Excerpt:

From "Watcher Of The Ways"...

Ginevra Weasley sat at a table outside a café and sipped a cappuccino.

It wasn’t just any old table outside any old café. Ginny was in Venice. The tables – which would, knowing Italy, probably double the price of her coffee compared to if she’d just stood and drunk it at the bar like a local (although whether there actually were any locals in Venice was another matter altogether) – had been squeezed awkwardly into the space left between the building and the narrow canal before her. The young witch leant back in her chair, cappuccino cradled between her hands, and watched the steady stream of tourists file past. It was, she thought, rather like watching a vaguely intelligent species of animal in a Muggle zoo. They chattered loudly amongst themselves in a babble of different languages, and only paused now and then to snap photographs of the canal or the view outwards towards the sea if you looked down along the canal’s length. The strange thing was that none of them appeared to actually see the city, not really. None of them stopped and breathed it in. Ginny shook her head at the thought and smiled wryly to herself – seriously, she was starting to sound like Hermione.

Still, the facts couldn’t be denied: it was as though the tourists knew in advance that the only things they would remember in the end would be their photographs, and so they didn’t bother looking at anything else.

Every now and then a random man would make the mistake of pointing his camera in her direction – as if she weren’t going to notice something so damned obvious, honestly – and then she’d shoot the offender such an evil look that he’d go scurrying, shame faced, back to his Muggle wife. Like her, most of the tourists had spent the morning pacing their hotel rooms or stuck in queues on temporary board walks in Piazza San Marco, and that sort of thing could have unpleasant effect on a person’s morale… and Ginny’s morale had attitude at the best of times.

High tide had only just gone down enough for everyone to venture back out into the city’s streets and alleyways. Along the edges of the canal, Ginny could see shop owners setting their goods back up on display outside shop doors. The cobblestones beneath their feet were still slick and gleaming with water. An oddly saltless breeze – given how close they were to the Adriatic Sea, the witch had expected the air to be tangier – played in her hair and she brushed the loose strands impatiently behind her ears.

It would seem that autumn wasn’t really the best time to see the ancient city. But then, it wasn’t as though they’d sat around picking out pleasant places for a holiday.

Not that Venice wasn’t pretty. It was, very much so in fact. Ginevra rather liked the crooked alleyways and stubborn dead-ends and unexpected little campielli. Venice was a city she felt she could quite easily learn to love, especially in comparison to some others they’d spent time in recently (Naples, oh Merlin, Naples and it’s heaped piles of rubbish bags…). Venice felt pleasantly… familiar. But then, there had always been a strong wizarding presence in the Most Serene Republic. It had – according to Hermione – been an unusually tolerant place during its golden years. Jews, Arminians, Wizards and Witches, anyone and everyone with power or wealth, or a deliciously appealing combination of the two, had been welcomed in amongst its pale stonework and liquid streets. They’d even been protected from the Inquisition, Hermione had explained. In the end, however, both Muggle and wizarding politics had gotten the best of them. In 1692, when the International Confederation of Wizards met, the world had changed. Magic split definitively from Muggle. And less than a hundred years later all the old wizarding families had left and the Muggle maggio consilio was opening the gates to Napoleon… Venice had been slowly suffering ever since, both structurally and spiritually. Anyone with eyes could see the scars in the stonework, and the way that the water bubbled upwards from the drains with disturbing regularity. Ginevra had heard the Muggle tourists discussing the problems with their typical know-it-all enthusiasm, and she didn’t doubt that their explanations for the city’s failings were valid in their own way. But the fact remained that the protective charms dating from back in the sixth century, when the island had first been colonised, were simply wearing off.

Besides, it was all irrelevant. Ginevra wasn’t that interested in history. And she certainly wasn’t in Venice for a holiday.

A shadow passed across her table and then stopped, blocking what feeble bit of sunlight had been snaking down between the tall buildings on either side of the canal. The witch looked up at the shadow’s owner and a frown fell into place on her face. “You’re late,” she said in a dangerously quiet voice.