The night was peaceful above Little Whinging. It was especially peaceful around Number 4, Privet Drive. The night seemed to wrap the little house in a blanket of peace and quiet. All was still and calm. Only two things broke the sleepy picture: the presence of three wizards and one witch in the back garden, and a swarm of bees hovering outside the upstairs window.

"Want to do the honours, Hermione?"

Hermione's teeth bared in a feral grin as she raised her wand. "Oppu—" But then she blanched and almost dropped it. "What am I doing?" she gasped. "Underage Use of Magic! I'd be expelled!"

"Oh well," Fred grinned. "It was worth a try, wasn't it, Forge."

"It was indeed, Gred."

Hermione rounded on them. "Is this," she said so dangerously that the twins backed away a step, "your idea of a joke?"

"Come on, Hermione."

"Where's your sense of humour?"

"Er, not to interrupt or anything, but can we get on with it? This lot's making me nervous," a worried Ron interrupted, eyeing the swarm of angrily buzzing bees.

Hermione looked from Ron to the bees. This was not the time for revenge. "You haven't heard the last of this," she said in a voice that held a promise of a slow, painful death. She took a step backwards. "Go on, then." The twins eyed her nervously. "Go on!"

Twin breaths, twin incantations. "Oppugno!"

The bees seemed to rear up as one before disappearing through the crack of the open window.

Hermione and the Weasleys waited.

And waited.

Shrieks began to echo from inside the house, becoming increasingly frantic. Thumping and running could be heard. Finally, the door to the back garden burst open and three figures rushed out, tumbling into the grass and flailing wildly around. The first was a large man with a purple face and an abnormally large bottom. The second was a plump teenage boy with a huge bum. The third was a thin woman whose behind lookd much too big for her small frame. It was as though she was trailing a balloon.

Gradually, Hermione realized that the three bottoms only appeared large because a) they were swollen to roughly five times their normal size, and b) each person's bottom was enveloped by a cloud of bees, who were not stinging anywhere else. Next to her, she could see Fred and George howling with laughter. But as she looked across to Ron, she saw that he was looking as serious as she was.

The Dursleys' yelps of pain as the enchanted bees kept stinging, and the howls of "Ooh!" "Aah!" "Gerremoffme!" and "Help!" would normally have roused Hermione to their defense, and prompted a lecture on Muggle-baiting. But all she could think of as she watched the scene was Harry at their mercy, lying on the ground. As the big man tried to shoo the bees away from his swollen posterior, getting stung in the hands for his pains, Hermione envisioned him hitting Harry with a stick, and her heart hardened.

Her eyes were drawn to the boy, lying face-down on the grass. She blushed to see that he had pulled down his trousers and pants altogether, revealing an astonishingly large expanse of scarlet, sting-swollen buttocks, one of which he seemed to be trying to cup in each hand. This proved to be a particularly bad idea, because not only were his buttocks too big to fit into his hands, but – judging from his renewed and increasingly frantic shrieks – the bees seemed to delight in stinging bare skin. The sight was comical, in a way, but all she could see was his foot crushing Harry's hand, and the horsy woman looking on, watching.

Hermione didn't find their antics in the least bit funny.

"That's enough," she said sharply to the twins, and her voice must have been sterner than she thought, because they both positively quailed before Fred lifted a shaky wand and banished the bees. For a moment the Dursleys lay on the grass, howling, seemingly unaware that the stinging Furies were gone.

"You – you freaks!" bellowed Vernon, pain seemingly fuelling his anger. "Think you've got the better of me, eh? Well, I'll have the last laugh! Just wait till that wretched boy gets home! I'll thrash him within an inch of his life…" But he got no further because, at the words "I'll thrash him", Ron had already torn himself away from the twins and now hoisted him up by his shirt collar.

"If you so much as think about taking this out on Harry," Ron said quietly, his voice like tempered steel, "if you touch a hair on his head, I mean it – I don't care whether it's a shove to get him to hurry up or if you think you can take it out on him, what we've just done to you – if you so much as touch him, you'll have me to deal with, and I haven't got a bloody sense of humour. I won't be sending sodding bees after you. That's my brothers' idea. 'S up to me, I'll just kill you. Or turn you into earthworms or something. I'm getting frightfully good at it." His eyes narrowed with contempt. "Earthworms. That'd be good for you, grubbing through the mud for something to eat like the insects you are. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"Ron…" Hermione said thinly. You're frightening me was what she wanted to say, but she didn't. She had never seen this side of him before.

"I hope you're getting it," Ron said. "Are you? If you hurt Harry ever again – never mind hurt, if you so much as look at him wrong – I'll find out about it. And what I'll do to you then will make this seem like nothing, believe you me." He rounded on Vernon and Dudley and spoke slowly, deliberately. His eyes blazed. "There are curses, Unforgivable Curses. Have you heard of them?" He addressed this last to Petunia, frozen in abject terror.

"Have you heard of them? ANSWER ME!" Ron roared. Hermione backed away a step from this stranger. She tore her eyes from him to look helplessly at the twins, who looked frightened but not as surprised as her. She was distracted by a squeak from Harry's aunt.

"Ye-ye-ye-ye-yes," quavered Petunia.

"Then tell your husband and your son to effing keep their hands – OFF – Harry." He turned his hard stare on Vernon and Dudley. "And that goes for whether his godfather is there or not. Or whether he's alive or dead. Or whatever the bloody hell he's done, whether he's right or wrong or flaming whatever – Just. Stay. Away. From him."

He turned on his heel and stalked back to them. The twins applauded lightheartedly, but their eyes were serious. In dead silence they walked back to the Knight Bus stop.

The ride home was very quiet.