Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"But why — ?" Harry began.

"I'm not entirely sure," said Draco. "Perhaps your standards are too high."

Harry scowled. "I meant, why would Rhysenn want to sleep with me?"

"Perhaps her standards are too low."

"Malfoy…"

"All right, all right." Draco snorted. "You mean why did she lie? I don't know. Why does anybody lie? I'm not sure, Potter. Don't ask me why there's evil in the world and people are cruel to puppies and ickle kittycats go to bed hungry. I don't know, and furthermore, it's too late for ontological explorations of the universe. If you mean why did Rhysenn lie to you about that, probably because she took a disliking to your face."

"There's nothing wrong with my face," objected Harry.

"Actually, your mouth's crooked, did you know that? When you smile, one side's a little higher than the other. And — " Draco relented with a grin.

"All right, all right. Honestly, she probably lied to you because she's a sex demon, Potter. And if she crawled into bed with you, I'd assume we can guess what she was after. But you were drunk, if you recollect. I would have been surprised if you could stand up, much less…"

Harry felt himself turning red. "I get it," he interrupted hastily.

"Ah, but you didn't then, and therein lies the problem." This was obviously the most fun Draco had had in weeks. Harry felt obscurely miffed. "She was probably resentful of your lack of interest."

"Well," Harry said, "she did say that something had happened to her that night that had never happened to her before."

Draco grinned hugely. "I think it was more a case of something not having happened," he announced. "And I think we've solved almost every part of this mystery except one…"

Harry gave him a narrow look. "What?"

"Why did she want to sleep with you in the first place?"

Now Harry was definitely miffed. "Lots of people want to sleep with me!"

"Oh really? Did you take a poll? And Myrtle voting sixty times doesn't count."

Harry growled something under his breath.

Draco smiled in a placating manner. "Just winding you up, Potter. Never let it be said by me that you are not a burnished sex god."

Harry was amused despite himself. "Burnished?"

"According to Passionate Trousers, being burnished is absolutely essential."

"Malfoy, if you don't stop reading that crap, I will cut your supply off. It's rotting your brain."

Draco twitched slightly. "I can't help it," he said worriedly. "It's strangely compelling."

"Don't tell me you're actually interested in whether or not Rhiannon escapes the clutches of evil whatsername. The busty woman with the leather fetish."

"Lady Stacia?" Draco was suddenly animated. "Oh, Rhiannon escaped from her ages ago. Tristan seduced Lady Stacia and tied her up in her own dungeon with a spare pair of trousers. Then he and Rhiannon escaped…"

"And lived happily ever after?"

"No, then he actually turned out to be Tristan's evil twin Sebastian."

"Is there any reason that-"

"Harry!" A voice, urgent and anxious-sounding, cut across their conversation. Harry twisted around and looked up in surprise. Hermione stood in the open portrait hole. She carried a sheaf of parchment in her hands: Harry recognized the copies of the Liber- Damnatis she had made earlier that day. Her face was as white as her dress.

It was Draco who stood up first, fluidly uncurling himself from the floor like smoke rising upward. "What is it, Hermione?"

"It's about Ron," she said. She stepped into the room and the portrait swung closed behind her. Her eyes were large and dark in her pale face.

They swung beseechingly towards Harry as she spoke. "I'm afraid…I mean, I've found out…Harry, I think…" She took a deep breath, and said in a steadier voice, "I think I know what Lucius would want with him."

Harry stood up slowly. "What?"

"It's the last part of the Four Worthy Objects spell," Hermione said.

"Remember how I said the last part of the spell requires a wizard's life blood?"

Harry nodded. "Yeah, but I thought you said — I mean, it said it required a dark wizard's life blood. Ron's not a dark wizard. Even if he wanted to be he isn't old enough to be one that was any good."

Hermione nodded. "The word is Conjuretor — it means a powerful Dark wizard. But it means something else, as well."

Harry got slowly to his feet. Now he was facing Hermione, with Draco beside him. He resisted the urge to reach out and grab onto something for support. It was Draco who spoke before he did, asking the question to which Harry did not really want an answer. "What else does it mean?"

Hermione bit her lip. "It means Diviner," she said.

This time falling into the past was like falling into dark water; it closed over her head, and for a moment she thought she was drowning. When she came out of it, gasping and on her knees, his voice was the first thing Ginny heard.

"Oh, I don't know about that." He sounded desultory and amused, but the tones were the same — carefully lazy, softly alert. "It is not as hard to raise the dead as you might think."

Ginny raised her head, blinking the dizziness away. She was kneeling in the narrow aisle between two tall shelves of books. The stacks must have been arranged differently fifty years in the past. And it was lucky for her, because the shelves hid him from the view of whoever else was in the room. Tom's voice had come from somewhere to her left; she cautiously leaned to the side and glanced through a gap between two books.

The library was dimly lit by candles; the torches seemed to have been blown out. A number of the longer reading tables had been pulled together in the center of the room to form a T shape, and around them sat a group of students in their school robes. Most appeared to be Slytherins, although here and there the blue of Ravenclaw was visible.

There seemed to be no Hufflepuffs among them, and no Gryffindors.

"But, Tom — " protested a girl in blue Ravenclaw robes, who looked vaguely familiar to Ginny, "You know it's impossible, really."

"Very little is impossible, Priscilla," said the voice Ginny would never forget if she lived to be three hundred. A cool, unhurried, serpentine voice that wound you in its coils and refused to let you go. She shivered, hearing it, as if a snake had slithered over her grave. She stood on her tiptoes and tried to gaze over the books but she could not properly see him. Only the edge of a black cloak, a slim white hand moving as it gestured. "There are certain methods of…sympathetic magic, by which a soul might be bound or retained and later transferred to a useful vessel.

Such a preserved entity is very hard to destroy. A kind of immortality, if you like. Such spirits are easy to summon back. And then, of course, there are cruder methods of necromancy. In those cases, however, the dead rarely come back as one might remember them…"

The boy at Tom's left chuckled. "Zombies," he said.

The girl Tom had called Priscilla shuddered delicately. "Zombies are so messy," she said. "Dropping foul bits of themselves everywhere. Lucius says that — "

"He says a lot of things," said a brown-haired boy with a sharp, irritable air. "Most of them are doubtless lies."

Tom's tone was cool when he spoke again. "What do you mean by that, Avery?"

"I'm talking about Lucius Malfoy," said the boy called Avery, sounding aggrieved. "He's only a child and he talks as if he were in on all your plans, Tom. But he's too young to be one of us. It's irritating."

"Lucius may be only thirteen," said Tom. "But his family name is a thousand years old. Malfoy Manor counts its birthdays in centuries. Their vaults in Gringotts, their castles in Romania, their wealth and connections, all outweigh the disadvantages of Lucius' youth."