Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"And you didn´t answer my question," he snapped. "Who are you? Tell me immediately, or I´ll go to my father!"

"I wouldn´t," she said immediately. "Heś in his study and he doesn´t want to be disturbed."

Draco narrowed his eyes at her, but fear of his father kept him in place.

"Well, what are you doing here, then?"

"I´m the new, er, Arithmancy tutor," she said, realizing as she said it that this hardly explained her posh violet-colored dress and expensive jewelry.

"For your summer studies."

"Governess? I don´t need a governess. I´m going to Quidditch camp this summer. I just came home to pick up my kit, in fact." Dracoś lip curled into a sneer. Ginny looked at him with fascination. She remembered having thought he was a very ugly boy; he hadn´t been, but the ugliness of his expressions had made him seem that way. "I don´t believe you at all, and anyway my father would never hire someone with so many freckles to work in this house. You practically look like a Weasley."

Ginny jumped. "I look like a what?"

"A member of the poorest and most repulsive family on the face of the earth," announced Draco, with a superior smirk.

"You are a horrible little boy," she snapped. "And when you go to camp this summer, I hope Seamus Finnegan puts dead spiders in your bed. In fact, I know he did. I mean, I know he will do. I mean…"

Draco screwed up his face into a disbelieving frown. "I don´t like you," he said.

"And some things never change," replied Ginny sourly.

At that moment, the sound of the bolt being drawn back on the study door nearly startled her out of her wits; she clutched the books she was holding to her chest and gasped. Her eyes met Dracoś across the room.

He looked as terrified as she felt, and for a brief moment she almost saw the Draco she knew in the face of his younger self. Then he turned and fled, banging the library door shut behind him.

And not a moment too soon. Ginny reached for the Time-Turner around her neck and flipped it hastily; the world around her dissolved into grayness and from a great, great distance, she heard Lucius Malfoyś voice fading as he called out, What was that noise? Whoś there? Draco, was that you?

"I can´t believe you called your father a pimp," Harry said. He sat with his back to the parapet wall; Draco knelt next to him. It hurt a very little bit to talk, but the pain was receding. It was the one good thing about magically induced pain, he thought — it vanished almost instantly once the spell that caused it was lifted.

The tense look behind Dracoś eyes eased slightly. "Well, he probably is one," he said. "I´ve always known heś into some nasty stuff…dragonś blood bars, unicorn smuggling, polyjuice brothels…" He broke off as Harry winced. "Are you sure you´re all right? Look up at me — " His mouth tensed as Harry lifted his face. "Your pupils are still all dilated."

"Well, so´re yours," said Harry mulishly. "He just left it on me longer, is all."

"I know. I guess he really couldn´t believe Hermione hadn´t told you where the cup was."

"He must not read Teen Witch Weekly. If he did, he´d know she wasn´t speaking to me."

"He probably let his subscription lapse while he was in the mental institution." Dracoś grin was a white flash in the darkness. "Can you stand up?"

Harry tried and found that indeed, he could stand up. He still smarted slightly — he hadn´t realized that the Veritas curse would be so painful. It had felt as if two enormous steel grappling hooks had been sunk into his chest and were ripping it open, exposing all his innermost secrets. 'You know," Harry said slowly, turning to lean against the parapet, "that look on his face when he realized we really didn´t know…"

"I know." Dracoś smile faded: shock and anxiety had wiped his face clean of its usual guardedness. He looked defenseless, tired, and years younger.

"I´d think it was funny, but I suspect it means he´ll soon be back with something worse."

"Is that the famous Malfoy optimism?"

Draco did not reply. He was looking up at the sky as if he expected answers to appear there, written magically in the space between the stars.

"What are you thinking?" Harry asked.

"I was pondering the immortal words of Socrates, when he said, 'I drank what?´"

Harry laughed. Draco rested his elbow on top of the wall, his chin in his hand. He seemed to be staring out at the winter landscape, black and white as a chessboard now that the last sunlight was gone. The bare branches of the distant trees flung thin shadows along the snow, narrow as knife cuts. In between the trees, the moonlight struck sparks of fire from dangling icicles and nets of frost.

Harry felt an odd cold peace steal over him. Things were bad, it was true.

They would probably only get worse. But he had faced worse in the past, they both had, and they had won out. At least this presented him with a target: something to fight against.

"I told you you were enjoying this," Draco said, so quietly that Harry had to bend his head to hear him. He was black and white in the moonlight too, a statuary angel with sad blank eyes.

"I´m not," Harry said, with partial truthfulness. "Well…maybe just a bit.

Itś just that-"

He broke off as the tower door opened again. Harry turned slowly, his feeling of dread returning.

It was, of course, Lucius, once more alone. His heavy cloak was tightly fastened against the cold, and a brilliantly wicked look of inner glee illuminated his narrow features. "Hello, boys," he said. "Did you miss me?"

"Of course," Draco said flatly. "This tower just feels empty without a gibbering maniac on it." He turned slowly to face his father, keeping his back braced against the wall. He looked very tired. "What have you come for now? Just more taunting?"

Lucius shook his head, and his look of inner glee intensified. "I have not come with curses or taunting," he said. "Only news."

/Whatś his game this time?/ Harry demanded silently of Draco.

Draco shrugged. /I don´t know./

"You might, however," Lucius added, "want to sit down."

"This is ridiculous," Harry burst out angrily. "You can´t hurt us, not in any lasting way. The Ministry is watching — and even if you´ve got them in your pocket, which I don´t believe, thereś still Dumbledore and the rest, they´d never let you live if you hurt either one of us — "

"I have no intention of hurting either one of you."

"Then whatś the point of coming up here and making empty threats?"

Harry snapped, but Lucius wasn´t looking at him. Instead, he was staring at his son and there was a look in his eyes that Harry found most unsettling — a dedicated predatory sort of appetite that made Harry want more than anything to distract Lucius´ gaze onto himself. "You´re just trying to frighten us, and it won´t work. You just have a little bit of time until they come for us, and you can´t hurt us, you can´t kill us, and you know it. And you can´t touch me — " Harryś voice came out on a hissing whisper. "I´d like to see you try it."

Lucius raised one silvery eyebrow, as if he found Harryś outburst tactless. "You I would not bother to kill," he said, still looking at Draco, and his gaze narrowed and narrowed until it seemed as sharp as a needle with which he jabbed at his son. Draco continued to stand very still against the parapet wall, his face in shadow. "You I would not bother to kill, Harry Potter, and Draco is dying already."

When Harry had been eight years old, he had been following Dudley to school one day — several paces behind him, as his cousin always insisted.

They were late, as they often were, due to Dudleyś habit of eating breakfast twice, and they´d been forced to sneak around the back of the school after the front gates had been closed. Ducking under some low-hanging tree branches, Dudley had held one back for him, and Harry, forgetting momentarily the instincts drilled into him by a lifetime of his cousinś abuse, had followed after. Dudley, of course, had immediately released the branch, which had whipped backward and slashed Harry across the face. Even Dudley had been surprised by the amount of blood it had produced, but more than the humiliation or the bleeding, what Harry always remembered was the sudden, vicious shock of it: the blinding pain out of nowhere.