The vampire was diving at me with hideous speed while my friends tried to hold off an ever-growing army of reanimated mummies when suddenly there was a shout of, "In the name of the Lord, avaunt!" followed by a flare of golden light. Mavra immediately aborted her attack at my prone form and focused her wand at the new arrival, even missing a beat at her drumming and causing the undead to stumble.

I looked toward the source of the shout and saw a burly white guy with short brown hair and a trimmed, dark beard standing amid chunks of hacked-up mummy coming out of the corridor closest to the exit. He was wearing jeans and a simple flannel shirt with a toolbelt, and I thought I'd seen him around over the last few days helping to install the wooden support beams in the corridors.

Also, he wielded a longsword that was possibly bigger than he was—and he wasn't a short man—emitting the golden glow. So that was unusual.

"You!" Mavra screeched, even angrier at the sword-wielding craftsman than she'd been at me for burning her. Wait, dark hair, beard, carpenter… I briefly entertained the idea that she'd accidentally reanimated Jesus with her necromantic drumming. But that would be silly. As silly as a caretaker showing up at just the right moment to save me with a giant sword? I was withholding judgement. Mavra starting firing curses at the guy, and he just batted them out of the air with the sword.

The man simply strode across the chamber toward her, deflecting spells and calling, "Blood of the Dragon, that old serpent, I cast you out!"

I finally got my legs moving and drunkenly stumbled up and away from the distracted vampire. Some mummies were emerging from the corridor we'd started in, so I shot a gout of flame at them while Percy and Penny tried to cover the horde coming out of the other areas. They were really stepping up, though their situational awareness wasn't great. Hopefully all the fire wasn't going to start affecting our ability to breathe soon.

As the handyman-warrior got into melee range with Mavra, she started moving around. The vampire moved so quickly that she almost seemed to be apparating, but I knew she wasn't. The anti-apparition wards the Gringotts teams had set up to prevent antiques from teleporting off were still keeping us from taking the easy way out of the building. Instead, she was basically moving like the Flash, a blur of robes and a dopplering of drumming sounds.

Yet, despite this speed advantage, the swordsman was moving unerringly. His blade swings caught her spells and forced her to dodge, even though he was only at human speeds. Realizing she was distracted and this was my best shot, I lined up my blasting rod, anticipated where she was getting herded, and yelled, "Reducto!"

She still nearly dodged it, but I'd configured my object-shattering curse for high speed, low power. It just needed to do one thing: shatter the drum. It caught an edge under her elbow, and that was enough. The musical instrument broke into several pieces, pulling the skin in half as she made one last attempt at a downbeat.

The remaining mummies staggered, confused, for a few moments, and then began to collapse. Good. I'd remembered at the last second Percy's mention that some research suggested stopping the drummer merely freed the undead to do whatever they wanted. I didn't know if that was a different ritual, or she just hadn't built up enough power in them yet.

Blowing up her drum also wrong-footed Mavra, and she was barely able to drop and roll to avoid being decapitated by the glowing sword. As it was, it cut the top off of her headdress, exposing matted, stringy hair to the light of the room. Tumbling back, glancing around, and realizing she was now significantly outnumbered, she clearly decided to leave.

Three wizards oriented to blast her and there was just a streak of colors sprinting out the exit, three curses going her way and not quite landing. She didn't even have time for any repartee.

Rude.

There was a tense standoff as we all warily regarded each other and the collapsed bodies, many of them smouldering. Penny was the first to break the tension. "Well, that's a big mess." She lowered her wand and asked, "Mr. Carpenter, right?"

The big man (whose name was hopefully an on-the-nose cover identity like that of my werewolf friend "Remus Lupin") nodded and stepped back, the glow fading from the sword. I could see that he was perhaps in his forties, older but still clearly athletic. I wouldn't have looked twice at him in any industrial district or construction project in the Western world. Penny had probably talked to him in passing because he reminded her of her father. Honestly, he had a pretty dad-ish vibe in general.

I lowered my blasting rod and Percy followed with his wand, and I quipped, "How'd you get that sword in here? Magic hat?" In my experience, wizard hats were the preferred method of moving big swords quietly.

"In my bag with the shovels and prybars," he chuckled, his accent indefinably middle American. "Glad I didn't have to make due with hammers and framing squares."

"Are you a focus caster, like Harry?" Percy asked, nodding at my blasting rod compared to his and Penny's wands. To be fair, it wasn't much of a leap, given that I'd been running around casting with a broadsword a few weeks earlier.

"Not exactly," he said, again with a wry grin, though I thought there was some wariness in his eyes. "I go where I'm needed, though. I was surprised to get an invitation to work on the other side of the world at a magical dig site, but now I know why." Seeing that he had our curiosity, he explained, "That vampire is an old enemy."

My wariness was growing at his talk of invitations, and I asked, overly calmly, "You're not a rival assassin then? Or… wait… did someone pay you to watch my back?"

"She was after you in particular, then?" he asked. "No. While I'm sure you're a fine young man, I usually don't get called in to save a single life. I suspect once she'd killed you, she planned to unleash that horde on the campsite above and then use those bodies to terrorize the nearby human city. Or, at the very least, she'd then have plenty of time to find dark artifacts in these tombs that she absolutely shouldn't take possession of."

"Some kind of MACUSA counter-terrorism force, then?" Penny asked. She'd been hyperaware of terrorist groups since her father was injured in an IRA bombing the previous year, plus all the Death Eater attacks on myself and the school.

"Kind of. Not the wizarding government, though. I answer to a higher power. But, effectively, yes, a lot of the time I find myself in between innocents and forces that would unleash terror upon them." I felt like there was a faint stress on "higher power," but I didn't feel great about pursuing it since he was giving up more information than he probably had to. He just might give me an answer.

"Not unlike Harry," Percy grinned.

"You weren't so bad yourself, Perce," I told him, looking around the room. "You too, Penny. I didn't know you'd both been doing combat drills together."

"It seemed prudent," my roommate shrugged. "Neither of us has your raw power, but we are more likely to be attacked together, so coordination gives us an advantage."

Mr. Carpenter's face looked sad, and off my quirked eyebrow he said, "I hate to see kids having to deal with this kind of thing so early. Just thinking about my own children getting involved at all, much less as teenagers…"

Penny clearly wanted to ask him about his kids, but we were interrupted as the whole curse breaker squad came pouring down the stairs, along with most of our adult chaperones. Wands out, they probably weren't prepared to see us casually talking in the middle of the room, surrounded by a defeated undead horde.

"Alright, folks?" the lead redhead asked. While it was hard to think of most people as truly tall, given my own freakish height, Bill was, so far, the tallest of the Weasleys (though I thought Ron might give him a run for his money as he finished growing). He was the one who actually worked here, that the vacation was based around getting to see. Long hair pulled into a ponytail and a pierced ear that Mrs. Weasley had already complained to all of us about, he gave off a vibe of being competent and dangerous, only mitigated by my introduction to him amid getting smothered by his mom and baby sister.

Also, Mad-Eye Moody had been right. Bill did look more like the paranoid auror than his own father. Wizarding genetics were weird.

"The vampire escaped, and Harry took a hit to the head, but I think otherwise fine," Percy summarized.

"We barely saw her passing and put up guards and wards," Bill acknowledged. "That's what kept us. Glad you had some help… Mr. Carpenter, right?" he asked, wary of the giant and seemingly-ancient longsword that our new friend had point-down but not stowed.

"Michael Carpenter?" shouted a voice from the throng of wizards, and Percy's second-oldest brother stepped forward, aghast. Charlie was the one Weasley boy that seemed to most take after his mother, short and stocky. The lack of height had apparently served him well as Quidditch seeker, but he'd bulked up working at a dragon preserve in Romania the last couple of years. He kept his own red hair very short, one might even say singed, and his complexion already showed a few burn scars that not even magic could completely heal. "It is you. I've seen the pictures! This asshole is a dragon poacher!"

"You have the story wrong," Michael said calmly but with a hint of danger.

"You're saying you didn't kill Siriothrax seven years ago?" Charlie insisted. "He was probably the oldest living dragon in Europe! How much did you get selling his parts!?"

"Nothing. He was possessed by a dark entity and had been kidnapping mortals to devour." Michael could have ended his statement there, but went on, "But I guess wizards generally care little for the depredations of monsters as long as they aren't killing your kind?"

The longsword may have lifted a little more off the floor, not quite into a combat stance but ready to get there. Wands of the incoming posse weren't exactly being lowered. Fortunately, Mr. Weasley moved forward and laid one hand on Charlie's wand arm and one on Bill's shoulder. "It sounds like Mr. Carpenter felt he had a good reason, and I take it he was very helpful in driving off that vampire?" Penny, Percy, and I nodded. "Then perhaps we can worry about this over tea rather than wands?"

With his father crimping his righteous dragon-handler anger (likely secondhand, since he must have been like twelve when it happened), Charlie grudgingly stowed his wand, everyone else soon followed suit, and Michael moved his immense sword to a relaxed stance and suggested he need to go get the sheath where he'd left it up the corridor.

As he was walking off, and everyone was calming down about the unexpected swordsman, the Gringotts-employed curse breakers and archaeologists in the group finally realized that they were looking at the undifferentiated, mostly-burned bodies of dozens of historical mummies and the spell-damaged walls of the ancient tomb. They started making very sad noises.

"Sorry?" I shrugged. "We really did try to just stop the drumming. But… vampire."