Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Beside Ginny, Hermione sucked in a gasp of breath. "It's starting," she said.

The pentagram burned, and inside the fiery outline, Tom stepped to Voldemort's side. Ron, looking down from his platform, saw the Dark Lord greet his disciple with a frown. "At last you grace us with your presence, apprentice."

"Apologies, my Lord." Tom, hiding a smile, swept a graceful bow towards his older self.

"Take your place at my side," Voldemort snapped, and Tom did so. "And now, Tom — the bloodletting. Begin it."

Tom looked up, still smiling. Ron saw a dark brilliance flash in his blue eyes, and the sharp white of his teeth as he grinned, and raised his left hand. The tips of his fingers flashed a bright green fire, and an agonizing pain lanced through Ron's body. The skin of his arms burned as if hot pokers were being held against them. Screaming, he thrashed in his chains, but the manacles around his wrists were mercilessly tight. He felt a drawing pull against his veins, as if a vampire were sucking the blood out of him. He whimpered hoarsely as hot blood spilled from his slashed wrists and arms, dripping down his fingers and splashing onto the marble floor below.

"Ron!"

Hermione heard Ginny scream as Ron twisted and struggled on his platform, his cries of pain audible to them all. She turned to look at Harry. His face was white and set. Draco was gazing at Harry, his teeth sunk into his lower lip. And it begins, Hermione thought. This is what Voldemort wants us to watch. Each death worse than the previous one until only Harry is left.

Ginny, sobbing, thrashed and struggled in her bonds, crying out alternately for her brother and for Tom. Some part of Hermione pitied her, and some other, more ruthless part, wanted to slap her into silence.

What was the point of begging Tom Riddle for help or mercy? He didn't know the meaning of the words. He was standing beside the Dark Lord now, looking around in smirking pleasure as Ron's blood spattered down onto the floor in front of him. The blood sizzled as it touched the flaming lines of the pentagram. And as it touched them, they began to glow more strongly, the flames licking higher, the whole area inside the pentagram shimmering. It was almost beautiful, even more so as the Four Worthy Objects, mirror and cup, dagger and scabbard, began to glow with a fierce brilliance, like four separate torches.

Hermione began a swift series of mental calculations. At the rate Ron was bleeding, they had ten minutes, perhaps twenty, before he went into shock. After the shock, death would follow shortly. They were lucky, she thought, that Tom had gone for the wrists. If he had hit an artery, they would have even less time than they did.

Raising her hand as high as the chain would allow, she slid her fingers under the collar of her t-shirt, finding the lockpick she had tucked under the strap of her bra by touch. Then she went to work on her shackles.

Voldemort raised his black-draped arms to the sky, clearly visible through the open ceiling of the Ceremonial Chamber, and began to chant. "Fulmen evoca! Callis inveni! Exitum repta! Exitum! Exitum!"

As he chanted, the strange light inside the pentagram turned from white to green. A fine silvery mist rose from the floor, half-cloaking the figures inside the five-pointed star. The mist drifted across the floor of the chamber, winding around the legs of the four shackled prisoners. It felt like cold fingers. Draco tasted it on his lips and shuddered. The taste was bitter as aloe.

He turned his head to the side. "Harry," he whispered, but Harry seemed not to hear him. He was staring ahead of him, white to the lips, his hands clenched so tightly into fists that Draco could see where his nails dug into his palm. Draco couldn't tell if he was staring at Ron, whose struggles were slowing, or at Voldemort. Or even at Lucius, standing impassively just beyond the perimeter of the pentagram. As Draco watched, he crossed and uncrossed his arms, and Draco saw the bright flash of the Malfoy signet ring on his finger.

He glanced down at his own hand, where the same ring burned on the same finger. When he was a child he had looked forward to being old enough to wear the Malfoy ring, to using its carved back to stamp his initials into soft sealing wax. He remembered the way the stone caught the light when his father reached, bare-handed, to swing him up in his arms, and a pain lanced through his chest, so sharp and so severe that for a moment he thought that it was the poison, burning him from inside.

The truth was that he still could not believe it. As a child, he had loved his father unconditionally. He had always known his father's love for him was not the same. That it was conditional love, contingent on the honor he brought to the Malfoy family. He had known that his father did not mind the sight of his son's blood, or the sound of his son's cries of pain. He remembered dead birds, their necks broken, and chairs lined with nails, and the memory of the scars up and down his back, the cicatrices of his family name. I am a Malfoy. The cold comfort of that.

But conditional love was still love. That his father might not love him at all had never occurred to him. He was his father's bone and blood after all, almost a perfect carbon copy, and surely that did not mean nothing?

Even Voldemort seemed to hold some fatherly affection for his younger self. And yet Lucius faced the prospect of his son's death without blinking.

I am young. I can have more children.

Draco looked away from his father, unable to bear it any longer. He saw Ginny, hanging limp in her shackles, and Hermione, working away at one of her manacles as if she could rip it off her wrist. Good old Hermione, he thought, refusing to ever give up. And then there was Harry, looking directly at him now, his green eyes lambent, like far-off water. He seemed to be gathering himself for something. "Malfoy," he said. "When I tell you to close your eyes, close your eyes, all right?"

Baffled, Draco nodded. "Yeah, all right."

Chains rattled as Harry reached his hand towards Draco, but even with their arms extended as far as they could reach, only their fingertips touched. Draco swallowed against the bitter taste in his mouth. "Potter, you — "

But Harry was staring upward. "Malfoy, the sky."

Draco jerked his chin up and stared. Through the open chamber ceiling, he had a perfect view of the black night sky above, spangled with stars like chips of ice. It had begun to roil, like the bubbling mixture in a potions cauldron. Streaks of blue and gold, violet and silver, hurtled across it, colliding in vast explosions that seemed to rock the heavens.

Jagged tongues of black lightning crackled across the sky. One stabbed down through the open roof, striking the ground of Voldemort's feet. Tom looked startled, but Voldemort only threw his head back, howling his chant to the sky. "Fulmen evoca! Fulmen evoca! Fulmen evoca!"

The Four Worthy Objects began to rise into the air. Now they hung at eye-level to the Dark Lord, each at one point of the star, a thin line of blue energy connecting them. Another jagged line of lightning struck the mirror; Draco wondered if it would shatter, but it merely began to glow with a terrible, eye-piercingly bright silver light.

Letters began to appear inside the mirror, rising slowly to the surface like a drowned corpse rising to the surface of water. Voldemort ceased his chanting abruptly, seizing at the mirror, drawing it towards him. He opened his mouth, shouted out a word, which Draco could not hear.

For a moment, there was perfect silence. Even the wind had stopped. The echo of the Word hung inside Ginny's mind, twisting and turning like a moth caught in a spider's web.

The mirror shattered in Voldemort's hands. He shouted hoarsely, raising his eyes to the sky. It had turned to blood. A roaring came from all around them, a terrible wailing howl, more unearthly than any scream, as if the heavens themselves were crying out in rage. Draco heard Harry suck in his breath. "Shut your eyes! Shut your eyes, Malfoy!"