"A vampire?"
Flume, the owner of Honeydukes, stared openly at Elune, his earlier professional cheer was draining rapidly from his face.
Standing there in front of the shelves, still picking eagerly through the sweets on display, Elune looked thoroughly delighted by the whole experience and yet, even in the midst of that childlike delight, she still carried herself with the refined air of a well-bred noble, nothing at all like the dangerous, dark creature the word "vampire" ordinarily conjured for most people.
"That's a joke, right, Mr. Weasley? Tell me that's a joke."
Flume's mouth twisted uncertainly to one side, seeking reassurance.
Ron made a couple of vague, deliberately noncommittal noises but didn't actually argue the point one way or the other, letting the shopkeeper's discomfort sit.
Judging purely by outer appearances, it really was genuinely hard to believe that this lovely, serene, faintly aloof first-year girl could actually be a vampire.
"I want this one—and this one—and this one!"
Elune had, by this point, finished making her selections.
She crooked her pale fingers in a small, precise gesture, and every one of the store's bestselling sweets on the nearest shelf lifted a little into the air, gathering together to hover in a floating cluster in front of her, turning slowly in the empty air.
"You can actually eat this stuff?"
Harry was the first to spot the potential problem. He glanced quickly over at Hermione, whose face had gone faintly, distinctly green at that, then looked back at Elune with suspicion.
"I thought you could only—"
Harry caught himself mid-sentence and shut his own mouth in time, before the rest of the thought could escape.
Whatever joking liberties Ron chose to take with the truth didn't really count for much, but it wasn't genuinely Harry's place to go announcing Elune's true nature to Flume without her permission to do so.
Whatever else was true about tonight's whole strange escapade, she remained, first and foremost, a guest Professor Watson had personally invited to Hogwarts, and that status deserved some baseline respect.
"How much do we owe you for all this, then?"
Hermione, if anyone present understood the situation properly, knew perfectly well that this vampire wasn't entirely incapable of eating ordinary human food—she was, in all likelihood, making trouble on purpose.
She wouldn't dare misbehave in front of Professor Watson himself, so instead she'd apparently decided to come all the way here, purely to torment her!
'Patience, Hermione.'
Hermione told herself sternly, deep down, working hard to hold onto her composure.
Professor Watson believed that honest, good-faith exchange with sentient magical beings could carry wizarding civilisation forward to new heights of achievement and understanding—and in service of that larger important goal, a single little vampire's petty mischief hardly mattered.
Besides which, being kind and accommodating to her now was, in its own indirect way, a form of being kind to the centaurs and house-elves and everyone else in the delegation who genuinely needed and deserved this whole arrangement to succeed!
"Oh, there's no need to pay for any of it—"
Flume scratched absently at a small pimple on his own cheek, looking sheepish now.
"Whatever the situation, it's on the house this time, all of it. I just genuinely hope you'll all keep coming back to the shop regardless, going forward."
Then he muttered.
"Ever since I gave that testimony over at the Ministry, plenty of folks round the village have taken rather a dim view of me and my business, truth be told."
"Serves you right."
Ron said it without a single shred of visible sympathy in his tone.
"We should take more, actually, Hermione—enough to properly share round with everyone in the whole delegation. The goblins gave us gifts earlier, didn't they, without being asked? We ought to show a bit of class of our own in return, don't you think."
"Good idea, Ron, actually."
Harry nodded in genuine approval at the suggestion.
They proceeded, over the following minutes, to clear Honeydukes out of a fair amount of additional candy, filling several large wooden crates to their brims with a careful selection.
Though Harry and Ron both privately felt that Flume rather deserved to be fleeced without the slightest mercy, given the history between them, Hermione, in the end, possessed considerably more decency than either of the boys were currently inclined toward.
She still insisted on paying properly with the funds Professor Watson had specifically allotted them for this kind of purpose—which came as an enormous relief to the Honeydukes owner.
He gave Hermione a discount on the whole haul and promised, that from now on, the three of them would always receive his very lowest available price whenever they came to the shop.
That particular promise went a long way toward smoothing over Harry and Ron's lingering resentment toward Flume from the trial.
But as they were finally preparing to leave, a new unforeseen problem presented itself.
Getting ready to go, Harry instinctively started heading directly for the Honeydukes cellar stairs which left Flume utterly baffled.
"What are the three of you going back down to my cellar for?"
Flume even fixed Harry with a distinctly pitiful, pleading look, as though bracing for some further inconvenience to his evening.
Harry froze mid-step at the question and spun around sharply to look at Ron and Hermione—who were already looking back at him with matching expressions. All three of them had landed on the exact same realisation at precisely the same moment.
They had, in fact, snuck into Hogsmeade in the first place through the secret passage beneath this very cellar. But they couldn't very well use that same hidden route to get back to Hogwarts now, not with Flume standing right there watching their every move—the passage would be entirely exposed, right under his nose!
This particular tunnel was, by common agreement among those who knew of it, the best of all the various secret passages connecting the village to the school.
It would be a genuine shame if Flume discovered its existence tonight and decided, out of an abundance of caution, to have it properly sealed up for good.
"Oh, I just forgot something for a moment, that's all—"
Harry put on his most convincingly nonchalant face and strolled casually toward the shop's front door instead.
"Well then—good night to you—"
Ron said, matching Harry's forced composure admirably, giving absolutely nothing away in his own expression.
"What's wrong?"
Utterly enchanted by the delicious candy still in her hands, the little vampire narrowed her red eyes appreciatively as she savoured the tingling, fizzing burst of a sour Fizzing Whizbee dissolving in her mouth.
"Aren't we going back the same—"
"Oh, shut up, we've got another—way of getting back!"
Hermione hissed under her breath, shooting Elune a sharp, warning glare, then, without further discussion or explanation, grabbed hold of the girl's arm and hurried after Harry and Ron out through the front door of Honeydukes into the cold night air.
Autumn wind stirred outside, bleak and genuinely biting against exposed skin.
To help the trees survive the coming winter ahead, leaves—yellowed thoroughly at their edges but still faintly green closer to their stems—let go of their branches without any hesitation, drifting slowly through the cold, thin night air before finally settling into the waiting earth's embrace, scattered across the village's empty lanes.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione who was steering the heavy candy crates carefully along beside her—trudged along together in tired silence, heads bowed against a wind that set all three of them shivering, making their slow, weary way toward a distant hill crowned by a bleak, looming wooden shack silhouetted against the moonlight.
"You two really don't have any shorter way back to school than this?"
The little vampire licked a bit of stray sugar from the corner of her own mouth, trailing along easily behind them as she unwrapped yet another Chocolate Frog with leisurely enjoyment.
The three of them said nothing in response, simply pressing on with their heads down against the wind, conserving whatever breath remained to them for the climb ahead.
It took them nearly two full hours of steady, exhausting walking, but they finally made it back properly onto the Hogwarts grounds just before midnight—mostly because the secret passage running beneath the Shrieking Shack was considerably narrower than the one hidden in the Honeydukes cellar, which had badly slowed their progress at several points, forcing them to squeeze the crates through sideways.
On top of that difficulty, they'd had to take turns dragging along several of the heavier candy crates.
Next to the three students now standing before the Whomping Willow, grey with accumulated tunnel dust, bent nearly double, gasping openly for breath after the ordeal—Elune looked positively, almost insultingly relaxed by comparison.
Her own breathing remained entirely steady throughout, without a single visible trace of sweat anywhere on her skin, and the whole exhausting way back she'd done nothing except contentedly eat her way through her own private stash of candy.
"What is it—"
With a fresh lollipop stuck in her mouth, Elune watched with keen interest as the Whomping Willow's massive branches thrashed through the cold air with a sharp, splintering crack somewhere nearby, saying, somewhat indistinctly around the sweet.
"I figured you three would've already found some faster way back—"
Harry's teeth were nearly grinding audibly together by this point from sheer accumulated irritation.
"There is no faster way—unless you happen to be able to conjure us up a few broomsticks out of thin air!"
"Broomsticks?"
Elune crunched away at her candy, entirely unbothered by his tone.
"I'm not especially fond of such crude contraptions, personally. Can't we simply Apparate instead? Seems considerably more practical to me."
The exhausted, gasping breath of all three students cut off completely at once. They straightened up sharply and stared directly at Elune. Hermione asked, hesitating badly over the question.
"You can Apparate—inside Hogwarts grounds? Like a house-elf can?"
"Oh, no—"
Elune's tone seemed to lose some of its earlier haughtiness, perhaps softened somewhat by the sheer quantity of delicious candy the three of them had generously bought her over the course of the evening.
She turned instead to look thoughtfully at the glowing, giant silhouette of the castle rising against the darkness in the distance.
"The wards on this old school are rather special, as it happens. I genuinely can't Apparate anywhere within the grounds—but I certainly could have Apparated the four of us straight into that lovely candy shop's cellar in the first place, without anyone noticing a thing."
'I really am an idiot. Truly, genuinely an idiot.'
"Then why didn't you say so earlier, before we walked for two solid hours?!"
Hermione demanded, thoroughly, comprehensively exasperated now.
"Oh, I just assumed the three of you already had some more convenient way sorted out in advance."
Elune said, as though this were the single most obvious, self-evident thing in the entire world, requiring no further explanation.
"Let's just go, Hermione—"
Harry shook his head slowly, far too genuinely worn out at this point to argue the matter any further with the little vampire.
He opened up his Invisibility Cloak and let Ron duck underneath it alongside him; as for the candy crates and Hermione herself, they were shielded instead with a quick Disillusionment Charm.
As for Elune—well, none of the three of them believed that a dark magical creature would lack even the most basic ability to properly hide herself from casual observation.
"Hurry up and hide yourself properly—"
Hermione urged anxiously at Elune, who was busy, at that exact moment, breathing small tongues of fire out of both her nose and mouth after downing an entire Pepper Imp in one go.
"If a patrolling professor spots you wandering about like this, you'll land yourself in detention too—or worse, depending on who catches you!"
The little vampire flicked her dark hair back over one shoulder, giving Hermione a look of cold, thoroughly haughty disdain in response to the warning.
Stepping into the castle at last, the warmth radiating from the dozen-odd bright torches lining both sides of the entrance hall made all three chilled, exhausted friends shiver despite themselves.
The empty ground floor of the castle at this hour—the entrance hall, the darkened Great Hall beyond, and the shadowed corridors branching off on sides—was wrapped in the occasional loud bang, as gusts of wind howled between the freezing air still pressing in from outside and the gathered warmth within, slamming some forgotten cellar door somewhere deep in the castle hard against its frame with each fresh gust.
"Filch must be slackin' off again, leavin' doors banging like that—"
Ron grumbled, wincing at the noise as he dashed up the stairs from the entrance hall toward the second floor, eager now for his warm bed.
"Loud as that racket is, shouldn't he be along any minute to shut it properly, before it wakes the whole castle?"
"I'd honestly rather Filch and Mrs. Norris took the whole night off, just this once, and let us get to bed in peace—"
Harry said, following close behind.
"Both of you, be quiet!"
Hermione, still fully Disillusioned and therefore invisible even to her own friends, snapped from somewhere nearby.
"If a patrolling professor—"
BOOM!
An explosion, sudden and utterly, violently unexpected, tore through the dead silence of the sleeping castle night!
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