The Quick and the Dead

January 2000

Wiltshire

The January wind blew steadily outside the little marble structure at the edge of the Malfoy estates. Draco thought that he could hear the sound where he stood in the foyer, even through the solid stone walls. He stood staring at the marble steles set around the double doors without really seeing them, absently noting the pyramid and eye designs, knowing that they matched the carvings on the outside of the small building. The room smelled horribly musty, but that was natural enough, he supposed. After all, the Malfoy mausoleum hadn't been opened in well over two years, since the death of his mother. He closed his eyes and thought of how vast it really was, far larger than it looked to be from the outside; there were wings for house-elves and wings for family retainers, rather shabby wings for distant cousins, and ancient wings that had not been opened in five hundred years, and that were meant for the serfs that had once lived on the estate. The main vault was for immediate family members, of course.

The sound of footsteps echoed on the marble flagstones of the floor behind him. Draco thought that they sounded as hollow as the sound of his own heart beating in his chest. I'm being idiotic; I'm sure I can't hear that. If I could hear the wind blowing outside a moment ago, I can't very well be hearing my heartbeat. But I can't be sure which sound was real. Or if either of them were, really...

He knew that his thoughts were becoming random and very strange. It's being in this creepy place. I only need to get back to the house. Then... well, what then? A sort of sensory impression of Malfoy Manor flashed through his mind; its long echoing corridors, its vast empty rooms, its silence. He shuddered. The footsteps stopped. Without turning around, he knew who it must be. There was only one person left besides himself. Few people had been there in the first place; few had dared to come. Pansy Parkinson had been there a little earlier, but Draco hadn't particularly wanted to see her. They had exchanged a few perfunctory words, and she had left early. There would be no funeral collation, no reception. He hadn't wanted that, and there had been nobody else to arrange it.

"Mr. Malfoy," said a low, smooth voice. "The final ceremony has been performed. Would you like to go?"

Mr. Malfoy. The name threatened to send fresh shudders down Draco's back, although it was certainly appropriate for this person to use it. Lambert Mustelidae had been his father's man of business for the past three years, acting as his liaison between the dual worlds of Muggles and wizards. As such, he would never have any reason to call the Malfoy heir by anything but his surname. The only other human being who could have claimed that title now rested in the family wing of the Malfoy mausoleum.

It's over, thought Draco. There is nothing left here for me.

"Yes," he said. "I'm ready to leave."

Outside, Draco watched his breath eddy out into the biting air in little wisps of steam. The engine of the Aston-Martin two-seater idling in the drive made an inviting purring sound, but he made no move to get in. Lambert held the front door on the passenger's side open, looking at Draco questioningly. "Wouldn't you like a ride back to the Manor, Mr. Malfoy?" he finally asked, when Draco did not move. "It's dreadfully cold."

Draco shook his head. The car pulled away, and he continued to walk along a frozen, grey road that stretched into the distance, his breath forming little frozen puffs in the frigid air. A long way off, he could see Salisbury Plain. To the other side, just over a little ridge, was Malfoy Manor. He knew the mass of buildings as well as the back of his own hand, although he could not yet see them. The ivy creeping up the great E-shaped manor house would be brown and dead now, and the winter winds would whip across the curving drive that led up to the stone façade with its rows of mullioned windows. And when Draco walked into that silent grey house, he would walk alone.

It's all mine now, he thought. The grounds, the outbuildings, the house and everything in it... and then a bit in Istanbul, I think, and the London flat, and the property in the south of France as well... He tried to think of golden skies and azure blue seas and white sand beaches, but they seemed as unreal as a fairy tale told to amuse a child. Only the house seemed real. In his mind's eye Draco saw it brooding over Salisbury Plain, where the Muggles could not see it, and did not even know it was there when they actually passed through it. The spell used to accomplish this feat was far older than the Druids that had used the site, so old, in fact, that no living man now remembered that sort of magic, and even the oldest books in the Malfoy library gave no accurate account of exactly how it had been done. The house could even be hidden from other wizards, if necessary, and no spells of concealment or Secret-Keeping would do the job half so well. Draco wondered if it was because the manor never really seemed to be entirely in the real world in the first place.

It always seems as if it might simply pass into the mists one day, like the Way of Karnak, or the Stone Circle of Cailleach, Draco thought tiredly. And if I was in it at the time, nobody would ever know what had happened to me... Would I wind up in the Land of Faerie, I wonder? He shook his head. What dreadful rubbish. He'd hoped that the long, cold walk would clear his head, but it didn't seem to be doing the trick. I need to think about something else. But the only other things that came to mind were the events of the past two and a half years, and how they had led to this day. And that line of thinking, Draco thought, was no improvement.

Lucius Malfoy had been released from Azkaban and cleared of all charges about a year after he was originally incarcerated there, perhaps six months before Draco graduated Hogwarts. It was generally understood that he had pulled all the strings available to him in order to do so. Most of the other Death Eaters, however, had remained. Everyone had expected them to break out immediately. Draco knew that Dumbledore and his crew expected the Dark Lord to make his next move then, as well. But there had been no real activity for almost two years. They had waited and bided their time until everyone was lulled into a false sense of security. Moving earlier would have been the easy way, Lucius Malfoy had explained to his son, the expected way. The plan was more subtle than that. More sophisticated. Draco had listened, and nodded eagerly, desperate to be trusted with the little scraps of truth that his father let fall. But there were never very many.

Draco always seemed to be just on the outer perimeter of the Death Eaters' plans during those two years. Lucius Malfoy trusted him with all of his investments and business affairs, but the door almost always seemed to fall shut in his face when his father met secretly with Thomas Nott or Carolo Zabini or Manfred Goyle. He resented the exclusion bitterly. "The less you know, you safer you are," Lucius would very occasionally say. "Until our plans are complete, it's dangerous to tell you more, Draco." So he had waited, and bided his time, and told himself that his day would come.

Sometimes he thought that the only thing keeping him sane was the delicious secret in his rooms, the one nobody else knew about. Until six months ago, he hadn't even thought that his father knew about that secret. Of course--Draco laughed, short and sharp, and watched his breath puff out in the frigid air--he should have known better. Lucius Malfoy had a way of always knowing everything. Had. Past tense. Yes, his knowledge is in the past now, and nobody knows but me. My secret, my wonderful secret--but I won't think about that just yet. Draco liked to keep even his thoughts about the secret separate and a thing apart, and now he was remembering all of the events that had led up to this day. Strictly speaking, the secret had had nothing to do with that.

When the plan was finally carried out a month ago, Draco hadn't even been in Britain, but in the South of France, visiting the Malfoy property along the Cote d'Azur. He had been dumbfounded to hear the news, and by the time he'd returned, it was all over. The plan had failed utterly. Lord Voldemort had been seriously weakened, the Dementors had been defeated, and Lucius had been killed. Draco had been questioned by the Ministry, of course, but they were unable to establish any sort of link between his activities and those of the Death Eaters. He realized that his father had been very clever in that way.

The days and weeks after his father's death would always be a bit unreal to him, all the details of what he'd done and refused to do a bit hazy. They permitted him to return to Malfoy Manor, since wizarding law didn't permit them to confiscate it without some sort of proof that he'd been involved in the plans. A lot of gold smoothed the way even further. So Draco had come back to the empty house full of echoes, and had gone through the motions of living for a time.

He found that he had no interest at all in the Death Eaters' activities anymore. The remnant that had managed to keep themselves out of Azkaban kept bothering him, and finally he had some of them thrown out when they Apparated in the front hall of the manor. He never quite lost touch with Pansy Parkinson, of course. She had her uses. But Draco realized then that his burning curiousity about their plans and plots and secrets had drained from him with his father's death as thoroughly as water from a bucket with a hole knocked in it. And one week before, the body of Lucius Malfoy had finally been returned.

It can't be, he thought now, kicking at a rock and watching it bounce across the rutted path into the dead brown grass of the fields. He can't have died. It can't have happened. He remembered the still, pale, cold face in the coffin as it was levitated into the vault. But I saw him lying dead. So the impossible has happened. When I looked at him, I knew it was true... because he looked dead, didn't he, not at all like... like... But he forced his mind away from that thought again, at least for the moment.

When Draco's mother had died two and a half years before, her death was not a surprise. Narcissa Malfoy had been young, of course, but the time of death for wizards and witches didn't necessarily have much to do with age. After the events near the end of Draco's fifth year, the will to live had drained out of her like air from a balloon. He had never known why until the very end, when he found the letter, and he truly preferred not to think about that at the moment. At any rate, her death certainly hadn't destroyed his world. True, he had never been quite the same again, and he knew now--although he did not acknowledge the fact very often--that something in him had died, too. Some last tender, human scrap of a self. But he didn't really miss it much, as it had never taken up a great deal of space in the first place. The death of his father, on the other hand, was like the failure of gravity, or a rip in the fabric of reality.

Yet it had come, the impossible thing, the singularity of his father's death. And it seemed right that it should be in this season, the end of this bitter, iron-hard winter. The event seemed to throw open a frozen door through which high winds howled.

What a strange way to think of it, thought Draco. And yet... and yet, perhaps not. A still, small voice in him whispered that certain things were possible now. Things that weren't possible before.

So that was the turning point, Draco later realized; a boulder that triggered the avalanche to come. He did not realize it at the time.

A house-elf took his coat and gloves in the entrance hall. He caught his reflection in one of the hall mirrors with the gilded frames. Colorless hair framed a deadly pale face. His silver-grey eyes were the only part of him that looked alive, and they seemed oddly frightened. He changed from his embroidered white funeral robes the moment he reached his rooms, handing them to a silent house-elf to be packed away. I don't want dinner, thought Draco. I don't know if I ever want to eat again. But I'd better, I suppose...

He turned down a maze of corridors and entered the small dining hall. The larger one had been shut up along with most of the rest of the house; it had seemed utterly pointless to keep so many rooms and wings open for two people. And now, one, he thought. Or is that true? Is it quite, quite true? No. Not now. Dinner first.

The walk had made him very tired. I should have ridden home in Mustelidae's car after all. Idiotic not to, really... He picked at his food once it was served to him by a silent house-elf, moving meat and potatoes and bread around on his plate with a fork. Appetite had left him. Sometimes it would be conjured up during the long walk between his rooms and the table, but not tonight.

The empty chairs at the table stood silently, and the facets of the chandelier hanging overhead reflected flashes of violet and red and green and yellow into his water glass. Silence seemed to have suddenly descended over Draco like a large, suffocating blanket. He really couldn't hear a sound, he realized. There were house-elves, of course, but the mark of a good one was its utter noiselessness. And they really didn't count anyway. He looked around the barren dining room and realized that if you didn't count the house-elves, then he was the only living thing left at all of Malfoy Manor. Lucius Malfoy had been away for almost two months, of course. But he was coming back soon, after the triumphant break from Azkaban, and the shape of his absence had been a thing more palpable than any presence. Now even that hope was gone.

Enough. He pushed his chair back from the table. He didn't want to eat, anyway, not really. He knew what he wanted, knew what he needed, and there was only one way to get it. He needed to see his secret.

In his more lucid moments, Draco knew very well that his obsession with the secret was... well... A little strange. All right, I'll admit that, he had uneasily thought while lying in his bed and staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning a few months before. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the secret's shape on the other side of his bed, unmoving. Sometimes he felt a shiver of dread when he saw it. Sometimes he wondered if he should get rid of it permanently, as his father had finally wanted him to do. Yes. It's a bit strange, I suppose, he had repeated to himself, looking into the darkness as if it concealed an invisible judge who demanded explanation. Sick? The word drifted across his mind as he fell into fretful sleep. No. No. I won't admit that. Then he dreamed of trying to walk through a dark dungeon, his legs fettered by chains. But when he looked down at the chains, they were the bones of human hands, clutching at him as if they still contained life. At last, he collapsed on the stone floor.

"Let go of me," he snarled.

A pretty young woman leaned against the wall and looked at him with great dark eyes outlined in kohl. Her hair was long and black as a raven's wing, and around her neck she wore an ankh on a chain. "Sorry, kid," she said. "It's not that simple."

"If these skeleton hands would just get themselves off me, it would be!" Draco said indignantly.

"Oh? You think that's all the problem is?"

"Well, of course that's it," said Draco, feeling himself fill with a sort of righteous anger that made perfect sense in a dream.

The woman looked at him with something like pity. "Look down," was all she said.

Draco glanced down at his legs, rolling his eyes a bit first. Then he felt something strange. The bones of the skeleton hands bit into his own palms. He was grabbing onto them. It wasn't the other way around. He tried to drop the bones, but his own muscles would not obey them.

"I can't let go," he said in horror. Then he began to cry.

"What's wrong?" the woman asked gently.

"Everything," sobbed Draco. And in the dream, it was true; deep down, in the part of him where there were no lies, he had that bone-deep knowledge.

The woman knelt in front of him, and took him in her arms. He huddled into them like a child. In waking life, he had not wept in front of any other living being since he was six years old. But in this dream, all things seemed possible.

She was still looking down at him. He knew it without looking at her. He wiped his hand across his nose, sniffling, and finally looked up. "Who are you?" he asked.

"Don't you know?" she asked gently.

"Should I?"

She shrugged. Her torn black T-shirt with its twisting silver designs threatened to slip off one moon-white shoulder. "I wouldn't expect most people to know, Draco. But you're a wizard. Haven't you seen me before?"

He studied her lovely face. "I saw a picture of you in my fifth-year History of Magic book once," he said, very slowly. "You were with the other six... Dream, Destiny, Desire, Delirium, Destruction, and... what was the other one... Despair. Yes, that was it. I remember the caption as well. And then there are the seven Endless, those who are before the gods ever were... You are the Lady Death."

She inclined her head.

"But why am I seeing you in a dream?" he asked.

She looked at him very steadily. Her dark eyes contained infinite depths, he now saw. He didn't think it was wise for a mortal to look into them for very long. "Don't you know?" she repeated. And then he woke, gasping, sitting bolt upright, the image of those eyes and the feel of her immortal arms still haunting him.

The secret still lay on the other side of his bed, as it always would lie as long as he put it there, until he moved it again into the little closet off the bedroom where he liked to keep it during the day. The secret would never move on its own. He stared and stared at it. He reached out a trembling hand to touch the long red-gold hair that streamed over the white nightgown. He had touched the secret a great deal when he first brought it home two and a half years before, as much as he could, anyway. The sort of preservation spells he had used meant that there was only so much contact he could have. But he had barely touched it at all in the past several months. He only realized the fact now.

"What have you done to me?" he murmured, knowing that there could be no answer.

And as he continued to look at his secret, Draco had a rare moment of utter clarity that broke over him like a wave. He didn't know if his slavery to the secret blighted his life on its own, or if that would have happened anyway. But because of it, nothing he did or left undone could bring him health of mind or spirit, ever again.

He stared into the darkness until dawn touched the windows of his room. Then he slept a little. When he awoke, he remembered nothing of his dreams.

But, no matter, he thought now, his hand on the doorknob of the door that led to his suite of rooms. I feel sick after that funeral, and the cold old mausoleum, and walking along that freezing road, and coming back to Malfoy Manor all alone. Sick in mind, sick in body, sick in soul, I suppose. I need to see my secret, and touch her, and stroke her hair, and speak to her... even though she can never speak to me...

I need Ginny Weasley.