Dust & Bloodlines
POV: Hermione Granger
They Apparated just beyond the boundary line, the crack of arrival muffled by Ministry warding. The Rosier property stood silent against the morning light, a red-brick monument wrapped in frost and old enchantments.
Hermione exhaled once, sharp and shallow, and adjusted the sleeves of her coat. She felt the wards immediately—static against her skin, like a whisper held too long in the throat. Standard Ministry replacements: efficient, impersonal, indifferent. The kind of protections installed after death, not to prevent it.
She glanced toward the house.
“Why re-seal it with public-grade locks?” she asked, more to herself than to him.
Draco didn’t answer. He stood a few paces ahead, watching the house like it might decide to speak. He hadn’t said much since handing her the case notes. She hadn’t needed him to.
Hermione stepped forward, wand drawn—not raised, just present—and crossed the perimeter.
The air changed.
Inside, the Rosier townhouse had been cleared. The body removed, furniture returned to order, any evidence considered useful now stored in a holding vault. But the magic remained. Not in strength—there were no active spells left here—but in texture.
She closed her eyes for a breath, then opened them again. Slower.
It felt wrong. Still.
Not dangerous. Not active.
Just... unsettled.
She moved to the sitting room. The tea service had been cleaned, but the spill remained faintly dark against the rug. Faint outlines marked where the body had slumped. Someone had been thorough, but not thorough enough to erase the past entirely.
Hermione dropped into a crouch beside the cold hearth, murmuring a charm beneath her breath. A flicker of blue-white shimmered from her wandtip, then rose into the air like smoke.
It hovered over the rug, curling above the threads, forming a hazy bloom just above the floorboards.
Vapor. Not magical residue. Not spellwork. Something subtler.
She tilted her head.
The charm filtered for essence: the haze trembled once, then shifted to a faint green-blue glow at the center.
She frowned.
“Bitterroot base,” she murmured.
Draco’s voice came from behind her. “That wasn’t in the original sweep.”
She didn’t look up. “Because you were looking for spells,” she said. “Not craft.”
He didn’t reply immediately. She heard the faint creak of his step on old wood, then silence again.
Hermione turned her wrist, directing the charm to hover closer to the hearthstone. The haze thinned, revealing a second note layered beneath the first—a chemical stabilizer. Not common. Not Ministry-cleared. Not anything that belonged in tea.
This isn’t magical residue, she thought. It’s potion vapor. Deconstructed. Designed not to leave a trace, but it did anyway. Just barely.
She filed the observation away without writing it down.
Behind her, Draco shifted again.
The silence between them was no longer neutral. It was observational—two methods brushing against each other like blades left too close on a table.
She stood slowly.
“There’s a pattern,” she said, not quite to him.
He didn’t argue.
But he didn’t agree, either.
POV: Draco Malfoy
She catalogued everything.
Draco watched from the edge of the room as Hermione moved through the space like someone assembling a puzzle only she could see. Her wand traced glyphs through the air—tight, deliberate curves meant to capture energy decay, scent trails, signature echoes. She muttered the incantations low and fast, barely audible, as if magic was only real when spoken in the grammar of research.
She paused by the tea stain again, adjusted the angle of her charm, and frowned when the vapor re-formed—slightly off-center from its first bloom. She corrected the rune with a flick of her wrist, not bothering to acknowledge that he was still standing behind her.
Draco turned away.
It wasn’t that her methods were wrong. They weren’t. They were thorough. Documented. Academically sound.
They were just... blind.
A scene didn’t speak in glyphs. Not really. It spoke in absence. In the way a room held breath, or failed to. In what a floorboard didn’t creak when it should have. In what lingered too precisely to be natural.
He crossed back toward the fireplace, crouching near the seam where hearth met stone. His fingers brushed along the edge, slow, not casting—feeling.
The imprint signature was there, faint but intact, etched into the stone with a warder’s hand. Standard placement. Rosier’s magical ID folded into the charm matrix, burnt in during the original bonding.
But it was soft. Too soft. Not broken—but not whole, either.
It felt... cautious.
He narrowed his eyes. “There was hesitation here.”
Behind him, parchment rustled. “You mean hesitation in casting?” Hermione asked, her tone distracted.
Draco shook his head. “In intent.”
He stood, brushing off his hands.
“Someone was let in.”
That made her stop.
She turned toward him, brows raised. “That’s not how warding works.”
“It is,” he said. “If the caster wants it to be.”
She folded her arms. “Intent isn’t measurable.”
Draco didn’t flinch. “Doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
A beat stretched.
She held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary, then turned back to her spellwork with the clipped precision of someone filing disagreement into a drawer she would re-open later.
Draco watched her move. There was a sharpness to her now he hadn’t remembered—measured, yes, but not detached. She was trying to solve the scene.
He was trying to feel it.
The room was too clean. The spill was too precise. The silence didn’t echo the way it should.
She wanted patterns. He wanted contradiction.
Somewhere between the two was the truth.
He looked down at the hearth once more, at the faint ash smear trailing to the rug’s edge, and didn’t say what he was thinking:
That the room still felt like it was waiting for something to return.
POV: Hermione Granger
The tea stain was older now. Not in time, but in tone—its edges oxidized, the color deepened to something closer to rust than steeped leaf. Beneath it, the rug had begun to stiffen.
Hermione crouched again, her wand low and steady, and murmured a chemical separation charm under her breath. The incantation barely stirred the air, but the reaction was immediate: a thin line of red began to pool at the center of the stain, glistening faintly before separating into two distinct rings.
She leaned closer.
The inner ring shimmered just slightly—a stabilizing agent. Rare. Not Ministry-issued. Not domestic.
“Stabilizer,” she said aloud, almost to herself. “Someone built this to last long enough to dissolve cleanly.”
Behind her, Draco’s voice came, dry and unimpressed. “Why would they bother? A simple curse is faster.”
Hermione didn’t look up. “Because if it were a curse, it would’ve left magical prints. Traces. An echo. This didn’t. Which means it’s not a spell.”
She stood, brushing the dust from her knees.
“It’s intentional. Hidden. Controlled.”
Draco tilted his head, folding his arms. “Or you’re seeing what you want to see because it fits your thesis.”
The words landed with surgical precision.
Hermione froze.
The space between them tightened—not with heat, not with tension, but with something sharper. The kind of silence that made you aware of your own breathing.
She turned.
“You think I want this to be potions?”
He didn’t answer.
“I want it to stop,” she said, voice even but unmistakably threaded with steel. “I want the body count to end. I want one of these scenes to make sense without having to rewrite everything we know about forensic magic. But I’m not going to pretend that magic is the only language someone can kill in.”
Draco’s jaw shifted, just slightly.
Hermione exhaled through her nose. Quiet. Measured. But her grip on her wand was firmer now.
She added, more softly, “Just because you were trained to look for rupture doesn’t mean absence can’t speak.”
That—finally—seemed to land.
Draco didn’t reply. But he stepped back, just half a pace. Enough to acknowledge that she wasn’t guessing. She was already too close to something real.
Hermione turned away, refocusing on the residue now darkening against the spell matrix. She didn’t need him to agree. But she needed him to stop pretending she was reaching.
They were both too old—and the dead too many—for performance.
POV: Draco Malfoy
He crouched again, this time lower—closer to the hearth where the wood met stone in uneven seams. The Ministry’s cleanup team had done their job with ruthless efficiency: the ashes swept, the scorch marks vanished, the floor beneath left antiseptically bare.
But not clean.
Not entirely.
Draco ran two fingers lightly across the edge of the floorboard. The grain was slightly warped, not from time or heat—but from pressure. Something had pressed against it. Or into it.
He adjusted his grip on his wand, then brushed aside a thin layer of soot and ash with his palm.
There it was.
A mark.
Shallow. Uneven. Carved hastily into the wood, as if the person who made it had neither time nor permission. A jagged curve, a half-formed loop—unfinished, but deliberate. Not a rune. Not Arithmantic. Not anything officially sanctioned or taught.
But he knew it.
Draco’s stomach drew tight—not with fear, but with recognition. It was a variant. A fractured symbol from a lineage warding codex he hadn’t seen since childhood. One of the older tomes. The kind that was shelved not for disuse, but for disavowal.
Blood marks. Erasure sigils.
Not dark magic, exactly. But not clean.
His pulse clicked once beneath his collar.
He stared at it for a moment longer than necessary.
Behind him, Hermione’s footsteps padded softly across the rug.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look up.
Instead, he stood in one smooth motion and stepped sideways, angling his body between her and the hearth. The file folder under his arm shifted slightly, just enough to conceal the mark from view.
“Nothing useful,” he said. His voice was even. Bored, almost.
She paused. He could feel her watching him—assessing not just the space, but him.
“Sloppy etching,” he added, with the kind of dismissiveness that invited no further inquiry.
The silence stretched, taut.
But she didn’t press.
Not yet.
She turned away, wand already rising to conjure another analytical charm, her attention shifting back to the pattern of vapor near the hearthstone.
Draco exhaled slowly through his nose.
He didn’t look back at the mark.
It was already following him.
POV: Hermione Granger
She swept the room one last time, wand low and quiet in her hand.
The spell she cast wasn’t a standard diagnostic—it wouldn’t register magical residue in the traditional sense. It was older, messier, built on the idea that emotion, like energy, left a print. Unsanctioned in most divisions. Still used, quietly, where Unspeakables knew better than to pretend the soul didn’t bleed when no one was watching.
The charm whispered across the floorboards, then pulsed back through her feet—faint, flickering, wrong.
Not dark. Not cursed.
Just heavy.
Hermione paused near the hearth. Beneath her boots, the wood vibrated slightly—barely more than a shiver. As if something had settled there and refused to be scrubbed out. Not a spell. Not a presence. A memory, maybe. Or guilt.
She turned, scanning the space.
Draco stood by the far wall, not quite watching her. His posture was still, too still, the kind of stillness that came from holding something in place—not just his body, but a thought.
His gaze flicked—once—back to the hearthstone. Just a glance. But she caught it.
Then he looked away.
She held her breath.
He knows something about the mark.
Her grip on her wand tightened slightly. The spell completed and fizzled into the air, giving her no new data. Just that same, dull pressure underfoot. A psychic echo without origin. She had half a mind to trace it further. To push. To ask.
But she didn’t.
Not yet.
She filed it away—the flick of his eyes, the way he’d stood between her and the floorboards, the tone he’d used when he said “sloppy etching.”
The lie wasn’t loud, but it lingered.
She turned from the room, stepped past him without comment, and slipped out the front door into the mid-morning air.
The street beyond the threshold was quiet, the mist thinner now, but still present—like the house had exhaled something it hadn’t meant to.
Hermione pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders.
The bitter scent clung to the wool.