Hermione hadn't really slept that night. She was sure that she would never sleep when she started to hear yelling from the other room. Her new foster mother was drunk. She missed her parents terribly. As soon a she left the train station from her 4th year at Hogwarts, she was informed that her parents had been killed in a car accident on the way to pick her up. The image of the police confronting her with the news still haunted her. She couldn't decide whether it was that or the yelling that had stopped her from sleeping. But she knew she wouldn't be able to listen to it any longer. She ripped the covers off herself and reached for her boots. She found it hard to move very fast. Her foster father had beat her earlier that day when she showed him her letter from the headmaster giving her a list of supplies to buy for the next year. She had hoped her would allow her to go to Diagon Alley to buy her supplies, but he took it as a lie just to get away from him and his awful wife. He told her if she ever were to tell anyone that he was beating her, he would kill her. It didn't take her long to figure out the puzzle. They had taken her in to be able to get the money to support her. They had missed the part about support. Then she heard the voices become even angrier and someone opened a drawer from the other room. There was only one draw in that room. And she knew very well what was inside it!

She darted for the window, her heart racing beneath her chest. She heard loud footsteps and them wrestling. She knew what her foster mother was on the verge of doing. The window was stuck. She pulled with all her might but nothing budged. She grabbed for one of her many books stacked up on her desk to throw at the window to make it break so she could run free. But just as she lifted it behind her head, ready to throw it, she heard a bullet shot from behind her. She was lucky at that second because the bullet missed her by just inches and had gone threw the window she had tried to pull open, shattering it to hundreds on pieces. She ran toward it, jumping onto the chair before it to go through it when she heard the gunfire again and sheer pain shot though her right arm. The force from the shot pushed her through the window. She gathered herself together, trying to ignore the pain. She ran away faster than ever had before in her life; hearing gunshots from being fired from behind her the entire way to the dirt road. They had all missed her from just a couple inches or so. Even when they had stopped she did not slow down.

She knew that now more than ever she needed to see Ron and Harry. She had not owled them or written them all summer because she had not been allowed to. Not to mention her foster parents sold her owl for the money. She had hidden her trunk and things in the woods so that when she needed them, she could run off with them. But her arm was in too much pain to even be able to make her hand into a fist. Blood spilled everywhere. All she could manage to do when she finally got to her trunk was pull out her wand, which was all she had needed at the moment. She had read in her third year how to make a portkey. She had decided already where she would go; not at all caring at the time what any of her Professors would say when they heard she used magic out of school.

She held out one of her books from her trunk and recited the spell. Before she knew it, the wind around her was whirling in frenzy. Familiar surroundings began to envelope her. She had reached the Burrow!!