"This is nice," Penny opined, sitting back sipping from her coffee. "I never really expected to be able to afford the whole bumming-around-Europe thing, you know?"

I looked out around the Kheima Souk, Cairo's version of Diagon Alley, a tourist-trap of a magical shopping district, and couldn't help but agree. The place was basically straight out of Indiana Jones, so only probably 50 years behind rather than Britain's century-plus lag for magical architecture. It was nice. "Me either," I agreed, enjoying my own overly-strong coffee.

The two of us were holding down our table at the outdoor coffee shop, a hard-won place in the best shade and with six seats. We'd been trading off who stayed behind to guard it while everyone else explored, and as long as we kept ordering coffee, the owner didn't seem to mind. We were going to be so wired by lunchtime. Currently, Mathilda and Alexis were in a nearby clothing store, Percy was checking out the bookstore, and Oliver had demanded a chance to check out the broom shop.

He was passing up a chance to go broom racing with the kids, after all, so he had to get his quidditch energy out somehow. That had been vital, however, since the athletic fun day had pulled off all the younger kids and, importantly, all the parental chaperones. It was just the six of us, on our own. I think they may have forgotten that Mathilda wasn't technically an adult yet.

It was still weird that the rest of us, being 17, counted as grown-ups in wizarding society. I didn't expect to be trusted to go off on my own like this until I was 18, maybe not even until 21. I couldn't even vote yet, let alone drink…

Wait. I probably could legally drink, at least at wizarding bars. And I could legally drink in British muggle bars in a few more months. The world of possibilities this opened up…

"Oh, weird, is that Michael?" Penny asked, pointing with her coffee cup across the way. Sure enough, our mysterious sword-wielding savior was sitting at another outdoor cafe several storefronts down. It looked like that one served breakfast and juice. He didn't have his sword, but was still rocking the jeans and button-down, which is probably how Penny noticed in the otherwise robe-centric area. The man he was having breakfast with seemed like a local, long gray hair and beard but dark skin and still tall and fit. His robes seemed like he had money. "I wonder who that guy is? Another secret global protector?"

"What guy?" Mathilda's voice asked from behind us. We'd been focused enough spying on Michael that I hadn't noticed her and Alexis get back.

I turned to answer but just got out, "Wow," to my girlfriend's obvious amusement. She'd changed into the new "robes" she'd bought, and I used that term guardedly. They were more like a sundress, made of something diaphanous in a red and gold pattern, probably very comfortable in the summer Egyptian heat despite being, well, clingy. "The, um, we saw… nice dress."

"I think you broke Harry," Penny laughed. "We saw Michael over there, and wondered who the guy was that he's talking to."

"The guy with the sword that showed up to help you fight mummies?" Alexis asked. She and Oliver had missed all the excitement a few days earlier by rushing off as soon as they got back. I noticed she'd also bought and worn new robes, in cooler cream and reddish-brown to better match her dark-haired complexion. Oliver was likely to have his own problem communicating once he got back.

"Let's go be nosy!" Mathilda suggested, seeing that Michael had said his goodbyes and headed off, but the mystery man was still lingering at his table.

If my brain had been in gear I might have objected to just bothering a potentially-dangerous older wizard, but I was halfway there before I really realized where we were going. I picked out giggling from Penny and Alexis as they stayed guarding our table, behind us.

"Hi!" Matilda greeted the man without pretense. "Are you a friend of Michael's?"

Up close, despite his gray hair and beard, the man's skin wasn't terribly wrinkled or thin and he still seemed to have an athletic build under his blue-and-gray robes, but his dark eyes seemed almost impossibly old and wise as he regarded us. I didn't make eye-contact, but Mathilda did, and after a moment he smiled and gestured us to take a seat. "Indeed. I suppose you were involved in the unfortunate recent affairs of vampires he told me of?"

"Well, Harry was. She was after him. I missed it!" Mathilda gave away. It was probably good that she didn't have plans to become a professional card player. "Vampires! They're supposed to be under control, these days!"

"Sadly, the degree to which the vampiric courts are willing to pretend to be civilized directly depends on the power of the nation they are confronting. They have generally found it inadvisable to target wizards, but still prove quite dangerous to the mundane population." He explained, echoing what Michael had said. His accent was perfectly clear English, a hybrid of an upper-class British accent, the local flair, and an almost Germanic undertone.

"And you take up the sword and defend the defenseless yourself?" I guessed.

"Not in quite some time," he shrugged. "My place is now as teacher, rather than upon the field. Were I to take up the sword again… well, others that have retired may also choose to step in. Best to let younger people lead the fight." His eyes didn't quite twinkle the way Dumbledore managed, but it was clear that he knew he was showing he knew more than he should, as he explained, "People like yourself, if I had to hazard a guess, Harry Dresden?"

"Legilimency?" I suggested, worried about his eye contact with Mathilda. "Or Michael told you?"

"Neither," he waved my guesses away. "While I am retired, I receive news. Both your English magical newspaper, and word of those who were using it to hunt you. It was wise to change locations, but news of your presence in Cairo will follow you. Stay wary. You strike me, sadly, much like Michael, as a young man destined for a life of needing to watch your back."

"I've got people for that, too," I said, squeezing Mathilda's hand under the table. She grinned that I was finally getting it. I picked up on the reference and asked, "Is anyone watching Michael's?"

"On this earthly plane? Not so much. The swordbearers tend to lead short, lonely lives. Michael has lasted longer than most. He has a support network, but refuses to put anyone else but himself in danger."

"Sounds familiar," Mathilda joked.

He nodded, "It has always been a paradox that the stronger the man, the harder it is for him to admit when he needs help. You would think he would have less to prove, but no. It's good, I think, that women are more and more able to take the field themselves, as they tend to be less prone to the same dangerous assumptions."

"Me go into wilderness, kill mammoth, bring home to women back home, where safe," I grunted, owning that he was basically calling me a caveman.

"Quite. But it's easy to forget that humans never killed a mammoth without a hunting party. And Michael is after something far more dangerous than that."

"I'm getting what you're saying," I told him. "Where do I–," I glanced at Mathilda's sudden frown, "–we need to go to back him up?" The guy had probably saved me from Mavra. I owed him for that, even if it wasn't my natural disposition to jump in when there was a fight that didn't actually concern me.

And that's how all six of us wound up down in the "bad" section of the Cairo magical district (where we'd absolutely promised our chaperones we wouldn't go, incidentally).

Mathilda, who'd changed from her distracting new clothing into her more protective (but less breathable) creature-minding robes, was finishing explaining, "There was a mysterious old man in a tavern handing out quests. Of course we had to agree and form a party!" She had been reading Arcanos, the roleplaying game, after it had proved so useful for identifying petrifying creatures the previous year, and had already been picking up the tropes. She wanted to run a campaign once school started again.

Alexis had already called dibs on playing the party wizard, causing grumbling from everyone else.

"Has anyone actually been to Knockturn Alley?" Percy asked, suddenly realizing that we were in the bad part of a wizarding town in a foreign country and we weren't even used to the bad part of town in Britain. "Maybe we should have brought Malfoy."

Rather than keeping the seedier businesses on a distinct thoroughfare like in London, the magical souk in Cairo featured a courtyard off the muggle area and nearby streets that were touristy, and a gradually diminishing level of gentrification the further away you got from the center. At this point, we were pushing deep into territory that muggle aerial photos showed as being beneath the Nile. When the settlement was founded, the regular seasonal inundation had probably rendered these parts of the Kheima district uninhabitable for large parts of the year. These days, they were just a labyrinthine slum.

"I've been meaning to ask about that," Alexis piped up in her English accent with an undercurrent of her birth and early years in France. She'd also switched back to more practical clothes, much to Oliver's disappointment. "We're just friends with Malfoys now? Draco seems like a nice enough kid, but…"

"Harry has a plan!" Mathilda defended me. "Admittedly, not sure if he's converting Draco or Draco's converting us. But a plan!"

"Thanks, 'Thilda," I told her, slightly sarcastically. "I think he could be a lot better than his family, with proper role models. But… agreed. I feel like I was kind of tricked into being his entourage this summer. I don't like when his dad's plans are involved."

Alexis nodded, "I can appreciate how much having a rich kid along is increasing our standard of vacation, and I haven't heard him say anything especially bad. But… Death Eater parents, though, right?"

"I actually have no idea what Lucius Malfoy is up to," I admitted. "He could have helped Nott, but he didn't seem to? Maybe just because that crew was trying to keep the circle small?" When Cantakerus Nott had been marshaling the Wizengamot to clear Hogwarts for their plan to revitalize Lord Voldemort, Malfoy had appeared to be uninvolved and amused. And I couldn't voice my suppositions that he was deeply embroiled in whatever plot my godmother, his sister-in-law, had involving the sidhe, which seemed totally unrelated to Voldemort's plans.

But Mathilda could. "That crazy half-sister of his! It may be that Draco really wants away from her this summer. Or he could be trying to help her with whatever her plan is. Since her slut-bomb thing doesn't work on my Harry!" There was a round of nods. Whatever the Winter Lady's strategy at Hogwarts, Mathilda had done a better job than I had of making sure Maeve wouldn't get her hooks into Gryffindor.

"I… I think he may be getting sweet on Ginny, without his Slytherin gang around," Penny ventured. "We should make that happen." The girls started chatting conspiratorially, while Percy, Oliver, and I tried to maintain some situational awareness in this magical slum, small alleys and multi-story buildings making it hard to even remember that it was still early afternoon.

That awareness was only partially successful, giving us a few moments' warning as a small local man peeled himself off the shadows of an alley and declared, "British tourists? Lost, are you?" in heavily-accented English. We'd probably gotten this deep without being bothered by being six members. But I counted more than that of humanoid figures still lurking in the area. We'd wandered right into a trap.

"Not particularly, thanks," I told him. "Just a bunch of poor kids trying to find a cheap place to drink. Heard there was one in the area."

"Nothing that way but Necropolis," our mugger said. He reminded me a lot of Mundungus Fletcher, a fixture of the British underworld that kept floating up into the shop where I'd worked the previous summer. He didn't have the leprechaun afro of red hair, though. "You kids don't want to go there."

We did.

"We have no money!" Mathilda insisted, breaking off her conversation about Draco's love life in a tone of voice that implied the man was stupid. "Are we going to fight?"

Maybe I shouldn't have explained to my girlfriend, the only one of our group still not-quite-of-age, that the Egyptian magical government barely policed the Trace on their own people, much less on tourists. At least that's what my research had suggested. The rest of my friends had their wands out and looked ready to throw down.

I shook my shield bracelet out of my sleeve and readied my staff. Apparently a half dozen teens who'd had way too much coffee were not ready to negotiate with muggers.

The shadows moved as the gang of locals got into position, and I hoped we were as hot shit as we thought we were.