the wall next to her bed and a pair of slippers that looked like they might fit. She pulled on both before leaving her curtained off cubicle. She would have walked straight out, but she saw something on a little table in what looked like a play area near the door. Hermione picked up the box of crayons, slipping them into her sling and going on her way. With no wand or practical weapons, the crayons were unfortunately her best bet.

It was a little after three in the morning according to the clock she'd passed and there was almost nobody about. A simple mental suggestion kept the doctors and nurses from noticing her as she went to the elevator and then up to the sixth floor.

Once on the proper floor, Hermione paused in front of the elevators. They were one of two banks of elevators in the building. Hermione removed a blue crayon and pealed off the label before using her magic to lift it to the ceiling. Hermione had long ago memorized the many and varied forms of devil's traps and how each worked. It was a bit difficult to get the level of pressure right, but Hermione managed to draw a circle, with a pentagram and appropriate symbols within above the normal elevators and service elevators before finding all four stair cases and drawing devil's traps above them as well. She went to the entrance to the maternity ward and pulled out the white crayon which was only a shade brighter than the ceiling tiles. Hermione used it to draw a full heptagram devil's trap. More specifically, it was made up of two pentacles of the lesser Key of Solomon and had a far more powerful effect on demons.

A quick check showed that the demon was still on the first floor. Good, she had time.

Hermione glanced about, before seeing an elderly woman in a small break room with a coffee maker and various supplies with a rosary in hand. Perfect. The Campbells-well, the hunter branch of the Campbells at least-were almost entirely Catholic.

Hermione let the magic hiding her fade as she approached the woman. Transfiguring a rosary wouldn't work unless it was permanent transfiguration and Hermione had neither the power to spare nor the skill for it at the moment. If she'd a wand on her, that would have been a different story.

"Ma'am?" Hermione said shyly, ducking her head so that her mid-thigh length hair fell over her shoulders, hiding her face slightly. She really needed to cut off about a foot of hair, but that could wait until later.

"Yes dear?" said the woman, with an accent Hermione couldn't quite place. "Shouldn't you be in bed?"

"I had a nightmare and I wanted to pray but I don't have my rosary. Do you know where I can get one?" It was a risk, but having a rosary meant she could make holy water, and she needed every possible advantage right now.

"I don't think the gift shop will open until eight or nine," said the woman. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a metal ring with a small cross and ten knobby bits of metal jutting out of the ring's perimeter. It was a simple, basque ring rosary, but it was more than enough for her purposes. "Here, you can have this."

"Thank you ma'am," said Hermione gratefully accepting the ring.

"You should go back to bed."

"Have a good night," she said, leaving the room.

A little further down the hallway, Hermione found the right room. She knocked on the door loudly. "Mr. Wandell, are you there?"

The door was yanked open. Hermione looked up, more than a little annoyed by how short she was, to see a rather tall man in layered flannel and denim, the typical uniform of hunters almost everywhere.

"What do you want, kid?" he demanded, looking down at her suspiciously.

"Somebody possessed by a demon is looking for you. It's in the hospital right now."

She didn't even flinch when the man pointed a gun at her. "How do you know that?"

"I can read minds," she pointed out. "Christo. You want to test me with salt and holy water as well? Or is that good enough for you?"

He uncapped a flask and handed it to her. "Drink."

Hermione couldn't help but roll her eyes, but she did as ordered. Most hunters were incredibly suspicious and paranoid, for admittedly good reason. It proved to be watered down alcohol-whiskey from the taste. Probably watered down with holy water. It was an old trick, but not much used these days.

He pulled out a knife edged in silver and motioned. With a sigh, Hermione held up her uninjured arm and allowed him to knick her skin. She didn't bother to react when he took out a salt packet and poured it into her hand. The various tests proving she was not a monster at least seemed to satisfy the man.

"Get in here, kid," said Steve. "What's your name, anyway?"

"Hermione." She shrugged, stepping into the room and allowing him to close the door behind her. "I'd tell you my surname, but it'd be a lie, so I won't bother, if that's alright with you." Hermione held out a crayon. "Here, if you want to put up a devil's trap. I already put them up over the elevators and the entrances to the stairs on this floor, but it'll figure out how to get up here eventually."

"How'd you do that?"

"Psychokinesis," she said nonchalantly. The term would explain more of her magical abilities than just telekinesis. "I can move things with my mind."

Hermione noted that there was a second man in the room, a sawed off shotgun in his lap sitting next to a rather exhausted looking woman in the hospital bed with an infant in her arms. At least there were two hunters here. As the woman was Wandell's daughter, she probably knew the basics of hunting, even if she weren't trained as a hunter. There were several schools of thought regarding the female relations of hunters. Some felt that women should remain civilians and be protected, others that they should at least know how to take care of themselves. The Campbells belonged to the third school of thought, namely that women should learn to hunt and be active hunters as their gender would not protect them from the monsters.

"Michael, call Danny. Tell him to get over here and call in any backup he can," ordered Steve. "Hermione here claims to be psychic. She says there's a demon in the hospital and it's coming for me."

"I have a rosary," she offered. "If you want to make holy water."

Michael picked up the room's telephone and began to dial while Steve asked her, "Do you know anything else about this demon?"

She shook her head. "I felt the demon. I didn't see the person it's possessing and the human inside was suppressed really deep. I didn't want to go into the human's mind and risk the demon sensing me. It's in the elevator now, though."

"You can feel it?"

"Hey Uncle Dan, it's Mike," said Steve's son-in-law, obviously paying some attention to their conversion.

Hermione nodded. "Yeah. I felt the demon and that's what woke me up. I'm not usually so good at feeling monsters, unless I'm looking for them." Her brow wrinkled. "I've never felt a demon without searching for it before."

"Come on kiddo," said the woman. "Grab that stack of paper cups and start filling them with water. You can turn them into holy water while the men find the demon."

"Yes ma'am," said Hermione , picking up the stack of eight paper cups and heading to the bathroom.

While she was there, she pulled the stopper on the sink and let it fill up with water between filling and blessing water in the cup. After turning the water in the sink into holy water, Hermione carried them into the room, setting two on the bedside table, three on the woman's tray, two on the window sill, and holding onto the final cup as though it were her drink. Mike and Steve had already left the room, presumably to find the demon.

"Do you want me to put up a devil's trap?" asked Hermione, holding out a pink crayon a couple shades brighter than the floor tiles.

"Put it in front of the door, on the ground."

"Alright."

Hermione put down her drink before doing as ordered. Azazel had seemed to have some personal vendetta against Mary and as a result, instead of meeting perhaps two or three demons over the course of a lifetime's hunting career, as was normal for most hunters, after the fire which had killed John and Roseanne, Mary and Hermione had met as between one and five demons a year from the time Hermione was four. Less than a week ago-well, she thought it was a week ago, but Hermione wasn't sure how long she'd been unconscious-Azazel himself had come to Hermione, offering to bring her mother back to life… in exchange for permission to enter her home one evening ten years later. Hermione had told him to go fuck himself, among other, far less polite things.


About halfway to the hospital, Daniel Elkins had received a second phone call from the Wandell family. This one was from Steve, who claimed that the demon had been dealt with and asked him to find out what he could about the psychic child who'd warned them, a Hermione Cooper. Well, that was her name according to the hospital files Mike had found, but apparently the girl had outright admitted that any surname she told them would be a lie.

Danny had been a hunter for the better part of forty years, having grown up in the business. In his experience, when somebody-usually a fellow hunter-admitted their name was a lie like this girl had, it meant that the person was wanted in most, if not all of the Lower Forty-Eight and that it was just as much for the person they were telling's protection as their own.

It didn't take much effort on his part to change into his FBI suit and grab appropriate badges before going to the police station. He entered the station, showed the badge when asked and was soon shown to Detectives Greer and Hollis who were working the case.

"So you're here about that Cooper kid?" said Hollis.

Danny nodded. "Yeah."

"Well, the girl was moved across state lines," Greer admitted grudgingly.

"Why don't you start with how she was found."

"One of the guests called in a disturbance at the Hillside Motel, Monday night-two nights back. Said they heard shots fired and what sounded like a child screaming," explained Greer. "When we got there, we found two men, both dead. They'd died within half an hour of our arrival according to the coroner. John Doe number one was shot through the head, John Doe number two was killed by a shot to the chest that punctured his lung. We think it was the same weapon-a .45. Ballistics hasn't gotten back to us yet. Neither of them put up much of a struggle. There were spell books all over the place and some sort of occult circle thing in one side of the room. The girl, Cooper, was found tied up in the center of the circle, unconscious."

Satanists? They occasionally performed human sacrifice. "Do you have any photos?"

An appropriate stack of photos, minus the girl were handed to Danny. The books were actual Satanist texts and he'd seen that particular sort of circle used before.

Had a hunter interrupted their ritual and then played the part of concerned citizen by calling it in to the police rather than take the girl directly to the hospital and be forced to answer uncomfortable questions? Some of them would do that so long as the victim wasn't too injured or if they hadn't dealt well with learning of the supernatural.

"What did the girl say happened?"

"According to Hermione," said Hollis. "She walked out of a library in Aberdeen-as in Aberdeen, Scotland-and they grabbed her. They pressed a funny smelling cloth to her face and she lost consciousness. When she woke up they had tied her up and tried to kill her, but she lost consciousness again and doesn't remember anything else."

"When they took her, she said it was June 24th, that was more than two weeks ago and she either doesn't remember what happened in between, or she doesn't want to talk about what happened," explained Greer.

"What sort of injuries does she have?" If the girl was as familiar with the supernatural as Steve thought, she might also be claiming ignorance rather than trying to fool them.

"Hermione has deep lacerations on her wrists and ankles from ropes. The doctor said she struggled so hard to get out of her bindings that she cut down to the muscle. She almost slit her wrists by accident and had to have stitches. Her left wrist and collarbone are fractured." Hollis shook his head. "Dr. Bernstein's more worried about her old injuries. He thinks she's been abused."

Danny looked up from the notes he was taking. "What sort of injuries?"

"From her x-rays, she's had about five broken ribs in the past, her right leg was broken some time ago and healed correctly. She has a number of scars along her body. There are five on her right outer thigh, like something clawed her up and one on her right arm that the doctor says severed some of her tendons and muscles, although it was properly repaired. There's a scar that runs diagonally across her chest from her right shoulder to the bottom left side of her rib cage, like somebody tried to cut her open that was then sewed shut by somebody without formal medical training." Hollis let out a disgusted sigh. "The girl is maybe eight, and she… somebody tattooed a pentagram on her chest, above her heart."

"A pentagram?" It was one of the only real ways to ensure you weren't possessed by a demon, but few hunters bothered to go so far. Most thought it wasn't worth it. Why would somebody have tattooed a little girl with one? Then again, Steve had said she was a hunter's child. Her family had probably thought it worth it.

"Doc says Hermione's had the tattoo for a couple months, at least," said Greer. "When she was brought in, they did a rape kit, just in case. Somebody raped that girl. Doc wasn't sure when it'd happened, but he said it might be one or both of the John Does, or it might be an older injury."

"Have you located her family?" asked Danny.

"She said her mother was Elaine Cooper, but the police over in the U.K. haven't found anybody who matches the woman's description and nobody has reported Hermione missing yet," explained Hollis. "We haven't had much luck finding her father either. The man is a John Winchester, originally from Lawrence, Kansas but he's some sort of survivalist and lives off the grid when his kids aren't in school." Summer break had already started, meaning that Sam was out of school.

That caused Danny to still. He'd trained a John Winchester a while back, but both names were so common, Danny couldn't be sure it was the same person. "You're sure he's her father?"

"No idea," shrugged Greer. "But his DNA is on file in CODIS and we sent a DNA sample from Hermione in to be tested. The girl knew the names of John's sons and their birthdays. Although she also said she had a younger sister named Roseanne, and we haven't found any record of her birth or death."

"What did she say the relationship between her parents was?"

"I think she's the product of a one night stand or maybe a fling," Hollis shrugged. "She'd only just gotten out of surgery at the time and was pretty out of it. She said something crazy about them meeting on a hunt except John didn't know it was a hunt and ended up in the middle of things. I asked her if her father would know the name Elaine Cooper and she said that wasn't her mother's name then. We think the woman either got married since then or perhaps divorced."

Or more likely, the woman had been a hunter using an alias. No wonder they couldn't find the right Elaine Cooper. It was probably the alias the woman was using when this happened. Danny found himself worried about her injuries. Particularly the rape. It might have been those Satanists. Some rituals required the human sacrifice to be defiled first. Or it might have been any of a number of other attackers. The Winchesters he knew attracted demons far more regularly than other hunting families, although John had only really encountered seven of them so far, ignoring the yellow-eyed demon which had killed his wife.


Ending Notes: About whether or not Hermione was raped; her body is currently about eight years old. She is not old enough to consent so far as the police or anybody else is concerned. Whether or not Hermione had consensual sex whilst in her normal, seventeen year old body, she is currently eight and they have assumed the worst. As for CODIS, I'm relatively sure it existed in 1997, although it wasn't anywhere near as extensive as it is now. Still, it is entirely possible that John's DNA would have been on file.