Just a quick minute here to clarify that the wooded area Hermione & Lucius venture into, while labeled as Hagley Wood in the story, is not intended to be taken as a factual account of that—or any—forest in Britain. The forest here (and which will be revisited as the story continues) is an amalgam, part imagination, part fictionalized representation cobbled together from different accounts I've read over the years of haunted forest locations.

Chapter Twelve

It wasn't quite dark yet, but Hermione illuminated her wand out of an abundance of caution. She could swear she felt the ripple across her psyche of Mr. Malfoy's irritation before he appeared from the brush behind her.

She had the good fortune of turning in time to see the final moments of a battle he was waging against a tree branch that didn't want to relinquish its hold on his left sleeve.

Tugging free of its gnarled, clutches at last, he exhaled sharply through his nostrils and smoothed his hand against his hair. Hermione thought he looked for all the world as though he was about to give that troublesome branch a sound smack.

Oh, she was trying to hold it in. Her lips pursed and her cheeks dimpled with the attempt. The way he eyed her so very coldly as he made a show of straightening non-existent wrinkles in his robes only made it more difficult not to laugh.

One of his brows shot up as he pinched the cuff of the sleeve over which he'd so valiantly struggled and gave the fabric a good, sharp pull. "What?"

She started to open her mouth, but was stopped short as a snorted giggle escaped. The witch gave herself a shake and tried again, utterly ignoring the lethal narrowing of his equally lethal grey eyes. "I'm . . . I'm sorry, it's just . . . . You're so stern and stoic all the time, it's nice when you do things that remind me you're as human as the rest of us."

His brow settled into place and he rolled his eyes. "Yes, I often find myself overcome with the need to hold back peels of laughter at 'nice reminders,'" he deadpanned.

Hermione responded to his eye roll with one of her own. "God," she hissed the word in a near-breathless mutter before turning on her heel and starting through the trees again. "Just had to go back to being you again, didn't you? Couldn't let a pleasant moment simply be."

Lucius bristled, but bit back the scathing retort that formed on the tip of his tongue, instead opting for civil reasonability. "If you don't mind, I believe we'll be done here all the sooner, and possibly before it gets too dark to see our hands before our faces, if you focus on searching for whatever it is rather than wasting time and energy trying to bait me."

It was on the tip of her tongue to snap at him for once again putting the blame entirely on her for this new layer of tension between them while ignoring the true source, entirely . . . . And she would've, if she hadn't recognized that he was correct.

Holding a breath until she felt the urge to sass him subside, she exhaled as she drew to a halt and looked about. Nothing seemed familiar. Not here. Maybe it was another area she'd run through? Maybe it had been too dark at the time and she'd run blindly. Or, more likely, she couldn't remember anything because she'd run through here blindly, in the dark, when she was too young to recall even a fragment now, just like that memory Lucius had to pull out of her at the pensieve.

Her shoulders sank while she stared about. Perhaps he was right about something else, too, something he'd said earlier—that they should simply leave. Come back another day if she was so insistent, when there were still more hours of daylight left. It would be so easy to dismiss this, to return to the manor and pursue the much more practical avenues to find out what had happened to her. Yet, there was a feeling now that she was here, a gnawing in the pit of her stomach like when one entered a room where something terrible had taken place . . . .

Haunted, that was the word, yes. This place. She didn't know if it was the area that felt haunted, or that the area made her feel haunted, but whichever the case, the edge of unease it set off in her was just enough to raise the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

Yet not enough to make her turn away. There was definitely something here, she simply had to find it. To see it. Maybe then, something would shake loose.

Even the thinnest sliver of a memory seemed enough to give this mad notion a few more moments of her time. There was something here. Hermione felt her breathing slow as she repeated that thought, her inner voice echoing of its own volition. There was something here, something . . . something waiting for her to find it.

Swallowing hard, she ignored the chill those unbidden words that had tacked themselves on the end of her initial thought sent up her spine and started through the trees, once more. After all, she was a strong, capable, war-surviving witch, her company was one of the most powerful wizards in all of Wizarding Britain, if anything . . . unexpected were to occur, she was certain they could handle it perfectly well.

After a few minutes, there still was nothing which spoke to her, only the deepening of that sour gnawing. The sinking temperature nipped at her cheeks and the tip of her nose a little, and she heard the soft, breathy murmur of Lucius' voice as he activated a lumos charm of his own.

More minutes passed, the sky overhead darkened.

"Miss Granger?" Lucius' voice was strained, evidently in an attempt to not sound pushy—she wasn't even in a proper state to wonder how difficult that must be for him. "I must again insist that we leave this place. There is no way we're going find anything at this hour."

He looked up from watching his own steps through the brush to find she'd paused. Lucius' brow furrowed. "Miss Granger?"

Turning her head slow, she met his gaze over her shoulder. Her brown eyes were wide as they held his.

He hated to admit it, even to himself, but in the encroaching darkness of the forest, with the wash of illumination from their wands, the effect of that startled look on her face was quite unsettling. "What's the matter?"

Schooling her features—Hermione hadn't realized she probably appeared spooked until she saw the reaction in his eyes—she stepped to one side and lowered her wand. At first, she'd thought it a figment of her imagination. That there should be something so utterly incongruous here, in the middle of a forested nowhere . . . .

Those grey eyes squinted in the shadowed light, no more certain he believed his own eyes than she had hers. Yet, the worn gravestone shown now in the brightness from their wands like bone made pale beneath a wash of moonlight.

From where he stood, it was plain to see the surface was smooth—whatever writing might've been there worn away long ago. What the bloody hell was it doing out here? Where no one could visit the departed? Where possibly no one knew it was here? Lucius frowned as he tried to make sense of the scene. Why would anyone bother to do this?

Unless . . . .

"Perhaps . . . perhaps we should search the area. See if there are more?"

Hermione was strangely comforted that he sounded uneasy. That made two of them, and maybe she did like seeing a chink in his shiny, implausibly perfect Malfoy armor. "What are you thinking?" she asked as she stepped away from him— keeping near enough to maintain visual contact—as she looked about the immediate area.

"I'm thinking if you're going to bury someone way out here, you clearly don't want them to be found. So, why bother with a gravestone?" he answered as he knelt before the slab, checking for any markings they might've missed at first glance.

"You think there's a graveyard here?" That in mind, she widened her focus, looking for crumbled stones that might've fallen beneath grass and leaf litter, or be overgrown by moss.

"I think it's possible there's a graveyard here," he clarified, standing and moving about the area, himself. "There are many hamlets and villages lost to time and memory in the British Isles. Who's to say there wasn't one here?"

"What if this all means nothing?" Hermione frowned, upset she was not coming across anything else. "At the very least, it might have nothing to do with whatever happened to me."

"You could be correct, of course, but . . . ." He winced and shook his head, letting his words drop.

She turned to face him in the lumos-dappled darkness, genuinely curious. "But what?"

"It sounds ridiculous, but it feels a little too much of a coincidence that this should be here. That it should be in the place you felt drawn to explore—that you were called to, for lack of a better term, in your nightmares—seems more like—"

"Are you about to say fate?" Her voice was dubious.

He could hear the arched brow in her tone. Lucius let out a sigh. "Are you going to tell me after everything in the Wizarding world which you have been witness to over these last eight years, you don't believe in the possibility of such things?"

Shaking her head, she sidestepped a few brambles. "I think I need more than a single misplaced gravestone to—Oh!"

His jaw fell as he watched her tumble sideways. The surrounding darkness made it so that it appeared she'd tripped over her own two feet. "Miss Granger?"

"I'm all right," she said, grumbling the words as she righted herself. Sitting where she'd fallen, Hermione searched for the culprit. "My leg struck on something."

Brow furrowing, he crossed the forest floor to help her search.

Her eyes landed on the source and after only a heartbeat—sooner than he'd reached her, in fact—Hermione shot to her feet. "We . . . we should go."

Lucius looked down to where she'd just found whatever it was. To his great confusion, all he saw was a low, messily hacked-off tree stump. Wide enough to perhaps serve as a small, informal table.

Or perhaps an altar. In an area where at least one possible sacrifice had taken place. Where there was at least one grave. His stomach dropped.

"We can—should . . . will—come back when it's light out." She didn't wait for him to speak as she moved beside him and took one of his hands in her own, the familiarity of the gesture not even an inkling in a corner of her mind in this moment. "Now that we've been here, we can Apparate back at any time."

His own observation notwithstanding, he shook his head, uncertain what it was about this that had her finally listening to reason about leaving. Though, he would not second-guess her decision as she Disapparated and pulled him side-along.

Once they popped back into existence at the gates to Malfoy Manor, she relinquished her hold on him. He watched as she pressed her hand to her face and exhaled long and low.

Those words . . . it simply couldn't be. Could. Not. That was a myth. But with everything else going on, could she really dismiss it so easily? She couldn't dismiss the sour iciness slicking the pit of her stomach, so why should she try with the source of the awful sensation.

"I'm sorry," she finally said, aware of the weight of his expectant gaze on her.

"There is no need for apology, but perhaps explanation?" He opened the gates with a flick of his wand and made an after you gesture.

Her gaze fixed on the massive house in the distance. How strange that it felt like home just now. Stranger, still, that if her life had not been changed, she might've grown up calling a place as imposing and austere as Malfoy Manor home.

She wouldn't look at him as they walked, as she took her time formulating how to explain. For some reason, that troubled him.

"It was simply . . . well, that tree stump? There were words carved in the side."

His brows pinched together. "So?"

"So?" Hermione forced herself to keep walking, to keep her attention straight ahead. "They were old, very old, carved in there a very long time ago from the look of them."

He interrupted with a harsh sigh. "I fail to see what would be so alarming about—"

She cut him off, going on as though he hadn't cut her off, "And I thought 'if the words on stone had been worn away, how were words in wood still there?' That was when it occurred to me. They must've been magically preserved. And that's the part that concerned me. None of this felt like it was really happening until I saw that name there."

"Miss Granger?" Lucius ignored the chill he swore he could feel in the air at her tone, at the ominous feeling her words threaded into the ether of the grounds. After all, he reminded himself, he'd given her his cloak and been wandering around a forest at night for the last few hours, it made sense the cold was finally catching up with him. "What two words?"

Hermione paused, shaking her head as they reached the front steps leading up to the house. Thinking of speaking the name stuck her tongue to the roof of her mouth and made her stomach flip.

"She's supposed to be a myth. A story to scare children, like the Bogeyman. It shouldn't have been there."

"Good Lord, Miss Granger!" Lucius hissed, exasperated in spite of himself. "Will you please just—"

"Black Annis!" She felt her throat close immediately after the words left her lips and her skin crawled.

At the name, he went perfectly still, his widened grey eyes locked on her profile. "Perhaps . . . ." He scrambled for reason as he exhaled noisily. "Perhaps you were mistaken."

"There was no mistake. I know what I saw." Forcing herself to breath, she clarified, "On that tree stump in the middle of nowhere, near a faceless gravestone, near the scene of something terrible once upon a time—more than one something terrible, in fact—is the magically preserved name Black Annis. A Dark witch so terrible, even Muggles know her name."

Her eyes watered of their own volition as she finally managed to turn her head and look at him.

The typically regal set of his shoulders drooping, he nodded lifelessly as he tacked on, "So terrible, even in the few whispers of her that still exist in the Wizarding world, she was only ever believed to be a myth."