ghost riders in the sky, for indiana_j, (Harry Potter, PG)
Title: ghost riders in the sky
Author: Eisoj5
Recipient: indiana_j
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Request: With the removal of Voldemort, an older, more ancient power arises. With the Order scattered, how do the Trio (separated as well) survive long enough to make it back to each other?
Spoilers:Through the end of the series
Warnings: sadly unbetaed; any and all mistakes are therefore completely mine.
Summary: Ten years after Deathly Hallows, a new challenge looms.
*****
The first death came a week before Christmas.
Later, Hermione would remark that all the signs had been there from the start, and when Harry and Ron looked at her in surprise, she would shake her head and say, rather sadly, that it was too bad the Ministry of Magic had never established a more effective Muggle Relations Department.
For it was in fact a Muggle, Mrs. Ambrose, who looked out into her back garden that fateful December 18 morning, and decided to send her daughter out to play. Snow had fallen steadily for two days and nights, and there was enough to make her dreary bare rosebushes and the overgrown hedge look pretty again.
“I want to stay in,” said Maddie, even as her mother got her gloves with the purple flowers and boots from the closet. “It’s wet.”
“It’s lovely,” insisted Mrs. Ambrose. “Better than spending all day in front of the telly like a lump again, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Maddie, but she went outside dutifully and pretended to like lying down in the snow waving her arms and legs about.
Mrs. Ambrose smiled at her obedient daughter from the kitchen window and set about cleaning. She’d gotten through the dishes, feeding the turtle, and was grimly mopping the floor when she heard a bark.
There was a dog in the back garden, a big furry black thing. Maddie was squealing with giggles as it tried to lick her face.
Mrs. Ambrose frowned. The Martins next door had two dogs, great beasts that put their heads up over the fence and barked like mad when she went to collect the mail until she petted them. Perhaps the Martins had left the gate open and it had gotten out. She supposed it was all right for now, though. The dog was on its back in the snow, and Maddie was rubbing its belly.
She finished mopping, regretting for the thousandth time that they had gotten such a hideous tile for the kitchen floor, and began to head for the bathroom to clean the tub, when she realized the dog had gone quiet, and that so had Maddie.
A flutter of worry went through her as she looked out the back window. Maddie and the dog were nowhere to be seen. Had she, instead, been the one to leave the gate open?
Mrs. Ambrose threw on a coat and hurried outside, ignoring the cold as she looked over into the Martin’s yard for her daughter. The two dogs jumped up and tried to lick her hands-Maddie was playing with some strange dog, then. She turned to see if they’d gone down the street and saw them.
The black dog was padding silently away, leading Maddie down the walk. They were already almost four houses from where Mrs. Ambrose stood dumbly gazing after them.
“Maddie!” called Mrs. Ambrose.
Maddie didn’t turn, and gave no sign that she had heard her mother.
“Madeleine Ambrose, you come home right this instant!” She began to hurry after them, a strange and sick feeling creeping over her.
The dog and Maddie reached the corner, and it was there that Maddie looked back, just the once. She waved at her mother, and as Mrs. Ambrose watched, the dog barked-and it, and Madeleine Ambrose vanished.
Mrs. Ambrose screamed, and ran forward. Where her daughter had stood, only a glove with purple flowers remained.
*****
Harry awoke feeling as if someone was watching him. In the hazy winter morning light filtering beyond the drapes, he fumbled for his glasses. His hand brushed the cover of a book he'd been reading before bedtime, and it purred a little at his touch.
“I never would've figured you for a professor,” said an amused voice at the end of his bed. It was a voice Harry hadn't heard in a decade, and he jammed his glasses on hastily to see-
-Nymphadora Tonks smiling serenely at him. The pale sunlight streamed through her body, making her once-vivid hair dull and grey as it never had been in life.
“How-?” gasped Harry.
“I can't stay; the pull is very strong,” said Tonks. “Remus already went on ahead, but one of us had to try and warn you.”
“Warn me? Of what?”
“If any of us come for you,” she said, very seriously, “you have got to resist. Don't follow. No matter who it is, do you understand?”
“I don't-Tonks-”
“Promise you won't.” Tonks drifted away from the bed. “You've got to be the one to stop it.” She lifted a hand-it turned briefly into a brown-furred paw and then back again-and said, “Give my love to Teddy.”
Then she was gone.
Harry looked over at the picture of the Order on his nightstand and found the miniature Tonks, waving up at him, her other arm slung around Lupin's shoulder. “Did I imagine you here just now?” he asked her portrait quietly.
He thought back to a conversation he'd had with Nearly-Headless Nick, long ago, after Sirius' death. “Wizards can leave an imprint of themselves upon the earth, to walk palely where their living selves once trod. But very few wizards choose that path.”
Harry felt sure Tonks was the sort who wouldn't have chosen to remain on as a ghost, and besides, he thought he would've seen her around if she had. Pushing his glasses up his nose and sliding out of bed, he resolved to ask the Hogwarts ghosts about it.
As he roamed the castle halls, though, Marauder's Map in hand, he found the place to be deserted not only of most of its students, gone on Christmas holiday, but its spectral inhabitants. Even Myrtle had vanished from her usual haunt in the girls' bathroom.
“Potter?”
Harry hastily shut the door to Myrtle's bathroom behind him and instinctively straightened his robes. “Headmistress,” he greeted McGonagall.
“What were you doing in the girls' bathroom?”
Harry cleared his throat, feeling color rise into his face. No matter how long he'd been teaching at Hogwarts, talking to his former professors still sometimes made him feel as if he were eleven again.
“I was looking for Moaning Myrtle,” he said, attempting to sound casual and failing.
“She may be in any one of the many bathrooms in the castle,” McGonagall reminded him, frowning slightly. She looked down at the parchment he clutched in one hand. “Or perhaps you would know that already.”
“Actually, Minerva, I haven't been able to find any of the castle ghosts,” he admitted. “I thought they might be able to help me-” he broke off, not wanting to tell her about Tonks' visit.
“Potter, one would think that by now you would have realized that I don't consider what you say to be outlandish in the slightest,” she admonished him gently. “What is it that you needed from the ghosts?”
Harry opened his mouth to reply, when he saw the dots labeled with the names of the House ghosts moving on his map. They were all together, along with, oddly, Peeves, and they were moving away from the castle towards the Forbidden Forest.
“They're leaving,” he said, holding the map up to show McGonagall. She stared at him for a moment, and then rushed to the nearest window. Harry joined her, and they watched as the silvery-gray forms floated to the edge of the dark forest. Nearly-Headless Nick seemed to turn and look back, and even from their distant viewpoint, Harry swore he saw Nick sweep off his head in one final bow.
*****
The Muggle papers insisted there was some kind of scientific explanation. Mass hallucinations, or perhaps some new kind of holographic technology still under development. (Few papers, with the exception of a tabloid or two, were willing to use the word “ghost”.) Still, there was no denying the now-innumerable reports that people all across the United Kingdom were seeing their dead, and in some cases, walking away with them to boot.
*****
The Burrow was full to brimming, as it was every year at Christmastime. Ron waved his wand and swept Harry's side of the room clean, his dirty Cannons socks neatly balling up and rolling away under the bed.
Ginny put her head around the door. “Cleaning up? It doesn't matter, Mum will think you haven't done it anyway.”
Ron grinned at her. “You're home early,” he said. “No one expected you for another night.”
She shrugged. “Nepotism has its privileges-Dad let the whole department off, he was in such a good mood after he got that...tellyphone thing working. Looks almost like our moving portraits, really. Come down and have a game with George and me after you're done hiding all of your junk?”
“Yeah,” Ron said, “nothing like beating up on your baby sister once you've gone pro-”
Ginny stuck her tongue out at him.
Once he was airborne, Ron couldn't help but show off a little. The Chudley Cannons had come up with some new maneuvers in the fall, and though he hadn't gotten to mess around with them much as Keeper, he thought he'd got the basics down.
“Stop swanning around and play,” George yelled, launching a Bludger in Ron's general direction.
Ron started to make a vulgar gesture back at his brother, then froze in midair. A pale version of George was rising from the ground atop a faintly visible broom of his own.
Only...it wasn't George, for even from where he hovered, Ron could tell that the figure had both his ears.
“Oi,” said Fred. “Mind if I play a spell?”
Ginny looked faintly horrified. George swung his bat at Fred-it passed through him-and, unbalanced, almost fell off his broom.
Ron just gaped.
Fred shrugged. “I'm dead, what do you want? Look, if you could round up the rest of the family, this bit would go a lot quicker.”
“What would go a lot quicker?” Ginny demanded.
“I'm supposed to bring you all with me,” Fred said. “So let's go, get Mum and Dad, and we can swing by Shell Cottage to pick up Bill and Fleur-”
“I'm not going anywhere with someone who's been dead for ten years.”
Ron looked over at Ginny, whose face had settled into a fixed expression of disbelief.
“Yeah,” he echoed slowly, trying to shake the feeling of inexplicable dread that was settling over him, “you never call, you never write...”
“Have it your way, then,” and Fred turned to George. “How about you? Care to see what kind of mischief we can get up to now?”
George glanced around at his siblings. “If one of you will watch Wizard Wheezes-”
“Good enough,” Fred said, and then he and George disappeared.
There was a shriek from the Burrow-Ron turned and saw his mother running to where a crumpled body lay sprawled on the ground, one hand still clutching his broom. He landed quickly beside her, Ginny right behind him, both of them yelling at once.
“It was Fred's ghost-”
“I thought George up and Disapparated-”
As if from very far away, they heard a horn blow. Ron looked up and saw the ghosts of his twin brothers, faint against the clouds, riding their brooms into the dusk. They were laughing.
*****
Hermione persisted in making her own breakfast every morning. After all, that was the point of her visit, though the house-elves were appalled and kept trying to help her butter her scone. They had also tried to actually make the scone, but something hadn't translated entirely correctly along the way, and the scone had resembled something more like a pancake.
“Vot are they doing?” said a voice in her ear.
“Oh, good morning,” she said, and reached up to give Viktor a peck on the cheek. “I've tried to explain what the Ministry's new position on house-elf regulations is, but they keep-please stop that!-doing things.” Hermione produced a sock and attempted to give it to the nearest house-elf as a token of thanks, but he merely bowed and Disapparated with a crack.
“It is vot they like,” Viktor said, shrugging. Then, seeing the look on her face, he held up a hand to forestall her lecture. “I know, no need to tell me again. I haff put out clothes like you said, and some of them accept paying from me now.”
A flutter of wings at the window of Viktor's flat startled them both. There were a pair of owls struggling to grip the narrow sill, and Hermione hastened to let them in.
“Harry and Ron both wrote me,” she said, surprised. “I don't know why-I'll be back in England for Christmas.”
“There is also the Daily Prophet,” Viktor said, hiding a disappointed expression by unfolding the paper while Hermione read the letters.
She glanced up from Harry's, her face pale, and went even paler as she took in the headline emblazoned across the Prophet's front page:
THE DEAD RISE
The accompanying photo was too hard to look at for very long. Ghosts swooped through the skies above London, and the living people in the streets seemed to be running away in fear. There were a few bodies lying about, too, with more ghosts bending over them. And the photograph went askew at the end, as if the photographer had fled himself, or...
Hermione shuddered.
“You haff to stay here,” Viktor said, emerging from behind the paper, his eyebrows knitted with concern.
“I have to help them,” Hermione said, determinedly.
“You can help your friends from Bulgaria vere it is safe.”
She opened her mouth to retort-“Ve haff a perfectly good library here,” he added.
In the end, though, Hermione found herself on a Muggle flight back home. For all the conveniences of wizard travel, there were times when her parents still insisted on using their methods (especially when it came to frequent-flyer miles). It was not at all like flying on a broomstick, or hippogriff, or thestral-in fact, she was rather liking it until the ghosts arrived during the in-flight movie.
The Muggles screamed. The plane shook violently, although out Hermione's window the sky was perfectly clear, as long as she didn't include the several ghostly forms riding broomsticks and horses alongside-
She had just enough time to Disapparate before the plane struck the ground.
*****
“So what are we facing?” Harry asked. They were sitting on the floor of Ron's bedroom at the Burrow, three days later. “I mean, I know they're ghosts, but-”
Ron cut him off. “How do you kill a ghost? This isn't like Horcruxes, there's nothing to stab, or burn, or break-”
“He was your brother,” Hermione said, sounding faintly horrified.
“Yeah, and he killed another one besides,” Ron retorted.
“What I don't understand,” Harry said, “is why there are so many of them running about now. And it's not just people, either; the Muggle papers write about dogs and horses more than dead celebs coming round to say hello.”
Hermione nodded. Then, with a start, she said, “You haven't seen...Sirius, have you?”
Harry's mouth tightened, and she thought he looked rather sad. “No.” They were quiet for a moment.
“Anyway,” Hermione said, “I brought some books-” and she drew several weighty tomes from her handbag.
It was rather like the old days, Harry thought, hours later. Ron was reading the same page for the tenth time, and Hermione was furiously scribbling down notes on apparitions of historical import.
Mrs. Weasley leaned in to check up on them, once. “You don't have to always be the ones saving the world,” she said, with a sad sigh. “I imagine Fred and George are quite happy to be together again...”
“Mum-” Ron looked aghast, but she had gone.
“If it was someone else you saw,” Hermione said slowly to Harry, “would you have gone with them? If it was your parents?”
Ten years ago, he supposed it would have touched a nerve. Now, however...
“I've been dead before,” Harry said. “It wasn't all that bad, and my parents were there, and so was Sirius, and Lupin, and-and Dumbledore-but Tonks told me to stay and fight.” He looked at the other two. “So tell me what it is we're fighting.”
They returned to the books.
Ron was asleep when Hermione found the answer, buried in a book of Muggle fairytales.
“It's called the Wild Hunt,” she told Harry. “Ghosts of hunters and hounds seeking across the sky-the stories say you're not supposed to look at them, or you die.”
“Ron did more than look-he talked to Fred, and I talked to Tonks,” Harry noted.
“These are really old stories, though,” Hermione said.
“Are they hunting the rest of us? The ones that aren't dead, I mean.”
She shook her head. “I don't know what they're hunting. It could be us, it could be something magic...they've never found it.”
“That's it, then,” Harry said. “We have to find what it is they're looking for.”
“You don't understand,” Hermione told him. “They've never found anything that could be what they want. The Hunt's been going on for a thousand years-that's how far back the stories go, all around the world. There have been places that were completely wiped off the map when it passed through. It's just our luck that now the hunters are people we know-knew-and they're taking more of the living with them.”
“There's no stopping it, then,” Harry said.
“Either the Hunt moves on again, or...”
“Or everyone we know will join it.”
*****
On Christmas, London was a ghost town.
*****
the end...for now...
Author: Eisoj5
Recipient: indiana_j
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Request: With the removal of Voldemort, an older, more ancient power arises. With the Order scattered, how do the Trio (separated as well) survive long enough to make it back to each other?
Spoilers:Through the end of the series
Warnings: sadly unbetaed; any and all mistakes are therefore completely mine.
Summary: Ten years after Deathly Hallows, a new challenge looms.
*****
The first death came a week before Christmas.
Later, Hermione would remark that all the signs had been there from the start, and when Harry and Ron looked at her in surprise, she would shake her head and say, rather sadly, that it was too bad the Ministry of Magic had never established a more effective Muggle Relations Department.
For it was in fact a Muggle, Mrs. Ambrose, who looked out into her back garden that fateful December 18 morning, and decided to send her daughter out to play. Snow had fallen steadily for two days and nights, and there was enough to make her dreary bare rosebushes and the overgrown hedge look pretty again.
“I want to stay in,” said Maddie, even as her mother got her gloves with the purple flowers and boots from the closet. “It’s wet.”
“It’s lovely,” insisted Mrs. Ambrose. “Better than spending all day in front of the telly like a lump again, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Maddie, but she went outside dutifully and pretended to like lying down in the snow waving her arms and legs about.
Mrs. Ambrose smiled at her obedient daughter from the kitchen window and set about cleaning. She’d gotten through the dishes, feeding the turtle, and was grimly mopping the floor when she heard a bark.
There was a dog in the back garden, a big furry black thing. Maddie was squealing with giggles as it tried to lick her face.
Mrs. Ambrose frowned. The Martins next door had two dogs, great beasts that put their heads up over the fence and barked like mad when she went to collect the mail until she petted them. Perhaps the Martins had left the gate open and it had gotten out. She supposed it was all right for now, though. The dog was on its back in the snow, and Maddie was rubbing its belly.
She finished mopping, regretting for the thousandth time that they had gotten such a hideous tile for the kitchen floor, and began to head for the bathroom to clean the tub, when she realized the dog had gone quiet, and that so had Maddie.
A flutter of worry went through her as she looked out the back window. Maddie and the dog were nowhere to be seen. Had she, instead, been the one to leave the gate open?
Mrs. Ambrose threw on a coat and hurried outside, ignoring the cold as she looked over into the Martin’s yard for her daughter. The two dogs jumped up and tried to lick her hands-Maddie was playing with some strange dog, then. She turned to see if they’d gone down the street and saw them.
The black dog was padding silently away, leading Maddie down the walk. They were already almost four houses from where Mrs. Ambrose stood dumbly gazing after them.
“Maddie!” called Mrs. Ambrose.
Maddie didn’t turn, and gave no sign that she had heard her mother.
“Madeleine Ambrose, you come home right this instant!” She began to hurry after them, a strange and sick feeling creeping over her.
The dog and Maddie reached the corner, and it was there that Maddie looked back, just the once. She waved at her mother, and as Mrs. Ambrose watched, the dog barked-and it, and Madeleine Ambrose vanished.
Mrs. Ambrose screamed, and ran forward. Where her daughter had stood, only a glove with purple flowers remained.
*****
Harry awoke feeling as if someone was watching him. In the hazy winter morning light filtering beyond the drapes, he fumbled for his glasses. His hand brushed the cover of a book he'd been reading before bedtime, and it purred a little at his touch.
“I never would've figured you for a professor,” said an amused voice at the end of his bed. It was a voice Harry hadn't heard in a decade, and he jammed his glasses on hastily to see-
-Nymphadora Tonks smiling serenely at him. The pale sunlight streamed through her body, making her once-vivid hair dull and grey as it never had been in life.
“How-?” gasped Harry.
“I can't stay; the pull is very strong,” said Tonks. “Remus already went on ahead, but one of us had to try and warn you.”
“Warn me? Of what?”
“If any of us come for you,” she said, very seriously, “you have got to resist. Don't follow. No matter who it is, do you understand?”
“I don't-Tonks-”
“Promise you won't.” Tonks drifted away from the bed. “You've got to be the one to stop it.” She lifted a hand-it turned briefly into a brown-furred paw and then back again-and said, “Give my love to Teddy.”
Then she was gone.
Harry looked over at the picture of the Order on his nightstand and found the miniature Tonks, waving up at him, her other arm slung around Lupin's shoulder. “Did I imagine you here just now?” he asked her portrait quietly.
He thought back to a conversation he'd had with Nearly-Headless Nick, long ago, after Sirius' death. “Wizards can leave an imprint of themselves upon the earth, to walk palely where their living selves once trod. But very few wizards choose that path.”
Harry felt sure Tonks was the sort who wouldn't have chosen to remain on as a ghost, and besides, he thought he would've seen her around if she had. Pushing his glasses up his nose and sliding out of bed, he resolved to ask the Hogwarts ghosts about it.
As he roamed the castle halls, though, Marauder's Map in hand, he found the place to be deserted not only of most of its students, gone on Christmas holiday, but its spectral inhabitants. Even Myrtle had vanished from her usual haunt in the girls' bathroom.
“Potter?”
Harry hastily shut the door to Myrtle's bathroom behind him and instinctively straightened his robes. “Headmistress,” he greeted McGonagall.
“What were you doing in the girls' bathroom?”
Harry cleared his throat, feeling color rise into his face. No matter how long he'd been teaching at Hogwarts, talking to his former professors still sometimes made him feel as if he were eleven again.
“I was looking for Moaning Myrtle,” he said, attempting to sound casual and failing.
“She may be in any one of the many bathrooms in the castle,” McGonagall reminded him, frowning slightly. She looked down at the parchment he clutched in one hand. “Or perhaps you would know that already.”
“Actually, Minerva, I haven't been able to find any of the castle ghosts,” he admitted. “I thought they might be able to help me-” he broke off, not wanting to tell her about Tonks' visit.
“Potter, one would think that by now you would have realized that I don't consider what you say to be outlandish in the slightest,” she admonished him gently. “What is it that you needed from the ghosts?”
Harry opened his mouth to reply, when he saw the dots labeled with the names of the House ghosts moving on his map. They were all together, along with, oddly, Peeves, and they were moving away from the castle towards the Forbidden Forest.
“They're leaving,” he said, holding the map up to show McGonagall. She stared at him for a moment, and then rushed to the nearest window. Harry joined her, and they watched as the silvery-gray forms floated to the edge of the dark forest. Nearly-Headless Nick seemed to turn and look back, and even from their distant viewpoint, Harry swore he saw Nick sweep off his head in one final bow.
*****
The Muggle papers insisted there was some kind of scientific explanation. Mass hallucinations, or perhaps some new kind of holographic technology still under development. (Few papers, with the exception of a tabloid or two, were willing to use the word “ghost”.) Still, there was no denying the now-innumerable reports that people all across the United Kingdom were seeing their dead, and in some cases, walking away with them to boot.
*****
The Burrow was full to brimming, as it was every year at Christmastime. Ron waved his wand and swept Harry's side of the room clean, his dirty Cannons socks neatly balling up and rolling away under the bed.
Ginny put her head around the door. “Cleaning up? It doesn't matter, Mum will think you haven't done it anyway.”
Ron grinned at her. “You're home early,” he said. “No one expected you for another night.”
She shrugged. “Nepotism has its privileges-Dad let the whole department off, he was in such a good mood after he got that...tellyphone thing working. Looks almost like our moving portraits, really. Come down and have a game with George and me after you're done hiding all of your junk?”
“Yeah,” Ron said, “nothing like beating up on your baby sister once you've gone pro-”
Ginny stuck her tongue out at him.
Once he was airborne, Ron couldn't help but show off a little. The Chudley Cannons had come up with some new maneuvers in the fall, and though he hadn't gotten to mess around with them much as Keeper, he thought he'd got the basics down.
“Stop swanning around and play,” George yelled, launching a Bludger in Ron's general direction.
Ron started to make a vulgar gesture back at his brother, then froze in midair. A pale version of George was rising from the ground atop a faintly visible broom of his own.
Only...it wasn't George, for even from where he hovered, Ron could tell that the figure had both his ears.
“Oi,” said Fred. “Mind if I play a spell?”
Ginny looked faintly horrified. George swung his bat at Fred-it passed through him-and, unbalanced, almost fell off his broom.
Ron just gaped.
Fred shrugged. “I'm dead, what do you want? Look, if you could round up the rest of the family, this bit would go a lot quicker.”
“What would go a lot quicker?” Ginny demanded.
“I'm supposed to bring you all with me,” Fred said. “So let's go, get Mum and Dad, and we can swing by Shell Cottage to pick up Bill and Fleur-”
“I'm not going anywhere with someone who's been dead for ten years.”
Ron looked over at Ginny, whose face had settled into a fixed expression of disbelief.
“Yeah,” he echoed slowly, trying to shake the feeling of inexplicable dread that was settling over him, “you never call, you never write...”
“Have it your way, then,” and Fred turned to George. “How about you? Care to see what kind of mischief we can get up to now?”
George glanced around at his siblings. “If one of you will watch Wizard Wheezes-”
“Good enough,” Fred said, and then he and George disappeared.
There was a shriek from the Burrow-Ron turned and saw his mother running to where a crumpled body lay sprawled on the ground, one hand still clutching his broom. He landed quickly beside her, Ginny right behind him, both of them yelling at once.
“It was Fred's ghost-”
“I thought George up and Disapparated-”
As if from very far away, they heard a horn blow. Ron looked up and saw the ghosts of his twin brothers, faint against the clouds, riding their brooms into the dusk. They were laughing.
*****
Hermione persisted in making her own breakfast every morning. After all, that was the point of her visit, though the house-elves were appalled and kept trying to help her butter her scone. They had also tried to actually make the scone, but something hadn't translated entirely correctly along the way, and the scone had resembled something more like a pancake.
“Vot are they doing?” said a voice in her ear.
“Oh, good morning,” she said, and reached up to give Viktor a peck on the cheek. “I've tried to explain what the Ministry's new position on house-elf regulations is, but they keep-please stop that!-doing things.” Hermione produced a sock and attempted to give it to the nearest house-elf as a token of thanks, but he merely bowed and Disapparated with a crack.
“It is vot they like,” Viktor said, shrugging. Then, seeing the look on her face, he held up a hand to forestall her lecture. “I know, no need to tell me again. I haff put out clothes like you said, and some of them accept paying from me now.”
A flutter of wings at the window of Viktor's flat startled them both. There were a pair of owls struggling to grip the narrow sill, and Hermione hastened to let them in.
“Harry and Ron both wrote me,” she said, surprised. “I don't know why-I'll be back in England for Christmas.”
“There is also the Daily Prophet,” Viktor said, hiding a disappointed expression by unfolding the paper while Hermione read the letters.
She glanced up from Harry's, her face pale, and went even paler as she took in the headline emblazoned across the Prophet's front page:
THE DEAD RISE
The accompanying photo was too hard to look at for very long. Ghosts swooped through the skies above London, and the living people in the streets seemed to be running away in fear. There were a few bodies lying about, too, with more ghosts bending over them. And the photograph went askew at the end, as if the photographer had fled himself, or...
Hermione shuddered.
“You haff to stay here,” Viktor said, emerging from behind the paper, his eyebrows knitted with concern.
“I have to help them,” Hermione said, determinedly.
“You can help your friends from Bulgaria vere it is safe.”
She opened her mouth to retort-“Ve haff a perfectly good library here,” he added.
In the end, though, Hermione found herself on a Muggle flight back home. For all the conveniences of wizard travel, there were times when her parents still insisted on using their methods (especially when it came to frequent-flyer miles). It was not at all like flying on a broomstick, or hippogriff, or thestral-in fact, she was rather liking it until the ghosts arrived during the in-flight movie.
The Muggles screamed. The plane shook violently, although out Hermione's window the sky was perfectly clear, as long as she didn't include the several ghostly forms riding broomsticks and horses alongside-
She had just enough time to Disapparate before the plane struck the ground.
*****
“So what are we facing?” Harry asked. They were sitting on the floor of Ron's bedroom at the Burrow, three days later. “I mean, I know they're ghosts, but-”
Ron cut him off. “How do you kill a ghost? This isn't like Horcruxes, there's nothing to stab, or burn, or break-”
“He was your brother,” Hermione said, sounding faintly horrified.
“Yeah, and he killed another one besides,” Ron retorted.
“What I don't understand,” Harry said, “is why there are so many of them running about now. And it's not just people, either; the Muggle papers write about dogs and horses more than dead celebs coming round to say hello.”
Hermione nodded. Then, with a start, she said, “You haven't seen...Sirius, have you?”
Harry's mouth tightened, and she thought he looked rather sad. “No.” They were quiet for a moment.
“Anyway,” Hermione said, “I brought some books-” and she drew several weighty tomes from her handbag.
It was rather like the old days, Harry thought, hours later. Ron was reading the same page for the tenth time, and Hermione was furiously scribbling down notes on apparitions of historical import.
Mrs. Weasley leaned in to check up on them, once. “You don't have to always be the ones saving the world,” she said, with a sad sigh. “I imagine Fred and George are quite happy to be together again...”
“Mum-” Ron looked aghast, but she had gone.
“If it was someone else you saw,” Hermione said slowly to Harry, “would you have gone with them? If it was your parents?”
Ten years ago, he supposed it would have touched a nerve. Now, however...
“I've been dead before,” Harry said. “It wasn't all that bad, and my parents were there, and so was Sirius, and Lupin, and-and Dumbledore-but Tonks told me to stay and fight.” He looked at the other two. “So tell me what it is we're fighting.”
They returned to the books.
Ron was asleep when Hermione found the answer, buried in a book of Muggle fairytales.
“It's called the Wild Hunt,” she told Harry. “Ghosts of hunters and hounds seeking across the sky-the stories say you're not supposed to look at them, or you die.”
“Ron did more than look-he talked to Fred, and I talked to Tonks,” Harry noted.
“These are really old stories, though,” Hermione said.
“Are they hunting the rest of us? The ones that aren't dead, I mean.”
She shook her head. “I don't know what they're hunting. It could be us, it could be something magic...they've never found it.”
“That's it, then,” Harry said. “We have to find what it is they're looking for.”
“You don't understand,” Hermione told him. “They've never found anything that could be what they want. The Hunt's been going on for a thousand years-that's how far back the stories go, all around the world. There have been places that were completely wiped off the map when it passed through. It's just our luck that now the hunters are people we know-knew-and they're taking more of the living with them.”
“There's no stopping it, then,” Harry said.
“Either the Hunt moves on again, or...”
“Or everyone we know will join it.”
*****
On Christmas, London was a ghost town.
*****
the end...for now...