Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Lucius blushed — his version of a blush, a bloodless rush of further pallor.

"My Lord. What do you mean?"

"Your son." Voldemort set the die down on the table and stood. He was a head taller than Lucius, who was not a small man. "You poisoned him, I hear. I don't recollect telling you to do that."

"Ah," said Lucius, with admirable poise. "That."

Ron pricked up his ears. He had not known anything about this. Draco, poisoned? Harry would be beside himself, so would the rest of them. He was not sure how he felt about it himself.

"Yes," said Voldemort. "That. Must I remind you, Lucius, that boy is mine and not yours. I did not make him to be spoiled with toxins."

"It was a regrettable accident, my Lord," said Lucius. "He smashed the vial of antidote I provided. A most unforeseen outcome."

"I would have foreseen it," replied Voldemort coldly. "He hates you and wants nothing of yours. You must come at people through what they love and not what they hate. I have told you that many times, Lucius."

"Harry Potter has left Hogwarts," said Lucius, apropos of nothing, or so it seemed to Ron.

"I know," said Voldemort. "We will find him out. It is only a matter of time."

"I can make more antidote," Lucius said.

"Can you?" Voldemort's voice was lazy, curious. "Such a powerful poison you used, so rare and ancient. I am the assassin against whom no lock can hold." He chuckled dryly. "You must be very afraid of your son."

Lucius ignored this. "The antidote is simple. Save for one ingredient, which presents something of a conundrum."

"And why is that?"

For a bare fraction of a second, Lucius hesitated. "Because it doesn't exist," he said, at last.

Voldemort's scarlet eyes narrowed. He turned, and looked at Ron over his shoulder. "I do not think I want the boy listening to this," he said. He looked at Rhysenn, in her cage. "Take the boy upstairs," he said to her.

"Take him to the roof."

"And what?" said Ron. "Throw me off?"

Voldemort smiled at him, a lipless smile that chilled Ron to the core. "You wanted to see the outside of this place," he said. "Now you will see it. And may you enjoy the sight."

It had probably been only a little more than thirty minutes, but it felt to Hermione that she had been waiting in the corridor outside the infirmary for hours before the door finally opened, and Madam Pomfrey came out.

"Oh! Madam Pomfrey. How is Ginny — can I see her?"

"She needs to be left alone," said Madam Pomfrey firmly. She stood like a bulwark in front of the infirmary door, her arm stretched across it, keeping Hermione out. "She was badly burned. The skin on her hand needs to be regrown, and the process is painful. It is best if she remains unconscious through it." She narrowed her eyes at Hermione. "She also has bruises on her shoulders and a cut across her scalp. Do you know anything else about what happened to her — is there anything you can tell me?"

Hermione shook her head, the words faltering on her lips. "No."

"That charm bracelet must have been important to her," observed Madam Pomfrey, rather dryly.

"Oh, it was. It was a Christmas present from Seamus."

Madam Pomfrey gave her a long look. "Ah, yes. Mister Finnigan. And where is he?"

"He went home," Hermione said. "Yesterday."

Silently, she prayed that this was true. What Ginny had said while reviving had been troubling. But then, people with head injuries often said things that made no sense. And Seamus has told Hermione yesterday that he was packing to leave. And Ginny had been babbling about Tom, and there was only one Tom that Hermione could think of that she might have meant…and that made no sense at all.

She glanced anxiously down the corridor. Where was Draco? If Harry had been in his dormitory room, they should both have been back already.

And if he hadn't been there, Draco ought to have come back to tell her that. Maybe Harry had faffed off to the Owlery to send a letter to Sirius or something. Either way, Draco ought to have returned by now.

"Madam Pomfrey," Hermione said. "The charm bracelet made a mess of the Gryffindor common room. I really ought to go and clean it up. If you could come and tell me when Ginny wakes up…I think she'd be a lot happier if one of us could come and be with her…"

Madam Pomfrey nodded, tight-lipped, as Hermione made her excuses.

Hermione knew perfectly well that the older witch suspected that there was more to what was going on, but had decided not to make an issue of it. For which Hermione was profoundly grateful. She told herself she would thank Madam Pomfrey at a later date, and set off, half at a run, for Gryffindor Tower.

The common room was still a disaster. It looked as if Draco had cleared something of a path through the smashed plates and scattered flowers on his way upstairs, but had not exactly stopped to tidy up. Hermione paused at the foot of the boys' staircase, pricking her ears up, wondering if Harry and Draco were up there talking.

She heard only silence, the beat of her own blood in her ears.

Her uneasiness was growing inside her chest. The sense that something terrible had happened, was about to happen, seemed suddenly stifling, as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Hermione half-closed her eyes. Harry, she thought. Harry…please let nothing have happened to him, please.

But surely she would know if something had. It was what she had dreaded every moment of every day, somewhere in the back of her mind, since she was eleven years old and he had sent her away, back through the fire, sent her back to safety and gone forward on his own. And she had known that it would always be like that, for as long as she loved him, this would be her life: a long series of corridors taking her away from him while he went forward towards a danger she could neither see nor protect him from.

There was no reason, now, for her to fear that something had happened to him. They were safe inside Hogwarts. He was safe. He had Draco and as long as Draco was alive, surely Harry would be alive too, because Draco would die to protect him. There was no reason for her to be afraid, but it didn't matter: sudden irrational terror gave her feet wings as she bolted upstairs, down the empty corridor, and flung open the door to the seventh year boys' dormitory.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness inside the room. The first thing she saw when the darkness cleared was Draco sitting on Harry's bed. He had something white in his hand. It took her a moment to realize that it was a piece of parchment.

She stepped forward slowly, her heartbeat slowing to normal. If something had happened to Harry, there was no way Draco would be here like this, calmly reading a bit of parchment. Still, something about his posture — the tenseness in his shoulders, the arms rigid at his sides — forbade approach. "Draco…?" she whispered. "What's happened? What was that you were reading?"

He raised his head and looked at her. She had always liked torchlight better than Muggle electricity; it seemed to add color to things rather than bleach colors away. Under the torches, Draco looked blond rather than silver-haired and his eyes were the pale gold of coins rubbed to a tarnished sheen. He held the parchment out to her and said in a steady voice, "It's a letter from Harry." His voice was very calm. "Only I don't think he wrote it."

Hermione blinked at him. "But why..?"

"Because he wouldn't write this. He couldn't possibly have. Here — read it," he said, and there was something odd in his voice, a slightly childish demanding tone that she'd rarely heard him use before, and then jokingly. She wasn't sure he was joking now. "You'll see what I mean."

She took the parchment from him and sat down on the bed to read it closer to the light. The handwriting leaped out at her first, it was absolutely Harry's, from the crooked t's to the inexpertly dotted i's. The handwriting of a boy who'd grown up writing in the dark, late at night, funny little journal entries he had never let her read, and as she scanned rapidly down the page she felt her mouth dry up and her heart quicken.