AUTHOR'S NOTE: This chapter had a small revision in the middle. Minor, really. If you read it on LiveJournal at the fest site previously, then you might recognize the changes.

Malfoy Manor – Wiltshire, England

6 June, 2001

Hermione found Draco locked up in his study, reading while lounging on the settee. The thick, embroidered draperies were closed, as they always were during the day around the house. Now she understood why that was. If someone were to open it and let the sun shine down on him…The thought made her positively nauseated.

"You hate me that much that you'd contemplate my murder?"

Her eyes jerked from the window to where he lay. He was watching her with guarded, dark grey eyes, his book lying flat across his chest, open to the page he'd been studying.

"It's not hate," she honestly stated. "I'm… well, I'm… worried for you. Walking around above ground during daylight hours is dangerous. If one of the others in the house wanted you dead, all they'd have to do would be to-"

"Open the curtains. I know," he stated, seeming rather unconcerned at the thought. "No need to panic, Granger. First, no one here is, as the Muggles say, gunning for me. I had each of the Vampires in this house take blood oaths to that affect before they stepped past my property wards. Those that wouldn't, I turned away. Second, sunlight doesn't affect me the same as the others. When I was first Embraced, I tried killing myself by walking in full sunlight. For my efforts, all I received was a nasty sunburn that stung like hell for a week before it faded."

Huh, weird. Now that was something she didn't know about the Toreador lineage – their susceptibility to light was minimized. Or this unusual characteristic could instead be an adaptation that Draco's Sire had carried and passed onto him when he'd been turned. Or it might possibly be a mutation caused by something innate in Draco – something in his magical essence that changed the Vampire's curse so that sunlight wouldn't be as much of a bother to him. The explanation could lie in any of those things or in none of them, but something else entirely. She wasn't sure, and wouldn't be unless she studied Toreadors in a lab.

Yes, she'd read all of Edward Worple's books and there had been plenty of Vampire information in her Defence Against the Dark Arts classes, but that alone wasn't enough to make her an expert on Vampires. If anything, she'd consider herself a well-read practitioner of knowledge on the subject. Yet, even she wasn't naïve enough to believe that even the human "experts" on the species knew everything there was to know about slippery, manipulative Vampires. She was sure there were a lot of precious nuggets of information that interviewed Kindred left out of their discussion – like the Veela connection, for instance. That hadn't been anywhere in the texts.

Vampires were such frustratingly secretive creatures!

"I was just wondering," she murmured, transitioning into a slightly related topic, "why I'd been so thick before yesterday's revelation. I've been living in a house with a bunch of Vampires for two months. Why hadn't I put together the little clues that had been right in my face all along before now? I'm usually more astute than that. Did someone here do something to me to make me not see such things?"

"Truth?" he asked. She firmly nodded. "I had Zabini plant the suggestion in your head not to give such things much thought when you first arrived here. It's a lingering effect that's been slowly waning as your mental faculties woke back up. You were severely traumatized when we rescued you from Azkaban. Your mind needed a break."

Hot anger churned her gut. "Mind magic is the equivalent of mental rape, Draco. How dare you!"

In a flash, he had the book down and was across the room, standing in front of her. "To protect you, my beautiful Concubine, I would dare anything – even your wrath."

He let her hand find its mark across his cheek, but the blow didn't faze him in the least.

"Got that out of your system now?"

Before she could answer, he had her in his arms and across the other side of the room, pinned against the wall near the cold hearth. "I find I'm hungry for you again," he murmured, nuzzling his nose and lips against her throat. He spread her legs with an insistent nudge of his knee and pressed upwards to stroke across her covered mons. "In both ways."

Hermione repressed her impulse to throw her arms about him and give in. Damn his Vampire magic! "We can't… we have to talk," she insisted as his fangs scraped across her pulse. "About the zombie plague. You promised last night we'd talk!"

He let out a deep sigh and relaxed into her. "Gryffindors," he groused. "Always ruining my fun."

She slapped his shoulder this time. "I'm serious, Malfoy. The point of you setting me on the task of finding a cure was to prevent nuclear armageddon on the Islands. That's more important than appeasing your needs."

He growled, and then to show her how wrong she was, he lifted her long frock and tore her knickers apart. "My needs are your priority, mate."

She raised a knee to shove at the juncture of his hip, but the action only allowed him to fall deeper into the cradle of her thighs. "That's more like it," he sinfully chuckled, and in a quick maneuver, he was out of his trousers and inside of her again. "A quickie, I promise," he offered, placing kisses along the bottom of her jaw and feathering over her lips. "I need to feel your pleasure. It gives me peace, Granger, as nothing else can. And I can feed off of that sexual energy rather than your vein," he breathily murmured with a roll of his hips. "Come for me, beloved. I want to see your beautiful face when you let go."

His sultry words, combined with his incredible bedroom skill, were enough to win her capitulation. Seriously, how could she resist when his thick, hard shaft was rhythmically surging deep into her, destroying her senses?

It didn't take long. She came around him as he cajoled her response, his fingers flicking her clit while his cock stilled within her. She literally saw stars behind her eyelids, and she whispered his name as her body convulsed in miniature spasms of death and rebirth. As her high eventually dissipated, she collapsed into his arms, panting, her heart slamming against the back of her ribs. Her mind had gone temporarily numb.

"Hold still," he bade her and gasped, arching his spine a bit. "I'm coming in you, my beauty. Can you feel it?"

Her breath held as she felt the pulse of his release. Hot, sticky seed filled her channel in a burst, followed by another and another. Draco was shaking and quietly shuddering for breath as each ejaculation erupted from him, riding the beautiful highs of his culmination.

When he finally calmed, he held onto her as if he never wanted to let her go. Hermione's heart tugged, but she tamped it down. Temporary… she was a temporary interest to him. He would grow tired of her soon. It was the Toreador way.

"No," he warned her as she tried to struggle from his grasp, to disconnect their bodies and put some distance between them before she irrevocably lost her sanity. "Don't do that, Hermione. Don't close down on me again."

"Let me go, please." She was shaking inside and out and there were standing tears in her eyes. She felt unhinged, vulnerable. "Please, Draco."

He seemed to deflate and sighed again. With strength that was incredible to behold, he lifted her off of his still erect member and set her on her feet before him. When he was sure she could hold her own weight up, he let her go and stepped back. Tucking his penis and his wrinkled, dark blue silk shirt back into his pants, he buttoned and zipped up, and re-notched his belt.

Hermione demurely reached under her shift to remove the lingering scrap of fabric that was her knickers. With nowhere to put them, she handed them to Draco when he held his palm out. With a flicker of his wrist, they were banished by magic to null-space, where Evanesco'd items went. "Thank you," she offered, "although it would have been nice not to have lost them. I only have three pair left."

"Exciting though the thought of your undergarments – or lack thereof – are, Granger, why don't we get down to the business you wanted to discuss earlier?" he replied, running a hand through his long hair to smooth it. His voice was neutral, giving no hint as to his emotional state. It was as if a switch had flicked off inside his head now that his need for sex and feeding had been satisfied. He secreted that part of himself back into the vaults of his personality once more, and returned to the cold man she'd known when she'd first arrived here at the Manor.

The change threw her off-balance, and it took a moment longer for Hermione to regain her bearings. "Right," she determined, regaining her command of the situation. "The plague – I think I may have an idea of how it started."

Draco took a seat in the high-back chair behind the study's massive desk. Crossing his legs in the gentleman's style, he sat back and folded his hands over his abdomen, and gave her his undivided attention. "Explain, from the beginning."

Godric's bane, that imperious tone was sexy! She'd always harboured a secret fetish for the severe authoritarian…

His slow, naughty grin told her that he knew what she was thinking.

Again, like the turning on of a light, he was back to being playful with her. Honestly, the man's moods jumped about faster than a cat on a hot tin roof!

She primly cleared her throat and ignored the heat in her cheeks, launching into a similar explanation to the one she had given earlier to the women regarding her thoughts on Voldemort's intentions by allowing his Death Eaters to be Embraced by Vampires.

Draco easily confirmed her suspicions with a nod. "He never stated outright in front of us that his intentions were so, but we all guessed what the Old Snake was up to. There was no chance to stop him, however. He had every male Death Eater under the age of thirty randomly locked into separate rooms at Hogwarts, our wands confiscated. We'd be there anywhere from three days to a week, depending on the Dark Lord's schedule. Our only sustenance provided in that time was water; he denied us food. By the time he showed up, we'd already been suffering from hunger. He'd then instruct a Clan Vampire that he'd had captured for these little experiments to turn us into Kine or die. He wanted to see the process from start to finish – which is different for each Clan - hence the reason he didn't just observe an already-made Vampire. Plus, he wanted to know how Vampirism would affect his connection to us through the Dark Mark. I think it came as a big surprise to him when, one by one, the Marks disappeared from all of us. He could no longer enter our minds without casting Legilimens on us, and in the case of the Clan Vamps that could resist such mind games, he couldn't read us at all, no matter how strong his Legilimency. The whole process fascinated him. He had my father taking notes on it."

"Do you have those notes?" she asked, her heart beating faster. If he had included the information on the Samedi vampires…

Draco reached into his desk drawer and brought out a stack of parchment several inches high. Mesmerized by the stack of research materials, she quickly hovered over to his side and reached out to gently touch them.

"When Voldemort ran, I took everything he left behind. I was looking for a way to reverse what he'd done to me and the others."

She glanced at him with sorrow. "There is no way to change it," she sympathetically, but very assuredly stated, her research on the biological implications of Vampirism clear. "You're not technically alive anymore, Draco. The only thing that keeps you walking around is fresh blood providing oxygen to your cells, allowing your brain to fire off the proper signals for your organs to function normally. Without that, you'd die permanently."

He uncrossed his legs and slammed a hand down on the desk, his face a mask of cold ire. "Then explain to me how I don't remember dying when I was Embraced. I really don't think I did, Granger. I recall being lucid for the whole thing, which is something none of the rest in this house can boast. And I can feed off of sex and not blood – something no other Vampires can do. Or how, unlike the others, I can walk around in the daytime. Alright, maybe not in direct sunlight for very long, but if I'm covered up and shaded, I'm safe from burning. And I don't need to enter a state of deep torpor to regain my strength every day like the others, either. Regular human sleep works just fine for me. I don't need food or water, but I can digest them if I have the odd want. I prefer not to, because it upsets my stomach, but I can eat like a human when required." He adamantly shook his head. "No, I'm not like the other Vampires in this house. I'm not truly as dead as they are. Explain to me how that can be if I'm not at least partially still alive."

She considered it. "Honestly, I don't know, Draco. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Antediluvian of Clan Toreador was a Veela, or perhaps it has something to do with your family's heritage specifically. It might have had something to do with the way you were Embraced and who did the turning. I'm not really sure. We can look into it at some point later." She turned her attention back to the parchment. "Right now, we need to find the cure to the plague before we all end up on the other side of a very big boom that no amount of sunscreen will be able to block."

He gave her a queer look, as if she were speaking a foreign language - which she was. She was speaking 'Muggle.'

"So, you think Voldemort was playing around with Vampire lineages. What does that have to do with the zombie disease?" he asked, prompting her to finish her hypothesis for him.

"Well, now that we have these notes, I'm closer to being sure one way or the other," she explained, "but I think it's more than possible that his 'playing around,' as you put it, was more than just a fascination with seeing which Clan would be best for him. I think he intended on combining bloodlines to create the strongest Vampire lineage he could. That's the one he'd turn himself into – the ultimate bloodline that had all of the greatest strengths of the Clans and none of their weaknesses. I could see him wanting to be the Prime Antediluvian – the one who could control all Vampires, and through that magic, all of the Wizarding and Muggle worlds. As a bonus, he'd gain true immortality, instead of the false immortality that he'd previously sought through owning the Philosopher's Stone, or drinking unicorn blood, or creating horcruxes."

Malfoy assessed her theory through narrowed eyes, looking off into the distance. "World domination and eternal life would definitely be something he'd try for, the arrogant bastard." He focused on her again, reached up and pulled her into his lap. "So what went wrong?"

Hermione decided it best not to make too big a fuss over his handling of her. Honestly, she preferred this to his earlier icy demeanor. "If I'm right, he underestimated the magical abilities of the Cappadocian Clan."

Draco frowned. "Who?"

Lecture time! This was Hermione favourite part of any discussion.

"The Cappadocian Clan was one of the original and the largest Clan of Vampires until the Dark Ages," she explained. "Their Antediluvian, Cappadocius, volunteered for Vampirism to learn everything he could about the condition of life and death. His three Kine – those he Embraced himself – went on to turn others, who turned others, and so on. Long story short, Cappadocius eventually culled all Vamps of his lineage that he felt were 'unworthy' of his blood in an event called The Feast of Folly. The Feast was responsible for the death of most of the Cappadocian Clan. It also sparked a major fight between two of Cappadocius' Kine – one that ended in the death of one of them, and the defection of the other. The defector formed his own Clan from those Cappadocian Vamps who had escaped the Feast. Over the centuries, some members of that splinter group ended up in the Caribbean. The death of the Antediluvian Cappadocius at the hands of Giovanni - a fourth Kine the man had turned, who ended up betraying and murdering him in the end – coupled with their distance from the purer blood strains of Vampirism in Europe mutated the defector's group, however, degrading them over time. They transformed into a type of Vampire that resembled rotting zombies. They gave themselves the name 'Samedi.'"

Draco perked up. "I saw that name here." He reached into the stack of notes and shuffled through them. Finding what he was looking for, he showed it to her. "Here, you see? My uncle by marriage, Rodolphus Lestrange, was turned by a Samedi in one of Voldemort's experiments."

"He volunteered to be Embraced," Hermione noted, reading quickly down the page. "But why?"

Her lover snorted. "Immortality, what else? Besides, his wife was not-so-secretly knocking-off Voldemort. Everyone knew. Maybe Uncle Rod wanted her attention back on him. Or maybe he wanted power of his own so he wouldn't feel like such a big pussy for being cuckolded. Who knows? He got the worse end of the deal regardless, poor fool."

She reached through the papers and scanned them. The last two parchments in particular seemed to provide the answer she was seeking.

"It says your Aunt Bellatrix volunteered to be Embraced, too, by a-" She paused in shock and re-read the passage again to be sure. "It says here she was bitten by a Lamia Vampire. They were an off-shoot of the Cappadocian Clan, too – an all-female cult of Vamps obsessed with the worship of the Dark Mother, Lilith. I was under the impression that they were extinct, though, as their Antediluvian, Lamia, was murdered – diablerized, in fact - and the clan systematically exterminated." She huffed with amazement and narrowed her eyes in thought. "It appears at least one of them escaped the genocidal blood-hunt that was believed to have marked their end in the eighteenth century. Hmmm…"

She tapped a fingernail on the notes that Lucius Malfoy had so painstakingly written. The script was neat, clean, and elegant.

"You know if Bellatrix was made into a Lamia, then that means she carried the curse of that bloodline, too: The Seed of Lilith." When she saw Draco's eyebrow rise in questioning, she explained. "It's a disease they carry in their mouths – a Clan scourge, if you will. If a Lamia feeds on a man, the disease infects and kills him by putrefying his flesh, decaying his body out from under him in a matter of days. He's alive through it all, too, until the heart and brain stop functioning. There's no cure for it."

She mulled that bit over in her mind.

A Lamia and a Samedi: two of the rarest Cappadocian Clan Vampires under the same roof during the initial outbreak at Hogwarts, where Voldemort had been conducting his experiments. Both were types of Vampires involved with the rotting of flesh. And soon after their appearance, a zombie pandemic erupted – a plague that was passed through biting and blood…

Instinctively, Hermione felt that the answer had to be there somewhere, but frustratingly, it remained elusively just out of reach. What was she missing?

"I'd hate to see what happened to the moron who diablerized the Lamia Queen," her lover stated as an aside, his sensual lips turned down in a grimace. "I bet he was surprised the morning after he drank her blood. Poor fool probably melted into a pile of putrid goo on the spot."

Hermione's head jerked up in surprise at the flash of inspiration she received from his casual comment. "Actually, he didn't. Giovanni survived – but the price was that every Vamp he turned after that was cursed to have a very painful bite. No, the Seed of Lilith only rots you if you're bitten by a Lamia, not if you're the one doing the biting. Vampires that fed from Lamia instead always became… carriers… of the curse…"

She tapered off as the facts began to coalesce into a single coherent picture, the pieces of this bizarre jigsaw puzzle snapping into place.

The notes that she'd read over from the others in the house – specifically from Zabini and Pucey - had stated with assurance that the zombie plague had only begun spreading through the country once the Dark Lord had fled the castle and the wards around it had fallen, allowing those inside Hogwarts - the Death Eaters, Snatchers and their servants - to Apparate or run away. But that had happened only after the plague had struck inside the castle first. That meant that the contagion had begun within the walls of the school, and had spread outward into the general population once those bitten had tried to escape their fate by running. They'd infected the Muggles and the rest of wizarding Britain.

Reaching out, she looked for paper, a quill and ink on the desk. When she found them, she leaned over and began drawing a diagram from the thoughts jumbling around in her head, trying to tie them into some sort of cohesive picture.

She was close… so close that she could taste the answer…

Draco looked over her shoulder. "What are you doing, my witch?"

A warm sensation lit up Hermione's belly when he called her 'my witch' in so possessive a tone. "Wait for it," she offered him with a distracted smirk. "I've almost… I think… this feels right." When she'd finished her conclusion, she looked at it, and then she showed it to him. "From the notes I read previously from each of the nine men in the house, and the ones I just scanned on your aunt and uncle, I conjecture that something like this is how the zombie plague began."

Malfoy took one look at the drawing and his jaw dropped open.

"It can't be that simple," he protested. You're saying that somehow the curse of the Lamia mingled with the curse of the Samedi? What, did my Aunt Bella bite her husband, Rodolphus, and infect him, and then before he died from her curse, he bit some other unlucky bloke and contaminated him with both the Lamia Seed curse and as well as the Samedi Necrosis Curse?"

"Or it could have been the other way around, but yes, essentially that's my theory," she stated, nodding. "Of course, we still don't know who 'Patient Zero' was – the first person infected with the combined curses. It was his or her immune system that somehow mutated the two diseases, transforming them into the one super virus – our so-called 'zombie plague'. Was he or she a living wizard or an undead Vampire before being bitten? Knowing that would make all the difference in determining what angle to take in trying for a cure."

She tapped the feather of Draco's quill against her cheek, considering where to start her real lab work. "I think I'll need to look at some of the blood of an infected zombie in a microscope to see how it mutates living cells, as well as blood from each of the Vampires in the house to understand how Vampirism alters living cells. I think it's important to first establish whether the two viruses are, in fact, related."

Her lover made a face and put a hand over his mouth, as if keeping back sickness. "God, how could Bella actually sink her fangs into a rotting corpse?" he murmured, still hung up on the idea that his aunt might have been into blood-play and necrophilia. The Toreador in him was showing.

Feeling rather frisky, and a tad mocking, Hermione waggled eyebrows at him. "Who said Bellatrix was only biting her hubby?"

Draco swallowed and turned three shades of green – which was a funny sight to see on a Vampire.

Hello, Stockholm Syndrome, here I come – full steam ahead, she wryly thought as she laughed, kissed him on the cheek and got off his lap. "I'll need you to capture a zombie for me and figure out how to pen it in here so I can have access for the experiments."

He stood up so fast it startled her into taking a step back and cut short her humour. "No, absolutely not! I will not risk you!"

Unwilling to be intimidated, she tsk'd and put her hands on her waist, giving him the stare that had often quelled Ron and Harry whenever they'd argued her logic. "Without a fresh sample of zombie blood and tissue, I won't be able to look at the cells properly. That's the only way to figure out if my theory is right or not."

He narrowed his eyes again. "Does it have to be a walking, shambling zombie, or will any part do?"

She opened her mouth to argue, and then realized he was quite correct. They didn't actually need a live (or undead, as the case may be) zombie in the room – only pieces of it, for the entire creature was one, big, infested virus carrier. Every part of it would be teeming with the stuff of decay. "Clever," she praised him. "Fine. Bring me something fresh though. It has to have been recently taken off of a zombie."

He gave her a knicker-melting smirk. "That we can do."

X~~~~~~~~~~X

Malfoy Manor – Wiltshire, England

8 June, 2001

Early that morning, Draco gave her three rather unexpected surprises.

The first was to require her to move out of the servants' quarters and permanently into his bedroom. After Hermione recovered from the shock of that offer, she began to actually warm to it. The idea of sleeping in a soft bed on a regular basis was quite appealing. The cot in the servants' quarters was more than adequate, yes, but it was lumpy and old, and the blankets were made of wool, not soft Egyptian cotton and silk, as his were. Being offered the softest bedding she'd ever lain in for a permanent home was awfully tempting, she had to admit. Yes, she may have had her pride, but lying on a dirty, stone floor in Azkaban in nothing but a pair of thin denim jeans and a well-worn jumper for three years had taught her the value of not looking gift horses in the mouth. Plus, having access to a gigantic private bathroom – one that had a marble tub the size of the Isle of Man - rather than having to share a much smaller space with eight other women... Well, the offer was the equivalent of being thrown a bar of the finest Belgian chocolate on the planet along with a prime selection of those bodice-ripper romance novels that Lavender Brown would sometimes read to her and her roommates back in the dorms during their school days - it was that good.

However, Malfoy wouldn't be Malfoy if he didn't say something to spoil such a wonderful proposal…

"I want you here so that when I wake up, I can shag you if I desire, Granger."

Seeing red was one of those metaphorical phrases she'd always thought to be ludicrously ridiculous and quite impossible to accomplish until just that moment.

She opened her mouth to tell him to stick his offer where the sun didn't shine, but in a quick move, he shut her down with a kiss that melted her into the floor and turned her brains to utter mush. To make matters more shocking, as he worked her lips over, he reached up and removed her slave collar from about her neck, tossing it aside with a negligent throw. That was her second surprise of the day.

Playfully nipping at her now-fully exposed throat, he finished his explanation: "I also want you here so that when you wake up, you can shag me if you desire, Hermione."

What he was implying – that he intended to treat her as an equal from then on, and no longer as a servant – touched her deep inside, and was enough to make her agree to the new living arrangements. If he was willing to take this scary step, then she would be brave enough to meet him half-way. After all, it wasn't as if she didn't like the git. He was amusing and intelligent, and oh, so very sexy.

The third surprise was to present her with a new wand. He'd gone out last night on a raid of Diagon Alley's abandoned shops with Nott, Pucey and Bole, and he'd picked the wand out for her from the ruins of Ollivander's shop. They'd discussed her old wand – lost during the war - a few days before when they'd talked about her needs for the new lab and the experiments she might have to run there. When asked, she'd told him its properties, and obviously, the man had remembered, because her new wand was made of the exact same materials. Oh, it wasn't a perfect magical fit, as each wand had a personality of its own and this one hadn't chosen her directly, but had been chosen for her by a third party. However, it had seemed to accept her once she'd held it in her hand and said 'hello' to it.

Giving her freedom and her magic back, and making the public declaration of intent that they were a real couple, no longer Master-Servant bound - by moving her into his private chambers - had been so overwhelming that Hermione had burst into tears of happiness. For the first time in years, she'd felt truly alive.

Draco had then made her feel even more so minutes later when he'd stripped them of their clothes and mated her again in their bed. In the throes of passion, she let the carefully guarded shields over her heart slip and allowed her lover in. It had been more than a little scary for her to be willing to trust this much so soon, especially after being deeply hurt by others in the not-so-distant past, so she'd taken hold of his hand, entwining their fingers, and held onto him for support.

As they made love to each other, she told him with her eyes what she was too afraid to speak aloud. Draco smiled at her in understanding, his silvery gaze lit with the same emotion.

X~~~~~X

Goyle and Nott arrived in the labs that night at a quarter past eight as Hermione was getting everything prepared to begin her experiments. She'd decided nighttime was best for such work, in case she needed any help from any of the resident Vampires in the house aside from Malfoy.

Her two "guests" each bore her a grisly gift…

Theo tossed a freshly torn zombie limb – an arm, from shoulder to rotted fingers – onto the center table. Gregory very neatly stacked a spinal column attached to half a brain next to it. "Delivery," Nott gleefully stated. "Picked them up no more than an hour ago in London proper – just as instructed."

Thankfully, Hermione was already wearing the protective biohazard suit that she'd transfigured earlier (she got the idea from the Dustin Hoffman movie, "Outbreak"), so when some droplets of blood splashed up and struck her chest from the limb that Nott had so carelessly chucked, she felt relatively safe - at least, enough not to go into panic mode. With a quick wave of her wand, she banished the blood and was spotless again. She then very carefully cast a Stasis Charm about the messy table, and Scourgify'd the area around it.

Taking in the two men next, noting the gore that covered their clothing, she cleaned them up with another magical wave. "Scourgify," she cast over both of them – three times a piece before she was satisfied that they were clean. "I want you both to Apparate directly from this lab to your bathrooms and immediately get in the shower," she instructed in a very no-nonsense tone. "Don't stop to talk to anyone or even to use the loo. Get under the water immediately and scrub up twice from head to toe with soap. No fooling around here, gentlemen. This virus is the most deadly disease on the planet, and I'm not sure if it affects Vampires or not, regardless of your undead status."

Nott looked suddenly very pale and panicked. "I thought it was only contagious if you were bitten by one of the infected."

She shook her head. "We have no idea as to whether this thing has mutated or not."

"Well, fuck-a-doodle-doo, if I'd known that in advance, I wouldn't have volunteered!" the Setite Vampire admitted. "Why the hell didn't someone tell me something that fucking important?"

Hermione met his flared, panicked gaze with a steely resolve. "Consider yourself properly advised."

He looked at her then – really looked. "You're as cold and bossy as I remember from school." A smirk filled with fascination and sexual heat worked its way up his cheek. "Bet you like it rough in bed – a real hellion, yeah?"

Before she could open her mouth to remonstrate the man, Goyle had him by the throat with one large, meaty hand and his eyes shifted to the brilliant amber of a wolf. "She's Draco's," he growled, and his voice had dropped an octave, whisky-rough and full of barely-restrained violence.

Theodore's face paled out again, and his smirk disappeared in a flash. "Right," he agreed, putting his hands up to ward off the man who outweighed him by a good fifty pounds of muscle. "Joking, mate."

Greg released him with a solid push and immediately, Nott Apparated away, hopefully to follow her instructions to the letter.

"Thank you."

It was a surreal moment for her – she was actually was grateful to Gregory Goyle for something. The boy he'd been had been little more than Draco's stooge and as much a bully as his Housemate in Slytherin. As an adult, she supposed that he'd changed as a result of having been forced to undergo the Embrace of a near-rabid Grangrel, but that strong loyalty to Malfoy had, apparently, not wavered. No wonder no one moved on Malfoy's position as head of the household, despite how competitive Vampires were in general for top spot. With friends like Goyle, he had some powerful muscle on his side.

"If you need more, I'll go," he offered, then turned to leave the lab.

"Wait," Hermione called after him.

Despite his hulking size – he might have slimmed down in the middle, but he made up for that weight loss in pure muscle - Goyle stopped on a knut to glance over his shoulder at her. It struck her then how he had matured into a rather handsome-looking bloke, especially with the help of the added genetics of his Vampire Sire. His maker may have been more animal than man, but the Vamp who had turned Gregory into his Kine had also been noted as being a stunning specimen in both strength and appearance. Clearly, he'd passed those traits onto his Bloodlet.

She hoped she was making the right move here…

"I'm going to take a walk around the garden later tonight with Sage," she hesitantly stated. "We've cleared it with Pucey. Would you like to come with? We could use the… protection… you know, just in case."

At mention of Kelleen's name, Goyle's expression lit up with interest. He nodded in acceptance of the invite.

"Meet us at the back door off of the kitchens at eleven, then," she cheerfully directed. "Oh, and please don't forget to directly Apparate to your room to shower from here… and maybe even burn those clothes and shoes, as an added precaution. If the zombie disease spread within these walls, everyone here could die. I can't stress that enough, Gregory. Constant vigilance!"

His grin was slow, but bright when it appeared. "You sound like Old Mad-Eye," he commented, and in a rumble of thunder, he Disapparated.

It was funny how such a small reminder of their school days could once more depress her.

Shunting aside memories of fourth year, and their inevitable logic chain to Harry, Ron, Cedric and the false Moody, she carefully began dissecting the zombie flesh and taking samples, using magic to move the infected pieces onto prepared microscope slides. Thank heavens Malfoy had been able to get her the kind of research materials on viruses and the equipment she needed by raiding a Muggle hospital pathology lab, as she'd directed him to do just yesterday. There was a built-in digital camera on the microscope he'd brought back. It also had a memory storage card attached so she could save the pictures and then go back and cycle through them on the attached LCD screen, if she wanted. The whole thing was powered by Lithium-ion batteries with a long lifespan, thankfully, so she didn't need to come up with a way of jury-rigging electricity to make things work.

The real work began that night.

TO BE CONTINUED…

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

Lamia = The Sisters of Death. A Fourth Generational Clan. An extinct blood lineage of Vampires off of the Cappadocian Clan who are all women. When they bite males of any species, they curse them with "The Seed of Lilith," which is a virulent and fatal disease. Bellatrix Lestrange was made a Lamia Vampire for this fanfic.

Setite = Nickname for the Followers of Set Clan, of which the Serpents of the Light are an off-shoot.

Changes I made to White Wolf Universe canon to make this fic work:

In this fanfic, I have made the Lamia bloodline not extinct (as it is in the actual White Wolf Universe), but on the verge of being so. There is only one left in the world, and she went missing after Embracing Bellatrix Lestrange.