Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"Now you're going to tell me we can't always get what we want," Harry said.

"I would never say that," Draco said. "But I can barely stand up, Harry. I don't know how far I can walk and soon I'll be blind, too. Where you're going, I can't go. I simply can't get there. And I'll just slow you down."

Harry reached out then and took the other boy by the wrists. Holding Draco's wrists felt like holding bundles of dry twigs. Harry could feel Draco's pulse through the cold skin — each beat of his heart pumping poisoned blood. "If you can't walk," he said, "I'll carry you. Physically, or by magic, or whatever I have to do. And if you go blind, I'll guide you.

Take some of my strength — I have more than enough. Take it." And he held Draco's wrists tightly, as if he could somehow transmit his own vitality to the other boy through bone and skin, through the magic that bound them together. The pulse under his grip quickened, and he looked up at Draco's face; color had bloomed along Draco's cheekbones, bright red spots of it. "Take it, Draco," Harry said. "Because I won't leave you here."

"Harry," Draco said, and there was an odd hitch in his voice — he paused, and when he spoke again, he sounded more like his old self. "Harry, you're crushing my wrists."

A surge of despair ran through Harry, sharp as a knife-thrust. He let go of Draco's wrists and stepped back from him; he whirled, and stared at the river, fighting the urge to cry or yell or bash his own hands against the rocks. "I'm so stupid," he said in a half-whisper. "I don't know what I was thinking — I can't give you my strength. Strength can't be given — not like that."

He heard the crunch of pebbles behind him as Draco walked up to him; felt Draco standing at his shoulder. For a moment they stared at the gorge together in silence: at the fierce river, the tiny, jagged trail that wound through rocks and bare thornbushes on the other side of the water, at the steep wall of the cliff. Then Harry felt Draco's hand light on his shoulder.

"It can, though," Draco said. "And you have — you have."

Harry turned to see the determined look on his friend's face, and his heart jumped up in his throat. "You mean…?"

"We should go," was all Draco said in reply. "It'll be easier to cross that river before nightfall." He set off, walking slowly and carefully, like an old man — but he was walking. Harry stared for a moment, and then raced after him.

It was her third strange awakening in as many hours. When Ginny opened her eyes and saw, hanging above her, a dark blue velvet canopy rising from the four mahogany pillars that made up the corners of her four-poster bed, she merely closed her eyes again. Great, she thought. I'm back in Passionate Trousers. Maybe I'm actually dead this time. She lifted her hands to cover her face — and felt the rough graft of bandages against her skin.

She opened her eyes again, and sat up. She was in a small room whose walls were made of carved stone. Somehow she was tucked into a linen-sheeted bed with a coverlet made of a heavy, velvety material embroidered with a pattern of black thorns. Incense smoked from a coppery brazier near the bed, and a gold-framed mirror hung on the opposite wall. In it, she could see herself, a small flame-haired figure swathed in bandages. There was one around her head, and others on her arms and hands. Pushing the coverlet aside, she saw that someone had dressed her in a plain cotton shiftlike nightdress, and had wrapped bandages around the worst cuts and scrapes on her legs.

She wondered who it had been. Gingerly, she moved her arms and legs, expecting shooting pain — but the pain was gone. She got up and went over to look at herself in the mirror. She looked pale, but otherwise unharmed.

There were no cuts on her face, only fading bruises the color of old parchment. At the throat of her gown was a glitter of silver. She put up her hand and felt a thin chain under her fingers. Drawing it out, she saw the round silver pendant that hung off it with a surge of disbelief: J'aime et j'espere. Her thoughts in a whirl, she recollected the moonlit garden of her dream, the painful awakening inside the crypt with Tom, the way he had clutched her as they were whirled away -

She gasped and dropped the pendant. Ron. She spun around as if expecting to see him behind her, but the room was empty. Surely she'd seen him, hadn't she? Or perhaps it had been another hallucination? She'd also thought she'd seen Lucius Malfoy, and a terrifying-looking man with bone-pale skin and red eyes like a cat's…

The sound of a door opening snapped her from her reverie. She turned, and saw Tom.

Her hand flew to her mouth. How had he come in? She could not make out any doors in the walls of this room, nor a single window. And there was something different about him. As he walked towards her, she saw what it was, and recoiled.

There was no longer anything about him that was Seamus. He looked like his old self, the diary-self she remembered from dreams and clouded memories. Hair black as ink, skin white as paper, blue eyes like twin gas flames lit by unhealthy fires. He wore dark, old-fashioned clothes, a jacket long out of fashion, a white shirt, a dark robe thrown carelessly over it.

Black hair spilled down into his eyes. He was grinning.

"Virginia," he said. "Did you miss me?"

"Tom," she whispered. "What have you done to yourself — what's been done to you?"

"A glamour," he said, holding his arms out with a wicked leer. "My elder self assisted me with it. Do you like it?"

Horror surged up into her throat. "Your elder self? You mean Voldemort?"

"I do indeed," he said. "Lucius brought us to him. Very clever of Lucius, playing us both off each other like that. I admire that. It doesn't mean I won't kill him for it, later, but nevertheless. Admirable."

"I thought you hated Voldemort. I thought you wanted to destroy him."

Tom's grin became even wider. "That was before," he said. "Really the old man seems quite fond of me. He healed you, at my request, installed you in these chambers, found me new clothes, restored my appearance…and he has promised me a seat at his right hand when he rules the world."

"Oh, Tom," Ginny said. "You'd never be content at anyone's right hand."

"True." Tom's grin faded to a secretive smile. "But he does not know that.

He has shown me how the Ceremony will take place. It was very instructive. One man must stand in the center of the circle and speak the name of God when it appears in the mirror. He thinks it will be him." The blue eyes burned. "I disagree."

"You'd betray your own self?"

"The old must give way to the new," Tom said, prowling towards her.

There was really no other word for it. He stepped as softly as a panther as he came towards her and reached out his hand to touch her hair. "The wizarding world will crawl at our feet when this is done," he murmured.

Ginny jerked away from his hand. "Our feet?"

Tom looked at her consideringly. "I intend to rule with you at my side," he said. "I have long pondered that which binds us, Virginia. I thought at first it was hate, but that seems too simple. Lucius suggested that it was love, but that is absurd. Finally I understand what you are to me. You are that which tethers me to the world. When the Ceremony is complete, it will be easy to lose myself in the magnificence of my own power. I will be able to part seas with my left hand, transform mountains to rubble with my right. I could destroy the world in a heartbeat — but then what would be left to rule?" He was not touching her, but Ginny imagined that she could feel the drift of his fingertips across her hair, her cheek. "You will prevent that," he said, so softly that she could barely hear him. "It is you who will remind me of what is real."