[A/N: Thank you to Calamity Owl and Darsynia for beta-reading this chapter! Fair warning: this one's a cliffhanger.]
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Harry settled easily into his new routine of coming home to dinner with Sirius, Remus, and Hermione, no matter when he got done with work. That did cause him to miss an impromptu after-work trip to the pub with a colleague once, but he thought that was a good trade-off for regular family suppers. By Sunday morning, when Hermione and Remus laid out their plans to use his two days off in a row to perform some rituals on her, Harry was almost sad to see it end. He did miss being in his own place, though, and he knew it wouldn't be safe for them there much longer with the full moon only a few days away.
After they finished their Sunday breakfast, Sirius lit his wand with a Lumos Charm and led the rest of them down to an old ritual room in the sub-basement he'd spent the previous day preparing for use again.
"You should have seen it," he said. "There was enough blood scattered about that I wonder if my mother sacrificed my father in there." Beyond them, the main hallway of the sub-basement stretched into the foetid (and presumably spider-infested) darkness.
Hermione laughed, then stopped when she realised no one else was.
"It's alright." Sirius patted her on the head. "I thought it was kind of funny, too. It would have served him right for being dumb enough to marry that abusive old hag."
"Don't worry," Remus added, "we won't need to sacrifice more than a little blood for this ritual."
"You're serious. Blood?" she asked.
"No, I'm Sirius," Sirius said as he opened the door to the ritual room. "Yes! I've been waiting all week to catch her on that."
Hermione pouted. "You only got me because I was distracted by the suggestion of actual blood sacrifice."
"It's pretty normal," Harry said, taking in the room. It was built of old Portland Limestone with lighting runes carved all the way around the walls about a foot below where it met the walnut ceiling boards. Sirius touched his wand to the runes as he entered and they all lit up like a series of dim magical LEDs.
Sirius said, "Nox" and cancelled his light spell, leaving their eyes to adjust to the dimmer rune light. "It could be worse," he said. "Some rituals need to be performed skyclad."
"Wait, what?" Hermione asked.
"Starkers," Harry said, both to be helpful and to see the look on her face. She did not disappoint.
"What?!" Hermione's mouth fell open. "That's a thing?"
"Indeed it is," Sirius said, and let his eyes rove suggestively from her to Harry. "Better luck next time, Pup."
She blushed bright red.
"Stop traumatising our guest," Harry said. "Knowing ritual magic, this is probably going to be uncomfortable enough without that sort of thing."
Sirius rolled his eyes and gestured for Hermione to sit down in the centre of a ritual circle he'd prepared. Her place was in the centre of a square drawn on the stone in thick red chalk, which was inscribed in a circle of green chalk that was itself inscribed in a circle of blue chalk. Harry didn't recognize the runes written in white chalk where each of the shapes overlapped, but he did recognize Remus's handwriting in them. Which was for the best, since attaching Hermione's magical core to runes designed by Sirius would probably be the equivalent of hooking the feed block, action, and ammunition magazine of a Vickers machine gun to the barrel of a water pistol.
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Hermione Granger and the Theft of Magic
Fanfiction(AU) Hermione's biggest worries in life are her dissertation and her rent, at least until she drunkenly takes a stick from a green-eyed stranger and breaks what she thought were the laws of physics. Now she's facing a high-stakes, impossible test, b...
