Author's note: Hello dear readers,
This chapter is a little shorter than usual, but not by much, I put a lot of effort into it, and it was actually hard to write, because I had to think up why the dragon actually stayed with Hermione, I hadn't actually thought about that before (Ooops, shame on me!) But I think you will like what I came up with, and if you didn't please leave a comment!
I hope you like it! And thanks again for all the support! I really like it that so many people read it!
Your writer ;-)

While I was sitting next to Ariel, absentmindedly stroking her neck, I was deeply lost in thought. Why was she still here. Ariel I mean. If I was free to go as I pleased, I would go see my family, visit the world, look for new things to learn. But my situation had changed, I couldn't leave, I did not have any options. I needed to stay hidden. But she, Ariel, she had the world at her feet. She could literally fly away and find a new world, build a new life, never come back. But she didn't, why?

I needed to know. I needed to be sure. It was one of the most interesting things that had happened to me in a long time, so I was keen on figuring it out. I read all about familiars, magical creatures, everything I could find. But I found nothing. It was a frustrating time for me, but I was not giving up that easily. So I was trying to replay the events of the night I first encountered Ariel.

I was fighting her, I was in werewolf-form and we were both very wounded, bleeding all over the place. Suddenly something clicked. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the blood. Maybe we were linked. It was possible. I needed to find a book on blood-binding, and fast. Being bonded with a dragon was something special, but there was no way in telling how dangerous this might be for either of us. So I needed to find out as much as I could.

I was still absentmindedly petting Ariel, murmuring soft words to her, essentially to keep her calm, but they were more for me that for her. She was stretching her wings, letting me know she wanted to fly, as if she was asking me for permission. It felt weird. I can only imagine Ariel being so wild and free once. Now she just seemed a pet dog. Oh well, I wasn't going to over think it just yet, it might be something else completely that I had overlooked.

On a broom (Charlie's pov)

Of course I was going with the ones on brooms. I had played a lot of Quidditch and if I had not chosen to have a career with dragons, I would have been a professional Quidditch player for England.

We were divided into teams of two. I was flying with Max, my best mate. We knew each other best and filled each others blanks. I knew he was going to have my back if something might happen. Not that something was likely to happen, but still. We were flying quietly alongside each other. Max knew me well enough not to say anything, to leave me with my thoughts. I needed to think. I had lost things important to me in two days. How did this happen? What did I do wrong?

I didn't even know Hermione was coming here. If my stubborn family had let me know, I could have treated her better and I wouldn't have attacked her. Now she probably thinks I'm some savage. I wonder why they didn't tell me. Maybe I should contact them tonight, ask them what is going on. Yeah, that's might be a good idea.

"Uhm, Char.. I think we will not find them tonight. It's already dark. We should get back. I sent a patronus to the other teams to call them back to The Den. We are meeting them there." Max said, finally braking the silence.

"Right. We will start again tomorrow morning, bright and early."

Once we were back at The Den, we walked into the command center. The others quieted immediately and I started speaking.

"So had anyone found any trace of our beloved chinese fireball Bast or the missing girl?"

"Well Char, we have found some evidence of a struggle, but it is impossible to be from a dragon, because there would have been a body with it and there was no evidence of a cadaver. We looked everywhere. There was just a lot of blood and what looked like a fighting ground." Stella said, the androgynous girl that had been there when we first tried to capture Hermione. "No sign of Hermione or the dragon though." She adds as an afterthought.

"Oh well, we could only try. Tomorrow we start bright and early. We will meet here at 8:30. Be well-rested and well-fed, because it will be a long day!" After I finished my speech, I rushed back to my hut. I needed to floo my parents immediately, I needed to know what was going on. Maybe Hermione had gone home already, maybe there was nothing to worry about anymore. I needed to talk to them.

Once I got to my hut, I closed the door, charmed the lock closed, silenced the room and warded the room. Nobody could come in or out and nobody would hear anything. I got over to the fireplace and lit the fire. I took some floo-powder, put my head in the fire and spoke loud and clear : The Burrow.

It took a some time to get over the dizziness caused by traveling by floo. But once I could focus my eyes again, I could see clearly that my family on the other side was very worried, and they had expected somebody else to floo them. Hope had flared across their faces for a split second until they saw it was me. It felt like they weren't even happy to see me. With that thought in my head I just went on a little rant.

"I will just come right out and say it. What the hell is going on, why do I have a feeling that I saw Hermione in Romania several days ago? Why did she hex me? Why did she not let me help her? And most of all, why did I not know she was coming?"

In The Burrow, the room was covered in silence, and when I looked around all I saw was pain, maybe even a little regret or remorse and some other emotion I couldn't quite put my finger on. What was happening? Why was nobody saying anything?

"Okay, guys, what is happening, why is nobody saying anything?"

At this, Bill finally looked up. "Charlie," his voice sounded hoarse and thick, but I shrugged it off, probably a side-effect of the full moon I thought, "Hermione, she...well...She ran away. We don't know where she is. Or what state she's in..."

At this my head started spinning again, crazy thought filled them. Maybe she was attacked, maybe she was raped, maybe this, maybe that, all maybes. It was unbearable.

"What do you mean what state she's in?" I almost yelled. How could they still be this cryptic about everything. Couldn't they see that I cared, this was also my 'surrogate' sister they were talking about, she was family. Or maybe, well, no need to think about that, I just needed to find her first.

"Charles Weasely, don't strike that tone with your family. We know you care as much as we do. Come home, please, so we can explain." My mum was looking at me pleading as she said this, but her tone was still definitive. I didn't really have much choice in the matter anymore.

"I'll see what I can do." And at that I retracted my head out of the fireplace. My head started spinning again. I hated floo-calls. But at this moment it was a welcomed change. I stood up and walked straight to the command post, looked for my boss and said that I needed to visit my family straight away, that it was an emergency pertaining to the missing girl. He made a few stupid arguments, but in the end he let me go and I rushed home back to the fireplace to take the floo to The Burrow.

In the dragon's lair(Hermione's pov)

I would never know if Ariel could actually understand me, but talking to her seemed to work pretty good. I was telling her now that it would be best if we would go for a fly together and find a new place to hide out, maybe a cave of some sort or a mine. Something large and hidden, something secluded.

So I broke up my tent, put out the fire and put all the food that I had found in my handbag. after the camp was gone, I wiped the area of any trace of human existence, so if anyone came across it, nobody would know I had been there.

When I was done, Ariel lowered her head and let me get on her back. I put myself between the spikes on her back and grabbed on, just like old times. Thinking about the heroic scape Harry, Ron and I made out of Gringott's after we got into the Lestranges vault, brought back a surge of emotions. Fear. Pain. Excitement. Guilt. next thing I know I was being tortured by Bellatrix. Another flashback hit me, and before I know it I'm crying, sobbing.

Ariel seemed to have felt my destress, because she let loose a fierce blaze of fire. It startled me, but the sobbing stops. If she can feel my emotions, that I need to keep in control. I try to calm down, try to calm her down. I pet her neck, whisper sweet nothings to calm her and hope to god that nobody saw that giant ball of fire light up the sky.

Not much later we are well on our way, flying over the water of a lake. I tell her we should stop here for a little while so I can bathe and she can drink. We still need to find ourselves a cave to set up camp in. And we need to find it fast. The sun will be rising soon and than, all hell will brake loose if we are not under cover.

At The Burrow(Charlie's pov)

I hadn't even stepped out of the fire before I was already being crushed in a bone-breaking hug by my mother.

"Oh Charlie, it's so good to have you home again. You look skinny, what do they feed you at that camp of yours? Come, sit, let me make you some dinner!" She said.

"Molly, dear, let our son breathe for a while, he's not even back for five seconds and you are already trying to stuff him. But I think we all could use a little food in our stomaches." Dad said as he clapped me on the back. "It's good to have you here." He tried to smile, but it never quite reached his eyes. That usually meant something was horribly wrong.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but would someone like to explain to me what's going on? Because, we were actually having quite the situation at the reserve. A dragon escaped and we can not find it, and if Hermione is indeed out there...Please, I need to know what's going on." I looked around the room almost pleading. Trying to look everybody in the eye, but everybody just seemed to look elsewhere. Maybe the ceiling and the floor had suddenly gotten interesting. Or so it seemed.

"All in it's time son, all in it's time." my dad said.

Merlin. Sometimes I could kill him. Why did everything have to be so complicated. Why not just tell me now so I at least knew what was going on.

"No, if you are not going to tell me, than that is your choice. But I'm not going to sit here and eat, play pretend for a little while and wait for something I came for in the first place. If you will not tell me, than I might as well go back to the reserve and make myself useful by looking for my dragon." I was getting so worked up about this. What was it with these people, were they trying to get on my nerve? I waited a full three seconds and when nobody answered I stormed out of the kitchen, straight into the living room.

I took some floo-powder, stepped in the fire, dropped the floo-powder, shouted "The Den" and crash-landed in my small home in Romania. What a way to have a family trip. When my head cleared, I took out my wand and closed the fireplace, so they could not reach me. I was not able to hear or speak to them, not today at least. I was so angry. What was their problem.

At the lake(Hermione's pov)

When I felt freshened up, and Ariel seemed to have had her fill, I called her back and mounted her again. She flew up, her feet still touching the water, before going high up in the air. I saw the first rays of sunlight starting to come up at the horizon, so we needed to be fast. Luckily for us, I spotted a cave near the lake, perfect for hiding out. It was big enough to house a dragon and it was well covered from the outside world. Also, it was situated in a steep cliff, so nobody could really go near it unless they could fly.

Once we were in, I put up all the usual charms and wards. I still used the muggle-repellent charm, just in case, you could never know. Better safe than sorry, right? After that, I looked around in the cave and tried to make it more cosy. This would probably become our home, for a long while, unless of course, someone found us. That would be disastrous.

Ariel lay herself down in the back of the cave, crawled up into a ball and fell asleep. Softly blowing hot breezes of air into the cave, heating it up to room temperature. All the while I was still trying to make the cave more homy. I pulled out my tent, but instead of putting up the tent, transfigured it, so that the outside of the tent covered a part of the stone wall and the inside of it, just stood there like a regular room. It was my own sort of home. The only thing I still had to figure out saw how I was going to make a shower. I couldn't just transfigure one, because there wasn't any plumbing here, but I needed to come up with something. In the meantime I took some rock, one I transfigured into a four poster bed, another one into a comfortable sofa and the last one into bookcase. If me and Ariel were going to live here for a long time, we might as well make ourselves comfortable.

Sometimes I was still baffled by the magic of magic. Even the thought of magic made me snigger sometimes. It all seemed so surreal, and then I looked around and I had a pet dragon heating up my transfigured cave-home. There's totally no irony in that.

I defiantly needed to find some books on blood-bonding. And maybe some on dragons and dragon folklore, just to be safe. Oh god, I needed to go back into town, preferably magic and preferably Diagon Alley. That would have to wait until tomorrow. For today, I just needed to sleep.

At The Den(Charlie's pov)

I had all this anger in me now, it had to go. I needed to vent. So I took my broom and took it for a ride. The cold crisp of the night, the wind blowing in my hear, the stars twinkling above my head, it seemed to take the anger out of me, it seemed to cool me down. After hours of flying, when the first rays of sunshine hit the my face I decided it was time to go back. I still had a lot of things to do today. Like finding Bast for example.

My precious Bast, where can you be. I hope you are not injured too badly, or worse that poachers didn't catch you. I need to find you soon. I need you home, safe and sound. Pleas be safe until I find you sweetheart.

Once back at my home, I found an owl waiting for me. With a big red envelope attached to it's leg. Oh god, my mum send me a howler. How old does she think I am, eleven? I quickly took the letter, let the owl out and silenced the room, before the letter could burst. This was not going to be fun. But what could she possibly have to say that could make this situation any more shitty than it already was? Nothing really. I think.