"I think she's a vampire," Penny whispered, wand at the ready.
"She is, and her hearing is very good," Mavra chuckled, in a voice that was as dry and dusty as the tomb we were in. She still perched a yard above the stone floor, standing on a stone bier that had been used to embalm the denizens of the mausoleum complex.
"Black court," Draco added, surprisingly. He hadn't even done his third-year defense work, which was mostly about creatures, but maybe he'd been reading ahead.
The vampire didn't deny it, and I wracked my brain for what I knew from my own OWL studies. The Hogwarts curriculum didn't go that deeply into vampires beyond pointing out that there was a different type native to the Americas that functioned differently than those more common to Europe. The locals were pretty similar to the ones in Dracula, while the American ones were more like demon bats in human suits?
Magical creatures are weird.
They were supposed to be hideously powerful, especially as they got older, though they had the classic weaknesses to sunlight, garlic, holy symbols, and the like. But they were technically classed and legally protected as beings: if they were willing to follow the laws of wizards when interacting with them, the Ministry and the International Confederation of Wizards didn't really care if they were devouring muggles by the busload. Which meant we weren't supposed to light them on fire preemptively, even if they were being super creepy.
Percy had apparently come to the same conclusion, and tried to be diplomatic, "We appreciate the offer of friendship, madam. But I think we will soon be missed by our fellows and would prefer to go ahead and demonstrate that we are all okay."
"So polite," Mavra told him, still drumming. "For that, you, your lover, and the Malvora-castoff can go. Dresden, however, has an engraved invitation that it wouldn't be polite to decline."
I groaned and said, "Let me guess, that invitation came with a snake and skull on it?" I'd known there were rumors that Voldemort had made allies among the dark creatures throughout Europe. Maybe I'd gotten complacent that he'd just be sending Death Eaters after me.
Mavra just nodded, still drumming calmly. She cocked an ear expectantly, and I, also, soon picked up sounds of desiccated feet shuffling up the several corridors that emptied into this room. The other bodies in the complex must have had to dig themselves out rather than being laid out under a tarp.
"You'd deny me my protector?" Draco asked, curiously. He bargained, "The house of Malfoy has a use for Harry Dresden still, and would be willing to negotiate an end to hostilities."
While I wasn't really pleased that he was treating me like a business interest, I hoped that Draco was just trying to stick up for me. Mavra just shook her head however, and explained, "I care little for the concerns of the White Court in the best of times, and even less for the machinations of their cadet branches. But, again, your politeness does you credit. Best take my offer to leave while you can. The party is about to begin." Hopefully I'd have time to work out what she meant about a White Court later.
"I knew being in that picture was a bad idea," I muttered. The Weasley family had won a Ministry prize draw that was funding their extended Egyptian vacation, and it was apparently newsworthy. I mostly suspected that the Malfoys had engineered it to make sure Draco had a good vacation without his hosts feeling like they were taking charity from a man they hated. Regardless, the nine-person family and several of their close friends who were also on this trip crowded into a spread for the cover of the Daily Prophet. It must have been a slow news day.
Maybe I should have argued harder about not being in the photo. I was paying for my own trip with book money, which I already felt guilty enough about taking since I'd just cleaned up Severus Snape's potions notes from an old book I'd found that had belonged to the dead potions prodigy. Would this just be the first of bad guys who would figure out where I was and make a play for whatever bounty the Death Eaters had set on my head?
"You guys get out," I told them. Hopefully the, "And get help," was implicit.
"No," Percy said, simply. "I have failed to have your back too many times already." Damn, why did my friend have to prove right now that he wasn't just in Gryffindor as a legacy?
Penny had looked torn about leaving me, but she definitely wasn't going to leave me and her boyfriend. "Professor Lupin better give me extra credit for this," she whispered to console herself, moving further into a dueling stance.
Draco looked at both of them like they were mad, gave me a seriously apologetic shrug, and said, "Well, good luck to the three of you. Madam Mavra?" She smirked that evil smirk and gestured, so Draco strode quickly past her and toward the exit. He did keep his head turned, so he could watch her out of his peripheral vision.
Maybe he'd just hoped for her to try to hex him in the back because that would give us a chance to attack her? That would be the most charitable assumption.
But the kid got safely into the stairway that led up to the surface, and we were running out of time to wait. I could clearly hear the shuffling almost to us from the other corridors, though we'd at least delayed the attack from the one we'd come from. I vaguely worried that I didn't have my staff, mostly because it was hell to maneuver in the low-ceilinged corridors, but I drew my blasting rod and shook my shield bracelet out from under my sleeve. Percy moved to my right and drew his wand, with Penny slightly back and more protected between us.
"Last chance to call this off, ma'am," I suggested, playing toward her enjoyment of politeness for all the good it would do me.
"No, I think not," she said, and then stepped back off the embalming bier, placing its solid stone basalt bulk in between her and us, dropping prone so we could only locate her by the drumming. Mummies began to stagger from the corridor opposite us, quickly orienting on the only living beings in the room.
"Reducto!" I shouted, hoping that the Gringotts teams would accept a horde of mummies as a good reason to damage the architecture. Sadly, my spell barely affected the lintel of the hallway that was spewing undead, resisted by ancient protections in the stone. A few chips of limestone shattered free, but did little more than annoy the undead.
"Aguamenti!" Percy tried moments before Penny's, "Glacius!" Sadly, the attempt to combo summoning and then freezing water was thwarted by the dry air. The water-making spell needed water vapor in the air to catalyze its conjuration, in concordance with Gamp's laws, and so all Percy got was a Super Soaker rather than a firehose. The lead mummy was encased in a thin layer of ice that it quickly began to escape from, and the few behind just started to go around.
"They're not all going to be fireproof!" I suggested, still hanging onto fiendfyre as my last ditch "wizards' curse." I wasn't keen to use it, since it would likely kill me and my friends as well, but if all hope was lost anyway… but for the time being, I tried, "Confringo!" and launched my girlfriend's uncle's favorite spell at one of the approaching mummies. The torrent of explosive fire had the intended effect, causing the animated dead man to catch fire and explode, shattering the ice off of his neighbor and staggering all the nearby mummies.
Fortunately, Percy was watching our flank, because I heard him yell, "Protego!" at the same time as Mavra nonverbally launched some kind of curse from the cover of the stone bier. Percy's hasty shield barely knocked it out of the air, but wavered as if it had packed a hell of a punch. The vampire had switched to entirely drumming with her left hand while she was using her ebon wand as a focus instead of a drumstick. "Switch!" Percy suggested.
I went low as Percy and Penny started hurling fire-making charms at the remaining mummies, getting my own shield up to intercept a couple more unspecified curses. They hit hard, but my shield was holding. I didn't recognize them exactly from her wand gestures and the colors, but they reminded me of some of the darker spells that the aurors had warned us about in our tutoring sessions. Yet, somehow, more raw, as if Mavra had studied their precursors from centuries past.
I wondered why she hadn't resorted to Unforgivables. I'd later discuss with my spiritual research assistant and evolve the theory that the darkest curses technically require the caster to have a soul, no matter how shredded, because Hell has no interest in providing power to those that it will never capture. But at the time, I was really worried that if she launched a killing curse, even if I could dodge, it might hit my friends behind me. So I was powerfully incentivized to bring the fight to her.
Trusting that the two combat-untested prefects would be able to handle flammable mummies that had no ranged attacks, I charged the vampiress. Several large strides carried me across the room. "Confringo! Incendio! Bombarda!" I cast as I ran. Mavra easily dodged the blasting curse that went over her head, did that annoying point-defense deflection to my fire-making charm that advanced wand duelists were so good at, and put up a full shield to keep my exploding charm from taking out her cover. But hopefully she wasn't prepared for me to then shout, "Lumos solem!" as I rounded the bier.
The bright, sunlight-adjacent variation of the light charm hadn't done much to the basilisk, but I hoped vampires were more vulnerable. Brilliant blue-tinted light streamed from my mother's amulet on my chest, and the vampire shrieked as I caught her full in the blast. Transparent shields weren't much help against light.
It didn't last long. "Finite incantatem," she hissed, and my light went out. I'd been just as blinded by the light as she was, so I didn't realize that she'd moved forward rather than back. As the light winked out, I realized she'd dispelled it from inches away. Faster than I could hope to block, she backhanded me with her wand hand, never ceasing drumming with the other, even as mummies began to spill from the other corridors, surrounding us.
The blow to my head felt like a baseball bat wrapped in old leather. I suspected, later, that she hadn't even hit me as hard as she could have, for fear of snapping her own wand in the impact. I went down hard (fortunately onto the left side that wasn't usually taking punishment from hitting the ground in fights).
Looming above me, shaking the stars out of my eyes, I saw that her pallid visage was now crispy like burned meat, and the look of smug amusement in her eyes had been replaced with barely-controlled rage.
"By my own hand, then, wizard," she growled, baring yellow teeth and diving at me faster than I could track.