Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

Chapter 5

The Interpretation of Dreams

The remnant of our waking thoughts and deeds move and stir within the soul.

--Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

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Ginny's steps halted. Her breath was coming very hard and fast through a painful stitch in her side. She wiped the sweaty strands of hair from her face. Had she heard her brother's voice? Had she seen the carriage retreating from her?

Or had it all been an illusion... a trick of some kind?

She glanced around. She was standing beneath a enormous oak tree, and the forest was very silent around her. It was a waiting silence. A listening silence, as if some brooding force held its breath. She glanced from side to side, uncertainly. The branches were much too dense overhead for the full moon to penetrate. Or maybe even the sun-- I don't know how long I've been here, time seems to have no meaning, really--

And an icy chill rippled down her back. She was no longer on the path. She could see no trace of it. Only the titanic sentinels of trees in all directions. No. No. Oh, no--

Ginny leaned against one of the trees, thinking, trying to retrace her steps. The feel of the bark was like touching living flesh. She stepped back with a gasp. But the tree had turned monstrous, its limbs writhing in anger at her presumption. It swelled to such enormous heights that she could no longer see the top. She clutched at the silver locket around her neck. The tree fell back. Its branches folded inwards, and it was silent.

She'd done exactly what she had been warned not to do. She'd lost the path. The thought came to her in a way that was almost calm.

Well, there was nothing to do but keep walking. Ginny moved beneath the branches of the tree that had seemed to threaten her, and it stood silent and motionless.

The trees were shifting and changing. Their trunks were actually moving. Sort of-- she squinted-- running into each other. The fabric of everything she saw stretched, the colors of green and brown and black sliding together like wet watercolors. The fabric of reality itself was going to rip any second, and something great and terrible would come through, its monstrous clawed hands reaching for her--

--or was it only the forest, seen through her swimming eyes, her terrified tears?--

Inside the locket, a soothing voice whispered in her ear. The same one she'd heard earlier. The parchment. You need it now, don't you? You need to touch it. To touch the jewels. Her hands crept up to her neck. Yes. Yes, my young one... that's right...now open it... And in the moments before the shrieking panic claimed her completely, she parted the halves of the silver locket with a fingernail and grasped the folded parchment inside. A very faint warning voice said that this might not be such a good idea. She ignored it. Ginny pressed the glowing rubies against her fingertips as if she were going under for the third time in a monstrous ocean, and they were life preservers bobbing on the waves before her.

The world steadied itself, slowly, slowly. Became understandable again. Gravity worked, and Ginny heard the beating of her heart, the frightened sound of her own breathing. She felt almost foolish for having been so afraid. There was nothing to threaten her here. Nothing to fear but fear itself. She'd follow the stream and find her way out; she could hear its chattering sound coming from somewhere to her left, surely she must be almost through the forest.

And on the other side of the Ogham wall, Draco felt the heat pulsing through the Kitap-an Düs, stroked its pages, and linked once more to Ginny Weasley. But he was not the only one who had.

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There was none of the numbing shock he had felt the other times he tried to go through, none of the tremendous force barring his entry. It resisted him for a moment and then gave way, the spells parting to allow him access, snapping into a re-formed crystalline structure as soon as he'd passed through them. Draco stood on the path in the middle of the forest, blinking at the weird sourceless light, looking around him at the silent sentinels of trees. He'd only been here once before, he realized. That time in first year when he'd had detention with Potter and Longbottom and Granger, and that insane oaf Hagrid had dragged them all right into the path of Voldemort. Draco couldn't stop a sick shiver from going through him at the memory; even from all those years ago, it still had the power to frighten him, to make him remember how he'd slumped to the ground behind a tree, sobbing and shaking, praying that none of the rest would find him, thinking, I know who that is, who it's got to be; I could never follow that, I could never believe in that... I'm only eleven years old, don't make me decide, Father, don't make me swear... What a foolish child he'd been, sometimes. Strange, too, that the memory could be coming back so strongly to him now.

Sighing, he stopped and opened the Kitap-an Düs. It moved in his hand as if alive, and he almost dropped it in shock. He could feel the incredible power running through it now; he'd had enough training with magical objects to sense it, but he rather thought that any Muggle could have felt it. The only way to find Ginny was through it. Draco was suddenly sure of that. He sensed her vaguely, but he couldn't have said precisely where she was. But he was also, all at once, rather afraid to touch what he held. The book was more powerful here, much more powerful. It only made sense, he supposed, that a Book of Dreams tapped into some sort of power source in the Dreamtime. But it also made him wonder, for the first time, exactly what its powers were. Well, no time to think about that now.

He steeled his courage and opened the book. The rubies within glowed so brightly that they left little spots on the insides of his eyelids when he closed his eyes. Like a blind man, Draco reached out his hand to touch the page. He immediately fell through it.

Falling. Falling. Tumbling through dimensionless space. Tossed by a vast, indifferent power. Pieces of his memory falling through the void at wildly different speeds as he tried to clutch at them. Random dreams thrown out by this impersonal energy as if by the centripetal force of a spinning top.

--falling from a high tower, over and over again, screaming and screaming but somehow I just kept falling and never stopped, and just before I landed I'd always wake up--

--a great pair of scissors chasing me down an endless dark hall, opening and closing, opening and closing--

--drowning in deep waters and fathoms of ocean closing over my head--

--searching for someone through the endless mists, running and searching and never finding them, crying out a name I can never remember when I wake--

He was losing it, Draco thought almost calmly. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea after all.

Desperately, he tried to clutch onto some scrap of a memory that might save him. . Thinking about Hogwarts or Malfoy Manor wasn't going to do any good; where had he ever been happy, really happy? The fields and streams of Linz. The fields of purple loosestrife, waving and whispering to each other in the soft summer wind. The von Drachen estate. The rose gardens, heavy with intoxicating scent. He'd play among the rosebushes as a very small child when his mother sat and sketched, and sometimes she'd draw intertwined scarlet symbols, hearts and flowers and half-moons in happy red intricate shapes across the parchment. Draco would reach out his chubby toddler hands to hers as she drew, and the sound of their laughter mingled in the warm air, a delicate sparkling ruby web of magic stretched between mother and son. "Hexensymbol," Narcissa would say, her face lit up with one of its rare smiles. His bedroom that looked out over the clock tower, and the comforting sound of its bells tolling in the middle of the night. Even after he could sleep nowhere else, long after he spent endless weary nights staring up at the canopy of his bed in the Slytherin dormitory like a prisoner marking time to a release that never came, he could sleep in Linz, deep, heavy, refreshing sleep, simple and pure as a spring of clear water. The library, with its dog-eared, dusty tomes. The von Drachen librarian, an Austrian ghost. Draco had called him Ziggy when he was very small and couldn't quite get his mouth around the ghosts' real name, which was Sigmund. How many happy hours he'd spent in that library. That was a happy memory. Surely it was. He' d spoken with Ziggy about some of his dreams in the summer, before he left Linz; what had they said?

"Hmm," the ghost said in his mind's eye, tapping his incorporeal cigar on a desk in the library. "The fall from a tower represents separation anxiety. Dreams about scissors represent castration fears, of course. The image of searching for a lost companion means that you long for greater closeness with your mother, and ocean dreams signal a desire to return to the womb. How long were you breast-fed, child?"

"That's the silliest thing I've ever heard," said Draco, and the absurdity of the memory lifted him a bit. "What does that cigar represent, then?"

The ghost shrugged, curling smoke out his ears and through his trimmed white beard.. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Draco could feel himself rising from the sea of dreams. He laid his cheek against the cool smooth parchment surface of the page, sighing softly.

"I can figure out for myself what the right sort of people are, thanks," the cold voice of Harry Potter said quite distinctly in his left ear, and Draco pulled his head up, startled. But it was too late, and the oceanic force smashed into his mind again from a different direction. Memory, this time. And his memories were far worse than his dreams.

--Lucius Malfoy's cold flawless face with its one drooping eyelid was advancing on him from a great height as he said, "You'll spoil the boy, Narcissa, you'll make him soft, and that is one quality no Malfoy may possess." And then his favorite house-elf, his old nurse Tibby, had given a little shriek of pain and fear, trying to crouch back into a corner. But his father was far too strong and fast for her, and house-elves were not built in such a way as to defy their masters. So she only cried as she went out the window. The sight of her great eyes liquid with tears the last thing he saw, and he knew it was his fault, all his fault, she'd tried to sneak food up to him when he was in his room being punished for something and was sick with hunger. His mother had tried, too, but she couldn't go out a window of course, people would have noticed, people would have asked, what would their friends, or at least the people in their circle, think? But what happened to her behind closed doors, he was never to know; she only because more silent than ever-

--silent, his father would be silent for days and weeks on end sometimes, ignoring Draco's very presence in a room, turning his cold grey glare across his son as if he no longer existed; Lucius would never lay a hand on him but Draco sometimes wished that he would, surely nothing could be worse than the icy disapproval, the knowledge that he'd failed again. He had been ten years old when he befriended a Muggle girl with long red hair in the village and walked through the apple orchards with her. They giggled together and played cat's cradle as they knelt in the long grasses of the Kentish fields; he whispered that he liked her, touching her fingertips as if stroking precious silk, and he gave her a chain of magical daisies that would never fade.... But somehow his father had found out about it. Not a word was ever said, there was only a dreadful rotten silence that overlay the workings of whatever happened next, but his friend's family left Kent in a large black removers' van in the middle of the night, their faces haunted and strained. He had gone out into the main street of the village crying after them, running, waving with all his might at the girl in the back seat with her face pressed up against the glass, and she had pushed the window open and spat on him. "I hate you, Dray!" she had shrieked. "My mum was right! The Malfoys are all the same! All the same!" The shredded daisies landed at his feet.

Draco had trudged back to the manor after that and, as he had fully expected, was locked in his room on rations of moldy bread and water. But the silence and the isolation were worse, much worse, and by the end of it he had not seen a human face or heard a human voice for a month and a half; even the house-elves were all too afraid to speak to him. Every book had been removed from the bookshelves, and the chess set was gone from the window seat. He found a copy of Webster's Unabridged Wizarding Dictionary forgotten in the back of a closet and read it for hours on end, pausing occasionally to pace the room and trace his fingertips across the curtains, permanently closed with charms. He knew that the fields he would have seen stretching outside were green now, but in his mind's eye they were barren and brown, as if a dark wizard had stretched out his hand and forever withered them. He counted the tiles of the ceiling and the patterns on the rug; sometimes in the middle of the night they began writhing on their own, and he'd thought quite calmly that he was going mad before he was even eleven years old. Before he ever had a chance to go to Hogwarts, to escape this house.

Six weeks he was utterly alone, day after day and night after night; every other being might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Draco never saw his mother. Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps everyone was dead. Perhaps nothing existed anymore outside of this room. These thoughts sometimes seized his mind and wouldn't let go, and then he would have to turn his head to the wall and stuff his pillow in his mouth to keep from screaming.

Then, one night, when he'd given up all hope, his father had come and spoken to him in a low hypnotic voice, very late, when the rest of the household was asleep. Whispering that Muggles were deceitful and untrustworthy, rotten to the core, and Mudbloods were worse, the Muggle-born who dared to ape their wizarding betters. But worst of all were the pureblood wizards who refused the fate appointed to them, who were too timid, too soft, too weak to seize the power that was theirs. "We alone are born to rule," he'd whispered to his son.

"And that's..." Draco fumbled for words "... good... isn't it?"

"Destiny cannot be defined by petty moral questions. We are beyond good and evil."

And Draco had nodded his head and agreed, looking at Lucius Malfoy anxiously, reading his face for some sign of approval. "Is that why we hate the Weasleys, Father? The Muggle-lovers?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"All of them. The mother, the father, the cousins, the sons, the daughter. There can be no exceptions."

"Oh."

"Never forget that you are a Malfoy," his father had told him. "Never... never... " And Draco no longer wanted to escape. Only to please his father. There was no other fate for him, and he wanted none...

--and he never did forget; but now it was one year later and he was eleven years old, standing on a step stool at Madam Malkin's in Diagon Alley, being fitted for his first set of school robes. Looking over to see the green-eyed boy with the messy black hair standing next to him. His heart leaping, a shy smile on his face, saying, "Hello, Hogwarts too?" Longing for friendship, for acceptance. Gods, but how he wanted a friend, a real friend, not those morons Crabbe and Goyle who hung around him because their fathers fawned on Lucius Malfoy and their mothers came to garden parties at the Manor, but someone to talk with, to share secrets with, to run and fly and dream with... But he didn't know how to do it, didn't have any practice. He hated the sound of his own boasting voice, and when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the far wall, what he'd thought was a smile was actually a sneering smirk. Still, he'd tried again on the Hogwarts Express, knowing what he was trying to say was coming out all wrong, but persisting anyway. Offering his hand. And the other boy had turned him down, eyes cold, voice cold, going off with that damn Ron Weasley, who pulled him into a tight little circle of best friendship, leaving no possible room for Draco. How terrible he'd felt that day, knowing that he'd failed. But a Malfoy didn't show such things...

--twelve years old, standing in front of Flourish and Blotts, watching the same green-eyed boy with the lightning-shaped scar pose for pictures with that idiot, Gilderoy Lockhart. But Draco didn't particularly care if Potter needed to feed his ego at that moment, or was angling for the front page of the Daily Prophet. No, what made his heart contract in his chest was the sight of the girl with the red-gold hair and the golden eyes. Draco had been coming out of the bookshop when he saw her in a corner, waiting, and the world had seemed to stop for an endless moment as he watched her. He couldn't have possibly said what he was looking for, or why his feet seemed rooted to the spot, but it was as if his heart had known something, on seeing her. That he had never seen her before, he knew. But he had known her for lifetimes upon lifetimes. And still he stood, and stood, and stared, and stared, thanking whatever gods might be that his father wasn't here.

The girl must be for Hogwarts, first year probably; who could she be? There was power in her glance, ambition too, she had the look of a Slytherin. Her face with its high cheekbones and square jaw was very grave, but there was a sort of light dancing behind it, as if her soul couldn't help but peep out through her eyes. He had to find out who she was. If she was new, she would need... friends, and a sort of rush of images went through his head, of all the things he could show her, the things he could share with her, the long talks they could have as they walked around the lake, the whispered secrets they could exchange in the long grasses of the fields behind the clock tower... She was a child and so was he, but he felt something on seeing her that he had never felt before, the mysterious beginnings of some sensation he had yet to know. And Draco watched her, trembling, as if before a long-locked door about to swing wide.

Her face lit up, honestly lit up, with golden radiance, and he could see how beautiful this girl was going to be. For an instant Draco almost thought that the look was for him, that she'd seen him and recognized something in him as he had in her. He started forward eagerly. Then he saw Potter tipping a stack of books into a new cauldron by her side. The girl turned towards him. The smile was for Potter, and so was the inner glow, the eagerness, and the hero worship. And the stupid prat didn't even see it. Draco's chest went cold, and he somehow found himself face to face with the other boy. "Bet you loved that, didn't you?" he asked, sneering.

And the girl spoke, finally. "Leave him alone, he didn't want all that!" Her voice was cold, and she glared at him with dislike. She knew who he was, he realized. And when Draco looked up and saw the youngest male Weasley spawn headed towards them, an angry scowl on his face, he knew who she must be. The girl didn't really look much like the rest of them, but that hair... Ginny Weasley, youngest of the brood. His natural enemy, as he was hers. He groped for the most self-punishing words he could think of.

"Potter, you've got yourself a girlfriend!" he drawled.

The girl had gone scarlet, he had said all the nastiest things he could imagine to her brother and Potter, and his father, Draco seemed to recall, had ended the day in a brawl with her father. The chance was ruined beyond repair. But a Malfoy didn't care about such things...

--the rush of sounds and images was coming faster now, more jagged, more disconnected in time and space. Pansy's voracious eyes, shining with excitement, turned towards him as they crouched in the ancient Roman hypocaust beneath Malfoy Manor, hearing what they should not have heard, learning what they should not have learned. What a laugh, Draco... what a laugh... little Ginny Weasley, in the Chamber of Secrets... . Marie-France Tessier and her red-gold hair, falling about him like a shining curtain in her rose-satin bed... Mon cheri, mon Draco, laissez-moi... je peux n'être pas plus ce quie suis je... Voices on the other side of the hedge in the rose gardens of Linz, that summer, the voices of Klaus and Cisselinde von Drachen . They are upstarts, the Malfoys, all of them, Gabriel, Michel, Lucius. And the boy? He has his father's eyes. He is his father's son. I see nothing of Narcissa in him... Pink roses in his hands, roses that should have been given to Pansy but he couldn't bring himself to do it, he was watching a thousand tiny figures circling below him on the dance floor at the Yule Ball, but all his mind on only one, one brilliantly copper-gold head glowing in the fairy lights, turned always and forever towards Harry Potter...

--and with that remembered image of Ginny, the tidal wave of memory, or dream, or whatever the hell this was, might have been made of sulfuric acid, which Longbottom was forever brewing by mistake in Potions class, and which Snape continually threatened to force the round-faced boy to drink. Draco felt as if he were swimming in a sea of the caustic substance now. Every emotion from the most painful memories he had ever experienced was attacking him from all sides. I need her, he thought irrationally. I need her now. Ginny. Ginny, I could find Ginny, I've got to find Ginny. Through this book.

With that thought, the poisonous flood of memory was stopped for a moment. Draco struggled to understand what was going on. There was a flash of lucid thought at least, as if grabbing onto a piece of flotsam in a shipwreck. He'd tapped into the extraordinary power of the Book of Dreams somehow, but it was too much for him. It was overwhelming his mind. If he had understood the analogy, he would have thought instantly of an electrical outlet with far too many plugs in it, sparking, threatening to blow its circuit.

His mind was lined with a bottomless pit of dream and imagination, mostly dark, some terrible, but his memories were far worse. Ginny. If he could only hold onto the image of Ginny, the smell of her hair, the remembered feel of her skin--

Draco staggered forward, still holding the book. He was walking on the forest path again. He was reasonably certain that he was in the real world. But when he blinked, and then looked round again, he saw that he had somehow come to a crossroads. Four paths led in opposing directions, and at the center stood a tall white stone pointing to the sky. Oh Gods, what now? He looked from side to side in desperation.

And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, there was a tall dark man standing before him, an invisible wind whipping at his cloak. His blue-black hair was moving, too, in patterns that no real wind could ever create. His eyes were fathomless, and his skin was white as death. Draco actually felt his mouth go dry. He was in his sixth year at Hogwarts; he'd taken Unearthly Beings-- How to Recognize and Hopefully Avoid Them, and as a Malfoy he'd gone much further into the study of unclean spirits and dark entities than was healthy for any sixteen-year-old boy to do. But this-- person? thing?-- before him was utterly outside his experience. Or was it?

A vague memory stirred in his mind, just a little. A dusty book in the Malfoy library that only opened to the hair from the head of a Drow elf, a feather from the wing of the great Roc that carried Aladdin and the Forty Thieves in its talons, and fur from the pelt of a manticore, all woven together into a lanyard and laid across its pages. The crabbed red script that only appeared to a Revealing spell whispered on the night of a blood moon at Beltane...

For many gods there are, and many devils also. Some that do good, and some that work evil. Yet above them all are the Seven Immortals, those that walked before aught else lived, or breathed, or suffered. But of them it is forbidden to speak. It is not given to mortals, to love the Endless...

And Draco knew who the man must be. He remained oddly unafraid, and was surprised at this a little, but only a little. It was as in a dream, when all things are possible. "Lord Morpheus," he said.

"Draco Lukas Malfoy." The dark man inclined his head.

"Where-- where am I?"

"You have entered my country now." Lord Morpheus began to walk down the path, and Draco followed. He noticed that the Lord of Dreams wore black boots of some curious material that left no imprint on the earth.

"I used to have this recurring dream where I was falling off a tower," said Draco, thinking that it seemed a perfectly natural thing to say. "But I'd always wake up just before I hit the ground. I'd be in the worst sort of cold sweat, too. Terrified that if I'd fallen before waking up, I would've died. Tell me, is that true?"

"I cannot say." Lord Morpheus shrugged. "You never fell."

"Oh." Draco was oddly disappointed. "I suppose I'll never figure it out."

They walked a little further, and Draco wondered detachedly if they'd just keep walking and walking, walking off the edge of the earth into the mists that curled around the edges of the flat earth, falling where the wild wind whirled and the ships of unwary mariners awaited them, and Ginny was waiting there too in the form of a mermaid with poisonous green scales, combing her long fiery hair and singing songs to lure sailors to their doom...

"Ouch!" The edges of the Kitap-an Düs were glowing so hot that they burned his fingers. He sucked on their tips, jolted back to himself for the moment. What insane rubbish he'd been thinking. He had to hold to reality, to count the steps of his feet and the beats of his heart, not to sink into the madness and illusion of the Dream Country...

"What do you here, little dragon, little dreamer?" Lord Morpheus was asking.

"I'm looking for Ginny Weasley," Draco replied.

"And how will you find her?"

"Through the Book of Dreams." It glowed now like the heart of witchfire itself.

"Give me the book." The Immortal held out his hand, and it seethed with the dead white light of a moon rising over bottomless seas.

"Why?"

"That is a thing that mortals were never meant to touch."

"I'm touching it," said Draco.

"You will pay a price that mortals were never meant to pay."

"Can I find her without it?" Immortals tell only truth, Draco remembered reading in that book in the Malfoy library. Although they do not always know how truth looks, to a man...

Lord Morpheus shook his head. His eyes were like the dark matter that lies at the center of galaxies.

"Then you can't have it." A calm peace passed through him. Draco laid his hand flat on one of the pages of the open book, feeling the power that hummed through it. And inside his ears, he heard a gravelly voice, whispering words he had almost feared he would never hear again. My young apprentice. The time has come. The time to strike, and to seize. It was, unmistakably, the voice of Lord Grindelwald.

He turned and ran down the path, leaving the dark Lord of Dreams, who continued to look after him, motionless.

Everything in this land seemed to have the quality of a dream, both more and less real than waking life. So, too, it was with Lord Grindelwald. Draco saw him, or thought he saw him, yet he couldn't say if the dark lord was sitting or standing, solid or insubstantial, in the mortal plane or out of it. Yet he knew, unmistakably, that he was there. In the stones of the path, the darkness under the limbs of the trees; the space between one breath and the next, Grindelwald had taken shape. Draco felt the dark lord's presence again, and the relief that swept through him was overwhelming.

" You've returned," he whispered.

Yule dawns soon, a few days only, Grindelwald said without words. The time of my greatest power is near. It is the hour to strike. It is now that we may take the girl into our circle, and for our own.

The only sign of the feelings rushing through Draco at that moment was the faint smirk on his face. He knew how to hide his emotions well; it had become second nature in the past year.

This pleases you?

"Yes." If the dark lord knew just how pleased he was at the thought of getting Ginny Weasley at his mercy... But then, Draco supposed that he did.

She's close, so close, oh, I can feel her. A hot excitement ran through him. But Draco didn't dare to allow his thoughts about her to run riot for even an instant, or he'd lose control. And that must not happen; he sensed that the hour of trial and testing was coming, and he would need all his strength. "But why now? Why Yule, my lord?".

Have they taught you nothing about the days of power at that school of yours? Grindelwald's voice in his head was gently chiding.

"We learned a bit," said Draco. "The great feasts are Beltane, Midsummer, Samhain, Lughnasa, Mabon, Yule, and Imbeholc. We'd generally have some sort of ceremonial dinner at school, except Midsummer, of course. And often we had a ball or something as well. I suppose that's about all."

A pity, for you must understand this. But it is enough for you to know that the power of the oldest magic ebbs and flows with the cycle of the year. On those six days, the veils between the worlds grow thin. The immortal may walk among the mortal. The girl moves now at the borderlands between the worlds of gods and men, beneath the world-tree... I see her.. yes... but only you may lead me to her.

The smile on Draco's face was sinister, and his eyes glittered like the shadow of moonlight on snow. "How?" he asked.

You must allow me further into you than I have been hitherto, my little dragon. In a sort of nightmare vision, his spidery white fingers of unnatural length reached out towards Draco's head.

Draco didn't know why, but he flinched slightly; it seemed a reaction so instinctive that he had absolutely no control over it. That damn little voice was screaming. Perhaps after they returned he could have it surgically removed.

Will you allow this? It is a thing that cannot be done unwilling.

"Yes," Draco whispered back fiercely. "Yes!"

When we are joined-- Grindelwald paused, in his voice, or his thoughts, or whatever this communication was--Then you will find her, my young apprentice. You will see what she sees. You will know what she knows. You will walk through her very mind.

And if Draco had still harbored any doubts, they were gone in an instant. He bent his fair head to one side, permitting the dark lord easier access to him, willing his mind to be open. He felt a touch cold as death. The skeletal hands on his skull.

The sound of his feet walking the forest path grew louder and louder. Then it vanished, and he felt the sudden jolt of connection, a bit like a portkey, a bit like time travel through the wormhole; this sensation that a hook that had been attached in his head and given a sharp, profound pull.

The world vanished. Transmuted into a fog of flickering shadows and dark shapes. Draco looked at the dark lord walking at his side and saw without much surprise that he glowed silver, a mist of profound power streaming away from the pulsing outlines of him. Rivulets of power ran down from his hands, and a circlet of poisonous light shone from his brow; he was taller than the tallest trees, great and terrible beyond human imaginings. And one of his immortal hands was still on Draco's head. The power was shooting into him, more than any mortal should have been able to endure; and yet, somehow, he was enduring it. It thrummed through his veins and he knew that he now held more magic than any wand in the world could ever have given him; it was filling him, spilling over, he couldn't begin to contain it.

Yet he knew that he could use it... use it to find Ginny. She walked at the edge of his powers of perception.

Now open the Book of Dreams, and take the pen in your right hand.

Draco did so. The rubies were glowing so brightly now that he knew he couldn't have looked at them with the naked eye, without the power of Grindelwald running through him.

The knowledge of what to do next was transmitted directly to him, without any need for the intermediary of words. Or perhaps it rose from within his own mind and had nothing to do with Grindelwald at all. There was no way to tell anymore. And he knew, suddenly knew, what this might mean. If he had Ginny Weasley, and Lord Grindelwald was at his side... what the hell did anybody need Lucius Malfoy for?

He set the pen to the parchment and began to write.

Come to me, Ginny Weasley. Come to us.

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Ginny tucked the parchment back into the locket and began walking again, feeling almost foolish. She'd been jumping at shadows, afraid of the monsters her own mind conjured up, nothing more. She wondered if she'd really heard Ron after all, really seen those carriage wheels. Perhaps she had. There were certain types of magic that only worked through the bond of blood, parent to child, brother to sister. They weren't the sort of thing that was taught at Hogwarts, though; they were too instinctive, too difficult to quantify through the use of spells and wands. Of course, maybe that meant that she could use them even now, when her wand didn't work. Ginny sighed bleakly. The fact had hit her again, like a cruel and treacherous blow. Her wand didn't work!

But if it actually had been Ron-- her mind had returned to that track again-- and he'd seen her, then why hadn't he stopped? Ugly thoughts began pushing their way into her mind. We're busy, Gin. Run along. Quit bothering me. Don't you have something else to do? All the times during this past year when he'd ignored her, treated her with condescension. All the whispered conversations in a corner of the Great Hall, or the couch in the Gryffindor common room late at night when the fire burned low, all stopped the moment they saw her, and her brother's carefully blank face turned to her with the rest. He stood with the others, Harry and Hermione and even Neville, presenting a united front against her.

Perhaps he had seen her, after all.

Perhaps he'd decided that such a scarred and damaged sister was better left by the side of the road.

Perhaps he'd been glad of the chance to abandon her, and was only sorry that she'd ever gotten out of the Chamber of Secrets in the first place--

Ginny stopped short, horrified, and put a hand to her forehead. It came away covered with cold sweat.

These thoughts... these thoughts weren't her own.

Or at least, not her waking thoughts.

They were muck dredged up from the bottom of her darkest nightmares, the worst moments of her night terrors that drove her sitting upright and gasping for breath at three in the morning in her four-poster bed in the Gryffindor dormitory.

It was only then that she felt the alien presence that had entered her mind. A tremendous force, like a giant hand riffling through all her dreams and memories, randomly tossing scraps of them into her brain.

--I ran through the attic of the house in Ottery St. Catchpole, but it was all different somehow, dark and sinister, and the shadows lengthened and caught at my feet with clawed hands--

--five years old and I fell off the merry-go-round in the park, the bully pushed me, and I cried and cried for Ron, but he wasn't there, he didn't protect me, and the world could never feel safe again--

--I felt the Killing Curse hit me in a flash of green light, over and over and over again, just like what happened to Harry except this never ended, and I never was allowed to die, just to suffer, to writhe like a bird in a trap waiting and praying for death--

--the forest. The clock tower. The sound of Harry's voice. Come to me, Ginny. It's all right. He was holding a book, one that glowed with a strange ruby light, and Ron and Hermione and Neville were there, Colin too. And then he said to someone else, someone I couldn't see, Damn you for making me do this to her. And then there was a great flash of white light and I didn't remember anything more-- I don't remember-- I--

--the dungeons. The lamplike yellow cat eyes of Mrs. Norris on me when I set the monstrous snakelike thing on her, I remember those... Then the long blank shafts of time, when I didn't know what I was doing. The blood, the blood on my hands. Secrets, so many secrets. Tom, Tom, will you leave me now?--

--unripe fruit, Tom Riddle said. Unripe fruit, my little Gwenhyfar--

No!

And the horror of that memory, the one that was buried so deeply in her mind, covered over with layer after layer of the scar tissue that kept her sane, pulled Ginny back to herself.

She walked and walked. There seemed nothing else to do. A creeping certainty came over her that someone was dogging her footsteps. It seemed to be about the only human feeling left in her. She hadn't felt this until she'd seen whatever she'd seen-- until she'd left the path. Something had found her. Someone was tracking her. The urge to turn back and look was almost irresistible. But Rhiannon's words echoed in her head. You must not stray from the path, and you must not look back. Ginny had already ignored those words once. She had to hold on to the sound of the stream. Surely it would lead her out of here if she kept on long enough.

But where was the sound coming from? She'd thought it was ahead of her, but now she wasn't so sure. It might be to her right, or her left. It almost sounded for a moment as if it might be running underground. Or-- no. It was, it must be, coming from behind her. The urge was irresistible. A force from outside herself seemed to seize her head and turn it. Ginny looked back, and she knew at once that was looking back into the memory she had so hoped to escape.

It enclosed her, and it was almost a relief. Walking through the great forest along the water's course, unseeingly, Ginny walked into a dream, or a vision, or perhaps simply the heart of one of the indelible scars that she, at fifteen, already bore. The events of one year before played themselves out within her, the ones she scarcely remembered with her conscious mind, and she fell into them resistless.

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It was cold, very cold; the snow crackled under (his?) feet, and there were little puffs of condensed vapor from (his?) breath as... as... Draco caught glimpses from the corner of his field of vision. It was very late afternoon, almost evening; the shadows were growing long and the wintry sky was gunmetal grey. He thought that he must be walking through the fields behind Hagrid's hut on the way to the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Yet it wasn't really like walking. More like being... carried? He was traveling under someone else's power. The head turned, and now he was glancing from side to side without his volition. There was a basket over one of the arms. A hand reached up to rub his cheek, and he felt its velvety softness. The fingers were smaller, more slender, than his own. Ginny. He was seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears, feeling with her skin. In some strange way, perhaps he was thinking through her mind, or so closely entangled with it that he wasn't entirely sure where he ended and she began. It was a very unsettling feeling.

How did we get here? he asked, concentrating on sending a message to her.

"I'm going to find holly, laurel and boxwood, maybe some bay," she had told her roommates, and they had nodded vaguely, not challenging her story. If they had cared where she went or what she did, they might have wondered why in the world she should be looking for Yule greens to decorate her room now, when the holidays were two days away and everyone would be leaving for home soon. But nobody did care; that was why everyone was so easily fooled. Colin Creevey had caught her outside the castle though, walking through the stone quadrangle, going out to the forest to photograph the barren trees at sunset. "I'll come with you," he'd said, kissing her lightly on the cheek, sure of his welcome.

What? Draco recoiled at the thought. But there was worse to come.

Only the night before, Colin had held her in his arms at the Yule Ball, his eyes intent on her during every dance, every interlude, his hand clasped tightly in hers when they walked in the rose gardens. "Is this your first kiss, Ginny?" he'd asked in a squeaky voice. Knowing that it was his, she had lied, and said yes. She wasn't about to say that Neville Longbottom had been there before him, and when she thought about the sloppy, fumbling attempts that generally threatened to take off half her nose, she wasn't sure they even counted anyway. Ginny had watched Harry out of the corner of her eye all evening with Cho Chang, slipping away once with the excuse that she needed to find her wool robes, as it was growing so cold. She could move so silently by then, and neither of them had seen her. But she saw them, behind the hedge. So when she returned to Colin, she let him kiss her.

That had better be all there is to remember! Draco riffled through Ginny's memory a little. She didn't try to stop him; he wasn't even entirely sure if she was aware that another consciousness was sharing her mind. A little snogging, a bit of touching, and there was no more, thank all the gods. He stumbled across something dark in his search, like a locked chest hidden at the back of a closet, and shivered when his mind glanced across it. There were things he didn't need to know.

"I don't know how long I'll be gone, Colin," Ginny said now. "And it's cold."

"I'll keep you warm," he said eagerly, reddening a little.

She had nodded in resignation, and they had started towards the edges of the forest. How could she say no to Colin Creevey, when she owed him a debt she could never repay? It was all her fault that he had lain paralyzed by the basilisk's stare nearly three years before. He had suffered for her sins, and she wondered drearily if she would ever be able to make it up to him. So she feels guilt over that, thought Draco. Wonder what I'd feel? But at least now I know when this was; it must have been a year ago, almost exactly.

"Wait a sec, the light's just right--" Snap, snap went the camera. "I like the shadows on the snow, don't you? Wonder what Ansel Adams would've made of all this. Ginny, there're some greens-- and there-- why aren't you cutting them?"

"I--" Ginny stopped, wondered if she dared to trust him. Well, perhaps he would understand as no-one else would. "Colin, I'm not looking for Yule greens."

"You're not? What did you come out here for then? We could've stayed in the Gryffindor common room and made popcorn over the fire. I know how, and I'll bet we could find some. Let's go back. I've got enough pictures." He smiled at her a little slyly. "I reckon there's nobody there this time of day. We'd have it all to ourselves."

She put a hand on his arm, making her decision. "Doesn't it seem to you that Harry and Ron and Hermione are acting sort of strangely this autumn?

"How d'you mean?"

"Well--" Ginny struggled to put what she'd been feeling into some sort of logical sense, but could find no words. That fall had a shadow cast over it, one of hideous length. Nothing was as it had been, even if Ginny could never quite put her finger on what had changed so subtly, so monstrously. A frightening difference had stolen over the people in her world. Perhaps that was it. Harry, Ron, and Hermione had all become more somber, more silent, more guarded. Their faces were closed to her nearly all the time now. They frequently whispered in corners of the Gryffindor common room or secluded spots in the shifting stairwells, falling silent every time Ginny came near.

She'd tried to trace it all back to its source. At first, she'd thought that surely the change must have come right after the Triwizard tournament, after Cedric had died, after they all thought that Voldemort had risen again. But no, that was not it. Especially because it became increasingly clear that the Dark Lord had lost his powers when he tried to kill Harry. Most of the Slytherins had become glummer and glummer, their faces darkening in exact proportion to the degree by which those of the Gryffindors lightened. Predictably, interhouse rivalries had gotten more and more vicious. Hexes flew through the halls every hour on the hour, and several Quidditch matches ended up with most of the players being carted off the hospital wing. Detention had never been so full; every piece of brass in the Trophy Room was polished to a mirror gloss, and even Filch quickly ran out of tasks for the students, which only deepened the frown on his face and his mutterings to Mrs. Norris. So the tournament wasn't it, couldn't have been it. In fact, when Ginny thought about it, she realized that her brother and her friends had been almost light-hearted in the early fall. Things had changed at the end of October. Yes! Right around the feast of Samhain.

"The week they had the Halloween dance," she began fumblingly, "I saw something awfully strange."

Colin's face darkened a little. "I'll just bet you did," he said.

Oh dear. Perhaps this hadn't been a good idea to bring up, not with Colin. He would probably never forget that Neville had been her date that night. Draco sensed Ginny's nervousness, and began to feel a little uneasy himself. Whatever was going to happen, he would have to experience it with her.

"It was in the library," she said hurriedly, hoping to distract Colin.

"What, a quivering bowl of Mrs. Craven's Magical Custard that somehow managed to escape the kitchens, get into some robes, and start following you about? Because I saw that, too, and I don't think we need to waste any time on--"

"No, no! This has nothing to do with Neville. Honestly, I think you're a bit obsessed on the subject of him!"

"I think he's a bit obsessed on the subject of you," Colin retorted.

"You're the last person who should talk," she said without thinking, and then could have bitten her tongue off. She was afraid it was too close to the truth. She did not want to know if she was right.

Colin turned a very definite shade of red. "I don't know what you're on about!"

"Forget I said anything." Ginny started walking faster.

"No, I want to know what you mean!"

"I don't mean anything."

They walked for a few moments in silence. Then Colin said, "Are you still seeing Neville?"

"I don't like the way you're asking that question."

He drew his breath in. "You are, aren't you." His face grew very sullen.

"I didn't say I was."

"But you are. You are." His thick eyebrows were knitted over his dark brown eyes, and there was a look in them she couldn't define, once that made her faintly nervous. Ginny realized for the first time how far along the edge of the forest they'd walked, and how distant the castle was. .

"Tell me," he said. She didn't reply. Then she gave a little cry of fear. Colin had grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her around to face him.

"How much more of this am I supposed to stand, Ginny?"

"Let go of me," she said through gritted teeth.

"No, listen to me, listen," he insisted, his breath puffing out into the icy air. "I like you more than any girl I know, Ginny. But you don't really care about me, do you? If you did, you'd..." His words trailed off and he leaned in to kiss her.

She let him do it, passively. The feel of his hands on her gave her a cold, unpleasant shiver, as if she'd brushed up against a snake.

That little bastard. If I ever get hold of Colin Creevey again I'll beat him to a bloody pulp. He dared to lay hands on what's mine, and nobody touches Malfoy property... well, I didn't know then that Ginny would be mine... or did I?

Ginny put one hand to her temple. For the first time, he sensed that she knew he was there, in her head, both of them caught in the strangeness of experiencing and remembering this at the same time. She was seeing it not only through her own eyes, but inexplicably through someone else's as well. She wondered at this a little, but only a little, since she was walking through the land of dreams, where all things are possible.

Even then they were there, the seeds of what Colin would later become, she was thinking. Could I change this, now? Oh, could it end some other way?

Creevey had damn well better not be planning to do anything else to you, Draco thought with cold fury. I'll have to feel it too!

But the memory only continued, unchanged and unchangeable.

"Colin," she said, in what she hoped was a placating tone, "I'm not even fifteen yet. I don't care about anyone that way. I don't want to, not yet, please let go of my wrist, Colin--" Ginny yanked away her arm suddenly, hoping to dislodge him; he moved forward with her, and they both fell against the trunk of a tree. It gave a muffled yelp and something tumbled from behind it onto the snow. Neville Longbottom blinked up at them, spitting out the snow that masked his entire face.

Colin started laughing. "Are you trying to make a snow angel, Longbottom?" he jeered. 'Need a bit more practice, don't you?"

Neville picked himself off the ground, attempting to brush off snow and only getting it further down his robes in the process. "Is he bothering you, Ginny?" he asked.

"We were having a conversation. A private conversation." Colin tried to take Ginny's hand; she avoided his as unobtrusively as she could.

"That's not what it looked like to me," said Neville. "Why don't you leave her alone, Creevey?"

"Like to see you make me." The two boys glared at each other, and Neville's hands clenched into rather ineffectual-looking fists.

Ginny rolled her eyes, trying to suppress an inward groan. They were starting to shove each other now, she saw.

"Moron."

"Prat."

"Twit."

"Wanker."

As the pair traded rather unoriginal insults, they stole glances at her to see if she was impressed. Neville had the little glow of bravery about him that he so rarely had a chance to experience; in protecting her, his self-image skyrocketed from mouse to giant. He was so kind, so understanding. She often thought that he knew exactly how she felt about Harry and humbly took what scraps of her affection were left to give, asking no more. So she had to bolster him when she could, for she owed him a debt, too, in a different way. Debts, debts, was there no end to them?

Never, Draco replied. Never. I should know. Every time you try to get out, they'll pull you back in, Ginny Weasley. Nothing that begins, ever really ends...

But even as she pondered that question, she saw a flash of Harry's maroon cloak in the trees far ahead of her, and remembered why she was here.

So we're trailing Potter. How humiliating.

"Wait, wait!" protested Colin, seeing her dash ahead of him.

She turned briefly. "I'm following Harry," she said. "I'm not losing him, either. The pair of you can either come with me and be quiet or stay here and kill each other. Your choice!" Without another word, she turned and began stalking her quarry, who was moving slowly through the trees. Looking at each other sheepishly, the two boys trudged after her.

Ginny barely noticed them, except to hope that they wouldn't give her away. Her mind was too full of the need for silence and stealth. Once, Harry stopped for quite a long time, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands against the cold, , and both Neville and Colin caught up to her where she crouched behind a bush.

"Are the two of you going to be quiet?" she hissed at them.

They nodded earnestly, both looking a bit surprised. At her sudden show of spirit, no doubt, thought Ginny. And good for you, too, added Draco

"What were you going to tell me about what you saw the week of the Halloween dance?" asked Colin, spreading the edges of his cloak over her. Neville immediately gave her his mittens when he saw that.

"Shh," she said. Neville kept busily tucking the warm woolen mittens further up her wrists, brushing her skin with his hands in such a way that it might have been an accident. It made her want to scream. She pulled her hands away and tucked them into the pockets of her robes.

"Not now," she whispered, craning her neck. Hermione had appeared from a different direction, and after a few moments Ron came from a third. She tried to see what the three were doing, but they only seemed to be talking, their heads pressed together, red, brown, and black. Ginny realized what was going on; they'd arrived separately so as to throw off anyone who might be following them. It hadn't worked.

I should have gone back, thought Ginny. Right then, I should have simply turned back to the castle. Neville and Colin would have followed me.

Maybe you should have, Weasley, said the voice in her head, and it was so teasingly familiar that she could almost recognize it.

Who are you?

Never mind that. Did you ever tell them what you saw the week of Samhain?

No, I never did, she silently said.

Tell me, then. Tell me why you couldn't forget it, and why it drove you out into the edge of the Forbidden Forest where no-one ever goes, trying to solve this mystery.

And, without wondering why she should, she did tell him. Or rather she showed him, her mind opened wide to the specific memory, and he-- she was sure, now, that it was a he-- retrieved it.

She had been in the library with Hermione all that month for a rather silly Identification of Magical Creatures class project, one that involved the precise measurement of the rings on unicorn horns. She was never quite sure why the older girl had chosen her as a research assistant; she wasn't very good if the subject didn't interest her. How many times that fall she'd wandered through the library at Hogwarts when she supposed to be working with Hermione, who always gave her a stern lecture about discipline and good study habits and the necessity of acquiring them, shaking her head. But Ginny loved libraries for a very different reason than Hermione did. When she drifted through the stacks, closing her eyes, inhaling the magical dusty pungent smell of books, she felt safe. Sometimes she curled up in a window seat for hours on end and read odd things, dipping from a stack of random books, utterly at peace. She loved picture books of dragons and unicorns, fifteenth century alchemy texts in crabbed faded script, and Arithmancy Problems That Made Grown Wizards Cry with a passionate lack of distinction. Once she'd spent an entire afternoon reading the dictionary.

Webster's Unabridged Wizarding, thought Draco. I've read that too.

It made me feel like there might be order and logic in the universe after all, Ginny replied. That was a day when I felt like I was barely held together by some sort of glue that was about to dissolve any moment, and I'd fly apart... when did you read it?

There was a pause. When I was in prison, once.

Azkaban?

There are other prisons than Azkaban. What happened next?

She'd been turning over the pages of an encyclopedia of magical crystals and gems on that day, waiting for Hermione to make a move, surreptitiously spying on her from around a stack of books entitled When Real Things Happen to Unreal People, Parts 1-999.

Aha! You were being a bit devious, weren't you?

I was curious, Ginny admitted. All week long, Hermione had been acting strangely, closed-mouthed and distant. "Homework," she'd said in a clipped, closed voice whenever Ginny questioned her. "Too much homework." She'd all but added Run along, Ginny, and it always left the younger girl with a strange, sick feeling at her heart, as if standing before a suddenly slammed door. So she had waited until she saw Hermione slip out and start down the corridor in the reference section. Ginny crouched down and stole after her, noiseless as any cat.

The other girl was headed briskly and purposefully towards a blank stone wall, her overstuffed book bag swinging. There was definitely something strange going on. Ginny pressed closer to the bookshelves; hardly a breath of air marked her passing. Any moment now--

"Oh!" She tripped over something sticking out slightly from the bottom shelf and fell headlong, tipping over an entire stack of books. One by one, they fell onto her back and then slid to the floor.

"D'you know what I admire most about the Weasleys?" drawled an all-too-familiar voice. "Their grace. You had dancing lessons as a child, didn't you?"

Ginny rolled over onto her stomach, trying to catch her breath. "I wouldn't have-- tripped if you hadn't been--sticking your foot out into the aisle!" She raised herself onto her elbows, glaring at the bookshelf nearest the floor. Draco Malfoy was sitting in it, a book propped up on his folded knees, a tiny witchlight illuminating the little space. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

Draco raised his eyebrows at her. "I learned to read at an early age. But I suppose you think that only the Mudblood's chosen ones are permitted to use the library."

"I've certainly never seen you in it before!"

"Why, Weasley, I didn't know you noticed. It's one of my favorite places actually."

"I didn't notice!" She scowled. The word "mudblood" rankled at her; she hated the sound of it for Hermione's sake, but if she said anything about it he'd only sneer at her in that insufferably superior way of his. "I suppose your father donated half the books or something. I'm surprised you even let us lesser beings use it."

Draco examined his buffed fingernails idly. "Oh, he did... but I was raised to believe in the principle of charity."

His face was smooth and expressionless, but she could have sworn that she saw a smirk struggling to get out. Ginny changed tack. "And I'm surprised your goons aren't with you. I rather thought they were permanently attached." The words had barely left her mouth when she realized how dumb she sounded; she hadn't seen him with his old bodyguards in months. Not since the spring. Not that she had spent any time noticing. Perhaps it was better that she'd said what she'd said; otherwise, Draco might think that she was paying far too much attention to him, which of course she was not.

"I don't really see Crabbe and Goyle fitting into this bookshelf, do you?" he replied.

"I suppose not." They both fell silent while she tried to think of something more clever to say. She seemed to having trouble thinking of anything at all. They were so far back into the stacks; almost no sunlight penetrated this aisle. The very air was dim and dusty and drowsy, and the orange rays of the witchlight encircled them. They touched Draco's brow and chin and cheekbone, one eye in a little triangle of light, one in shadow; he looked like a portrait by Rembrandt, she thought. Not one of the wizarding ones; Ginny secretly liked the artist's Muggle paintings better, because they always looked like they were about to move, just about to move--

"What's that book you're reading?" she asked.

Was it just her imagination, or was his composure broken a little at her words? Perhaps he was as startled as she was that she'd asked such a thing. Ginny had no idea where her question had come from, and regretted it instantly. His face hardened. His voice took on the cutting, nasty tone she'd heard so many times before.

"Do you know why I come here, Weasley?"

She shook her head.

"For privacy." His words became very clipped. "I don't particularly enjoy your company at the best of times. I certainly don't care for it now." He turned back to his book. "Get out."

She fled.

But later she came back, after she'd searched for Hermione through the entire library and found her nowhere. Ginny walked up to the wall and tapped it thoughtfully. She murmured Revealing spells, pressed her fingers over various stones, and finally kicked at it, stubbing her toe. Nothing. Ginny sighed, and turned to leave. She promptly stubbed the same toe again on a book lying half-in, half-out of the bookshelf Malfoy had been occupying.

She picked it up and looked down at the cover. Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. 1. Her eyes went wide. "Malfoy was reading this?" she whispered. She stood for a moment, weighing the book in her hand, and then carefully replaced it and turned to leave.

Thank all the gods she never knew I was watching her the entire time, thought Draco.

You were what? asked Ginny's mind in the Dreamtime, startled.

Shh, shh. The strain of it all had been almost more than he could handle. More than once, Draco had been afraid that he would lose control completely. This had been an incredibly stupid thing to do, never mind that the power given to him meant that he could do it. It didn't matter to him how the whole thing had started. He had just had a sudden impulse to relive this memory through her eyes, to see what she had seen, to see himself as she saw him. Experiencing and controlling her memory at the same time had taken tremendous energy out of him. The gears in her mind shifted smoothly, and Ginny took over again.

Like a snowball that starts an avalanche, that had been the beginning. Hermione began to disappear constantly over the next two months, and when Ginny started spying on her brother and Harry, she saw that they were doing it, too. All three of them always had plausible explanations for where they'd been and what they'd been doing, but they were never the truth. Many times Ginny had come tantalizingly close to catching them. But they always seemed to slip through her fingertips, and her frustration had grown and grown.

The same stifled rage became Draco's, as he mentally kicked himself with all the savagery he could muster. I never saw any of this! How could I have been so blind? That damn trio was plotting and planning this right under my nose all autumn long; what the hell was wrong with me? Oh, I know! I was moping and sulking about like a character in a cheap melodrama! He felt a surge of furious indignation that he could have been such a fool. Gods, but he could and should have learned all this. Ginny had one up on him; she'd at least tried to find out what was going on.

His anger was hers, too; he could feel it. But hers was different. She was angry that her friends and her brother had turned away from her that autumn stretching into winter, shutting her out over and over again. They had never really understood her-- and never tried particularly hard-- she was telling Draco that, or he sensed it. They hadn't asked her about St. Mungo's (St. Mungo's? What--when-- but Ginny's bitter rush of thoughts only continued.) After the Chamber of Secrets, she'd been stunned at first, going through the motions of days and nights, marking time. Then she'd learned subtler ways of behaving as if everything was all right, but it was only the thinnest veneer stretched over a bottomless chasm of darkness. Her family and her friends only saw the carefully rehearsed normal gestures, the bright smiles, the well-controlled tones of voice. They had not wanted to see more. But the cool, deliberate rejection of the last months was something new.

And strangely enough, Draco felt that sort of anger as well. Who in the hell did they think they were to treat her that way? Not that he would have expected any better behavior from those three. But he was also still resentful that she had won a round he hadn't even known he was playing, had thought to spy on her friends when such an activity should have occurred to a Slytherin first. He didn't know if he was angry at Ginny or angry with her, and the frustration generated by this conflict was almost unendurable. There was something about this experience, something about the weird feeling of being neither in his body nor precisely in hers, that seemed to heighten every emotion.

Potter, Granger, and her brother were still talking. He felt Ginny shift restlessly from foot to foot. Creevey and Longbottom were rustling behind her. He sincerely hoped they weren't going to make so much noise that they'd all be discovered. He wanted to know what this was all about. Oh no. Now Ginny was thinking about last night's kiss at the Yule Ball again. Reliving it. Draco grimaced; it was an experience he could have happily lived and died without.

There's something wrong with me, Ginny thought dolefully. I just know there is.

What makes you think that? Draco probed her mind gently, careful not to frighten her into silence.

He felt a deep inward contraction of pain in her chest. They've both kissed me and-- well, done other things with me, a little anyway. A dreary procession of images, some of them from before this day one year ago, some after. Groping hands, rubbery lips, roaming fingers. She would sit passively for awhile, thinking of other things, and then pry them away from her. And I didn't like it. I never liked it. Not with either of them.

Why'd you do it then?

Because it made them so happy. And I owe them both that, for different reasons.

The shadow show of Ginny Weasley's limited experience began again. Her memories of being touched and held and kissed were all so grey, so cramped, as if being forced through a tiny space. They were memories of submitting; not enjoying; enduring, not participating. Then Draco saw something so strange that for a moment he almost didn't recognize it, although, in a place too deep for his waking mind to touch, he knew that he had hoped to find it in her. His own face. He was touching on the outer edge of her memory of the night of the Yule Ball one year after this, and of what had happened with him. O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us, rang tauntingly in his head.

It was not quite the face he saw in mirrors, even magical ones. All the features were the same, the eyes silvery, the hair a glossy pale ash-blond, but when seen through Ginny's eyes it suffered a sea change, and not, alas, into something rich and strange. A face that was sculpted and cultivated, almost too pretty to be handsome, but shockingly sinister, filled with malicious intent. A face disturbed, somehow damaged from within in a way that had only made it more impossible for her to look away from him. A face overlaid with a patina of lust and desire so concentrated that it seemed ready to burst into flames. I didn't know I looked like that, to her... I didn't know... I can't believe she didn't run from me as fast as she could the first time I kissed her. Maybe she should have. But it's too late now. Too late.

Draco pushed the memory away; he found that he didn't want to know what that experience had been for her. If it turned out to be no different from all the rest, from Creevey's groping and Longbottom's fumbling, he didn't know if he could hold it together, and he had to. Perhaps this was cowardly, but the Malfoy motto was, after all, By craft not courage.

Wonderful, Weasley, Draco told her in mocking tones, not exactly sure what he was hoping to accomplish. He was recoiling from the thoughts in her head and the remembered image of himself with a sort of horror, not of her, but for her. Really logical. So you're saying that you're eventually going to shag both of them because it'll make them happy? Haven't you ever heard of Cheering Charms?

I don't think so. I don't think I could. When--if-- I'd give myself to someone that way, completely, it would have to be because I wanted to. Really wanted to, I mean. I don't think I could bear it otherwise. She smiled inwardly, bitterly. So maybe I never will. I've never felt that for any boy. And I'm not like Susan Bones; I don't like girls that way, either. Maybe I will spend my life without ever feeling pleasure at the touch of a human hand.

Her words were unutterably sad. Listening to them, or sensing them, or whatever he was doing, was like watching flowers wither in a frost. Draco moved forward in the dimensionless space of her mind. He fumbled for her without the slightest real idea of what he was doing. Perhaps he was trying to find some sort of essence of Ginny, her sadness, her hopelessness, her darkest memories. He had found it. Had found something.

Here I am, she said, without words, and her smile was a secret smile of the eyes, that never touches the lips.

He reached out his hands to a tiny dancing spark of light. But when he touched it he knew that he was also touching a secret core of joy. That shocked him more than anything else. It was as if she had waited for that moment to reveal that her sadness was not total. He shivered in the cascade of liquid light that bathed him, that invited response. What to do now, what to do?

If they had been in their bodies, he would have taken Ginny in his arms and kissed her with all his passion and all his need, kissed her as he would have on the night of the Yule Ball if she had come back to his room in the Slytherin dormitory and lain on his bed, and he knew, now, that for an instant he had almost thought she would. But they were both bodiless here, both walking through memory alone. There was no room for artifice, or for any of his carefully learned techniques. Without them, Draco really didn't know what to do. He certainly didn't think he could begin to match what she was offering to him. But he tentatively reached inside himself and felt something stretch out to her, something faintly glowing in her radiant light. So the darkness in me is not total, either, he thought.

She was shocked by what they had found and so was he; the shared emotions flooded through him. It was as if she looked at him in wonder for a long moment, her eyes wide, and he saw himself mirrored there, the same look of astonishment on his face. They began to move towards each other, taking the first step. Slowly. Slowly.

But then Ginny saw Harry striding along the edge of the forest, Ron and Hermione following him. She leaped to her feet. "Come on, if you're going to!" she hissed back at Colin and Neville. Two groups of three walked in the shadow of the trees. Draco, the unwilling passenger, was flooded by the greatest bitterness he'd ever felt. He didn't give a damn just then that this was only a memory and they were both somehow trapped in its actions; he was in no mood for logic. He had been on the precipice of some unimaginable thing, fearing to fall, ready to leap. And Ginny Weasley had broken it off in order to chase after Potter.

Damn her.

****************************************************************************