Happenstance

They left the hotel. Hermione had a moment to catch a flash of silver before she was shoved roughly forward. Her feet slipped on the icy front steps and she barrelled down onto the pavement. Landing with a crunch, she saved her breath for fighting not swearing and rolled.

A man in a turquoise anorak got a boot in the crotch as he approached. Hermione hoped he was not a Good Samaritan coming to assist. Even the nicest guy would bear a grudge for getting his olives pressed. She scrambled up fast, favouring her right knee, only to have Draco crash into her as he staggered back from a brunet in another blue-green jacket.

She caught him and used him as cover to pull her wand. Not for a Hex, not in broad daylight in the Stortorget, but there were other options. Since her kidnapping, Hermione had researched an array of Charms she could discretely use on herself. She thought of this one as her Valkyrie spell.

Magic flooded her limbs with power and she launched herself at the man who had struck Draco. Her elbow met his sternum in a blow that probably would have popped her shoulder out of joint had she tried it without the Charm. His breath whooshed past her face as he went down.

Hermione crash tackled the third guy opportunistically rifling through Draco’s pockets. She had developed the Valkyrie Charm to give her a defensive and adrenalin boost in melee combat when duelling was not an option. Her research into a spell to give her martial arts skill beyond the rough techniques she had picked up in the field was still in progress unfortunately.

So she used blunt force, bowling both her target and herself into a snow bank. He armed her off, splitting her lip. Hermione got a heel jab into his knee that made him swear in German. Then a woman yelled in Swedish for a police officer. The fight broke up quickly after that. The three men ran, two of them gingerly, as Hermione lurched over to Draco lying prone on the sidewalk.

Her spell-wrought verve drained from her as shock flooded in; blood soaked the front of his sweater. Draco had not been punched. He had been stabbed. Hermione grabbed her beanie and used it to apply pressure to the wound as a tall man in navy blue radioed for an ambulance.

“I’m a doctor.” She lied quickly. “I’ll stay with him. Get them!”

The cop gave her a nod before running down the street in pursuit. Hermione cast a Healing Charm while hiding her wand low near the ground. Draco coughed, red foam splattering over his face, but he roused and swore a rather different oath than the German had used.

“Let’s get out of here.” He levered himself into a sitting position wincing at the bruises she had not yet mended.

“Too late.” Hermione spotted the policeman returning as well as the onlookers’ avid interest. A matronly woman in a florist’s pinny came out into the square with a blanket to swathe Draco with no more comment than ‘Varsågod’.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a visit to a casualty ward where Draco was given an efficient few stitches to the small but deep gash just under his ribs and then in making a statement to the police. By the time they finally excused themselves it was dark. Hermione took them home as Draco was in a temper foul enough to Apparate them to the banks of the Tiber not the Thames.

He stormed off in a huff, not quite slamming his door but shutting it firmly enough to brook no visitors or comment. Hermione was at a loose end. She felt she should be doing something constructive. Firstly she went to the nursery for the evening feed. And to think.

The three men had no used magic. Hermione could not decide whether that was significant. Only the terminally reckless threw spells about in front of Muggles. She did not think she and Draco had looked especially affluent or vulnerable to tempt as targets of a random mugging. Not that she had been a victim of street crime often enough to judge trends.

Alek was fractious and she hoped he was not teething. Surely it was too soon? There was not much research on immature lycanthropes. Hermione resolved to take detailed notes on every developmental stage so the next woman who found herself in this situation, Heaven help her, would have some references to judge what was normal.

She missed normal. Everything had settled down nicely after the War until bloody Greyback. Hermione held Alek against her shoulder to burp him and was rewarded with an enthusiastic amount of spit-up. Lovely.

A little elf magic took care of the mess. Suki was a godsend. Hermione thanked her and swapped Alek for Lind.

Who did she know in Germany? Or Austria or Switzerland? Or Liechtenstein or Luxembourg, for that matter? She needed more to go on than a chance heard swear word. Draco might know someone. He socialised a lot with the Durmstrang crowd but she was not going to ask him anything until he came out of his sulk. It was tempting to connect the abduction with the assault. Hermione disliked coincidences.

She finished the feeding, tucked her children into their cots and had a maternal moment looking down at their pink little faces. Hermione blinked away tears, cross with herself for crying for no particular reason. Hormones had a lot to answer for, the witch opined. She collected her jacket before heading to the least ominous workroom below stairs. There was something else she could do.