Author's Note: Hi everybody! Sorry about the lateness of this chapter. It was difficult to write (took a while to squeeze some inspiration out of my) especially over school. I didn't even have time to get it beta-read ^^". Now I know what all the other authors talk about when they say they can't update! *gasps*

Anyways, this is Chapter Eight. I haven't decided yet whether I'll make the next chapter 'chapter 9' or '8B'. Oh well, not that it matters. I hope it'll be out within the next two weeks; this is the last transition chapter, I promise.

Yeah, I know DiC is quite different from most other fics I've read; I tried to write it that way, to be un-cliché. I want it to deserve to be called 'original' and I hope my plot will make it a better fic =)

Small credit to Master Woo – for…I dunno, he just wanted credit =D. Well, thanks for reading and listening to me complain all the time ^^. You're highly appreciated.

Thanks to the reviewers: Lena, Sora Ketsueki, snow_queen, Mione G, dracorockstar, Late-Summer-Night, Mochi, Landry Anne, Rowena R, SilverDragoness08, Blanch Dubois, Princess Aiko, crazychick77, Lyra, E-chan, Rhiannon, Eyebright, MysticNiNe, anarkeya and of course, Hell's Hauntress, Mikomi Kume, and Master Woo.

Rhiannon: Yes, David Copperfield is a book about an abused boy, lol! By Charles Dickens. But there is also a very good illusionist of the same name, just search on the Internet, and you'll see. I'm not sure if he copied the name of the classic, because I was confused the first time I heard of him, too.

Also – I'm thinking of making a mailing list for DiC. Note on your review if you want to be on it. The people I emailed this time are the ones who left an email address on Chapter 7's review.

Chapter Eight Excerpts from the Daily Prophet, Nov. 1

Yesterday night, a group of Aurors led by former Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore along with a force of the Ministry's own Hit Wizards were involved in a raid in France that ended up in disaster.

The raid, which took place in the Louvre, Paris, France took a death toll of at least fifty Death Eaters, Aurors, and Hit Wizards killed by suffocation when a fire was started from reasons unconfirmed in the magical structure of the building. Rumors that Harry Potter (the Boy Who Lived) was killed in this fire are unconfirmed…

Albus Dumbledore currently refuses to give out any more information, but details will be published as they become known…

Dean Thomas…Padma Patil…Draco and Lucius Malfoy…Harold Crabbe…our hearts go out to their families and loved ones…

~

No one could understand how much it hurt Hermione. No one knew why and how it hurt her, her, more than anybody else, not even the families of the dead.

When Hermione read the title of the newspaper clipping Dumbledore brought in to the hospital room, it hit her like an enormous slap across the face, and then the skin all over her body stung. With every word, a jolt of furious guilty pain stabbed fiercely at her insides until she finished the article.

In the resonance of the invisible slap her body became numb, very, very numb. Her body? No, the whole world was numb. She was zooming backwards through an endless tunnel, and the light at the end was fast disappearing. Questions were racing through her head, pounding questions like the blood rushing after a vampire's bite. How could it have happened? How did she end up alive? Clever you, Hermione. You got out, someone had said. But - she didn't run away! Did they think that she abandoned her friends, she didn't even know how.

It's your fault! Someone kept repeating it.

But it's not fair! No, it wasn't!

It's your fault they're dead, you stupid girl!

Oh, what the hell?

What mattered was that two of her friends were dead. Dean…tall, responsible, Dean with his dark curly hair. Padma…that smart, sensible Ravenclaw who knew people so well that she could calculate anyone's actions in any situation. They were so in love when they died…they probably died in each others' arms…died…in each others' arms…No! Dead? Simply – plunged into darkness? Silencing every sense, simply turned off?

No. It was impossible. They had been alive but hours…or was it days…ago. Two healthy young people could not just be alive one day and dead the next. It was not possible. They were not dead.

But what about the sad looks on her friends' faces? What about the news stories kept showing up in the news? Dead. Padma and Dean were dead.

The world was shaking. Hermione could not get her eyesight to steady.

They had been murdered. By Death Eaters, by the Dark Lord…

Hermione suddenly, could, for the first time, feel first-handedly the true evil of Lord Voldemort. This was what everyone always talked about. This was the damage he could so easily inflict. This was what it felt like to feel your friends die next to you in the battlefield.

It hurt.

Hermione hugged herself in a cold, shivery self-embrace. She wanted someone to comfort her, but Harry and Ron were running around St. Mungo's, their temporary headquarters. So was everyone else; they were working while despite the loss. She was alone. The room was empty but for herself and the lifeless furniture. This had to what it felt like to be dead. To be alone in a cold, dark, room.

Hermione felt herself choke back a lump in the back of her throat. It was her fault that two of her friends and fifty others had to take this…this overwhelming loneliness. The least she deserved was to be alone. What friends did she deserve anymore?

Distantly, Hermione heard the sound of crying. Soon, it became her own. The searing tears began to break through…

And Hermione cried, letting her tears harshly take her over. No one stopped her. She didn't want to talk, read any letters. In fact, Hermione cried until someone did tell her to stop.

It came from a grieving family member who was visiting at the hospital. She had been most bitter in her mourning, swollen-eyed and tear-faced, when she met Hermione. "Why are you crying for? We all know my son was a Death Eater, don't fool around with me, you ministry people are happy he's dead!"

Had she not the right to cry? Oh, if only that bitter mother had known the truth, it had been her who had killed the son, it had been all her fault. She did have the right to cry.

"No one blames you, Hermione. It was the Death Eaters that started the fire," Seamus said to her once. "Dean and Padma…they took down forty Death Eaters with them." His arm had been in a cast, large parts of his body still bandaged from burns. He had been so quiet and sad when he said this, but had paused his own hurt to try and sympathize with Hermione. 

Hermione gritted her teeth and tensed every muscle to hold back her sobs at this point. She did not deserve Seamus's kindness. He did not understand. The others thought Hermione was crying from guilt that she had somehow survived the incident while the others had gotten smothered by the fire. But that was not why. It was because she had been the one to give the instructions that led to their deaths.

~

So he was dead.

They were all dead, but he couldn't mourn for them because he was dead, too.

Draco hadn't heard from any of the other Death Eaters or his mother, Narcissa, ever since the last raid at the Louvre in Paris.

His body had not been found; he was sure they must have tried to contact him. But they had failed; the Daily Prophet article a few days later had announced him dead. The list of dead Death Eaters, Aurors and Hit Wizards had been quite long. Perhaps most of the Inner Circle had been killed. The Daily Prophet did not list most of them as Death Eaters out of respect for their families. Perhaps the Malfoy's were such a prolific Dark family that they did not bother to hide it; near the bottom of the list read Draco and Lucius Malfoy, two of the notorious names that had been openly listed as Death Eaters.

So his father had been killed.

This hit Draco in a subtly sorrowful sort of way, kind of like when an ex-lover finds someone new. Of course Draco and Lucius had not been lovingly close, but there had been things Draco always meant to say one day. He had never vented out of any of his frustration at Lucius's poor fatherly ways, never vented out the anger at being raised him to be such a pessimistic, malevolent child, never told him of the many times Draco had cursed his name and wished him dead…and of course, possibly most importantly, let him know that he still loved and respected him despite it all. 

And of course, Narcissa. What did his mother think? To have lost a husband and a son in the same night? The same raid? Draco knew she must have been torn apart. Would she sell the Manor? Would she remarry? The latter was unlikely. Draco's mother was not an independent woman, and Draco was surer than hell that a widowed Malfoy could not - would not marry another man.

Draco felt another pang of sadness for his mother; perhaps he could never see her again.

And the Dark Lord. His father's master, his master. The Dark Mark tattoo stopped its red-hot burning and faded like a scar. He didn't return home for Christmas, his birthday, or his own funeral. Within months, his eighteenth birthday passed.

The intriguing thing about that was the fact that with his birthday, he did not get any older. Everyday, Draco saw the same person he had two months before in the mirror, his hair never growing, his body never changing.

As previously mentioned, he was dead.

Oh yes, he thought harshly. Dead.

Draco found the new ritual fairly easy to get used to. He would climb into a coffin during the day to sleep. His body changed only changed with the amount of blood he drank that night, his skin color fluctuating from healthy pink to transparent white.

Oh, what it was like to be a vampire.

It was like he owned the world after the sun went down.

Life came to him with every victim, every mortal he sunk his youthful fangs into, and the blood that flowed forth. With guidance, Draco found it was much better to choose criminals such as murderers as victims.

The choice between life as a vampire and simple human death on the spot? Oh, what a choice. There hadn't been much to ponder when it came to him. Immortal life, or instant death? He had unfinished business, doubtless he had wanted to keep living. And really, it was a wonderful life from death. The artistic beating of that wonderful vampire heart gave Draco intensively good senses; everything he had as a wizard was magnified still as a vampire.

And he basked in this bitter glory.

Ankar and Bardot taught Draco what he needed to know. And Draco accepted it. As a vampire, he had all of eternity ahead of him. No, if he pushed away all thought about his parents and times before becoming a vampire, he knew he would eventually forget them. Ignoring his feelings was not something new for Draco. He was not an emotionally attached person. He would naturally be good at being one of the Dark Immortals.

 With the world and all time in his hands, he didn't need any of them. He would leave them all…he would only need to wait a few years and his old family would all be dead, and he would know enough to leave the other vampires. He didn't need them either. He didn't even have to bother with any of them anymore.

Except for one –

When he had accepted his initiation, Draco had been thinking about living, to save Hermione. For some strange reason. That had been the only thing on his mind them, perhaps the only thing still tugging at it now.

At that moment, at least at that obsessive moment, he would have given a lot for her. And he had. What a waste it would be to never contact her again.

The war between the Dark and Light side was still raging. She was still alive; he had seen to that. She would still be an Auror, of course. She would still be working…maybe still around the muggle streets like she had before. He could find her again…talk to her again…oh, delicious thought, bloody delicious thought.

~

End of Chapter