Hermione wasn't sure when the witching hour was. She'd read stories where it was at midnight, and she'd read stories where it was at 3am. Dawn on midsummer was set to be shortly after 4am that far north, at Stonehenge, so it could be either one.
Instead of asking anyone or writing to her blackmailer for clarification, Hermione refused to embarrass herself by admitting she didn't know when such a basic wizarding thing was. She decided she'd just go at midnight, and if Sylvia wasn't there, she'd hang around and practice magic until she turned up.
Hermione went to bed early Monday night and slept until quarter till midnight, woke up, Time-Turned, made her way to the third-floor corridor with spare beds, and went back to sleep again. She wasn't about to face down an Unspeakable without a full night's rest, no matter what time she had to meet.
When she awoke the second time, Hermione returned to her dormitory, dressed in her favorite green robes, and carefully packed her bag, wrapping the Elixir flasks in a school robe to protect them. She wore her sturdiest boots, the ones she could run in the best, and tied her hair back as best she could. Then it was just a matter of waiting.
Hermione sat on the floor in her dormitory bathroom with her eyes closed, ready to go at any moment. It wasn't quite time yet, though – the longest day of daylight of the year hadn't quite begun. Though it was close – she could feel the magic of Hogwarts moving, and the ley lines seemed as if they were shifting—
There was a deep resonant twanging, almost, as the ley lines shifted and locked into place with a determination Hermione hadn't expected. The dim bong – bong – bong of the grandfather clock in the common room echoed in her ears, declaring it midnight.
The ley lines were open. It was time.
Hermione took a deep breath, centered herself, and drew aside the veil of mist of the ley line, vanishing from the school silently in the dead of night.
Even at night, Stonehenge was breathtaking.
It was almost a full moon, giving Hermione enough light to look around and walk without worry of crashing into something in the dark. And out here in the middle of nowhere, the stars glittered in the sky with no impediment, and Hermione sat down to just appreciate their beauty for several minutes as she waited, just looking up at galaxies with quiet amazement.
That got old, though.
By the time Sylvia arrived at 2:59am, appearing silently in the center of the stones, Hermione had made up a game of leaping from stone to stone, trying to make it around the circle without falling. She hadn't managed it yet – some of them didn't have horizontal stones on top of them and had very narrow tops – and she was about to leap again when laughter from nowhere caught her off-guard, making Hermione shriek and topple off the stone and plummet toward the ground.
The 13-foot fall didn't matter; her air magic caught her immediately, and a moment later, Hermione was gliding smoothly to the ground, glaring at Sylvia.
"That was dangerous and irresponsible of you, to startle me like that," Hermione snapped at her. "I could have been really hurt!"
Sylvia looked amused.
"So that's how you're planning to do it," she mused. "You can fly. I've spent months charm-breaking a Cleansweep, but of course you can just fly. Why wouldn't you?"
"What are you talking about?" Hermione demanded. "I thought you Apparated in. I didn't see you come in on broom."
Sylvia ignored her.
"Do you have what I asked for?" Sylvia's voice was calm, completely normal, as if she'd asked for a quill and not for the Elixir of Life, which she had blackmailed Hermione into making.
"I do." Hermione held her head high, doing her best to be unafraid. "Do you have my book?"
Sylvia grinned. It was almost a pleasant smile at first, but her lips stretched just a bit too far, and for a moment in the moonlight, Sylvia looked crazed and deranged, just like you might imagine a blackmailing Lestrange to be. She withdrew a small book from her pocket.
"I do," she said. She raised an eyebrow. "Shall we trade?"
Cautiously, Hermione stepped towards Sylvia. She pulled one of the flasks from her bag, handing it to Sylvia as Sylvia handed over the book. Hermione gave Sylvia a second flask, just to be sure. She flipped through the book, letting out a sigh of relief as she verified it was the genuine thing.
"This is the Elixir of Life?" Sylvia asked. "You'ire sure?"
"Yes, I'm bloody sure," Hermione snapped. She scowled. "You have no idea what I went through figuring out how to make and test the bloody thing."
"No, I don't," Sylvia laughed. "Nor do I care, really. So long as it works…"
She shrugged ambivalently, easily, and Hermione's temper flared.
"Why are you doing this?" she demanded. "You could have just asked me for help. Why blackmail me? Why kidnap me? Why all the secrecy and subterfuge?"
Sylvia's eyes darkened.
"If you were carrying out a dark and highly illegal plan, would you openly ask for help with it?" she said, her voice deathly quiet. "Would you just trust someone to keep your secrets? Or would you use your hold over them to force them not to betray you?"
Hermione bit her lip uneasily.
"I…"
She didn't have to think about what she would do; Hermione had been in that exact situation already, and she'd made her choice.
Hermione had told no one about the activities she'd planned for midsummer night, save the one person who she had the ultimate hold over. Tom Riddle couldn't betray her without being destroyed, and given the act of evil he'd committed, it was his only chance to atone for his actions in making the horcrux and convince her he had morally changed. It was just as Sylvia had said – she wasn't trusting someone to keep her secrets, but utilizing the one person she could force not to betray her…
Sylvia's eyes glittered in triumph.
"That's what I thought," she said in tones of satisfaction. "You would do the exact same as me."
"What are you going to do with it?" Hermione asked, watching as Sylvia pocketed both flasks. "Two flasks aren't enough for immortality, not nearly."
"Not your concern," Sylvia shrugged. "I'll use them as I please."
"I was offering to help, you dim-witted watermelon," Hermione snapped, annoyed. "If you were trying to heal someone, for example, and if you didn't have enough, I could come and help or make more—"
Sylvia laughed.
"A watermelon?" she mused. "That's new." Her eyes refocused on Hermione, glittering. "Do not worry about me, sweet girl. You have rather enough to worry about tonight, mm?"
Sylvia vanished, with nary so much as a pop, and Hermione's eyes widened, staring at the place where she had stood.
A minute later, once she was sure Sylvia was gone, Hermione vanished as well, floating in the ley line as a bubble to get back to school.
Hermione was immensely, incredibly relieved to have the original Pureblood Directory in her hands. It was the only copy that didn't have the information about New Bloods in it, and the only thing that could condemn her and reveal to the world that New Bloods were made up, that they weren't real at all. Now that it was in her possession, no one else could use it against her.
Hermione didn't know what to do with the damn thing.
Her first thought was to destroy it – Fiendfyre could destroy anything; it'd swallow a book quite nicely. But some part of her recoiled at that, instinctively flinching from the implications of a book burning. What if she needed the original someday, and she'd destroyed it? What if she needed to not be seen as a New Blood for some reason, and she had to tear down her own charade?
In the end, she'd bound it up tightly, jinxed it with every jinx she knew, and laid a minor blood ward down on the ribbon she'd tied it closed with, forbidding anyone not of her bloodline to touch it. She buried it deep in her trunk of forbidden books and pushed the matter from her mind. Sylvia had been right, after all – she had quite enough to worry about for tonight.
Breakfast was lazy and light-hearted, and Hermione wandered to the library for a bit of light reading before heading outside to enjoy the weather. The last days of the term were carefree, generally, as the teachers worked to finish grading their exams, and it was nice to relax and mentally recover. Hermione claimed a place in the shade underneath a tree on the grounds, and she opened her book to read.
Other students were outside as well, laughing and chatting, everyone relaxing and enjoying the sun. Several students were swimming in the lake – Hermione could hear the splashes – and from the sounds and shrieks, someone had been pushed into the lake as well. Impromptu games of Quidditch broke out on the grounds, not bound to the stadium, and Hermione saw Harry zipping around on his Firebolt after lunch, helping to catch stray Snitches that had managed to escape.
A short while later, he came and landed next to her, relaxing under the tree with her.
"Brilliant weather, isn't it?" Harry said. "Not too hot, not too windy. I hope it stays like this all summer."
"It'd be nice," Hermione mused.
They watched their classmates play in a comfortable silence for a while, both of them laughing when a Ravenclaw got pelted straight in the face with a Quaffle for not paying attention to the game.
"It's Midsummer, yeah?" Harry glanced over at Hermione. "It's a special day. Are we doing anything special for it?"
Hermione kept her voice and breathing even.
"I didn't have a ritual or anything for it planned," she said. "Is there something you wanted to do?"
"Nah." Harry scowled for a moment. "I just wondered. I was talking to Luna, and she made it seem like some big thing was going to go down. I couldn't tell if she meant we were going to do some big thing, or just some big thing was going to happen elsewhere."
"Luna sees things that we can't," Hermione said, amused. "Who knows what she might have meant?"
"Yeah…" Harry sighed. "I wanted to do the Blood Debt Ritual again, so we could re-catch Pettigrew, but Susan said it doesn't work like that."
"We could have only done it a second time if it hadn't worked the first time," Hermione agreed. "To Magic, you called him to account for his crimes, and the debt is 'settled'. Magic doesn't care that he escaped."
Harry made a face. "I guess. Still. I wish there was something I could do."
Hermione laughed. "Buy Ron a new pet, maybe."
Harry grinned. "There is that."
Harry watched as a modified Quidditch game grew closer to them. It seemed like they were playing with three Quaffles, no Bludgers, and a live pigeon. Hermione had no idea what the rules were.
"I'm just worried," Harry said, after a while. He didn't look at her. "If he goes and finds Voldemort… well, then Voldemort has a helper again, doesn't he?"
"Voldemort will probably find a way to come back eventually anyway," Hermione said gently. "Him coming back with the help of someone as inept as Pettigrew might be the best-case scenario, really."
Harry sighed. "I guess."
As Hermione thought it over, the idea of Pettigrew helping Voldemort, she wondered how they would go about trying to rebuild him. They'd have to use ritual magic, she expected; both of them were wandless, though, so—
Her thoughts came to a panicked, screeching halt, her eyes going wide.
Wandless.
"Hey, Harry," Hermione said, her tone very casual, "can I try something with your wand?"
Harry blinked. "Um. Sure." He handed it to her, and she put it on the ground in front of her, withdrawing her own wand. "What are you going to do?"
"Undoubtedly, something very dumb," Hermione said, taking aim. "Gemino."
When Hermione awoke, her head was pounding, and Harry was looking down at her worriedly.
"You passed out," he said, as soon as her eyes flickered open. "You collapsed right after casting that spell."
Hermione groaned, stretching and pushing herself up off the ground, her head spinning.
"I believe it," she said. "There was this huge drop in my magic, and I felt like I couldn't breathe—"
"You just kind of crumpled," Harry told her. His green eyes were serious. "I caught you, but Hermione—don't do that to me. Do you know how scared I was to see you collapse with no warning?"
"I didn't know I was going to collapse," Hermione protested. "I've duplicated magical things before, and it always takes a lot more magical power, but I didn't realize—"
"Well," Harry said. "You got something."
Hermione turned to examine what her magic had wrought.
It was a wand, certainly, or something that looked like a wand. It was wooden, the same length as Harry's, but when Hermione picked it up, it didn't have the same hum of power that Harry's had held in her hand.
"I think I duplicated just the materials," she said, examining it curiously. "I think the phoenix feather is in there, and the wood is holly…" She cast a charm on it, an Ancient Rune glowing in the air above the wooden rod. "Ah! So I got all the materials, and I even duplicated the magic runes inside it, but I couldn't duplicate the magic in the Runes. Ollivander put his own magic into the runes when he made the wand, and my magic couldn't copy that."
"Bizarre," Harry said. "Makes sense, though. Wand-making is a difficult art, I've heard."
Hermione tucked the odd wooden duplicate away in her bag. It might not be a full wand, but it still had runes of power and a phoenix tail feather in it. And in a fight with a dementor, even the slightest edge might help out.
