Chapter 23

A/N: Hello readers! I know, it's been forever. Sorry. I haven't answered reviews in forever, so sorry about that as well. My inbox is full of things I should have answered. Sorry for that as well. I'm working on getting to it.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed and to everyone who's still sticking with me!

~Frosty

It was a good thing that Effie hadn't been trying to eat her gelato because she probably would have choked on it, possibly spat it out across the table at Draco. Hermione didn't even want to fully contemplate what would have happened then; their plan would be a lot harder to execute if the Pythia had to seduce Apollo without her head.

"You want me to what?" Effie demanded, seeming to choke a little on air. Definitely a good thing she hadn't had anything in her mouth.

Suddenly very glad that she'd had the forethought to silence her partner before she got to this part of their meeting, Hermione repeated herself. She lowered her voice slightly since Effie's outburst had drawn the attention of some of the Muggles around them and the topic wasn't exactly one that would pass as normal.

"We want you to seduce Apollo."

Surprise fading, Effie started to look offended. "You think I haven't tried that before? He's kept me alive for centuries because I'm his favourite Pythia yet, but he hasn't responded to a single one of my advances. He doesn't want me."

Hermione glanced at her partner, for assistance or reassurance, she wasn't sure. While she was glad to have correctly ascertained the cause of the Pythia's misery, she hadn't expected that Effie had actually tried something with Apollo. For some reason, Hermione had taken Effie's gelato binge as an indication that the woman was eating her feelings because she couldn't bring herself to act on them. Hermione had obviously read her wrong. She mentally apologised to the Pythia for thinking her cowardly.

"What if I told you that I knew where Aphrodite's girdle is kept?" Hermione asked, trying to be casual but knowing that she failed miserably. Draco's exasperated expression confirmed this.

The last thing Hermione wanted was to force Effie into doing something that went against her morals or even something that she hadn't fully committed herself to. The use of an object as powerful as Aphrodite's girdle could have serious emotional repercussions if the wearer wasn't fully prepared for the consequences.

Hermione had less concerns about the god's willingness in the matter. As Draco had put it, "Maybe a shag would do him some good".

At first, Effie looked horrified, but then her face slowly morphed into a contemplative expression. Few people were more morally flexible than a woman scorned, and Effie had been scorned repeatedly over a very long time.

"How does this benefit you?" Effie finally asked. Hermione didn't blame the woman for being suspicious of their motives; she'd been living with gods an everyday part of her life for longer than was healthy for any mortal.

"We need him distracted." True enough, though Hermione failed to mention a few key details. "He's kidnapped the daughter of a friend of ours. We need you to take him to us and keep him distracted."

Effie nodded her acceptance of this. "I'll help. How is your plan going to work?"

"Granger, this isn't going to work," Draco said, stealing a look at the brothel across the street.

"Don't start being the doubtful one now. What happened to beheading first and asking questions later?"

He looked at the brothel doubtfully. "You want me to behead prostitutes? The Muggles write crime novels about this type of thing."

"This is serious," Hermione admonished with a frown. She knew that Draco would never hurt innocent people – at least no unprovoked.

"Why do I have to go in there? You know how I hate unnecessary contact with people."

"Would you prefer I go in there myself? I'm perfectly willing to do this alone if you're too busy whinging to help me save a little girl and stop the goddess who's out to get us. But if you want to stand out here and watch me do all the work, that's fine."

Hermione liked to think that Draco's mouth shut with an audible snap, but that was probably wishful thinking on her part. He did stop talking though, so she considered it a victory.

"Let's go then," he growled. Hermione distinctly heard him mumble something along the lines of "The baby's not even born yet and she's already started the guilt manipulation," but she pretended she couldn't hear them for time's sake.

They managed to steal the girdle without detection, which had come as something of a surprise.

While Draco made a fuss to distract attention from Hermione, she'd slipped in behind him unnoticed and simply spelled the lock open and removed the girdle from its case. At the very least she'd anticipated disarming an alarm of some sort. When no one even glanced towards her, Hermione turned to look at Draco, wide-eyed with surprised. Having been watching her out of the corner of his eyes even as he yelled about something or other, he only jerked his head towards the door, wordlessly telling her to escape as he picked up a prostitute and threw her onto a pile of pillows.

By the time she'd made it out the door, he'd thrown more than one of the women onto various soft things. He was lucky none of them had tried to do anything more than push him out the door and yell at him. Actually causing him harm could be bad for business and they didn't want to risk it unless they absolutely had to.

Hermione was suspicious of the ease with which they'd been able to run off with the girdle, but she was too concerned about Cassie to let it stop their plans. She told herself that it had been so easy because a brothel wasn't the kind of place that once would expect to be robbed and that their security was lax – she didn't believe it, but this is what she told herself.

Effie had warned them that it might take her a while to track down Apollo, so Hermione and Draco had taken the girdle and retreated back to the Manor. Unfortunately, Hermione and Draco didn't get a few moments alone, as they had hoped. Harry, Ron, and Daisy were gathered there.

"I had really bad luck in second year," Ron was saying as Hermione and Draco found them in one of the Manor's sitting rooms. "Do you think it could be the work of a god?"

Draco rolled his eyes. "That wasn't bad luck, Weasel. That was complete lack of skill coupled with a bloody broken wand."

After Hermione had intervened to stop a duel between Draco and Ron, she settled herself on the sofa and told them about everything that had happened since she'd last spoken to them.

"That's rubbish," Harry said. "Blackleaf can't just ban a relationship that's already happened. It's like he's personally attacking you."

Hermione shrugged. "I'm sure it won't be so bad. And once he sees that we're perfectly capable of keeping ourselves professional, he'll probably lift the ridiculous rule.

Draco's snort and muttered "Optimist" went ignored.

With no word from Effie, Hermione and Draco didn't have a good reason to stay home from work the next day. Draco had numerous suggestions about "better" things they could be doing with their time and had made a few very persuasive arguments. In the end though, Hermione's sense of responsibility won out and she pushed him off of her with firm instructions to get dressed.

They didn't get even a moment alone together once they arrived at the Ministry. Trish and Smith were waiting for them in Hermione's office. Immediately, Draco bristled at the proprietary way Smith propped his feet up on Hermione's desk while sitting in her chair. Forgiving his love for being forced to kiss a god is one thing, but forgiving that god was completely out of the realm of possibility. Still, Draco was aware that engaging the god of war in a duel in the confines of an office with a pregnant woman in attendance was a bad idea, so he – barely – reigned in his temper.

Trish, completely oblivious to the tension in the room, rushed forward and shook Hermione's hand with enough enthusiasm to make Hermione quite uncomfortable.

"Miss Granger, it's such an honour to work with you. I've been following your cases and you've had remarkable success in a number of highly difficult situations." Her eyes slid over to Draco as if she wanted to force the same praise on him, but his forbidding look had her shoulders hunching up as she focused her attention entirely on Hermione. "I was so pleased when Blackleaf informed Smith and I that we were going to be working with the pair of you."

Hermione knew how Draco felt about fawning. In all honesty, it made her as uncomfortable as it did him, she was just nicer about it.

"We were just doing our jobs to the best of our abilities," she said, untangling her hand from the other woman's with difficulty. Stepping around Trish with Draco hovering at her side like an angry shadow, Hermione turned her attention to Ares. "What are you really doing here?"

Ares smiled maliciously and handed her a folder. Apparently he'd had no qualms about going through the ever-present stack of files on her desk. "The case you two were working on up until this point has been reassigned. Blackleaf thought it best that you work within the country for a while." He looked between the two of them. "I'm here to watch you, just like you were told."

Hermione knew how to read between the lines; Blackleaf wasn't the only one who wanted to keep an eye on the two of them.

"What case have we been reassigned to?" Trish asked, having recovered from her momentary disappointment over hearing that the international case the whole office knew Hermione and Draco had been working on was reassigned.

From the smug look on Ares' face alone, Hermione knew that she wasn't going to like his answer. His words only confirmed this. "It seems there's an infestation of giant slugs near Stafford that are disrupting the ecosystem there. We're going to de-slug today."

Handling giant slugs was so far below Hermione and Draco's abilities that Hermione hadn't had to do it since her fist day on the job. Their superiors had understood that their abilities could be better utilized elsewhere.

Such jobs were often foisted off as field trips for Care of Magical Creatures students because it almost wasn't worth the Ministry's time. Hermione wasn't bigheaded, but she knew very well that her time was being wasted on something any untrained child could do.

Draco would normally flat-out refuse to do such menial labour, but Hermione was adamant on playing Blackleaf's game. Something about knowing she was exhausting herself shovelling the two stone slugs off of trees and rocks while already fatigued from carrying his child had him shovelling alongside her. His new bout of helpfulness didn't mean he refrained from his usual string of complaints.

"This is the worst job we've done to date," he grumbled to his partner beside him. "And that includes the time I had an allergic reaction to the bloody prank tree."

Hermione agreed but knew that is she verbally expressed such agreement, Draco would try and mutiny against the smug Ares. Unsurprisingly, the god had named himself supervisor as soon as they arrived on scene and doled out tasks. Hermione and Draco were on shovel duty, while Trish followed behind them levitating a bottomless bucket to collect all the slugs.

"You know what gets rid of slugs?" Draco continued, "Fire. I'm pretty sure we could stop all of this shovelling with a few well-placed fire spells. These trees are relatively dry, they would go up in flames like the kindling they are." He stopped his shovelling to finger his wand, his eyes distant and as dreamy as Hermione had ever seen him with the prospect of violent destruction. Sometimes she wondered if she should worry more about him.

"We're here to save a delicate ecosystem, not burn it all because we don't want to shovel some slugs."

"Fine. We'll levitate them all into the nearest volcano."

"You know something in their slime makes them resistant to magic."

From his perch on a boulder, Ares called, "Less talking, more working."

Hermione quickly threw the slug on her shovel into the bucket so that her hands were free to hold her partner back from trying to murder the god. Something about Ares had a way of making Draco's temper even more unstable than usual. Maybe the god's bloodlust and violence were contagious.

"Don't let him get to you," Hermione whispered urgently. "I'm not sure what he wants, but I think getting us both fired would be a happy bonus for him. Don't give him the satisfaction."

"If this vile slime so much as touches my shoes, he won't have to fire us, I'm going to quit."

Draco shook her hands off of him and then glared menacingly at the globs of slime travelling in rivulets down the trunk of the nearest tree. He had to stretch to the limits of his reach with his shovel to halt the slug's retreat into the canopy, muttering angrily the whole time. At least his complaining was quieter.

Three hours later, Hermione was breathing heavily from all of the lifting she'd done and Draco's mood had gone downhill from its already low point. Usually a team would be involved with this sort of job. With just two people, something that shouldn't have taken very long at all became an entire day's work of work, possibly more.

Draco threw down his shovel. "The Ministry is required by law to allow its employees a lunch break. I'm taking mine now." He grabbed Hermione's arm and dragged her with him to a large boulder as far from Ares as possible within the clearing.

As a habit, Hermione usually brought some non-perishable food with her in her beaded bag whenever they were working away from the office. She'd been a little short on spare time to restock as of late, but there was still more than enough food stored in her bag for their lunch. Hermione fished out a large bag of mixed nuts, two bottles of water, some dried fruit, and a few chocolate bars. She divided them between her and her partner. There was no way she was going to split the food with Ares, and Trish seemed to have brought her own lunch.

Draco frowned at the less than gourmet meal. He preferred his meals to be prepared by his culinary gifted House Elves rather than scavenged from Granger's beaded bag of no return. She'd once handed him some Muggle food with an expiration date on it from three years prior. It had probably been put in there during the war. Surreptitiously, he checked over the food she'd handed him for signs of decomposition of any sort before eating it.

"We can still do the same type of work, Granger," he murmured between bites. "We'd just do away with the bureaucratic nonsense and bosses that think they know what's best. I'd still behead things and you'd continue to rescue the poor, helpless creatures."

"We can't. I'd be living entirely off of your money. I won't be dependent on you for my living; it's not in my nature. Besides, without Ministry backing, we'd be no better than vigilantes."

Draco rolled his eyes. "We're already vigilantes. The Ministry knows only about a quarter of what we really do."

"This will pass. Give it time." She went to pat his hand in comfort, but then glanced up and caught Ares' vigilant eyes following their every movement. Remembering to avoid doing anything that may be misconstrued as an act of affection was going to be harder than she thought. She didn't notice how many times she casually touched Draco until she had to put a stop to it.

"It's not going to work."

Hermione and Draco both looked around, trying to find the source of the eerily familiar voice. When the source didn't present itself, they shared a look of dread. His interference was the very last thing they needed when they were already up to their ears in divine interference.

"What's not going to work?" Hermione eventually asked, dreading the answer. The back of her neck had started prickling the moment he spoke and she suspected that the feeling wasn't going to go away anytime in the near future.

Movement out of the corner of her eye had her and Draco turning to look at her beaded bag as a familiar lizard crawled out of its depths. He didn't have lips, but his beady little eyes still managed to project a smarmy smile and an overall smugness.

"Your whole plan," Earl said, still doing his creepy smile thing. "It's not going to work."

Hermione had to push Draco's wand arm down as he raised it, ready to hex Eros. Seeing this, Earl rushed to climb up Hermione's arm and rest on her shoulder where Draco wouldn't hex him for fear of hitting her.

"What's the matter, mortal? Not happy to see me?"

"I thought you were spending time catching up with your wife."

"Well, now I'm back. And just in the nick of time too. Your plans are terribly flawed."