"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" three voices asked Harry simultaneously. He shushed his friends and turned an ear toward the other end of the street. Hermione, Draco, and Ron stared at him, until a scream rang out.
The Gryffindor started sprinting.
"Harry, wait!" She glanced at Ron and Draco; the first shrugged and the second shook his head as they watched him go. She sighed and took off after him. The crunch of her feet alerted the other boys of what was happening.
"Hermione—" Draco began, but she was already too far by then.
Hogsmeade was in chaos. Students were screaming, crying, running, and they weren't alone. Other shoppers were doing much the same, though there was the rare person hurling spells toward figures in black robes and eerie masks. Hermione froze as she noted a man in a black and white mask, bars over a slit where the mouth would be, creeping toward Lavender Brown. A red spell crashed into him and he fell backward.
Harry reached down his nondominant hand to help the fellow Gryffindor to her feet. "Go back to the castle," he ordered, and the girl nodded and took off.
That was all Hermione needed to spur her into action.
Clad in the invisibility cloak as she was, Hermione slinked along the slush to disguise her footsteps. A man in a coppery mask was her target; he had cornered two small boys who looked to be third years at best. One of them was screaming and rolling on the ground while the man cackled.
Fire blazed through her at the sight. "Confringo!"
The spell rolled toward him and hurled him into the outside of a nearby shop. He grunted as his body hit, then his head whipped back with an audible thunk! and he slipped down to puddle on the ground.
She cast Disillusionment on the boys next and yelled at them to run, which they did, albeit glancing every which way in befuddled gratefulness.
When she surveyed the chaos next, it was to find Ron and Draco back-to-back amid the fight. She sought out Harry to find him with one of the staff chaperones for the day. Nearby stood Professor McGonegall, standing tall and proud as she launched spells at their attackers.
"Travers? I'd recognize that shoddy spellwork anywhere," the woman's Scottish brogue decried. Hermione resisted the urge to laugh. "How disappointing to find you here attacking school children."
"Not just children, professor," the man replied. "Mudbloods, blood traitors, and those who teach them, too."
Her teacher huffed. "You never were a bright one."
"Yet you haven't beat me, have you, you old bitch?"
That was it. The insult fanned the flames that had banked after her first spell, and she cast oppugno on rocks that lined the way. Pebbles to stones nearly the side of her fist rained against the man, who was batting them away with one hand while trying to cast with the other.
"What—"
"It's Hermione Granger, professor," she murmured lowly to the professor. "I'm wearing an invisibility cloak."
The woman's eyes widened, and she shook her head and muttered, "Potters. They never can help themselves. You, Miss Granger, are not supposed to be here. It isn't safe."
"I don't think it's safe for anyone right now," she pointed out.
"True enough." McGonegall sighed. "Very well. Just— be careful."
"Yes, ma'am." She turned in time to curse a masked figure who had set sights on the professor. Unfortunately, this individual was good. He saw the sparks flying and effectively blocked her stunner.
"Invisible opponent!" A strong masculine baritone rang out from the figure, and she hissed in irritation and sprinted in the other direction in an effort to shake off the fighter. It didn't work.
When she glanced over her shoulder, it was to find the eyeholes of the mask turned toward the dirt.
"Stupefy!"
The man shielded against it and sent his own, which Hermione narrowly avoided. She was so set on the figure behind her she didn't pay enough attention ahead and tripped over something on the ground— a body which had fallen while she was looking away. She spilled across the ground, the cloak riding up to bare her legs.
Before she could rise, the man was upon her, shoving the cloak out of the way to reveal his quarry. He had one large, gloved hand wrapped around her wrist and pinning her wand to the ground, on his knees settled over her stomach, but he did nothing further. For one long moment, he just sat there and stared through the dark pits in the bronze mask. Finally, he sneered and pushed off of her. "Leave, Mudblood, before I decide to test out a new curse on your filthy hide." When she didn't move, the man kicked her.
Hermione scrambled to her feet, holding out her wand as she did. In her other hand was the bunched-up cloak. She backed away a few steps, then the man seemed satisfied and left her there.
The cloak went back over her head, and she skirted the outskirts of the village, watching the bronze-masked man stalk through the battlefield as though he were untouchable. He cried out a foreign spell and green light shot into the sky to form a skull. The screaming mouth of the macabre object housed a snake that wrapped around it in a figure eight.
Heads turned up in symphony and, all at once, the masked figures disapparated.
For a moment, no one did anything, and then the survivors began helping one another up or searching through the bodies.
"Hermione!"
Her name was called in triplicate; she surveyed the village until she found the boys and jogged to them. "Here! I'm right here."
Draco dragged her into a hug quite awkwardly, and more than one person frowned as the oddity of a boy hugging the air. "Don't run off like that again."
She nodded, then realized he couldn't see it. "I'm sorry. I'm okay, I promise." He breathed deeply and kept his hold on her until a cough made her jump.
"We should help the professors with the younger students, yeah?" asked Harry.
"Yes," she agreed, and the others echoed, albeit Ron a bit more slowly. They began sorting through the survivors. Students were sent to McGonegall for accounting and villagers were just checked over for major injuries. Healers from St. Mungos arrived on the scene and took stock of the wounded, and then Aurors, though Hermione had no clue why it took them so long. Harry bolted toward his father.
"— at least five different attackers since all the masks were different," she heard her friend inform the older man as she approached. "I couldn't see Hermione, of course, but we found her after and—"
"And I'm fine," she finished for him. "Although something rather strange happened." She was hesitant to tell, but it might have significance.
Hazel eyes stared out from under familiar, untidy black hair. It sometimes unnerved her, how heavily Harry favored his father. Violet was much more equal in her parental physicality.
"Go on, Hermione." It was almost as though James could tell where she was, though she put that down to plenty of practice over the years.
She played with one sleeve and thought of how to describe the event. "One of the men, one in a bronze mask with a sort of swirling textured pattern, he— well, he was attacking Professor McGonegall. I sent a stunner at him, and he started attacking me. I tripped." It was embarrassing to admit. "When he saw me, he just stared for a minute, then told me to leave. I don't think he wanted to let me go, not when he was attacking others regardless of age and seeming bloodstatus, though..." She frowned. "He knew I was a muggleborn. Is there a way to tell, other than through records or lineage spells?"
"There is not," said James.
She shook her head in disbelief that this stranger had recognized her. Masked though he had been, she was sure she'd never met the man whose murderous grey eyes burned through the dark holes in his mask. "He knew who I was somehow."
The Auror ran a hand through his dark hair. "And he was masked. Was his voice familiar?"
"No. I didn't know him. I'm sure of it."
Harry exchanged a long look with his father. "D'you think maybe Mister Malfoy sent them?"
"He'd have had them capture me if that was the case." She knew that much. "And I don't think he has so many open supporters now."
"Hermione is right," the man agreed. "This doesn't feel like a Malfoy move to me."
They stood silently for a moment, perhaps all considering the interaction from different angles, before a reedy voice interrupted their musings.
"Potter— Not you, James, your son. It's time to go back to the castle, young Mister Potter." The woman pursed her lips. "Oh, is she still with you?"
"Yes, professor," Harry called back.
"Good, good. Bring her along."
Hermione tucked an invisible finger through one of his belt loops. "Ready when you are," she whispered. They bade goodbye to James Potter and headed back.
Ron and Draco had been looped into assisting with small groups of students, so the two were left to make their way back alone.
"If it wasn't Mister Malfoy, who do you think sent those men?" Harry speculated.
She hummed. "Did you see that thing in the sky at the end? The man who attacked me cast it."
"Oh yeah. A snake coming out of a skull." He shuddered. "I heard his cast it. It was something like mors mordra. Or mordray. "
Hermione contemplated that. "Mors is a Latin word for death, but neither of those other pronunciations mean anything to me. Maybe mordere , meaning 'to bite?" That reminded her of something, one of the few similarities between her time with the Malfoys and her childhood. This particular word was more heavily associated with the latter; her parents had been fluent in French and were dentists. " Mordre ." Harry snapped his
Fingers in epiphany and agreed. "It's French. Same meaning though. Death bite? Bite death? Death biting?" She shook her head. "Why mix Latin and French? Seems like clumsy spellwork to me."
"Only you would nitpick over something like mixing romantic languages in spell crafting after a battle," her friend mocked gently.
"Well, it tells us something about our attackers. They have no eye for detail."
Harry chuckled. "Clearly. You should tell them next time we meet. 'Scuse me, sorry, but did you realize you're using French and Latin in your snake-y symbol spell? No? Well, I just thought you should know.'"
"And then they'd call me a know-it-all, and all attack at once," she supplied.
"That's just fine, since they've such shoddy spellwork," he finished.
She laughed.
Notes:
I'm trying to get more on schedule with my writing again. Getting COVID twice last year, the loss of my dog, depression, etc, all really took its toll (though I still managed to write 342747 words).
On that note, here's my monthly announcement freya-fallen/738433930452140032/january?source=share
You can also see announcements on Twitter.
My plan is to finish this story this year. I'm on the last arc- there's ten or so more on this arc before we get there with the posts though. So hold on right; this is gonna be a wild ride!