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It had just been a hunch, one Hermione didn’t dare share with Harry, nor Ron for that matter, who couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. No, she’d just told her fiancé she was on a work trip. Ron would be none the wiser. Work at the Department of Mysteries often took her abroad, just that this mission? She’d appointed herself.
She looked down at the case file in her satchel, the white label peeking out of the over-stuffed bag: The Hunt for Lily Potter.
Various clues had brought Hermione to the doorstep of the magical speakeasy that stood in the heart of Amsterdam’s less savoury wizarding quarter, running adjacent to the infamous Red Light District.
Several strands of the puzzle had come together by accident: obscure mentions in vampire genealogy logs, a half-charred journal entry from the Potter’s archived personal effects, a cryptic prophecy.
But it was only when she’d inspected the gravesite at Godric’s Hollow that her wild hunch became reality, and her world turned upside down.
It was one thing to doggedly pursue a theory, but as she stood above the grave—the crackle of the Skeleto Revelio spell still sizzling in the air—Hermione confirmed her suspicions: Lily Potter had never been buried there.
From that moment on, Hermione relentlessly followed every wisp of rumour like a bloodhound. A pale witch with hypnotic green eyes, the suspect of a bloody attack on Fenrir Greyback a few years prior. A ‘Poppy Evans’ listed as receiving an unregistered wand in Prague’s magical district in the ‘90s. A redheaded bar-owner and performer, who never aged, working in the world’s most free-living city.
The trail had led Hermione here, to Tales and Spirits, disguised with Polyjuice potion procured from the DoM stores.
The venue was low-lit with a magically enhanced red hue kissing every surface and the inebriated faces of its patrons. The bar curved like a Cheshire Cat smile, lined with smoking cocktails. Candles floated like fireflies, reminiscent of Hogwarts’ Great Hall, while Goblins nursed blood-orange bottles, wizards converged on dark alcoves, and a hag was beating a sallow-skinned figure at wizard’s chess in the corner.
At the bar, a dreadlocked mixologist spun liquids in the air, combining them in a slew of sparks like a firework display.
And onstage…
Deep red hair—not fiery like Ginny’s, more akin to dying embers—fell over bare shoulders. Freckled breasts were cosseted by a crimson and black cage of fabric. Hermione watched the hips of the woman sway with the seductive instrumental.
Captivated, Hermione paused at the narrow walkway between crowded tables. She watched the woman prowl with the authority and control one wouldn’t expect of a mere dancer. It was like she owned the room, their attention, their hearts, their minds. And perhaps she did.
This was Poppy Evans, owner of Tales and Spirits, and her eyes—Harry’s eyes, Lily’s eyes—found hers.
If Hermione didn’t know anything about biology, she would’ve said her heart stopped at that moment. Perhaps it had? The muscle in her chest stuttered and staggered as if clutched by some unseen force and prohibited from beating.
At that very moment, the pale vixen staggered onstage. Her hand grasped her own chest like it had just remembered how to beat—which would be entirely absurd. Vampires had no pulse. Her lips parted in an ‘O’, and a flicker of something fearful and bewildered crossed her face.
Poppy snapped her fingers, and the music changed its score as she stepped down from the stage like a queen descending a dais, hips keeping to the new beat. Her eyes never left Hermione’s.
The room hushed to a murmur around her. Even the hag and grey figure paused their match. Poppy’s hungry gaze smouldered, and Hermione stopped breathing.
She was tethered to the floor, every inch of her skin alive and tingling with awareness, as if this woman’s stare alone could strip her bare. Her breath caught when she—Poppy? Lily?—paused only inches away, so close Hermione could smell her—dark fruits, smoke, and something coppery underneath.
“Upstairs,” she purred behind black matte lips, then turned.
Hermione followed like she’d been summoned. Spellbound. Like her name had been enchanted in a forgotten tongue.
The flat above the speakeasy was unlike any home Hermione had known. Heavy velvet curtains kept the world out, bookshelves lined every wall—most stuffed with obscure texts on vampirism, curse-breaking, and magical afflictions of legend. Among them were well-worn newspapers. Clippings of the Triwizard Tournament, the Order, the Second Wizarding War hung up on a large pinboard. Harry’s autobiography was dog-eared on a coffee table.
Moving photos filled a cabinet. One of them she recognised from five years ago. The Golden Trio, just after the Battle of Hogwarts.
The woman poured herself a drink from a crystal decanter—thick, red and viscous. She didn’t offer Hermione one. With poise and a straight spine, she sat on a high-back armchair, crossed one elegant leg over another and gestured for Hermione to take a seat on the adjacent sofa.
“You think I wouldn’t recognise Hermione Granger when she walked into my domain?” her voice bit into the silence. “Vampires have True Sight, which I’m sure you’re aware of. I’m not sure why you bothered—I gather you already discovered my affliction. The Brightest Witch of our age—came to find me.”
Hermione assessed the woman. For all her control, there was a hesitation brewing under the surface, adding a faint quiver to her speech. She was like a cat prepared to flee or strike with readied claws.
“Professor Slughorn used to say the same about you,” Hermione said, just as measured, careful with her movements so as not to startle the creature into an act neither of them could return from.
Fight or Flight.
“In your case, it was likely earned,” Lily tutted, glancing down at the drink in her hand, swirling it with a rhythmic motion of her wrist.
There was the confirmation, in case she still needed it. Hermione had found her.
Time had not changed Lily Potter. It had not taken its toll on her skin, her eyes, her form, but it had certainly taken its fair share of her soul. The laughing, vivacious young girl Hermione had studied all these months, had been replaced by a woman young in flesh, but wise beyond her years in both mind and heart.
“Personally, I think it was just another title he could bestow to inflate himself,” Hermione said dismissively. “Boast of his association with the ‘Golden Girl.’”
“Hmmm,” Lily considered, her tongue grazed the sharp tip of a protruding incisor, and Hermione’s pulse stuttered. “Somehow, given that you’re here, I doubt that.”
The tension between them felt charged and taut. Hermione was eager to get on steadier ground with the woman. “Why Poppy?” she asked curiously. “I imagine you chose the name yourself?”
“The flower stands for ‘restful sleep, peace and death.’” Lily sipped her drink. The thick mixture clung to the corner of her lips, and Hermione felt the absurd drive to lick it off herself. “Rather morbid really. I thought I was being clever. Instead, it ended up just being sad.”
Hermione offered a small smile. “A lily by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Her hostesses returned her smile, though much more wicked in its flavour. “Are you quoting Shakespeare at me now?” Her voice was smooth. “Careful, you might just make a vampire blush—then who’s telling what havoc you’d wreak.”
“I think my being here is already doing enough damage to both of us,” Hermione admitted, looking down at her hands and noticing the skin beginning to undulate.
Lily studied her keenly while Hermione’s form shifted back to her true self, Polyjuice wearing off. Unfortunately, it created the perfect distraction for Lily to move to safer topics.
“So,” she said, as she placed her empty glass down. “What gave me away?”
Hermione shook her head and shrugged. “Not one thing. Everything. The grave, the vampire ledgers—”
“Fucking Dumbldore,” Lily snarled.
“I’m sorry?” Hermione frowned at the swift change in the woman’s demeanour, heat prickling at her skin—being so close to something so dangerous.
“Oh, had you not discovered that piece of the mystery behind my transformation?” She waved a flourished palm at herself, “Don’t worry, it took me seven years.”
Hermione considered her words.
There had been some open questions, of course. Who Confunded the aurors to recall that two bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the Potter’s home and not one? Who made sure all those working the case believed both had perished? And who had been responsible for ensuring Lily Potter had vampire blood in her system at her moment of death?
“Dumbledore—” Hermione breathed.
Lily had watched as Hermione slotted the final puzzle piece into place. She rolled her eyes, her shoulders, her neck—easing the tension that had built up.
“He had provided a post-natal tincture.” Lily inhaled a shaky breath, her jaw tight, bright white fangs resting just slightly on her bottom lip. “I wasn’t sleeping well with the worry. Voldemort had marked us as his next target. He needed to eliminate Harry as a threat, and I needed my wits about me.”
“You believe Dumbledore spiked it with Vampire Blood?” Hermione asked, leaning forward in thought.
“My maker was a confidant of Dumbledore’s, he had visited Hogwarts on a number of occasions to lecture N.E.W.T. students. And if that wasn’t evidence enough, I wrote to the Headmaster the year Harry began at Hogwarts.” Lily rose and pulled a wooden box from a bookshelf, placing it on Hermione’s lap.
Hermione’s heart palpitated again, as Lily winced from some ghostly pain.
It was not the time to dive into those matters, however, and Hermione shook off her need to pursue that line of questioning, to open the box.
Inside were years of correspondence between Lily and Dumbledore. After many minutes of Hermione’s brain exploding from the revelation that Dumbledore had known all these years that Lily had survived, she whispered, “You had shared Pandora Lovegood’s prophecy with him…”
Lily exhaled and shook her head, “No, she did.” She pursed her lips. “I hadn’t understood it well enough to share its contents before my death. I was still piecing together the implications.” Lily looked up from her hands and levelled Hermione with a knowing glance. “I imagine you would understand.”
Hermione nodded. She knew all too well about keeping her theories close to her chest until she had enough evidence to back them.
Lily’s gaze tracked to the biography of Harry’s life, published on his most recent twenty-fifth birthday. She smiled ruefully. “Be brave like my mother. That’s what Harry’s autobiography had said,” she leant back on the chair, not in a relaxed manner; her shoulders were too hunched for that. “That I had been so brave to die for him that night, had given up my life to protect him from the killing curse, and Slughorn should summon equal bravery to relinquish his knowledge of the Horcruxes… Yet I did not die. Not truly. All I have done these years is skulk in the shadows, watch on from afar, all because of a prophecy of a long-dead friend.”
Hermione recited the words she had etched into her mind from the recovered orb:
“Thy heart shall stop the night he dies. Only if you flee, the boy survives.
Return not ‘til silence breaks—When blood calls blood, and beating wakes.”
Lily closed her eyes as Hermione spoke. Silence stretched on.
“If the prophecy is to be believed,” Hermione said gravely, “then… it’s one thing being brave enough to die for those you love. But it’s another—perhaps even greater—strength to be brave enough to live for them. Without them. All to hopefully, one day, be reunited.”
Lily was quiet for a long time, when she finally opened her eyes they were locked onto Hermione. “Many times, I wished I had died. It would have been simpler. But I heard her words in my head for years. Mulled them over, tortured myself with them. There was only one way my heart could beat again… I had all but given up hope.” She traced her lips with her tongue and Hermione squirmed in her seat. “But then you walked in… and I felt it. My heart. You’re my Blood Singer.”
Hermione blinked and her pulse ran rampant. It was as she suspected, but couldn't never have predicted. A ‘Singer’ was the one person whose blood called to a vampire more than any other. The one who, if the vampire could resist for long enough—could prove to whatever Gods that they could be trusted amongst the living—could stir the undead back into life.
“When you saw me for the first time….” Hermione said slowly. “Your heart started beating, didn’t it? Just like mine stopped for a moment.”
“It hurts,” Lily rasped. “My heart. It hasn’t beat in so long. And now it pains like an open wound. I had come to the conclusion that it would not be my fate. To find my Singer, to reunite with Harry. My heart hadn’t pumped a single beat for a quarter century.”
Hermione swallowed, a flush climbing her chest like ivy. Her blood was heating up, becoming ever the more tempting to the dangerous creature before her. And she wanted to give into it.
Lily gave a soft, sharp laugh. “And then you walk in and I need—your beauty, your mind, your blood.”
“You want me?” Hermione’s voice was barely a breath.
“I crave you,” she said hungrily. “And yet, I can never have you.”
“You can have me,” Hermione said back, almost feverishly.
There was Ron. Protective, safe Ron. The man who she cared for. The man who she settled for… and then there was Lily.
The woman she was clearly always meant to be with. The woman her blood sang for.
Hermione stood, came before her, looking down onto the pristine, porcelain face. A thing of danger. A thing of beauty.
“Come home with me,” Hermione asserted, extending her palm out for Lily to take.
Lily’s eyes burned into Hermione’s exposed wrist. She swallowed and turned to face the cabinet of moving pictures. Her boy, the time with him she’d lost.
“I can’t return to his life now after abandoning him for all these years, orphaning him in the care of my loveless sister, leaving him to face Voldemort alone. How could I? How could he ever forgive me?”
“Harry deserves his mother. You deserve to live. You’ve already died for him. Don’t you think it’s time you lived for him too?”
A beat. A breath. A small swallowing back of regret, sorrow and despair built over twenty-five years.
She looked back at Hermione, her gaze reaching so deep it made her heart leap once more, then, finally nodded.
She took Hermione’s hand in hers.
Mother was coming home.