The Gloriana Set

Knockturn Alley

Notes:

Hello everyone! This chapter is one of my favorites, and was conceived before I began writing the story. Vasile is back, as well as someone else we all like. And plot. Lots of plot.

Draco looked a bit grim as they neared Knockturn Alley, and Hermione couldn't blame him. Accusatory potions, a run-in with his mother, now a meeting with a vampire—this hadn't been his best day. They both pulled up the hoods of their cloaks as they passed through the alley's shadowy entrance.

"Stay close to me," Draco said.

"You stay close to me," Hermione returned. She held her wand inside her cloak pocket and strode ahead into the narrow, winding street, forcing Draco to follow. He growled at this but he couldn't pass her since hags and vagrants and decrepit stalls selling suspicious wares had narrowed the street further.

A large, tattooed wizard with yellow eyes and a bulbous nose stomped toward them from the opposite direction, flailing a long black whip. He slashed an old hag trying to scuttle away, prompting Hermione to draw her wand. Draco pushed Hermione's arm down and shoved her back against the wall.

"Draco!" she hissed.

"Stop charging into trouble," Draco said, hand still on her arm.

"I could take him," she snapped.

"That's not what we're here for."

"But that hag—"

"I know," he hissed, "but if you start hexing every mean person in Knockturn Alley, we'll never get to your bloodsucking friend before someone chases him off, and wouldn't that be terrible?" Draco looked around. "Who knows how many chaps will come out of the woodwork if you face off with someone like that. You're not invincible, you know."

"But look," she protested, pointing. The wizard's whip had destroyed a pile of wooden crates holding a street vendor's supply of disembodied hands. All the hands were getting out, clutching people's cloaks and crawling up walls like cockroaches.

"Come on," Draco said, releasing her arm and putting his own around her waist. "Let's go. Merlin, I can't believe you came here last month without causing a riot."

"We'll need to talk about all this grabbing of hands and arms," Hermione said as he pulled her further along the alley.

They made it halfway to the pub without mishap until Draco caused a small scene outside Borgin and Burkes. A stowaway disembodied hand had crawled up his leg, reaching his upper thigh before he'd noticed. Draco started tugging the hand off, but the fingers held fast to his trousers, and Hermione cast a tiny spark at the hand that hit the wizard's leg instead, he was flailing so wildly. She could see Borgin's pale face peering through his shop's grimy window.

"Eeee!" Draco very nearly squealed as the green fingers moved upward again. Furious, he shoved his wand into the hand and exploded it, splattering hand guts all over the shop window and their cloaks. Borgin's face vanished. By the time they reached the White Wyvern, Hermione was giggling and Draco was sputtering with rage.

"You should have seen your face," she gasped, "when the hand got up near your ..."

"Don't you dare finish that sentence," he growled. "Just look at my cloak." He tried to shake the blood off the thick cloth.

Hermione looked at her own cloak and sighed. "Well, now we fit right in."

They did three rounds of the Wyvern before they found Vasile, and that was only because the vampire came out of the shadows and almost stepped on their feet. The three of them quickly withdrew to a corner table, and what looked like a half-troll came by and slammed three foaming steins in front of them.