I'd managed to make it all the way back up the road and into town before my knee totally locked up, and planted myself at a 24-hour hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant across from the bus depot. They probably weren't thrilled that I looked like I was going to stay all night nursing a coffee, but it wasn't like I was tying up table space other patrons were using. I was hoping the thugs didn't wander this way, but theoretically the cops would be on my side this close to town.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I was pretty sure I had enough money for a bus ride down to the coast and a ferry across the channel, but they'd probably want to see my passport. I didn't have one. Justin had brought us here the wizard way and hadn't bothered getting us muggle identification. He'd put off a lot of things that would have made sense for living here for some time, which probably should have been my clue that he didn't exactly expect me to live long.

While I wasn't exactly skilled with mind magic, I was pretty sure I could do enough to convince a security guy that a scrap of blank paper was a legitimate passport long enough to get through. But even without Dawlish being out to get me, even the regular Trace would probably throw up a ton of red flags if it caught you confounding muggles at the border. I could try to get the US embassy in London to ship me home, but the Ministry might have enough ties with the muggle government that I was on a list. Getting deported home was likely to take long enough that information could make it through and I'd find myself getting picked up by aurors long before getting shipped home.

So I needed to run the anti-Trace ritual again. I had the tools to do it, but everyone magical I knew was either back at Hogwarts or I had no idea where they lived while they were home for winter break. Wait. That wasn't entirely true. Hermione had mentioned that her parents were both dentists, and the general area of metro London where they lived.

Borrowing the phone book from the restaurant, I flipped to the businesses section and it didn't take long to find a dentist advertising for doctors Jean and Helen Granger. Then it was another trip through the local listings with the full names to find a home phone number and address. And it was all on the way to the coast, so I wasn't wasting bus fare going the wrong way! Perfect.

The teller at the bus depot across the street was super helpful to an obvious American trying to figure out how to get thirty miles across town, and made me a detailed list of the buses and trains to take, so by dawn I was pulling into the south London suburb, slightly refreshed by a few power naps between switching transits and another couple cans of Coke.

Dentists' offices open very early, and a quick pay phone call in confirmed with the secretary that the Grangers' office was open today, but that scheduling was tight if it wasn't an emergency. I was hoping the parents had gone to work and left Hermione at home for the Monday before Christmas Eve. She was a responsible girl. Surely even at 12 she was trusted to stay at home for the day? Talking her into helping me might be hard enough, I didn't exactly want to answer questions about why a 16-year-old boy was showing up asking their daughter to help him do magic.

After making my way to near the right neighborhood and having a cheap breakfast at a diner, I figured the time was right that the parents would be at work and hopefully Hermione was still at home. I called to make sure. "Hello," said a voice that sounded like the first-year.

"Hermione? It's Harry Dresden."

"Harry! Hi!" she exclaimed, and after a beat realizing what a phone call meant, "You're obviously not at school. What's up?"

"Yeeeaaahhh…" I admitted, drawling it out, "I'm actually kind of nearby and stuck. I was wondering if you could help me out."

"My parents are at work, but I could call them and ask if they can pick you up on break–"

I interrupted, "Actually, I just need your help doing a ritual… to cover up the Trace so I can use magic to get around."

"Oh, hmmm…" I could basically hear the gears turning in her brain. "Did you sneak out of school, Harry?"

"Little bit," I said. "I had to pick up some personal stuff and they weren't willing to let me out for the holidays."

"But if you'd asked Professor McGonagall–"

"Who knows what she would have done? I know you chose to go to school here, but I'm basically stuck and they never seem to care what I want to do," I sighed. "I'm basically an adult, and used to doing stuff on my own, but they're only used to dealing with kids so they don't see it."

She was quiet for a few seconds, and then said, "Okay, I guess. But I want to know what this ritual is. You have the address?"

"Yeah, I can be over in about half an hour."

"See you then," she hung up, not totally sounding convinced that this was a good idea.

I could tell she'd just gotten more wrapped up in her own worries when she let me into her family's big suburban brownstone row house a little while later. The house was nice inside, with an obvious front sitting room full of classy furniture. But as she led me to the back part of the house, it all became a lot more comfortable. She led me into a cozy den that was basically all library, it had so many bookshelves, with her school books clearly set up where she'd been rereading them already over the break. "Something to drink?" she asked, remembering to be a good hostess.

"I'm good, thanks," I said, looking around at the room and pictures. Lots of pictures of her at various ages with her mother and father. "Huh, from Jean and Helen, I assumed you had two moms."

I'd been pronouncing what was evidently her dad's name like the pants, but when she corrected me, it sounded like a French starship captain's name. "He gets that a lot around here. Grandmother is French. It's my middle name, so I pronounce it the girl's way. It's confusing." After I'd been sitting for a second and just nodded, the 12-year-old-going-on-40-years-old asked me, "So what was so important that you sneaked out of school and came to London to get?"

I wasn't actually sure she was ready to know about Bob, though Bob was the main reason I couldn't tell McGonagall about my cache, since he was probably super illegal, especially for a student to have. I could tell her part of the story, "I managed to save the few mementos I had from my parents from the fire, and didn't want the Ministry to steal them or something, including this. It was my mother's." I showed her the silver amulet.

"That's pretty," she said, clearly mollified by keepsakes from my dead parents. "What does it mean?"

"The way it was explained to me, it represents the three aspects of magic: defense, knowledge, and power," I traced the outer triangle, the inner circle, and the bisecting line as I said it. "It's based on an old wizard legend about three treasures that three wizard brothers got from Death. A wand so good no one can kill you in a duel, a stone to contact the spirits in the afterlife, and a cloak that can make you so invisible not even the grim reaper can find you." She seemed surprised about how much wizard history she didn't know. "To me, it basically means that magic is about life."

Maybe it was the good explanation for why I'd left. Maybe it was because we'd slipped back into the role of mentor and student rather than peers. But finally, she said, "Okay. What's the ritual you need to do?"

"It just temporarily confuses the Trace about where I am and what I'm doing. In this case, as far as the Ministry is concerned, as long as you're not casting spells, I'm not casting spells. I already did it with the twins to get down here, but it wore off."

Another moment of conflict about breaking rules, but then the girl shone through that had covered for the boys after the troll, and she said, "Let's do it. But you have to explain it to me as we go."

The house had a walled back patio that would be a good place to write in chalk for easy cleanup but without the neighbors seeing, and we set up back there. It was a little slower going than it had been with the twins (who I'd just shown the entire ritual in advance), but she was clearly learning a lot as I explained each rune and how it worked. By late morning, we'd finally completed it and I felt my magic hidden in the second Harry doll amulet, which Hermione slipped into her sweater.

Having been fully invested in doing the ritual, I hadn't really been listening inside, so I was surprised that when we walked back in, a woman's voice said, "Bunch of cancellations, so I came home early to make lunch. Isn't it a little cold to be reading outside?" Before I could think about bolting, a woman who was clearly Hermione's mother walked into the back room and caught me dead to rights.