Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

Chapter 14.

Visions of Desire.

Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.

-- Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Season of Mists

A/N:

The reviews are becoming better and better, more and more insightful, interesting, and thoughtful, contributing immensely to this fic. Thanks to:

Fatema, who emailed me a truly wonderful review, Essayel (as always!), Sharlene, who can burble anytime, Enrian03, Katya, wonderful Katya, Azzelya, Anna, Mika Weasley, Meredith, Trippnchik, Torriel, Mara Jade, the fabulous Sydney Lynne, Kori Lewis, Verbal Abuse, Kureneko Kashikoi, Athena, Natasia Kith, Dominique Castaldi, PhantomSoula, waterlily12, my GWTW spotter, the insightful Sare, Draconia, Kateline, and the one and ONLY!!! StarEyes.

(detailed list to come...)

I just saw X2, and I have to tell y'all, the Remus-in-my-head will now and forever be Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. Just so you know. Yes, I am the Flashback Queen, and I've been indulging that vice a lot in JotH. ;) In this chapter, though, everything Ginny sees is in good old-fashioned linear time, happening in the sequential "now"... although not necessarily in the same century. Oh, and Fluffy!Draco ran screaming after reading this chapter and is currently in therapy and sending me all the bills.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

The absolute best fanart yet has been drawn by the mulittalented StarEyes, and you'll find the link in the Harry/Hermione scene. A lot of hints get dropped in this chapter. All will be followed up, I promise. For instance, JotH WILL incorporate all the canon of OotP, whatever it may be, through a perfectly evil and as-yet-unrevealed plot device. The first clue to that is in this chapter. ;) There is now a folder in the Files section of the Pillar of Fire Yahoo group where I will answer any I'm-confused-about-the-plot, what-happened-in-Chapter-3, etc., questions anybody has. Just join the group at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PillarOfFire/

Also, I'm starting to post my completed novel-length original contemporary fic, The Secret Life of Girls, chapter by chapter at the original-spin Yahoo group. No Draco or Ginny, but plenty of teenagers, drinking games, lies, deception, betrayal, secrets, Visa cards without limits, evil cousins, sex, warehouse parties, alluring older men, disastrous camping trips, and bad performance art. Rated R-- for now. It's going up in the Anise's Fics folder of the Files section of:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/original-spin/

Come join us there, too!

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

Ginny was never sure what had woken her in the middle of the night. But she sat up with a start, jerked out of sleep, rubbing her eyes against the brilliance of the moonlight streaming in through the window casement. The muscles of her legs were cramping painfully from lying in one position too long, and she knew she needed to stretch them. When she tried to get up, however, Draco's left arm was anchoring her down, his hand splayed possessively across her hip.

Ginny looked down at that hand for a long time. It was so large; the fingers looked so strong and sinewy; she thought that he could probably fit it around her neck and strangle her without a second thought. For a moment, she shuddered, wondering if maybe that was his plan. No, she was being ridiculous. He'd had plenty of opportunities to do that, if it had been what he wished. Plenty of chances to do other things, as well, her mind mocked her. And he hadn't done them. If Draco Malfoy had wanted her that way, she didn't think anything could have stopped him. She supposed that she'd never know why he kissed her the night of the Yule Ball.. Whatever combination of madness or drunkenness or boredom had driven him to his actions then, it obviously would not occur again. She was thankful for it, too. Surely she was.

Still, she kept looking down at that hand for a long time, studying the fine white-blond hairs on the backs of his fingers. Her mouth would run across those little hairs very slowly, and she would feel each one rise and stiffen against her lips. If Ginny had believed in any gods, she would have prayed then, a stark, pitiful, awful prayer. Don't let me think of his fingers, of his hands. Please, please don't let me imagine...Don't let me remember those hands at my waist, gripping me so hard that night at the top of the North Tower that I became breathless, a boneless thing...

Abruptly, she did get up, knocking against the leather bag as she rose from the bed. Draco had put it next to his pillow. Ginny was sure that she would awaken him with her sudden movement, but she did not. He mumbled something, groped towards the bag with one hand, and pulled one of the fur coverlets over his head with the other. It was dreadfully cold. She shivered and wrapped the other coverlet around her like a cape, but did not get back into bed, even though she knew how warm she'd be, next to him. She walked across the room, pausing in front of the window. How restless she felt. The full moon has gotten into my blood, I think... It reminded her of all the nights she had awoken in the Gryffindor dormitory and slipped noiselessly from her bed, stealing out into the predawn darkness and flying over the Forbidden Forest until the first orange and pink lights streaked the sky. But she couldn't go outside now; she was fairly sure that the Hexensymbol bond wouldn't permit her to get so far away from Draco, and anyway it would be much colder out there. Even as she stared out the window, she could hear his even breathing behind her, and it rasped at her nerves. There was no escaping him. Her glance skipped around the room. There's little enough to see, God knows. The ruins of the fireplace, the window, the bed, which she refused to look at for long, a motheaten tapestry on one wall, a door...

A door!

It was no more than a shadow of dark, uncarved wood, blending into the wall. If she hadn't been examining the room so closely, she probably wouldn't ever have seen it. That must be why she hadn't noticed it earlier. Slowly, she approached it. Each shuffle of her feet seemed very loud in the sudden stillness. Surely she still should have been able to hear Draco's breathing, but everything seemed to have fallen into an unnatural silence. The distance from her to the door kept increasing. It was such a small room. Surely she should have been able to reach it by then. The plain dark wood was like a black hole at the heart of a galaxy, swallowing all light that the moon cast upon it. The power of that door was pulling her in. She was turning the handle without volition, stepping inside. And then she knew. Here, here. The heart of Melrose Abbey is here. This is what I feared. This is why I trembled. I have found it, as I knew I would.

At first she was confused, because it looked as if she had stepped outside. It was a small enclosure at the very centre of the abbey, open to the sky now that most of the high ceiling had fallen in, and filled with a dank, damp smell. Someone stood against the other side of the circular wall. Ginny gasped in shock before she realized that it was only a statue. She walked slowly towards it, her eyes fixed on its carved face, and gave a cry of pain when she knocked her shins on stone. She looked down and saw a small, dark well, ringed by a little rock wall. A reflecting pool. A cool draft wafted up from it, and Ginny wondered if it might also be a spring. Driven by some impulse she did not understand, Ginny bent down and knelt before it on a riser bench covered with the remnants of tattered velvet. She stared up at the statue. It was a woman, robed and veiled in blue, with great, sad eyes. Although she looked nothing like Rhiannon, it was the fairy queen that Ginny remembered, kneeling there. Of course, she thought, the statue was really supposed to be the Virgin Mary. But then she was an aspect of what Rhiannon represented, too. The moonlight played over the lady's carved face and lent it the illusion of movement and life. Ginny studied the plaster features.

"What do I do now?" she whispered. She didn't believe in Mary or goddesses or anything else, and she certainly didn't think her plea was going to be answered; she winced at how desperate it sounded, and how silly. Still, she kept talking in the lowest voice she could manage. "All right, I'm here, I found the heart of this place that was frightening me so much. A sacred well... I know a bit about those... Yet it doesn't really seem frightening now that I'm actually here. Was I only jumping at shadows?" As if in answer, the shadows in the room shifted, and the moon went partly behind a cloud, casting Mary's face into darkness. Ginny sighed.

She leaned back against her feet, tucking them under her, and as she did so something shifted at her chest, hitting her collarbone painfully. Ginny swore and reached up to brush it aside. But it felt hot, nearly burning her fingers. The moon was almost obscured, now. It shouldn't have cast a light on anything. Yet the thing was glowing, and her eyes travelled down to it.

The silver locket burned like the disc of the full moon itself.

A strange sense of fatalism came over her. So this is it. Well, no trying to escape it, I suppose. I was a fool to think I could. She watched her own hand reach up to it, and her long, delicate fingernail pry the two halves apart. The tiny rubies on the scrap of parchment shone steadily. She laid the tips of her fingers on them, and felt herself fall through them, as if tumbling down a long, long well lined with crystalline red.

At first it was so dark that she could see nothing, only the faint outline of a large, four-poster bed. Not so very unlike the one in which Draco lay, in the bedroom alcove behind the reflecting pool room, but that seemed very far away and distant now. She was standing over it, looking down at it, and yet something was wrong with the scene and her own place in it-- she couldn't move a muscle, that was it. And she still couldn't tell anything about where she was, or why she had been brought here, or even who else might be in the room, although she did sense the presence of other people. Then somebody stirred on the bed, sitting up, and touching a little witchlight on the bedside table so that the little circle around them was just barely illuminated. The soft orange light touched auburn hair, glinting off the fiery highlights. It was her brother. He stared at her.

"Can-- can you see me, Ron?" she asked quietly, sure that she would receive no reply.

But he blinked, rubbing his eyes. "Ginny?" he said. His voice was no more than a breath, like a sigh, or a prayer, or a wish whispered on the wind. His hands reached out towards her, trembling.

She stepped back quickly, holding up her own hand, palm out. But she smiled to soften the rejection of his touch. "Yes, it's me."

A grin spread over his face. "I knew it all along," he said softly. "I knew you were really here. Didn't matter what they all kept saying. How'd you get in? How'd you find us? Well, I suppose none of that matters now-- come here, let me look at you--"

Ginny stepped a little closer, still avoiding his outstretched hands. Her brother embraced her with his eyes. "Ginny," was all he said, but in that one word, everything was contained. This was a Ron she had not seen for a long time; it was as if he'd been resolutely wearing a mask around her all year, and now, in the deepest part of the night, it had dropped. She couldn't believe she'd ever thought that he didn't love her, that he wanted to abandon her.

"It's all going to be all right now," he said.

"Yes."

"They'll be surprised to see you but they'll all just have to get over it. Can't wait to see Harry's face when he finds out! He'll see now that we never should've--" Ron broke off. She looked at him, wondering, but he did not speak again for several moments. "It's like waking up from a nightmare," he finally added. And then he smiled, the sweet, happy smile that Ginny remembered so well from their childhood, the one she had not seen for so very long. He reached out his hands to her again, and she couldn't resist wanting to hug him.

She moved forward, grasping at him, but her own hands had no solidity. They moved through his arms like wisps of smoke. And as they stared at each other, Ginny could almost hear the perfection of those moments cracking, then shattering into a thousand pieces, beyond hope of repair.

Ron's mouth fell open. "Oh," he breathed. "Oh." His face fell into his hands. "You-- you're not really here, are you?" he mumbled through his fingers.

A chill struck at her chest and began working its way inward."Yes, yes, Ron, I am! Or, I mean--" She hesitated. What was the truth? "I mean, I don't think I'm really here, wherever it is you are, but I am--"

"It's just another dream then." He sighed and fell back against the pillow, looking defeated. "They've all told me and told me you're not real and these are only dreams. I suppose they're right. But there are so many things I would've liked to say to you. Even if you're not real, you will listen to me, won't you?"

"Of-- of course," faltered Ginny. Should she tell Ron that this wasn't a dream, at least not the way he thought it was? She believed she knew a bit more about what was happening, now. To her brother, she was a Sending, something to see, but not to touch. Her body was still kneeling on the riser in the tiny room, and she could see its dim image in her mind, head on her crossed arms. Yet if he knew that-- and this thought struck her with an awful clarity-- he would be more determined than ever to find her. She thought again of Draco Malfoy, lying in the next room.

Even though their hands couldn't touch, it didn't seem to matter, Ron kept clutching at hers anyway, so hard that she could see the marks rising on the pale skin as his fingernails dug into his own palms. "Ginny, I think there's something wrong with me. Really wrong, I mean. I remember when I used to talk to you about anything that was wrong... and you would to me... seems so long ago, now... I don't know when it started. Wait, yes I do. It was a year ago, after what happened in the clock tower, after what we all had to do. What I had to watch Harry do. I never forgave him. Never. Oh, I let him think I did, suppose I convinced myself I did, as well, but something changed... something changed forever on that day. We were best mates before then but that seems so long ago as well. Now, I mean. I was a child before that day, Ginny, a child... do you see?"

"Yes," she said, because her brother seemed to expect some sort of answer. But he seemed not to hear her, continuing his frantic, disjointed rambling without a pause.

"Something changed in me, then. It had to change, and it's brought me to where I am now. I'm not what I used to be, Ginny. I look back on that Ron, and I think he was a nice bloke. But not me, not what I am now. Never seemed to have a thought past what's-for-dinner, next chess game, the Chudley Cannons' average and will I ever be keeper on the Gryffindor team... sometimes I think he's gone without a trace, that Ron. There's not much left of him, anyway. But I can't blame anybody else, not even Harry. It's been a very strange road, but I've walked every step of it myself. The worst part is, I think I've barely even begun..." He lapsed into silence for a moment, his chocolate-brown eyes focussed on her, yet not really seeing her. "No, I know what the worst part is. I've sacrificed you to this. You've paid the price... and Hermione too... I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry for everything."

None of what he had said made much sense to Ginny, but she realized that the only reason he was talking to her this way was because he didn't think she was actually there. Ron believed he was speaking to some shade of his sister that his own mind had conjured up; in the flesh, she could never have been permitted to hear these things. Perversely, it sparked an awful wish to prove that him wrong. No. No. She shouldn't expose her brother to the danger of knowing that she really was there. The thought drifted across her mind. She examined it dispassionately. It seemed very dim and distant.

"But, Ron," she said, laying a spectral hand on his wrist, and seeing the fingers go through. He didn't react. He couldn't feel it. "What if... what if I was real?"

"You're not." He shook his head stubbornly. "I need to stop fooling myself. I've said enough. I can talk all I please, but you could never really answer. You're only a dream, just like they all said." Her brother lay back down, pulling the embroidered coverlet over his shoulders. She recognized that look on his face. Ron Weasley had made up his mind, and nothing from powers to principalities to the sweep of the galaxies to the depths of the deep blue sea was going to change it. Perhaps the only way he could bear to continue on the quest to which he had sworn himself was to believe at last what they had all told him, that she could only be a figment of his imagination. Perhaps he was protecting his sanity as best he could. Of course, all those thoughts came to her later, when she was sane again. In this strange bodiless state, hovering between worlds, nothing did seem quite real, and her actions seemed to carry no weight. It did not occur to her then that what she was doing might be a very bad idea indeed.

"Ron!" Ginny raised her voice as much as she could, suspecting that only he could hear her anyway.

He only kept shaking his head and closing his eyes, turning towards a vague form beside him in the bed.

"I'm not a dream!"

"You are," he mumbled. "Have to be. I've accepted it..."

The coldness in his voice. The aversion of his eyes, skipping over her as if he did not see her before they closed. These were things that had haunted her nightmares for the past year, driving her awake at three in the morning, gasping for breath in her narrow bed in the girls' Gryffindor dormitory.

" I'm in sixteenth century Scotland right now. I'm at Melrose Abbey, Ron, where we went last year with Dad!"

"Impossible." Her brother's voice was rather dim and froggy-sounding now, the way it always was if he'd been awoken in the middle of the night, just before he went back to sleep. He was slipping away from her and she felt the connection begin to grow dim; looking down at her hands, she saw that they had faded almost entirely. "You're at St. Mungo's," he said. "I didn't like putting you there. Wish we could've told Mum ahead of time, but she'll have gotten the owl by now, I think... not sure how time runs between them and us. We all agreed with Madam Pomfrey; it was the best place. And it is, Gin, it is. Few weeks... nice rest... see you when we get back..."

Cold. Between the worlds as she was, it was so cold. She'd never felt anything like this ice that seized at her every vein, and stopped her breath in her lungs. Yet she hadn't noticed it before. The puzzle pieces were falling into place now, drifting, like snowflakes, into logical order. Ron had known she was going to be sent to St. Mungo's. Her brother had known. And he had agreed. She bent over the bed where he lay, mouth to his ear. He shivered from the eddy of piercing chill in her breath when she spoke.

"I'm in the guesthouse at the abbey, Ron. And I'm with Draco Malfoy."

Her brother sat up so fast that if Ginny had been a corporeal being, she surely would have been knocked aside. And his eyes, too, were like chips of ice when he looked at her.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"He's got me. Malfoy. He's taking me with him to Leith. He's bonded me so that I can't get away from him."

"No," said Ron, wrapping a pillow entirely around his head in a gesture that should have been funny, but had something deadly and desperate in it. He looked at his sister as if she were no ghost, but an evil night spirit, a succubus, perhaps, or a vampiress. "You're not real. You've been sent to tempt me with what I know can't be true. Maybe this is some weird sort of loyalty test. I wouldn't put it an inch past Moody. You're not Ginny. No. No. No."

But Ginny only leaned closer, continuing to speak. "Malfoy's asleep in the room behind me, Ron. And any moment he's going to miss me and come looking for me-- because we've been sleeping in the same bed, and his arms have been around me every night, and mine around him. We've kept each other from the cold, Ron--"

Her brother actually began to hum the Holyhead Harpies fight song, pillow still firmly stuffed over his ears. Ginny trembled on the edge of hysterical laughter, or perhaps frenzied screaming. "He hasn't touched me yet in that way, Ron," she said. "Don't think he has. But who knows what he'll do, before the end." She leaned closer until she lost balance and felt the strange sensation of falling through him, next to him on the edge of the big bed, and without the solidness of a body it was like falling off the edge of the earth. The words that tumbled out of her mouth were bitter and vile and burning. "And if Malfoy does do anything to me it'll be your fault. I won't be able to stop him and I'll be at the mercy he doesn't have and it'll be all your fault, Ron, because you didn't protect me. You promised you would, and you didn't. You didn't save me! You weren't there for me! You're not--"

"Shut up!" he finally snarled, sitting bolt upright in bed. "You're not my sister. You're not! Ginny wouldn't say these things, she never would. Shut up, go away, leave me alone, get out--" And in rage he lashed out at her. Ginny tried to pull herself back, but she didn't have control over her insubstantial body, or whatever it was he saw, and she felt his blow go through her. She flinched back, curling into herself, crying. There were no physical tears; she supposed she wasn't capable of them now. But everything she now was, whatever that spiritual form might be, was locked into a knot of anguish. And as he looked at her, his eyes widened in horror.

"It is you," he said. He reached for her, and like a breath of wind, she winked out.

The scene suddenly became very cold and small and far away, the colours sharp, bright even in the near-darkness of the room, and much clearer than before. Now what does this remind me of, thought Ginny. I know. It's like a television broadcast. And, just as it had been when she'd watched the television set Arthur Weasley had jury-rigged in the garage for a week, there were no emotions attached. One simply observed. Ron could no longer see her, she knew that. She could still see, but she could not be seen, not even by her brother. Coldly, she examined the red-headed boy on the bed. He was crying. The figure lying next to him sat up. A girl, her hair moving like dark water. She tapped the light on her side of the bed, and Ginny saw that it was Hermione.

Ginny hoped quite dispassionately that she wasn't about to see her friend naked in bed with her brother, as she did realize that once she returned to her normal complement of emotions, the memory would be very disturbing. But Hermione was still fully dressed, and wasn't even under the covers. It looked as if they'd lain down to talk and then both fallen asleep.

She pushed her hair impatiently out of her face. "What-- what happened, Ron? Are you all right? Is there any trouble? Is--"

He wiped his eyes quickly. "Everything's fine, Hermione. Go back to sleep."

But he wasn't fast enough to hide his tears from her, and a look of concern passed over her face, swiftly followed by pity. "Was it another nightmare?" Hermione asked softly.

"Yes," was all Ron said.

"About-- about Ginny?" She reached out a hand to his arm, tentatively. He moved away.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"But it might help if you--"

"I'm lying down now. I'm going back to sleep! Good night!"

Hermione crossed her arms and lay back, propped against the headboard. "Fine." She was obviously trying for a gentle, soothing tone of voice, but Ginny thought that it wasn't working very well. The way she was glaring at Ron wasn't exactly helping the effect, either.

The poisoned silence between the two could have ended in almost any sort of reaction. But then Hermione lifted her head, frowning, staring into the darkness. "Oh!" she said. "Do you hear that?"

"I don't hear anyth--"

She held up her hand for silence. "Shhh. Listen."

And then Ginny heard it too, a faint, restless, mumbling cry that grated on her nerves. It seemed to be coming from the room right next to this one.

"Ohhh," said Ron, snapping his fingers. "Yeah, I do hear it! I bet you should go see what that is, right away." But Ginny thought from her brother's tone of voice that he already knew quite well what the sound was.

Hermione glowered. "You're trying to get rid of me."

"Nope!" Ron assured her, a rather ghastly smile on his face. "Out you go. It could be serious."

Hermione smacked her clenched fists down on the coverlet. "I'm tried of you treating me this way, Ronald Weasley!"

"Dunno what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do, and I'm not going to--"

The door slammed open, and they both jumped. "What's going on?" Neville asked worriedly. "I felt a disturbance but I couldn't quite tell where-- Oh! Hermione." His voice became even more nervous when he saw her. "Uh, you're here. In Ron's room. In Ron's bed, uh. Is everyone, well, fully dressed and, er..."

"Yes, yes." Hermione impatiently waved a hand. "You heard it as well?"

"Well, that's why we've all been drinking the Dinclik tea every morning. We're connected so that each of us knows if any of the others is in any physical or emotional trauma," Neville explained. "I heard it all the way down the hall. Or well, I didn't hear it exactly, but--"

"What were you doing down the hall?" Hermione was already getting up, out of bed, screwing her hair briskly on top of her head to get it out of her eyes.

"Talking with some Moorish physicians. They're going to Istanbul as well." Neville's eyes lit up. "And oh, Hermione, it's so exciting! Did you know that the Moors knew secrets about medicine in the twelfth century that we're still struggling to understand today? One of them has a hand-illuminated copy of De Materia Medica and we've been talking about--"

"Are you sure that's safe?" snapped Hermione, feeling around by the bed for her shoes.

Neville wilted visibly. "":I-- I think so-- I'm not telling them anything about who we are or where we're really going-- I don't think--and anyway Professor Moody's been in and out of the room all night and I'm sure he'd know if it wasn't--"

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Neville, you oughtn't to be let out without a keeper," she said, not without affection. "I don't know what we'll do with you-- but anyway-- that's Harry, isn't it?"

"Yes, of course it is."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Not the first time it's happened, either, now is it?"

"Well, no, it's not, but I've tried all sorts of sleeping potions, and every kind of tisane and decoction I can think of. He didn't react well to the stronger ones and valerian kept giving him nightmares and--"

"I think Hermione ought to go and sit with Harry for awhile," Ron said suddenly from the bed. "I'm sure she could help him get back to sleep. So much is going to happen tomorrow, once we get to Leith. We all need our sleep."

She turned and looked at Ron, and it seemed to Ginny that there was something ominous in her friend's eyes. "I think I'll just do that, Ron," she said. Then she turned and left the room, her footsteps clattering on the wooden floor.

"Goodnight, Neville," Ron said pointedly, turning on his side and extinguishing the light.

It seemed to Ginny that she ought to have been able to see in the dark, if she really was some sort of spirit now, or whatever she might actually be. But she could not. After a couple of seconds of staring into darkness and listening to Ron's breathing, an uneasiness seized her; without being able to see anything, she felt more disembodied than ever. She followed Hermione out into the corridor. I must have some sort of connection through her... how strange... I wonder... But she was like a will o' the wisp now, blown this and way and that on currents of invisible wind, and she was sidetracked by Professor Moody. Neville fell into step beside him.

"Professor," he said timidly, "it's worrying me a bit. All these nightmares, and nobody's really sleeping."

There was no response.

"If everyone's health doesn't hold up, it won't be good. I'm trying to keep track of it all-- that is why you brought me--"

Moody only nodded, his gaze seeming fixed on the walls of the corridor.

Neville stopped, clearly gathering up all his courage. "Professor. Shouldn't we be, well, doing something?"

Moody turned his craggy, rock-like face to the boy. "Do? he growled. "What, precisely, do you propose that we do?"

"I'm not exactly sure." Neville looked at his feet. "Look, maybe I'm not clever about these sorts of things. But it seems to me that those three are coming apart. And they're what has to hold this entire thing together. Shouldn't we, uh--"

"Force their splintered friendship back into what it was in first year, when they were children?" asked Moody. "Yes, yes, I know all about it, from the troll incident on out."

"Troll? I don't remembering hearing anything about any troll. Suppose they just never told me," Neville said dolefully, with no surprise in his voice.

"I know the whole story. They've all saved each other's lives many and many a time. Put each other in mortal danger, too. There's a bond that can never be broken, once those two things have happened."

"That's how it always was," Neville sighed. "They've always been so different as people, really, but so inseparable still."

Moody looked at Neville shrewdly. "You're a good judge of character."

"Oh, I don't know. Perhaps with what I'm trying to do I've rather had to become one. They have always been that way, though, like three in one, one in three..." Neville's voice trailed off.

"Jealous of them, were you?"

"Suppose I was, sometimes." Neville blushed.

Moody only looked at him, but there was something about that look that demanded further explanation. Ginny knew that if it had been turned on her, she would have blurted out every thought in her head.

"Well, there were times when I'd come upon the three of them when we'd all meet in the library or the common room last year, or Harry's room. There especially," said Neville in a rush. "It would be really, really late at night sometimes, because I'd been working in the greenhouses after hours, I'd use that special key you gave me, Professor. They had this way of falling asleep. I saw it more than once. Hermione's head would be on Ron's chest, and her feet would be in Harry's lap, and his head would be on her stomach. I used to watch them... they'd never know I was there. Seemed like nothing could ever come between them then, but now... it's like a great wedge just split them into three separate bits. Together, they're like-- like nothing could ever stand against them. But when they stand alone, like they are now, what was strongest in them becomes weakness." Neville sighed. "Suppose I'm not putting it very well."

"To the contrary, Mr. Longbottom..." Moody steered them both towards a door in the corridor. "You put it very well indeed."

"Isn't there something you can do then? Couldn't you talk to them? Sit them down and lay out how important this mission is and they've just got to get over this thing, whatever it is, or--"

Moody sighed, and turned back towards Neville. His jewel-like magic eye seemed the one living thing in his inhuman-looking face, cast almost entirely into darkness by the irregular light of the torches thrust into holders on the walls, and that sapphire eye whirled and glinted. "Things will be as they must be. There's no interfering with destiny, laddie."

"What?" Neville blinked. "But, uh, that really doesn't make any sense to me. Sorry, sorry! But it just doesn't."

"Doesn't it? Well, it will, one day." Then the door closed behind them, and Ginny felt herself drifting back down the hall, towards Hermione, towards Harry. She heard the cry again, but it sounded like a word, now. Almost like... her own name. Harry, crying out her name in his sleep, perhaps. The thought carried no emotional weight at all, but then nothing did.

Slowly, she eddied through the door of the room, and by the time she did Hermione was hurrying towards a great four-poster bed. Harry was a dim shape in the low light, moving restlessly. He wasn't very coherent; it was mostly muttering and unclear words that she heard. But Ginny could hear, now, that the word he repeated was not her name. She drew closer, and closer, hesitating at the very edge of the bed, and at last she could make it out clearly.

Harry grabbed onto a pillow and squeezed his eyes tightly shut; his hands moved restlessly, trying to grab at something that was not there. "Jane," he said, very distinctly. "Jane." Then his face contorted as if in pain, and Hermione rushed forward the last few steps, tripping and tumbling onto the bed.

Harry gave a yell and scrambled up towards the headboard, sitting bolt upright. He wasn't wearing a shirt, Ginny saw now, and he looked very skinny and pale. "Who? What? Wh--where?" he stammered, groping frantically for his glasses.

"Shh! You've scared everybody enough for one night." Hermione reached for his hand, stroking it soothingly, and at last he quieted down.

"Hermione?" He squinted at her, rubbing his eyes.

"Here." She handed Harry's glasses to him. They were different to what they had always been, Ginny noticed; round and rimless.

"Mmph." He ran a hand through his hair, but only succeeded in pulling every strand in a different direction. "What a way to wake up-- and what do you mean I've scared everybody?"

"You were yelling."

"Oh. Sorry." Harry shivered. "God, it's cold in here."

"I suppose it is." Hermione rubbed her own arms.

"Here-- let me--" He straightened the fur coverlet, which was scrunched up to one side of the bed, and shook it around the two of them like a little tent. "Better?" he asked softly.

"Mmm-hm."

"So." Harry cleared his throat. "They sent you to shut me up, did they?"

Hermione rolled her eyes. "I came to try to help you get back to sleep. It wasn't just the yelling, Harry. Neville knew something had happened because of the Dinclik herb-- clever little Turkish charm, really. It was orginally used by the Tartars to promote solidarity among small raiding bands. If one man was sick or hurt, everybody else felt it too."

Harry looked away from her, rubbing his lower lip. "Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry I woke you up."

"Well, you're not as bad as Ron with his snoring," Hermione said lightly.

"I expect you'd know," he mumbled.

Hermione was silent for a moment, sitting on the edge of the bed, toying with the embroidered bedspread. She seemed unusually nervous. "You know--" The sentence remained uncomplete.

"What?"

"It's not the first time that's happened."

"The first time I've woken you up, you mean?"

"No. The first time I've heard you say that."

Harry stared at her. "You've heard me say-- her name before?"

"Yes," said Hermione. "Almost every time you've ever fallen asleep when I'm around in the past year, I've heard it. When we used to meet in the library late at night, before Moody changed the meeting place, you'd fall asleep. And you'd say her name then. When we all sat up in the Gryffindor common room, when it was still early days, before we decided it wasn't safe enough, we'd all fall asleep for awhile after midnight. Ron would snore, though, and it always woke me up-- and that's when I heard him snoring, I'll have you know. So then I'd hear you mumbling 'Jane.' At first I thought you were saying Ginny's name, but I soon realized you weren't. And those times we were able to sneak into your room and talk behind your bedcurtains and I'd put Silencing charms on them, you'd nod off every time. You did it then, too."

He looked away. "Oh? What else did I say?"

"I don't know." Hermione shook her head. "The words were never clear enough."

"You never said anything about this before."

"It never came up before," Hermione said stiffly.

"And now it has?" Harry asked, just as stiffly.

"Apparently."

The silence stretched on and on, well past awkwardness.

"That's Jane Ashpool, isn't it?" asked Hermione. "The Jane you keep talking about in your sleep, I mean."

"Suppose it is. I don't know anybody else named Jane."

"You never did tell me about what happened with her, you know," she said, with elaborate casualness. "Over the hols last year."

"I didn't run about screaming it down the street, you know. I never told Moody, either."Harry drew his knees up and rested his elbows on them, as if making a cage of himself.

"Ooh, Harry, are you sure that was really a good idea? Maybe it was important. Whatever it was, I mean."

"Look, it didn't have anything to do with magic or the Jewel or Istanbul or anything else. She wasn't even a witch, like Arabella Figg turned out to be."

"Was she just an ordinary Muggle, then?"

"Well, not exactly. She was a Squib. She knew a bit about Hogwarts and-- and magic, but that's all. And Moody doesn't need to know every last detail of my private life. What little I have of it."

Hermione looked at him strangely. "Did you talk to Ron about it?" she asked, her voice even.

"Yeah, and he doesn't think I need to tell Moody either."

Even in her incorporeal form, Ginny winced. Harry had just walked obliviously into a trap.

Hermione's brows drew together, ominously. "So what you're saying is that you told Ron and you didn't tell me."

"Oh! Um-- that is to say-- I, er--"

"Something terribly important happened with Jane Ashpool-- I know it did. And you've been keeping it a secret for a year."

"Well, I just didn't think it was important enough to--"

"But you haven't been keeping it from everybody, apparently. Just me!"

"I'm sorry, Hermione! I didn't even mean for you to know-- that he knew and you didn't know, or that he knew you didn't know that I knew that-- oh, bother," mumbled Harry.

"What was there to know?" she demanded.

"It wasn't-- Hermione, can't you just take my word on this one? Why do you always have to keep pushing for an answer?"

"Why didn't you just tell me when you told Ron?"

"Because-- oh, why can't you just let this be?"

"Because I can't," she snapped.

"All right! You really want to know why? Because it wasn't the sort of thing I was going to discuss with a girl," he said through clenched teeth.

"A girl!" she said, not very coherently. "Is that all I am, when anything important comes up? 'Oh, Hermione's only a girl, so she must be weak and silly, despite spending forty hours a week in the library she doesn't have a vestige of a brain in her head really, and she'll surely fall to pieces if we tell her the truth about anything that matters!"

"Come on, Hermione-- please don't take it that way, I didn't mean it--"He reached out a hand to her, tentatively.

"Don't touch me!" she said with sudden, strange savagery, her voice muffled, her head turned away. That was a part of her friend as well, Ginny remembered, those sudden black tempers, those cutting words and unforgiving, furious looks. She wondered if Harry really understood this about Hermione.

He put a hand on her chin, tipped it up to his face. Hermione's cheeks were wet with tears. "Don't cry," he said. "Please, please don't cry."

"It was part of your private life, was it?" she asked in a very small voice.

Harry looked away. "I shouldnt've said that. You know. The thing about you being just a girl, although you are, of course, I'm not as dense as Ron was a couple of years ago-- well, I'm just making matters worse I suppose, so I'll shut up about that. I never meant to keep it a secret from you if you cared as much as all that about knowing it. I only thought-- well, after it happened, and after it ended, I thought I couldn't bear to speak about it ever, to anyone. But I'll tell you, Hermione. If it means so much for you to know."

"What did she look like?" Hermione asked in a very small voice.

Harry blinked. "What?"

"I think you heard me, Harry. Describe her." Pause. "Was she pretty?"

"That's not exactly what I expected you to ask." He tried to smile, but it didn't get very far. "I would've thought you'd map out some sort of secret-police questioning sequence to extract absolutely every last detail I knew about Jane Ashpool, and then put them together with some sort of Arithmancy formula. You really want to know something like that?"

"I do."

"Then, yes." Harry gave a long, long sigh, and his shoulders drew closer together, as if he were trying halfheartedly to protect himself from a blow that could not be avoided. "She was very pretty."

"Tell me more."

"Well, she dressed beautifully all the time, rather expensively, too. She was-- elegant, I suppose you'd say. Long curly chestnut hair, with gold highlights. Huge dark eyes that always looked amused, and a mouth always on the edge of laughter. Rather small, and a few freckles on her face. She always wore heels because she thought she was too short, so she had a sort of wiggling walk-- sometimes she'd take them off and run to catch up with me, she always said I walked too fast for her. She even looked elegant then, running about without shoes... Then she'd laugh. She had a, uh-- a very nice laugh--" Harry's voice caught.

"How long did you know her?"

"Just the Christmas hols in 1995. Four weeks or so. It started with me showing her around Little Whinging, which certainly didn't take long. And then we started going to London, and she'd show me around-- I'd almost never been there. She was borrowing a friend's little flat in Clapham while he was out of the country; she said she'd go mad if she had to be around the Dursleys morning, noon,and night. I certainly understood that. She said it was very nice. And then, after about a week, she... showed it to me."

"She showed it to you," repeated Hermione, her head turned down so that her hair hung over her face.

"Yes. And we, uh-- we went there sometimes, in those next weeks. You know, when we weren't going to parks, or museums, or libraries. Very educational visit overall." A definite blush stained Harry's cheeks.

"How old was she?"

"I don't know. A lot older than I was, I'm sure about that. I suppose she might have even been my aunt Petunia's age, or thereabouts. But she still seemed really very young. You know how you can never tell how old witches are, even Squibs. Anyway, Jane never told me, and I never asked."

Hermione propped her chin on her hands. "Didn't it ever seem a bit odd to you, Harry? An elegant, well-to-do woman in-- what? her thirties, perhaps?-- hanging about with her fifteen-year-old cousin all the time?"

"I'm not contagious, you know," Harry retorted.

"Was it because of your fame in the wizarding world? Was she some sort of Harry Potter groupie; was that it?"

He threw up his hands. "No, that's not it! She'd heard of me maybe once before; I told you, she was a Squib."

"Well, then, what do you suppose it was?"

They faced each other across the width of the bed, like enemies. Both of them were breathing hard; Hermione's hands were clenched on the fur coverlet that still covered the two of them, and Harry glowered at her. Then a smirk spread across his lips that wouldn't have been out of place on Draco Malfoy's face. It looked embarrassed, perhaps, but very self-satisfied. "Don't you know what it was, Hermione?" he asked, very softly.

She turned away from him, suddenly, violently. Ginny wasn't sure if Harry could see the tears in Hermione's eyes. But she did.

"I'm sorry," he finally said, in a voice so quiet that Ginny could barely hear him.

"What are you sorry about?" Hermione choked out. "There's no reason to apologize that I can see."

"Well, I'm sorry that you're crying, then." He touched a hand to her shoulder.

"I'm not crying."

"Hermione, I may not be the brightest bulb on the tree, but even I can tell when you're lying about something like this." He gave a deep sigh. "Turn around-- please do."

Mutely, she shook her head.

"Look, you're right. You're exactly and absolutely right. I'll write it out on a scroll of parchment if you want, and enchant it to follow you about, screeching 'Hermione Tamara Granger was right! Harry James Potter was wrong! Repeat as often as necessary!' How would that be?"

"Hmmph." But there was a small smile touching the corners of her lips; Ginny could see it, even though it looked very sad. "Tell me more about how right I am."

"Well-- what you asked me was nothing more than what I've asked myself. That's exactly what I couldn't understand, even at the time. Why did she want me to show her around? Why did she want to spend time with me? If she'd been more a part of, well, our world, I would've thought it was because of who I am. But she lived entirely as a Muggle. We talked about it once, and she said she had a very vague memory of hearing my name a couple of times, but that was it. I mean, I felt a perfect fool, just at first. And even after-- things-- began to happen, it still didn't make much sense. I wasn't even sixteen years old at the time and here was this beautiful, sophisticated woman, who actually wanted to be around me. To..." He paused and took a deep breath. "I'll tell you everything, Hermione. You're right. You deserve to know, I'm not sure why I didn't tell you before." But she put a finger on his lips before he could open his mouth again. Slowly, his head sank to her lap, and she smoothed his hair over and over with one of her hands. Harry's eyes were closed; he definitely didn't see the one last quick tear that rolled down Hermione's face, before she wiped it away impatiently. But once again, Ginny did.

(A/N: That was the art. In the link. You MUST see it.)

"I'm sorry I smirked at you. And I'm sorry I said what I did," said Harry, looking up at her. "That don't-you-know-what-it-was thing. I don't know what came over me. " He sighed. "Wait, yes I do. I thought you were laying on the dense act a bit thick. After being with Ron for a year, you had to know bloody well what I was hinting at. I'm just telling you what I thought when I said it. It was an utterly nasty thing to think."

"Oh!" said Hermione, her tone of voice somehow strange. "You mean you thought that I'd know what you meant because we'd-- that Ron and I had-- oh."

"Well, haven't you? No! I'm sorry," Harry groaned. "Please, please ignore absolutely every word I say right now. I'm ninety percent asleep. That must be it."

Hermione turned her head away from Harry, which meant that Ginny could see the expression on her face. "In point of fact-- no. We haven't."

"Oh," said Harry, his voice sounding a bit strangled. "Well. I see."

"You don't have to tell me any details about you and Jane Ashpool in return," Hermione hurriedly said. "You don't, Harry. I can guess what-- what happened. It just hurts that you told Ron and not me, I suppose--"

"Oh, and you see what an unbreakable bond that little piece of information made. Ron's not talking to me now."

"You mean you're not talking to him."

"That's not it at all," said Harry. "I'm just not going to go along with this mad idea of his that he's seeing or hearing Ginny around every corner in the sixteenth century, when it's impossible. Look, I know it's hard for him; well, it's hard for everybody. We've all had to do things we regret."

Hermione chewed on her thumbnail. "Do you really think we handled it the right way with Ginny, over the past year?"

Harry shook his head. "I don't know anymore. It seemed the safest way at the time. And I'm sorry to say it, but I do see why. But it hurt Ron the most, I think."

"Maybe he should talk to Professor Moody about it."

"Wouldn't that be comforting," Harry said dryly.

"Doesn't have much of a bedside manner, does he?"

"It's hard when you're not human. I think he's actually a cyborg, don't you? With that eye, and everything."

"Shh," said Hermione. "He's just down the hall. Could be back, at any minute."

"Oh, yes. 'He'll be back,'" said Harry in a dreadful Austrian accent, waggling his eyebrows.

They both giggled for a moment, and then sobered again.

"I like talking to you, Hermione," Harry said.

"I suppose that's why I'm sitting on your bed at-- what? Three in the morning?"

"No, I mean-- there are so many things Ron doesn't understand, never will. Little things..." Harry gave a great sigh, and turned onto his back; Hermione moved against the carved oak headboard with its grapes and goddesses to accommodate him, still keeping his head in her lap. How pale he looked, thought Ginny, and how tired. "Like when I said Moody's a cyborg. Ron doesn't have the faintest idea what that is, never heard of Arnold Schwarzenegger either. But we both know. Dudley watched those idiotic Terminator films every single day all last summer on his VCR. "

"Mum let me see the second one, finally," said Hermione. "She kept asking me afterwards if I wouldn't like to learn how to do special effects like the ones that were in it, since they were--" she snickered "--almost like magic. Or maybe superconductors were more my line-- there are loads of scholarships available for girls who want to go into science, she said."

"You're joking."

"I'm not. She had brochures about the summer particle accelerator programme at Stanford University laid out on my bed."

"I'm surprised you didn't go," Harry said reflectively. "Sometimes I do miss those sorts of things." He played with a loose thread on the bedspread at the edge of Hermione's thigh. "Those strictly Muggle things. Makes it worse, really, that Dudley's surrounded by them all the time, not that I ever get to touch any of them. There he sits in the midst of Nintendo, Game Boy, Playstation, Coke cans, McDonald's hamburger wrappers, laser discs, a Pentium-2 computer with a modem, and oh, he's got his own cell phone now. He talks about television shows he's watched and movies he's seen and music he likes, the car he's going to get, the afterschool job he has at some electronics shop or other..."

"But none of that matters."

"Seems like it does to him."

"But you've always said he's an idiot."

"He is."

"I don't see how all that proves anything, anyway. My cousins on my mum's side handle snakes and drink strychnine, and it's pretty bloody important to them," retorted Hermione. "That doesn't turn those into worthwhile activities!"

"They do what?" asked Harry, obviously taken aback.

"They-- well, they bring poisonous snakes in boxes to people's homes and pick them up and let them slither over
their arms. Copperheads mostly. I saw it once when we visited them, when I was a very little girl. It scared me to death." She shivered.

"And they'd drink poison?"

"Yes. They'd pass it around in a Mason jar."

"Why in the world would anyone do that?" asked Harry, staring at her. "Was it some sort of magical ritual?"

"No, no, they're not wizards. At least, not the way they'd think of wizards, at Hogwarts, or in the magical world here."

"I don't understand. If they weren't here, then where were they?"

"America. The eastern part of a state called Kentucky."

Harry was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Who is it in your family, Hermione, who came from there? And why did you never tell me?"

He had those moments, Ginny remembered. Harry seemed so unperceptive so much of the time, and then he'd say something that showed the wheels in his head had been turning all along.

"I don't want to talk about it anymore," said Hermione, avoiding his eyes.

"You do have a bit of a nerve," Harry said, "accusing me of keeping secrets. But never mind, never mind," he added quickly at the look on her face. I suppose you have your own reasons for not telling me."

"Right," she said, raising her chin a bit belligerently. "You don't know anything about it. You couldn't understand, about them--and anyway it doesn't matter. So let's move on to what does. What we're doing is infinitely more important than all that Muggle rubbish, don't you see? It's not just a matter of magic anymore. We've actually got history in our hands. Our actions now could affect the fate of the world." She blushed. "Sorry, I do rabbit on about this, but I'm sure you can understand that--"

"Fate of the world," said Harry. "Yeah. Just what I always wanted to control." He yawned. "Oh, Hermione, don't pay any attention to me. I'm so tired. So on edge. I don't remember the last time I had a proper night's sleep."

"Goodnight, then," Hermione whispered. "I should go."

"I don't really think I could sleep," said Harry. "Not after all that. Don't leave, Hermione, don't leave just yet. Sing to me, will you? I think I could sleep if I heard your singing..."

"If you think the sound of cats caught in a rusty gate is restful," she said, with a wry little smile, patting his hand. "You know I can't sing, Harry. I'm not Ginny."

His strong brown fingers went up and caught at hers, caressingly, for a moment. Then they fell away, back to the coverlet. "Remember the day we all had that picnic by the lake a couple of months ago, right before it snowed for the first time?"

"Yes, I certainly do. It was rather mad. We were lucky we didn't all catch cold."

"Remember that song you sang while you were unpacking the basket? That stuck in my head for some odd reason, and I always wanted to hear it again. Something about Paris, being there, or wanting to be there... Sing that one."

She leaned back herself then, still smoothing his hair under her hands, gently, carefully, detachedly, as a nurse might do for a sick child, or a sister for a brother. "It was one of my mother's favorites. A Muggle song from the 1970's... let's see if I remember the words..."

After a moment's hesitation, Hermione began to sing very softly.

The way that I see it, you just can't win it...
Everybody's in it for their own gain
You can't please 'em all
There's always somebody calling you down
I do my best, and I do good business
There's a lot of people asking for my time
They're trying to get ahead
They're trying to be a good friend of mine...

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favors
And no one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on..."

Hermione didn't have a good voice; it wasn't steady or supported or on pitch; both reedy and raspy, but the thin thread of melody seemed to pour out over the bed like something rich and dark, and Harry's eyes closed. As he fell into sleep and Hermione's head drooped, Ginny's connection to the scene pinched itself off, exactly the way that Arthur Weasley's television had winked out into a bright bead before going dark. No! she thought, panicking. Outside of this room there seemed to be only formless darkness, and the pull of her body, kneeling before a reflecting pool in sixteenth century Scotland. Ginny could feel how cold that body was growing, in that little room so open to the elements. She ached to go back to it, to return to the bedroom alcove, the great bed, and the lovely warmth waiting for her in Draco Malfoy's arms. But there was still so much to learn in this way, flitting between worlds, and she sensed that the chance would not come again, at least for a long time. With all her will, she struggled to stay as she was.

Harry was leaving her, going to sleep, and so was Hermione. She was losing the connection because it had been through him, or perhaps both of them. Her brother was asleep as well, so she couldn't find a way to stay through him. But surely there must be someone else she could use. Neville... no. Moody? She had been able to follow him out into the corridor earlier, but there was something strange about his energy pattern, and when she tried to latch onto it, her mind seemed to slip without being able to grasp. Frantically, she tried to see without seeing; to sense another person through whom she could keep this faltering connection.

A faint presence drifted across her mind, like a watercolor that had been left out in the rain, all its colors run. Twisted as the roots of a gnarled tree, and very, very dark. Lucius Malfoy, she thought, and shuddered. It is him. I can feel it. I'd know him anywhere... He's still awake, sitting at a desk, I think, and talking to... Professor Snape? Why on earth would Snape be there? But the other shape was so misty that Ginny couldn't even tell if her guess was right. He was near where she'd been, wherever the rest were. It hadn't felt as if she'd had to go far. Does he know that my brother and Harry and Hermione are nearby, though? Oh, he can't. He'd never have let that one rest; he'd be trying to capture them, surely. A wave of dizzy sickness ran through Ginny when she tried to connect through him; it reminded her of the time she'd pulled one of her father's plugs out of the wall of the garage, where he'd hooked up an electric circuit. She'd touched the metal prongs, and a dull shock had splintered through her. She didn't know now if she could bear being so close to this man; she seemed to be feeding off him in some bizarre way, closer than she could have been if she were in a physical form, and she wondered if he knew it. But the connection didn't feel strong enough anyway, and it was almost with relief that Ginny felt it fading.

I had the connection, such as it was, because of Draco, she realized. I'm bonded to him, so I also have some sort of bond with his father. And if I go back to my body, I'll walk into the next room and lie down in the arms of Lucius Malfoy's son. She forced herself to face that thought. That's what I want so much. I want that piece of filth's son touching me. Draco's hands are exactly like his father's, down to the last tendon and knuckle, and I want them on me. And his face is just like Lucius Malfoy's as well... his eyes are the same, his forehead, the shape of his cheekbones, his jaw, his lips... his lips... I am mad. I am sick. The self-disgust flooding through her was so strong she could nearly taste it. But the feeling was amplified by the fact that she was pure spirit, and its power pushed her past the confines of the place where she'd been.

Let me see what I need to see, she pleaded, as if with some invisible judge. Let me see what I must.

Yet her judge was very much visible, and Ginny saw him now. He was a tall man in a plain robe with a hood pulled over his head, so that only his chin and part of his nose could be seen. In the crook of one of his arms was a large book. His eyes were cast utterly in shadow, and yet he himself did not cast a shadow as he walked through the endless space in which they stood, and left no footprints. "You would see what you must, Gwenhyfar?" he asked, in a voice like the dark dust of galaxies. "You need not ask me for that. Every man, and every woman, will see that."

Ginny didn't have the faintest idea how to answer. "I've seen you before, I think," she blurted. "Or someone like you."

The man inclined his head. "It was my brother that you saw, and my sister as well, although I do not think that you remember them. Still, there are few mortals living indeed who have seen them both, and yet still live."

"Who are you?" she whispered.

He turned his head towards her, and Ginny instantly wished that he had not. He looked as if he had taken on some semblance of a human being for her eyes, but either had no idea of what a man actually looked like, or did not care. Looking at him made her feel like her mind was being stretched on a rack until every nerve screamed. "Are you-- can you actually see me?" she asked stupidly. "It doesn't look like you're looking at me, or at anything. Are you-- well-- blind?"

"I have travelled far beyond blindness. Indeed, I can do nothing but see. I see the fine traceries the galaxies make as they spiral through the void, and I watch the intricate patterns living things make on their journey through time."

"Oh." Ginny fell into step beside him, and he slowed his strides to match hers. Then, when it seemed as if they would walk forever through this dimensionless land, he spoke again.

"I am Destiny. I am the oldest of the Endless. My brother is Lord Morpheus, the King of Dreams. My sister is Lady Death. Do you know of us, little mortal?"

Ginny racked her brains but could think of nothing. Or perhaps that wasn't exactly right. Perhaps her mind skipped across some infinitely dark door, and chose not to open it. "No."

"You will." Each of Destiny's strides became infinite, Ginny thought, and still she kept pace with him, until they were spanning worlds, galaxies, universes...

"It is not good for mortals to remain long in my realm," he said.

"What?" Ginny shook herself. She felt as she had forgotten the English language entirely in a span of endless time between one of his words and the next, and had only relearned it when she heard Destiny speak again.

He stopped, and so did she. After looking at her, or through her, for an endless moment, he opened the book and wrote something in it with a quill pen. "Go, my little Gwenhyfar, and see what you must," he said. "You will not profit by it, and it will not make you happy. You will continue to be deceived by appearances."

"How do you know?" Ginny demanded, feeling truculent.

Destiny shook his head with something that might have been sadness. "Mortals never like my advice very much." Then he stretched out a hand and touched her, and it seemed to Ginny that she was pulled through the book and came out the other side, and between its covers, saw everything that there was to be seen. She was a universe created in that moment, a star dancing, a planet spinning, filled with oceans and continents, plants and animals, human beings living and loving and hating and dying, the life of each an infinitely intricate pattern. Slowly, slowly, she condensed into herself, and for the first time, she understood that she was the universe, boiled down into a drop, and so was every living thing. Then she was alone, in the formless form of a spirit, still wandering between worlds.

Well, she thought. That was strange. Somehow, she was sure that human beings were never meant to meet Destiny on the road.

There were people to whom she was connected, and she was drawn to them as simply and naturally as a bird alighting on the branch of a tree. It made no difference that they were hundreds of years distant from where she'd been before, for that was only a matter of matter itself. In this dimension she drifted through, connections between one human being and another were all that counted.

A scene was coming into focus, just as it had done during that week in the garage when her father made her hold the rabbit ears over the television set in an eternal attempt to get a better picture on the screen. A large room, the ceiling long and low, dark but for a flickering little light on an old wooden table. Beneath that light, she knew, was the place she'd started carving her initials once, before Mum caught her at it. Her chair was pulled up to it, the one she'd used since she was ten years old, when she'd still been so small and the seat had to be charmed so it was several centimetres higher. It was the kitchen table at the Burrow. And seated at it in two chairs drawn up were her twin brothers Fred and George, their copper heads pressed closely together. Ginny drifted down a little, without her volition, and what was spread out before them became visible. Fred was tapping an unrolled parchment with the end of a long feather, and George traced something on the other side of it with one finger, arguing something in a furious whisper. The scene came into focus then, and Ginny clearly saw that they were looking at a map.

"What in the bloody hell are you two doing up?" yawned a voice behind them.

Fred jumped. "Charlie, old boy! Didn't see you."

"Positively eerie, the way you sneak about," added George, hastily stuffing the parchment into a pocket.

"Uh-huh." Charlie Weasley dropped into a chair. "It must be three in the morning."

George made a great show of peering at a nonexistent watch on his wrist. "So it is! Didn't realize. Time flies when you're having fun, and all that." He poked his twin in the side.

"Seems like just a moment ago that we sat down over a nice cuppa to catch up on old times," said Fred enthusiastically.

"You two work in the same shop," yawned Charlie, pouring himself a cup of tea and grimacing as he drank it. "Stone-cold. Ugh. And you live in the same flat. And you're trying to run a mail-order business together. Out of the same room. How much catching up can you have to do?"

There was a pause.

"Well, uh..." began Fred, giving George an appealing look.

"We don't shower together, after all," his twin finished.

"So we were just sitting up for a bit..."

"Lovely evening for it," George agreed.

As if on cue, a tremendous bolt of lightning cracked through the air, briefly illuminating their faces through the picture window over the sink.

"Yeah, so I see," said Charlie dryly, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the roll of thunder that followed.

"So," said Fred, "I suppose you'll be getting back to bed?" He looked hopefully at Charlie, who stretched out his feet luxuriously and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head.

"Nope," Charlie said. "Think I'll stay down here for awhile. Mum's cold tea that's been sitting about for six hours, mm-mm. Nothing like it." He continued to sip at his cup.

"Well then," said George, kicking Fred under the table. "We'll be going up to bed, won't we?"

"Need our beauty sleep," Fred confirmed, with an ostentatious yawn.

The pair sidled past their brother, casting him a covert look on their way to the stairs. As they did so, however, he grabbed Fred's arm. "Suppose you tell me what this is really about?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing at all."

The twins attempted to make a break for it at that moment, however, which Ginny remembered was always a mistake when dealing with Charlie. With a regretful look, he captured their necks in a headlock, one per thickly freckled arm, and said almost soothingly, "Now, you're not going to make me use the Încâ spell, are you? Handy for calming fractious baby dragons, but it's not very pretty."

"Mmph," was the chorused, eloquent reply.

"Come on, then," Charlie said in a soft voice, deposting his brothers effortlessly in their original chairs at the table. "D'you think I don't know what all this is really about?"

The twins exchanged glances, all levity gone from their faces. Ginny had never seen them look so serious, so sober, and a sudden chill went through her. Even in her present state, she was still capable of feeling foreboding.

"Mum and Dad haven't slept a wink since the news came," Charlie continued. "There's a line of light under Percy's door still. Bill's off treasure-hunting for Gringott's somewhere in France, I think, or maybe Spain-- probably hasn't gotten the owl we sent yet. Merlin knows what sort of state he'll be in when he does."

And at those words, Ginny could almost see another scene superimposed on this one, but so much fainter that it seemed no more than a wisp of smoke. Her oldest brother, Bill, asleep on a pile of hay, twitching restlessly. He was in some sort of large space. A barn, Ginny thought without knowing why. A farmer's barn in the French Pyrenees. I don't know how I know that but I do know. He wore khakis tucked into his boots, and his wand was in its holster beneath his weatherstained cloak, his fingers resting lightly on its hilt; she knew that too. There were several days' worth of ginger-coloured stubble on his face. He looked utterly exhausted. But the image faded nearly as quickly as it had come; he drifted back into deeper sleep, and she could not hold the connection.

"It doesn't make any difference that nobody's said anything," Charlie was continuing. "I know how to read what animals are feeling, when they can't express it. And people are animals as well, you know. They suffer in silence, sometimes, just as dragons do."

Fred gave a long sigh. "You're right, Charlie. You always are. I saw Mum's face when she got the owl from St. Mungo's. Looked like someone had given her a blow she couldn't stand up under-- only it was from the inside."

"And the worst part of all," added George, "is that she can't even see Ginny for a whole fortnight, that none of us can."

Fred nodded. "We reckon that something dreadful must've happened or she wouldn't have been sent there. But we can't even find out what that was."

"Yeah," said Charlie reflectively, "it's tearing us all apart, in our own different ways. But." His eyes studied his brothers keenly. "Why would any of that lead you to be sitting at the kitchen table in the wee hours, studying a copy of the Marauders' Map?"

Fred stared back with utterly blank eyes. "Dunno what you could be talking about. Do you know, George?"

"Not a clue."

"Not the faintest."

"Well, time for bed."

"Suppose we'll just be toddling off to Dreamland--"

Charlie raised his hand in an impatient movement. "Accio parchment." The map flew into his hands. "Don't you know that the pair of you can't hide anything from me?" he said, unrolling it. "You never could. Hmmm. You've modified it, I see. Close your mouth, Fred."

"How'd you know?" Fred asked.

Charlie grinned. "How do you think? I used it when I was at Hogwarts, as well. Bill had it before me. What happened to the original?"

"Gave it to Harry and Ron. But we made a copy first, naturally. We're not stupid."

Charlie tapped it with his wand, watching little lines on the parchment glow, then fade. "Mmm. It didn't used to do that; what have you done to it?"

"Loads," Fred assured him.

"But you can't see it," said George. "And that's what first made us suspicious."

"Well, no," said Fred. "That wasn't the first thing actually. It was the owl."

"Definitely the owl."

"What I think," said Fred, "is that there was something wrong about that owl."

"Something not right," confirmed George.

"Have the pair of you gone barmy at last?" Charlie demanded. "You're not making any sense."

The twins looked at each other, gave identical, long sighs, and seemed to reach some sort of conclusion.

"Charlie," said Fred, "we've decided to take you into our confidence. We think it's necessary."

"Three heads are better than two, anyway," added George.

"Unless they were all on the same person. That'd be rather disgusting. But I wonder if there's a sweet that could cause that effect. Perhaps after the holidays we ought to start working on--"

"Fred," George said warningly, "focus."

"Right, right. The owl was the first thing that tipped us off. The one from St. Mungo's."

"The owl that was supposedly from St. Mungo's."

Fred leaned forward, speaking intently. "That owl," he said in low, confidential tones, "was too big."

Charlie stroked his chin. "Too big for what?"

"To deliver a message at that distance. They normally would have used a screech owl."

"Yes," Charlie said slowly, "you're right. I wouldn't have thought of that, but you're right."

"Even a barn owl would've been excessive," said George. "But think about it. That was an eagle owl."

"And that's what really started me thinking," said Fred. "Because I knew that not only was it too large, it was a familiar owl. I've seen that owl before; more than once, in fact. But I still can't remember where."

Charlie drummed the fingers on one hand on the table. "What do you think it means?"

"Dunno," said Fred, "but there's more."

"I hope there is. Because that's an awfully slim peg to hang some sort of weird conspiracy theory on."

"Well, it gets worse," said George. "You know that we sent Hermes to Hogwarts with a letter to Ron, asking him to leave that mysterious project they're all working on and come back."

"Yeah, I knew that. Percy sent him. But you could hardly expect an answer already."

Fred shook his head. "Not the problem."

"Then what is?"

Fred leaned forward, his coffee-coloured eyes intent on his older brother. "Ron isn't at Hogwarts."

"How do you know that?" asked Charlie, startled.

George tapped the map. "You wanted to know how we modified the copy? That's how. We can track the movements of people at Hogwarts even if we're not there, or anywhere close to it."

"It was my idea originally, of course," put in Fred. "But then, the good ones always are."

"You mean the demented ones always are. Anyway, it's a very complicated spell, loads of problems to be worked out with it still. Really, it only works for family members. But it does work very well for them."

Three pairs of eyes moved to the surface of the parchment, faintly glimmering in the near-darkness of the kitchen. The map showed no-one, and nothing moved on it.

"I see." Charlie gave a long, low whistle. "Ron ought to be on it. And he's not."

A brief span of time seemed to lapse then, when the sounds and sights from the scene in front of her became a little blurry, like a television programme that was not quite tuned in. Ginny was beginning to wonder if she'd lost the connection after all when she heard George's voice.

"Here's the feather we kept," he said, holding it out to Charlie.

"A word to the wise-- never pluck a feather from an eagle owl, if you can help it." George grimaced, rubbing his index finger, and Ginny saw for the first time that it was covered by a nasty purple bruise.

"We were working on a Tracking Toffee, for mothers to feed to their children in the mornings," added Fred. "The idea was that at the end of the day they'd be able to tell exactly where their little brats had been. It was one of our mercifully few socially responsible ideas. Never got very far. But it gave me the idea to try to trace where the owl had really come from. Nothing we can think of has worked out too well, though."

"We did rule out the Antarctican continent," sighed George.

Fred shook his head. "Bit more than that. I figured out that at some point, that owl had been at Hogwarts. But I never could get further than that."

Charlie laid the feather on the table, running his wand over it. "There's a Tracking spell we use in Romania," he said thoughtfully. "Allows us to trace the movements of dragons-- and they're related to birds, after all, if you go back far enough. It's worth a shot." The feather quivered. "Descoperâ."

"Now what?" asked Fred, after several moments had lapsed.

"We wait," said Charlie. "It takes a bit of time."

"Right," said Fred. "Well, I suppose we might as well tell you our plan, then."

"Might as well get all the yelling out of the way," said George.

Charlie leaned back in his chair. "Why do I have a bad feeling about this?"

"Can't imagine," shrugged Fred.

"Our plans are always well thought out," added George.

"Calm..."

"Practical..."

"Sensible..."

"Just tell me," groaned Charlie.

"We're going to Hogwarts," said Fred.

"Well, that's not as bad as I thought it might be," said Charlie. "I thought you were going to say you planned to storm the bastion of St. Mungo's and rescue Ginny."

"That too," George admitted.

"We thought," said Fred, "that we'd each pick one."

"You don't really know how impossible that idea is, do you?" asked Charlie.

"Why, because they have wyverns guarding the grounds of the Mental Health wing to keep patients from escaping? I could take them," said George indignantly.

Charlie looked at them both. "D'you think Ginny needs to be rescued?"

The silence became awkward. "I think there's something queer about it all," Fred finally said. "Can't really put my finger on it, but there it is."

"I remember what-- what happened last time she was sent there," George said awkwardly. "Maybe it was right then, maybe it wasn't. Dunno. But now-- she's the sanest one of us all."

"Compared to the pair of you, anybody would be a paragon of mental stability," observed Charlie. "Are you sure she doesn't really need to be there?"

Fred slammed his hand down on the table, hard. "Damn it, Charlie, you don't know anything about it! You weren't even living at home at the time. You didn't see what it did to Ginny. None of us did while it was going on, of course, we were all blind and stupid, but it was like-- it was like--"

"A light just went out of her," George supplied.

"Exactly right."

"We felt such fools for not seeing it while she was being pulled into that diary. It was ages before I could even look her in the face again-- same with you, right, Fred?"

His twin nodded. "Really, I think we teased her too much after that. Trying to cheer her up. To pretend everything was really all right, when it wasn't."

"There is a limit," George said gloomily, "to the power of even Weasley's Wizard Wheezes."

"A man's got to know his limitations," agreed Fred. "But the point, Charlie, the point is that something's wrong with all of it. And we're not going to rest until we find out what it is." Ginny recognized the expressions on the faces of her brothers then. It was their spoiling-for-a-fight look.

"I agree with you," Charlie said quietly.

The twins blinked at each other. "What?"

"I think you're absolutely right."

"Well then, what was all that about?"

"Devil's advocate," shrugged Charlie. "I needed to know how serious you were about this entire thing before I was going to let you jump into it. But there's something about this entire set-up that stinks to high heaven. We have to find out what."

"We?" Fred asked cautiously.

Charlie grinned, the wide, goofy grin that always made his freckled face look as if it were about to split in half. "Well, you'll never get into Hogwarts without me. Or St. Mungo's, either."

"Right," said George. "Knew you'd come through for us, Charlie. But--"

"What do you mean, we wouldn't get in without you?" continued Fred, sounding a little hurt.

"Something very queer's going on there." Charlie laced his hands behind his head and stared up into the darkness of the low ceiling. "I meant to tell everyone about it, but it really slipped my mind after that bloody owl. There are extra wards all around Hogwarts now, odd ones too. The dragons have been hearing some very strange things--"

"Can dragons talk?" asked Fred, sounding very fascinated.

"Not exactly. It's difficult to explain. But they do communicate things, if you understand them well enough. Anyway, the passageways we knew about from the map aren't going to work, now. There are still ways of getting in. But not anything you'd be able to--" The feather on the table suddenly vibrated, turning a bright green. Charlie grabbed it, his fingers moving across it.

"What--" George began.

"Shhh..." Charlie bent over the feather, peering at it intently. "I've almost got it..."

The feather gave off a little shower of lime-colored sparks, shuddered, and lay still, limp and charred. When Charlie looked up again, his face was furrowed into a puzzled frown. "What in the hell?"

"Is that a rhetorical question?" asked Fred. "Or is that where the owl's from?"

"No. Kent," replied Charlie.

"What?"

"Kent," Charlie repeated. "That's where this owl originally came from."

"No wonder they used an eagle owl," said Fred, "if it came from Kent and stopped at Hogwarts. But what can that mean?"

"Dunno. I can't tell anything more specific."

"What's in Kent?" mused George.

"Quite a lot of things, I'm sure," replied his twin. "But nobody we know, right?"

"No, but... I can almost think of it," George said slowly. "Where I've seen that owl. And it did have something to do with Kent."

Fred looked at Charlie. "D'you think we should go there? One of us, anyway?"

Charlie paused for a long time before responding. "No," he finally said. "I'm purely going on feelings, but I feel that we've got to stick together just now. There are some strange times ahead. And if we don't know what's in Kent any more specifically than that-- you can't remember anything else, George?"

"No," George said sadly.

"Well, maybe it'll come to you, in time. But somehow, for now, I think Hogwarts is the key. I keep thinking of how we can't see Ron; why wouldn't he be there? And then there's that owl. Wherever the precise location was it originally came from, it definitely stopped at Hogwarts at some point, you say?"

Fred nodded. "But what about St. Mungo's?"

"I've thought of that too. I'm planning to get the pair of you into Hogwarts. Then one of us will go. And if anybody remembers anything more about what might be in Kent, we can split up further then."

"It's a plan," said Fred in the middle of a yawn that threatened to split his head in two and send the top half rolling across the floor.

"Not a good one," said Charlie dryly, "but a plan."

"What d'you mean, Charlie?" asked George. "It's one of the best we've ever come up with."

"Considering your track record, that's not a compliment." Charlie shook his head. "I'm not sure. I just have a very bad feeling about this one-- and I've learned to trust my feelings."

"But we have to do it," said Fred, and George nodded in agreement.

"Yeah, we do." Charlie rubbed a hand through his coppery hair, causing it all to stand on end.

"What'll we tell Mum and Dad?" asked Fred.

"The truth," replied Charlie.

"Strange concept," said George, musingly.

"Well, part of it, anyway."

"You're not going to tell Percy, are you?"

"Fred," said Charlie in an exasperated tone of voice, "I'm not going to sneak out of here under an Invisibility cloak, or something stupid. Someone has to know where we're going in case anything happens to us. That's one of the first lessons I ever learned, working with dragons."

"Right. But you know what Perce's like; he's worse than ever now. D'you really want to have the rule book quoted at you for hours on end? And if he knew we planned to break into St. Mungo's, well..."

"Yeah," sighed Charlie. "And for all we know, he'd be right about that one."

"We can do this without you, you know," Fred said with a touch of belligerence.

"No, you can't. And anyway you're not going to. I won't let you." Charlie turned and looked back at his brothers. "Look, it's just that I don't know if this is right or wrong. And--" he held up a hand "--I don't care. I'm not going because of the rightness of it, or the wrongness. I'm going because Ginny's my sister. Our sister. And Ron's our brother. And I think they're both in trouble."

The twins nodded soberly, as if an agreement had been reached.

"But for now," Charlie continued, "we all need to get a bit of sleep. We'll be leaving at dawn."

"Dawn?" Fred asked. "You mean, when the sun comes up?"

"I think I saw that happen once," said George. "Why so early?"

The three of them had begun moving towards the stairs, but Charlie paused. "I'm not sure," he said slowly. "But I feel as if we haven't got much time. We have to make every minute count."

The three looked at each other for a long moment. Something hung in the air that Ginny could almost see, could feel. Apprehension. Determination. Love. Despite all their teasing, her brothers loved her, loved Ron, and were walking into darkness to try to save them both. The knowledge went through Ginny in a deep shiver, and she knew that this lack of emotion on her part would not last. Soon, it would all come rushing back to her. She ought to warn them. She ought to keep them from trying to find her. But perhaps mercifully, there was no time to think about that. As Fred, George, and Charlie continued up the stairs and their last footsteps died away, Ginny felt her connection to the scene narrow, drift, and disappear. Another one was coming into focus.

The wind was blowing through the trees, sending their bare, skeletal branches waving wildly, clattering against each other like bones. The snow in the street had been trampled by many feet into a dingy greyness, and the wind eddied the finer, whiter flakes on the ledges. People were coming out of the large, timber-framed building, staggering from the double doors, attempting to stand upright against the bitter flaying wind, and a woman bustled within, extinguishing lamps and gathering up glasses from the little round tables and booths. Ginny knew her, she realized. Madame Rosmerta. She was in Hogsmeade, looking at the front of the Three Broomsticks at closing time. The sky was overcast with swollen storm clouds, and if there was a moon she couldn't see it.

Ginny, of course, had never been in the wizarding village anywhere near that late. The school trips always ended at an early hour. The motley assortment of wizards, witches, and dubious creatures who hung about the Three Broomsticks at closing time was something entirely new to her, although she supposed it was nothing compared to some of the more disreputable establishments she'd heard about, such as the Hog's Breath. She was almost certain she saw two hags leaning on each other and singing a very unpleasant-sounding song in two different keys in voices that really ought to have shattered the glass windows of the pub. Definitely a group of goblins in striped caps, and what looked suspiciously like a troll in a Norwegian sweater with Viking ships knitted all over it. Was that a windlord? And then her vision narrowed, suddenly and without warning, to one pair coming out of the door. A man and a woman, both clutching their cloaks about them against the cruel wind. Their heads down, they hurried along the street, past the closed storefronts. A sudden burst of wind slapped freezing rain in their faces, and they quickly turned down a narrow side alley. Without volition, Ginny followed them. These, then, were the people for whom she had been granted the gift of spirit-sight. She wondered why, and also who they were.

The woman turned slightly, and her pretty features didn't look familiar. Her hair was long and dark red, settling about her face now that they were away from the worst of the wind, her eyes large and bitter-chocolate coloured, her nose slightly crooked over a generous pink mouth. She shivered and tried to grab her cloak more closely, but her slender fingers were stiff with cold. The man paused and wrapped the green cloak around her shoulders, caressing her neck slightly, his hands lingering a bit longer than they needed to.

"Better?" he asked softly.

"A little," the woman said. "It is so cold." And she shivered again, tucking her hands beneath her arms.

The man drew them out, gently, and began rubbing them between his own. "Marie-France," he said in a chiding voice. "You should dress more warmly."

"I suppose I should-- I am not used to it, this weather. St. Tropez is so very different." Marie-France, for such seemed to be her name, smiled slightly. There was something not quite English about her voice, Ginny could tell now, and she could almost think of what it was.

"It seems even colder now," Marie-France continued.

"It is colder, I think. We ought to wait until it clears up at least a bit-- do you mind, Marie, even though it's so late? You can become quite dangerously chilled in this sort of weather if you're not careful. Wish I had an umbrella, but it seemed so clear earlier--" A low rumble of thunder drowned out his last words, whatever they were.

She leaned up against the brick wall, sighing. "My father used to say that thunder in the winter is the devil's thunder. But, it is a Muggle saying. One that may not make much sense to you, yes?"

The man shook his head. "It does, all right. I know a bit about Muggle mythology." His voice grew slightly bitter. "I've lived among all sorts of people, and travelled a great deal, you know."

She looked at him intently. "Journeys you did not want to take?"

"Let's not talk about that. Oh, Marie-France, you were made for warm days, filled with sunshine and white sand beaches. The climate of Scotland isn't for you. It can be so cold, so barren here."

She tilted her head up at him. "Are you saying you are not glad I am 'ere?" she asked, and the smile was in her voice now.

"You know I'm not saying that." The man leaned down, and kissed the knuckles of her hands lightly. There was something tentative in the gesture, as if he wasn't quite sure it would be welcomed. She laughed softly, the sound very low in her throat. And with that laugh, Ginny knew what Marie-France's voice reminded her of. When Fleur and Gabrielle Delacour had come to Hogwarts with the Beauxbatons delegation more than two years earlier for the Triwizard Tournament, their voices had sounded like hers. Except that their French accents had been much more pronounced; this woman's voice had only a trace. It was definitely there, though. And of course; she felt a fool for not remembering right away. St. Tropez was in the south of France, as Draco had told her only yesterday.

"I was going to ask you where you wanted to go now," the man said softly, "but it is so very late. Hog's Head is still open, most likely. I don't really feel that I could sleep, just yet; do you?"

"No," she said. "I do not need to return to work at the museum until Monday, when we will begin cataloguing again. Until then, my time is my own."

"But considering that the weather is so bad--"

He did not finish the sentence, and she did not answer him.

The man and the woman stood quite close to each other, but it might have been for warmth. Except that he was still clasping her hands, and she made no move to pull them away. They exchanged a few more words, so soft and low that Ginny couldn't hear them clearly, and anyway she didn't try. She was busy trying to figure out the precise nature of their relationship; there were many clues that could be gleaned from looking at them. It seemed absurdly important for some reason. There was a certain intimacy between them. It was obvious in the way they stood, the way their bodies relaxed next to each other. Yet they had the air of two people who are still in the preliminary stages of a wary dance; who had not known each other very well, nor terribly long. They advanced slightly towards each other, murmuring something, and then, both laughing nervously, retreated.

At last, Marie-France raised her voice enough so that Ginny could hear her clearly. "Is it still raining?"

"Wait a minute-- I'll check." The man let go her hands, slowly, and walked to the end of the alley. He peered out for an instant. Ginny had her first good look at him. His hair was a rich chestnut brown with grey scattered all through it, and his eyes a darker, sherry-wine sort of color, like her brother Bill's. His face was weary and a little craggy-looking, but there was something very youthful about it, curiously untouched by time, as if, never having been young, it could also never be old. All the individual features seemed scattered from each other for a moment. Then they coalesced. She knew him. Remus Lupin.

After a confused second, she understood. He had cast a Praestigiae charm on himself; it was one they had learned about in Transfiguration in the fall of her fifth year. This spell didn't change the appearance of the user, but rather the perception of the viewers. Even if they knew the affected person well, he or she remained unrecognizable. Perhaps because she was in this strange spirit form, Ginny's own eyes had remained undeceived. But why would Remus Lupin be walking around Hogsmeade under Praestigiae? The answer came to her at once. Because he doesn't want anyone to know that it's him, that he's here. And why was he here? He'd left Hogwarts after Professor Snape had told everyone he was a werewolf in her second year, when she was thirteen, and as far as she knew, nobody had ever seen him since. She certainly hadn't.. or... had she? Her mind skipped across something too dark and deeply buried to touch, some memory that had been wiped clean from memory itself. Ginny flinched. No. She hadn't. She moved back from Remus, even knowing that he couldn't possibly see her, and sensed another presence at the open end of the alley. It didn't feel like a person, though.

"Still raining," he said now, returning to Marie-France. "Harder than ever, really. I think there's hail mixed with it now. You'll have a job getting back to your lodgings."

"They are close," she said. "But you! 'Ow far must you go?" Her smile became teasing. "You never will tell me, will you?"

Remus smiled, shaking his head. "Top secret," he said pleasantly, but there was a hint of iron in his voice. "But yes-- it's quite a distance." As if on cue, another tremendous roll of thunder rumbled across the landscape, and the ping-ping sound of hail clattered on the streets. The alley where they stood was narrow, protected by buildings on either side, but the weather was starting to penetrate even here.

"You should go," he said, still holding her hands. "Quickly. Before it gets any worse." But he made no move to drop them.

"I should," she agreed. She did not move, either.

Suddenly, Remus leaned in and kissed her. Marie-France stiffened for just a second, perhaps in surprise. Then she leaned towards him, two failings become firm, and as his arm crept around her waist, her hands went up into his wet hair.

"My lodgings are really very close," she said breathlessly, when they broke apart. "The Pigg and Peach. Across from Gladrags. It is under cover most of the way, too."

"And?" Both of his arms were around her now.

"It is so late, as you said. And the weather is so dreadful. You could come with me, and you could... stay."

"I could stay?" repeated Remus, a smile beginning to spread across his face.

"You would not need to walk back, that way. I could build a fire in the fireplace, make tea. We could sit up and... talk." She pressed his arm, and looked up at him. "Unless you wish to sleep?"

"I don't," he said huskily, and, as if drawn together by an irresistible force, they kissed again. Something in the atmosphere had changed, and shifted subtly. Ginny might not have any experience in this arena, but she understood what had happened, and what was about to happen. Yet she still couldn't understand why in the world she had been taken to see this. Which one of them could possibly be her connection, anyway? She couldn't think of any reason why she would have it through Remus Lupin. He had been a good teacher, of course. She'd liked him. In fact, if she was going to be brutally honest with herself-- and Ginny knew the only reason she wasn't writhing in embarrassment was that her spirit-self seemed to have no proper emotions-- there was, well, that other thing.

In her second year, when she'd been thirteen years old, she'd had a dreadful crush on him. She'd spent her Defense Against the Dark Arts classes all that spring staring dreamily at him, curling a strand of hair around her finger, imagining complicated scenarios involving romps through fields of flowers, and daisy chains he wove for her, and long, earnest conversations in which he told her his deepest secrets, and she did the same. Once Hermione had caught her writing "Ginny Lupin" over and over on one of her parchments. The other girl had laughed, and told Ginny that she'd been through the same sort of thing in her second year, with Professor Lockhart. Ginny remembered him, and bristled with indignation at having her finer, purer emotions compared to any silliness one could conjure up for that vain, stupid prat. (All of said emotions had coexisted quite comfortably with her shining dreams of Harry, of course. Ginny had a great many dreams running through her head at any given time.) But having her infatuation dragged out into the open like that had dissolved it, somehow. She'd never thought about Remus Lupin in that way again, and had been overtaken by embarrassment every time she remembered her old feelings. She had tried to see him, to say goodbye, after the whole school had learned the truth. God only knew exactly what she would have said, or done, but she hadn't gotten the chance. When she'd gone to his office, it was empty, and he was gone.

It was hard to believe that feelings as silly as that would have been enough to connect her in this way. Ginny had learned a bit about how this sort of thing worked, and the bond between the wandering spirit and the flesh-and-blood person had to have been physical at some point, whether through kinship, or no more than a single kiss. The emotional connection was paramount, which was probably why she hadn't been able to form a useful bond with Neville, and why her hatred of Lucius Malfoy had prevented her from using him even though she was bonded to his son. But the physical aspect had to exist as well, and she had never even touched Remus Lupin's hand. But then how on earth could she be connected through Marie-France, this mysterious woman she didn't even know? Of course, then her connection through Hermione was unexplained, as well...

Lost in thought, Ginny was slow to respond when a figure dashed past her. It was the one she'd sensed a few minutes earlier, but it was moving so fast that she couldn't tell what it was until it leaped on Remus Lupin, all wagging tail and friendly barks and wagging, lolling tongue.

"What-- how-- get off of me!" sputtered Remus, trying to throw off the large black dog. It only jumped up and placed its large front paws on his chest.

"This is your dog?" Marie-France asked, rather unnecessarily, in Ginny's opinion. She moved closer to pet its head, crooning something at it.

"No-- um-- I've never seen it bef--" Whatever Remus had planned to say, it was rather cut off by the way in which the dog started slurping its large pink tongue across his face, whining happily. "Uh-- go home. Go home! Shoo!"

The dog scampered to the end of the alley and then back, barking loudly, and looking at Remus with what Ginny could have sworn was a grin. "He's going to wake up every--oh!" He threw his hands in the air. "Yes! It's my damn dog!"

"And he came looking for you. So sweet. What's 'is name?"

"Snuffles," Remus said grimly, sounding as if he could think of a great number of other, less pleasant names that might have been more suitable at the moment. The dog was barking so loudly now that Ginny could hardly hear what they were saying over the noise. The moment was most definitely broken.

"Look, uh--" Remus began awkwardly. "I don't think I can--"

"I understand. You must take your dog home."

"Oh, I can think of other places to take him. I wonder how late I can call the village dogcatcher--"

Marie-France put her hand on his arm. "It is all right. Another time."

Remus was silent for a moment. "Really?" he asked in a voice so full of suppressed hope that it was painful to hear.

"Really," said Marie-France. Then she started down the alley in the other direction.

"Wait, wait," Remus called after her. "I simply can't let you walk back by yourself-- get off me, you stupid mutt-- sorry, of course I didn't mean you, Marie--"

She giggled. "I will be all right. It is 'ardly fifty steps. Goodnight."

She began to walk away then, her footsteps clattering on the cobblestones. Remus Lupin stood staring after her for a long time, motionless. Then he turned to the dog. But even in her spirit-state, Ginny felt a dart of surprise. Because the dog was a dog no longer, but a man, tall, lean, and wiry, with black hair pulled back by a leather thong, and a dark brown cloak. The alley was so dark that she couldn't tell anything more. Yet there was something familiar about him, although she couldn't yet say what it might be. Remus stared at the other man as if he were trying to suppress something unimaginably violent that was struggling to get out of him with all its strength, and the effort simply left no room for speech.

"Come on," the other man finally said, beginning to walk down the alley, turning back to look at Remus, to see if he was following. At last, he did.

The two trudged down a winding series of back allies, avoiding the main streets. Ginny was lost at once; there was so much of Hogsmeade she'd never even seen that she honestly didn't have the slightest idea where they now were. But, without being able to tell why, she felt that they were drawing closer and closer to the part of the Forbidden Forest that bordered the town, lying on the edge of Hogwarts. The final alley opened out into a large field, and the massed trees stood motionless and infinitely dark on the other side of it. The pair stopped beneath the eaves of the last building, still somewhat sheltered from the continuing rain and the blustering, icy wind. They both glanced up at the sky, then turned in opposite directions, several metres from each other.

"It's not going to get any better if we wait," said the dark-haired man.

"Mmmph," said Remus.

"Likely it won't blow itself out until morning."

Silence.

There was a pause. Then the other man held something up, black and rather battered looking.

"I do," he said, in the tones of someone offering a great treat, "have an umbrella."

Without turning his head, Remus grabbed the umbrella in one hand and twisted it into a ball of metal and crumpled fabric. Wordlessly, he handed the thing back to the other man.

"I take it you don't want an umbrella," he said, looking down at what he held. It was now smaller than a tennis ball.

"What I want," said Remus, through clenched teeth, "is a crackling fire. A cup of hot tea. Soft music... pleasant conversation... and good company. I was on my way to it. Until you took it into your head to show up, Sirius."

Sirius? Sirius... Black? The murderer; the one who escaped, and came after Harry. Ginny felt only a mild curiousity, but this was important information. She filed it away for later use.

"Right, right. That's the thanks I get for worrying about you," said Sirius. "For trying to help you--"

"I don't need your help." A muscle jumped uncontrollably in Remus's jaw, although his voice was still quite calm.

Sirius advanced on the other man until they were nearly nose to nose. "Well, apparently you bloody well do!"

"I was wrong. The dogcatcher's too good for you," retorted Remus. "Listen, what the hell were you playing at?"

"I might ask the same. Who is she?"

"I can't imagine," Remus said coldly, "how you could possibly think that's any of your business. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's very late, and the path through the forest is a very long one. And it's cold, and wet."

"Well, you could have had an umbrella if you hadn't-- don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you!" Sirius put out a hand to restrain Remus as he attempted to push past him, and although Ginny rather thought that he had the strength to push through the brick wall they'd been leaning against if he wanted to, Remus stopped, glaring murderously and breathing very hard.

"She's the one you were going to see those other times, last month. Wasn't she?" asked Sirius.

"Those other-- wait a minute. How do you know about any other times?"

"Neither one of us should be in Hogsmeade at all. You know that, Remus. We shouldn't be seen. And Dumbledore made it very clear that it isn't safe now, not since they went through the clock tower. The road back, through the forest, is becoming too dangerous," said Sirius, evasively.

"Oh, I know," continued Remus, as if he hadn't heard. "Why am I even asking you how you know, when I know the answer perfectly well? It isn't enough to watch me damn near twenty-four hours a day in the clock tower. You've been spying on me!"

""I've been trying to figure out what's going on. That's all. I only want to--"

"Help me," Remus finished the sentence. "Yeah. Some help. The one time I try to have some goddamn semblance of a private life--"

"I'm worried about you!" Sirius exploded. "You've been behaving erratically-- you have, Remus. This isn't the only thing, but it's unbelievably stupid to take such a chance, to keep coming to Hogsmeade by the forest path, meeting this Marie-France, some woman you didn't even know two months ago-- who knows what she might be up to? Why she's really cozying up to you?"

Remus took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. The face he turned to his companion a few moments later had at least the appearance of calm. "I'm not about to do anything stupid. You know that. We've all worked too hard for this. I understand the risks. I do. I simply thought that it was still safe to return this one last time--"

"Didn't look like a last time to me--"

"Because," continued Remus in a slightly louder voice, "they'd all gone through the clock tower so recently."

"Time runs differently there, remember? Who knows how long it's really been, for them."

"Yes, Sirius, I paid attention during the planning meetings as well as you! I was going to leave off coming here."

"When?"

"Soon," said Remus vaguely, attempting to push past his companion once again.

"That's not good enough." Sirius's voice had lowered to a snarl, and he stepped forward, blocking the narrow exit to the alley. "Tell me, Remus, when were you planning to stop coming to see Marie-France, this tart who's got you by the short hairs? After the first good shag? Likely-- "

His words were cut off rather abruptly. Remus had grabbed him by the throat with a hand that moved faster than sight, and was holding him up against the brick wall without the slightest effort, his feet dangling several inches off the ground.

"Never," he growled, "never, ever, speak to me about Marie-France that way again. I never want to hear words like that out of your mouth about her again. Never! Do you understand me?" And although the other man was both tall and strong, he shook him as effortlessly as a rag doll in the hands of a child.

"Erggh..." said Sirius in a choked whisper.

"Do you understand me?"

Vigorously, he nodded, his face remarkably sincere. Then he went utterly limp in Remus Lupin's hands, slumping against the wall.

"Oh God," whispered Remus. He let Sirius go, guiding him gently to the cobblestones, kneeling before him, whispering urgently, his hand as tender when he caressed his friend's face as it had been violent only moments before, both hand and face shockingly white against the cold rain.

"Well," said Sirius a few minutes later, "you haven't done that in a while."

Remus mumbled something inaudible, still crouched against the brick wall, face in hands.

"If I had a galleon for every time you did it to me fifth year at Hogwarts, though--"

"Shut up," said Remus. "It isn't funny, and you know it."

"I suppose not."

Remus raised his head, and Ginny saw that his eyes were dark, and his face far more haggard than it had been even a few minutes earlier. "I swore I'd never do that again, Sirius."

"Yes," the other man continued in a far more sober voice. "I should know. I was there."

When Remus spoke again, his voice was barely audible. "You're right. You know that, don't you? Not about Marie-France, I mean. But the other thing. My being more erratic. I suppose I am. The full moon's over a fortnight away; I oughtn't to feel like this, but I do... and I don't know why."

Sirius nodded, as if something had been confirmed. "Do you see why I'm worried about you now?"

"Perhaps." Remus shivered. Ginny thought that they must both be dreadfully cold. "I often feel, these days, as if I'm being broken down to my most basic instincts. The elemental desires. Very unsettling feeling, that."

"It's the clock tower, you know. It has to be."

"I suppose it is."

"Snape did leave you enough Wolfsbane potion, right?" Sirius asked abruptly.

"Yes, yes, of course. But..." His words trailed off.

"What?"

"Nothing. Oh, don't look at me like that. It really is nothing. It's just that-- well, I didn't feel last time that it was working as it ought. Not that I can ever really remember anything from those times all that clearly, at least not the way we normally think of remembering things we've done, but--"

Sirius stared at him. "Seemed all right to me."

"Really?"

"I would have told you if it hadn't. You curled up and went to sleep in the top tower room. Same as always."

"You're sure."

"Yes, I'm sure," Sirius said a bit impatiently. They both stared into the darkness, silently. Then he spoke again. "There is something that's been happening that I haven't told you about. Probably because I didn't believe at first that it had actually happened."

"What! You've been keeping secrets as well?" asked Remus. "I don't ever want to hear another word about--"

"It's not like that. It's just-- well, some things feel as if they're not to be spoken about. But I should have told you before. It happened about a week ago." The wind had muted into a steady roar, and it seemed to blow through Sirius's words, touching Ginny with icy fingers. "I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. So I got up and started pacing; I didn't want to wake you. I happened to look out the window. Remus-- this is going to sound absolutely mad, but-- I didn't see the Hogwarts grounds."

"Well, what did you see?"

Sirius gave a short, humorless bark of a laugh. "A sort of wavy green, with everything distorted. At first, it didn't make sense. Then I realized what it was. We were underwater, at the bottom of an ocean. And it was lit only by the lights coming from inside the tower; beyond that was a vast darkness. I saw forests, Remus, and realized they were made of kelp. Schools of strange fish... a lot of odd horseshoe-shaped sorts of things... and an unimaginably huge monster, took forever to glide by, made the giant squid look like a goldfish."

"A dream," said Remus, his voice a bit uncomfortable.

"That's what I thought too, at first. But it seemed so real...And listen. That wasn't the only time. A couple of days later, it happened again. Middle of the night, couldn't sleep, et cetera. But this time, I looked out and saw sand dunes. Nothing but desert. The next night, it was the strangest of all-- a sort of maze of twisted metal filled with flashing images, and a lot of what looked a bit like flying cars. I couldn't begin to understand half of what I saw. But I know, Remus, I know that it wasn't simply a dream. You do believe me, don't you?"

"Yes. Or I believe, at least, that you believe it." Remus lapsed into silence. "What do you think it can all mean?" he finally asked.

"I don't know. But-- strange things are beginning to happen. We knew they might." Sirius laid a hand over his friend's fingers, which were clutching his cloak around his shoulders. "We need to pull together now-- not fly apart, Remus."

"I know." Remus continued to stare into the distance. "But whatever you do, don't blame Marie-France, Sirius. It's nothing to do with her."

"Who is she, anyway?" Sirius he asked, in a voice that was probably supposed to be gentle and soothing, but failed miserably. "And when did you first meet her? Where?"

"About a month ago," Remus said stiffly. "She's guest curator at the Hogsmeade art museum, brought in for the Post-Impressionist exhibit they're holding after Christmas. I was there one day-- before we were supposed to stop coming to Hogsmeade, I might add-- and happened to speak to her about a Shelby Lee Adams photograph in the Muggle collection." Ginny thought that he sounded rather as if he had been summoned to provide hostile testimony for a roomful of Aurors.

"She's not English, surely. Where did she come from?"

"St. Tropez. South of France, on the coast."

"And you've been slipping away to Hogsmeade under a Prestigiae charm and meeting her ever since."

"If you must put it that way, yes."

"Uh." Sirius tapped his chin. "What do the pair of you do, anyway?" he burst out, apparently having run through the limited store of diplomacy at his disposal.

"I'm not giving you a blow by blow description, Sirius. This isn't bloody sixth year at Hogwarts!"

"It's just that--I worry about you. I do, Remus. I doubt you really know anything about her. And the timing seems suspicious to me--"

"There's nothing suspicious about it!" snapped Remus. "And I told you-- don't blame her for anything. It's nothing to do with her."

"I worry that she's not good for you. That's all."

"Marie-France is one of the few things keeping me sane right now. She's very good for me. And she would have been even better, if you hadn't interfered the way you did, bounding in to save the day like some demented St. Bernard with a keg of brandy around its neck--"

"That's it!" said Sirius. "If that's the thanks I get for trying to help you--"

Remus rose to his feet, clearly keeping his temper with an effort. "I don't want to get angry with you, Sirius. And God knows I don't want to do what I just did, not ever again. But you don't understand. Let me be by myself for awhile. Let me take the path back on my own. Give me some time alone, to think."

"But it's not really safe to--"

"Sirius!" And something dangerous flashed in his eyes, briefly. Something red, like the flickering light of a fire.

"All right." Sirius turned his hands, palms up, in a gesture of surrender. "All right. Go. I'll follow along after you a bit."

He stood at the edge of the field, watching Remus make his way towards the forest. The trees seemed to swallow him, leaving no trace. He stared into the distance for a long time, wrapping his cloak about him closely. Ginny wondered why he didn't just cast a Calorium spell. But when he was sent to Azkaban his wand was broken, I suppose-- that's what Dad always said happens, anyway. And I don't imagine he's been able to get a new one since. "Oh, shite, Remus," he muttered at last. "That means that I've got to go back through the forest alone as well. Thanks loads, mate." Sirius set off across the field, shivering.

Ginny watched the dark figure trudge away from her, seeming to disappear as suddenly as Remus had once he reached the edge of a path leading into the trees. There was something about that path that drew her eye. She knew what it was. It looked exactly like the path through the Dreamtime, the one she had taken four hundred years earlier through the same forest into the Scottish countryside, the one that had led her straight to Draco Malfoy. That journey that had been like the waking world made into a dream, more real than reality itself. The one she could not quite remember, nor make sense of. A deep shudder of unease went through her, watching Sirius Black vanish into the Forbidden Forest. Then she felt her connection fading, dimming, and she knew why. It hadn't been through Remus. It had been through Marie-France. She had only pretended to leave earlier; she must have actually doubled back and remained hidden at the edge of the alley, watching and listening. Everything Ginny had seen and heard had only been possible because of this mysterious woman. And she still had no idea why.

She was leaving. Her spirit was being pulled back towards her body with a force that could not be resisted. But there was still so much to learn! She could feel it just beyond her reach, could nearly taste the knowledge that was so tantalizingly close. She hovered bodiless between worlds, struggling to stay where she was, to not return to her own body slumped in the lady-chapel of sixteenth century Scotland. But she did feel herself returning, moving through time and space both; she could grasp onto nothing that would keep her there. The centuries fell through her like leaves blown by a savage wind. By herself, Ginny could not hold on; she needed to find someone else, some real human being with whom she had a connection, and she didn't think she could do it. But when she least expected it, when she could feel how close she was drawing to Melrose Abbey and her waiting body, she felt herself snag on something. And there was something-- someone--sharpening into focus far below her, a place, a person, the harsh sharp cries of human voices... Summoning forth all her strength, Ginny grasped onto those voices.

The first lights of dawn stained the sky. It was a village, a very little one, no more than a church, a smithy, and a few broken-down buildings huddled around a public square. There was a battered cart slowly rolling down a rutted path, each turn of the wheels jostling the man who sat tied in it, head down. She didn't know him. A gaggle of people followed the cart. Children scampered after it, throwing rocks, stooping to pick up handfuls of muck on the street. The man didn't try to avoid them, and didn't seem entirely aware of what was going on. And as her field of vision expanded, she saw the crude gibbet that waited at the very centre of the square. Ginny's skin crawled. She'd seen this before, or a picture of it, anyway, in her Muggles: Medieval to Modern textbook. A public hanging. And just behind the cart, to one side of it, crept a small figure in a black cloak, wrapped so securely that Ginny couldn't tell if it was male of female; it could just have easily been either a girl or a small boy. But the hood fell back slightly when the person wove through the crowd as stealthily as a cat, and Ginny saw Pansy Parkinson.

Her surprise at the realization that her connection to the twentieth-century scene at Hogsmeade was through Marie-France was nothing compared to what she felt now. Pansy Parkinson! She couldn't have spoken fifty words to Ginny in five years. Those had all been insults, of course, but for the most part she was beneath the notice of someone like Pansy. There was simply no way in which the two of them could have any kind of bond. At least, Ginny didn't see how. The other girl had kissed Draco Malfoy, of course; Ginny had seen her do it. As she herself had done. But that wasn't enough to form this sort of connection.

She had reached the gibbet now, where a larger number of children and women were already gathered, eagerly watching. There were water-sellers and a boy with twin buckets of beer over his shoulders; a cart with roasted chestnuts and another with little meat pies. It all had the air of a festival. Ginny felt a wave of sickness rolling over her even though such a thing shouldn't have been possible in her current state. Her emotions were returning to her, she realized; and behind the scene she watched, she could dimly see her body, waiting for her at Melrose Abbey. Blackness clamped down on her. For several minutes, she was sure that the connection was severed. But then it cleared again, and she saw a body swinging from the gibbet, back and forth, back and forth, like some sort of hideous fruit. But Pansy moved forward, and Ginny was forced to travel with her. She was holding a coarse cotton handkerchief, and she stole to the foot of the gallows and dipped what she held into the blood of the hanged man. She wasn't the only one doing that, either. Little children were shoving each other and shrieking to get at the trickle of blood, shouting "Keepsake! Keepsake!" But only Pansy had that strange smile curving her face, that expression that was enigma. The sickness overtook Ginny again, and she missed whatever happened next. Then she saw Pansy tuck something carefully into a little bag tied at her waist and slip away, moving through the crowd like a cat, back towards the high road...

Cold. Surely Ginny had never been so cold, so frozen to the bone. Slowly, vision and sense was coming back to her, and her hands and feet were prickling painfully. She blinked, and each eyelid felt as if a weight were attached to it. She was kneeling on the riser in the Lady-chapel before the sacred well, and a chill wind blew through the ruined walls and through her as if her flesh were made of paper. She almost felt too cold to be alive, and in that moment she didn't care.

I stayed too long, she thought. I attempted magic past my powers. I should have known how dangerous that can be.

In the next room, there was the bed, the wool blankets, the fur coverlets. And the living warmth of another body, waiting for her. Draco Malfoy. Yet to get there, she would need to move from that spot, to stretch her immobile limbs.

I think I'll just stay here. Just... stay here and... There was some reason why that wasn't a good idea, Ginny thought dreamily. But she couldn't seem to recall what it was.

Up.UP! You can't stay here; you'll freeze to death. There's something you have to do, tomorrow. Or perhaps I should say, not do. You know it. Now that you've seen what you've seen, and heard what you've heard...

No. No more. No more.

Yes. Listen to me, listen, the inner voice insisted, pulling and plucking at her mind. Ginny wasn't strong enough to shake it off. So she listened dully as the interior voice, whatever it was-- conscience, reason, or something else-- told her what she would have to say and do once she awoke in the morning. If it was a living thing she truthfully thought she might have tried to kill it, but, unfortunately, it was a part of herself, and so the voice continued, softly, inexorably.

You're joking, she finally told it. You've got to be. Wait, what am I saying? I've got to be. I can't do that.

Well, what else are you going to do?

I don't know. But then... it would be easier to just stay here, wouldn't it? Ginny shrank back even further within herself, and felt some spark in her contract to a tiny, feebly flickering thing.

And let the sleep of trance pass into the sleep of death? asked the voice.

For a dizzying moment, the idea was actually enticing. I couldn't hurt anyone then. I wouldn't be bonded to Malfoy anymore. I couldn't betray my brother, or Harry, or Hermione. It would solve a lot of problems...

Coward, jeered the voice.

Don't say that! I'm not!

Coward, it whispered again. So it's true after all, what everyone always said. Little Ginny is afraid. And why not? She needs to be protected, after all, wrapped in cotton wool, cocooned. Locked in her little girl's room, surrounded by her dolls and her toys, suspended in a shining dream. Never to grow up. Never to step outside the charmed circle of her family. She will always remain a child, and real life, the life of adults, will forever dangle just beyond her grasp. But it doesn't matter really, because she's nothing but a--

I'll show you what I am, she told it, staggering to her feet. Her arms and legs almost didn't seem to belong to her anymore, and she could barely force one foot in front of the other. It took all her strength to push the door open; it stuck stubbornly in its frame, and she clung to the doorjamb with nerveless fingers and cried silently. At last, it gave, and she stumbled into the room, unable to so much as focus her eyes, barely seeing the large four-poster bed in front of her.

Her legs gave out just as she reached the bed. She fell forwards onto the enveloping mattress, and it felt as if she were falling forever, into something infinitely dark and bottomless, but it didn't matter because-- oh-- it was warm, so warm. The voice had fallen into silence at last. And a pair of solid human arms caught her; she sagged into them, the last of her strength gone. Somebody was saying something but she couldn't hear it, and it was dimming like the faint faraway buzz of a mosquito. Darkness claimed her then, and she tumbled into sleep so profound it was coma.

Draco had searched the bedroom alcove, the larger guest room, the corridor, the refectory, the monks' and nuns' quarters, and, at last, the church. It wasn't until he felt his fingers going numb that he realized he had left without his cloak. No Ginny, no Ginny anywhere. It was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed her. But it was impossible. He could feel that she was still nearby; the Hexensymbol bond wouldn't have permitted her to go far, and anyway he would have known if she'd tried. At last he came back into the little bedroom and sat down on the bed, staring into the darkness. The full moon appeared fitfully for a moment before clouds covered it again, briefly illuminating the room, its cold light dimming now that dawn approached. No trace of her at all.

Draco rose abruptly and stood at the stone casement of the window, where the glass had been. A chill wind blew and it was dreadfully cold, but he was burning, his chest and neck and head feverish, and something hot and tangled throbbed behind his eyes. She couldn't be gone, but she was gone. He had lost her. Ginny Weasley was his last chance to redeem something from this failed rebellion of his, and now even that slim hope had vanished. He was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't hear the stumbling steps behind him, at first. But then he turned, and saw her.

Something twisted inside him. A frightening feeling. It might have been rage. Surely it was. Had to be.

He crossed the room in a few strides. Sensation were pumping through his veins that felt as if they might burst his skin with their violent intensity. "I'm going to make you pay for this, Weasley," he snarled. But she only continued to move as if in trance, unseeing, and she did not respond when he climbed onto the bed in front of her, grabbing her arms.

"Where in the bloody hell were you?" Draco barked. "Did you think you could escape from me? You can't. Did you think you'd be able to trick me? You wouldn't. Did you imagine you'd get to Leith without me? You won't. Answer me!" He shook her back and forth by the shoulders, but she only flopped about in his hands, her head lolling like a large doll, her eyes closed. Then she went completely limp and pitched forward into his arms. An alarming stab went through Draco, making it difficult for him to catch his breath. That's what a knife to the chest must feel like, he thought. But I don't really know about that... no... the first, the very first tearing ripping sensation of the Cruciatus curse was just like that. And that one was the worst, because I wasn't expecting it. I had no defenses against it.

His hands became more gentle, seemingly of their own accord. He laid her back down on the bed, where she lay immobile in the position he'd placed her. He leaned his head down to her chest. It seemed impossible to hear either breathing or heartbeat. Although he spoke to her, and shook her, and at last, in desperation, pinched her hard, there was no waking Ginny Weasley. Like Sleeping Beauty, she lay in unnatural slumber, and no wall of thorns could have barred her more effectively from the waking world.

Finally, Draco stopped his attempts to wake her. A slow fear was creeping into his mind, the sort that made no sense whatsoever and was all the more frightening for it. But it was all too easy to believe when he was hundreds of years and a world apart from every familiar thing he had ever known, and the stone walls seemed to be closing in on him, the sinister abbey advancing on the bed where they both lay as if to crush it in one cruel hand.

Perhaps all the world had fallen into enchanted sleep, and only he remained. There were spells like that, he knew. He'd heard of wizards who enchanted clocks to stop time for them, and some of the books in the Malfoy library told stories of the ones who'd broken the timepieces, and been eternally caught in a frozen world, where only they lived and breathed.

Perhaps the very air had stopped, and was growing stale. Perhaps the wind was no longer moving the still, still trees outside the guesthouse. Perhaps the fabric of reality itself had grown rotten, and was about to rip.

And as his fears closed in on him, and he stared down at the pale, marble-like face of Ginny Weasley, Draco felt his heart convulse. Weakness. Weakness. That's all this is-- despicable, disgusting-- It made no difference. The wave of terror was breaking over him, and he needed some solid thing to cling to in its storm. He leaned down to her and wrapped his arms around her body, one over her neck, one below her back, and pressed his chest against hers until he could feel their combined heartbeats thrumming. Then it dawned on him, the meaning of what he heard.

Heartbeats... wait...she is all right! And he heard her breathing too, now, shallow, a little gasping at first, but there. A tiny bit of color returned to her cheeks.

"Weasley," he said urgently. "Come on. Say something... anything..."

She murmured low in her throat. Her hand moved just slightly to one side, reaching out to him, grasping at his arm. Draco moved forward so that she could reach him more easily. Her fingers crept along his wrist and pressed against the smaller of the two little wounds there, the one that was healing. The other was not. He watched the red mist of symbols flicker briefly. Then, as if the effort had taken all her remaining strength, her face relaxed. She passed into a natural sleep, her breathing deep and even. Draco looked down at her for a long time.

There were smudges and streaks all over her face, and her blouse was dingy with dirt. But it was strange. He could swear that he still smelled flowers. Then he lifted a curl of that hair and rubbed it between his fingers, lifting it to his nose. Yes. That was where the smell came from, and it was still smooth and shining from when he'd combed it. They were both filthy dirty, covered with mud and bits of hay from sleeping in the hayloft the night before, leaves and grass stains all over their clothes... but he could still smell flowers in her hair. Draco rubbed the curl absently between his fingers and continued to look down at her. The first pink lights of dawn spilled over her body through the stone casement.

He wondered when the point of no return had come.

Had it been last night, when he washed her face, and thought that she was beautiful? Or was it when he bonded her to him with the Hexensymbol; surely that made more sense? Or maybe the moment when he'd been watching Lord Grindelwald pull her to himself in the re-enactment of the Chamber of Secrets, although that was very vague. When he'd broken and rescued her, or whatever it was that he had done? No... it had been before that... When he decided to go after her, into the Dreamtime, leaving his father and the other Death Eaters behind? When he'd followed her through the clock tower into the sixteenth century? When he'd grown angry after learning that Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy had been sent after her, to bring her from Hogwarts?

There had to have been an irrevocable moment of decision, some snowball that had begun this avalanche. Had it been during those twelve strokes of madness at the top of the North Tower only days ago, when he had lost all his hard-won control and gathered her to him and kissed her, and touched her, and, devouring a bit of her, found that appetite came from eating? Or had the foundation been laid by all those treacherous thoughts of her that he was never able to keep out of his head in the past year? That day in October, perhaps, when she had found him reading in the library, and struck a spark in him he had thought burnt out? That night in August, staring at Harry Potter sitting across from him at a back table at the Hog's Head, Draco knowing he couldn't take revenge on the other boy as he wanted to do, knew he could do, and that in some mysterious way it was because of Ginny Weasley? Or... was it even further back than that? The thought hit him like an unblockable curse from a well-aimed wand.

It had been well over four years since that day outside of Flourish and Blotts, when she was eleven and he was twelve, and he had watched her heart blossom on her face as she looked at Potter. And that was when this-- this thing had begun in his head, the thing he had never acknowledged, even to himself. This forbidden thing. This thing that was never meant to be. And so, like a drifting underwater dream, it had never surfaced.

But now, it was as if his dreams had solidified, and been made flesh. Or-- Draco's mouth twisted-- his nightmares. This was not a pleasant sensation that he felt, looking at her. It was as bitter as gall and bit deeper than poison. The very sight of her stumbling back towards the bed that night had shaken something in him and turned it upside down, and he wasn't sure he could ever find equilibrium again.

He didn't want this feeling, whatever it was. He didn't want to want her, to need her. But he did.

And, looking down at the innocently sleeping Ginny Weasley, the only coherent thought in Draco's head was that he hated her for doing this to him.

Who or what was she, this girl? A succubus. A female vampire, draining will and strength out of him. He would not, could not let her under his skin. She would get into him if she could, and then she'd grab all his cunning, all his power. And she would do it through his most vulnerable spot, where he'd always been the weakest. His mind might resist her, but his body could not, and she must know it.

Draco propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her still, not breaking his gaze. And as he did, he remembered someone else he had seen in this way, one white hand outstretched across the bed, long red hair spilling across her face, hiding it, only the sweet curve of cheekbone and chin visible through the smooth cloak of hair as she lay sleeping next to him in the small hours of the night, the first hour of the morning. A woman, not a girl. Marie-France Tessier. He let the curl of Ginny's hair sift through his hands.

There was only one thought in his head now, and it was almost calm.

Too late.

He had been like a man idly watching a blackening sky, realizing only too late that the storm is upon him. And all the while his primal desires had been laughing at him, biding their time. They'd won.

She'd won.

I might have told you it would end this way, some interior voice informed him, sounding very amused.

Don't gloat. You're going to get what you want; isn't that enough?

Oh, it'll be more than enough. The voice was sly.

I suppose you're what Ziggy always called the id, thought Draco.

That name will do as well as any other. Cheer up. It isn't all bad.

You've won. Now do have the grace to shut up. There was something odd about that voice, Draco thought but not did not say, even mentally.

Desire is not a matter of grace. Desire is primal, sometimes ugly. Our bodies don't know what they should want. Only what they do want.

Draco shifted restlessly in bed, dropping Ginny's hair. His eye caught a flicker of glowing light. Not the pale misty light of the growing dawn, but something red and pulsing. He peered more closely. It was the edge of the Kitap-an Dus, sticking out of the leather bag. An idea was beginning to coalesce in his mind. Not the whole puzzle, not by a long shot, but a few of its pieces, anyway. Do I have to wake her up for a go right now? he asked.

The voice considered. I can be generous in my victory. Sleep a bit more.

That's the last thing I want to do. With a sudden, violent movement, Draco swung his legs around and scrambled off the bed. That voice was not coming from inside his own head.

The dark little door across the room beckoned to him. He was sure he hadn't seen it before. Maybe it hadn't been there before. Draco had certainly seen enough rooms at both Hogwarts and Malfoy Manor that appeared and disappeared.

He walked into the little enclosure with the fallen-in roof, and the reflecting pool with its tiny surrounding wall. Kneeling on the tattered velvet-covered riser, he knew that Ginny had knelt here before him. This was where she had been. And just as she had done, he thought that this was the heart of Melrose Abbey, the place to which both he and she had been led. He looked up at the statue and, with no particular sense of surprise, saw it move and change into the form of a living woman. She crossed the little room and sat facing him, an enigmatic smile on her lips. He could never have said what she looked like, but since she was every one of his unacknowledged dreams made flesh, she did bear a certain resemblance to Ginny Weasley.

"Do you know who I am?" she asked in a voice like the taste of the first summer peaches in an orchard, when all the world bursts with sweetness. Her slanted yellow eyes mocked him.

And, remembering that dusty, secret book in the Malfoy library, he did know. A shiver ran all through him. If he hadn't already been in that position, Draco rather thought that he would have fallen to his knees, and not because he wanted to do so. He swallowed hard before speaking. "You are one of the seven Endless. Your-- your brother is Lord Morpheus, and your sister is Lady Death." And he did bow his head then, in an instinct too strong to be resisted; as a mortal facing immortality, there was nothing else he could do. "You are the Lady Desire."

She inclined her head as well, as if recognizing a worthy opponent. And as she did, Draco was no longer so sure that she was a woman; there was something predatory about her, or him, something utterly male. The shape of the face had changed, the cheekbones, the jaw, the lines that mark the difference between one gender and the other. Desire had become a beautiful boy, as perfect and corrupt as one of Botticelli's angels. "You know of me, then?" he asked. "So few mortals do."

"Yes, my Lord," said Draco. But the words were hardly out of his mouth when Desire shifted, and became, quite unmistakably, a woman once more. Her red hair fell over her shoulders in cascading ringlets, and the skin of her slender hands glowed softer than white velvet. Draco blinked.

"I don't--" he began.

"Understand?" Desire interrupted. "Surely you're not going to say that."

"No, Lady; I'm not. It makes sense, I suppose, that Desire would have to be both male and female. I was going to say that--" he rubbed his forehead, trying to tamp down the dizzying sense of unreality "-- well, that I don't understand why you're here. This can't be normal. Even in the wizarding world, we don't go about running into members of the Endless. Why have you appeared to me?"

She moved forward a little further, and laid her cool fingers against the side of his cheek, and everything else in the world disappeared without warning. The sensation reminded Draco bizarrely of the Cruciatus curse. It was as if the very blood in his veins had turned to want and was struggling to spurt out of him; his will, his judgment, and his plans were turned liquid, all flowing into this fathomless ocean of feeling for her. Yet everything that he felt for the Lady Desire was, in some mysterious way, really being offered to Ginny. And without knowing why, he sensed that this was exactly what the Immortal wanted him to feel.

"No," he whispered, without knowing what he was saying. "No. No. No."

"I see your thoughts," she said. "What does she look like, your Gwenhyfar, the all of her? You don't even know that. You have only caught tantalizing little glimpses of her body so far, and they've made you feel as if you understood the torments of Tantalus indeed. You have tasted only the fruits of your imagination for long and long; the rest was eternally out of your reach, or so you thought. And so you run over and over the fading scraps of what you do know. You're not even sure if her white, white skin would feel soft and warm under your lips, or cool and smooth--"

"Stop it. Please. Please," Draco said, his voice muffled as he sank his head into his hands, but the voice of Lady Desire went on and on as inexorably as thick dark honey pouring from a cup.

"Have you forgotten the pleasures of the flesh so soon, little mortal, little dragon? Do you remember your time of feasting to the point of surfeit, a glut, an exhaustion with what had seemed so dear and desirable? Then those months of self-imposed famine... But the night of the Yule ball shattered the dam you'd erected, thinking there was no longer a river behind it. Didn't it? And then the river was in flood. Just as it was with Marie-France Tessier. Do you remember her?"

"Don't you have any mercy at all?" he murmured between his fingers.

She shook her head. "Desire has no mercy, and no pity."

"But I will fight it still, if I can."

The corners of her mouth curled up. "Would you fight Desire?"

"I would."

Her laughter was soft and amused. "You will only be battling yourself, Draco Lukas Malfoy. And a house divided against itself cannot stand."

Draco's mind was spinning like a top by this point, but he held onto one thought, the one he'd had when he got up off the bed and headed towards this room..

The book.

His trembling hands fumbled inside the bag and knocked against the heel of a loaf of bread, the carved wooden comb, a cloth wrapping; his fingers entangled themselves in a coil of rope he'd brought for some reason he could not now remember, and it seemed for a muddled second as if he'd never be able to get them free. Then he grasped the book, and pulled it from the leather bag. Lady Desire watched him quietly. There was no mockery on her face now, and no triumph, but there might have been sadness. "Against the power that now arises, little mortal," she said, "there is no victory. For the Immortals have taken notice of you now, and your doom is ours."

Draco ignored her and picked up the attached pen, the one with a little tassel of rubies at one end. He held it over the page with no clear idea of what he was doing, and both of them, mortal and immortal, watched a drop of ink gather at the tip and fall. As soon as it touched the yellowed parchment, she vanished. Her last look in his direction was sorrowful beyond the imaginings of woman, and beautiful beyond the dreams of man. His heart contracted. Draco knew that somewhere within himself he would always keep that last glimpse of Desire, and that it was a memory no mortal creature was ever meant to hold.

Then he watched the drop of ink vanish into the page as if into thirsty, drought-parched earth. Long minutes passed, and still he waited. He didn't have the faintest idea what would happen now. But something would, and of that he was sure.

And as he watched and waited, marking time with each breath, a long, slow stroke of ink appeared on the page, shining from within like a piece of jet.

I come.

And Draco knew who it must be.

His hand was shaking so violently that he dropped the pen and had to pick it up, steadying his left hand with his right. Lord Grindelwald? he finally managed to write.

The answering strokes of ink were very slow, as if coming from an unimaginably great distance. I am he to whom you were sworn before your mother gave you birth. You are bonded to me by ties that cannot be put asunder... have you forgotten?

It is Grindelwald, then. It is. The words were thrumming through his head; there seemed to be a hot mist before his eyes, and only one thought, one tremendous mental sensation really, consumed him from head to foot. He has returned. Or he will return. He's coming to me. What a fool I was to doubt. What a fool. Oh, let me be forgiven... He picked up the pen again, his hands strong and sure this time.

I will never forget. I am yours. Yours, mind and soul.

Then, my servant, there is a task you must perform.

Anything, anything. What must I do, my Lord? Only tell me.

The writing appeared again, very slowly, with what he could only think of a distant, wandering quality. Gwenhyfar Weasley...

Shame rushed over him when he read those words. Lord Grindelwald knew, of course, as a spirit of such power always would know. Step by step Ginny Weasley had been leading him from his sworn path, further and further Draco had drifted, and now he had to pull himself back. But he could, he would, he must.

I haven't betrayed you because of her, my Lord, he wrote. I swear, I haven't. But I-- I've done foolish things, I think. I've... she's made me want things that aren't... and then there was the Lady Desire, or maybe a Lord, I'm really not sure, I suppose no-one can be... I'm sorry, he wrote, knowing the words to be fumbling and inadequate, not knowing what else to say.

This is not a matter for sorrow. There almost seemed to be a tinge of amusement in the words. Draco read them and his heart gave an odd little leap, sideways in his chest. He tapped the pen against his cheek, thinking for a long time before writing the next words.

Does the task concern her?

Yes... The ink seemed to fade, and Draco watched it with pounding heart.

Tell me what I must do, he wrote, trying to pour his own strength into the book in some indefinable way, willing Lord Grindelwald's words to reappear.

And the writing did appear, thick, black, and angular once more. You must bind her to you.

"But I already have!" Draco exclaimed. He picked up the pen and wrote, I don't understand, my lord. She is bonded to me already, with a Hexensymbol spell. That was something I did that... may have been foolish.

This I know. Again, the sense of barely contained amusement filtering through the very pages of the book. But you are no fool, Draco Lukas Malfoy.

Draco looked out through the high window, out over the ruined abbey without seeing it, and then turned back to the page. So you're saying that what I did-- maybe it wasn't wrong?

Right and wrong... How very young you are, and how human. You have much to learn, my apprentice.

Draco wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that. But if it's so powerful, then how could I possibly bond her to me in a stronger way? he finally settled for asking.

The response was a long time coming. The winter winds whistled around his ears, and the pink lights just beginning to sift through clouds overhead cast odd, eerie shadows through the half-ruined walls and open ceiling of the Lady-chapel. All the coming dawn seemed to hold its breath for the reply. And by the time Draco saw the crabbed letters appear on the parchment, each one written very slowly, he already knew what it was.

In the flesh.

"What?" he murmured, unnecessarily. "You don't mean-- but--" He knew precisely what it meant. His fingers trembled when he picked up the pen. But that's--it's weakness. It's failure. It's defeat.

Yet it is your desire.

Yes, he wrote, and the bitterness of the admission was like gall. It was somehow worse to see it in writing. But I can't do it. I mustn't give in to it.

Do you know of the Chinese Tao-Te Ching, the Book of Changes?

It's in the library at Malfoy Manor. I've read it. But what does that have to do with anything?

I would draw your attention to the seventy-sixth chapter, my young apprentice.

Men are born soft and supple.
Dead they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant.
Dead they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

Draco stared down at the flowing script, turning it over and over in his head. There was a meaning in those words, he knew it, a meaning that specifically related to him, and he could almost grasp it. There would be no more clues; he knew that, somehow. If he was going to figure this out, it would be on his own. Unseeingly, he stared into the little pool. Lucius Malfoy's words from one year before kept floating back to him, for some reason.

A man's got to know his limitations.

The soft and supple will prevail...

My limitations. What are they? That's simple enough. I want Ginny Weasley. I shouldn't want her. But I do, and I think it could destroy me, not getting what I need from her. But the consequences might be even worse if I did get it. I have no defenses against her in that way. I am a fortress unguarded. So what can all this mean? That I have to hold out against this thing no matter what it costs me? But I can't. Not anymore. I've lost that battle. I knew it before I knelt to Desire. So what now?

My limitations... the supple will prevail...

The page was almost filled with script, but the final words appeared in the remaining space. Think well, my apprentice, on the nature of power, and the getting of power. Think well on the correct time, and the appointed place. And you will know what you must do.

Draco tucked the book back into the bag, and slowly left the room. He saw, without surprise, that the door vanished as soon as he'd gone through it. He walked over to the bed and looked down at the girl moving restlessly on it. He still didn't know if she knew her power over him yet. But it might not matter; even if she herself was innocent, something was moving through her, grasping at him, touching and taking from him. She had turned onto her back and thrown an arm across her face. His hand hovered over her chest, not quite touching it. If he reached under the plaid and ran his fingers along the sensitive underside of her breasts, she would wake, no doubt about it. Then what? Would she fight me? Would she scream at me? Would she just... look at me with those wide golden eyes, expressionless, passive, letting me do what I want, the way she did with Longbottom and Creevey and the gods only know who else? But that couldn't be, because on the night of the Yule Ball... Try as he might, however, Draco couldn't sort out exactly what he'd done, or how she'd responded to it. It had been such madness, that night; nothing was clear, not then or now.

His hand moved down to Ginny's breasts. This was probably unwise. He was going to do it anyway. Draco had to know, whatever the price of knowledge might be.

But he had barely brushed the surface of the plaid before he saw her response; her head fell back, her breathing quickened, and her back arched up towards the palm of his hand. A long moan escaped her lips, a moan with a little whimper at the end of it, and her eyelashes fluttered. "Ooooh," she said, at the very edge of sleep.

Draco's eyes widened in astonishment. That morning, when he'd been holding her as she slept, when this desire had first taken hold of him so very strongly, he'd been thinking that he could make her enjoy whatever happened between them as much as he would. Apparently, he hadn't known the half of it. A thought struck him. She felt this, too; she must feel it. But she didn't really know what it was she felt; perhaps she was too inexperienced to know. He thought again that there was something about her not only untouched but untouchable, walled off from human hands, retreated within herself.

His hand was still hovering in the air, and she was still reaching for it with her entire body; unconsciously, he'd swear. Draco didn't have any illusions that Ginny Weasley would be showing this sort of response to him if she were awake enough to know who he was and what he was doing. He looked at her for a very long time. And as he did so, he felt something shift in him, like earth and sky reversing, and it all fell into place at last.

"Shh, Ginny," he said, lying down next to her, tucking the bag carefully beneath the bed. When he was pressed against her, she gave a long sigh and relaxed into sleep. But Draco lay awake for a long time, his heart pounding with triumph, with satisfaction, with the desire he knew he no longer had any reason to suppress.

A long time ago, he had learned the secret of winning a conflict. You had to let your opponent do the hard work towards his-- or her-- own destruction, to guide his strength towards his weakness, in other words. It had always worked, or nearly always-- with everyone except Potter, really, and in the final analysis even that had been because Draco had held back on that August night, had not pushed his advantage as he could have done. But, at last, he understood that it also worked the other way.

He had believed that this uncontrollable tide of lust overwhelming him for the girl who lay sleeping at his side was the greatest of all weaknesses. He saw, now, that it could be turned into the greatest of all strengths. Fighting it would do no good, so he would no longer batter his head against the walls of it. He would slip in through an unguarded gate, and harness it for his own. It would not take power from him. Instead, it would be the gateway to a power far stronger than any he had ever known. And he would seize that power through the body of Ginny Weasley.

Draco looked down at her. The moon shone full across his hair, turning it a blindingly bright silver, and his eyes glimmered with a hard silver sheen. Slowly, he ran his hand over the length of her glossy hair, and she stirred a little, not quite waking. Everything he had felt before was still in him, but now it was controlled. Locked safely away, until the time came to release it, and he knew that time would come soon. Only a little longer. Tonight, on his seventeenth birthday, one day after the feast of Yule...

She stirred a little, and made a small noise. "Shhh," he repeated in a whisper, pulling the blankets over them both. "Shhh, Ginny. Sleep a bit more. You'll need your sleep for later." Oh, you can't imagine how true that is... She murmured something inaudible and fell back into silence.

Watching her, he wondered idly when her brother and the rest would find her, at what precise moment they'd come running into the room at an inn in Leith. The door would burst open; he'd allow them to do that, since it might lend them a false sense of security. It would make it all the more amusing when they realized how utterly they'd failed. How complete was Draco's own triumph.

For that, he instinctively felt, was exactly what would happen. If brother and sister shared a bond, as Ginny had said the day before-- and Draco firmly believed that she'd been speaking the truth-- then Ron Weasley wouldn't be able to help knowing that something had happened to her, after it happened, something that had caused a great shift in the balance of power. And through that bond of blood, her brother would find her. Too late, of course; that lot was fixed, without their knowledge, to the doom of arriving too late.

Who to imagine in the forefront, Draco mused; who should be the first to see what had happened? Not Longbottom; he was a nonentity. Why they'd even brought him with them was something Draco couldn't understand. Granger? No. Her dark eyes would be scornful, unbearably superior, as she took the measure of them both and found them wanting. No, if he wanted to hurt her more than the rest, he'd had his chance that autumn night a few months before, and it hadn't pleased him to do it then. Potter... well, perhaps. That scenario had its amusing aspects. Draco could certainly picture how utterly the other boy's face would fall once he realized what his rival had claimed before him. To hell with Quidditch games and House Cups and idiotic schoolboy rivalries; this would be the greatest loss of all, one that put every other in the shade... But the plan hit a snag; Potter didn't seem to care about Ginny in that way, so that particular part of it wouldn't be much of a loss to him. He could have had her years ago if he'd wanted her; all he would have had to do was to stretch out his hand, and she would have fallen into his palm like a ripe fruit. But he'd never done it. What a fool.

Ron. Oh, there was a plan to conjure with. The stunned disbelief that would spread over his face when he saw his sister lying in the arms of his greatest enemy. The pain. The betrayal. You'll know a thing or two about betrayal then, Weasley... betrayal, and revenge, that dish best eaten cold. I will be the one who takes revenge for all the Malfoys, for Michel, for Gabriel... and for myself. Because nothing that begins, ever really ends. And the best part of all was that the destructive power would come through the youngest Weasley, the last of the family that had tried to destroy Draco's own. The idea had such a lovely completeness to it, like an elegantly structured spell.

Draco leaned back, running his fingers through a strand of Ginny's hair. Once they reached an inn in Leith that night and she could wash her hair, he'd see that they brought her rose oil to put in it; how lovely that would smell; he'd sift it through his hands and feel it falling across his bare skin...

She made a restless noise again and clutched at her pillow, reaching her hands out a little. He finally understood that she wouldn't go back to sleep fully until she felt him holding her again, and Draco smirked at the thought that this was her unconscious desire, expressed only when she didn't know she was doing it. So he slipped one hand beneath her, snaking the other over her from behind, brushing the tips of her breasts, and she sighed and relaxed back into him. The sensation rushed over him; ah, it was sweet, sweet, to clasp Ginny Weasley close and feel her body against his; he could never get enough of it, he never wanted to be without it, this feeling. No other human being had ever made him feel this, no matter how much their bodies might have pleased his... A faint warning bell seemed to be ringing somewhere in the back of Draco's mind, but he did not hear it. The lure of sleep was too strong, and at last, cradling Ginny against him, he drifted off.