Turas Fada

Lavender cracked open the door to Lucius' chambers and listened. Harry's voice came drifting out, grumbling about something. Obviously the coast was clear. She pushed the door the rest of the way open and its hinges gave an ear-piercing screech. From the next room she heard a frightened gasp and some frantic scrambling. Amused, she crossed the room, an elegantly appointed sitting room, and went into the bedchamber. A quick scan of this room revealed a dirty pair of trainers under a large lump in the thick, green velvet drapes.

"It's okay, it's just me," she reassured the lump, which immediately disappeared as Harry stepped out. "Really! How you ever became the hero of the wizarding world, I'll never know! You suck at hiding!"

"Hey! I didn't have much choice!" Harry told her indignantly. "The only piece of furniture in this room is that bed, and there was no way I was getting on Lucius Malfoy's bed! Yuck! Did you ever think about what he probably does in there?"

"No, I hadn't. But thank you so much for the lovely mental images. Besides, haven't you ever heard of hiding under the bed?"

"I'm feeling dirty just being this close to it! That's way too close! Have you never heard all those stories about what Lucius Malfoy does with--"

"Ew! That's enough!" Lavender interrupted hurriedly. "I'm really overloading on mental images already, thank you. Now have you found anything in here, or have you been too busy fantasizing about Lucius Malfoy's sex life?"

"You know, I'm just helping you here out of the goodness of my heart," Harry said, annoyed.

"Yeah, yeah. I know, sorry," Lavender admitted grudgingly. She was so frustrated! She had been so sure she would find something here to enable her to help her parents, and so far all she had found was that Malfoy was an amazing kisser and his father was a pervert. Without warning, her lower lip began to tremble. What was the Dark Lord doing to her parents right now? Were they even alive?

She ducked quickly into Lucius' bathroom to get herself back under control. She didn't want Harry to see her break down like this. Besides, this negative thinking wasn't helping them any. She had to stay optimistic, be a cauldron-half-full kind of girl--she wasn't going to be able to do any rescuing if she was blubbering all the time. And she still had Harry, who, despite his sucky hiding, was still the Boy Who Lived.

Taking a deep breath, she gave herself a quick check in the large gilded mirror over the sink to make sure that no signs of her recent distress showed on her face. She tried out an experimental smile on her reflection but it looked watery and fake, she wasn't going to be fooling anyone like this. Maybe if she could think of something funny to distract herself...her mind drifted back to what Harry had just said about Lucius and his kinky sexual habits. She smirked, wondering what exactly they were. Lucius was pretty hot. She'd...

"Ew!" she said aloud, pressing her hands to her ears in an attempt to ward off her thoughts. "That is just wrong!" Now she felt dirty. She needed to wash her brain clean, but lacking the ability to do that, she did the next best thing and washed her hands.

Lucius' sink was in the shape of a large pink seashell. The water spigot was a gracefully leaping dolphin. Pretty girly sink for one of England's most feared wizards, she thought with amusement, forgetting her discomfort. She turned one of the starfish knobs and watched water spill from the dolphin's mouth. Maybe ol' Lucius is secretly a fruit. As her hand closed around the pink bar of soap a horrible feeling of wrongness swept over her. It took a moment for her to realize what had caused this feeling. The soap was wet.

"Harry!" she called into the adjacent room. "Did you wash your hands in here?"

"No, why would I wash my hands in Lucius' bathroom?" Harry asked, plainly confused. "What are you doing in there anyway? I seriously doubt Lucius has hidden any death eater secrets in his toilet."

A sickly fear began to creep into Lavender's stomach. It was a weird, random thing to have noticed, but that didn't stop the fact that soap was only wet when used, and no one should have been in these rooms to use the soap.

Now Lavender's eyes darted about the room, looking for other signs of recent occupancy. The sink was covered in water droplets that she was sure she had not created. The pink, lace-edged hand towel was damp. Lucius was in Azkaban, but someone had washed their hands in this sink just recently. Lucius was in Azkaban...right?

"Um, Harry," she said, backing hurriedly away from the sink, that harbinger of doom, and into the next room. "Someone's been here. Recently. They washed their hands. We've got to get out of here. Now." She tried hard to keep her voice steady and not let the panic rising within her rock it into a shrill scream. Lucius couldn't be home! She would never have considered breaking into Malfoy Manor if she had known Lucius was here. The only thing that had made this escapade seem even slightly sane was the fact that Lucius was tucked safely away in Azkaban. Her mind grasped desperately for any other possible explanation. Maybe Narcissa had taken a lover in her husband's absence and housed him in her husband's suite. A bit tacky, but then she was a Malfoy. But even as her mind came up with support for this theory, she knew that it wasn't true. Lucius was home.

Harry looked up from where he had been going through the items on Lucius' dresser and stared at her in shock. "But that's impossible," he said.

"No, it's not," she grabbed his hand and began to drag him from the room, explaining what she had found. They were halfway through the study when Harry put a finger to her lips to quiet her. Grabbing a piece of paper and a quill from the nearby desk, he scribbled a quick note and held it up to her:

Someone's coming.

Lavender's heart seemed to stop beating. Now she could hear the steady tread of feet along the plush carpet in the hall, getting closer and closer to the door of the suite. Dobby, who had been forgotten in the bedroom, poked his head into the study. He opened his mouth to speak, but right then the footsteps stopped in front of the double doors. The three in the room watched, frozen in horror, as the doorknob jiggled.

"Damn doors, impossible to open." The unmistakable angry drawl of Lucius Malfoy was clearly recognizable, even through the thick wood of the door.

With a frightened squeak and a pop, Dobby disappeared. This seemed to snap Harry out of his paralysis. Grabbing Lavender around the waist, he pulled her underneath the desk. As the door swung open, they plastered themselves to the wall behind them, drawing their feet up as far as possible, and held their breaths.

The head of the Malfoy family strode regally into the room, past their hiding place, and into the room they had just deserted. They heard the bedroom door close shut with a click. Knowing there was no time to lose, they sprinted to the double doors. Resisting the urge to yank them open and escape, Lavender turned the knob carefully and then pushed the door slowly open, mentally begging it not to squeak. The moment there was enough space to fit through, they both squeezed out into the hall and shut the door just as carefully behind them, before fleeing down the hall.

Turning a corner, they ducked into the first room they came to. The room was windowless and dark. From what Lavender could make out, it appeared to be a bathroom...or maybe a linen closet. They stood there, staring at each other, breathing hard, more from fear than from exertion.

"All right," Lavender said finally, breaking the silence. "How are we going to get out of here?"

"Well, call me crazy, but I was thinking of just turning the doorknob and opening the door. However, if you have a better idea..."

Lavender rolled her ideas and then realized Harry couldn't see her. "No, not here! The house! I believe I know how to get out of this room, I'm not an idiot," she said. "Unlike some people," she added under her breath.

"Leave the house? Are you kidding?" Harry asked incredulously. "But we haven't found anything yet! And by the way, just because I can't see you doesn't mean I can't hear you."

"Are you crazy?" she asked in return, choosing to ignore his last comment. "Lucius is here! We can't stay! That's suicide!"

"It was suicide even before we knew he was here. What's the big deal about Lucius anyway? He's just some poncy git with a ponytail. Personally, I was much more afraid of the chimaera."

"Lucius is an incredibly evil, insane maniac!" Lavender almost screeched. "Look, I'm trying to have some of that good commonsense you were complaining about me lacking earlier, but you've got to help me out a little here." A hand touched her shoulder and she jumped, before realizing it was Harry's.

"You're the one who said the house would probably be more dangerous with Lucius gone, remember? So now he's here, you should feel safer," he told her, his voice reassuring. "If you really want to leave, we can. But I think it's a shame to just give up when we've come this far. This might be our best bet to find out where your parents are," he reminded her gently.

With a rush Lavender remembered her parents, captured by the Dark Lord. If this was what she had to do to save them, then she would stay. She wouldn't let them down. She took a deep breath, trying to suck in bravery along with the oxygen...

"Okay, I'll stay. But where do we look now?"

There was a long pause while Harry thought. Then he snapped his fingers (Lavender suppressed a feeling of resentment, she had never been able to master that).

"I don't know why I didn't think of it before," he said, with obvious excitement. "The drawing room! Malfoy said second year that they have a secret chamber under the drawing room floor where they keep their Dark Arts stuff! I bet if we were going to find anything it would be there."

"Why did Malfoy tell you that?" Lavender asked in confusion.

"Um...I just...um...overheard him," Harry replied. He was obviously lying, but for once Lavender decided not to push it.

*****

Harry and Lavender crouched in their hiding place just down the hall from the drawing room, waiting impatiently for Dobby's return. This time they were definitely in a linen closet. It was extremely cramped and smelled almost overpoweringly of clean clothes, but the piles of towels made nice seats. Dobby had reappeared as soon as they had made the decision to search the secret chamber, scaring ten years off of Harry's life by materializing right behind him. Harry had wanted to tell him off for abandoning them earlier and then scaring him like that, but he had held back. Dobby was critical to the next part of their plan, without him they would never be able to find the drawing room, much less the secret chamber underneath it. Unfortunately, Dobby had not known about the secret chamber, apparently it was too secret to even entrust their servants with its location. Harry wondered what Lucius would have done if he had known his son was bragging about it to his friends at school.

But Dobby had been able to lead them to the drawing room without trouble and now he was checking it to make sure the coast was clear. For all of his annoying and stalkerish tendencies, Dobby really was a useful little bugger. Harry wished they could just send him to search the house, but Dobby didn't know what they were looking for. Heck, Harry didn't even know what they were looking for, and he doubted Lavender did either. He suspected they were both hoping that whatever they were looking for would just kind of jump out at them whenever they saw it.

A sliver of light pierced the darkness as the closet door opened a crack and Harry and Lavender cringed back into the corner, until they saw Dobby's head poke into the opening.

"It is clear, Harry Potter, sir. But you must hurry!" After a bit of awkward maneuvering, they managed to free themselves from the Malfoy's towels and followed Dobby into the drawing room.

The room was everything Harry would have expected from the Malfoy's drawing room. Furnished in ridiculously expensive green and silver, it was gaudy to an extreme, and there were so many snakes Harry felt as if he had wondered by mistake into a reptile house. His eyes went immediately to the floor, expecting to see a trapdoor hidden in the woodwork, or maybe covered by a rug. But the floor was covered in green shag carpet, with nowhere for a trap door to hide.

"Are you sure this is the drawing room?" Harry asked the house elf, thoroughly confused. Dobby looked offended. "Right, sorry. So the entrance must not be in the floor." He now began walking slowly around the room, looking for a hidden door in the wall.

After several laps of the room, Harry stopped and ran his hand through his hair in frustration. He had had fair experience with secret passages at Hogwarts, but he could find no signs of any in this room. He had checked behind tapestries and portraits, and even felt up all of the statues, but had come up with nothing. He looked for Lavender. She was standing in front of the fireplace--a colossal structure made of green marble and carved with an intricate pattern of entwining snakes. She reached up and grabbed one of the silver, snake-shaped candleholders flanking the mantle and pulled. The back wall of the fireplace slid noiselessly open, revealing a twisting flight of stairs leading down into the dark. Lavender stood staring at it, open-mouthed.

"I didn't really think that would work," she said in amazement.

Harry came up to stand beside her and together they looked through the opening. "Should I go first?" he asked, already moving towards the first step. Lavender grabbed his arm.

"What are you doing?" her voice sounded slightly hysterical.

"We had decided to search the secret chamber under the drawing room, so now that we have found the entrance, I was thinking I would go down and search it," he explained, patiently.

"You can't go down there in the dark! Who knows what's lurking in the shadows, waiting to eat you!"

Dobby, who had come up behind them and was now clutching the back of Harry's legs and shivering madly, nodded fervently in agreement. "Harry Potter cannot go down in the dark!" he cried emphatically.

Harry sighed. One day he was going to learn to go on rescue missions alone, but even Ron and Hermione didn't make this much of a fuss. "Okay, okay." He spotted a torch on the wall right inside the fireplace and grabbed it. "Here, I'll use this. Dobby, can you light it? Lavender and I are trying to use as little magic as possible. It would suck to rescue her parents and defeat the Dark Lord, only to be expelled once we got back."

Dobby, his shaking much less severe now that Harry had started to show some signs of sense, let go of his legs and pointed a long finger at the torch, which immediately burst into flames. Holding the torch up in front of him to light the way, Harry started down the stairs. Lavender clutched his free hand and started down after him and Dobby reattached himself to his leg. The fireplace slid closed behind them and Lavender's grip tightened on his hand.

"If we're stuck down here I'm going to cry. And then I'm going to kill you," she informed Harry through teeth clenched to keep from chattering.

They descended the rest of the way in silence. The staircase was relatively short, but they were moving awkwardly which made the going slow. When they at last reached the bottom, they were greeted with a scene straight from a horror movie. The narrow hallway they were in was lined with cells filled with a ghastly assortment of torture devices. Human skeletons lay on some, and blood crusted them. On one skeleton, Harry noticed the flesh had not rotted away in places. He swallowed the bile rising in the back of his throat and glanced over at Lavender. Even in the uncertain torchlight he could tell that her face was deathly pale and her hand trembled in his. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, hoping desperately that she was not thinking of her parents down here. Dobby had fainted, but his death grip on Harry's leg had not loosened.

They walked quickly past the cells, trying not to look too closely into their ominous shadows. After the cells, the hallway widened and torches bracketed the walls. There was only one door, at the very end of the hall. It was a large wooden door banded in iron, with the dark mark scorched into the center. They approached it with caution. Harry pressed his ear to it, listening for noises within, but the wood was too thick. Letting go of Lavender's hand, he grasped the iron handle and pulled, bracing himself for the squeal of the hinges, but the door swung open without a sound.

The room beyond was pitch black and Harry, now glad Lavender and Dobby had insisted upon the torch, shoved it in first, revealing the contents of the room with its flickering orange light. Glass cases and shelves cluttered with artifacts of an obviously dark origin lined the curved walls of the large circular room, reminding Harry of his accidental trip into one of Knockturn Alley's shady stores. As the trio moved silently around the room, looking into the cases and peering at the contents of the shelves, Harry realized that this was stuff that would not even be allowed in Knockturn Alley. No doubt this was an example of what was traded on the legendary Wizarding Black Market.

Started centuries ago by the ancient Black family as a way to smuggle and sell the darkest of dark magic objects, the Wizarding Black Market's name was a double-entendre, standing as both a tribute to its creators and as a reference to the type of magic it dealt with. Harry wondered if they knew about the Muggle market of illegal goods with the same name. He doubted it; the proud purebloods who were the Wizarding Black Market's main customers would probably eat their own livers if they did. He smirked to himself; surely it would only be kind for someone to inform them.

A sword in one of the cases caught his eye. It was a finely wrought black blade carved with mysterious silver runes. Its pommel was made out of the same black substance as the blade that seemed to absorb light and was decorated with a single blood-red stone. He bent closer to read the label by the sword. The name on the card was in the same strange runes, but underneath it was written Soul Stealer. A shiver ran up Harry's spine. Lavender gasped and her nails dug into the back of his hand, jerking his attention away from the blade. Biting back a yelp of pain, he shot her a questioning look.

She was staring with wide frightened eyes at a stone archway a few feet away that he had not noticed earlier, but he could not see what had scared her so badly. Then he caught the sound of footsteps and saw a flicker of light in the depths of the dark chamber beyond the archway. His heart plummeted--this was not good. Suddenly the light, which had been moving steadily towards them, stopped.

"Who left a torch burning?" a voice queried.

"No one, you know Lucius forbids it in that room," another voice answered.

"Well then, what's that light?" the first voice asked.

"Intruders!" the light began moving again, bobbing rapidly towards them.

Harry's heart, which was now residing somewhere in the region of his stomach, began pounding furiously.

"Put out the torch!" Lavender hissed, panic evident in her voice. Dobby, predictably, disappeared with a crack.

"Did you hear that?" one of the voices asked sounding much too close.

Harry stood frozen, unsure of how to put out a torch, and unable to make his mind function properly. Growling in frustration, Lavender grabbed the torch from him and smashed the burning end into the stone floor, putting out the flames and pitching them into total blackness. The fog on Harry's mind cleared, and without a word, they both turned and ran for their lives.

When they reached the top of the stairs, Harry felt a rush of despair--the fireplace remained closed. Frantically he felt along the door for a handle, but it was smooth, with no means to open it. The footsteps behind them had started up the stairs. He could hear their pursuers swearing angrily as they struggled to catch up. It would not be long now until they did, and they were trapped with nowhere to hide. Beside him, Lavender was groping around on the wall. There was a click and the door slid open. The light from the drawing room poured in, showing Lavender, smiling victoriously, her hand still on the bracket that had held the torch.

"They are so predictable!" she said, before following him out of the fireplace.

Dobby was gone, so they had no idea where they were going, they just ran. There was no question now of staying, if they did they would surely be caught. Harry just hoped they could elude their pursuers long enough to find a window. Then they would be able to climb out to the grounds and make a break for the fence. It was not much of a plan, but it was the best he could come up with on the spur of the moment; they did not exactly have time to sit down for a good planning session.

After several tries, they finally found a room with a window looking out onto the lawn. It felt like they had run for miles, but at least they had lost the men who were chasing them for the moment. Harry knew the respite would be fleeting, but hopefully it would give them the time that they needed to make their escape. He went immediately to the window and tried to raise it, but the frame had been painted over so many times that the window was glued in place.

"Perfect."

*****

Lavender sat on the edge of a table and kicked her feet listlessly. Harry was trying to chip off the paint holding the window closed with a statue of a dragon he had found. She had tried to help, but Harry had just snarled at her, so she had backed off and left him to it. Since she could think of nothing useful to do, she had come over here, out of the way. At first she had sat tense with fear, straining to hear any sounds of pursuit, but as the minutes ticked by and no one found them, she found herself relaxing. Now she was actually kind of bored.

Just then she heard a sound in the hallway. She stiffened and opened her mouth to warn Harry, but before she could, the door swung open and Draco Malfoy strode in, then stopped dead at the sight of Harry. He had not yet caught sight of Lavender, whose table was off to the corner of the room.

"Bloody hell, Potter! What are you doing in my house?" he yelled, his handsome face etched with an interesting mixture of shock, rage, and disgust. "Can I not enter a room in my own bloody house without running into a bloody Gryffindor!"

At this, Harry, who had been standing motionless in shock, whipped his head around to look at Lavender. She had neglected to mention her previous run-in with Malfoy to him. Malfoy's icy gaze followed Harry's. When he saw Lavender, he smirked.

"So you're with him, are you? I hope Potter's not going to use the same lame excuse for this breaking and entering as you did. You were an excellent kisser, I will admit, but I don't much fancy a lip-lock with Scarhead, here. He'd probably slobber horrendously." He grinned wickedly and Lavender blushed scarlet, while Harry looked like he was about to hurl.

"You kissed Malfoy?" he finally managed, looking at Lavender with horror, momentarily stopping his furious chipping, and obviously forgetting the eminent danger they were in.

"Well..." she said, her face felt like it was on fire and she wanted desperately to curse the smirk off of Malfoy's face.

"She certainly did, Potter. Though, who can blame her?" Malfoy asked smugly.

"So are you going to turn us in now, Malfoy?" Harry asked, his mind thankfully returning to the situation at hand. He was gripping the dragon tightly in his fist, and Lavender suspected he might be planning to attack the blond Slytherin with it.

"Oh no, I think I'll just stay here and watch for a little while, if that's all right with you? This promises to be quite amusing," Malfoy drawled.

Harry glared at him a while longer, then seemed to decide that Malfoy was going to keep good on his word and not turn them in, yet, and went back to picking away at the paint. The minutes stretched by in awkward silence, and with each passing second Lavender expected someone to come bursting into the room. But no one did, and eventually Harry was able to pry the window up. Studiously ignoring Malfoy, he held out his hand to Lavender.

"Come on, quick," he urged.

"I wouldn't go that way, if I were you," Malfoy remarked, from his place leaning casually against the wall.

"Oh yeah, like we're really going to trust you, Malfoy," Harry retorted, scornfully.

"Well you should," Malfoy smirked.

"And why is that?" Harry asked. "Our goal is not to die a painful death."

"I should hope not," Malfoy replied. "Well, actually I would love for you to, Potter," he amended. "But that was quite a fiery kiss your little friend there gave me," he nodded at Lavender. "I was hoping we could continue in that fashion, but, as you two seem to be in a bit of a rush, I suppose I'll just have to be content with keeping her alive so that we can shag another day," he heaved a tragic sigh.

"And sadly you seem to be with her, so I guess you'll have to go too. Besides," he added as an afterthought. "No one else is nearly as much fun to taunt as you. My days at Hogwarts would be so dull without you around to mock. So, if I were you, I'd take my advice and go that way," he concluded, pointing to a small door in far wall.

"And where will that lead us?" Harry asked skeptically.

"To a broom closet in the muggle train station down the hill," Malfoy answered. "It was your dumb luck, Potter, that you just happened to pick the room with our escape portal in it."

"So we just go through the door and poof, we're in the train station?" Harry's disbelief was clear in his eyes.

"Yes, Potter. Many wizarding houses have escape portals. It's almost like magic," Malfoy sneered.

Lavender looked hard at Malfoy's eyes. For some reason she could not fathom, she sensed he was telling the truth. He was actually helping them to escape. She doubted her sex appeal was really that great, the sooner they got out of here the better, before he could change his mind about turning them in. Jumping off the table she grabbed Harry and drug him over to the door.

"Thanks, Malfoy," she called over her shoulder, before stepping through with Harry in tow and closing it behind her. There was a brief moment of disorienting nothingness and then they were standing in a broom closet, just as Malfoy had promised. Of course this could just be a broom closet at the manor. The real test of Malfoy's truthfulness would be when she reopened the door. Stealing herself for disappointment, she turned the handle and pushed. They were on the platform of the Muggle train station. A train chugged to a stop right in front of them. With a squeal of joy, she threw her arms around Harry's neck and hugged him tightly. "We're safe!"