With Maeve's gambit disrupted, the rest of the party went pretty well. The only other weird moment was the guy I'd met briefly before his conversation with my godmother, meeting me at the refreshments table. "You armed?" he asked, conspiratorially, over punch. I narrowed my eyes, and he shot a glance over to the table where I'd seen Mavra earlier. "I don't think she's done with you yet. Watch your back." Before I could respond to that, he'd walked off as if we'd never talked.

Other than that odd little warning, there weren't any more interruptions to our dancing, we shared a lovely midnight kiss, and I was walking Mathilda back to the floo as the party was ending when my godmother beckoned us into her little conspiratorial antechamber.

Perhaps a little more willing to go along with it because of the glasses of champagne, my girlfriend shot me a confused look but didn't object as we headed in. "Mrs. Lestrange," she greeted, politely, one of the biggest bogeywomen of wizarding Britain.

"I suppose so," my godmother mused. "Not that I've seen Rodolphus in some time." She started stalking around us, observing Mathilda with a stance somewhere between a dressmaker fitting a gown and a tiger trying to pounce from behind. "Good speed. You're hamstrung a little on energy throughput. You should consider conjuring spikes to add some variety. Ditch the first-year jinxes, they won't even slow serious opponents down. Shield seemed solid, glad that Harry's taught you to make a physical one. Some tutoring with the old man's auror friends, too, I imagine?"

"I take it you watched the duel?" I asked her.

"Of course. Draco's idea? I'm glad you've been giving him so much effort. He really needed more perspective than he'd have gotten simply from Slytherin house. If you can just kill off cousin Siri, he'll stand to inherit the Black seat, so needs to be competent."

"You want Sirius Black dead?" Mathilda asked. "He's your cousin! And worked with you to support You-Know-Who!"

Bellatrix waved her hand in dismissal as if swatting away gnats. "He was the worst Black in some time. He certainly never supported the dark lord. I don't know what he's up to now. Probably crazy."

"Huh," I said, then explained, "He has a shard of Voldemort's soul possessing him." I hadn't totally explained the horcrux thing to Mathilda, but she had the gist of it.

That actually stopped the madwoman for a moment, and she paused, considering. "Well, then it's doubly important that you kill him soon." She took in both of our looks of surprise and said, "What? I don't want the dark lord back any more than you do. He killed Margaret with an entropy curse out of pique. Probably your father too! She was my friend! And he set our plans back years! You thought Severus alone was enough to do the job? Who do you think checked his potions and didn't report that they were explosives?"

"We had wondered why you hadn't been involved the last three years," I admitted, after taking a beat to internalize that Voldemort killed my parents. It certainly fit.

"I guess I could be doing more," she shrugged. "But you keep handling it. He does keep putting Draco in danger. I'll look into it." She physically bobbed, cocking her head to try to shake herself back off the tangent. "Anyway. Good showing, Ms. Grimblehawk. I never supported Maeve's crusade against you, but, well, there's only so much you can say to the boss' daughter. You and Harry should try to stay out of her way. She can hold a grudge forever." Looking at me with her mad eyes, she tapped the side of her head and explained, carefully, "She's not all there, I'm afraid."

I barely managed to stifle my guffaw and choked out, "Thanks for the advice."

"Now, you may not have noticed, but I haven't been around these past few months, and I won't be around much the rest of the year, either. Other people to teach besides you. Watch your back. Watch each others' backs, I guess. I'd say stop annoying my benefactors, but then you'd just do it twice as hard. Maybe I should tell you that you should annoy them. Hardheaded boy. I'm forgetting something…" she ran a hand through her flyaway mass of black curls before lighting up like she'd remembered and retrieving an old magical camera from a cabinet in the room. "Bunch up! Smile!" she said, snapping away like she was getting a prom photo. "You're so cute together. I approve." Suddenly, she was inches from Mathilda's face, "Break my godson's heart and I'll rip yours out with my bare hands." The smile never left her face when she said it, and she patted Mathilda on the shoulder. "Good night!"

As we walked down the hallway to the den, Mathilda was only shaking a little bit. Finally, she explained, "Overall… not as bad as my family dinner, huh?"

"I'm not sure what to do with any of that, least of which is that she seems to like you," I told her. "But if you get any mysterious gifts you need to let me know. You don't want to go into debt with her."

"Right! Don't get under that lady's thumb. Understood!" she said. "Still! Those two aside, I had a nice night!" She gave me another long kiss goodbye, "Night, Harry! See you on Monday. Get home safe!" and she went home through the floo.

I, of course, immediately failed at that simple mission.

Moments before I should have exited the floo into the Three Broomsticks' common room, I felt a sudden jerk in my passage and I found myself shooting out into the frigid night air. I barely managed to still land on my feet, spinning and seeing that I'd come out of a campfire beneath a hastily-erected, rune-etched wooden archway. Between the light of the fire and the moon that had been full only a couple of nights earlier, both the terrain and immediate environment looked familiar. I was standing in the burned-out foundation of the Shrieking Shack, which had an incident with fiendfyre (not my fault!) the year before. The fae woods were to my right, the Forbidden Forest behind me, the walls of Hogwarts arcing across my left, and Hogsmeade far enough away in front of me to be a problem.

Because there were three shadowy figures at the edges of the foundation, blocking my way.

"Dresden," a smoker's voice grated from the middle figure, and I could make out Mavra's colorful dress from the party, "that must have been a hell of a goodbye. We were starting to think you weren't coming."

The other two figures weren't as nicely dressed, two vaguely-male forms with the same corpselike look to them as Mavra had. So I was facing three super-fast, super-strong vampires. They'd obviously managed a redirect on the floo. Mavra could probably put up an anti-apparition jinx, or my attempt to teleport away would just be redirected to the same spot. They almost certainly didn't pull me out here to talk. I had to admit, I was pretty scared, and already thinking about fiendfyre based on the environment.

"Pyroincendio!" I yelled, rather than bantering, snapping my blasting rod free of my belt from underneath my jacket and taking aim. Raith's warning had gone a good ways to making sure I had it ready to draw and was keyed up enough to start out very aggressively. Mavra was already moving, but the vampire to my right must have thought I was unarmed. The purple jet of flame almost instantly resolved into a large cat imago that pounced on the guy. He didn't even have time to scream.

Look, I'm not proud of it. But I'd been doing the research for over two years. Unlike the "true" Unforgivables, since fiendfyre was doing the most simple and obvious thing possible with hellfire it wasn't automatically damaging to your soul, but only if it killed someone. Vampires didn't count as someone, as far as killing-with-magic went. And I was reasonably certain that the scrub grasses in the area weren't going to give the fire enough fuel to make it to the forests or Hogsmeade even if they hadn't been covered in frost. After all, it had only taken out Justin's entire house the last time I'd used it, rather than the neighbors'.

See, I'm a responsible user of hellish flame!

The hard part was cutting off my connection to the fire before it drained my available magic. I swung the super-hot flamethrower across the foundation while I clamped down, and managed to get the torrent of flame to go out without sacrificing another blasting rod. Hoping the hellfire imago would keep them distracted for a minute before it used up whatever power it had gotten from consuming the vampire, I turned and bolted.

It got me a really good head start. Unfortunately, vampires are obnoxiously fast. Something that hit like a small car smashed me in the back before I'd gone even a third of the way back to Hogsmeade. I was moving away as fast as I could, so that seemed to turn some of the energy into throwing me across the heath instead of actually breaking my spine in half.

Fortunately, I was getting a lot of practice aiming while getting knocked to the ground. I grunted out a regular, "Incendio!" as I hit the frozen ground, focusing on a big gout of flame rather than a focused line and managed to catch the second vampire henchman with the edge. He went up, well, like a desiccated corpse, and started wailing and throwing himself on the ground to try to put out the fire.

I thought about a follow-up spell to try to finish him off, but I realized I'd lost track of Mavra. I threw up a shield and was rewarded for my forethought by some nasty dark spell cracking off of it a moment later. I was once again glad that hellfire spells didn't seem to work if you didn't actually have a soul to tear up with them, because a vampire throwing Unforgivables would really, well, suck.

Okay, with her henchman still trying to put himself out I was down to one, one vampire, ah ha ha! One was manageable. Sure, she was a super-fast dark witch, but that just meant she was more likely to hang back and lob spells at me before deciding to just rip my head off. I managed to get my feet under me despite my aching back and started hustling toward town as fast as I could go while still holding up a shield and trying to keep an eye on where the spells were coming from.

I was so focused on where the zippy vampire spellcaster was on the rolling, moonlit heath that I missed another threat. Bounding from the edge of the fae wood, I was flanked by a large black dog with glowing red eyes, who managed to grab a mouthful of my leg and yank my foot out from under me, once again slamming me on the ground. "Oh come on! Confringo!" I yelled, forcing the dog to let go and dodge rather than eat a blasting curse at point-blank range. With my luck, the dementors would probably tag in on me in a second, too. As I scuttled back, favoring my dog-bitten leg, I tossed in a, "Bombarda!" for good measure, aiming at the ground, kicking up a blast of frozen, rocky soil into the animagus' face, and hopefully creating a screen of dirt against Mavra for a moment.

Between the two fast-moving enemies (maybe three, since the henchman was no longer screaming about being on fire), there was no way I was making it to Hogsmeade over the clear, rolling terrain, especially since nobody seemed to have wandered out to help with a fight at two in the morning. But I'd gotten herded right up against the edge of the fae woods.

And my godmother had just told me she wasn't coordinating with Voldemort's forces.

Managing to roll to my feet and narrowly avoid another salvo from Mavra, I pushed myself to dash into the treeline, back and leg in agony even through the adrenaline. A few more spells slammed against the trees around me as I dodged between trunks, and I could hear branches crashing from my right as the extinguished henchman tried to catch up to me. Maybe he'd stake himself? To my left, I heard a canine grunting as Black tried to outflank me. Within moments, I'd be caught in between three opponents, and they could corner me and tear me apart at their leisure.

But I knew something they didn't know.

Using the last of my physical strength to bound onto the low, unusually circular hill in the clearing before me, I started to turn and could make out all three of my pursuers in a perfect triangle. The vampires even seemed to be grinning smugly at how trapped I'd gotten. But I was really hoping that the rath, designed since before the Veil for long-distance travel, wasn't subject to whatever interdiction Mavra had set up. I kept turning and used the last of my magical strength to concentrate on my deliberation, determination, destination: far away from here.

I risked splinching a finger off by shooting Mavra the bird as I disapparated.