Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. And Prudence.

To be honest, Harriet should have realised what was up back when she'd first seen the blond boy climb in through Elena's window. But she'd been incredibly new to the place back then and didn't think it quite her place to rat the girl out to her aunt for the simple crime of having boys over.

Also, a part of her assumed it was some American thing. She saw it a lot in those high school movies they had in this country, throwing rocks at the window until the girl opens it to let the boy in. Did they even have high school movies back home?

Well, it's not like she would know, she thought bitterly. By the time she'd had the free time to go to watch a film in the theatres back home, the stalkers had been there. The Muggleborns who had seen her photo in the free introductory pamphlets adorning many a rack at Flourish and Blotts around July, with her standing with Hogwarts behind her frowning most frightfully with the tag reading 'The Saviour'. A photo that had not been taken or used with her consent, one that they had to develop using muggle methods because otherwise she kept running out of the frame.

Wankers.

But yes, she should have reported the boy way back then. Or when she saw Elena kissing another guy on the porch, one who looked far too old for her and if the whispers making their rounds at the tea parties were to believed, was the blond boy's brother, or when people kept dropping like flies. And now, if the exsanguinated body she came across while trekking through the woods was anything to go by, vampires.

And not very subtle ones either. Knowing Sanguini and how he made a game of draining the most amount of people and then hiding the bodies in 'accidents' just to see if anyone realised what was going on, or even Prudence whose kill count wasn't even hidden but instead thought to be the work of a serial killer due to the macabre tableaus she turned them into, it kind of made these vampires look amateurish. There was no finesse there whatsoever.

But then she supposed the different ties between magic and magical creatures in this country changed things. And their vampires were created out of muggles and wiccans rather than True Witches so there was that. She had heard tales of how their vampires had been created through the perversion of an immortality spell. Meanwhile vampires like Sanguini were created through a Necromancer who had played with Blood Magic a bit too much. She knew that garlic had been heavily involved in the potion the Necromancer had been trying to create and thus grew the aversion to the same in her vampires. These ones had no such aversion to garlic.

And her kind of vampires weren't sterile. Sanguini's repeated polite requests that she bear his children made that obvious. Probably because they weren't actually dead, just...sort of cannibals.

But vampires in her backyard. Literally, seeing as how her house was right next to a forest.

With a sigh she took off, trudging through the forest. She could feel some magical resonance from somewhere and it was only a matter of time until she finally reached it.

She found Elena, Jenna and some other woman, dead and heart ripped out, in circles of fire while a woman chanted and another man stood nearby, looking at them hungrily while squeezing what appeared to the the third woman's heart. When Harriet stepped out of the forest into the light they all turned to her, Elena and Jenna yelling at her to get out of there while the man and the chanting woman, probably a wiccan, shared a glance.

The wiccan waved her hand in Harriet's direction and she felt a gust of wind that would have swept her off her feet and into one of the trees had Harriet not batted it away with a flick of her finger. She must have put too much power into it though because instead of just deflecting the 'wind' she ended up deforesting a good strip of land.

"Oops!" She cringed. She'd forgotten about the power surges that came when she hadn't used her magic in a while. "Oh, carry on, I'm just here to observe. This is just incredibly nostalgic." She wheezed out a laugh.

But the wiccan just stared at her with her mouth open.

"Harriet, what are you doing?" Elena screamed.

"Call it an intellectual curiosity, usually the type of magic I see is powerful enough that the sacrifices can be limited to a literal pound of flesh and a bit of enemy's blood. This is vaguely reminiscent but at the same time, very new. But I mean when magic is weak it has to be augmented by sacrifices, that's just how it goes. You get back what you put in and this wiccan can't exactly put in that much so..." The wiccan drew herself up at that, clearly furious and Harriet realised she had offended her, "No offense meant, I'm sure you're powerful enough compared to others like you, but you're not quite up to my level. Carry on."

The man opened his pretty pillow lip mouth to speak but closed it just as fast. He nodded at the witch but before she could resume chanting, the blond boy Elena liked appeared at the top of the cliff.

"I don't recall you being on the guest list." The man said and Harriet stared in amazement.

"Bloody hell, blondie's a vampire too? That makes the sneaking in through the window even more creepy." The man turned to her annoyed and she held up her hands, "Sorry about that, I didn't mean to steal your thunder."

He did the vampire speed walk to the cliff and then it was just the four of them women there. He returned quickly enough, pausing to stake the blond boy in the back before making dramatic speeches about goddesses being sacrificed at the altar and what not. Harry always wondered about that, rituals and sacrifices tended to be the same, always done by firelight with daggers, very often in graveyards for some reason. With the exception of Blaise Zabini's mother whose sacrifices were conducted in her ritual room with its stainless steel tables and stone tiles to reduce cleanup and specially crafted goblin-made scalpels, everyone seemed to want to create an atmosphere rather than be precise the way they really should.

If Harriet's magic ever got weak enough to need sacrifices she hoped to follow in Callidora Zabini's footsteps.

The ritual was interrupted again when Jenna bit the wiccan but they carried on ,Pillow Lips staking her through the heart. Blond boy and Elena's dramatic overtures were boring her and suddenly Harriet was very glad that it had only been Pettigrew and Voldemort there back when he'd come back to life. Interruptions and uninvited guests ended up dead, this much she had learnt from Cedric's presence back in the third task.

Meanwhile, Elena had been killed too and Pillow Lips was ecstatically yelling at the skies.

And then finally, Harriet got really interested as Pillow Lips started transforming like a werewolf.

A hybrid! She hadn't seen one of those yet.

And then Blond boy's brother snapped the wiccan's neck and another wiccan began some sort of pain spell that caused Pillow Lips to begin screaming and twisting in pain.

She'd have to look it up later. Since Harriet built up her immunity to the Crucio she'd been looking to test her pain tolerance with other spells. This one looked plenty painful, she might actually feel it!

The next thing she knew, Elena's body was gone, Blond boy's brother was gone, the new wiccan-Harriet was pretty sure that was Benny, Elena's friend- and Blond boy were screaming when some other man rushed off with Pillow Lips.

"Even by sacrifice ritual standards, that was pretty dramatic."

Benny rushed at her, angry, "You just stood there, why didn't you do anything?!"

"Why would I? Jenna's the only one of them I actually gave the slightest bit of a fuck about."

"And you did nothing to save her!"

"Of course not, I was interested to see the ritual. Besides, she didn't seem like she'd be able to cope with the whole vampirism thing so it was best to let it happen and deal with it now."

"What do you mean deal with it?"

Harriet stepped over to the body that was once Jenna. She pulled the stake out and tapped her index finger on Jenna's forehead, shoulders, sternum and the side of her hips. The body came alive once again, heart beating, lungs breathing, human and all. The only left to do was to stick her soul back in.

Harriet rubbed the stone in her ring and summoned the Jenna's spirit. Benny and Blond boy were still there although terrified beyond belief, literally, all Benny was saying was that she couldn't believe this was happening.

"What's going on?" Jenna's spirit asked, looking down to see her body, "Is that me? But-I died! Didn't I?"

"Weeeell, yes. But I couldn't let it just stay that way." Harriet said and shushed Benny, who's prayer like chants of 'Oh my God!' were getting very annoying. "Give me your hand." Harriet commanded and the spirit did just that.

After that it was a simple matter of stuffing the spirit back into the body.

Jenna woke with a start, gasping for breath, looking around terrified before finally fainting at the sight of the hole in her shirt courtesy of a stake. Benny and Blond boy picked her up and left.

Harriet could only throw her hands into the air and roll her eyes.

"You're welcome!"

Americans were just so very rude.

oOo