---

A little known fact about humans is, a person interprets the taste of their own blood differently than that of another person’s. Most take this as theory, but I have come to find that the taste of my own blood on my tongue is starkly different than what I taste now.

“My mouth was open.” The shuffling of feet let me know that the person hovering over me, dripping on me, has given me space to move. I would wipe the drops of blood from my face, were it not for my hands being bound behind me. So, struggling through the impending burning that it will cause, I force my eyes open, for once missing my need for glasses, as they would have surely protected my eyes. That, or destroyed them due to breaking. Glass never did hold magic well. Made it entirely too brittle.

“How can I help you?” I don’t like being snuck up on, and moreover, I don’t particularly enjoy being clubbed in the back of the head. One positive to the altercation was the good shot in with my foot that I apparently landed as I fell. The blood staining the once simply dirtied tan of my boot evidenced that.

“Harry…”

“Don’t, Ron. Don’t. You have made your choices in this, and I have made mine, and I will be damned if you force me into any of this foolishness you people have found yourself in.”

“You say ‘you people’ like you aren’t one of us anymore! What has happened to you, Harry? The old you never would have sat by as people were killed!”

“The old me and the new me had a fight for dominance. This one won. This one lives.”

“Are you saying the old one died?”

More observant than I expected from him. But my mental opinion of Ron will always be rooted in the person he was at Hogwarts. The person he is now is a new monster that I know little to nothing about, and honestly, don’t care to learn of. “I’ve said it before, I will say it again, Ron, I will not subject myself to becoming part of this little war you idiots have found yourselves in. If you simply got off your asses and left the island like I said to, none of this would be happening. This is your faults, not mine.”

“We can’t just up and leave, Harry! This is our home!”

“Your home is gone, Ron. This is nothing but a shadow of what it once was, contorted and misshapen by the consequences of your choices.”

“Cut the poetry, Harry, and talk to me. You’re my best friend!”

“No, Ron. Magic is your best friend. Your love and your crutch. And you, just like the rest of these foolish sheep, have all begun a steady decline in your sanity upon the steady decline of it. And the hilarious part is, you aren’t losing your magic. The world around you is, and you’re finally forced to see it all for what it is, without the magic permeating from it.”

My voice catches as I finish speaking this, the last sentences seeming to drop a weight onto my stomach that I struggle to acknowledge isn’t real. Those words ring so familiar that it pains me. But even worse, remembering that the last time I spoke them was in a much gentler tone, devoid of such overwhelming spite.

“Stop with the unnecessarily big words, Harry, you’re starting to sound like…” He trails off, and I know why he has. And I have the perfect opportunity to kick him while he’s down. But I won’t. Not because I wouldn’t want to, but more because of the fact that if I do that, he won’t take to heart what I am going to say otherwise.

“She’s fine, Ron. But this isn’t about her. She listened to me, she got out. You should try it too. It’s better than the alternative. Being on either side of this shit.”

“I can’t, Harry. Ginny’s stuck on bed rest and can’t be moved, and I can’t leave her.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Dammit Harry!”

“Either leave her to her own devices and get out, or wake up being drained of your blood, Ronald. You decide.” And finally, one of us has said it straight, no dancing around it. “Get out of here; now, Ron. Or realize that sooner or later, someone more desperate than you will come gunning for your life’s-blood. That, or you’ll eventually succumb to your desperation and end up looking for someone else’s. I don’t interfere in this, Ron, but I will not watch an injustice before me and do nothing of it. If I see you becoming like them, Ron, then in memory of the friendship we once had, I will prevent you from tarnishing the memory of the man you once were.

“For the good of preserving who you once were, I will kill you, Ron.”

“And I thank you for that, Harry, but I will not become like them. I will not hunt people like animals, using their blood to power my wards, to heat my house, or increase my power.”

“You say that now, but what happens when you, as a Defender, run into someone who has no such qualms with using it? When you have to watch him outclass you, will you accept continual defeat? Or will you be willing to shun morality for the sake of justice? Your department hasn’t ever been shy about such actions being far from against operational policy. How long will you say no? I’ll tell you how long a person can say no, Ron. Someone can say no right up until they say yes, out of either necessity or desire.”

Blood. At the center of a crisis of dwindling magical power in the atmosphere surrounding the UK, somehow the least tied to ambient magic has become the cure, at least in a temporary sense. Many operate under the belief that blood stores magic. It has yet to be proven, nor will it ever be, but one thing is for sure, blood is a magical conduit. It retains magic well, and it will act as enough of a buffer from whatever necessity Hogwarts has to draw magic away, that a spell can last for a while before it needs more blood to feed from. It’s become a warped form of magical battery.

In weakness and panic, leave it to humanity to show the ugliest possible side of itself.

“Will you take to drinking the blood of others, of your prone and disabled sister, for the edge you need to protect others from the same fate?” His turning away from me tells me all that I need to know. Wherever he has taken me, isn’t somewhere I want to be, and it is obvious that I can’t just beat him and leave, because he had to have backup.

The drip on my hands tells me something I suspected since I awoke, but was unsure of. Whoever hit me in the back of the head, did in fact break the skin. So my own blood has begun to fall on my bound hands, which works quite well for what I have to do. Thrusting my head back and stopping it abruptly showers my hands with sprinkles of my blood, just enough to cause the ropes to slip on my hands a slight bit. With some wiggling, they are loose. I am, for once, glad that Ron has long since been incapable of direct confrontation, as his embarrassment has kept him turned away from me.

I turn to take stock of my surrounding quickly, only to find a small jar filled with... “Ron, is that my blood?” His silence tells me everything. I reach out to grab it, and he turns and grabs me. “Let me go, Ron.”

“No Harry. I can’t do that. You have to understand, you were always powerful, your blood could power the wards on the hospital! At least the long-term care areas, and the treatment centers for the emergency arrivals!”

“No, Ron.”

“Why Harry? It could help so many people!”

“No, Ron.”

“God dammit Harry, it could save lives! You are not so selfish as to deny us protection that you yourself can provide, are you?”

“Release me, Ron.” He releases my arm, and then grabbed it again as I took the jar of blood. “This, will help no one. You want blood to power those wards, Ron, then take from those who will be protected by them. They have no need for their magic, but I assure you, their bodies are filled with it. As is your own. But I promise you this. My blood, is not what you want for this. And my blood will not be used, by anyone but myself.

“Do not ask again.”

“I wasn’t asking, Harry.”

“You aren’t in a position to demand anything from me, Ron.” And I walked from the room. He followed, I was sure of it, but it made no difference to me if he did, as I had my bearings.

“People will die, Harry! Don’t be so foolhardy and selfish!”

“People are dying now, Ron. And no amount of wards will stop that. You want to make things better, get to the root problem. Figure out what is going on, and prevent people from needing to take blood, instead of simply chasing after them when they take it.”

“Dammit Harry! You will help us!” He takes a wild grab for the jar in my hand, but I am able to maneuver away from him with ease, evading him until I was outside, the building exactly as I suspected.

“Goodbye, Ron. For the sake of our friendship, I will not hold this against you, but do not be so foolish as to operate under a notion that if you try this again, I will not strike you down where you stand, and leave the others with you to collect your blood for their own use.” Tapping the Triple-W logo that was dusted over and weather-beaten beside the door, I head off. I leave a slight blood smear on the tin sign, and as I turn the corner, I look back to see what Ron does with such.

His attempts to remove the little bit of blood there, makes everything clear. The man that has been my friend has disappeared. He has been changed by the circumstance, and I am ashamed to admit, he has become just as the people he chases to bring to justice. But instead of the honesty of greed, he hides behind the mask of duty.

One friend dying, another one lost to obsession. One more to go. Off to the mainland.

---

The mainland smells funny.

I say that to say this: I never wanted to come back here. But here I find myself, leaving the airport, my nose protesting with the constant feeling of being on the verge of a sneeze. It’s not a bad smell, per se, but it’s foreign. The scent of many smells that have long since been lost on the island invading my nostrils, along with the annoying milling sound of way too many people around me eventually starts to get overwhelming.

So what do I do? I, of course, must make a stop at the gift shop!

An hour later, I find myself wandering out of the small shop with a bag full of my purchases, and I’m sure quite a few baffled faces. But if I have to be here, on this stifling patch of earth, I will be damned if I do not have something to show for it, beyond the obvious. Now…which way am I supposed to be going again?

This happens a lot. I have a lot of information stored in my head, and have a generally annoying time figuring out what I am looking for. I suspect this is how Hermione feels all the time, but for me, it’s mostly just information I obtained while browsing through the Goblins’ records. I’m looking for the actual location of the Greengrass Compound, and somewhere hidden in my brain, is what I seek.

Ah ha!

Her name was Jocelyn! I knew eventually I’d remember the name of that damned girl…side note, I’ve worked out where I’m headed, and hopping into a cab, that information is presented as quickly as I can communicate it through the language barrier. I never did find the need to learn Italian, and to be honest I’m probably happy about that given the insults I’m sure this driver is muttering my way in the language.

Hermione Granger has, for quite some time, lived on the Greengrass Compound. The word “compound” disturbs me, but I suppose in the scheme of things, it’s probably the least cult-like compound in history. Last I heard, religion and all religious paraphernalia were banned from the premises, but that’s neither here nor there. Hermione apparently spends her days holed up in the Greengrass Library. Or as I hear it’s referred to, the Shrine to Learning. Yep, nothing at all cult-like about this place.

Four house-sized buildings, full of books. And beyond that, all the resources she could bother to get her hands on. And you would think, with all of this at her disposal, Hermione Granger would be ecstatic. You would be wrong. She, was spending her days, trying to fix a problem that has no solution. This, was made worse by the fact that the problem she was hoping to solve, was not what she was supposed to be doing.

The Greengrasses, apparently, brought her on board to work out what had occurred in Hogwarts. To figure out the cause of the Ambient Loss, and to weed out how to solve the problem. Hermione instead chose to focus her time and energy, researching me.

A problem, without a solution.

Doesn’t help that her subject of study avoided the mainland, and more specifically, any room she happened to be in, like the plague. What can I say, she smells funny.

Too long in Italy.

Too long around the Greengrasses.

Too long around books.

Too long around magic.

---

“Have a seat, Harry.”

She looks nice. Tired, but much better than the last time I saw her. Her hair’s been cut, probably just so that it won’t get in the way of her researching, and she looks much livelier than anyone I’ve seen in quite some time. Likely the benefit of being surrounded by enough magic that daily aging and the odd fine line and wrinkle are wiped away easily. “Hey, Hermione. Long time no see. How goes the research on Hogwarts?”

“I’m not researching Hogwarts, Harry.” I feign a look of shock, mainly because that was the obvious.

“Well, obviously, but I’m sure you have to keep up appearances for the Greengrasses, so I’m sure you’ve done some research into the subject.”

She looks uncomfortable, which makes me very nervous. Hermione has been many things, but she has never been one to bite her tongue or feel at all wrong about sharing what is in her mind. Put simply, the woman’s always been so self-righteous that she can’t not share what she thinks. Which means what I’m about to here, it’s going to sit well. “…About that.”

“What ‘about that’, Hermione?”

“Harry, simply…I lied to you. I didn’t want to, but it was what I had to do.” Something about that line drew a parallel somewhere, and to someone, I wish it hadn’t, and in spite of myself, it made me shiver. “The Greengrass Family didn’t hire me to work out what happened at Hogwarts. They didn’t hire me to figure out the Ambient Loss. They hired me to research you.”

Nope. Don’t fucking like this, not at all. “And why, pray tell, do they find me worthy of hiring you to research me?”

“Simply, Harry? You’re an anomaly. And by anomaly, I mean that you’re someone…”

“I know what an anomaly is, Hermione. I’m not a fucking moron. I am, however, going to run out of patience very soon if you don’t tell me how it is that you can be hired by people I barely even know, to research me and you can’t be bothered to inform me of it.” She’s flustered, but I’m running low on give-a-damn, because given the debacle with Ron, the idea that both of them have their own little designs on me is very disturbing.

“They want to know what makes you so special, Harry. The Greengrasses couldn’t care less about Hogwarts, because the entire family is based out of this compound. They’ve apparently made more money since whatever happened at Hogwarts occurred, than they ever did before. But they can’t wrap their heads around you.”

“They, or she.”

“It’s the whole family, Harry, please don’t start looking for problems.” She’s begun wringing her hands now, and I can tell that this conversation is not going to continue to get better. Which means I need to get out of here, because if she’s wringing her hands, she’s either at a loss for words, or stalling. And since Hermione Granger is very rarely at a loss for words…

“She’s coming here, isn’t she?” The look in her eyes tells me all I need to know, and that is, that I need to get out of here quickly. I can feel the wards around the place. Being in an environment starved of warding for so long makes the presence of the protective magic stand out like a neon cage surrounding a building. Getting up from her desk, I find myself suddenly aware that her door is locked. “Open the door, Hermione.”

“I…I can’t do that, Harry. She just needs to talk to you.”

“And why the fuck should I speak with her, Hermione? What reason do I have to even be in the same room as her?”

“For me, Harry?”

“After this, why the fuck should I even speak to you, never mind do something for you? You’ve kept this from me, Hermione, and I know you. You’ve spent this whole time analyzing everything about me, picking it apart and breaking it down until you start to develop your little half-cocked hypotheses. And I’m sure they were standing right over your shoulder, observing it all. I am not a lab rat. I am not someone to study and analyze and make papers about!”

“Three of you went in there, Harry. You’re the only one who came out. This isn’t the first time that you’ve apparently made it out of an impossible situation, either. Escaping the impossible could be used as a summation of you entire life, Harry! This research could answer so many questions, or even save lives!”

“Or, Hermione, you could be examining your best friend to find a weakness that will eventually leave him dead in an alleyway. But what if I have no weakness? What if your time is being wasted? Maybe you should use it better. Maybe, just maybe, you should consider the fact that I don’t want to be studied. I just want to live.

“I’m lucky as hell, Hermione. For a long time, that was good enough. But eventually ‘better to be lucky than good’ stops being adequate, because luck runs out. You’ve spent all this time studying me, while I’ve spent this time staying alive, and watching the world you left, fall apart around me. I’m not you people’s savior. I do not hold in me all the answers to life’s problems. Get off your asses and find solutions, instead of thinking if I hold still long enough, you can dissect an answer out of my spinal column.”

Slow, patronizing applauding fills the room, and there’s something stirring deep in my chest. The feel of it is overwhelming, like having a vacuum in my chest growing and shrinking rapidly. “Bravo. Inspiring speech, but the fact still remains, Potter, that you are a lab rat. That’s exactly what you are, something to be studied, and if so determined; dissected, alive if need be. Do you know why? Because you are not more important than the entirety of Wizard-kind. And if we can find the answers to this inside of you, then it is only right of us to ensure that we do that.”

“Oh, take your faux-nobility and shove it up your ass, Greengrass. There are no answers to be found. Hogwarts has decided to take its payment for the generations of giving. The country is falling apart, magically, because there are too many xenophobic, magic-obsessed fools who can’t accept change, but on the same note, can’t force themselves to move away from their own destruction. That, isn’t my fault. And I will not give my life to fix a problem that could just as easily be fixed by people getting the fuck on a plane. Or a boat. Or their kitchen table and paddling their way across the water.”

Hermione has phased herself into the background, her eyes darting back and forth between the two people before her. One representing the memories of her past, the other the opportunities of her future. The fact that she actually looks torn tells me that it’s either been too long since I’ve seen her, or way too much has changed.

“I hear it’s gotten quite bad there, Potter. Why haven’t you taken your own advice and left the island for good?”

“Who says I haven’t?”

“My people at the airport who watched you fly in.” So not only am I being studied, I’m apparently being stalked…“I’ve known you were on your way here from the moment you purchased your ticket. I know what seat you were in. I know who you sat next to. I know what movie you watched on your flight.”

“Noted. I haven’t left, because I have no need to.” An eyebrow is raised in question, and I figure I might as well humor the unasked question. Years of Hermione made me quite knowledgeable of the fact that leaving things unanswered never made them go away. “It doesn’t affect me as much as it did everyone else. And before you start writing that down, it’s not anything supernatural. Blame the Dursleys. I’m used to being in a low-magic environment. It isn’t foreign to me.”

“And what of those who would attack you for your blood? You aren’t very low-profile, after all, given your living arrangements.”

“Living arrangements? Where are you living Harry?” Hermione has finally interjected herself into this conversation, and for once, I wish she hadn’t. I am quite prepared for what wheels this will start turning in her head, but I know my opponent, and if I do not answer, she will.

“I live in Gringotts, Hermione.” Turning to the other woman in the room, her stance arrogant and relaxed, I know I have to leave this place.

“You want something to research, how’s this. While you sit here reading books on me, people there are killing each other for blood with which to power wards, hide homes from attack, guard their valuables, cool their houses and store their food. The magically wounded, and the psychologically broken are harvested in their hospital beds for their “contribution” to the hospital’s care. Ginny lays in her bed with a needle in her arm, her blood pumping out to shield the hospital from those who would come from outside to do the exact same thing.

“While you sit on your asses thinking about me, people are dying. Tonks is dying, Hermione. Just last week, Seamus was arrested for harvesting. Harvesting Dean. Do you understand how fucked up all of this is?”

“Then fix it, Potter.” It takes every bit of restraint in my body to not strangle the bitch where she stands, looking self-assured with that smirk on her face. As if saying I had the power to fix this all and refused. I’m unwilling to put my neck out for anything stupid, but I am not cruel.

“Go fuck yourself, Greengrass.”

“Or you could do it for me.”

“Gladly. If you have a knife I can borrow, I’ll get started right now.” Hermione flinches at that, and I have this feeling I may have gone too far, but I couldn’t care less at this point. This is a place I don’t want to be, with someone I don’t want to be near, and if I spring myself from my confinement, I will simply give them more to study and therefore more reason to ignore the bigger problem. “Think about it, Hermione. You went to war for the House Elves. You struggled and fought for their freedom. Have you really now, become so desensitized to human life when surrounded all day by books, that you can’t feel anymore? Can’t see that you have the intelligence to work out some idea of what is going on? That you can really change the world? And yet, here you sit, day in and day out, reading on me.”

“Hermione is under contract, Potter. Meaning, as moving and inspiring as your speech is, she will not suddenly be rising up and deciding to pursue the research you wish her to follow. But, I think we can come to an agreement.”

“What do you want from me?” I’m tired of this, exhaustion is gripping me and squeezing tighter by the moment. Being here for this long has already begun to weigh on me, and I’m starting to feel heavy and tired. I need to leave here, and whatever they did to this door, it won’t be opening without use of force that I don’t want to exert.

“You take her place. Not for too long. Hermione will be released to ‘saving the world’, as you like to make it appear. In exchange, you give us free reign to study you.”

“Us?”

“Me.”

“Fuck you.”

“We’ve gone over this, I’m still waiting.”

It’s a trade. Her freedom, in exchange for mine. Really, I don’t know if I care enough about England to make it worthwhile to give my freedom for them. But then, wouldn’t I just be as bad as I accused Hermione of being, if I wasn’t willing to give of myself to save them all? “Fine. But not here. We do this where I choose.”

“For someone who has finally become free of the oppressive emptiness of England, you seem so intent to go back. Why?”

“Have you ever heard the parable of the cave walls? Basically, there are people sitting in a dark cave, and their game is to make out the faintest of shadows on the dark cave wall. One is given the chance to leave the cave, and see the outside, and the light. But upon returning to the cave, his eyes have lost their sensitivity to darkness, and he is now the worst of them at this game.

“That’s a bastardized version of it, but the understanding is there. I’ve lived there, under this ‘oppressive emptiness’ for quite some time. Being here for an extended time will just end up with me being like you once you get there: so used to the presence of ambient magic, the lack of it is crippling.” It’s a snipe at her ability as a witch, it’s a low blow and I’m glad I did it. She could have just as easily said no to my terms and I would have had to stay here, just to ensure Hermione retained her “freedom”, but a dig like that wasn’t about to be ignored.

“Fine.”

“Good.”

And with that said, I’ve finally had enough of the room, and with a gesture to the door, I wait for one of them to fix it. When no one makes any move, I figure I might as well just leave. With my new “companion” surely soon to be tracking my every move, I see no reason in hiding anything. So jabbing my wand at the door and projecting a Protego at the door, I’m quite satisfied when it breaks through the oak and leaves a nice sized hole for me to climb out of.

If they were outraged at that, they’d be even more bothered by the fact that such a simple maneuver was fully capable of disrupting area wards around the room. Every single one of them was destroyed. Which was likely why the angry scream released from one Daphne Greengrass echoed across library, and her tirade of profanity was audible even down the hall as I made my way out of the compound.

Time to make some preparations.

---

You never battle an enemy on their terms, in their territory. You are instantly at a disadvantage, strategically. Intelligence wins wars, and it is very difficult to know everything about your surroundings when they are controlled by your opponent.

I walked foolishly into the Greengrass Compound, and lost the battle of words, I will admit. But the idiocy that was evident in Daphne Greengrass actually setting foot in Gringotts was appalling to me. Which is likely why she ended up finding herself cracking her eyes open to the slate of the interior of a vault, just moments before she emptied the contents of her stomach on a pile of Sickles and Galleons.

Her overconfidence was evident by how lightly she took the return to the UK. I watched her face change as the plane drew closer and closer to the island, draining of color slowly, and a look of consternation washing over her features. At one point, she even reached out to grab my hand from the arm rest, but I would not be affording her any comfort, and decided it would be a good time to cough into my hand before replacing it on the armrest. The fact that she still grabbed my hand was my first sign that she wouldn’t make it for long.

The vault she was in was starved of the magic needed to power all of the ridiculous wards that covered it. And it decided that she was quite an ample source of that magic. She wasn’t putting off nearly enough magic to make the vault harmful to her, but it was enough of a drain that she wouldn’t be casting her way out of the vault. She would be feeling quite nauseous though, that was for damned sure. Magic is one of the harder drugs to kick, if you will. The withdrawal of it was border-lining on being called a national epidemic during the days following Hogwarts. Or so I heard.

The poetic justice of my decision to trap her in a vault was in the fact that she was in her own family vault. All it would take was her feeding the wards enough magic to power up the recognition wards, and then she just had to ask to be let out. But she wouldn’t know that, not if I had anything to say about that.

Tonks sat next to me in the expansive room that housed the vault Daphne was in, her face regaining color more and more as time passed. The room is reinforced to resist magic, mainly to prevent anyone from trying to break into the vault room magically. As such, it is the one room in the entire bank that will actually not hurt Tonks. It is the one room in the country where she won’t get worse. She won’t get any better, but as long as she stays in this room, she’ll be in a form of…remission.

The moment she leaves the room, the bank will probably suck her dry, but she won’t need to ever leave the room unless with me, I hope, so it’s a moot point.

“Stay here.” I stand from my seat on the desk and walk to the vault entrance, leaving Tonks seated there on her own, and open the door to the vault Daphne Greengrass currently inhabits. “Well well, how the mighty have fallen.” She scowls at me, but does little else. “I warned you. But you insisted. So here we are. London, sweet London. How does it feel to be back, Daphne?” Her silence is music to my ears, but nonetheless, the question wasn’t rhetorical. I tell her and such, and she looks at me with a blank expression before answering.

“It feels very cold.”

“Really? Last person I spoke to said the drain on their magic just felt…wrong, not cold. Guess it’s different for everyone.”

“What do you feel?”

“I don’t feel cold, that’s for sure Daphne. I thought you knew that, given how much you like to allude to you knowing.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know what you feel from the drain of magic?”

“You aren’t, obviously.” Crouching down so I am eye-level with her as she sits there on the floor looking quite confused, I can’t help but smile. It’s nice to see her finally looking disoriented and not so damned high-and-mighty. Though, I suspect a large part of that is the “cold” she says she is feeling, messing with her thought process. “You aren’t supposed to know how I feel from the magic drain.” Dramatic pause…wait for it… “You’re supposed to know that I don’t feel anything. I don’t feel drained…Because I’m not.”

“What!” Her reaction is endearing. I can tell it’s likely been so long since she was surprised by anything that the stretch on her face to display her shock is probably causing her pain. Good.

“You see…I lied. Your answers are in me, somewhere. Problem is, I don’t know where they are, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. People are dying, and I intend to work out what’s going on here. Not for this country. Not even for its people. But because I’m selfish.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need to figure this out, because I need to know what was done to me. What they did to me.”

“I don’t understand…” I can tell she’s confused, because her bitchy tone has dropped off into an almost pleading, desperate one.

“You’re not supposed to, dear Daphne. And even if you were, I wouldn’t tell you, because, frankly, you’ve been way too much of a bitch lately for me to willingly give you any information. What I will do, however, is leave you locked in this vault until you’ve had some time to think. Just you, a mountain of money, and the cold drain of the stone making a constant withdrawal from your magic.”

Turning to leave, I can’t resist making one last jab at her. “By the way, Daph? If you ever see her again, you may want to consider having a nice long talk with Tracey. Though, by the time you’re out of here, you might be calling her Mum.”

---