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Luna turned her head toward Coulson, whose face had gone completely blank, and smiled, mischievous, a little sly, entirely pleased with herself.
"Actually, I don't know Legilimency."
"That magic is far too advanced. Hardly anyone in the entire Wizarding World can master it. Senior Hermione can, but I'm not there yet."
Coulson stood frozen. His brain quietly stopped working.
She can't?
Then just now...?
He looked at Garrett, that instant of rigid shock, then the total collapse of his expression, and then back at Luna, her smile pure and bright and deeply, privately satisfied. Like a child who'd pulled off the perfect prank.
It clicked.
"Miss Lovegood..."
Coulson didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
"You were bluffing them?"
Luna's eyes curved into crescent moons. She nodded hard.
"Yes!"
She looked absolutely delighted, as if she'd just done something tremendously fun and couldn't quite believe how well it had gone.
"I just wanted to try it. I didn't expect it to work so well."
She glanced around at the petrified soldiers, then at Garrett's ashen face, her tone bright with genuine curiosity.
"The world outside the Wizarding World really is so much fun. These Muggles are simply fascinating!"
She tilted her head.
"If I'd known, I would have snuck out to play with Hermione ages ago!"
The agents around her fell silent.
To them, this had been a crisis, the survival of S.H.I.E.L.D., the lives of countless operatives hanging in the balance.
To this girl, it had been an amusing game.
Truly a friend of Hermione's. Another little fox hiding behind a guileless face.
The two of them couldn't have seemed more different on the surface, one coldly calculating, one dreamily innocent, but underneath, that vicious, quietly gleeful streak of watching people crash and burn? Identical.
Garrett stared at Luna.
She had been bluffing him.
Him. A seasoned veteran. A shadow player who had survived and manipulated countless high-stakes situations. Conned by a girl who couldn't be more than seventeen.
He could stomach defeat. He could not stomach this.
Coulson pulled himself together and turned to her, his voice sincere. "Miss Lovegood, we genuinely owe you. Without you, we—"
"Just Luna." She was already looking past him.
Her gaze landed on Skye, curious and unhurried, taking her in from head to toe.
"You're Skye, aren't you? Hermione's mentioned you."
Skye blinked. Luna had that same quality Hermione did, something that made you want to scoop her up, and she was halfway through figuring out what to say when the air beside them bent.
Hermione appeared.
"Hermione!"
Luna's eyes lit up instantly. She darted over and caught Hermione's arm with both hands.
"You're back!"
Hermione reached up and gently ruffled her hair, the easy, absentminded way you'd pet a cat you were fond of.
"Mm. Finished the performance... handled. Everything go smoothly here?"
The others watched with the collective expression of people who'd discovered something they hadn't been expecting.
The strange, sharp-edged Hermione, and she had someone she was actually soft with.
Hermione swept a look around.
"Looks like things got lively on your end too."
Hand stepped forward before anyone else could. The light in her eye was hard to miss.
"Miss Witch." Her voice was just slightly unsteady. "I'm Agent Victoria Hand. It's an honor to meet you in person."
Even Hand, rigid, precise, famously difficult to impress, was lit up like a starstruck fan meeting someone she'd admired from a distance. Level 8 agent, temporarily dissolved.
Hermione gave a brief nod.
"Hand... I'll call you Sister Hand. Hello."
Hand steadied herself with visible effort and switched into professional mode.
"Garrett is a senior HYDRA mole, codename 'Clairvoyant.' We need to bring him in for interrogation, extract whatever he knows about HYDRA's cooperation with the Ministry of Magic—"
"There's nothing worth interrogating. Everything he knows, I already know. Deal with him."
Before Hand or Coulson could react,
Hermione raised her wand. Green light bloomed in a web across the room.
No screams. No struggle. Not a sound. Garrett and every one of his people simply stopped.
She turned back to face the room, expression unchanged.
"Done. Clean."
Nobody had expected her to move that fast. The shock landed on all of them at once.
But after a beat, no one spoke. They looked at Luna, equally calm beside her, and quietly revised their understanding of what wizards were. What wizard culture apparently was.
Settle grudges directly. Children included. No hesitation.
Ward stared at Garrett's body.
Dead.
The man he'd followed for years. His mentor, his anchor, the reason behind a hundred choices he'd made and hadn't questioned, gone in the span of a breath.
The foundation his whole logic had been built on collapsed underneath him, all at once, without warning.
He looked toward Hermione without meaning to. Her gaze passed over him at that exact moment.
One second of eye contact. That was all. But Ward felt it like fingers reaching into his skull, and he understood, she had known all along that he was Garrett's mole. She'd known and said nothing.
Hermione didn't linger on Ward's hollow expression. She spoke to the room.
"The Ministry of Magic and I are finished. No pretense left."
"Hogwarts will stand with me."
"So."
She looked around at each of them.
"A magical war is coming, and it could start at any moment. I'm going back to prepare. I won't be returning for a while."
The air bent. Hermione and Luna were gone.
...
Avengers Compound.
Thor was in Asgard. Everyone else was in the room.
The meeting was quiet in the way rooms are quiet when the thing being discussed is too large for anyone to want to be the first one to say it out loud.
Fury's eye moved across the table.
"Let's hear it. Where does everyone stand?"
Silence.
Tony broke it. "Where do we stand?"
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, voice sliding into its usual dry register.
"I'll tell you where I stood before today. I thought the Ministry of Magic, strange as they are, at least counted as a legitimate institution. Maybe they didn't like Hermione. But at least they were rational people operating inside some kind of recognizable framework."
"Turns out they're control freaks. Barely different from HYDRA."
Fury shook his head. "That's not what I'm asking about."
Low voice. Serious face.
"I'm asking about the Prophecy."
Before he died, Pierce had released everything, every classified S.H.I.E.L.D. file, every buried secret, a scorched-earth act of revenge. And mixed into it, a prophecy the Ministry of Magic had given him.
The content: a Dark Witch would be born into the world, already immensely powerful, her magic growing rapidly over time until no one could match her. But that power would corrode her mind. In the end, it would shatter the structure of the entire universe and enslave every living thing, wizards and Muggles alike.
Tony scoffed. Loud and deliberate.
"A prophecy."
"Fury. Be serious."
"A street fortune-teller can produce a hundred of those before noon, all different. 'Dark Witch descends, universe destroyed' — that's straight out of a third-rate comic villain origin. What's next, she summons an evil god?"
He curled his lip.
"And even if we took it seriously, why does it have to be Hermione? Because she's powerful? Since when is being powerful a crime?"
He spread his hands.
"By that logic, shouldn't someone be arresting me? This suit alone could bring down a few buildings."
➤ Next: Hermione's Scheme — Face to Face
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