As Malfoy had warned her, larger and larger swaths of England's countryside had anti-apparition wards dropped over them. For weeks Hermione tried to avoid the areas and forage elsewhere, but eventually the wards swallowed up all the areas she needed to forage in. She tried to find new spots, but she couldn't obtain sufficient quantities of certain crucial ingredients.
When her dittany supply ran out, she gave up and ventured into a warded forest. She cast all the detection spells she knew and stayed alert.
She was harvesting her third, large bed of dittany when the forest grew unnaturally quiet. She immediately stashed her supply and turned sharply, casting new detection spells in every direction. Nothing.
She trusted her instincts. She was a good hundred feet from the edge of the anti-apparition zone. She headed for it calmly, trying not to to betray her concern. She held her silver knife in one hand and her wand in the other as she picked her way carefully through the bracken.
They waited until she was close enough to the edge of the ward to feel hopeful.
Razor sharp teeth suddenly sank into the back of her right leg. She screamed slightly and whirled to find that a gytrash had emerged from the darkness and slashed her calf open.
“Lumos!” she snapped. The ghostly dog promptly released her leg and melted back into the darkness of the forest. Hermione didn't pause to check the injury. She raised her wand and looked for more creatures. Gytrash tended to run in packs.
They also weren't typically aggressive toward adult humans.
As she was turning around warily, something abruptly dropped on her from a tree overhead. She barely had time to look up and see the pale skin and elongated fangs of a vampire before it knocked her flat. The vampire closed its hand around the wrist of her wand hand and pinned her to the ground as it sank its fangs into her shoulder.
Hermione didn't even think. She lashed out and buried the blade of her silver harvesting knife into the vampire's temple, wrenching herself free. She flung herself to her feet and bolted past the anti-apparition wards.
She reappeared and nearly collapsed in the middle of the creek in Whitecroft.
It was not an ideal place to reappear. She glanced around dazedly and wondered why on earth it had been the first place she'd thought of. She was bleeding profusely. Vampire fangs injected anticoagulant venom into the blood at first contact, and Hermione had torn her shoulder badly as she had ripped herself free. Her entire shoulder grew drenched with blood as she stood, trying to regain her bearings.
She looked down at her leg. She was bleeding badly there too.
She didn't have the energy to apparate again.
A car drove by and Hermione ducked awkwardly under the bridge until it passed. She had the supplies she needed to heal herself, but she didn't particularly fancy doing it in the dark under a bridge.
She checked the time. It was more than an hour earlier than she was supposed to show up to pick up Draco's missives. She sighed. Knowing him he'd probably left it the night before anyway.
She cast a disillusioning charm on herself then pressed down hard against her shoulder to slow the bleeding as she limped to the shack.
As she had guessed, the scroll was already on the table when she opened the door. She rolled her eyes and stuffed it into her satchel with her less blood-stained hand.
Hermione sat heavily in a chair and cast a diagnostic. She had bled a lot. She would start getting light-headed if she didn't staunch it quickly. She pulled a bandage out of her emergency kit and used a spell to wrap it firmly around her calf. She'd heal the Gytrash bite after she fixed her shoulder.
She arched her neck and tried to see the gashes. The movement twisted the injury; she hissed and conjured a mirror. The vampire had bitten down on the juncture of her neck and shoulder. When she'd torn herself free, the fangs had sliced long, deep lacerations over to her collarbone, barely missing her jugular vein and carotid artery.
Hermione cut off her shirt and cast a cleansing charm. Using the mirror and awkwardly working in reverse, she crushed and pummeled fresh dittany leaves in her fingers and then stuffed them into the gashes. Dittany wasn't very effective fresh, especially whole, but she didn't have a pestle on hand. She chewed on several leaves as she worked.
Holding her bunched up shirt firmly against the gashes with one hand, she set to work mixing together an infusion that could function as a coagulant. She couldn't brew a potion, but she had yarrow and murtlap essence. She combined them with a few practiced flicks of her wand and swallowed it quickly. After a minute, the bleeding in her shoulder began to ease.
She was covered in blood, and there was a decent sized puddle of it accumulated on the floor beneath her. She ignored it. She'd clean up the shack when she was done.
She used the mirror to start plucking the dittany leaves out of the gashes, then she recast a cleansing charm on the area and reappraised the injury. The upside of vampire bites was that they healed easily without causing any scarring.
She started near her clavicles where the laceration was the shallowest and began muttering the spell to knit the skin back together.
She'd made it halfway across her shoulder when Draco abruptly apparated into the room.
He appeared to blanch slightly when he saw her, and Hermione blushed and immediately wished she hadn't cut her shirt off. Then she snorted, because she was covered in blood; unless Draco had a weird fetish he probably wasn't paying any attention to what clothes she was or wasn't wearing.
“What happened?” he said after staring at her for several seconds.
“I was foraging,” Hermione said blandly, refocusing on her reflection in the mirror and resuming her healing. “Sorry. I'll clean up the floor before I go.”
“Are you alright?” he asked.
Hermione laughed. She had gotten a lot closer to dying than she had in a long time and she was slightly faint with blood-loss and having such a question directed at her while she was dripping blood on the floor of his dilapidated building was just strangely hilarious to her.
“Well, no,” she said. “But it's nothing I can't fix.”
Draco grew visibly angry.
“I told you to be careful,” he finally said.
“I have been,” Hermione said, her amusement suddenly disappearing. He was the one who'd said he'd teach her to defend herself and then refused to even lay eyes on her once she finished healing him. “But as you are aware there are anti-apparition wards all over England. I ran out of dittany. It's a critical supply for us. I cast detection charms and I tried to leave as soon as I sensed anything. But as you yourself noted, it was the benevolence of Fate that I'm alive at this point.” Her voice grew bitter, “My luck was due to run out.”
“Why not just buy it like a normal person?” he asked as though she were thick.
“Because,” Hermione said, her voice tight with a shrill and slightly mocking edge of it, “I'm a known terrorist. Perhaps you've forgotten. And—” she hiccupped “—I don't — have any money left.”
He fell silent and just stood staring at her for a minute.
“What happened?” he asked again.
“I was foraging in Hampshire. The forest went quiet so I cast detection spells but nothing showed up. I decided to leave anyway though. I was almost out when I got bitten by a Gytrash, then when I was driving it off a vampire attacked me. I killed it and apparated. I don't know why I came to Whitecroft. I didn't mean to. But I lost too much blood to apparate again and I don't — I used up all my Essence of Dittany. And without Dittany leaves I can't make blood replenishing potion either. So I had to come here to fix it manually.”
Hermione's voice was shaking as she finished speaking, and she was on the verge of tears. As she had related what had happened, it abruptly stopped being funny and started being traumatic and horrible and too close.