The Proper Care and Feeding of Zombies
Chapter 2: Mystery Girl
The next morning, Hermione rose with the sun. Given that it was the dead of winter and the sun seemed to have a natural aversion to cold weather—thus it waited until the last possible moment to drag itself above the horizon—this was hardly an extraordinary feat; it meant struggling out of bed later than she had intended, scowling and with the beginnings of a headache. After taking a moment to let her body recover from the act of standing, she pulled a dressing gown over her pyjamas and stumbled down the stairs.
Her much slower than usual pace allowed her to see how well the boys had managed cleaning without her; it seemed that when they weren't busy trying to foist all the work onto her, they were capable of performing minor miracles. They had even dusted the tops of picture frames and washed the curtain covering the portrait of Mrs Black, neither of which, she was certain, had been done since Kreacher's death nearly two years ago.
Either she should spend more time out of the house, or Harry needed to be threatened more frequently by the looming figure of a dying relationship stumbling towards him on its final pair of bruised and wobbly legs.
The drawing room, too, was an exercise in shock tactics: the dust had been beaten out of the ancient sofa until it was no longer a faded grey but light green (hardly tasteful, but probably no longer allergy inducing), and the rugs had been rolled back to reveal floorboards that looked surprisingly shiny and newly polished, given that there hadn't been any renovations to 12 Grimmauld Place for at least a century.
Harry and Ron were in the kitchen, sitting across from each other in silence as they scanned different sections of the newspaper. She gave each of them a hug on her way to the refrigerator.
"The house looks fabulous," she said. "Thanks so much."
Without glancing up, Ron replied, "Just don't expect it to become a regular occurrence or anything."
"After living with you for this long, I should think that I would know better."
She poured herself a glass of orange juice and some muesli, and claimed the third chair, selecting her own chunk of the newspaper from the pile on the table and skimming through it. The day before Christmas Eve was a slow one for the Daily Prophet, it seemed—most of the articles were advice on how to have last minute gifts delivered by tomorrow evening or advertising events to which one could bring the whole family. As Hermione had finished her Christmas shopping in May, and had no prospective family anywhere in her horizon, only the brief stub on the front page, saying that the Stonehenge killing was believed to be connected to the serial murders taking place at various monuments throughout the country, applied to her at all.
The personals, at least, were amusing: single witch looking for intelligent warlock for afternoon tea (and maybe more?), dom wizard seeks sub witch for fun sexy time, elderly witch longs for companion (must love cats, ability to play bridge necessary). They lasted until her cereal was finished, at which point she tidied away her dishes and climbed the stairs to her study.
Much to her relief, it was now the only room in the house that hadn't been recently cleaned: merely the thought of Harry or Ron attempting to organise the stacks of parchment made tears of frustration prod at the back of her eyelids. But there had nothing to worry about—books still lined the walls and stood in stacks on the floor, and there was still the tickling in her nose to inform anyone who entered it that this was a room of books and no amount of dusting could freshen the air.
However, instead of using one of the books to begin her research, she scooped up the laptop that her parents had given when she had graduated from Hogwarts and curled up with it in the armchair. It was big and bulky and hardly cutting edge technology, but it had served her well for the last seven years and she couldn't quite bring herself to part with it.
Besides, she had invested countless hours into making improvements, the least of which included being able to connect to any wireless network within five miles, whether or not it was password protected, a magically expanded memory, and a battery that could be charged instantly with a simple spell.
Even if her father had nicknamed it Ester because he thought it ran as quickly as a crotchety old woman, it was bloody useful and all she really needed. Technologically speaking, she was about a millennium ahead of the rest of the Wizarding world. The closest the Ministry stood to computers were typewriters straight out of the 1950s, enspelled to do the typing without sacrificing one's fingers.
The Muggle news had significantly more coverage of the murder, perhaps because it was not the most recent of thirteen. One article linked her to information about Stonehenge, which she bookmarked, and another featured an interview with the leader of a neo-Druid cult facing accusations. She raised her eyebrows at the woman's claim that she had been at Stonehenge for the solstice but hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary, never mind a human sacrifice, and copied down her name—Jennifer Bartleby.
She still highly doubted that the killer was a Muggle; high on her list of things to make her sceptical was the notion that anyone could have missed that particular sight, even in the dark.
Unfortunately, she wasn't the only one to make the claim—another chronicled an anonymous man's traumatic experience at the end of the revelry, when the rising sun shone through the window of stones.
Two hours and several more articles later, her eyes were beginning to swim, but otherwise the research was soothing and took her mind off of the thoughts that she knew would cluster if she stopped concentrating for more than a few seconds. Nevertheless, Theo being ushered in by Harry came as a welcome distraction, and Hermione took it as an excuse to close her laptop with a satisfying click.
As if to emphasise the likelihood that he had only crawled out of bed half an hour ago, Theo staged a yawn and scowled at her. "Up researching so early, my dewdrop?"
From the doorway, Harry rolled his eyes. "When is she not?"
A slight flush tinged Theo's cheeks but was quickly suppressed and replaced by his most charming smile as he turned around to reply. "If even you and Weasley haven't been able to beat it out of her in the last fifteen years, I'm sure it's a lost cause."
"I think it's embedded in her genetic code." Both of them chuckled, and when it died out, Harry hovered awkwardly, adjusting his glasses, before asking, "Can I get either of you anything? Tea? Lunch?"
"I'm fine—"
"Lunch would be lovely," Theo said, cutting her off. "Tea, too, actually. Two sugars and a hint of milk."
Hermione scowled at him. "Well, if you're making Theo food, I want some, too."
Harry winked at her as he ducked out of the room, and she shook her head in bewilderment.
The flush crept back into Theo's face as he turned back to face her. "Auroring has worked wonders with that man."
"And you're dating Jonathan," she said, emphasising the syllables in his name.
"Actually, his name is James, and, no, I am not dating him any longer."
"You were still dating him yesterday afternoon."
"Yes, and then he broke up with me over dinner."
She winced. "Oh, Theo. I'm sorry to hear that."
He waved away her sympathy with a flick of his hand. "The only thing about that relationship that was remotely functional was the sex—besides, now it frees me up to steal Potter from the tart formerly known as Weasley."
"She's not—"
A palm shot up, silencing her. "Not a tart, I know. But if I think of her as a tart, the guilt will be lessened when I steal him away from her."
"Guilt? And here I thought you were shameless."
He tossed his hair out of his eyes, a mischievous smile creeping across his face. "I am shameless, but a touch of guilt every so often never hurts. It saves me from being a total sociopath."
If it had been anyone besides Theo, she might have been disgusted by the ease with which he moved from one object of lust to another—but because it was Theo, who had been half in love with Harry since they had first started working together four years ago, and because his hair was lacking its usual sheen and he was sitting on the floor with his knees tucked under his chin, looking more than a little lost, the only effect it had was a sudden urge to hug him.
"So," he said after a moment's silence, "why don't you show me what you've been working on?"
With a grin, she flipped through her notebook to the first page of her notes. "I was so hoping you would ask. Okay, so I found out the meaning behind the positioning of the body—the head was facing in the direction of the sunrise on the Midwinter Solstice—but I haven't had any luck with the runes. We'll have to wait for the results on those, I suppose. Also, the leader of a neo-druid cult by the name of Jennifer Bartleby is having fingers pointed at her in the Muggle press—apparently she was among the people taking part in the celebrations that night, but it seems that nobody there noticed the body until dawn."
Theo drew his eyebrows together. "What kind of revelry?"
Hermione shrugged. "The harmless sort—I expect there were people running round in fancy dress, and some Morris dancers, oblivious to the anachronistic nature of performing at a pagan celebration. Maybe even a bit of chanting."
His brow furrowed further, and his mouth twisted into something that was either a smirk or a grimace. "Do Muggles often behave like this?"
"At least it is harmless," she said, turning the page. "Several other revellers saw nothing, which suggests either a conspiracy or the possibility that there were some sort of wards up inside the stone circle that prevented the murderer from being seen."
The look of disgust held. "I'm not inclined to like conspiracy theories."
"Nor am I, but we ought to look into the druids, just to be thorough." She glanced up to see him nodding in assent, then continued. "I haven't had any luck finding a name for the victim, but I'll keep searching databases of missing people."
"Is that everything?"
She sighed. "Not bad for a morning's work, but yes, unfortunately." It was a constant source of annoyance that she couldn't type 'human sacrifice' into a search engine and have all the answers she could possibly want pop up on the screen in front of her; she tried to tell herself that the extra work helped build character, but had never yet found it soothing.
Theo beamed in response. "Fabulous—for the first time in living history, I have information that you don't."
"Do tell," she said, straightening. "And quickly. The suspense may kill me."
"I stopped by the office on my way here to see if Hopkins had sent us the lab results."
"And?"
"Not yet, but I ran into Kempe—you know, the new head of the Aurors—and apparently there have been inferi popping up all over the country since yesterday."
Any last vestiges of hope that Hermione had held about solving the case with minimal fuss and having her promotion by February died a swift, painless death. "Coincidence?"
"In this case?" He snorted. "Not likely. Besides, it would have taken a lot of power to raise the dead in these numbers."
"On the bright side," she said, "we can just wait and see where they decide to congregate. On the somewhat less bright side, dealing with a necromancer's army was definitely not high on my list for how I wanted to spend my Christmas holidays."
Harry chose that moment to appear with soup and artistically arranged cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off—the expression on Theo's face was one that she would have donated an entire paycheque to see. His eyes widened and darted from side to side, as though he couldn't decide between the sight of a pleasantly toned man in a fitted t-shirt or the meal.
"Thanks, Harry," said Hermione, relieving him of the tray.
"Yes," Theo said weakly. "Thank you."
*
They spent the rest of the day lying on their stomachs in Hermione's study, peering at the screen of her laptop as she attempted to find information on Inferi and scanned through pages of missing people. Harry periodically appeared with fresh cups of tea, depositing them on the floor beside a flushing Theo before slipping out.
"Well, we found another person who managed to confuse 'inferi' and 'succubi'," she said, clicking the back button with more force than was required.
Theo shuddered. "Did they really have to be so descriptive?"
"I thought the pictures were worse, personally. A decaying corpse thrusting itself onto an unsuspecting person? Ugh."
She switched over to the window of missing people and scrolled down. The trouble was that there were too many people who fit the description of male, five foot nine, light brown hair, blue eyes. Every so often Theo would point to a picture, she would click it, and both of them would shake their heads.
"There has to be a better way to do this," Hermione said after nearly five hours, shutting the laptop and pushing it aside. Her elbows burned where she had been resting them on the rug, so she relieved them and rested her cheek on the floor.
"We could release his picture to the Muggle news. There isn't exactly much need for secrecy at the moment, and Kingsley is having the authorities turn over whatever information they can find to us."
Hermione nodded. "We'll have to clear it first, but we can write up the release now—start running it on the twenty-sixth."
"What about suspects? We should start interviewing them soon, before they disappear off the face of the earth."
"If anyone runs off, we'll have our culprit. We can poke around Stonehenge some more after Christmas to look for any leftover traces of wards and interview magical families in the area to see if anyone noticed anything strange that night."
"I'm going to be at Malfoy Manor tomorrow night—Christmas party. I'll keep my ears open, and maybe ask a few questions. Subtly, of course."
Harry's head appeared in the doorway, yet again. "Ron's cooking dinner. It should be ready in about twenty minutes, if Theo wants to stay."
"I'd love to," Theo said, ducking his head to avoid Hermione's amused look.
Harry nudged her shoulder with his foot. "You look like you're about to burst into tears."
"I feel like I'm about to burst into tears. Why can't everyone live together in peace and harmony, and not kill each other in ritual sacrifices? Especially when I am supposed to be on holiday?"
"Because you are destined for great things," Theo said, "which means that you are forbidden the eight hours of sleep and the vacation pay allotted to the rest of the human race."
*
The next morning, Hermione chose to laugh in the face of destiny by refusing to work. Instead, she helped Harry and Ron with the final tidying touches, decorated a Christmas tree to Celestina Warbeck's Christmas album (it was as terrible as always, but nevertheless a tradition that Ron refused to let her break), and took puppy-Ronald for a walk in the park with Harry.
After days spent puzzling over a case that was disturbingly lacking in helpful evidence, the crisp air and sensation of sleet melting on her cheeks seemed to slap the life back into her; she laughed as Ron gripped the lead between his teeth and tried to bound ahead of them. Only Harry was withdrawn, and she knew without thinking about it that he was worrying about seeing Ginny for the first time in three months.
Impulsively, she squeezed his hand and smiled at him. His lips twitched in response, but the lines in his forehead didn't relax until they had returned to the house, and Molly and Arthur had arrived with their daughter in tow.
Ginny flung herself at her brother with an agonised cry that suggested she was more than relieved to have people around her who weren't her parents.
"Glad to see that my baby sister survived her months of continental debauchery with minimal injury, except—did you break your nose?"
"Yes," she said with a wink, "although it definitely didn't happen playing quidditch."
There was a pause as everyone searched out Molly's expression, which didn't disappoint: her face was an odd combination of patched purple and red, mouth and eyebrows twisted into an expression that said exactly what she thought of her daughter's foreign antics.
Ginny giggled. "Relax, Mum. The bludger that did it made the front page of the Prophet."
A moment later, Hermione found herself on the receiving end of nine stones of hugging and heavily perfumed Weasley. "We'll have to catch up properly, this time," the redhead whispered in her ear. "Lots to tell you."
"Of course—just say when."
And then it was Harry's turn.
A quick glance told her that, yet again, the entire room was united in curiosity. Feeling less guilty for staring, Hermione trained her eyes back on them with the words that she had spoken to Theo yesterday ringing in her head.
Ginny had paused a foot away from Harry, her faltering gaze flicking away from Harry's searching one.
"Missed you," he said. "It's not the same without you here."
She nodded her agreement. "How have you been?"
Harry's shoulders bunched up in what was possibly the least nonchalant shrug of all time—a moment passed before his intention became clear. Still hunched over, he closed the gap between them and lowered his face towards her. It was like peering at a horror film through the gaps between her fingers; for a moment, Ginny looked as though she were about to turn and run, but instead chose the more diplomatic route, dodging the kiss in favour of wrapping her arms around him.
His lips collided with her left ear, and from where she was standing, Hermione could see his eyes widen and his entire body stiffen. He didn't relax until she had pulled away, and even then a muscle jumped in his cheek, telling Hermione that his jaw was clenched.
Almost instinctively, she sought Ron's reaction, which was to roll his eyes. She wasn't the only one experiencing a distinct lack of surprise at Ginny's behaviour.
"Ron," Hermione said, her voice high and nervous, yet still somehow too loud for the otherwise silent room, "when is your girlfriend coming?"
He shook his head. "No idea—whenever she feels like coming."
"Your father and I are looking forward to finally meeting her." There was no mistaking Molly's tone of voice for something benevolent, even eager. A frisson of pleasure rose up in her chest at the knowledge that she and Harry weren't the only ones yet to meet Mystery Girl.
The six of them hovered in a circle long enough for Hermione to formulate an escape plan: she would leave to pick up her parents, and stop off at the office on her way to retrieve the case files. If things remained as lively as they were just now, she would have the perfect excuse to slip away.
*
Upon apparating back to 12 Grimmauld Place an hour later, with a parent attached to each arm and a large stack of magically shrunk manila folders in her purse, it became immediately apparent why Ron had kept his girlfriend's identity secret for so long.
It wasn't just that she was showing more skin than the rest of the guests combined, although that would have been enough to make Hermione dislike her on the spot; nor was it the curled lip and obvious desire to shrink away from the antics of Teddy and Victoire, rather than pronouncing the expected phrases of delight.
It was that the woman Ron had invited over for Christmas dinner was Pansy Parkinson, bane of her teenage existence, who had mastered the art of being a bitch when the rest of the children her age were learning the most basic of insults.
She wasn't sure which was worse: that Pansy Parkinson was currently using her sofa as a makeshift throne before which Ronald Weasley (and any other male with a weakness for ample cleavage) could prostrate himself, or that Pansy Parkinson was currently sporting a ring, crusted with winking diamonds.
An engagement ring.
Any thought that had ever crossed Hermione's mind about the positive effects of Ron's girlfriend went the way of polar icecaps under the influence of global warming. Pansy had obviously lured him into her trap with large doses of filthy, disgusting sex, thus blinding him to the fact that she was a horrible human being who probably drowned kittens—no, puppies—in the endless free time of the too rich to be employed.
Maybe she had even used Imperius; there was clearly no end to the woman's nefarious deeds.
Still, she had promised Ron that she would be nice—as though she had ever been anything but—so nice she would be.
Before stepping forward towards the couch, she checked over her shoulder to make sure that her parents had settled into a conversation with someone—she wasn't about to bring them nearer to the Muggle-hating cow than was strictly necessary—and smoothed her skirt.
"Hello, Pansy." Deep breaths, swallow the hostility: she could do this.
Pansy's eyes narrowed. "Hermione."
She sat on the opposite end of the sofa, facing her arch nemesis and attempting a pleasant smile, which probably bore more resemblance to the expression of a constipated wombat than anything.
"You're Ron's, er, fiancée, then, I take it?"
Pansy held out her hand and studied the ring, before turning her stare onto Hermione. "One might say that."
It was worrying, how quickly she could be reduced to the state of a neurotic, insecure first year in the space of a word. Seated next to Pansy and her red silk dress that wouldn't have been out of place at a cocktail party, Hermione knew she probably even looked like a first year—petite, mousy, and lacking anything that might be mistaken for curves. Hermione had even dressed the part, with a plaid knee-length skirt and grey blouse.
She wondered if it would be too obvious if she ran upstairs and changed.
"So, how did you two meet?"
Pansy's eyes shifted from suspicious slits to wide-open disbelief. "When we were eleven, we got on this thing called a train that took us to a magical school where all the little magical children go so that they can learn to wave their wands and do magic. Ron opened a compartment door in my face, and, if I recall correctly, it made me want to hit him and make the rest of his life as miserable as possible."
"Marriage is the only way to achieve the desired result," Ron said, appearing on the far side of Pansy to hand her a glass of wine.
Hermione was saved from having to reply by Victoire's younger brother, Antoine, tumbling headfirst into the coffee table. His screams had a magnetic effect; everyone in the room except for Pansy, Hermione, and Ron descended upon him in an attempt to soothe his wailing.
"Ronald," said Pansy, covering her ears and wincing, "whatever else happens, promise me that we will never have children—it would bring an entirely new level of pain to hangovers."
Even from across a noisy room, the words reached Molly's ears, and Hermione could see her expression darken. Recalling her own days as potential daughter in law, Hermione had an idea of how that conversation would go, and found that she was torn between sympathy for the other woman and glee at the possibility of Pansy being taken down a peg.
Ron, who was slightly more used to the sounds of injured toddlers, but no more fond of them, nodded vigorously, and Hermione used the opportunity to escape to her study.
"Well, it's been lovely catching up, but I have work to do," she said brightly, as she sidled off the couch and in the general direction of the stairs.
"Yes," Pansy replied, "lovely."
"Ron, you'll call me when dinner is ready?" said Hermione.
"Of course."
*
It only took fifteen minutes to arrange the files in a way that allowed her to look at as many of them at once as was possible. Photographs of the victims lined the walls in chronological order, with the notes from each crime scene tacked beneath. Each picture had a sticky note attached to it, with the victim's gender and place of death, along with, for lack of a better word, his or her species. She ran through each category, trying to establish a pattern.
Six of the victims were female. Until the latest murder, they had alternated between male and female—now there had been two males in a row.
Stonehenge only continued the southward pattern of murder sites.
Eight of those killed were werewolves. Three centaurs. One merman. And one who had presumably been Muggle. Loosely, all except for the last could be classified as half-breeds.
At heart, Hermione was an arithmancer, and, although arithmancy involved variables, it also required constants and the skill to keep the balance. An equation was, in her opinion, a simple and elegant metaphor for the universe; things could shift, but only in conjunction with everything else, and, scientifically speaking, nothing could be created or destroyed.
The problem with life was that it too often felt like solving a three variable equation, in which the constants had to first be derived through some obscure formula that she hadn't yet worked out how to solve. She knew that the answers were possible, that all the necessary information was there, but in order to use it she would have to comb through a lifetime of calculations to find her mistake.
"Love what you've done with the place," said a voice from behind her. "Very macabre—the cobwebs in the corner add a nice atmospheric touch."
Hermione whirled around, about to snap at the person who was invading her sanctuary. Relieved to find that it was only Ginny hovering in the doorway, she smiled. "Come in."
As Ginny settled into the armchair, Hermione shut the door and took her usual seat behind the desk.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you—I just couldn't take much more of Mum's disappointed looks and Harry following me around like a lost puppy, hoping I'll throw him a bone."
"And I don't actually have to work today—I just…"
"Pansy?"
Hermione nodded, and tried not to smooth her skirt self-consciously. "It was a bit of a shock."
"She's not that bad, you know—just give her a chance to warm up to you, go shopping with her… It can't be easy for her, knowing that none of Ron's friends like her."
"Did you know?"
Ginny didn't have to reply—the answer was scrawled in red across her cheeks. The floor seemed to spin out from under her feet, and she had to clutch the edge of her desk to keep from spiralling away. It didn't stop the sensation of her stomach dropping out, leaving her hollow and shaken.
"I only found out in October—she was with him when he visited me in Paris…"
"He took her to Paris?"
"It's where he proposed."
Silence stretched across the room, and Hermione felt helpless in the face of it. A few moments passed before she realised that she was shaking her head in quick, sharp bursts, and took a deep breath. When she finally spoke, her voice wobbled.
"Two months? Without telling anyone?"
Perhaps more earth shattering than anything else was the revelation that Ron could be discreet enough to carry on a secret engagement.
"If it helps, I don't think they meant to keep it secret for that long.
"Never mind that—tell me about you. How is living in France and playing quidditch and being famous for it?"
As Ginny launched into a story about partying with the Danish national team, and their horde of screaming blond fans, Hermione shook her head, this time to clear it. If even Ginny had accepted Pansy as a surrogate sister and taken her shopping, then there was no arguing with the logic of it. Ron had let a viper into the nest, and he would have to deal with the nasty rash it left him.
Ginny's tale about waking up next to a Danish groupie, who was nearly in tears over having slept with a player for the opposition was only the first of many.
"You have to understand," she said, midway through recounting the blind date a team mate had forced her to go on with his part-Veela lesbian friend, "that these are all the stories I can't tell at the dinner table. Granted, they might disgust Harry enough that he will never want to touch me again, but I wouldn't want to give my father a heart attack. He's not as young as he once was, and stealing away any remaining illusions he may have about my virtue would probably kill him."
Hermione couldn't deny the truth of that statement. "And your mother would hardly handle the truth any better."
"Mum's much worse than Dad—rather than giving in to any sort of heart condition, she would pack up and move to France, so that she could keep an eye on me. She already tries to manage my life from a distance."
"She tries to manage mine, and I'm not even related to her."
"Well, now that you almost definitely—"
"Definitely."
"—won't be marrying into the family, unless Charlie straightens out, she may decide to leave well enough alone, but I wouldn't count on it."
*
The table, Hermione noticed when she and Ginny were called down to eat, had been organised into two camps: those who liked and approved of Pansy, and those who did not. The pro-Pansy half was larger than Hermione would have expected; Bill and Fleur sat to one side of her, and the three of them seemed to be deeply involved in a conversation revolving around stocks and bonds, and George had snagged the seat next to Ron, prime seating for ogling the neckline of her dress, a fact that did not escape Angelina's attention. Even Antoine seemed to have come back with a positive verdict, and was reaching out from his perch on his father's lap to grasp a handful of Pansy's hair.
The other half of the table was headed by Molly Weasley, who was flanked by her somewhat bewildered husband and Percy's expression of scandalised outrage. Andromeda couldn't bear the sight of anyone who didn't trip over herself to admire Teddy's multi-coloured tufts of hair and delicate lisp, and found Pansy's apathy towards her grandson insufferable. Caught in between the two camps were the Diggorys--invited the first year after Voldemort's defeat because Molly had bonded with Eustacia over the loss of a son--and her parents, who were sitting closer together than was probably comfortable and shifting their gaze along the table, obviously aware of the tension, but not the dynamics that had created it.
Hermione slid into the chair between her parents and Fleur. Polite, she thought. She didn't have to be friendly, just civil, if Pansy chose to speak to her at all. Besides, her parents would require attention--these weren't their sort of people, and making them feel left out at an event to which she had invited them was the last thing she wanted.
She was trying to mend bridges, not throw up a flashing barricade signalling that they had no place in her life.
As soon as the hum of conversation started up again around the table, Lindsay Granger turned to her daughter. "You've lost weight again, dear, and you look exhausted. You really must stop working so much."
It was her mother's diplomatic way of expressing her disapproval of Hermione escaping to her office when there were guests to be entertained.
"Sorry, Mum, but I'm in the middle of an important case, and I can't afford to let it sit."
"But surely no one expects you to work on it over Christmas."
"Kingsley should be here shortly, if you want to ask him."
Lindsay's mouth thinned; she didn't believe that there was a politician in the world worth working for, and refused to listen to Hermione's protests that he was more Auror than bureaucrat. "He's still in charge, then?"
"Yes, and currently finishing up an important bit of goblin legislature that should help with our inflation problems." That might make her mum happy; she had always expressed disgust at the exchange rate when it came time for school supplies shopping.
It didn't; instead, she merely sniffed. "About time if you ask me."
And, because she obviously wasn't feeling frustrated enough, Bill had to lean across his wife and cut into their conversation. "It is about time. Gringotts has been trying to get the Ministry to erase laws discriminating against goblins for the last two centuries. If that is finally done, it should cut back on costs enormously."
Fleur had been nodding along with her husband; now she squeezed his and added, "Eet is a great pleasure to finally see these changes 'appen. We 'ave been 'elping ze goblins with their cause for six years."
"It's how those two met, actually," said Bill, gesturing towards Pansy, who was looking from Bill and Fleur to Ron as he argued with Angelina over whether the Cannons or the Harpies had a chance at winning. "At one of our fundraisers."
"So, let me get this straight," said her father. "You have a subjugated race—sorry, species—in charge of the only bank in the country?"
Lindsay elbowed him. "Gary, there's no need to be rude."
"I wasn't being rude, I was asking a perfectly valid—"
"'E is correct, and zis is exactly what we 'ave been trying to tell ze Ministry—eet seems there is finally someone willing to pay attention."
Hermione's mind was still trying to wrap around the notion that Pansy Parkinson had been at a fundraiser for goblin rights.
"The thing with Kingsley Shacklebolt," Pansy said, cutting to the heart of the conversation, around which everyone else had been dancing, "is that everybody likes him. He's a war hero, but he was working in the background, so Voldemort's former supporters don't feel uncomfortable around him, and he has been nothing but fair since."
If fair meant doling out about a hundred pardons to people who, by all rights, ought to have spent the next fifty years in prison. However, she had to concede that Pansy had a point: the pardons had diffused a volatile situation that could have left the still powerful purebloods feeling disenfranchised.
It didn't mean she was about to revise her opinion of Pansy as a stupid cow.
"So," Molly said, looking up from her conversation with the Diggorys, and the entire table seemed to freeze in place, "Ron, why don't you tell us about your fiancée—I'm sure we're all dying to hear about her."
The colour in Pansy's face vanished, only to reappear a second later in Ron's.
"Well—er—"
"I can speak for myself, thanks," said Pansy, in the spoiled, huffy tone that Hermione remembered. "What do you wish to know?"
Molly flushed a shade of pink to match Ron, but in anger instead of humiliation. "I only ask because we've heard so little about you."
"At least, from Ron."
"I have no idea what you mean."
Pansy raised an eyebrow. "Oh, really?"
For a moment, Molly and Pansy sat in a deadlock, neither sure what more needed to be said, until Ginny broke the silence, saying, "Ron, you haven't shown me your animagus form yet."
He leapt to his feet. "No, I haven't."
"Not while we're eating—"
But it seemed that his eagerness to show off his newfound skill overrode his usual Pavlovian reaction to his mother's voice, and a moment later he was an Irish setter.
Ginny clapped her hands in delight as Ron ran a circle around the room, stopping to wag his tail at Pansy, who tossed him a broken off piece of bread. When she leaned over to stroke his ears, he thrust his nose into her cleavage.
"Haven't you heard what happens to pretty girls who lie down with dogs?" George asked, with a wink.
"I wouldn't know—I make him sleep on the floor."
The last of the tension disappeared as the room dissolved into fits of giggles—even Hermione had to grin. Ron put his ears back and whined, the whipping of his tail slowing to a steady wag, apparently aware that he was the focus of their laughter.
However, as he began tearing around the room again, this time with his eyes rolling and a panicked bark, the laughter died away, replaced with concern. When he finished circling the room, he ran into the hallway and proceeded to bark and snarl.
"Just a moment," Pansy said, crumpling up her napkin and setting it on the table. "I'll see if I can calm him down."
George snickered, and Angelina smacked him.
The murmur of a soothing voice was followed by a sharp knock on the door, and Pansy's footsteps towards it. When she screamed, Hermione led the sprint away from the table.
What she saw upon entering the foyer was the last thing she expected. Pansy was frozen in the doorway, with Ron—human, now—wrapping his arm around her shoulders. Just beyond them was a figure that made the breath catch in her throat and her mind begin to hurtle through thoughts at lightning speed. Only one made it to her lips.
"Professor Snape?"