Disclaimer: "I want to own Harry Potter." ... Hop ... "I want to own Harry Potter." ... Hop ... "I want to own Harry Potter." ... Hop ... A small doll with a lightning scar appears out of thin air ... mhh, maybe I should have been more specific ... So, I still don't own the Harry Potter universe ... sigh, maybe next time...

AN: Here is the first chapter. I hope you enjoy it and remember to drop me a line or two :-)!

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Chapter 1: A Strange Meeting

Three months earlier….

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In another life, maybe, Hermione would have stayed and seen her best friend defeat Voldemort. She might have seen him cast off his cloak, might have seen the bright light of spells clashing. Might have cheered with the others when the dark wizard fell.

As it was she was three corridors over, still believing her best friend to be dead.

In another life, maybe, Hermione wouldn't have seen the flash of blond sneak around a half-destroyed column. Or if she had, she might not have cared. She might not have followed him.

But she did.

Harry was dead. It was the one thing her brain was turning around and around, relentlessly. Harry was dead and there was Draco Malfoy, coward that he was, sneaking off from the last battle.

She didn't know why it bothered her. If he had been on the other side of the Great Hall fighting alongside all the other evil cockroaches she would not have cared. But he wasn't; he was slinking away and she couldn't let him. She just couldn't let him get away with this one last act of cowardice.

He was quick, she had to give him that. He was rushing through half destroyed halls, jumping over rubble and narrowly avoiding stray curses here and there. A few feet from the staircase to the dungeons she almost lost him.

A curse had been sailing her way and she had barely had time to duck before it collided with the wall above her head. Looking over her shoulder she saw Kingsley Shacklebolt. At his feet was a crumbled body, dark robes peeking out from between the rubble. A Death Eater.

When she turned back around, Draco Malfoy was gone. Cursing herself for her inattention she ran towards the stairs. Was that a sliver of white skin and pale hair at the end of the dark corridor leading to the Slytherin Dormitories? She leant forward, squinting. No, it was a torch, flickering uselessly against the encroaching darkness.

She was just debating returning to the Great Hall – what the hell was she doing here anyway? Her friends needed her – when a muffled scream had her jerking around. Kingsley was gone, no doubt back to the Hall. Another scream, enraged, desperate.

It had her sprinting down the corridor to her right. She slowed down at the end of the hall and cautiously peeked around the corner. What she saw had her jerking her head back, cursing under her breath.

She had found Malfoy and he was no longer alone. There was another man in a dark robe, his mask long since discarded.

Slowly, slowly, Hermione raised her wand and peeked around the corner again.

They were fighting. Bright lights clashed, held and separated before a particularly nasty Confringo exploded just a few feet away from her and forced her to seek shelter behind an overturned suit of armour.

For what felt like the first time in her life, Hermione Granger was unsure what to do. Should she help Malfoy? Malfoy, her childhood bully? Malfoy, the Death Eater? Malfoy, whose actions had led to Dumbledore's death? Malfoy, who had simply watched while his crazy aunt tortured her?

Gripping her wand tighter, she glanced over the suit's shoulder just in time to see a glittering object sail through the air. It landed a few feet away from her, spun in place, before coming to rest against the suit's helmet. If she stretched out a bit, angled her body just so she might be able to reach it.

It was closer than she had thought. A quick levitation charm and her fingers closed over cold glass. What was it? Cautiously, Hermione opened her palm. A pendant. A green emerald set in metal darkened with age. There were silver runes she had never seen before running along the metal casing.

On the other side of the armour, there was a scream. Then silence. Heart pounding, Hermione turned back to the fight.

For a moment, she couldn't see anybody. Were they both dead?

No. There was the body of the Death Eater. His head bent backwards at an unnatural angle. His eyes staring straight at her. Unseeing. Though she had never seen him before, she knew who he was. She had his picture - cut out of a newspaper article back when he first escaped Azkaban - pasted into her little black book under the heading Inner Circle; it was always good to know the enemy.

Rodolphus Lestrange, husband of Bellatrix Lestrange, was dead.

Malfoy, on the other hand, was very much alive. He had been bent over another body Hermione hadn't noticed in the confusion of the fight, but now he staggered to his feet and moved towards Lestrange's prone form.

Hermione sucked in a breath. Narcissa Malfoy was lying on the floor, her long blond hair in an uncharacteristic disarray around her aristocratic face, her eyes just as lifeless as her brother-in-law's.

Only then did she notice that Malfoy's shoulders were visibly shaking and his face was wet. He was muttering to himself, his movements erratic as he was rummaging through Lestrange's robes. "Must be … bloody fucking … where is it?"

Taking advantage of his distraction, Hermione came slowly to her feet, keeping her wand drained on Malfoy. "I think that is quite enough, Malfoy," she said, "Step away from the body. Slowly and let me see your hands."

He turned his frantic eyes to her. There was blood splattered over one side of his face and dripping from a wound on the other. His robes were cut and sliced in various places and the ends of his hair were singed from when they had narrowly escaped the Room of Hidden Things just hours earlier. He truly looked a fright. In fact, Hermione had never seen him less than perfectly put together, not even when Voldemort had taken over his family home and even Lucius Malfoy hadn't bothered with personal hygiene. He narrowed those grey eyes at her. "What are you doing here, Granger?"

"Hands, Malfoy", she repeated and motioned with her wand. "Don't make me say it twice."

His eyes dropped to her wand and he came slowly to his feet. "Never thought I would have to point out the obvious to you, mudblood," despite his taunting words, there wasn't much bite to his tone. He simply sounded tired, defeated. "You already said it tw-" Suddenly, his whole body snapped to attention. "Where did you get that," he hissed.

Confused, Hermione took a step back. "Wha-"

"The medallion!" He was moving towards her, his eyes intent on her left hand. "Give it to me, now!"

"Stop," Hermione screamed and fired a Stupify at him, but she stumbled over the suit of armour behind her and the hex went wide.

The next thing she knew, Draco Malfoy was on top of her, one hand gripping her wand hand with punishing force, the other grappling for the pendant she still held in her left hand.

"Let go of me," she hissed, struggling with growing desperation against him, "get off, get off, get-"

His hand found the pendant and everything went white.

Atop of her, Draco Malfoy turned his too still face to hers, his lily-white skin growing ruddy, his mouth stretching long, inhumanly long, between one ear and the other, sharp long teeth splitting his lips and dripping blood down his short stubby throat. His eyes grew small and beady, glowing a sickly yellow and his nose disappeared into his face until there were only slits left where his nostrils had been.

"And now, ma sweet", the demon drawled, his long, long tongue licking from collarbone to cheek, leaving a trail of green drool behind, "I will eat you."

…..

Gasping for breath, Hermione Granger sat up in her bed. Or what passed for a bed these days. She had been having the Dream – as she had come to call it – on and off for years since the final battle against Voldemort. Most of it was true, though the end varied from time to time.

In reality, after Malfoy had touched Rodolphus's medallion they had both passed out and only come to in the Great Hall among all the other wounded. Hermione had woken up surrounded by the tight circle of her friends, overjoyed to learn that Voldemort had died and Fred had come back from the dead, though nobody quite knew how either feat had been accomplished.

On the other side of the hall, close to the prisoners but not quite part of them, Malfoy had known his own moment of inexpressible joy when his mother, alive and well, had taken his hand in hers and wept.

But her dreams never showed her these scenes, instead, they mostly ended with Malfoy getting up and taking her hand. Sometimes, he would look disgusted at having touched her or spew out insults. Once or twice he had even attacked her.

One time, though, he had kissed her; Hermione preferred not to remember that one.

The demon touch was a new one. Maybe it was because they had raided another lair only yesterday and the images were still stuck in her head. Or it was because today she would actually see Malfoy again – face to face – after more than four years.

In fact, she had only seen him once after the final battle and that had been at his court hearing. She and Harry had testified on behalf of Malfoy and his mother, though Ron had been adamantly against it. That had been just two weeks before the first demon attack and a month before the demons had overrun the Ministry. Malfoy and his mother, along with many other pureblood nobles, had gone into hiding after that.

At first, there had been many that believed the purebloods had loosened the demons to punish the Wizarding world for Voldemort's downfall. They theorized that the purebloods had lost control over their creations or were simply biding their time until the demons had weakened the Wizarding world sufficiently for them to take over.

But that was before they had found Rabastan Lestrange in the abandoned ruins of Azkaban, half driven mad and the sole survivor of the dementors' tender and un-checked care. He had admitted to them, under the influence of Veritaserum, that Voldemort had found the legendary Orb of Deliverance in a cave in Iraq and had planned to use it against the Order in case things went wrong. Not that the Dark Lord had ever admitted to his followers, even those of his innermost circle, that he thought something might go wrong. But Rabastan had seen him slip the Orb into his robes just before the final battle and he had seen it shatter in Voldemort's hands seconds before Harry's Expelliarmus had turned his killing curse on the Dark Lord himself.

After that, when Wizarding village after village all over the world fell prey to the demons, people either took the purebloods for the cowards they were or believed them to be dead. The demons were attracted to magic and almost immune to it, though they seemed to be unable to see or touch muggles. When they found a Witch or Wizard, however, they would attack without warning.

It took Hermione six devastating months before she found a way to make magic undetectable to the demons. She had not yet devised a way to make traditional spells and hexes work against them but she had managed to augment human weapons enough to kill even the stronger demons.

But by that time the losses had been staggering. Some estimated that Wizarding Britain had lost more than eighty percent of its population. Most of those who had survived had either actively joined the Order in their fight against this newest evil or were hidden by Hermione's protective wards in small camps all over the countryside.

It was at that time that a group of young purebloods, headed by Draco Malfoy, had begun fighting the demons as well. They didn't join the Order but they were willing to trade information from time to time. They had shared the secret of their survival in return for some of the weapons Hermione and Kingsley had crafted. And they had extended an offer to the Order.

There was an ancient fairy circle in the woods not far from Malfoy Manor. Demons could neither see it or what was hidden inside, nor – most importantly – could they breach its boundaries. That was where the purebloods had hidden themselves way.

Now, they offered to let the rest Wizarding Britain – or what was left of it – inside their sanctuary. On one condition.

Malfoy's one demand was simple. He would lead the resistance, not Kingsley and most certainly not Harry Potter. It seemed his hunger for power had not been diminished even faced with so much death and devastation.

The Order had not accepted. Until now.

Hermione's protective wards and anti-demon spells were not completely fail-safe. Sometimes they flickered, letting demons know where they were. Or sometimes a band of demons would simply stumble into them by chance alone. Just like the band of demons that had walked right into an Order safe house, killing many including Molly Weasley and Kingsley Shacklebold. The Order had hit back viciously, destroying the lair the demons had begun to build in their safe house but it had shown them just how vulnerable they still were.

And so Harry had decided to hold a referendum among the Order and the rest of Wizarding Britain's survivors. Would they be joining Malfoy and his purebloods or would they go on as they had been? It had been a close result but in the end, a majority had voted for Malfoy and the safety he offered.

Which was why they would be meeting Malfoy and some of his followers today to discuss terms. It was not a meeting Hermione was looking forward to, to say the least.

….

The moment Hermione, Harry and Minerva McGonagall touched the old shoe, the familiar feeling of disorientation and being squeezed through too-tight a hole took hold of them. Being portkeyed was one of those things that didn't get more pleasant with practice.

The meeting place was in a heavily warded tent on a clearing someplace close to Malfoy Manor. They had used it often in the last two years, though Hermione had only been here once to set up the wards. She could have stayed back then but had preferred not to meet the purebloods if she could help it. Though she wasn't willing to admit it, past taunts and hurts still stung and if she could avoid them than she would. Harry, ever observant, had picked up on her discomfort and never asked her to come along again.

Until today.

She knew Harry wouldn't have asked it of her, but Malfoy had demanded her presence specifically. Just one more reason why she wasn't looking forward to the meeting.

The moment they stepped through the wards, she could feel the supple shift that told her they were not the first to arrive. It wasn't the sickly energy of demons that would stick to her magic like slime, but an almost welcome pressure against the back of her mind; like a cat that pressed its back against your legs, begging to be petted.

By the sudden, straight set of Harry's shoulders, she could tell that he had felt it too. He looked towards her, "Ready?"

She took his hand, squeezed, "For better or worse."

Next to them, Minerva sighed, "Let's get this over with."

The tent's interior had been set up to mimic a richly appointed parlour with comfortable looking sofas to the sides and a cheery fire in the hearth. In the middle of the room was a round table with six chairs. On the far side, closest to the fire, three figures were already seated. Two stood up when they entered and Hermione recognized them immediately. Blaise Zabini had been expected, Horace Slughorn not so much. They had thought him dead, but apparently, he had used his connections to secure himself a place with the purebloods.

Next to Hermione Minerva stiffened, "It is good to see you alive, Horace."

Despite his considerable belly Horace managed a graceful bow, one side of his mouth twisting in an ironic smile Hermione had never seen on his face. "No need to lie, Minerva."

The lines on Minerva's face tightened but she said nothing.

At the far side of the table, Draco Malfoy cleared his throat. "I would stand up," he said, a mocking smile on his face, "but it seems I ran afoul a demon last night." It was then that Hermione noticed the sling supporting his right arm. "Do sit down, I promise I won't bite. Much." He looked directly at Hermione when he said it and she couldn't keep last night's dream from flashing through her mind. His smile deepened as if he knew just what she was thinking – and he liked it.

"If you are hurt, Mr Malfoy, we can postpone this meeting." Minerva's eyes were sharp behind her glasses as she studied her former student.

"Just a scratch," Malfoy said offhandedly, "nothing to concern yourselves about. Please, do sit."

Zabini and Slughorn sat back down and after some hesitation, the Order delegates followed. Blaise leaned back in his chair. "Well, this is off to a good start." Malfoy cut him a sharp glance and Zabini made a zipping gesture over his mouth.

Harry, sitting between Hermione and Minerva, conjured several rolls of parchment and busied himself with arranging them before him. "We are ready whenever you are, Malfoy."

Smirking, Malfoy gestured with his uninjured right hand. "You know what I want."

Harry's voice was tight. "Yes, we do. And I must warn you, Malfoy, although a majority voted to accept your leadership, there was a significant number who wants nothing to do with you."

The fire reflected on Malfoy's white teeth. "Well, they don't have to come, do they."

"We have voted, Mr Malfoy," Minerva said, "on the fate of all of us. So, it will be all of us who will come."

"But not all of you will like it," Hermione hadn't thought it possible, but Malfoy's smirk grew even wider. "Don't try to spare my feelings, Professor. It is a well-known fact that I don't have any."

"Oh, I do know that you have feelings, Mr Malfoy, though I was never quite sure what exactly they were."

They stared at each other; Harry cleared his throat, always the diplomat he had grown into over the last few years. "As I was saying, Malfoy, you need to be prepared for some opposition to your leadership."

"From you, you mean."

Harry cocked his head. "No, Malfoy. I voted to come to you."

Malfoy was silent and his smirk slipped a little. Hermione could see that he hadn't expected that. Then he looked at her. "And you, Granger?"

"How I voted is my own business, Malfoy, but I won't oppose you." It cost her to say it, but it was the truth. "As long as you won't mistreat anybody under your leadership."

"Always one to have the last word, eh Granger?" The grin was back but there was a shadow behind it and she thought it was pain. Looking closely at him she could see the faint sheen of sweat on his too pale face. There were tight lines around his eyes and she thought he might be hurt far worse than he let on. "Would my word suffice that I won't abuse my power?"

She swallowed. "As long as you keep it, though I would prefer a vow."

He chuckled; it was a dry, humourless sound. "Then a vow you will get, but it will have to wait until after the negotiations." He looked at the rest of them. "Is this all you demand?"

"No, Malfoy," Harry picked up the parchment in front of him. "There are several things we must discuss starting with the fact that we have an existing hierarchy of command among the Order and we would ask you to respect that."

"That is fine. Our offer to you is so that we might be stronger to fight and destroy the demons. We know that disbanding the Order will not help us achieve that goal." He leaned forward. "But know that I will have the last say on any and all missions you go on."

"Will you be an absolute monarch," Hermione couldn't help but ask, "or will you listen to our opinions as well?"

Malfoy's stare found her again and lingered. She could only just stop herself from fidgeting in her chair. She had always been cautious around Malfoy but never before had he made her nervous. "I have learned, Granger, that to ignore your opinions – however tempting it might be – is usually rather foolish." He finally said, before addressing the rest of them. "We might not always agree on everything but I will listen to what you have to say."

"Considering the circumstances, we can't ask for more." It was grudgingly said, but so very true.

Looking at Harry, Malfoy asked, "Who will lead the Order after Shacklebold's death? You, I presume."

"Yes."

Malfoy nodded, apparently satisfied with the answer. "Any other demands?"

"You will accept all of us as equals. We will not be treated as if we were the enemy you have conquered. And we will not accept any slurs against or mistreatment of those of us who don't have magical ancestors."

"I cannot swear that all of us have forgotten their past prejudices but faced with the demon menace we have had some time to rethink them. There is now a large fraction that values all magical talent no matter where it came from. It is that fraction which first proposed to offer you sanctuary. I can promise you that most of us will not see you as less for accepting our offer or for your blood status." He glanced at Hermione again at the end of his speech.

He leaned forward. "Until now my mother has been in charge of most matters not concerning defending from or actively fighting the demons. She has offered to gradually share her duties with one of your choosing. It is her hope that this will make you feel more like our allies and less like refugees among us."

For the first time since they had entered the tent, Minerva smiled. "That is very gracious of her, Mr Malfoy."

"You will find, Professor, that my mother is a very gracious person." He glanced at the roll of parchment still in Harry's hand. "Is that all?"

"The most pressing issues, yes. But we ask you to be willing to renegotiate in the coming months if more problems present themselves."

"I would be fully within my rights to refuse you that request." He leaned back and studied them. His voice sounded tired.

Hermione studied him in turn. "But you won't, because this will help keep the peace." She had never thought that there might be a day when Draco Malfoy valued peace over force.

"Yes, Granger, I won't. As much as it pains me, you are right. We cannot afford any infighting, not with the demons threatening to wipe us all from the face of this earth. I will agree to a meeting every three months to discuss any problems."

Harry's eyes narrowed. "Every month."

"Don't push your luck, Potter. Every two months, that or nothing."

"Agreed."

"There is one more thing." Malfoy shifted in his seat, seemingly trying to find a more comfortable position – and failing. "To be more efficient we propose to create a – what do the muggles call it? – task force made up of Order members and some of our own. They will not be part of the active fighting but work behind the scenes to research ways to better combat the demons and how to protect ourselves from them more effectively." He glanced at Hermione and grinned, reminding her that her shield-charms had failed in the past. She truly hated him in that moment. "They will be the ones who will develop and produce our weapons. And most importantly, they will be the ones who will research and look for clues on the Orb's shards."

Harry looked at him sharply. "Have you found any shards since last time?" The Order had, reluctantly, shared their knowledge of the Orb with the purebloods some months back; but aside from two memorable occasions, their help in the search had not yielded many results.

"Unfortunately, no. We have been much too occupied simply staying alive." His smirk was back. "As have you, I believe."

Hermione grudgingly had to admit it was true. So far, since they had interrogated Rabastan Lestrange and found out about the Orb they had only been able to find seven shards between them. Not very satisfying if it was true that the Orb had shattered into hundreds of pieces.

Malfoy was still talking. "…reason why we believe that dividing the tasks and pooling our resources might be more effective."

"If we agree to this," Harry said thoughtfully, "who will be leading this task force?" He didn't look particularly willing to hand over more power to Malfoy than he absolutely had to.

"Careful Potter, I believe I have been very, very reasonable so far." Malfoy leaned back and said the one name none of them would have expected. "Well, Granger here of course."

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Much Love, Picca