Hermione sat on the patio, legs crossed, fingers toying with her teacup. It was midafternoon, but the lunch crowd had already cleared out. She had a sneaking suspicion that Harry and Ginny, with whom she had expected to have lunch, had deliberately stood her up. She had missed their engagement party.

She had been ready to go, everything in place so that she looked like Helena Cameron and not Hermione Granger. (Ginny had tried to persuade her to tell the others, but she had refused. Fawkes had insisted, and, if she was honest, she just didn't want to deal with it.) She'd stepped out the back door, checked the alley for Muggles, and turned to Apparate, but she hadn't Apparated to Hogsmeade where her friends were waiting. In fact, all thoughts about the engagement party had left her mind.

She'd spent the rest of the night in pursuit of Bellatrix Lestrange. Or at least she'd thought it was Bellatrix Lestrange. It had turned out to be a different Dark wizard. She never knew his name. She had chased him through a neighborhood, cornered him at the dead end of a dark alley, and summoned the reapers. She didn't know how it had happened; it had all come on instinct. (Or from the magic. It had become difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.) She had felt the darkness coming off him; everything about him seemed wrong. Stolen.

Her arm had slashed out, and there was a veil just like the one in the Department of Mysteries, only this one hung from the bricks of the building on her left, not from an arch. The whispers she remembered from Department of Mysteries filled the air, pressing against her like a physical thing. Buzzing not in her ears but in her brain. It didn't hurt, but the awareness of it was uncomfortable.

The wizard had started shouting as soon as the arch appeared, but screamed in earnest when the reapers came out of it. There were three of them, tall, hard to pin down. They weren't formless, but it was like some trick the brain played—like with noses. (You can always see your nose; your brain just chooses to ignore it.)

The reapers had dragged him toward the veil. One held the veil aside while the other two each took a foot and literally dragged him along. They heaved and pulled as if he weighed hundreds of pounds, or was putting up a fight.

When they got closer to the veil, the reapers let go of the wizard and stood like sentinels instead, blocking the way away from the veil. Hermione had almost lost her lunch when she saw what had made things so slow for the reapers.

There were two souls attached to the wizard by incorporeal chains. They hung there, limp dead weights attached to the wizard; the reapers continually reached out to them, trying to take them across the veil as they had with Dee, but the chains kept them tethered to the wizard.

It wasn't the visual that made Hermione sick to her stomach, it was the feel of the whole thing. It was the same as how she could feel the wrongness of the wizard himself. This was the wrongness. These trapped souls, bound to him by their own murder at his hand. It was vile.

"Reducto." The spell left her lips, though she hadn't needed to speak spells since before she'd left Hogwarts. She didn't make the wand movement, but she hadn't needed to do that since Fawkes had brought her across the veil.

The chains shattered. Instantly, the trapped souls snapped upright, turning on the wizard. They didn't hit him, or cast spells on him. She couldn't even tell if they had been Muggles or not. Instead, they went through him, again and again. The wizard howled. Where before he had been screaming in fear, now it was in pain. The more the souls went through him, the more substance they seemed to have. After a minute, the wizard simply whimpered and shook. The souls looked like people, as regular and solid as any. The reaper holding aside the veil motioned them through with a gallant sort of bow. They crossed over, and Hermione immediately felt better. The nausea passed.

The reapers picked the wizard up by the shoulders, one on each side, and a humongous black dog, a grim, appeared in the doorway behind the veil. It was huge and shaggy, and it seemed to collect darkness and shadow like the reapers did. It was exponentially more terrifying than the reapers, though.

Hermione drew back away from the grim, but it didn't even notice her. Its entire being was focused on the wizard held between the reapers. The wizard was eerily silent, staring back at the grim with equal intensity.

Slowly, deliberately, the grim stepped across the threshold of the veil. It shimmered a bit and was slightly harder to look at after it crossed over, but no less substantial. It seemed to occupy space more in her mind that in the physical world. The eeriness made Hermione's skin crawl.

One moment the grim was padding toward the wizard, the next it had launched itself at him with alarming speed. Hermione threw herself back and away from it, scraping up her elbows when she landed; again, the grim paid her no mind. The wizard wailed once, then then grim tore into him with its claws, slashing him to ribbons. The reapers holding him up let go and went through the veil, their duty done.

Hermione couldn't look away. When the grim finished tearing at the wizard, it ate the chunks of him. It should have turned her stomach, but it didn't. She felt a vague queasiness when the grim licked up every last bit of blood and viscera. When it finished, all that remained was a wet spot on the pavement.

The grim turned around and went back the way it had come. The reaper ducked under, and let the veil fall back into place as he went. It swished closed with the same soft sound that the folds of a heavy tapestry make when they slide past each other. They alley was quiet and still.

Hermione had returned to her flat and taken a long, hot shower. Even then, the shaking hadn't stopped until she had cocooned herself under the blankets and curled up. Fawkes had sung one of his wordless phoenix songs. And she had slept.