Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

With his free hand, Harry pulled his shirt up and looked down at himself: he saw a shallow cut across the skin of his chest just above his heart, blood threading slowly from it. He let go of the shirt. "It's all right," he said. "You haven't killed me."

Draco put out a shaking hand and gripped the banister. The sword hung at his side, but he did not let go of it. His eyes were half-closed; Harry could see the shadow of his lashes cast down across his cheek like a fringe of silvery thread. There was color in his cheeks, a dark flush along the cheekbones: he looked like a marble statue that had been slapped with red paint.

"I could have," he said. "I could have-"

Harry! It was a voice they both recognized, high and thin now with panic, rattling the windows like a heavy blast of wind. Harry, wake up!

"Hermione," Harry said, spinning, though she was nowhere to be seen.

"She's calling me back-"

"Then go back," said Draco, with a harshness that, Harry suspected, was not intentional.

"Not without you," said Harry. "No."

Draco shook his head, hard. "Don't you see you're torturing me?" he said, in the same harsh voice. "I can't go with you. I can't."

"Then I'll stay here until-"

"There is no until. I'm dying-the poison's burned me up, I'm just bones and char, can't you see that?"

"I just see you," said Harry, simply. The blood running down his stomach felt sticky and strangely cold. The voice came again: Harry, wake up! Harry, it's Hermione, can you hear me?

"I kissed her," Draco said, so abruptly that Harry stared at him, taken off-guard.

"Kissed who?" he said.

"Hermione. I kissed her."

"Yes, well," said Harry, wondering where this was going, "if memory serves, you've kissed her multiple times in the past."

"This wasn't the past," said Draco, looking almost desperate. "This was last week, maybe a bit before, after you'd gone off and left us, right after I saw you in the Midnight Club. When you Portkeyed off. Remember that?"

Harry nodded, too bewildered to speak.

"Well, I went back to the hotel and we kissed-and more than that besides-"

"Did you sleep with her?" Harry was appalled.

"No-God, no," Draco said, even more ashen than before, though still with the same odd determination. "She was wearing that ring you gave her and I stopped when I saw it-we both did-but that doesn't matter, does it?" He gave a short laugh, almost like a curse, and glanced away. "There," he said. "I told you I hadn't changed as much as all that. Are you still so sure you want to stay?"

The sixth journey was not cold, but hot. Ginny fell down and down through rings of fire, each hotter than the last, and the stench of smoke stung her eyes and nose with acrid pain. Falling and burning like an angel cast down out of Heaven, Ginny thought of Tom as she fell, the cool blue of his eyes and the ice of his touch.

The ground struck her, not her feet but her side. She lay curled up on the ground, coughing, her lungs seared with pain.

"Ginny!" There were hands on her, turning her over. She saw Blaise's frightened face looming overhead like a white balloon. She was speaking, but Ginny couldn't make the words out over the roaring in her ears.

Blackness danced at the edges of her vision. She wanted nothing more than to shut her eyes and sink down into it, lose herself in oblivion and a quick end to pain. There was something, though. Something important.

Something she needed to tell Blaise, to remember…

"The wall," she said, dragging the words up out of a throat raw from searing heat. With the words came a quantity of blood that spilled down her chin; she wiped it away with the back of her hand.

Blaise looked horrified. "Don't talk-"

"The antidote," Ginny said. "It's in the wall." She raised her hand to point, and saw that it was covered in blood. She stared for a moment, uncomprehendingly. Is that my blood?

The darkness was reaching for her again, with long, curved claws, sinking its talons in, dragging her down. There's something important I have to do, she told it, pleadingly, but it came on with the inevitability of nightfall, drawing a curtain of blackness across her eyes.

"Harry!" Hermione had slipped to her knees and was gripping his hands; she looked ghastly, Ron thought, as if she were imagining that this was somehow all her fault. "Harry, that's enough, wake up, please wake up!"

Harry didn't move. Blood seeped slowly, evenly, across his chest. Sirius and Charlie were looking over now from across the room, as if noticing that something was wrong. On her cot, Narcissa stirred restlessly.

"Hermione," Ron said softly. "Move aside."

She didn't move. She was still clutching Harry's hand, whispering rapidly under her breath as if he could hear her. Ron knelt down next to her. "It could be an old wound," he said, "something he got in Romania, opening up again-"

"It isn't," Hermione said, her voice breaking on a sob. "it's my fault- I sent him into Draco's mind and now they're dying together, he's being dragged down into it-"

"Don't talk like that," Ron said sharply, wondering if she'd gone mad.

With a quick movement, he pulled up the side of Harry's shirt. Blood seeped from the edges of a thin gash along his chest, but to Ron's relief, it looked neither deep nor serious. "Look, it's just a shallow cut, nothing to be-"

"What's going on?" It was Sirius, looming over them, Charlie beside him.

In the corner of the room, Lupin and Madam Pomfrey were in whispered conference. "Is Draco all right?"

"It's Harry, actually," said Ron, and saw Sirius' eyes widen in surprise.

"He-"

A shrill, horrific noise split the air. It sounded like the shrieking of damned souls in Hell. Narcissa sat up on her cot with a start, gasping, and Hermione's head flew up. Her face was wet with tears.

"The library-" she said. "Ginny-"

Ron sprang to his feet and dashed towards the door of the infirmary, Charlie hot on his heels.

Blaise looked up as the door to the library opened and Ron and Charlie Weasley burst in, both out of breath. She was standing amid an enormous pile of flung books- she'd yanked down almost every volume in the Restricted Section, and they were howling and shrieking around her feet in a massive pile of indignant, enspelled pages. She reached for another one to throw, half-hysterical, even as Ron came towards her and grabbed her arm. He was shouting something, but she couldn't hear him over the din and only shook her head at him, her red hair flying wildly around her face.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. This time she could see the words his mouth was shaping: Where is Ginny? Before she could get her hands free to point, Charlie drew his wand from his sleeve and waved it, shouting a frantic spell.

The noise subsided. "Thank God I'm a professor here," said Charlie, sliding the wand back. "Blaise, what's going on?"

Her voice caught at she replied, wrenching herself out of Ron's grip to point. "Ginny. She's over there-"

Ron and Charlie turned. One of the long study tables nearly blocked their view of her, but the edge of an outstretched hand was just visible there on the floor, the flutter of a sleeve-Charlie reached his sister's side first, Ron and Blaise just behind them.

Ginny lay where she'd slumped, her hair straggling raggedly out of its braid, a pool of blood spreading across the floor beneath her head. More blood leaked from her ears, eyes and mouth.

The Time-Turner, resting against her chest, was pulsing feverishly, like a separate, living heart.

Charlie made a terrible gasping sound and went down on his knees to lift his sister up in his arms; her eyes were shut, blue veins visible through the etiolated lids. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. "What happened?" Charlie asked tightly.