ordered to check.
The last thing Ginny remembered was Snape telling her that he had purposely awarded her a foul in the dying minutes of a sixth year Quidditch game he had refereed. That particular foul had cost Gryffindor the match and the championship.
It was one of the few things she and Harry were still a bit sore about.
"There was no foul. Draco was in the wrong," Snape informed her.
It was calculated on his part, she was still convincingly seething when they brought her around.
**
If Muggles employed biometric sensors as part of their security measures, than it followed that some wizards would invent ward-breaking alarms that could be nestled rather nicely inside your head.
Hermione had access to this new and nifty bit of spell-work precisely because she worked in the Department of Mysteries. And everyone knew that the Department of Mysteries got to play with the coolest new spells before even Aurors managed to get a look in.
This was one of those cases in point.
So it was that on that cold, Saturday evening that a little 'ping' went off inside Hermione's head. And this had nothing to do with the timer on the oven where she had just pulled out a hopelessly burnt lasagne dinner.
She'd been on her way to the fridge to see if something new and edible had magically appeared between now and the last time she had checked it two hours ago.
Wearing flannel pyjamas and bunny bedroom slippers than had seen better days, Hermione paused in the middle of her kitchen and blinked in concentration.
The invisible trip wire that guarded her modest property was triggered by someone unexpected entering the compound. It would have been na?ve of her to assume that Voldemort would never think to make her a target, whether for information or simply to make Harry suffer.
Anyone who knew Harry well walked around with the same distant, dark thought that something nasty was possibly lurking around the next corner. It came with the territory of caring for Harry and having him care for you. You just dealt with it.
It was really quite cold. The fireplace roared with an uncharacteristically normal flame. A quick exit was not on the cards, since Hermione had disconnected the chute from the Floo network that evening, just in case Nick would try to contact her.
Wasn't that what you normally did when you broke up with someone, avoid them for a few days? She didn't have a clue seeing as this was the first time she had ever had to end a relationship with anyone. Or second time, perhaps, if you counted Krum, which you really shouldn't because that was more one-sided than anything.
Nick, in his typical understated and concise manner, had said he understood. But she didn't think he really did.
This was probably because she had ended it on the basis of incompatibility. Had she told him she was still painfully in love with a boy...correction, a man she'd only known intimately for fourteen days and hadn't actually seen in five years, Nick's reaction might very well have been different.
His calmness in the face of the breakup was yet another glaring indication that they were not right for each other. Hermione prided herself on her practicality, but she understood herself well enough to know that any man who didn't put up more than a brief argument when confronted with the demise of their relationship was not the man for her.
Her head was practical, scientific even, but her heart was not. It was insane and unhealthy to want Nick to throw a chair, to stalk and fume, to fight for her, to give her a look that nailed her brain to the back of her skull and drag the truth of her feelings out of her.
But he didn't do any of this because he was not Draco.
The end of a thus far successful relationship was not an occasion to pour some more tea and have a deep and meaningful conversation about the various trials of life. This was precisely what Nick had done. Hermione had actually left his apartment strangely jubilant, but equal parts bewildered and terrified because she had unearthed a truth about herself that she had tried her best to keep buried.
When Hermione had arrived home, she'd figured an evening off the grid was called for, so to speak. That notion was backfiring now. There was no way to reconnect to the Floo Network quickly enough to make an emergency call.
She would have to Apparate to safety if it