The Quick and the Dead

He moved in a cloud of the greyish fog, broken only by the globes of light that seemed to hang suspended in nothingness before him. He didn't know where he was going, but it didn't matter. The magic was leading him. Dreamily, Draco remembered the way he had felt the first time he had ever done wandless magic, at the age of five. It blurred into his sensations now, and he relived the old memories with startling clarity.

He couldn't remember how he had got away from Tibby, the old house-elf who was his nursemaid, but somehow he was staring up into an apple tree in an orchard on the grounds of the estate. His kitty had climbed up too far and couldn't get down, and she was mewing at him in a frightened way. He had felt the same sense of urgency then. He couldn't risk his father knowing what had happened. Lucius Malfoy already thought that his son was too attached to the kitten, too fond of naming it, and petting it, and sneaking it secret bowls of milk. He could just barely see the orange and white kitten peeping over a branch, its golden eyes wide. It had been far, far too high for him to reach. He could still feel the anxiety he'd felt then, and the terror, almost as great as the terror in the eyes of his kitty. He'd reached his little arms up in a helpless gesture, and for the first time in his life, he had felt the power leave him, discharging through his fingers. The kitten had sailed down into his arms as if on an unseen breath of wind. He had hugged her close, feeling her small furry warmth, and her happy purring. Then he had brought her to the stables and made one of the elves swear to raise her as a barn cat. It hadn't been safe for Draco to keep the kitten any longer.

He passed Borgin and Burkes, and then a two-story building that he knew was Gris-Gris, the club run by Haitian wizards, although he could see no distinguishing features through the fog. The alley ought to have ended, but it did not. He continued walking, still thinking.

Draco didn't even remember what he had named the kitten, although he had dreamed about her golden eyes and soft orange fur for a long time. But he remembered the sensation that had crept through his blood when the power first began to sprout on that day, curiously light and wayward, as if his conscious mind gave up its control and let this strange new thing do with him as it would. There was always a moment of that sensation at the start of any spell, just before the words were spoken, or while a potion was being mixed, or a charm being cast. Never had it felt so strong as now.

The fog began to clear. He saw a small square laid out in a quadrangle. In spring, it might have been a pretty little park, but the grass and shrubs were all brown and barren now. There was a marble statue of a little girl holding a cat in the very middle, and he stared at it for a long time, trying to get his bearings. Certainly, this place didn't exist near any part of Knockturn Alley that he had ever visited; by this time, he should have long reached either a dead end or the connector that led back to Diagon Alley.

Something creaked very quietly in the slight wind, just behind him. He turned his head to see what it might be.

A neatly lettered sign swung from a post in the front yard of a little house painted white on the other end of the square. Draco came close to read it.

Madam Atropos's Book Shoppe.

Draco's heart began to beat very fast. He took several deep breaths, trying to calm himself. I still don't know if this is the place. I don't know if I'll find the book here. I don't know--But he did know. He went up the winding gravel walkway and knocked on the green door. It opened a crack.

"Er--Madam Atropos?" he called.

"Yes, dearie," said a low female voice. "Do come in."

Draco opened the door all the way and stepped into the front room. His first impression was that he'd never seen so many books in all his life. Huge stacks reached up to the ceiling and teetered around him on the floor in all directions. "Er--I can't quite figure out--" he began, hesitantly.

A cackle. "Those that have eyes to see, let them see, little dragon."

."I didn't tell you my name!" said Draco, startled.

"There are those who don't need telling." Clickety-click, clickety-click. A constant little metallic noise drifted to him from the front of the room.

Draco craned his neck, trying to see around all the heaped volumes on the floor. "It's a bit hard to find anything, what with all these stacks of books."

"There's a structure to them," said the voice. "A pattern. Can't you see it, poppet?"

And then he did see it. The seeming endless piles of books were arranged in strange uneven rows, like a three-dimensional representation of some weird mathematical equation. He peered around a corner and through a heap of dogeared copies of Unfogging the Future: The Zero Edition to see a very old witch sitting at a dark wooden desk. She had white hair gathered into a bun and wore a chartreuse-coloured shawl, and was knitting placidly. She seemed to be a very long away even though he saw her quite clearly, as if she were seated at the wrong end of a telescope.

"Right this way, dearie," said Madam Atropos.

He started off quickly, stubbing his toe on several massive editions of Shakespeare's First Folios that were scattered rather untidily about. But the books had the most provoking way of rearranging themselves when he wasn't quite looking. After running into a remainder lot of David Copperfield: Wizard's Ambassador, or Turncoat Traitor? several times, he nearly lost his patience.

"Oh, really!" he muttered, pushing at a stack of Chilton's Small Engine Repair manuals for several dozen of Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines. "This is ridiculous! How can I be lost?"

"It's very simple, poppet," said the voice of Madam Atropos. "You must see through the eyes of magic."

Draco bit his tongue before he could snidely ask if she was related to Sybil Trelawney, by any chance. She might well be, but he had felt the magic which led him here, and had guided his steps to a part of Knockturn Alley that he was not at all sure even existed in the real world. He could not afford to discount any ideas at the moment, no matter how silly they sounded. So he closed his eyes, and breathed in the rich scent of old books and leather bindings. Then he began to walk, very slowly, letting the sounds of the knitting needles guide him. Every once in a while, he opened his eyes for a brief moment. Each time, Madam Atropos and her desk seemed closer to him, and she smiled at him encouragingly. The number of knitting needles also seemed to increase exponentially. Click-clack... click-clack... clickety-clack... And the next time he opened his eyes, he was in front of the desk.

It was very dark. A lamp shaped like a group of lilies hung over Madam Atropos's head and cast a tight circle of light, but outside of that, it was impossible to see anything but the very vague shapes of stacked books receding into an infinite distance. Draco looked behind him, tried to figure out how far the piles stretched, and began to grow dizzy.

"Oh, you don't want to do that, dear," said Madam Atropos. "Never look back. If there's anything I've learned throughout eternity, it's that." Click, click, click went three of the pairs of needles at once. The sight of the light flashing off the silvery metal drew Draco's eyes to her work, irresistibly. It was a long, shapeless mass of some white material.

"What is that you knit, madam?" he asked.

"Shrouds," she said, serenely.

"Oh," said Draco, faintly. A shiver went all through him, but he could not look away. "Madam, do you have two sisters? Clotho, and Lachesis?"

"Yes," she said, smiling at him in a pleased fashion. "It's good to see that young people are still being taught Greek history these days."

Draco did not quite know what to say. Even wizards did not expect to hold conversations with one of the Three Fates at a bookshop in Knockturn Alley. "Er... I always thought you were supposed to cut the thread of men's lives."

"Oh, and I do," she said. "But I also like to knit. It's a very relaxing hobby. You ought to try it sometime." She added another pair of needles. "But we're rather straying from the point, aren't we, dearie? Tell me, what do you want to buy?"

Draco swallowed hard. "I'm looking for a book," he said in a low voice. "It's the book that was used for the Endings specialization at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, about two years ago."

Madam Atropos nodded without the slightest hint of surprise. She reached into a drawer of the desk with one hand, still knitting with the other. How does she do that? wondered Draco. She pulled out a book and laid it before him, then looked up at him with a questioning glance from behind her half-moon spectacles. He reached for it without a word, and picked it up, and read the words printed in gold on the black leather cover.

Endings. Being an exploration into diverse rituals of death and resurrection practised around the world.

Resurrection...

The golden word gleamed in the little pool of lamplight. Draco licked his lips. They had become very dry. "May I look in it?" he asked.

"Just as you like, dearie," said Madam Atropos, finishing off a row. "I don't tell humans what to do. It's odd how often they insist on believing that we indulge in that rather silly activity, my sisters and I."

He began to flip through the book.

"We never got to this part in the class," he muttered. "We didn't have time. And the books were charmed so that we couldn't read ahead in them." With trembling fingers, he turned the page.

The practise of resurrection of the dead is of limited use indeed, unless the corpus be mummy, zombie, golem, or other revenant being, unnaturally created or preserved in the realm between death and life. Then, resurrection is possible. This is a matter of much weight, and some say that it is best never approached by mortals. Still, many have done so. The specific procedures involved vary widely. In the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, for example, we find...

And the words simply stopped. The pages after that passage were blank. Draco flipped through them. "Where's the rest of the book?" he asked.

"Waiting to reveal itself," said Madam Atropos, finishing off a sleeve.

"For what?"

"The proper time, poppet."

"Yes," said Draco distantly, the words seeming to filter through the steady, rapid pounding of his heart in his chest. "I've heard of magical books like that." He closed the cover. "Well, this is exactly what I want, then. What's the price?"

"Oh, I can't tell you that," she said. "You must learn it for yourself, dearie. And you will, in time." She wrapped it up for him in brown paper, humming a song under her breath. It sounded familiar, although Draco couldn't think where it came from, at the moment.

"Oh, I forbid you maidens all, that wear gold in your hair, to come or go by Cartershay, for young Tamlin is there, my love, for young Tamlin is there," she crooned tunelessly. "Here you are, dearie. There's a door out the back. You'd never find your way through the front."

Draco was rather glad that he didn't have to try to make his way through the endless stacks of books again, but he still wondered why Madam Atropos seemed to think he couldn't have done. She chuckled, clearly picking up on his unspoken thought.

"The ways shift, my poppet. You'd most likely find yourself in Delirium's realm if you tried to go out that way now, and believe me, you don't want to end up there. Goodbye now." She picked up several dozen pairs of needles and began knitting again, her fingers moving so quickly that she seemed encircled by dancing silvery lights.

Draco opened a little green door just behind her, and found himself in the entrance to Diagon Alley. When he looked behind him, the little house and the little square were both gone.

*****

Malfoy Manor was as silent and still as it had been when he left it many hours earlier, and yet not so. Something was thrumming at its heart now. Draco could feel it. He ate dinner at the long, empty table mechanically, not tasting the food, simply chewing and swallowing until it was all gone and the plates disappeared. He needed to keep him strength up, after all.

He prepared for sleep, knowing that Ginny lay in the little alcove room, motionless as always. But not for much longer... He went into the room and looked down at Ginny for a long time before lifting her from the cot and settling her into bed with him. Tonight is the last time I shall ever do this. No, it'll never happen this way again. From now on, everything will be different. And his mind spun off into territory so uncharted that he did not dare to even give it a name.

Only once, when he was lying on his side of the bed and had just turned off all the lights, did an unpleasant thought strike him. But how? How will it be different? What kind of Ginny Weasley will I have in my house? What will I awaken?

Draco looked over at the other side of the bed, but her motionless body provided no clue. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared down at her face for a long time. It had no expression whatever. Or perhaps, he thought, it would be more accurate to say that it had the exact expression that any corpse always has, that which rebuffs any conceivable human attitude that anybody could adopt towards it. Draco remembered all the dead relatives he had ever seen laid out in coffins for burial. He remembered the face of his father, arrogant in death even as Ginny Weasley was beautiful in death, for these characteristics were bred too deeply into their bones to be discarded simply because the spark of life was gone. And it is, he thought. For all that she seemed to be sleeping, she was not. She was dead. She had been dead for two and a half years. A convulsive shudder went all through him.

He ran his hand along the side of her face and felt its warmth. She can't be entirely dead, or the preservation spells wouldn't have worked. She seems to be dead. But she isn't. Not really. He repeated this fact to himself over and over until he felt a bit calmer. Then he lay back down, and gave a long sigh.

I don't know exactly what she is, or what she will be. I am using magic that I don't understand. But I feel it moving through me, and I know--know--that it's going to work. I can't care about anything else, not now. And he fell asleep, and almost immediately into dream.

He walked along a road at twilight, when he could barely see the hedgerows lining its sides. They were studded with white flowers that gave off a heady scent. He walked slowly, deliberately, as if he knew where he was going, although he did not. The dusk deepened and the crickets shrilled, and all the while the sweet-smelling flowers seemed to lead him on. At last, he stopped. The sky glowed dark blue through a gap in the hedgerows, and he heard the sound of water rushing. A narrow river flowed by the side of the road, and he looked across it. On its other side lay a meadow. The grass looked very dark in the dim blue light, dotted with larkspurs and bluebells and very white daisies.

A girl sat in the middle of the meadow, her head bent so that he could not see her face. Her hair gleamed red-gold in the faint light. Her slender white fingers wove a chain of daisies, and she sang softly as she worked.

"Oh, I forbid you maidens all, that wear gold in your hair, to come or go by Cartershay, for young Tamlin is there, my love, for young Tamlin is there..."

It was the same song that Atropos had sung, but the girl's voice was young and sweet. She reached down to the grass that surrounded her where she sat and plucked several more daisies, adding them to her chain.

Draco blinked at her. "Ginny?" he asked in a low, incredulous voice.

She raised her head and looked at him, her eyes searching his face curiously. Then she looked back down at the daisies and began on the second verse of the song.

"But Gwen has kirted her green kirtle, just above her knee. And she is off to Cartershay, as fast as she can be..."

Draco looked down at the dark river, and wondered if he dared try to swim. In the twilight, the water seemed oily and black, like some particularly dangerous sort of poison. He doubted that he was getting that impression from the effect of the light alone.

A barge drifted up to him very suddenly, and he jumped. There was a sharp bend in the river as it went into the hedgerows, which might have concealed it. But once again, he wasn't sure if that explained the effect of the boat's unexpected appearance. It was long and low, and draped all in some cloudy black material that blew from its prow. A man stood on the little deck, holding a bargepole. He looked at Draco with large, mournful eyes. And Draco knew with the certainty that can only come in dreams that the man was Charon, ferryman of the dead.

"Do you have the coin of passage?" asked Charon in a voice that seemed unearthed from tombs.

Without the slightest sense of surprise, Draco opened his mouth and took out a Greek coin that had somehow appeared under his tongue. He handed it to Charon. "But it's not for me," he said. "It's for her." He raised a hand to point at Ginny.

Charon nodded. "It is all one," he said.

The barge began to move towards Ginny. She had seemed close to where they were in the river, but even as Charon poled the boat, she receded into the distance. Draco drew in his breath sharply. He stood at the side of the barge that was closest to Ginny, his hands gripping the railing.

"The journey is longer than it looks," said Charon.

"But we will get there, won't we?" Draco asked fearfully.

The ferryman turned to look at Draco with his fathomless eyes. "Do you know the way, little mortal, little dreamer?"

Draco gnawed on his lower lip. "I'm not sure," he admitted. "How can I find it out?"

Charon continued to look at him, steadily. "The wizard knows the spell's worth," he said, and his voice echoed through the world of dream like waves washing against the shore of the dark river, slowly fading into the silence of waking.

Draco's eyes snapped open. He stared at the ceiling of his bedroom, his breathing gradually slowing. A dream, he thought. But... He sat up and tapped the witchlight on the bedside table. But not only a dream. It was a vision of truth in some way, even if I don't know exactly what it meant. I saw Charon, he who ferries the dead. And he said to me, the wizard knows the spell's worth. What did that mean, though? What spell? Where is it?

Slowly, his head turned towards the bedside table, as if guided by an inexorable hand. The gilt lettering printed on the cover of the black book gleamed back at him.

Endings.

He picked up the book and let it fall open to the frontispiece. He turned another page to the start of the book, moved by some obscure feeling that it was the proper thing to do, rather than trying to skip ahead. He began to read.

He read the first part of the book through the early pre-dawn hours, Ginny Weasley lying at his side. Draco glanced over at her from time to time. She looked asleep, as she always did. The difference was that now he could pretend she really was only sleeping. Because now I know what comes next... He leaned over and pressed a soft kiss on her forehead. It felt warm and smooth. He glanced down at her full, pink lips. He might have kissed them at any time in the past two and a half years, but he never had. Draco didn't want to do that when he knew that she could not respond to him, and that he wouldn't feel the stirring pressure of her own lips in return. "Soon," he whispered softly, and went back to reading the book.

After a time, he reached a point where the pages became more and more difficult to turn, as if some unseen hand was pressing back from the other side. He couldn't have said how long that took, but he saw that the sun was high in the sky through a gap in the curtains drawn at his windows. He had got to the end of the section about Scandinavian revenants and grave-goods, and he vaguely remembered that it was near the end of the specialization he had taken at Hogwarts. They had, as he told Madam Atropos, never quite got to the end of the book. With some difficulty, Draco turned the last page he remembered reading in the class.

The next two pages were covered with an illuminated illustration of Charon poling his barge on the River Styx. Since it was a magical drawing, Charon was moving.

This is it, Draco thought, calmly.

The words below the picture of Charon were the same ones he had read in Madam Atropos's Book Shoppe. But they were written in blackletter script now, dark and ornate, and as Draco read them, they seemed to twist and writhe on the page.

The practise of resurrection of the dead...

And then Charon looked up at Draco, and held out his hand, white and nearly skeletal. It seemed to reach through the page in a swirl of mist. Draco reached out his own hand, and felt the utter cold of the fingers of the ferryman of the dead.

"Come," said Charon, and Draco did.

Later, he could never begin to piece together all the details of what had actually happened during that long, strange day. He always dimly knew that he was reading the section on resurrection, and sometimes specific passages seemed to jump out at him and stick in his memory.

He who casts this spell must draw a pentagram upon the floor, and place the revenant within...

Food and drink must be made ready, for the pull of life upon the body must be reawakened at once.

Awaken with a kiss. For the revenant must receive the first breath of renewed life from the lungs of he who revives.

Draco knew, too, that he had carried Ginny into a large unused anteroom just outside his suite, and laid her carefully in the middle of the floor. He had drawn a pentagram around her body with a piece of chalk. Then things grew hazy again, but he was sure that he had spent the entire day mixing potions and distilling essences at a table, and stirring something in a cauldron that sent up clouds of steam and smoke.

Yet even as he worked through the day at Malfoy Manor, he also sailed on the slow-moving barge of Charon, hour after endless hour, watching Ginny draw closer and closer to him in the meadow. He was never alone. Charon stood silently in the bow of the boat, and a changing pantheon of other preternatural beings kept appearing at Draco's side.

The jackal-headed god Anubis joined Draco for a while, and then Osiris, the Egyptian Lord of the Dead. They didn't speak. Draco wondered if that was because they only knew ancient Egyptian, or if it was some other reason. He thought of asking them to say something anyway, as he'd always been rather curious about what that language sounded like. But when Draco turned to Osiris, he had been replaced by the grinning, skeletal Mayan goddess of the dead, Mictlantecihuatl.

"You wanted something?" she asked, holding up her bowl of blood.

"Er--no," said Draco hurriedly, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on the floorboards of the barge.

He seemed to come back to himself a bit then, and found that he was cutting up strange herbs and not knowing where they came from, the book lying open on the table in front of him. It showed a dark plant that twisted across the page in curious shapes. When he touched the illustration, it bit him.

"Ouch!" Draco snatched back his finger, sucking on the blood that dripped from it, and for an instant, he knew real fear. But he firmly tamped it down. He knew that as long as he worked in this trance, he was doing what he needed to do. And he could feel the magic coming closer and closer to its completion.

He continued to work, measuring potions, laying out ingredients. The magic thrummed all through him like a song that never varied, although he could never remember it afterwards. Draco had been a wizard all his life long, but he knew that he had never been possessed by the sort of power that worked through him today. After a little while, the magic intensified, and he opened his eyes to find himself on the boat again.

Mictlantecihuatl had disappeared. Bodgar and Samhain, the Norse and Celtic gods of the dead, were sitting comfortably cross-legged on deck and playing a spirited game of Go Fish

"Got any spades?" asked Bodgar, fingering the luxurious twin mustaches that drooped nearly to his waist.

"You would have to ask that," sighed Samhain, pushing back the curls of copper hair that rioted around his pale face. "And I was winning, too."

"Lemme see."

"Oh, all right!" With a flick of his wrist, Samhain fanned out what seemed like an impossibly large number of cards. Every one was the ace of spades.

"Ha!" said Bodgar triumphantly. "Six hundred and sixty-six of a kind for me!"

"I wonder why all our games always seem to end this way," said Samhain thoughtfully.

It all made Draco vaguely nervous. He turned back to look at Ginny. She was still weaving her eternal daisy-chain, and still singing.

"If you go by Carter Hall
You must leave him a wad
Either your rings or green mantle
Or else your maidenhead..."

Somehow, it was still twilight, which made no sense at all, he thought. He felt as if hours and hours had already gone by. The light touched the golden highlights in her hair, which was gathered into two long, thick braids, one falling over her back, and one over her breast. The nape of her neck was tender and white and exposed as she bent over the flowers.

"Ginny," Draco whispered, and then again, more loudly, "Ginny!"

"She can't hear you," said a kindly voice. He turned to see Lady Death lounging against the side of the barge, her glossy black hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, her dark eyes lined with kohl.

"It's you again," he said. "You were in a dream I had, I think."

"Yup," said Lady Death. "Hi, Draco."

"But it wasn't like this," he said thoughtfully. "That was just a dream. But this is more than a dream... what is it, exactly?"

"You're calling up magic."

"It doesn't feel like any magic I've ever done, though."

Lady Death looked at him, and he thought that there was something like pity in her eyes. "That's because it isn't like any magic you've ever done."

"It's more powerful, isn't it?" he asked, his voice tinged with triumph.

She nodded.

"Ha!" He leaned against the prow of the boat, smiling smugly. "They don't teach anything like this at Hogwarts."

"They sure don't," she sighed. "Mortals usually have more sense than to try it."

"I think I can handle it," he said, although the look on her lovely face was starting to make him nervous .

"Do you?" Lady Death asked. Then she moved close to him, and caressed his head with one of her slender white hands without quite touching his hair. He closed his eyes. "Oh, Draco, Draco," she said.

"What is it?" he asked.

"You'll find out," she answered.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw that there was a smile upon her lips. As slight and sad as it was, he still thought that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Then he looked back at Ginny weaving chains of flowers, and was no longer so sure.

Beside him, Lady Death moved closer still. He could smell some scent or perfume coming off her body, something fresh and herbal and bittersweet.

"Do you want some advice?" she asked.

He made a noncommittal movement with his shoulders, still looking at Ginny. He was definitely feeling quite uneasy now.

"Mortals never do," she said resignedly. "But I'm going to give it to you anyway."

"Of course, Lady," he said. It was unwise to anger one of the Immortals, he knew.

"I don't think you're going to want to hear this."

"Any wisdom from an Immortal is always welcome," he said. The boat was drifting closer to Ginny now. He could see the exact texture of the skin on her neck where it met the fine wisps of coppery hair on her head.

"It's dangerous to touch those who have returned from my realm." said Lady Death.

"Dangerous to her?"

"No. To you."

"Why do you tell me this, Lady?"

"Well, that's what you want from her, isn't it?"

Draco squirmed slightly. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do. But never mind. What will be, will be." She passed her hand over his face, and he turned to her at last.

"Awake," she said, and he did.

Draco opened his eyes. He was standing directly over Ginny, who was still lying on the floor. Her hair streamed over her shoulders, and in her hands was a wreath of daisies. He found that he did not want to think about exactly where they had come from. At her feet smoked a brass tray of incense, giving off a heavy, sweet smell like the distillation of a thousand flowers. The curtains were drawn back from the window above her head, and the full moon had risen high in the sky. To one side of her lay the book, its covers closed. Beside it were a glass of deep red wine and a plate of bread sprinkled with salt.

Draco stared at it all rather stupidly for a moment. I did all this, he thought. I don't exactly remember it, but that's what I must have done. But now what?

He caught a glimpse of a pale figure draped in black robes on the opposite wall, and realized that it was a mirror. I look like an albino bunny rabbit, he thought. And I feel a perfect idiot. I don't have the faintest idea what I'm supposed to--

A breeze stirred the still air of the room, causing the clouds of smoke from the incense to move in odd patterns. It touched the book, riffling the pages. They fell open. The parchment was white and empty.

Slowly, Draco walked to Ginny's side and knelt down. The floor grated against his knees, but he scarcely noticed. Shreds of memory chased each other through his head. He had read what to do next at some point during the day, if he could only remember....

Draco looked over at the book. Words appeared, written in shining black ink.

Awaken with a kiss.

And then he did remember.

He leaned down to Ginny Weasley. "Awake," he whispered. Then he pressed his lips against hers. They were soft and warm, as he had known they would be. But they were as motionless as marble.

An awful sensation of panic shot through him . It didn't work! No--no--it must have worked. I only need to do it again; once wasn't enough. He kissed her again, harder this time. The unresponsive feel of her mouth sent ice up his spine.

It can't be. It just can't. Not after everything that's happened!

In desperation, he took her by the shoulders and shook her. Her head bobbled back and forth, and her eyes stayed closed.

"Wake up, damn you! Wake up. I won't let you stay dead--I tell you I won't, Ginny, not after everything I've gone through for this. Wake up, wake up, wake up..." Draco chanted, his breath coming in gasps, a choking sensation rising in his throat. He could see himself in the mirror on the opposite wall, his face deadly white and contorted with fury or fear or some utterly unnamable emotion that terrified him even more. He knew that he looked completely mad. I probably am, he thought incoherently. Or headed that way, at least. This absolutely can't be happening. She's got to wake. She's got to!

He gathered her to him, lifting her shoulders from the floor so that her head fell back, her masses of hair brushing the pentagram. "Wake up for me," he whispered, hardly knowing what he was saying. "Come back to the land of the living for me, Ginny. Only for me. You've got to." His voice began to break. If I start to cry, he thought, it'll be over. All over. I'll fall apart. I don't know what will happen then. The house-elves will find me when they come in to clean, I suppose, and lock me up in the unused wing of the house, and take care of me the way they did for mad old Uncle Augustus...

And knowing that he hovered at the very edge of sanity, Draco pressed his lips to Ginny's one more time, no longer expecting a response.

Her mouth moved violently. She gave a long, inelegant, shaky gasp. She took her first breath since the morning he had found her in the prefect's bathroom at Hogwarts in the spring of her sixth year, and it came directly from his lungs. She made a strange whimpering noise in her throat.

Draco simply froze for an instant. His mind and body seemed turned to ice. Somehow, he managed to hold her away from him a bit, and to scan her face, looking for the signs of what he did not dare to even hope to see.

Her eyes snapped open. For the first time in two and a half years, he looked into them. They were bright golden-brown, and wide with terror. She opened her mouth.

And Ginny Weasley began to scream.