Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

It spoke. "Tu," it said to Draco. "Tu esti mort ca si mine."

Then it vanished down the tunnel with a sideways scuttle, like a crab or a spider. Harry stared after it, then felt a tug on his arm. It was Draco, looking more subdued than Harry had ever seen him. "Come on," he said.

"We have to get out of here before anything else comes after us."

Harry had taken several steps after him when he realized he was still holding his bloodied sword. Sheathing it, he followed Draco out of the cave and into the sunlight.

Barely had Lucius twisted the ring on his finger, when there was a pop like the sound that followed Apparation, and two crumpled figures appeared at his feet, looking as if they had been hurled there. Ron saw a blond boy, curled on his side — wondered for a moment if it was Draco, but no, the hair was too dark a blond — and then stopped thinking about it at all as his eyes came to rest on the second figure, the girl in the torn jeans with the tumbling shawl of blazing red hair…

"Ginny!" He struggled to get to his feet, but Wormtail still had tight hold of his arm. It was like being gripped in a metal vise. "Ginny!"

Painfully slowly, Ginny raised herself up and looked at him. Then she smiled — a sweet smile of recognition, the way she had smiled up at him through the bars of her crib just after she was born. "Ron," she said. "Oh, Ron, you — "

She broke off as the boy next to her picked himself up as well, struggling to a sitting position. Ron realized with a shock that the boy was Seamus Finnegan, although he was wearing a surprisingly poofy white shirt, and seemed oddly different in a way Ron couldn't quite put a finger on. Also, he was covered in blood. Ron stared at him. Seamus Finnegan, murderer of Death Eaters? It seemed unlikely. Ron called out to him, but Seamus just stared at him blankly.

"Lucius…?" Voldemort said, staring at the two struggling teenagers with evident distaste. "I await your explanation for this."

"My Lord," Lucius began, taking a step towards the place where Ginny sat huddled on the ground, hands hugging her stomach. "It seems that-"

At that moment, Ginny cried out, and slipped from her knees to the floor, her head rolling to the side. It seemed clear that she had fainted.

Instantly, Seamus was at her side, his hands on her, cradling her so that her head fell back. "She's dying!" he barked at Lucius. "You fool! See what you've done?"

Dying? Horror seized Ron — this couldn't he happening. Hermione was dead, and now Ginny was — but he wouldn't let it happen. He couldn't.

"Ginny!" Ron struggled against Wormtail's grip, shouting at the top of his lungs. "Let me go — let me go, you fucker! Wormtail! Can't you see that's my sister? That's Ginny! You knew her when she was a baby! Let me go, you bastard!"

Wormtail made a sound in his throat, halfway between a howl and a groan, as if what Ron had said had enraged him. Suddenly Ron felt the metal fingers of Wormtail's hand clamp down on his throat. He would have cried out, but he could not breathe. He felt his own eyes roll up in his head, and blackness descended.

The gap in the cave wall was narrow enough that after Draco wriggled through it, he had to turn around and tug on Harry's arms to pull him through after. Harry popped out like a cork from a bottle, feeling scraped raw, and looked around.

They stood among tumbled boulders at the bottom of a narrow gorge that ran between two towering cliffs of gray stone. A black river ran along the floor of the gorge, swollen with water that foamed and frothed over enormous rocks. On the other side of the river, Harry saw what looked like a narrow pathway cutting up and along the cliff. The steel-gray sky above hung heavy with the promise of snow or something worse. It was the most desolate landscape Harry had ever seen.

He turned back to Draco, who was leaning against one of the boulders, eyes half-closed. His drained face was as gray as the wintry sky above them. It seemed to Harry that lately Draco was always leaning against something — walls, furniture, trees. He had thought that Draco was trying to indicate how bored he was, how little he cared for Harry's dramatics.

Now Harry realized that it was more likely that he had just been trying to conserve his strength.

"Malfoy," he said, and Draco's half-lidded eyes opened on a flash of silver.

"What did that thing say to you?"

Draco's voice was flat. "It said, You are as dead as I am." He looked away from Harry, turning his head, and Harry saw the puncture marks on his throat again, even uglier in the sunlight — raw wounds edged in phosphorescent blood. "It wasn't wrong. I'm walking, but I'm dead already. And I don't know how much longer I can keep up the walking part."

"I don't understand." Harry's mind raced. "The antidote — "

"There never was an antidote," Draco said gently. "Oh, Hermione liked to call it that. But it was never meant to cure me, just slow down the process of dying."

"Slow it down by how much?"

"A few weeks, I think. It doesn't matter. When Hermione was taken…"

Draco opened his hands wide. "The antidote, such as it was, went with her. I've none of it left now."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Harry's voice was harsh. "We could have stopped, made more — "

"I don't know how to make more, Harry." Draco's smile was maddingly placid, as if poison and exhaustion had leached out of him even the ability to care about his own death. "Only Hermione knew." He paused.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

Harry just stared. I'm sorry, Draco's mouth said, but his eyes said, I'm so tired, I don't care anymore.

"Sorry for what?" Harry said finally. "Sorry for dying? Sorry for not telling me you were dying? I know why you didn't tell me. You thought I knew."

Draco nodded, a small gesture, as if he were afraid even that would tire him out. He wasn't looking directly at Harry, but a little past him, as if he were wondering how they would ever manage to ford the river boiling over the gorge's floor. Harry could see the reflection of roiling black water in Draco's mirror-gray eyes.

"I didn't know," Harry said. His voice was nearly a whisper. "Please believe me — I didn't know."

As if startled by the pleading in Harry's voice, Draco looked at him sharply. His mouth was bloodless white, the blue shadows under his eyes the only color in his pale face. The black water boiled at the backs of his eyes. Harry saw as if for the first time how the poison had eaten away at Draco's beauty, leaving only bone and shadows behind. Like a lovely painting that had had acid poured on it. He wondered how he could ever have thought that Draco was well. "I know you didn't," Draco said. "I saw you realize."

"Thank you," Harry said softly. Some part of him was almost shocked at the way they were behaving, all their previous anger at each other gone, each treating the other with care and precision, like mourners at a funeral.

"I wasn't apologizing for dying," Draco said. "I was apologizing for not coming with you."

"But you have come with me," Harry said, and only then did he realize what Draco meant. A thousand birds of panic opened their wings inside his chest. "No. You can't mean that. You can't want me to leave you here."

Draco only smiled a little — less a smile than a twitch of the mouth — and looked past Harry again, his eyes filled with leaping water. "When I died before," he said, "I saw a river. And when we came out of the cave I thought perhaps I had died again and was back in that place. And I was glad, thinking about crossing that river. That river you can only cross one way. I was glad, thinking I could rest."

"You told me you didn't want to die," Harry said.

"I don't," Draco said. "I want to stay with you. Watch over you. Follow you always. It's what I was meant to do. Blood binds us, Harry, and some fate more inextricable than that. And I want more selfish things. No one wants to die at seventeen. I want to be young and to live, and to be with the person I love, and I want to travel and see the world. And I want to get married and have children some day, and spoil them rotten so they grow up to be foul little bastards, and I want to die in bed when I'm a hundred and ninety, hexed to death by a jealous husband."