Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Most of the books were ones she had already looked at. Several seemed to be general weaponry guides. She began flipping through them dispiritedly. There were chapters on Living Blades, pages on elf-arrows that never ran out or missed their targets, knives that cut stone, shilellaghs and maces and daggers and….

Hermione paused, and flipped back several pages to a full-page illustration of a dagger. It had a unicorn bone handle and a sturdy silver blade, and the box of text underneath it was slightly blurred with age: The Angurvadel Blade. Only one known to exist, on display in the Stonehenge Museum of Wizardry. The exact nature of the dagger is not known, but it produces cuts that never heal. When touched by a witch or wizard who is bound by a Dark Oath, they glow phosphorescent blue.

Hermione stared at the words, her mind whirling. A Dark Oath? But only a true necromancer could bind anyone by a Dark Oath — they were horrible dark magic, deadly and impervious — but she remembered the blade of the knife turning blue as Ron pushed it aside and her stomach churned. Ron! she thought. She bolted to her feet, almost knocking over her chair, and began to cram her books haphazardly back into her bag.

Harry gazed bleakly at his reflection in the mirror. He actually looked better than he felt. Although, he suspected, if he'd looked like he felt he would have been gazing at the reflection of a severed head on a pole.

Instead, he looked all right. Mostly due to the clothes he was wearing, which were expensive and very well cut. They took away from the fact that he was deadly pale, with black shadows under his eyes. He began to see why Draco was so attached to clothes. They made you feel that at least you looked all right, even if you felt like hell.

There's something wrong with me, he thought, looking glumly at himself in the mirror. Rhysenn had never affected Draco the way she affected him. Obviously there was some terrible flaw that he possessed that other people did not. Either that, or he was a sex fiend. Some kind of demented sex fiend that nobody else would ever want to be around. Hermione — she would never want to touch him or be anywhere near him again. Sirius would be horrified. So would Narcissa. They wouldn't let him stay in the house anymore; he'd have to move out and live in the toolshed at the bottom of the garden. Draco would go off and find other friends, friends who weren't depressed all the time, friends who didn't sleep with sex demons.

Then again, maybe not. He realized that Draco would find his current train of thought infinitely amusing. You, a sex fiend? he'd smirk. Potter, you couldn't possibly be an anything fiend. I mean, just look at you. Or, Oh, good, congratulations, you've found something else to beat yourself up about. It's a red-letter day! Let's make the most of it!

Harry looked down at his hands; they had, for the moment, stopped shaking. Yes, he definitely needed to talk to Draco. He had no idea how he'd face the party otherwise. Thank God Hermione had said she wouldn't be there; she was coming to the wedding proper, but not the luncheon today. He couldn't possibly face her. It was nearly killing him just to think about it.

He turned away from his white-faced reflection in the mirror, and caught sight of the bed with its rumpled covers. Nausea rose in his throat. He grabbed for his cloak and hurried out the door.

"Do I look all right?" Ginny asked Ron for the third time as they ascended the steps of Malfoy Manor. She'd forgotten what a forbidding building it was. A pile of steel-gray stone, necklaced with dozens of balconies, crowned with spires and turrets, fronted by a huge double staircase the size of the Burrow itself. And there were gardens around the Manor; there had not been the last time she had been there. They were filled with roses, scarlet roses, which showed up like blood against the snow. The charms that kept them alive in this weather must have been very expensive ones.

Ron, who had already told his sister she looked beautiful twice, sighed a martyred sigh. "I keep telling you that you look pretty," he said. "Is that not what you want to hear? Fine. You look horrible. Just looking at you makes me sick."

Ginny glared at him. "I hate you."

"Yeah," Ron said. "I get that a lot."

Ginny didn't say anything to that; she just speeded up her pace slightly in hopes of catching up with her parents. Both she and Ron had been lagging behind; Ron out of obvious reluctance, Ginny out of nerves. After all, she'd been planning for this day for several weeks now.

She and Ron went through the double doors to the entrance hall just after Fred and George; Ginny looked around, pleased and amazed as always by the beauty of the Manor. It was a cold beauty, but it was still beautiful.

The black-and-white parquet floor shone, and the walls were strung with thousands of diamond-like crystal globes, each of which flickered with a single pale flame.

Sirius was there, greeting people; Narcissa, he said, was somewhere inside the main hall, entertaining guests. Ginny barely heard her parents exchanging small talk with Sirius, who looked extremely handsome in a black suit. "I believe Draco is also in the Hall, and we're still waiting for Harry to come down…out a bit too late last night," he was saying, and the Weasleys laughed.

Ginny couldn't stand it another moment; she was too impatient. Refusing the house-elves' offer to take her cloak, she excused herself and went into the Hall; the only person who even seemed to notice that she was leaving was Ron, who muttered that he would catch up with her in a moment.

"Oh, no you won't," she murmured under her breath.

The room that Malfoys had for years called the Greater Hall was already half-filled with guests: women in casually pretty dresses, men in suits and robes. Ginny recognized Lupin, Pansy Parkinson in a hideous green dress, and a few other faces in the crowd. She cut diagonally across the room, heading for a small door on the west side of the hall, and ducked through it quickly.

She was in a stairwell, one she remembered well. A narrow staircase led upward, and there were bracketed torches on the walls on either side of a square mirror. Ginny glanced into it, seeing her own face very pale between her yellow cloak and her curling red hair. The gold chain around her throat gleamed brightly. She reached a hand up to draw it out from under her dress -

"Ginny, what are you doing back here?"

She turned. It was Harry, standing on the lowest step of the staircase. He wore a dark shirt that made his skin look very pale, and black trousers. In the dim light, she could not clearly see his face, but she thought he was frowning.

"Are you lost?" he asked.

She let the gold chain drop. "No. I was just — I was — "

"Are you looking for Draco? Because I don't know where he is."

Ginny almost smiled. "That's very helpful, Harry. But no, I wasn't looking for Draco. I was just — going to fix my hair. The wind ruined it."

Harry blinked. "It looks fine to me. You look pretty."

"Thanks." Ginny looked at him, oddly touched. He looked somehow distracted and a little lost, as he had looked lost seven years ago standing on the platform at King's Cross Station, and that lostness seemed to cling to him even now and forever would. Women would always fall all over Harry, Ginny thought, he was somehow vulnerable without ever being weak, attractive without seeming to know it. One never asked oneself if he was handsome because his face was so familiar and so arresting in its detail: the smoky-hollowed green eyes, the jet blades of lashes, the sharp fine bones. Even now, when he looked so unhappy, his melancholy seemed to suit him. "Are you all right, Harry?"

"Oh. Yes." He shook himself a little, like a dog shaking off water. "Just tired. I had a late night."