Harry stood alone at the reception desk of the latest hotel and waited for they key. Ron and Hermione were scouting the village, pretending to be tourists looking for sights to see and interesting places to visit. Hermione had donned a male disguise that was still holding - three males backpacking through the countryside attracting less comment from the often old fashioned locals than two teenage boys and a lone girl would.
This was the fifth town they had been in, and so far they hadn't found any signs of vampires, aside from laughable Muggle stories. Harry had wanted to stay in their tent, but Hermione pointed out that staying in hotels occasionally, instead of always caravan parks and camping sites, gave them a better cross section of people to talk to.
On leaving England, Ron and Hermione had first gone to visit the Dragon reserves where Charlie worked, spending a few days there while Harry used Muggle methods to get to Albania. Once the couple joined him, the trio had been careful to look and act like clueless backpacking Muggles following a guidebook of mysterious and scary places that Hermione had borrowed from some arcane library.
Ron had laughed himself silly at the photos they had used in the fake Muggle passports, not only because Hermione insisted that the photos had to make them look slightly stupid (as all passport photos invariably did), but also because Muggles needed to have permission to travel from one country to another.
"But you can just walk across the border at any point, can't you?" he asked, trying to fathom the whole system. "They don't have a dirty great wall that you can't climb over surrounding the whole country, do they?"
Harry didn't have an answer to that, and Hermione's answers weren't particularly enlightening. Eventually they made their way passed the heavily populated areas and into the extensive forests where towns were few and far between.
Finding magical communities in Albania had proven difficult. Hermione had several conflicting sources about the native Gypsies, or Roma as most books called them, but none of them helped much in actually finding the real deal.
The Roma live all over the country, but the biggest concentrations were in and around Tirana, the capital, and a few other towns like Fier, Gjirokaster, Berat and Korce. When the trio finally got in contact and started asking questions about vampires and Dark wizards, they quickly found themselves shunned.
"Here you go sir," said the girl behind the counter, startling Harry out of his thoughts. "One room for three people with private bathroom, as you requested."
"Thanks," said Harry taking the key. "I don't suppose you have heard of any places around here that have a history of, erm, well vampires or evil wizards? My friends and I are on a sort of history trek and we are interested in places local people think are cursed or evil or anything like that."
She looked at him as if he had grown another head.
"You don't want to go looking for places like that around here," she warned.
Harry perked up. Usually he was pointed towards tourist traps or just laughed at.
"Why not?" he asked.
"You really don't want to find out," she said and walked away, ignoring the questions Harry called after her.
As they ate at a local bar later that night, Ron and Hermione, reported they too had found people unwilling to talk to them, seemingly taking them more seriously than any other town.
Hermione traced their progress on the map. Worple had told them the heavily infested Vampire areas were unplottable and extremely hard to find. So far he had been right.
"We should just start flying in a straight line," suggested Ron. "Unplottable or secret or whatever, so long as they don't have a Fidelus on the whole forest, we have to come across something that way."
"It will take a long time doing it that way, Ron," said Hermione.
That set the two of them off arguing the merits of searching blindly or following dead end leads.
Harry tuned them out, and concentrated on what he knew. The clan Worple told them about that marked their members with a tattoo, supposedly lived in a hidden valley and had done so for centuries. That meant that there had to be a village, or more likely several villages, there, to supply the vampires with food.
So they were looking for a sizable valley that sustained enough enslaved people to keep a large clan of vampires well fed.
Voldemort may not have made his home nearby, but it was likely that he had learned how to make the Dark mark from this clan, and that meant his trail might still be there.
Looking at the map, Harry started searching for valleys the seemed to fit the bill.
"If it doesn't appear on a map, what is the point of going to places on the map?" asked Ron loudly.
Harry thought it was a good question. Apparently, so did Hermione, because she didn't answer but was staring off into space.
Ron gave Harry a questioning look. Harry shrugged in reply, then waved his hand in front of Hermione's eyes.
She blinked rapidly and snapped back to the present.
"Sorry, I have an idea," she said digging into her backpack and pulling out an ancient looking map that lacked any reasonable amount of detail aside from major landmarks like rivers and mountains. Harry recognised it as one she had purchased from a second hand store just the other day.
Without a word, she laid the old map over the newer one and, making sure nobody was watching, silently cast a spell. The two maps seemed to twist and bend before merging into one, though both were visible simultaneously. There were whole sections missing from the newer one.
"I think we know where to start looking," she said, with a smile.
-
They made camp the near a small stream deep in the forest. Harry carefully made his way through the dense scrub to the quietly bubbling stream and sat on the rocky bank. He could still hear Ron singing loudly and badly out of tune while trying to toast marshmallows impaled on bent sticks over the small fire they had built, while Hermione, now undisguised and happy about it, laughed and corrected the words of his flawed renditions.
Ron insisted that it was a tradition, but having never been camping before, Harry could legitimately state it wasn't his tradition. Hermione had stayed, and was now paying for her decision, although Harry suspected she was having far too much fun to seriously complain about Ron's merciless mauling of various tunes.
The babbling of the brook as it tumbled over the rocks and raced away nearly, but not quite, drowned out Ron's wailing and Hermione's laughter. He was obviously hamming it up for her, something Harry had come to expect recently.
Although it was nice to be in such a picturesque place with good friends, Harry couldn't help feeling a bit melancholy. He missed Ginny, still, again, always.
The stars were appearing alarmingly fast as the sun set behind the trees and mountains, and Harry leaned back into the long grass covering the top part of the bank and let his thoughts drift.
They were in vampire country now. He imagined he could feel the nervousness in the villages, and see hostile glares from the locals.
He couldn't understand how people could live in a place like this. Hermione told him they were virtually enslaved and trying to leave would result in a painful and public death, but Harry thought he would never have been able to survive long under such an oppressive regime.
Wizards were completely suppressed, most never even finding out that could do magic, and the others usually becoming food. They lived alongside the Muggles at the whim of the vampire clan ruling the area, who often seem to consider them as little more than trained, obedient, livestock.
Some clans were better than others, allowing the populations of their kingdoms a bit of freedom and respect. Others, like the ones ruling this particular stretch of country, never interacted directly with the villages unless it was to feed, or sometimes kill, if they felt like it.
Having met with a decidedly less than rousing welcome in the last village, the trio chose to camp hidden among the trees a fair distance from either village or the vampire castle overlooking the valley, and wait until it was safer to proceed.
Spying on a vampire den in the middle of the night, while possibly very exciting, was not a suggestion anybody had taken seriously, although they needed to find out as much as they could.
The hostility the locals had to outsiders was a defensive mechanism, either because they wanted to scare them off before they became food for the vampires, or because they were worried the newcomers might upset their vampire overlords who would then take revenge on the innocent farmers for any problems.
Unbelievably, they discovered some of the locals had taken the same mark the vampire lord put on the members of his clan. The tattoo advertised them as willing servants and they were given protection and privileges almost equal to that of a vampire. It was also said to provide a link to their vampire masters that could be used to summon, reward or even punish them.
They were the daytime servants of the night creatures. When victims were needed to replace ones that could no longer be fed on, the Hunters, as they were called, were sent to get replacements.
The tattoo was so similar to the Dark Mark, that Harry felt sure Voldemort had learned how to do it here, and if Voldemort had been here, they might be able to find clues to where he had made his home and probably hidden a Horcrux.
A scream from the camp cut through Harry's thoughts like an axe through butter. He drew his wand even as he leapt to his feet and started running, thankful his magical boots were making no noise as they pounded the leaf strewn ground.
There was a short, rough looking man wearing a trench coat and holding a club standing over Ron's unconscious form. A second man had Hermione on the ground and was wrestling with her while the first one looked on and laughed.
Harry silently fired a stunner at the man standing over Ron. He slumped to the ground without having seen his attacker. The second man rolled off Hermione and jumped to his feet grabbing a large cross bow off the ground.
"Where are you?" the man called out into the night, as if expecting Harry to respond.
Harry was about to fire a stunner at him, when he watched the man's arms clamp to his sides and his legs snap together. He toppled slowly to the ground, like a tree that had just been cut off at the base. The thud he made as his face met the ground made Harry wince involuntarily.
Hermione was sitting up holding her tattered top together with one hand while pointing her wand at the fallen figure with the other.
-
Minutes later Harry looked down at the unconscious body of the Muggle. The tattoo on his cheek looked like a pretzel rather than the winged snake it was meant to be.
"I have an idea," he said looking at Ron.
"Great," said Ron, rubbing the lump on his head and not sounding at all happy.
-
The two Hunters drove their cart towards the foreboding house perched on the side of the hill. In the cage in the back, the two young prisoners lay, apparently unconscious. The Hunters didn't talk. Their fearful eyes constantly scanning the trees as the rickety cart rattled up the hill.
When they came to the gates of an imposing wall surrounding the house, another man, marked with the same tattoo on his cheek as the hunters, stepped out of a hidden doorway and pointed an improbably large crossbow at them.
"Everything go all right?" the sentry asked.
"No, one got away," complained the driver of the cart.
"Which one?"
"The girl."
"Bugger. You are going to be in big trouble for that one. What happened?"
The first man shrugged.
"She was too smart."
"Yeah," added the second man intelligently.
The man at the gate frowned.
"Where do you want these two put?" the driver asked, forestalling any further questions the sentry may have been about to ask.
"Like normal. Take them straight in and lock them up."
The second man on the cart gulped and nodded nervously. They started the cart rolling again and headed inside.
As soon as they had gone a short distance, a voice whispered, seemingly out of the empty air behind the two men, "This is insane. I can't believe we are doing this. We are going to get caught."
"Shush, Hermione," whispered the driver. "I thought you said vampires had exception hearing? Keep it down."
"What difference is it going to make? We are going to be caught anyway. Besides, he wasn't a vampire."
"How could you tell?" asked Ron, who had insisted on carrying the enormous cross bow while Harry drove.
"Ron, when you see a vampire, you will know it."
"We are not going to get caught. We are going to have a quick look around and then get out, all right?"
"This is insane," the voice repeated, but stayed silent as the cart approached a set of large doors leading into the house.
Harry had just climbed down off the cart, when suddenly a thin, pale faced man wearing expensive looking clothes was standing next to him. There had been no crack of apparition; the man was just there, almost as if he had stepped out of a shadow.
There was a feeling of magical force around the man; a chilling, silent thing; a deadness that made Harry involuntarily think of long unopened tombs.
"You are back, Madensky. Where is the girl?"
His voice was a rasping whisper that, to Harry's imagination, sounded like it came directly from the grave; out of the mouth of a corpse.
Harry fought down panic. He saw Ron grip the crossbow hard and gulp, and felt the sweat that suddenly appeared on his own forehead sting in the cool night air.
"She got away," he said, through a suddenly dry throat.
He had hoped to have avoided meeting any vampires, but the plan was already going sideways. The vampire stood unmoving, as if judging Harry's words. Its absolute stillness unnerved Harry as he realised it was not breathing.
"Bring them into the main hall, and be thankful you are not taking the place of the missing one," it said, stepping aside in a graceful glide.
Ron looked at Harry and made a small motion with the crossbow towards the vampire. Harry shook his head. They might still be able to follow the plan and get away unnoticed, but if they attacked now it would probably be all over.
The larger man climbed down off the cart and moved to help Harry as he opened the cage and picked up one of the polyjuiced bodies. After a brief struggle with the awkward load Harry managed to drape it over his shoulder. Ron also struggled to do the same with his doppelganger without putting the crossbow down, and ended up solidly banging the Hunters head against the side of the cage.
The Hunters they had swapped places with were large and more muscular than Harry or Ron, but had a multitude of injuries scaring their bodies and negating a lot of the extra strength they should have had. One of Ron's hands was unable to make a fist and Harry walked with a limp, making their burdens difficult to manage.
Harry's feelings of dread and misgiving increased with every step as they followed the silently gliding form of the vampire into the house. He hoped Hermione was staying close.
Inside the doors, there was a magnificent entrance. A massive white marble double staircase, with gold trimmed hand rails, wound its way up to at least three floors that Harry could see before the light failed. Majestic statues and ornaments lined the walls and the polished dark stone floor reflected the light from huge chandeliers as if it was perfectly still water.
The vampire led them to one side and opened another pair of double doors. They followed silently into what may have once been an opulent ballroom. Golden chandeliers still lit the room, and mirrors lined the walls, but an enormous chair had been set onto a raised dais at the far end, like a throne, and on it sat a creature that the mere sight of sent uncontrollable shivers of fear down Harry's spine.
A vampire, a very old vampire, sat talking to another vampire standing next to it. Harry could feel the power of the ancient, richly dressed, blonde haired figure. It radiated a cold heat that touched his skin with a burning ice-like sensation.
Around the feet of the throne, richly dressed vampires lounged on cushions, talking and laughing amongst themselves. There were at least two dozen of them spread through the room.
Harry saw the tattoo on all of them. Some had it on their faces, others on the foreheads or naked arms. They were all wearing the same mark, except for the one on the throne.
The figure turned its eyes to peer at the newcomers, and Harry felt like something had pierced his mind. This had to be the leader, Rhokoth.
"Well, it looks like we have guests," said the vampire. The talking and laughing that had been a quiet murmur stopped completely as every vampire in the room turned to look at Harry and Ron. Harry heard Ron gulp beside him, and felt a lump in his own throat.
"I am Lord Rhokoth," said the Vampire. "And who might you be?"
Harry swallowed and fought to keep his voice steady. "I was asked to bring these prisoners to you, my lord," he said weakly.
"Really? I think not."
Harry opened his mouth to object, but was suddenly unable to move. A force that felt like steel bands enclosed him from the neck down. There were several quite laughs from the onlookers and a few excited whispers. The real Hunter he was carrying lifted from his arms and floated away out of sight.
"I asked," said Rhokoth, standing up and taking a few steps towards Harry. "Who are you?"
His gaze again fixed on Harry's eyes and Harry felt an incessant force beating into his thoughts.
Just answer, tell him who you are, a voice seemed to say inside of his head. A distant corner of Harry's mind rebelled. Memories of Voldemort and Barty Crouch casting the Imperius curse on him came back in flashes
"No!" he said, and just as quickly as it had come, the feeling was gone.
He was still immobile, but his mind was free. The whispers that had started again cut out and absolute silence fell. Harry could hear his breath panting in the quiet, and thought he could hear Ron struggling to free himself.
"Impressive," said Rhokoth. "Let us see what you really look like."
A gnarled hand, with skin that looked like dry parchment, waved casually, and Harry felt his face and body melting. If he hadn't been held up by magic, he would have been writhing on the floor in pain as his body was forcibly changed back to its normal form. The larger man's clothes he was wearing hung loosely on Harry's smaller frame.
Whispers again spread through the onlookers and Harry wondered if they recognised him, or they were just surprised at the transformation.
"And don't let us forget your friend hiding in the corner," Rhokoth said, again waving his ancient, withered hand.
Harry heard a startled shriek and saw Hermione out of the corner of his eye as she flew through the air and landed in a heap at Rhokoth's feet, the invisibility cloak having been left behind.
"Yes," the vampire continued. "I believe I heard of you and your friends a little while ago."
He walked back to his throne and sat down again. Harry struggled against the magic holding him. It had spread to cover his head so he was unable to speak.
Hermione wasn't moving, but she didn't seem to be unconscious. Ron was still standing next to him, struggling to free himself as well. It looked bad, very bad.
"So the question arises, why have such deliciously young wizards entered my domain?"
Rhokoth lazily reached out a crooked arm to take a golden cup from a side table, and brought it to his lips for a long, slow drink.
Harry's heart nearly stopped at the sight as he recognised the small goblet; it was Helga Hufflepuff's cup. The vampire was drinking out of the cup that held a part of Voldemort's soul!
Despite his hopeless predicament, Harry felt his excitement rise. They had hoped to find just a clue to the location of a Horcrux, and here was the actual item not ten feet away.
His eye's must have betrayed him, because Rhokoth stopped drinking and looked at the cup.
"This?" he said, holding up the cup. "You have given your life to obtain a trinket?" He laughed and a few of the court joined in with him.
"How wonderfully naïve of you. Did you dream that you are such powerful wizards that you could march with impudence into my home, slay me and take my belongings?"
He laughed again. It was not a pleasant sound.
"Of course, you probably know of the legend of the Hallows and their significance, but did you know that it was a wizard gave me this?" he said, holding up the cup and earning interested sounds from the other vampires.
Harry wanted to scream in frustration. There were vials of holy water in the pockets of their clothes, but they might as well have been still in England for all the good it had done them.
"Yes, a wizard. Now he was powerful. He came to ask for an alliance, and offered me unlimited meat to feed my people! He came seeking knowledge, a way to be as immortal as I, but he did not want to become one of my flock!"
There were several disbelieving murmurs from the crowd. Harry couldn't help thinking that most of the other vampires in the room were barely more than trained animals, performing for the pleasure of their master.
"It's true! Of course, I chose not to reveal many of our secrets, but I did trade with him, even though he intended to betray us all. He did after all have the same weaknesses of all mortals."
Another laugh from the court reinforced Harry's opinion about their general role in life, or death for that matter.
"I could tell he did not like us, but he was powerful, so I let him leave, but once he was gone, I searched the dark place he had taken for his own, and found this prize. He thought himself to be cleverer than all others, especially us, 'animals'; he was so sure his mind was secure. I found it entertaining to obtain that which he had taken such trouble to hide."
Appreciative murmurs filled the room as Harry searched for meaning behind the vampire's words. Voldemort had hidden the Horcrux in a land filled with vampires.
He must have learned a lot of dark magic here and felt a deep connection with the place, just like they had theorised, but instead of being safely hidden away in whatever lair Voldemort had made, the cup had been retrieved and had become a trophy!
"Later I heard he fell to the power of a mortal child! How fitting that a wizard so powerful and confident in his own godhood was bested by a baby!"
More laughing and giggling followed the story's conclusion.
"But, back to our guests," said Rhokoth, returning his attention to Harry. "It has been a long time since I have tasted one as young as you. We do not feed on the village's children; it encourages them to behave - a reward for them, if you will."
Without seeming to move, the vampire was suddenly standing next to him, a dry skeletal hand resting on Harry's head, pushing it over to expose his naked throat.
"But tonight I think I will have my fill," said Rhokoth, lowering his mouth to Harry's unprotected neck.
As Harry felt the fangs sink in, he screamed silently inside of his mind.