Disclaimer: I don't own anything Harry Potter. He belongs to J.K. Rowling, whom I heartily thank for having created him. I just happen to have been knocked in the head by my muse one evening, and took it upon myself to write this bit of fiction based on the characters she created.

Author's Note: I've never written fanfiction before, so you'll have to bear with me. It's rated R for language and possible violence in later chapters, and because at this point I really don't know where exactly the story is going to go. At the moment, I'm letting inspiration guide my hand, though I suspect it's going to take some help. This piece was begun before Book 6 came out, and I've decided not to let that volume influence my take on events as I have them written here. Also, I'd like to thank, in advance, all my online friends who I'm going to pester into reading this, as well as those people I'll more than likely turn to for help when my muse deserts me. And, of course, my husband, who has always been my biggest fan as well as my most honest critic. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I'm going to try, very hard, not to disappoint.

Chapter 3

"Hermione."

A puff of air gusted across the back of my neck, and I shivered involuntarily. "Harry, please, I'm trying to study." So much for not being able to see me if I went back to the Muggle world. In the four years since his death, Harry had come to me so many times I'd lost count, though he was careful to do so when I was shut away from others, with little chance of being disturbed.

Unfortunately, his visits tended to coincide with my periods of intense study, and his ghostly voice never failed to completely ruin my concentration. "What are you studying for now?" he asked, and I detected a faint whining tone to his voice. "You've only just taken your exams, after all."

With a sigh, I closed the book I was reading and looked at him. He had a rather aggravating tendency to whine if I didn't pay attention to him, and it was pointless trying to ignore him. "I've taken one set of exams, yes, but I've another set coming up next week, Harry, you know that." I was attempting to study both law and medicine at the same time, and it was grueling work that left me with no time to myself.

"I don't understand why you have to push yourself so," Harry complained. "Always an over-achiever, Hermione."

"Of course you don't. You never have." It was true enough, none of my friends had ever understood my desire to learn everything I could. Ron often teased that I should have been Sorted into Ravenclaw, if I loved books so much. "What do you want, Harry?"

"I wanted to see you, that's all. Is that so wrong of me?" He drifted away from me, looking at me with a petulant expression that reminded me of a kicked dog I'd once seen.

I sighed, and was about to reply when I was saved by a knock at my door. My parents had insisted on helping me get my own flat off-campus, so that I could study in private, and since I'd had no time to make friends, there were few people who knew where I lived. "Harry, you have to go," I hissed at him, but he was already gone.

Another knock sounded, and I called out, "I'm coming!" I hurried to the door, running a hand through my hair in a rather useless attempt at restoring some order to it. "Sorry to keep you waiting," I began, though whatever else I was going to say left me the second I opened the door.

There, on my doorstep, in Muggle clothing, was the last person I'd ever expected to see: Draco Malfoy.

"What are you doing here?" I cried in a soft whisper, stepping out of the way and ushering him into my flat. I looked out the door and glanced up and down the hallway to make sure no one had seen me letting a man into my apartment before I closed the door and turned on him. "Have you gone completely mad, Malfoy?"

"No, I haven't gone mad, thank you." He took a look around and sniffed with disdain, and I clenched my hands into fists. If he said one wrong word, I was going to deck him, wizard or no. "Well, you haven't changed, I must say. Same old Granger, up to her ears in books," he said with a smirk.

To my utter dismay, I found myself blushing, but he was right. I'd been so wrapped up in my studies that there were books everywhere. Crossing my arms over my chest, I lifted my chin proudly. "What are you doing here, Malfoy?" I asked again. "Haven't you got someone else you can inflict your presence on?"

I don't know what reaction I expected; perhaps I expected one of his insults from our school days, but instead he merely frowned. "Do you really think I'd be here if it wasn't important? Believe me, Granger, you're not exactly the person I expected to be bringing this to, but it was Dumbledore's suggestion." He looked around again, shaking his head. "I cannot believe that you, of all people, would give up magic and go back to this... this..."

"Don't go there, Malfoy," I cut him off. "Trust me when I say that you do not want to go there." I wasn't the least bit surprised that I was angry with him. In the seven years we'd been at school together, we'd never been able to go more than five minutes without getting on each others' nerves. Some things never change.

To further confound me, however, he nodded in agreement. "Right. Look, I don't want to take up your time any more than you want me here, so could you just hear me out, and then I'll go?"

I blinked at him. I'd thought I was done with weirdness in my life, but his presence proved that there was no limit to how strange things could get. I opened my mouth to snap at him, and instead found myself saying, "Would you like some tea, then?"

At least he looked as surprised as I felt, and he shifted uncomfortably. "Oh, well, I suppose that'd be all right." I went into the kitchen, the only room in the flat that was clean, as if I never used it (and with exams I hadn't bothered to eat, really). Malfoy trailed behind me, and apparently felt the need to fill the silence, because he said, "Do you know, I had to use Muggle transportation to come here? Was the only way to come and see you without anyone from the Ministry finding out about it. As it is, if my superiors find out I'm here, I could very well lose my job over it."

"Your job?" I asked, turning away from the stove where I'd just put the teakettle on. "Funny, you never struck me as the sort to need money, Malfoy."

He frowned at me. "As it happens, I don't. But then, I don't suppose you'd have heard anything that's going on now that you've gone back to being a Muggle."

I couldn't decide whether he meant it as an insult or not, so instead I pointed him toward one of the two chairs at my tiny kitchen table. "No, I haven't. As it turns out, I've been rather busy, and even you ought to know that I'm not supposed to have anything to do with magic."

"Yes, I know," he agreed, pulling the chair out and lounging in it gracefully. I stood, leaning against the refrigerator, not wanting to put myself within his reach. "I don't suppose anyone happened to mention to you, before you stopped talking to everyone, that I decided to work for the Ministry?"

That wasn't much of a surprise, since his father had always had Ministry contacts. "Is there a point to this?" I asked, with a yawn.

"Sorry to bore you, Granger," he snapped at me, and I could see something of his temper in his steel-colored eyes. It dawned on me, suddenly, that I was playing with fire by entertaining him; he reminded me of a tiger I'd once seen at the zoo, and he looked at me the same way the tiger had, as if he were trying to decide if I'd make a good meal. "I was trying to break it to you easily, knowing how close you were to Potter and all."

My heart skipped a beat, and if I hadn't been leaning against something I might have found myself on the floor. As it was, my knees were weak, but most of my weight was against the fridge, so I managed to stay upright. "What about Harry?" I heard myself asking. Had the Ministry somehow found out about Harry's ghost? We'd been so careful...

"Nothing. He's dead. I just thought it might come as something of a shock to hear that I took up the job he wanted so badly." I must have looked confused, because he gave me a pitying look. "I'm an Auror," he clarified.

I don't know how I did it, but I made it the three steps to the table, to sink into the chair opposite Malfoy. "You're a what?" I asked, trying to make some sense of what he was telling me.

"An Auror," he repeated. "Potter wanted to be one, remember?"

I remembered, all right. Harry had talked of nothing else since our fifth year at school, when he had lost Sirius. What I didn't understand was why Draco Malfoy, the son of Lucius Malfoy, a sadistic bastard who'd been known to be Voldemort's most faithful Death Eater, would want to become an Auror. "Why?" It was all I could think to ask.

"Look, I don't expect you to understand my reasons, just as I never expected you to understand why I turned against my father in the first place. The only one who ever understood was Severus, and not even he knew just how obsessed Father was right before the end." He shook his head, looking down at his hands, and I noticed there was a scar on the back of his left hand.

There had always been rumors about Malfoy at school, about his father's connection to Voldemort, and how Draco was expected to become a Death Eater along with Lucius. Certainly, he'd been a slimy, obnoxious prat at Hogwarts, but I'd never really considered him to be dangerous in those days. Looking at him now, four years later, I realized that none of us had really known anything about him. He looked so much like his father it was frightening, and I wondered if he ever used his name to intimidate people the way Lucius Malfoy had.

"Why were you apologizing, after Harry died?" I asked him. I'd never really cared what the apology was for, because I hadn't wanted anything to do with him by that point.

"Because it was my fault," he replied, looking at me. "If I'd been faster, if I'd been better, if I hadn't let my father distract me..." His voice trailed off, and he shook his head before continuing, "I was supposed to save him, Hermione. I could have saved him."

I was horrified. All this time, I'd never thought he was even capable of feeling guilt, and yet, here he was, in my kitchen, confiding his deepest, darkest secrets to me. It was creepy. "Oh, God," I whispered, and was saved the burden of saying any more by the fortuitous whistling of the teakettle. Only, to my absolute shame and disgust, when I tried to stand up I ended up falling right back into my chair. "Bollocks!" I swore.

That, at least, elicited a small snort of laughter from my guest, and he pulled himself out of the pit of despair he was wallowing in to get up and look down at me. "I didn't think you knew how to swear. Where do you keep your cups? And the tea?" Was he concerned?

"The cups are over the sink, and the tea is in that tin next to the stove." A thought struck me, and I couldn't quite suppress a smile as I asked, "Do you even know how to make tea, Malfoy?"

"'Course I do, what do you take me for?" he replied irritably.

"I take you for a spoiled, selfish prat who grew up with house elves waiting on him hand and foot," I shot back, but I was over my anger, and couldn't help the giggle that escaped.

"As well you should," he agreed, finishing with the tea and carefully carrying the cups back to the table. "Merlin, but I was a pain in the arse back when we were in school, wasn't I?"

"The biggest," I assured him, with another giggle. I'd gone mad, I was convinced of it, and decided I was hallucinating the entire scenario. Shaking my head, I looked at him seriously. "Now then, would you mind telling me why you've suddenly decided to appear out of the blue? Surely you can't have come all this way just to confess that it's your fault Harry died."

He looked pained, and I immediately felt guilty. "No, don't take that the wrong way, I don't mean to imply that it really is your fault," I rushed to explain. "I still have nightmares about that night. There was nothing you could have done, that any of us could have done. Harry made the decision to face Voldemort on his own, knowing the consequences. He's the one who chose to die, Malfoy. Don't blame yourself."

I hadn't told anyone about my nightmares before, but it had slipped out, and now I found myself rather relieved to be talking about them. Malfoy looked rather surprised, but surely we were reaching some sort of truce, or at the very least it was only fair for him to feel as creeped-out by the little bonding moment we seemed to be having as I was.

"Thank you," he said suddenly, and there was sincerity in his voice even if the dangerous look hadn't really left his eyes. There was an awkward silence between us for a few minutes, which he finally broke. "You asked why I was here."

"I'm aware of that." I hadn't forgotten a single word I'd said, and somehow the tone he'd used to remind me of my own question set off my anger all over again. "Does this mean you're finally going to tell me?"

He glanced down at his cup, and then reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a small glass vial. I stared at it for a moment before I realized it was half-full of blood. "I need your help. I don't trust anyone at the Ministry with this. You wouldn't have heard about the problems we've been having lately, even if you were getting the Prophet, but things are pretty bad. Voldemort's death has caused all sorts of chaos, and there are Dark creatures running loose all over. Three weeks ago, I came across the first in a series of deaths, Muggle deaths, and I have reason to believe a vampire's involved."

"A vampire?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Surely he had plenty of other contacts he could go to with something like this? "What do you need me for?"

"After the third killing, I started research for an undercover assignment. So far, the Ministry and the Muggle government has managed to keep this quiet, but it's only a matter of time before it goes public. Two nights ago, I was staking out a Muggle bar that we thought was a likely target. Sure enough, the thing was there, and I managed to keep anyone from being killed, but it attacked me and damn near killed me." His expression was grave. "I was set up. Someone inside the Ministry is feeding this thing information, and I was lucky all I got was a scratch. It didn't get away clean, though, because I managed to get this sample of its blood. Dumbledore suggested you because you're studying medicine. You have access to a lab, don't you?"

I knew at once what he meant. "You want me to analyze this for you," I said, slowly taking the vial from his hand and holding it up to the light. "To make sure it's really a vampire that you're dealing with."

"Exactly." He sat back with the expression of a cat that's just caught a really fat mouse. "I know you want to leave the wizarding world behind, but I don't have anyone else I can ask. Whoever it is that's in league with this thing, they won't suspect I've gone to you because of our history, and because you're on record as having broken all your wizarding ties."

"All right, Malfoy. I'll run some tests. How can I get in touch with you?" Again, I was convinced I'd gone mad. I couldn't possibly be sane and agree to what he was asking. It was too surreal.

"The bar I told you about, the one I had to stake out." As Malfoy recited the instructions on how to reach him, I happened to glance toward the doorway leading into the kitchen, and for a split second I could have sworn I saw Harry's ghost hanging there, looking disgusted. Then I blinked, and he was gone.