Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

The frog was still struggling in Tom's grasp. He dropped it to the carpet.

There was a fretful expression on his face. "I feel my heart," he said. "I feel its bitterness. Although it is not my heart but his, and the feelings his, still the pain remains with me like the ghost memory of a hand or arm that has been cut away. It is a phantom pain, but no less real for all that. I thought to kill this hunger by feeding it, but it is worse now that it was before."

Lucius was bewildered. "My Lord, I don't quite…"

"I cannot stop thinking of her, Lucius. She preys upon my thoughts. I am reminded of her everywhere I turn: a stranger's gesture on the street, a whispered word, the color of sunset that is very like her hair. It is like a disease."

Lucius' felt his eyebrows disappearing up into his hairline. "You're in love?"

"Certainly not," Tom snapped, looking very teenaged for a moment. "I am

— in hate, if such a thing is possible. Yes, Lucius," he said, looking as if the phrase pleased him, "I am in hate, and there is only one cure for what ails me."

"You want her killed?" Lucius asked.

"No," Tom said, and the heavy lids lifted, unveiling the eyes that burned like blue poison. "Not killed. I want her broken." His lip began to curl.

"And I know just how to do it."

"You've barely left your room for three days, Ginny," Charlie said. Sitting on her bed among the teddy bears and stuffed pillows, he regarded her with his elbows on his knees. "Mum's worried. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." Ginny tried to keep the tense impatience out of her voice. She was sitting in front of her mirrored vanity table, brushing her hair. A hundred strokes on one side, a hundred on the other. She found the repetitive motion soothing, and certainly her hair wasn't suffering for the attention. It lay along her shoulders and down her back like a smooth sheet of copper. "I just needed to sort my head out alone for a bit."

"I understand, but this is a little extreme. You've barely come downstairs except to eat, you stay locked in here, you haven't owled any of your friends — "

"I owled Professor Snape," Ginny muttered. This was true; she had. She'd sent him a sprig of the flora fortis Ben had given her, asking him if there was any chance it, or something like it, could be in the antidote for Draco's poison.

He'd owled her back almost immediately, a short message: Thank you but it is not what we are looking for. She'd gone to bed and pulled the covers over her head and stayed there for hours.

"I said friends, not professors you don't actually like," Charlie said. "Look, Ginny, It's not like I don't understand why you'd be even more upset than the rest of us — "

Ginny went still. "About Ron, you mean?"

"Well, you were always the closest to him." Charlie's voice sounded young, uncertain. "It's always been like that — me and Bill, Fred and George, you and Ron…"

"Percy and Errol?"

"Percy is his own man," Charlie said diplomatically, but he smiled a little.

"Charlie, I cry every night about Ron, you know that. But so do we all — "

"I know. It's just — look, Ginny, when I asked you to come back home it was with the understanding that you were going to be helping out Mum — "

Ginny whirled around on him, brush in hand. "And why do I have to be the one who helps out Mum? What about Fred and George? All they do is hang about the kitchen making smart remarks. Is it because I'm a girl?

That's hardly fair, Charlie!"

"I didn't say that," Charlie protested, surprised at her vehemence. "Is there something else you'd prefer to do?"

"Couldn't I help out Sirius and Professor Lupin?"

Charlie expelled an exasperated breath. "Ginny, what they're doing is dangerous. You know where they are this morning? Investigating a murder scene with Mad-Eye Moody."

Ginny blinked. "A murder? Who was murdered?"

"No one we know," Charlie said. "One of Voldemort's followers, a man called Avery. Probably just a Death Eater dispute. Still, hardly the sort of thing you should be — "

"I can take care of myself, Tom."

Charlie froze, his hand halfway to her shoulder. "What did you call me?"

Ginny could see them both in the mirror, frozen in tableau. Her brother's blue eyes were wide and astonished. "Charlie," she said in a small voice. "I thought I said Charlie."

Before he could respond, there was a knock on the bedroom door. It swung open, and Mrs. Weasley popped her red head around it. She smiled very faintly when she saw Charlie there. "Ginny, love," she said. "There's someone here to see you, downstairs. One of your friends from school."

Ginny dropped the brush and twisted around to look at her mother. "Is it

— "

"It's not the Malfoy boy," Mrs. Weasley said quickly. "It's a red-headed girl with a rather peculiar name. Sounded like a boy's name — "

"Blaise," Ginny said. "Blaise Zabini."

"Yes," said Mrs. Weasley. "A friend of yours?"

"Not exactly," Ginny said. She looked at Charlie, who looked as surprised as she did. "I wonder what on earth she wants?"

Once inside Viktor's weapons room Harry, to Fleur's amusement, proved himself to be a typical boy. It was a lovely room, probably the nicest in the house, with a set of huge bay windows giving out onto a view of a lake, and a ceiling enchanted to show the movement of the stars as streaks of silver against a coal-blue night sky. But Harry ignored all that; he went across the room immediately to the rack of swords that hung against the far wall, and ran a hand reverently along the gleaming blades.

"Can I take one out?" he called over his shoulder to her.

Fleur draped herself on the arm of a blue leather sofa and nodded.

"Viktor said you could have anything here you liked, you heard him."

Harry nodded, and promptly seemed to forget that she was there entirely.

He took down one of the swords — a slim-bladed one with a chased silver hilt — and began to examine it. Weapons bored Fleur; she sank back onto the sofa and began to read Viktor's latest chapter. It was, as usual, full of spelling errors. She frowned, and Summoned her red-feathered quill.

At least twenty minutes had passed when she looked up again. The light in the room was not good, and at first all Fleur could see of Harry at the far side of the room was his shadow, and the blade crossing his shadow as he moved, a silver streak against the dimness. She set her stack of parchments down and got to her feet. She was halfway across the room to him when he caught sight of her coming towards him and paused, lowering the sword he'd been holding. "Hey," he said. "I was just fooling around."

She waved her right hand absently at the unlit torches on the walls and the room filled with a diffuse golden glow that lit each of the individual dust motes in the air. Harry was suddenly standing under a rain of particles of light, like Danae under her shower of gold. Fleur smiled at him. "Just fooling?" she said. "You are very good."

"Good with this?" He glanced at the sword in his right hand. The sleeves of his jumper were rolled up and over several times so that they bulked out over his slender arms. His damp hair curled in dark tendrils over his forehead and at the nape of his neck. "I'm not, really," he said, "it's just Draco. He's good at this."

"It was you I was watching just now, was it not?"

Harry gave a little shrug. "He taught me," he said. "I fight like he does.

And I'm not bad. But just like I'll always be a little better at Quidditch than he is, he'll always be a little better at this than I am. I mean, he started learning when he was about eight. I just started in June."