I'd gotten special permission to use Dumbledore's floo to visit the Grimblehawks, both because nobody thought it would be safe for me to come back to Hogsmeade after dark and because the old man was twinkling up a storm about the whole thing. "Ah, it must be getting quite serious to be having Boxing Day dinner with young Mathilda's parents," he suggested. "Do give my best to Nicholas and Bridget!"

The house I tumbled out of the fireplace into after requesting Grimblehawk Manor was more or less what I'd expected. Not nearly as big as Malfoy manor, the den was still large and appointed with antique furniture. Hanging from all the old, polished wooden walls were many animated paintings of magical beasts and portraits of presumed ancestors. Several of them immediately began quietly critiquing me to their neighboring paintings.

"Ah, Dresden! Full early!" Abraham Grimblehawk stated, looking up from reading his newspaper. He'd put on a more upscale set of robes than the durable creature-wrangling outfit I'd usually seen him in, but his magnificent white muttonchops were still the same, much longer than his relatively-short head hair.

"Oh, good evening, sir," I told him. "I hadn't expected–"

"Hah! Of course not. You've been set up! Thought you were just going to meet Nick and Brid, eh? Those two don't go anywhere together that's not accorded neutral territory. Hence, welcome to my home!"

I'd been vaguely aware that, like Irving Cram, Mathilda had one of the few sets of divorced parents in the pureblood world, but I hadn't thought through the ramifications. She hadn't said I was meeting her father and stepmother. "Just her parents, though, right?" I may have squeaked the last word.

He just shook his head. "They told me to set the dining room for nine! I think you're getting pretty much everybody! Firewhiskey?"

"I'd… better not," I demurred. I would probably need all of my wits about me for this surprise.

"Suit yourself," he shrugged, pouring his own glass with a generous amount of brown liquor from a small but well-stocked bar in the corner of the room. He took a sip and explained, "I certainly don't want to spend the evening with Bridget and Rhiannon in the same room without fortification."

To hide my nervousness, I went and glanced out of a large window onto a large lawn with a fieldstone fence, at the top of a hill overlooking a lightly forested neighborhood of wide-spaced other houses. I was able to make out a little of the rest of the house, which clearly was a large country house faced with dark brick. "So, this is Wales?" I asked.

"No, good old England!" he joined me by the window. "Sheffield's the closest big city that way. Manchester is about twice as far the other. Nick lives in Rhiannon's family house in Wales. Mathilda was mostly raised over there!"

"So you're the head of the family?" I asked.

"Technically, technically. Never did get around to settling down! Just me and the house elves bouncing around in this big old place. I'll probably pass it to young Edgar and downsize, eventually!" he explained, finishing off his drink. Given how old he looked, I realized that I wasn't actually sure whether Abraham was Mathilda's great-uncle, and that hadn't cleared it up at all. "Of course, they're free to use it for events like this!" The fire in the fireplace turned green, "Speaking of!"

Mathilda tumbled out of the fireplace in a Christmassy, dresslike set of robes, "Harry!" she moved forward and gave me a hug, then hugged Abraham, warning us both, "Mum and Edith incoming!"

I vaguely recalled that Edith was one of her sisters, and the conservatively-dressed witch that stepped out of the fire looked only a decade older, so probably wasn't "Mum." More solidly built and shorter in contrast to Mathilda, she had the same dark eyes and reddish-brown hair, though her hair was pinned in a tight bun. "Uncle Abraham," she gave the old man a hug with the greeting. "Mr. Dresden," she gave me an appraising look before grudgingly offering her hand to shake.

"Giselle can't make it," Mathilda explained, more to her uncle than me. "She had to go right back on call." I must have looked confused, since I hadn't heard much about her other sister, "She's an apprentice veterinary healer. She was lucky to get Christmas day off! Magical beasts don't take the holiday off injuring themselves and getting sick!"

"I'm happy to just do the accounting," Edith said.

The fire flared again, and a woman that had to be Mathilda's mother stepped through. Firmly middle-aged, she had the slighter build that Mathilda had, though was even shorter than Edith. Her hair was a darker brown than her daughters', though she had the same brown eyes. I wasn't exactly a judge of wizarding fashion, but I felt like she'd dressed a little fancier than was expected for a family dinner, with a decent amount of jewelry on display. And perhaps a bit more skin than was normal for December, with her robes cut to show that she was still in excellent shape for a woman her age.

Not that I was checking her out, but the guys at school had suggested, "If her mum's still fit, she will be by that age too," and it was hard to ignore that kind of advice.

"Abraham," she acknowledged the host somewhat cooly, and then turned to me, "And you must be Harry! So glad to finally meet you." She held out her hand and after a glance to Mathilda to confirm, I took it and kissed the back. "Ah, good manners, at least!" Her accent was much more traditionally British than Mathilda's Welsh pronunciation. Come to think of it, Edith's was more received pronunciation as well. She turned back to Abraham after sizing me up and asked, "Are they here yet?"

"Still waiting, I'm afraid," he explained. "But we can go ahead to the dining room? Nick knows the way!" I noticed he had filled another glass of whiskey while I'd been meeting the two new women, and clutched it like a life preserver as he led the way into the house.

I was immediately almost totally forgotten by Mathilda's mother as she moved ahead to query Abraham about the rest of the family. My girlfriend, for her part, took my arm and explained quietly, "Mum hasn't seen Dad since Giselle graduated. Four years ago? She has questions."

"She wants to know if Rhiannon's gotten fat, most likely," Edith explained. "So, Dresden, tell me about your Doom of Damocles."

"Edith!" Mathilda argued.

"It's fine," I squeezed her arm as we walked through the upstairs gallery, which had even more old portraits. It was interesting that there was no evidence of any taxidermied beasts; given the family's proclivities, it made sense that they weren't big game hunters even though it would have been expected in the decor. "My mentor was trying to do a ritual to get me possessed by Voldemort," I waited for the gasp, but Edith just raised an eyebrow, "I didn't use the safest spell in the world to get out. House burned down. One of his former students is an auror who refuses to believe he was bad, and has it out for me. It sucks."

"Hmm," she eventually allowed, apparently satisfied. "And you're not teaching Mathilda the dark arts?"

"Edith! He's helping teach defense against the dark arts! He and our friends have already invented two new light spells. He fights Death Eaters all the time!"

"So you're going to be an auror when you graduate?" Edith asked.

I shrugged, "Probably not with the Doom. I always kind of wanted to be a private investigator, but I don't think wizards really have those."

"Like in Cast a Deadly Spell?" Edith asked. I nodded. I hadn't realized she'd have been as interested in the family practice of watching muggle fantasy movies as Mathilda was. "Seems interesting, but financially risky. You're not planning on just living on Mathilda's trust fund, are you?"

"I can honestly say I had no idea your family was wealthy until a couple months ago," I told her, skipping the worrying implication about marriage or at least long-term cohabitation. "The money's all from the Welsh dragon breeding grounds?" I asked, as we finally made it to the large dining room.

Their mother had already taken a seat near the head of the table and answered, "Ha! No, that's the Cadogan lands. Those belong to Rhiannon's family."

"Like Sir Cadogan, the excitable knight in the portrait at school?" I asked. He would frequently challenge students to duels, and no one could figure out how he planned to fight them.

"An ancestor, I'm afraid," a woman's voice cut in from the doorway. She was probably barely 30 and blond, but also had dark eyes, and didn't look like any of the other women in the room. Unlike Mathilda's mother, her (presumable) stepmother wasn't especially dressed up, but was equally slender. She was escorting two young boys who immediately reminded me of the Creevey brothers, with their light-brown hair. I guessed the older was nine or ten, at least a year before Hogwarts, and the younger a couple years behind him. "You must be Harry, pleased to meet you. I'm Rhiannon, and this is Edgar and Robert." She shook my hand politely and greeted, "Abraham, Edith, Bridget."

Fortunately Mathilda's mother's harumph was drowned out by the boys shouting, "'Thilda! 'Thilda!" and immediately dragging her off to explain what they'd gotten for Christmas.

"It was Bridget's year for holidays with the girls, so they haven't seen her yet. Sorry," Rhiannon explained, smiling. I got a sense that the relaxed, friendly air that she was putting on was at least partly affectation to show that the older woman wasn't going to get to her. "Nick should have been right behind me…"

"Just fixing a drink, love," a man's voice explained as he entered from the hallway with his own tumbler of whiskey. He was tall and stoutly built, especially around the middle, wearing his red-brown hair in a lion's mane and a full beard. Significantly older than his second wife, he gave me a look up and down, apparently didn't hate me on sight, and immediately ignored me to ask, "Where are my girls!?"

"I think he was just making sure you weren't a Death Eater, or ugly," Rhiannon smiled. "We trust Mathilda's judgement, but I'm sure he'll pay more attention to you when he's caught up with everyone else. It's hard, not seeing them for the holidays. Especially since we got so little time with her over the summer."

"Yeah, sorry about that," I rubbed the back of my head. "I thought she'd have a parent along to chaperone. Most of the other kids did."

"Unfortunately, I didn't have time due to the boys, Nick had to work, and I'm sure Bridget wouldn't be caught dead on an adventure."

Mathilda's mother seemed to overhear enough to shoot daggers at Rhiannon and then turn back to talking at her ex-husband about something. I shrugged and asked, "I was asking about your family because I thought Mathilda was Welsh and the Grimblehawks owned the breeding grounds."

"No, they're originally Hungarian: the Gindl-Hawliks. Moved here around a century ago and Anglicized the name. Abraham was first generation English, and Nick is second," I guessed that confirmed that Abraham was the great-uncle. "They still own Hungarian Horntail breeding grounds. I met Nick through that connection. Only a few European families in the dragon business." She shrugged, "We married when Mathilda was about five, and they moved into my family's estate. So I guess she picked up the language and the accent. She still sounds very English to me."

"Soups!" Abraham announced, trying to get everyone to sit down. I wound up crammed at Abraham's end of the table across from Mathilda and next to Rhiannon, watching the politics play out. Edgar, the older little boy, took his father's right, and Bridget had already claimed the left.

Dinner wasn't actually as bad as I'd feared, since the dynamics on display weren't actually worried about me. I'd occasionally get a drive-by question once someone remembered I was there, but it was mostly about the byplay of the ex-wife and her daughters getting to muscle in on the territory of the new wife.

Mostly, it helped me understand my girlfriend a lot better. Nicholas Grimblehawk had clearly wanted sons. It honestly felt a lot like the Weasleys having so many boys to try to get a daughter. When Bridget had three girls, he moved on. With the way she talked about their careers, Bridget clearly cared more about her elder daughters, rather than Mathilda, who'd been half-raised by her stepmother. Meanwhile, the way her father doted on the young sons, it wasn't any wonder he didn't care that she'd spent most of the summer in Egypt with her new boyfriend. It made sense that she'd told me about her Uncle Abraham long before she'd told me anything about anyone else, since following him into magizoology was a way to stand out to someone.

As a kid who hadn't had a family and kind of dreamed of one like this, I was beginning to realize how lonely it could be. It was interesting that my closest friends, Mathilda and Percy, were both solidly middle children, lost between the elder achievers and the much-desired youngest. I'm sure she wouldn't trade it for my situation, but there had to be a special hell in having so many people who loved you, but being the absolute last priority for every one of them.

When the dinner finally finished (Abraham drunk off of his chair and Nicholas getting there), I managed to catch a few moments alone with Mathilda. "Malfoy ball again?" I asked her.

"Exciting! Maybe we'll get to see the next crop of bad faeries!"

"Hopefully not," I frowned, realizing she could be right. "I have a suit this time that's not conjured, at least."

"I still think there's a market for party clothes that evaporate at the right time," she grinned.

"My suit has five more minutes, so we need to get home, now!" I joked.

She giggled a bit, then said, "Did you have an okay time? I know they're a lot. I appreciate you coming."

"It was good. I think I learned a lot about you. Thanks for showing me," I told her, wrapping her in a hug. "And I'm sorry if they don't always see you. I do."

She gave me a kiss and said, "I know. Your detective skills are just one of the many things I like about you!" She thought for a second. "I'm still not sure there's any money in being a PI. I'm not even sure private aurors are legal! You sure you don't want to teach defense next year?"

I shook my head. "Remus just needs to make it a couple more months and, counting spring term last year, he'll be the longest defense professor in forever. I don't think I could steal that from him."