The next evening when Hermione finally woke up, she felt awful, like an emotional torrent had just cascaded through her and wrecked every single part of her being. In fact, that was more or less exactly what had happened. She rolled over, groaning, and felt the sheets tangle and twist. She was wearing pyjamas like some kid—it all felt silly—had she been too warm, with the sun streaming in? Whatever. Sleeping during the day always left behind this fuzzy feeling, and she desperately and strongly wanted to be rid of it. It was her only real motivation for getting up, as exhausted as she felt from the torrent the night before.

Motivation enough, though. Hermione got up, stripped off her pyjamas, and walked into the hotel shower, flung herself in. Blasted herself with the coldest of cold water in the pipes for a while, until her skull and her face and her eyes were numbed with it, and then brought on the heat. She was shivering by the time the boiler in the hotel responded, and then the heat came much too hot, and that was perfect, she held it until she was scalding, wet all over, even her hair, which normally she cared about protecting more than this. But it needed a wash, anyway.

Washing her hair, as the day slipped to dusk outside, seemed like a perfect way to distract herself. It was a rather difficult and involved job, untangling, smoothing, treating. She used muggle methods right up until she couldn't get anything more out of them, and then resorted to hair care potions. An international coordination trip with a meeting of international Magical Creatures administration officials hosted in Blantyre of all places (the Blantyre in Malawi, not the Glasgow suburb) had put her in touch with some Witches who actually understood caring for hair like her own and made that achievement considerably more plausible, though getting stable potions shipped from Africa by the wizarding post was a pain, so she'd started mixing her own…

Distractions, distractions, endless distractions…

It was a nice distraction to wash and condition your hair and set it into a semblance of order with some potions. She took a good hour at it, and by the time she was done, she was furiously hungry and needed caffeine. Dressing quickly, she boiled water and made tea and looked around in the refrigerator and grabbed what was left of a bag of Chiftele and heated it up with a quick spell. Using magic to reheat the food kept the flavour of the battered meatballs with garlic, onion, egg and parsley. Almost as delicious as when she'd bought it, the combination of the tea and the Chiftele brought her back to life, as she turned off the rattling old air conditioner to help her hair dry.

Vampires. Bellatrix Lestrange is a Vampire. Nymphadora Tonks is a Vampire. If it had just been Tonks, it would all be so easy. Bringing someone from the war veritably back to life… They could deal with vampirism, just like they'd helped Remus, just like in the sake of Remus' memory, Hermione was involved in the reform of legislation for werewolves. That would have been straightforward.

Remus. She was alone. Denied her son. Denied her husband. Just Lestrange. Hermione really wished she had her library with her, or any library at all, to start to try and understand how, exactly, bonds between vampires worked. She wanted to understand what the devil was going on between Tonks and Bellatrix, and she wanted to understand it bad.

Larissa almost certainly has one.

Right, off to Minkol headquarters, then! It wasn't far, from inside of Tiraspol, and of course, it was more than just a security office, since it helped provide support to the entire local magical community. The duty officers had been briefed on Hermione, so after a brisk twenty minute walk, which also helped a great deal in terms of settling her mind, the British witch was standing in front of the glassed-in duty officer's desk, which was meant to look like the front of some security station. There was nobody there; but a wave of her wand demonstrated she was magical and gave her access to the back, larger on the inside than it was on the outside, and in a neoclassical style, with an Atrium and many offices, and softly glowing magical lights.

She was immediately approached by a gentleman in a Transnistrian MinKol uniform. "Are you looking for Councillor Naryshkina, Madame Granger?"

"I am, thank you."

"This way." They stepped past some enchanted mechanical birds chirping away on a very lifelike bronze tree with glowing green leaves.

Larissa's feet were kicked up on her desk with a set of reports in hand that she was reading with her chair cocked back, a picture of perfect insouciance. It was rather late, Hermione realised abruptly; she had just woken up, but for most people, it was the end of the work-day, though a conscientious security officer was never really off-duty.

Relaxing with her feet on her desk because it was after hours was another matter. "Tea, Hermione? Do sit."

"Oh I can always use more," Hermione smiled despite herself, and settled in the chair across from the MinKol Councillor, as the officer departed their presence, closing the door behind him. The click, promising privacy as she could feel the wards intensify again, was reassuring. And Larissa presented her the tea a moment later.

"Yes, well, isn't that the truth of life: It doesn't matter what the situation is, but more tea is always called for."

Hermione laughed softly. A thought formed, and she blurted it out. "I wonder if vampires can drink tea…"

"Hmm?" Larissa stared at her for a moment. "Forgive me, but I don't have the faintest idea what that's about."

"Oh, well. I was coming," Hermione picked up her glass, blushing. "I was coming to ask if I could use your library for some research on vampires. You see, I think there's a connection with…"

"There is," Larissa nodded sharply.

Hermione's eyes widened. "You knew, then. You know. And you set me up…"

Larissa glared at her for a moment. "I sat you up for nothing. But, personally, I was monitoring that little coven. However, you can trust Valentina Syromakha to have a sense of composure around Witches and that little coven is quite law abiding. But it does bear investigation, so I thought I might send you against it, to see if they were responsible for the dragon egg smuggling. They have got to get their money somehow. I admit, I'm somewhat impressed that you put it together so fast, but you do have quite the reputation."

"I suppose," Hermione sighed, her flash of anger dissipating, "that you could have intervened. And you felt an outside perspective not tied to your office might get more information, right? And that I'm a competent enough witch that I could handle a small group of vampires?"

"Essentially that," Larissa was grinning, though it was a bit rueful. "They don't really cover the details of vampires in the west, though, do they, so you weren't prepared for how to manage them and now you're here to look at my library?"

"Yes, exactly that," Hermione acknowledged. "I hate knowledge gaps." She paused, significantly. "But, the vampires said they didn't have anything to do with the dragon egg smuggling."

"...Do you believe them?" Larissa looked droll.

"...Possibly." In fact, Hermione believed them completely, because Tonks was there, and because she saw no reason for them to do such a thing, and attract attention, considering who the head of that little Vampire coven was. But, she realised now that it was not necessarily in her best interest to convey the slightest bit of that information to Larissa.

"Well," Larissa dropped her feet down to the floor, and summoned her boots. "Let's go have a look at the library. You can stay as long as you like." She got up, and Hermione hastily finished her tea as she followed the Russian woman through a few of the floors of the office, and into a fine library, set below a solar on the top of the building.

The moon flickered through to join the magical lighting. "Where did this building come from?" Hermione asked, wondering at the Victorian-era architecture.

"It was Tsarist," Larissa answered. "A headquarters for the railway district. We hid it, to be used as a magical headquarters, during the Civil War, making it look like it was destroyed."

"Well, it has a beautiful library."

"An extension of that of the Princely House of Naryshkin, I assure you – I had it moved here when I assumed my command. Before that, MinKol used the space for a rotating library, from Moscow."

"So you let the wizardfolk of Transnistria read your library?" Hermione expressed genuine shock. Yes, as a prospective friend, Hermione had hopefully asked for her chance, but the reality was that most Wizarding Aristocracy absolutely would not allow such a generous access to knowledge.

"Things are different in the former Union," Larissa shrugged. "Enjoy the evening, Hermione. I'll arrange for the access guard to have a regular badge for you, so you can just come and go, if it will help." She had reverted to being very helpful indeed. "Anything you can find on vampires, I'm sure, will be useful in your investigation into the dragon eggs."

She was also very insistent that the coven and the dragon eggs were linked.

But of course she would be. It's to her advantage and the advantage of her Government. With a slight shrug, Hermione stepped forward. Normally an aristocrat would just rely on House Elves to retrieve books, but she was relieved to see that with the library actually open, there was a card catalogue deck, in fact, almost blatantly muggle. Of course, it was in Cyrillic, and she was still learning, but it could point her toward books in other languages, and going to Hogwarts had certainly taught her the abomination which was called Wizarding Latin.

From that, she tracked down a selection of books on Vampires. Most of them were rather old, and so much the better for it, since Vampires had become rare enough that the more recent books on them that she had perused in the past had generally seemed vague and of poor quality research.

Under the moon and in the comfortable glowing magic lights of the library, she opened the first one of them. Von Karstein's Compendium of the Infernaliae, Vol. III, Vampires.

The Infernaliae. It seemed appropriate for Bellatrix, but she shuddered at applying such a name to Tonks. It was just the bias of the past. The bias of the present, too. Actually, of bigots in general, and wizarding Britain has plenty of those. Look at the way they treat Veelas. Tonks is absolutely right, going home would be downright dangerous for her.

The book laid out clearly the nature of Vampires, starting with the summary stuff that she knew—vampires were immensely powerful—and then the details. She moved on to other books, and kept reading: They could see for enormous distances in the light and dark, they could hear with enormous precision, they could follow people by smell like the finest bloodhound. Their strength was unnaturally powerful for their size—they could learn to transform, they could learn to fly and teleport naturally, wandlessly. They stopped ageing, but the young or deformed ones could learn a kind of wandless magic called fleshcrafting in which they could alter their shape, even their bone structure—almost like a metamorph, though it was expensive of energy and blood.

Blood.

Indeed, all vampiric magic was founded in blood. To practice latent vampiric magics required the exhaustion or expenditure of blood that had been consumed, because it was not the blood itself that they were consuming per se, but rather the life-force of the creature that the blood represented. Indeed, vampires could survive on the blood of any creature, because any creature had life-force, but the life-force of humans and other thinking creatures was the strongest, and offered the greatest nourishment. So, when Bellatrix talked about being able to eat raw meat, it's really about eating some blood with garnish and dross around it. Hmm. It suggested the memory of a mortal life was still strong for her—she wanted to remember her life as a mortal. Well, that was Hermione's informed speculation, anyway, or rather, wild ass guess.

Mmmn. None of this was very comforting, considering she had just been in the room with three vampires. Superficially if you read about their capabilities, it sounded like they could demolish anyone alive. They were invulnerable to any specific class of magic, excepting warding, which forced them to ask permission to enter—the origin of that specific myth. Specific spells, however, could end them. Fire spells, namely, were an utterly reliable bane of vampires. Vampires burned very well—the preserved nature of their magical bodies was insidiously vulnerable to fire. Fire is the Wizard's friend against the Vampire, the text declared authoritatively. Indeed, everything Hermione had ever read repeated that, usually in a dismissive tone of 'see a Vampire? Burn it' which permeated all the writings on the subject despite the protection laws.

But it wasn't the only one—vampires also had a vulnerability to silver which was not absolute (in that, their class of magic was related to that of werewolves), but, they could be poisoned by sufficient quantities of it being entrapped into their bodies. They shared an aversion to cold iron as Fae did, but again, it was weaker. Riddling their bodies with silver or iron or best yet, a mixture of both, could weaken them badly, and unlike normal physical injuries, they could not heal from it. Ultimately this could, if they couldn't remove the specks of metal, drive them into a state of senescence, a sleeping state of helplessness. However, burning and decapitation were the only ways to kill them; staking, like poisoning with iron or silver, produced a senescent state from which they could recover if the stake was removed.

There was no need to sleep on home soil, though; that was a legend. Well, I'd been wondering if they all had brought some from Britain. Or wherever Valentina is from, in her case. That solves that, Hermione mused, browsing through about the eighth book. The signs of the vampire confirmed what she had seen—pale, check. Eyes flashed like those of a cat—check. Fangs could appear and disappear—check.

It was in Givastra Sedaelaon's Book of Unnatural Creatures though that Hermione found what she was really looking for: The Wizard as Vampire. (and wasn't that kind of a half-Veela name, anyway?)

'Those to whom this misfortune falls have traded the true strength of their magical core for a long life. However, just as a ghost of a Wizard can cast so magic, so too can the Vampire. But, unlike a ghost, a Vampire can learn, and develop her strength in the remnant of her magical core, and experiment in ways to maximise her advantage. Indeed, Vampires of magical origin become much less ossified than those of muggle origin, and instead of becoming set in their ways may remain clever for centuries. But the loss of power is so great that few Wizards would voluntarily gain immortality in this manner.'

Then, it was time to go back to Abdul'kadir Osman's Cousins of Djinn: the Undead. She'd seen a reference there…

'The natural creature magic of Vampires is sympathetic. They form families, and nothing is more terrifying than the families they form. A powerful Vampire Lord can establish an extensive coven he rules with an iron hand, with advisors, guards, a harem, as if it were a proper Lord's court, or the regimented hive of bees. However, the relationship demands reciprocity. A Vampire Lord must help and support and protect the vampires under him; nor is it the only kind of relationship possible, for subtler combinations of magic and voluntary adoptions by mixing of blood can complicate and balance relationships.'

But Tonks hadn't known about that. She had assumed that at some level her relationship was 'complicated', but at least voluntary. She would have said, Hermione was certain, if her sexual relationship with Bellatrix had been driven by the objective of making her Bellatrix's equal instead of slave. That would have been a simple explanation congruent with Osman on how the blood-bonds worked—if they both shared of each other's blood for long enough they could become true equals—and then Hermione wouldn't have been bothered at all. She would have applauded Tonks' cleverness, accepted that the relationship made sense.

But that would have been a pretty Slytherin relationship for a Hufflepuff, wouldn't it have been? Hermione frowned as she thought through the implications, though. If Tonks didn't understand this aspect of blood bond magic… It seemed quite possible that Bellatrix did. And if Bellatrix did understand it…

She voluntarily gave up her control of Tonks by seducing her as her own lover. Every time they made love and shared blood, she gave up more of her control over Tonks. Huh.

It was slightly chilling, actually. It implied that Bellatrix Lestrange—Bellatrix Black—was actually capable of caring about her family enough to give up an advantage over her niece. If it was true. The other option—the one that asserted itself strongly and that Hermione wanted to believe in—was that neither of them had known the consequences. That preserved Bellatrix as a selfish and evil actor.

Unfortunately, that also meant that Bellatrix and Tonks had just started snogging because they decided Aunt-Niece sex was really going to be a lot of fun. Loneliness? Blacks are crazy, yo? Well, she really shouldn't think the later, considering Andromeda and even Narcissa were strong arguments against it, but the family had possessed something of a reputation in generations past, which Bellatrix had lived up to, to be blunt.

The clock chimed, and Hermione faintly shivered, looking up at the descending moon. It was the Hour of the Wolf. Late. Engrossed in her reading, she had spent something like eight hours in the library. She hadn't returned to Bellatrix and Tonks' manor in Bendery, though it was close enough and fixed enough in her mind she could apparate straightaway if she wanted to. She had promised that she would come back. It was a truce, though Hermione doubted they would attack the headquarters of MinKol in Transnistria under any circumstance at all; that would produce an unfathomable overreaction, and anyway, Tonks attacking the good guys…

Who wouldn't see her as a 'good guy' anymore…

Hermione grimaced, and quietly put the last of the books back. They wouldn't tell her which theory about Bellatrix was true. And, the books had also said Vampires became powerful Occlumens by nature, as well as Legilimens. Bellatrix was already a famous Occlumens and adding a vampire's natural abilities to that probably made any sense of the truth from magic absolutely impossible to obtain. She'd have to satisfy herself another way—with a conversation.

Now, feeling the dark of the night very strongly, Hermione walked out of the library, and back into down into the central Atrium. As the centre of the magical community in Transnistria, it was open at all hours, but more or less deserted. There was a night watchman, though, at the duty desk. He had a samovar, and offered a cup to Hermione.

Drinking it, and after a little pointless small-talk, she stood in front of the enchanted fake metal tree and birds, so wonderful in the quality of their workmanship, so cute with the enchantments that brought them to life. In Bendery, who knew what was happening? Had Bellatrix lost it, and gone to look for her? Was Tonks and Valentina out, frantically looking for her, while Bellatrix sank down in her chair in despair? She had seemed so depressed, it had almost been pathetic, in the way she had accepted the inevitable, this, the furiously talented witch who had once fought as Voldemort's right hand.

Hermione actually held a great deal of power over her former tormentor at the moment. But Bellatrix had power, too—she could answer this gnawing question that Hermione had, if only Hermione could coax it from her. Fire is the witch's friend, when devilish night-fiend to face! Another of the books had declared. Hermione had a very extensive catalogue of fire spells to her repertoire.

Smiling tightly, the need for knowledge exceeded her need for power. She put the cup back down, and tipped a salute to the guard. "I'll be heading out now. Thank you."

"Goodnight, Madame," his voice echoed behind her.

She walked out of the Atrium, out of the building, past the anti-apparation wards, and into the street. Moving briskly into one of the parks, under half extinguished streetlights, where only an old bus, snorting and spewing smoke, was in the street—in the dark, until she was sure she was away from any cameras or other Muggle artifices. Then she fixed the image of that comfortable manor, built out of three houses, firmly in her mind. She slipped her wand out from her thin outer coat, even in the middle of the night barely tolerable in the summer warmth.

She disapparated from Tiraspol, leaving behind the park, the empty streets, the bus, the streetlights.

Back to the other side of the river Dniestr. Back to Bendery.

Back to Bellatrix. Knowledge trumped fear, every time, and as long as that remained true—then Hermione knew that her self-worth wasn't measured by what that witch had carved in her arm. Never would be. Never could be.

Let's figure you out, Black.