"I got us tickets to the movie!" Mathilda enthused, reading a letter she'd gotten at breakfast, a couple of weeks before spring break. It was a Saturday morning, so not too many other kids were at the table to overhear. "On my birthday!"

"That's the first Monday of the break, right?" I asked. She nodded. "Wait… which movie?"

"Blood Beach, of course," she grinned. "I wanted to know what kind of horror movie vampires make. So I told Uncle Abraham that we should review it, after all."

"You're sure you want to watch a horror movie that's probably not any good on your birthday?" I checked.

"If it's really bad, we can just snog," she winked. "Anyway! It's at the Dominion Cinema in downtown Edinburgh, night of the 28th." With a pause and an unusual moment of vulnerability, checking that none of the rest of the kids at the table were paying attention, she asked, "Get us a hotel nearby for the night?"

My eyes widened, but I wasn't going to ruin the moment by asking if she was sure. She'd been planning what would happen after she was a wizarding adult for most of the last year, so I just nodded, "Sure thing." Though I couldn't help but ask, "Should we check with Hagrid to make sure you get one last hangout with the unicorns before the break?"

Mouth opened in amused shock that I'd gone there, she gasped, "Harry!" and socked me in the shoulder, drawing brief stares from our fellow Gryffindors. "But… yes. I'll go ask him now!"

Mathilda had probably assumed I would find a wizarding hotel room and just reserve by owl, but I only knew of the Three Broomsticks and the Leaky Cauldron, and neither of them were exactly the kind of place I wanted to have a tryst with my girlfriend. At the very least, Rosemerta or Old Tom would gossip. Ordinarily, trying to figure out how to find a muggle hotel from Hogwarts would have been hugely difficult, but the timing actually worked out.

Ever since I'd realized I'd need to find an apartment by the summer, I'd been trying to get back in the system. I was talking about getting a place with Percy and Penny (and, obviously, Mathilda when she wasn't in school), and both Penny and I didn't necessarily want to be stuck living in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade with no phone or other access to modern amenities. So, I needed to be legally in the country, with a passport, maybe some kind of visa, and enough other forms of ID to rent a place.

Fortunately, the Grangers knew where to start and Tonks' dad, Ted, was a muggleborn with a lot of experience bridging the legal issues between communities. I'd gotten special permission from Dumbledore to head out during my free periods that Monday to get passport photos taken, sign documents, and the like. So all I needed to do was also call around Edinburgh looking for a reasonably-priced (i.e., pretty cheap while not being terrifying) hotel that would rent in cash to an 18-year-old American with mostly-legitimate paperwork.

Easy.

It actually turned out to be the American thing that worked for me. While most college kids went to the beach on their spring break, it apparently wasn't that uncommon for American tourists to whip through Edinburgh and need a hotel room. I got a place all booked up that was within my price range of remaining muggle money, and also got my identification all sorted out.

The situation with paying taxes and the visa authorizing me to stay in the country indefinitely were the bits of the paperwork that were only mostly-legitimate. Ted Tonks had gotten Don't-Call-Me-Nymphadora to pull some strings at the Ministry so I was on some kind of student visa, and I was mostly hoping that Dawlish didn't catch wind of it. Though I supposed he probably didn't want to have me deported, because it would be much harder for him to harass me back in the US.

Nothing else of particular note happened before spring break other than finishing a scenario in Mathilda's Arcanos game. Oliver had wound up dropping out after his breakup with Alexis, not that he'd had much time to play with quidditch practice anyway. We'd replaced him with Neville and Hermione, who'd expressed an interest. They wouldn't be unavailable due to quidditch, and would provide some continuity for Mathilda's senior year when the rest of us graduated.

Neville was surprisingly into it, his shyness disappearing when roleplaying (he chose druid, obviously). Hermione was… about as much of a budding rules lawyer as one might expect. It took her a while to figure out that she shouldn't keep holding up the game to argue about minutia. I suspected that she might be better off playing one of the RPGs with looser rules—amusingly, probably the one where you played vampires.

I wondered whether the vampire game was as accurate about real vampires as Arcanos had turned out to be about basilisks and liches.

The game did feature fancy, artsy vampires that might make movies, so I considered picking up a copy while I was wandering around muggle Edinburgh. Mathilda was meeting me at the theater, so I got into the city early to get the room key for the hotel. I even had a whole little rune-etched Faraday cage wallet I'd made so I wouldn't instantly demagnetize the strip on the keycard (I planned to potentially have a credit card someday). The road atlas of raths my godmother had provided had several convenient apparition points in Edinburgh, and I wasn't too worried about destabilizing the veil at this point—that ship had sailed—so it was a quick trip.

While I was checking in, there was some splashy news show on the television behind the registration desk. A dark-haired man had his own graphical intro, with prominent blood spatters to heighten the vampire theme of the night. "No way I believe the wife didnae ken what he was doin' in 'is own house," the desk clerk insisted.

"What?" I wondered.

"Fred West?" he gestured at the TV.

I shook my head and guessed, "I haven't been following the news."

"Serial killer. 'Tis been on every channel for weeks!" the guy seemed baffled. "Maybe no' in the States?" he figured, catching onto my accent.

"Yeah. I don't really watch a lot of TV, either," I undersold.

He nodded, accepting that, and explaining, "It's ne'er the ones ye'd expect. Man with a family, killin' his own daughters and others in his own home. The wife hadta ken." He finished wringing me up, "Check out's at 10, an' that's you done."

"Thanks," I told him, not sure what to make of a serial killer's trial gripping the nation when so much more terrifying stuff was going on. I'd heard they'd put up Sirius Black as an escaped murderer as well, and that was apparently not getting as much airplay these days. Did they even know that a whole city had disappeared for a weekend in the US, or had the American wizards managed to cover that up somehow?

I checked that the room was nice enough, but did not leave my stuff there just in case I didn't get to use it and was without a change of clothes (I'd learned after New Year's). I was without my staff again, but was otherwise armed to the teeth just in case my time outside of the castle went wrong as usual. After that, it was just a nice stroll down to the theater.

The weather wasn't too bad for Scotland in early spring: it was maybe even 50 degrees when I wasn't getting the light rain whipped into me by the brisk wind. Environmental charms on my duster were, quite possibly, the best enchanting decision I'd ever made. The city was neat, all old brick buildings in long rows with narrow roads between them. I crossed over a quay from the hotel and passed a nice park, but was otherwise penned in by the old masonry, houses, shops, and churches all integrated into the same space-conserving rows. This was probably a much better way to make a city walkable than the wide, car-friendly roads in most American cities.

I actually overshot the theater as I walked past the first time, not expecting the art deco cinema to just be completely shoved in among a bunch of houses down a side street from most of the commercial shops of Morningside. Mathilda waved as I headed down Newbattle Terrace (and hoping that wasn't foreshadowing of fights to come), stepping out from a cluster of her family. After getting a quick hug and kiss, I greeted her uncle, her oldest sister, "and, Giselle, I presume?"

The second-oldest sister, the dragon-veterinarian, looked a lot more like Mathilda than Edith did, though taller, keeping her hair extremely short. She sized me up and nodded, "Punctual, at least. Let's go in and get seats?"

"Not waiting for the little brothers?" I asked, joking.

"To their great chagrin," Abraham nodded. "They're arguing that they should get to see The Crow in recompense next month."

I recalled reading the graphic novel while treating comic shops as my personal library and shrugged, "I've read the source material. Pretty dark, but probably at least not as gory as a slasher movie?" I felt a brief moment of premonition that I was going to be in a lot of trouble from Mathilda's stepmom in a month. Maybe I could have gone out for divination class.

"Remind me again why we're watching this one on the Ministry sickle?" Edith asked. "Is there some kind of magical subplot?"

"Maybe!" Mathilda guessed. "We're watching it because Malfoy funded his," she lowered her voice, "vampire cousins to make it. Maybe they slipped in some secrets!"

"And maybe they're all here," I winced, spotting Lucius Malfoy across the lobby chatting with the vampire that had to be the director, Darby Crane. Draco and his mother were getting popcorn, and Thomas was lounging, bored, on one of the lobby sofas, on the opposite side from the lead actress, Lara. At least Maeve and my godmother weren't around, but there was the risk they'd already taken their seats.

"I thought this was just a regular screening!" Mathilda gaped.

"Well, so did I," her uncle began, surprised as well. "The Ministry often gives us tickets they've gotten complementary. I didn't realize these would be a family showing. Perhaps Lucius rented the theater. I'll get popcorn!"

"Ah, see, the rest of the guests have arrived," Lucius told the director, quietly enough that probably only I could hear him across the relatively small lobby. "A bit better than the showing at the… hamburger establishment, yes?"

Crane rolled his eyes, "It's not exactly a sellout is it, Lucius? I was expecting some critics, at least!"

"There are a number of students from the local colleges, and perhaps some of them write for their school tabloids," Malfoy shrugged. "Including some of the older students from Heriot's school. You know they based their school houses on Hogwarts?" It did seem, in addition to the various White Court relatives, there were a large number of kids around our age moving into the auditorium we were supposed to be in.

I lost the rest of the conversation as I noticed Thomas striding up, a light in his eyes as if we would save him from the boredom of attending yet another screening of his family member's B movie. "Ah! Dresden, good to see you again. I recognize your date from New Year's. And who are the rest of these lovely ladies?"

Edith, tight bun and conservative clothing shielding the heart of an aspiring dowager accountant, actually tittered at the attention from the admittedly-handsome vampire. Giselle was already offering her hand. And Mathilda clutched tightly at my arm with a faint gasp at being up close to a vampire that fed on sex energy.

And the girl version, Lara, was also getting up to come see who her relative was talking to.

What had we gotten ourselves into?