The inconclusiveness of it grated on her mind. She found it difficult to focus or sleep that week.
She had given up on using her room for sleeping. Harry and Ginny regularly occupied it for the entire night. Harry slept when he was with Ginny. He could actually sleep peacefully. The effect was dramatic. His mood stabilised in a way that it hadn't in years, and Hermione rarely encountered him in the sitting room at night. The stress that had been erroding him for years seemed to ease for the first time since Dumbledore's death.
Hermione took to sleeping in whatever empty bed she could find or in the training rooms. She kept exercising and building her stamina up dutifully.
The next Tuesday she was so stressed she took a Calming Draught before she apparated to the shack. She had no idea what Draco might do.
When she arrived in the shack, she bounced on the balls of her feet while she stood waiting. Then she realized there was a scroll laying on the table.
She stared at it for a moment before picking it up and unfurling it. Raids for the upcoming week. Counter-curses.
Nothing directed to Hermione.
— not that she'd expected him to leave her a personal note.
She sighed faintly and left.
She didn't see him for the entire month of August.
She fretted about it. The intentional silence between them gnawed at her. She kept reviewing what had happened, questioning her conclusions and drawing new ones. Maybe she'd ruined everything. Or maybe he was avoiding her because he was afraid of how she tempted him.
She kept vacillating. Was it a good sign or a bad sign?
The worst part was that she missed him. She hated to admit as much to herself, but she felt forced to acknowledge it. Treating his injury had become a significant aspect of her daily life. Interacting with him had become a significant aspect of her life. Having it so abruptly ended made her feel the absence keenly. She didn't have many people that she saw regularly.
She kept replaying all their past interactions. She kept reevaluating him and all his behavior. She was obsessing but she didn't know what else to do. She needed him for the Order.
She had to obsess over him. It was her job.
She didn't need to miss him though, she told herself firmly. That was a personal failing.
September rolled around and he continued to simply leave scrolls without appearing.
Hermione began to feel fractured.
She didn't know what she was supposed to do.
It was smart of him, of course. If she were in his shoes, it would probably be what she'd do. But it didn't solve the problem of what Hermione was supposed to do about it.
She kept foraging and visiting the shack with increasingly dwindling hope.
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.