13 Aug 2012
11pm on a Monday
The outside the old church in Godric's Hollow

A woman in witch's clothes stood in the kirkyard in the darkness of a waning crescent moon. She wore black robes tonight and mirrored spectacles. The brightest part of her was her platinum white hair, kept in a short bob. Tamzin Ollivander of the great Ollivander clan was waiting for a vampire.

She sensed him before she heard him, indeed it was not possible to hear the vampire at all for his footfalls were supernaturally silent as if he had no mass. Her enchantment, however, informed her of his strange presence.[1] The vampire's presence was faint and hazy, nearly indistinguishable from the sleeping lonely ghosts. This one, though, was like embers.

Tamzin tightened her grip on her olive wood wand, not ashamed of the shiver of fear that made her hand shake. In all her years, she'd never met a vampire and she was grateful for it. What compelled her here was something greater than horror.

1.	Aura Perciperium

The orange light of Lazarus Blackburn's cigarette would have signaled his approach if it wasn't for the blindness of Tamzin Ollivander, who clocked in him another way regardless. He ambled between the headstones, making no sound, only breathing so far as it took to draw smoke from the dart. He saw the witch in the crook of the stairway, her white hair reflecting the moon's faint light. He could smell her anxiety-touched blood. She turned and looked in his direction, a flash from reflective glasses briefly glinting. Lazarus smiled. She was dramatic, he could tell.

"Well, good night, Miss Ollivander," he said as he got close, for it could be none other. His voice was like coal and gravel and as warm as.

Tamzin lifted her chin, took a shaky breath and held out her hand. "Tamzin, please. Am I speaking to Lazarus Blackburn?"

Lazarus noted in her movements that she was blind, but had no cause to pay it any mind. He took her small hand in his, feeling her heartbeat. To Tamzin, the embrace was ice-cold.

"No one else," he affirmed. "Only me and my sins."

An American wizard - Tamzin was not expecting that. The rest though, the drama of it all, seemed typical of a vampire from what she'd heard from friends' rare accounts.

"We all have something to answer for," she replied, keeping her voice steady. He wasn't too close, giving her space. A gentleman.

She was eager to end this encounter, nonetheless, so pressed to their purpose.

"I've brought them," Tamzin said and from her robes withdrew a long velvet bag tied with a drawstring. She held them out and Lazarus took them to look inside.

"They're all there. One is a little worse-for-wear, the oak. It was rescued from a fire. The others have been kept safe in my grandfather's vault. There's a providence statement as well there, for the maple."

She wanted the vampire to know that she'd held nothing back, that she'd kept up her end of the bargain, that she wanted as much as he did, perhaps, to unburden herself.

"Hmm..." Lazarus murmured and opened the bag for his own confirmation and curiosity. True enough, inside were four wands, distinct in design and size. Were he still a wizard, he would have felt them, the mote of magic in him reach out for the potent magical cores. But alas, he was dead now, no wizard's magic left in him. They were but sticks.

He took time to look at each one. True, one showed evidence of having been cast into a fire but recovered before it was reduced to ash. Otherwise, its condition was good. All of them were in fairly good order considering how old they were, how long ago they'd been stolen.

It had taken some months for Lazarus to track them down, his trail leading him through records of sale and old stories. He'd hunted high and low for them until he discovered they had ended up in the hands of the great and noble Ollivander family. He'd convinced Tamzin at long last they must be returned or, came a gentle threat, she could not expect to have warm wishes from the vampires of London.

In the end, it wasn't the danger that had moved Tamzin, but the rightness of it. It was wrong, she believed, that a wand be owned by strangers. They were to be buried with their hand or treated as a private heirloom. This, apparently, had not been an ideal shared by her grandfather, who hoarded rare and interesting wands.

Tamzin spoke when Lazarus was quiet for too long. "Well?"

"Can't know how long it's been. Can't know, can't know, who knows?" Lazarus said. Then he added to release the witch, "well and good."

"Then it's done?" she asked.

"Done as a doornail," he replied. "Good night, Tamzin Ollivander."

With that, he was away, leaving Tamzin in the moonlight.

fin