"He's in control when I'm Padfoot! But not when I'm me." Sirius Black slurred, stumbling away from Mavra and her scorched vampire minion. Barty Crouch Jr was as nonplussed as the rest of us by the sudden turn, and stopped in the middle of the road where he'd been trying to corral the dog. We probably should have used the opportunity to attack them, but I think we were just as interested in hearing what he had to say. "I didn't kill those muggles! It was Peter! He would have gotten away as a rat! But I caught him! Ate him right up! The Dark Lord made me do it!" He then began to cackle madly.
"Amateur hour," Mavra rolled her eyes. She muttered something and slashed her wand (I had no idea where she'd been storing it in the bikini, nor did I want to know), sending a blast of purple light at us that we had to scatter to dodge. Then the fight was back on.
"Cover!" I insisted to Mathilda and Edith. The Grimblehawks broke to either side, Edith making for a car parked in front of the theater to the right and Mathilda for the trash bins above the stairs down behind the building to the left. I'd stowed my Apologies focus and drawn my blasting rod as we'd exited, and I tried a quick, "Incendio!" to make a gout of flame to keep the vampires from rushing us. It wasn't a big street, and they were fast.
"Avada kedavra!" Crouch tried as the two vampires cringed away from my flamethrower and then bit back a cry of anguish, the killing curse fizzling as green sparks from his wand. He staggered back, and I suspected he was still feeling the effects of the exorcism. He recovered quickly enough, tossing a blasting curse my way that I simply dodged, already moving. I heard it shatter one of the doors on the theater behind me as I ran.
Tactically, I was in a weird spot. With Black out of the fight (for however long he could fight off the horcrux's influence), we were technically three-on-three. But Edith was an accountant, and I suspected she had never been in a real fight before this. Mathilda would keep her head, but she still didn't have a lot of luck with the really powerful combat spells. And I wouldn't necessarily bet my life savings on myself against any of the opponents on the street in a one-on-one fight.
But I just needed to not die long enough for Tonks to show up with the cavalry. It was time to break out the chemical augmentation.
As I ran across the street, mostly to try to keep their attention from going after the girls, I used my left hand to draw a potion from my utility belt and slugged it back. I grimaced since the flavor was one of the many things I still had to improve, but I'd at least gotten the potion up to doing something in the last couple of months. As the effects of the gummi-berry juice (even the muggleborn in my class didn't get my reference to the candy-inspired Disney cartoon) kicked in, time seemed to slow. I couldn't actually move any faster, so it was a lot like suddenly swimming instead of moving through the air, but I was thinking faster.
The two vampires were recovering, and I decided to take out the minion to worry about Mavra with more of my attention. Spells are more about thoughts than incantation, so my somewhat time-slurred, "Coonnffrriinnggo!" nonetheless managed a proper blasting curse. I was even able to make small adjustments to my aim as I spotted the vampire trying to dodge right. Interesting-looking in the slowed time, the coruscating flame of the spell nailed the vampire dead center mass, sending slow-motion chunks down Newbattle Terrace (I knew that street name was a problem).
Meanwhile, not expecting she could get a spell through their shields, Mathilda was playing a freezing charm across the street behind me, leaving a slick barrier between us and the remaining opponents. She had to break off the charm to dodge chunks of exploded vampire, but I noticed that Edith actually had the reaction time to banish the arm that had been flying toward her back at Crouch. That at least confused the hell out of him.
Clearly upset at the loss of her second minion, Mavra had to watch her step for a moment to account for the slick ground, and that gave me time to grab another item I'd been carrying in my utility belt since it became apparent she would keep coming. As the vampire began a mighty leap to clear the ice and pit her superior strength against my frail mortal body, I underhanded the fist-sized plastic bottle into the air between us and managed to hit it with a low-powered exploding charm, the speed potion letting me get it all in line in a way I probably couldn't have at normal speed.
Top vampire-fighting tip: garlic powder is cheap and plentiful at your local supermarket.
Clearly now regretting her dedication to the costuming bit, the cloud of yellowish dust nicely coated all of Mavra's exposed skin around the bikini, and she howled in pain. The trailing shockwave of my charm was enough to push her leaping trajectory a bit. Coupled with me backpedaling and her pulling her arms to her body in pain, she narrowly missed me and rolled to the ground a few feet further down the street.
Even covered in chemical burns, the vampire was fast. While I could track her visually as she rolled to her feet and made for cover, I couldn't swing my blasting rod down and around fast enough to nail her in the back (even if I could have marshalled enough magic to punch through her resistance, after all the spells I'd been throwing). And then came the distinctive pops of incoming apparition, though the sound was odd in the slowed time. I spotted Tonks' purple hair and red robes down the street one way, and the burly, scarred form of Moody the other.
"Screw this. Crouch! We have to go!" Mavra grated out, before spinning in the air to disapparate as a spell from Tonks flashed past her.
Moody's red stunner caught the still-cackling Sirius Black directly on, but that meant nobody was watching Crouch. The last Death Eater on the scene dived at the collapsing form of the possibly-innocent, definitely-mad escaped convict and pulled his own disapparition. A whole hunk of matted black hair and an ear were left behind in the road, splinched off of Black in Crouch's haste.
My gummi-berry juice didn't last long, and Tonks was hustling up as time snapped back to normal for me. "Follow them through?" she asked the senior auror.
Moody shook his head and snarled, "Too dangerous. Could be more than we can handle at the apparition point. And Crouch is smart enough to make multiple jumps to make himself harder to follow." I had always figured that the aurors had a way of following an apparition, but they kept that spell as secret as possible.
"Everyone okay?" Tonks asked.
"Muggle got bitten by a vampire inside. Mathilda's sister is trying to heal her. Otherwise, I think we got off okay," I explained, then quickly summarized the rest of what had happened as Mathilda and Edith walked up.
"Get the obliviators here, just in case," Moody ordered Tonks. "I'll check on the muggle."
As I followed Moody back into the lobby, I couldn't help but smile when I noticed that Tonk's patronus messenger had transformed into a small, sleek wolf in place of the jackrabbit she'd had previously. I supposed congratulations to Remus were in order.
Inside, Abraham was recovering in one of the chairs that hadn't taken spellfire, and Giselle spoke up from the ticketing counter, "I've got her stabilized, but we should really get her to St. Mungos to fix the internal damage."
The whole thing had taken only a few minutes, so there were thankfully no more muggles that had wandered into the lobby in the meantime. "I'll have Tonks take her," Moody agreed, frowning at the damage to the lobby, as well as the chunks of the vampire Abraham had blasted apart. "How are the rest of you with repair and cleaning charms?"
After that, the Ministry did what it did best and covered up a supernatural fracas. More aurors showed up, some of them specialized in memory charms, and the theater was basically as good as new by the time people started to exit the screening (just in time to be magically persuaded that the movie had just been broken up by a fun little live action special effects show that didn't bear further consideration). All the wizards and White Court got interviewed, and having Abraham's testimony backing mine, not to mention Mathilda and her sisters', meant even if Dawlish had been invited to the scene, he wouldn't have much to accuse me of.
Apparently I wasn't supposed to just blow up vampires as a matter of course, but Mavra was enough of a known criminal that with the assault on the muggle, being in the middle of breaking the Statute, and arguable self defense/hot pursuit, it would square with the Ministry laws. Nobody yet was enough of an expert on the Unseelie Accords, but if Mavra wanted to walk into the Ministry to demand recompense under the new inter-species rules, Moody thought that would just be hilarious.
"It's a shame John invoked the Doom on you, Dresden," Moody told me as everyone was wrapping up. "None of the rest of the kids about to graduate from Hogwarts are going to be worth a damn as aurors. Hell, I might as well go ahead and retire."
"You ever think about going into the private investigation business?" I joked.
"Now there's a thought," he regarded me more seriously than I'd expected for a beat too long and then said, "Well, you better get on."
"Yeah, we have a hotel to get to!" Mathilda stated, taking my arm.
"No way!" Tonks disagreed, striding up behind her. "After what happened tonight, you two need to go straight back to Hogwarts!"
"It's my birthday!" she said, and Tonks' hair flickered blue in surprise as she picked up on the subtext.
Moody had picked up on it as well and explained, "Hard to maintain constant vigilance when you're doing that kind of thing. Hotel room's not safe."
We apparently looked so put out that Tonks took pity on us. "Remus is still at the school for the break. And his house is still under the fidelius, which I think you're keyed into, Grimblehawk. I can't believe I'm telling you two to go have sex at my boyfriend's house."
"You're the best, Tonks!" Mathilda exclaimed.
Moody was just chuckling, but advised, "Apparate straight there. Wait… do you even have your apparition license?"
"I will soon!" I explained, then grabbed Mathilda and disapparated with her before they could ask any more questions.
We actually only went a few blocks, since I did need to check out of the hotel early. There was not a refund sadly, but I could tell that I'd scored points by picking a reasonably nice place. From there, it was a short trip to the nearby rath to jump back to Hogsmeade and then just use the Three Broomsticks' floo to get to Remus' (no need to risk splinching ourselves like had happened to Black).
Finally, we tumbled out into the mostly-emptied study of the house I hadn't lived in for nearly a year. Remus had clearly put most of his stuff into storage or moved it into his Hogwarts apartment, and the house was slightly eerie to navigate through with everything missing or under furniture covers. We lit our rings to see by, though, and if it was a little chilly in the house, we were soon planning to warm each other up.
My bedroom still had a bed in it, and the sheets were nicely folded in the linen closet. I don't know how making your own bed is for normal foreplay, but the bedclothes went on and the people clothes went off in one continuous process that we both seemed to find outrageously funny. It might have been the adrenaline crash from the fight finally catching up to us. Finally, blissfully, we were beneath the blankets.
"You're sure?" I asked, one more time.
"Obviously, Harry," she agreed.
"Even though we're basically in a horror movie and slipping upstairs in an abandoned house to have sex is the last thing we should be doing?"
"Harry Dresden, this is not a horror movie, it's a love story! But if you're super worried, you can… keep your rod handy," she smirked.
Very deliberately, I reached off the bed and pulled my blasting rod from my belt and set it on the nightstand in each reach, "Yes, ma'am!"
Rolling her eyes, she initiated a closer embrace, leaning in for a kiss and joking, "Well, if anyone asks, at least I can say you used protection."