The Quick and the Dead

The carved oak door to the spare closet creaked open as Draco pushed at it. A shaft of light spilled across the floor and into the dark little room. He could just barely see a tangle of hair, the shape of a chin and a cheekbone, and then, as his eyes adjusted, the slender, motionless form lying on the cot bed in the corner. He sat on the chair he kept at her bedside and looked down at her. The only light in the room came through the half-opened door. Since the closet itself was at the end of a short corridor connecting his suite of rooms, he really couldn't see her clearly. But tonight, he realized, he didn't quite want to.

Draco stretched out his right hand towards Ginny Weasley and skimmed it along the weighty, springy surface of her hair. Tentatively, he touched the petal-soft skin of her face, and then trailed his fingers along her neck.

In the beginning, just after bringing her back here, he loved to run his hands along her creamy skin, bury his face in her hair, and lay his head on her chest. He took great pleasure in touching her as much as he could. The spells he had placed upon her body made it impossible for him to do very much, of course. He couldn't undress her, for instance. The long white nightgown she wore now was the one he had wrapped around her cooling body and stiffened limbs on that day two and a half years before. After all the spells were completed, he could never take it off her again. He could touch her breasts through the enchanted cloth, but that was all, and he actually found that he was rather uneasy about doing that much. I didn't bring her back here for that sort of thing, Draco told himself. I have other girls for that.

But now, he touched her again, and the rush of emotion he remembered so well from the earlier days flooded all through him. It feels so good to touch her. I wonder why I stopped? It happened after that night with Pansy, I think... five or six months ago, maybe... Ugh. I don't want to remember that.

He kept running his hand over Ginny Weasley's motionless body, and tried to keep his mind blank. But the trick wasn't working tonight.

It had happened just after Lucius Malfoy had left for one of his extended trips abroad. Draco knew very well that his father travelled on Death Eater business, and, as always, it had rankled at him that he was never included. He knew, too, that his father was angry with him now because of the secret. He had always known how Lucius would react if he found out. But Draco still wouldn't do what his father wanted him to do.

He had touched Ginny that night when she lay on the other side of his bed, but the contact had felt like he was rubbing a wound that would never heal. He ran his hands up her smooth muscular thighs and taut stomach and rounded breasts and slender arms, feeling her firm warm flesh through the enchanted cloth. Her face remained utterly still, her eyes closed. Finally, he had grabbed onto her hands in a frenzy of desperation he could not understand. "Speak to me, why don't you!" he had snarled, looking into her silent face, knowing that she could not and that his question hovered somewhere between absurdity and madness. Her hands were limp and unmoving in his. At last, he had dropped them, dressed, and left to go to the rooms above the Hog's Head where he sometimes met Pansy Parkinson. He used her roughly, as he always did. But his sexual prowess was a point of pride with him, and so, as always, he made sure that she felt pleasure as well.

Afterwards, Draco lit a Muggle cigarette and stared up at the ceiling, watching the smoke curl towards the window that looked out onto the street. Pansy dressed herself on the other side of the room, not bothering to look at him. They never touched each other after sex; he had tried a few times when they were still at Hogwarts and had just begun to do these things with each other, but she had stiffened in his arms every time, and he had soon given it up.

She stepped in front of the dim mirror that hung over the splintered dressing table and examined her shoulder, pulling down her robe on one side to see. "You bit me," she said. "I wish you wouldn't do that, Draco."

He shrugged, looking at her reflected face looking back at him. "I didn't realize. Do you want me to cast a Healing charm?"

"Don't bother," she said. "I'll do it later." She tilted her head to one side and examined her neck. "There are some bites here, too... you were awfully rough tonight, weren't you?"

Draco took a deep drag on his cigarette. "I thought you liked it that way, Pansy."

She made a noncommittal motion with her head and shoulders and began to brush her hair. He got out of bed and came up behind her. "Well, don't you?" he asked.

"I don't mind," she said.

"What do you mean, you don't mind? Do you like it, or not?"

Her mouth curved into a smirk. "Don't tell me you care."

Draco scowled in irritation. He couldn't understand why he was putting himself to the trouble of even asking these questions, because in truth he didn't care. But his blood felt itchy, somehow, as if he were desperately uncomfortable in his own skin. He had just had over an hour of rough sex with Pansy and should have felt satisfied, for the moment anyway. But he didn't.

"How many times did I make you come, Pansy?" he asked pointedly. "Six, or was it seven?"

Pansy ran the brush through her hair. "Oh, you're good, Draco. You're very good. I didn't say you weren't." But her voice sounded absent and disinterested. She still did not look at him.

Draco didn't know what he was going to do until he did it, but suddenly he was yanking the brush out of her hand and throwing it on the floor. She gave a little cry of pain and fear. He'd wrenched her wrist without meaning to, and for a moment he did feel sorry. But the feeling was much weaker than his flare of anger.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!" he snarled at her.

Pansy stepped back from him, cowering. Draco saw himself reflected in her frightened eyes. At last, he had got a reaction from her. But it satisfied him no more than the sex had, and he felt only shame.

I'm sorry, he thought. Even though it's you, Pansy, I'm sorry. But the two of them never used such words with each other, and he did not know how to say them now. Without another word, Draco grabbed his cloak from the hook on the back of the door and left the room. He had not slept with Pansy since that night. And afterwards, he had scarcely touched Ginny again.

But he was touching her now. He skimmed his hands over her arms as she lay in the cot bed in the dimly lit closet. She feels so warm. I could almost think that I feel her heartbeat, or that I see her chest rise and fall... Oh, I do like touching her. I've missed this. I wish... His mind trailed off without formulating the wish. It felt very difficult to put his thoughts in order, or to clarify them very much. It was as if a large soft hand pressed down on his brain, stripping away some sort of usual barrier or defense.

I wonder why I thought about Pansy? I didn't want to. I feel as if there's nothing left to prevent me from thinking about things I don't want to think about. I haven't felt this way before. I don't really like the feeling... and yet... and yet... Everything felt different tonight, and it frightened him in a way he could not define. He was like a child shuddering in both fear and excitement before a locked door that seemed about to swing open.

He watched his hand skim over her body with curious detachment, almost as if it belonged to another person. I didn't want to do it for a long time. But tonight... tonight is different. How, though, and why?

A bone-deep weariness was beginning to descend on him, and he knew that he had to sleep. Sighing, he pulled the coverlet down her body, preparing to lift her from the cot. .And then he saw it. Or at least, he believed that he did, and it was the first time since she had taken up residence in his rooms that he had.

Her chest seemed to rise and fall, just the faintest bit. He stopped and stared at her. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead. It's impossible. Impossible. Of course it is. It must be only a trick of the light. Still, he waited, looking at her, willing her to breathe again. But she didn't. Ginny was immobile as always, as if in eternal sleep. And she will never wake. It was only an illusion.

Draco wasn't sure if he really wanted her to sleep next to him that night. Still, the habit of over two years was too strong. He carried her into the bedroom and carefully arranged her on the other half of the bed. He pulled the pinstriped sheets up over her chest, and then added a blanket, although she could feel neither warmth nor cold, of course. He folded her hands so that they lay peacefully on top of the wool material. Her long red-gold hair streamed around her head, and her eyes, as always, were closed. She lay like a sleeping fairy princess put under long enchantment. My Sleeping Beauty, he thought. But in the fairy tale, she was awakened with a kiss. And Ginny Weasley could never be. Or... no, I won't think about that now. I'm so very tired.

His body was utterly exhausted, but his mind would not fall easily into sleep. It rarely did. Draco squirmed and turned next to her that night, but he had done that almost every night for the past two years. Certain thoughts always had a way of coming to him then. They were thoughts he could easily deny during the day. But they crept in upon him in those small hours of the night, when he hovered for a long time just outside sleep. They seemed more insistent tonight than they had ever been.

Draco had not remembered certain things for a long time, and he had never remembered them very often. He preferred not to think about them at all. But there was something about the way the house was now, tonight, yesterday, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, all these endless days creeping in their petty pace since every other human being at Malfoy Manor was now gone, except for him, and this indefinable quality stripped away all of his normal defenses against such thoughts. So the hours crept by, and he remembered the events that had led to this night, and why there could be no awakening for Ginny Weasley, not ever.

It had been an accident. He was sure of it. An accident, only an accident, Draco repeated to himself over and over again, staring up into the dark and silent hangings of his four-poster bed. He hadn't come into the prefect's bathroom that day two and a half years before with any such plan in mind. Of course he hadn't. If Draco was to be perfectly honest with himself--which he never was, although there were times in the grey hours between midnight and dawn when a measure of honesty did creep in upon him-- the events of that morning shouldn't have even begun the way they did. He was still never sure exactly why they had. After all, he had been watching her for so long already without ever making his presence known. By then, in fact, that part of it had been going on without her knowledge for well over a year. He knew her habits, her haunts, almost her every movement around Hogwarts. And he had never once let her know that he watched her. He had a habit of watching her swim in the pool in the prefect's bathroom, during the off hours when she knew she'd have it to herself. There were so many peeps around that bathroom, and so many little nooks and crannies in which to hide. It was ridiculous; it fairly cried out for spies.

Draco had just returned from a special pre-dawn class for his seventh year Endings specialization. They had covered Scandinavian death rituals and Egyptian mummies, and were now studying Vodun and Santeria. They had used a special remote viewer to see a midnight ceremony in Haiti. He had not yet slept a wink; his head ached and his eyes burned, and he longed to go to bed, but he had come here first, knowing that he would find Ginny. She had not come to the prefect's bathroom until he had been waiting in his hiding place for over an hour, however. There were moments afterwards when he had wondered if anything would have happened differently if he hadn't had so much time to think about what had happened that week.

He had burned the letter on Monday, burned it to ashes and scattered it on the wind in the field near the clock tower outside Hogwarts. Nothing now remained of it. Yet his mother's dark graceful handwriting still seemed imprinted on the backs of his eyes somehow, as if the words he had read would overlay everything he ever saw in his life from that day onwards. Narcissa Malfoy had died several months before. But Draco had not found the letter until that week, tucked into the very bottom of his trunk. He would not remember what it had said; would not think about what it had meant to read the reason why his mother had lost her will to live after the end of his fifth year, and that it had nothing to do with his father's imprisonment. Yet the physical presence of the letter seemed more palpable than anything in the shadowy, dimly lit prefect's bathroom. Except for Ginny Weasley, when she finally appeared. And after she had undressed and slipped into the pool, Draco had stepped out of the shadows.

The little orange witchlight Ginny kept by the side of the pool had cast its flickering rays over him. For the very first time, she had known he was there. Her eyes had widened, and even before she opened her mouth, he knew that she saw him.

He hadn't meant for what had happened, to happen. He was sure of that. Not that it mattered now. But she hadn't behaved sensibly when she'd seen him, not at all. She'd begun to scream as soon as she'd drawn breath, long, piercing howls that would have brought everyone running from that part of the castle if he'd permitted her to continue. She hadn't paid any attention to his agitated whispers. He'd begged Ginny to be silent, and she'd ignored him. So he'd held her head under water. It was surprisingly easy; he was so much stronger than she. He'd honestly meant to only do it for a few seconds, just long enough for her to calm down, to see reason. But she'd kept struggling. So he'd been forced to continue, and by the time her struggles finally stopped, it was too late. She had floated silently to the surface, her long red hair flowing behind her like water weeds. He had looked into her white still face, and he had known that she would never speak to him now. A word from her might have been enough. But now, neither of them would ever know.

It hadn't taken him more than ten minutes to figure out what to do, his agile, Slytherin brain racing through possibilities as he knelt by her motionless body on the tiled floor of the bathroom. And yet, it was as if his mind had been made up for him ahead of time, and he had only to reason out the only logical solution. He certainly wasn't going to confess to the fact that he'd killed her, no matter how accidental he was sure it had been. Draco certainly didn't want to go to Azkaban. Lucius Malfoy had used up so much of the influence that he'd had with his own release, and now he was throwing all his energies into lying low, and working behind the scenes. A murder charge against his son was the last thing he'd want to deal with. But it was too late for any magical remedy that Draco could think of--too late to call Madame Pomfrey and take Ginny to the hospital wing, too late for one of Snape's potions, too late for her to be revived by any means at all. It was even too late for the use of the Draught of Sleeping Death, because Ginny Weasley really was dead. He stared at her blankly, and then he saw his bookbag lying forgotten on the floor. And then, it was as if it could never have ended any other way.

The students had been preparing infusions of datura all week long in his Endings class. Several of the large, flexible dried leaves were tucked into a zippered compartment of his bag. There was a small pool in a back room of the bathroom, and Draco knew that it was all he needed. Slowly, he rose and walked towards it, dropping each long leaf on the surface of the water until the pool began to turn black. Then he lifted Ginny Weasley from the floor, carefully supporting her neck, and laid her in the pool. After several minutes, he dried her with a towel, wrapped her in long strips of linen impregnated with natron salts from his bookbag, and eased a white nightgown over her head. Then he muttered the words of a Concealment spell and hoisted her over his shoulder.

He did not meet a living soul all the way back to the Slytherin dormitories; it was still much too early for most students to be up. His private room was dark and silent. He opened the trunk at the foot of his bed, expanded it with another whispered spell, and fitted Ginny Weasley into it. Then he looked down at her.

Her eyes were closed, and her red-gold hair streamed over her shoulders. She seemed to be asleep. And Draco knew that because of the spells he had used, she would always seem so. She would never change; he would grow older, but she would not. She would forever be the not-quite-seventeen-year-old Ginny Weasley about to finish her sixth year that he had watched at school. Her family and friends would look for her, of course. But they won't find her, he thought. She's left their world forever. She no longer belongs to them at all...

"You're mine now, Ginny," he whispered. And she was.

One week later, after he graduated Hogwarts, he took her back to Malfoy Manor.

His life after that did not exactly go as he had always hoped it would. Still, time passed. He was taught a great deal about the logistics of running an estate and gradually took over most of the business aspects; he talked frequently to Lambert Mustelidae, dealt with the goblins at Gringott's, and took trips to check on other Malfoy property. But he was not allowed at Death Eater meetings, and was never permitted to take the Mark. He heard stories from time to time about the Weasley family's desperate search for their daughter. Although he always felt his stomach clench and his spine give a shudder when he saw a story in the Daily Prophet, or overheard someone talking about the case in a wizarding pub, Draco knew that he was safe. He had been very, very careful; there was absolutely no evidence to link him with Ginny Weasley. He had seen Potter and Granger in Diagon Alley several times since they had all graduated Hogwarts. Usually they were with Ginny's youngest brother, Ron, who was easily the Weasley he had always despised the most. Draco always fancied that the trio gave him odd looks through narrowed eyes, and started whispering the moment he'd walked past them. He knew that they likely did suspect him, or his father, in Ginny Weasley's disappearance. But they couldn't prove anything, either.

Despite all the travelling he did, Draco felt oddly trapped in Malfoy Manor. He was kept at home every time his father travelled for unspecified purposes, which was often. Then, he would spend long periods of time sitting in the window seat of his bedroom, staring out over the rose gardens, brooding. I'll never escape, he sometimes thought, without quite knowing what he meant. During those times, of course, there was the great consolation of his secret.

But he sometimes wondered if the secret itself was the one thing from which he could never escape.

In the past eight or nine months, Lucius Malfoy had been gone nearly all the time, returning only for brief periods. Draco had to visit Gringott's often in order to iron out his father's instructions about financial transfers with the goblins. More than once, he saw Ron Weasley there. The redhead never said a word, but he looked at Draco every time with a long, cold, measured stare. Draco looked back with a face that was as nearly blank as he could manage. Then he returned to the echoing silence of his empty house. He grew thinner and paler, and grew to dread the evening, when the very bricks and mortar of the manor seemed to brood over some inscrutable purpose of their own. He had never known before that silence had weight, but undoubtedly it did. Its pressure finally grew to be more than Draco could bear.

He bought several purely Muggle items through Lambert Mustelidae, reasoning that he could always hide them when he heard that his father was coming back. They'll keep me busy until then, he thought. And nobody ever has to know. Draco put them all in a little sunroom that opened into a walled back garden. He spent many hours with a new custom-built computer late into the night. In the beginning, he was incredibly jumpy, darting up from his chair at the slightest noise that sounded like a footfall, or leaping almost out of his skin when a house-elf timidly approached with a plate of biscuits for his customary evening snack. But as the months went by, he relaxed. No human being ever disturbed his late-night explorations. Draco finally paid Lambert to have a phone line and modem installed by some Squib technicians, who were accustomed to filling these sorts of orders from curious wizards. He began to explore the monstrous ungainly web of knowledge that Muggles called the Internet. Even though Draco only poked at it cautiously, he had already been unable to avoid learning much more about the Muggle world than he had ever known before.

He had a little television in that room as well. Since Malfoy Manor was magically shielded from Muggle eyes, it couldn't receive any kind of normal signal over airwaves, of course, and Draco wasn't willing to go so far as to get cable. But he sent away for a DVD player and several discs about a week after the modem was installed. He soothed his conscience about owning such decidedly Muggle items with the knowledge that many successful film directors were really Squibs, and he only bought DVD's of their films. D.W. Griffith had been one, and Leni Riefenstahl, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia; Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, and Alfonso Cuaron. Longing for magic impossible to them, they created it through the ribbon of dreams that was Muggle film. Alfred Hitchcock, of course, had been another Squib, and Draco watched several of his films. He liked to curl up on a little couch in the corner of the room and drink whiskey and soda while the television screen cast its flickering light over his face. It all went very well until the night he saw Psycho.

Norman Bates was truly one sick fuck, Draco thought, unsettled, irritated, as he washed himself vigorously in the bath afterwards. Why would anyone make a moving picture like that... I should ask Ziggy about it, he thought, remembering the ghost librarian in the Malfoy library. I'm sure he'd know. But... no. It's funny really. I haven't talked to him in two and a half years... not since...

"Ouch!" he exclaimed, feeling a sharp pain and glancing down at his wrist. Red seeped through the pale skin. He had been scrubbing so hard with a nail brush that he'd drawn blood.

A few weeks later, Draco was reading Paradise Lost online at the Gutenberg Project site. He was able to soothe his troubled conscience by reminding himself that Milton had been a Squib, too. So it wasn't the same, really, as reading Muggle authors. Afterwards, he was never quite sure how it had happened. But he was so utterly unused to Muggle technology that it had taken him a while to stop expecting the mouse to squeak, or the pen that went with the graphics table to cast spells as efficiently as his wand. So it was natural enough that he should have got lost and clicked on the wrong link while trying to find his way back to the page. Or at least, that was Draco told himself later.

One click led to another, and another. He had ranged far afield from the Gutenberg project, but had no idea how to find his way back. This incorporeal thing called an Internet felt real to Draco in a way that it could not possibly have done to a Muggle, and he began to grow as agitated as if he'd actually got lost in some sort of subterranean labyrinth. Oh Merlin, what do I do now? he thought, clicking and clicking in a panicky way, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. And then a page suddenly opened up before him, and his hand fell away from the mouse as his mouth fell open.

The wizarding world had nothing like this. There were books in the Restricted Section at the Hogwarts library, true, and there were rows of shelves in the library at Malfoy Manor that had been closed with a spell until Draco turned sixteen. There were magazines passed around in the Slytherin boys' dormitories late at night; there were boasts and wild stories and whispered fantasies, but Draco had held himself mostly aloof from all of those. The boys of aristocratic wizarding families were introduced to sex in careful, measured rituals that had been handed down for untold generations of purebloods. There was nothing like what he saw now.

Naked women stared out at him from the glowing screen. They flaunted themselves in every way that was possible and some that surely weren't, their eyes lush and avaricious, their mouths parted. One had long red-gold hair and bright half-closed brown eyes, and was caressing herself on a bed. Jennifer likes to touch herself, the caption read. Do you like to watch?

This is disgraceful. Disgusting. Only Muggles would display themselves this way. I should stop looking, I should go upstairs, I should... Draco realized that he was drooling on the keyboard, and wiped his mouth without taking his eyes off the screen.

He had stopped speaking to Pansy. He didn't want to see Xanthia or Sadina. He was too lonely and bored and angry to visit the Crystal Palace. He could not fight the purely physical reaction that throbbed in his veins. He could feel each pulse of his heart, and his skin burned. He glanced down at his hands as if he expected their paleness to have turned bright red. The women beckoned silently from the screen. He clicked the mouse.

The next page was filled with redheads, as was the next, and the one after that. But he couldn't find the girl again. His search for her seemed to go on for hours and hours, although he saw later that it couldn't have done. All sense of time fell away from Draco as he clicked on link after link, always feeling as if she deliberately fled him. But I'm growing closer, he thought incoherently. Closer...

Then an image flickered on the screen, and Draco drew in his breath. He had found her.

She lay limp on a hard table under a bright flat lamp. Her eyes were closed, and her skin was deathly white. Her legs were spread awkwardly, and her hands hung off the edge like broken white birds. He read the caption under her picture.

Jennifer's even sexier now that she's dead. Cum on in and see her at the #1 Necrophilia Site on the Web!

He leaned over and vomited neatly into the wastepaper basket.

Much later, Draco sat hunched in a corner of the room, trying to catch his breath, fighting the waves of sickness still coursing through him. May all the gods together damn those house-elves! They're trying to poison me. I'm sure of it. It must have been the fish at dinner...

He caught sight of the computer out of the corner of his eye. He wiped his mouth with one hand, his eyes fearful.

Muggles are sick. I always knew it. They're not like us... they're...

Against his will, he remembered some of the darker whispers he'd heard about what went on at certain Death Eater rituals.

No. No!

He remembered Ginny Weasley lying silently on her cot in the little closet off his bedroom, her eyes closed, her red-gold hair streaming down her motionless shoulders.

The Muggles who made that page are nutters who ought to be locked up in Azkaban after getting the Dementor's Kiss. Nothing to do with us... with me... with anything I've done, or would ever do. Abruptly, Draco scrambled to his feet.

He went into the little closet and looked at Ginny for a long time. Her skin was firm and peach-colored, glowing with health. Her glossy red hair spread out over the bed. He ran one finger along the curve of her waist. All that he could do was to look at her, and touch her a little; he'd never do more, he'd never want more. Now that would be sick...and it's not what I want, so it proves there's nothing wrong with me. It proves I'm not like that!

Draco liked willing and responsive partners, girls who were enthusiastic and loud, and who let him know in no uncertain terms that they liked what he was doing to them in bed. He loved nothing so much as hearing moans of pleasure while he was skillfully bringing someone to the fifth or sixth orgasm of the night; it was almost as sweet as feeling that ecstasy himself. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his bedmate's pleasure added a diamond-sharp edge to his own. The thought of sex with someone who couldn't do or feel any of these things was not pleasant. Faintly nauseating, actually. He felt his stomach heave a little just thinking about it. Not because Ginny wasn't beautiful still, because she was, and always would be. Not because he hadn't wanted her in life, because he had. But because she would never, could never respond to him.

Draco skimmed his hand just over the surface of her breast. It felt warm, but as still as marble. He turned away, but not before the thought flew through his mind like an unwelcome bird.

What if she could respond? What if she opened her eyes and smiled at me, and held out her arms and said, "Come to me, Draco"? No. She never would, never could. Ah, but why did you use datura, Draco? You'd had the Endings specialization for nearly a year by then. You know what that herb is used for. You know what it means to bathe the dead in datura. You know what may happen to them when this has been done, even years later. You know... you know...

I know that if she was alive, her face would twist with revulsion, looking at me. Then her mouth would open wide in a scream. And she'd kill me, or herself, or both of us together before she'd let me have her in the way I want.

Draco turned away, but it was too late. He had admitted to himself that he wanted Ginny Weasley, wanted her in a way he simply could not have her, wanted to know her in a way he could never know her now. And the knowledge had sunk into the deepest part of his body and his mind, try as he might to deny its power. That had been about six months ago, and he had hardly touched her since.

But one fact still remained, and always would. Draco had come upon Ginny Weasley in the prefect's bath on that morning over two years before, and held her head under the deep water until all her struggling stopped, and she floated on the surface like a piece of flotsam. Dead. It was a fact that stood between him the rest of the world, and always would--although of course the world would never learn it, he reassured himself. But there was another secret he knew, a secret that kept him tossing and turning on those nights after he learned of the death of his father and before the funeral, when Malfoy Manor seemed vast and echoing and utterly empty, and he the only living thing at its heart. Only he and his father had ever known it, and now the knowledge rested in him alone.

For over two years now, Ginny Weasley had not coughed or sighed or spoken, opened her eyes or moved a muscle, eaten or drunk or scrunched up her nose until all her freckles showed or thrown back her head when she laughed until her hair was like a banner of flame or... well, she hadn't done any of the things Draco had secretly watched her do for more than a year before he killed her. But still, one thing was true. Ginny Weasley was dead, all right.

But she was not entirely dead.

Now, Draco sighed. He turned his face to the wall and pulled the covers over his head until he was trapped in a dark, warm cave, and his own breathing was the only sound he could hear. I won't think about these things anymore tonight! There'll be plenty of time tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow I'll decide what to do... And slowly, restlessly, he slipped into sleep at last.