Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Thirty

The Slytherin Common Room was in deliberate chaos. Draco stood in the corner nearest the door, a pile of trampled parchment and assorted bric-a-brac at his feet. He held the empty drawer that had once contained it all in his hands, his lips twisted into a frustrated snarl. He tossed it aside with a snort and reached for the next one, his fingers curling gracefully around the tarnished pewter handle.

"Get a move on, Goyle, those Ministry bastards will be along as soon as they can manage it," he snapped, and jerked the drawer from its housing. Behind him, Goyle grunted and increased his pace from standstill to creeping ennui.

Draco was sorely tempted to turn and lob the heavy wooden drawer at his thick, slab-like skull, but that would waste precious time, time they didn't have, so he shelved the idea in favor of dumping the contents of the drawer onto the plush Persian rug. The next followed suit, and the next, and when all the drawers had been pried from their sockets like rotten teeth, he crouched and began to sort through the mess.

Rubbish, all rubbish. He hadn't expected to find anything, but there was no harm in being thorough. He tossed aside a garbled love note dated three years past and rubbed his hands together in slow, contemplative circles. The others were working, too, searching for anything that might incriminate Professor Snape. Pansy was by the fireplace, her back mercifully turned to him as she fed suspicious papers into the crackling hearth. Most of it was personal correspondence from "Master" Parkinson, as he fancied himself, and he had no doubt that Ministry officials would find them most interesting.

He watched for a moment as the voracious, licking flames devoured the Parkinson family secrets, then returned his attention to the mound at his feet. Muffled scrapings and thumps sounded from overhead, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Crabbe pause in his riffling of Housemates' satchels to gaze up in befuddlement. He swore under his breath. He'd be lucky to dispose of anything with this lot. Not a brain between them.

"Crabbe," he hissed through clenched teeth. "Compelling though it may be to listen to the prehistoric thrashings of Millicent Bulstrode, you're wasting time."

Crabbe started and spared him a furtive, sidelong glance. "Sorry, Draco," he muttered, and his blocky, trollish hands resumed their indelicate work.

Draco shifted on his haunches, and his knee emitted an indecorous pop. His hands descended on the pile again, and his keen grey eyes inventoried everything at a glance, assessing worth in the blink of an eye. His first impulse had been to destroy everything, burn it all, leave nothing whatsoever for them to find, but it had occurred to him that finding nothing could prove more damning than finding anything short of a confession written in the professor's hand and signed with his blood. They'd know the room had been cleaned, know they were hiding something, and if they couldn't discern precisely what that was, they would gladly invent a sin with which to condemn their Head of House. Upstanding Ministry officials were only too happy to pillory a Slytherin whenever they could.

They seem to leave your father alone well enough.

Yes, well, as I've said before, money heals all wounds.

It wasn't as it they hadn't tried to bring him down. His mother was ever boring him with the same tired tales of Ministry harassment after His Lordship's fall. As soon as he was old enough to pull himself upright on the hem of her gown, she recounted the horrors of Father's trial, entrapping him in an overstuffed parlor chair and plying him with biscuits to buy his silence while she twittered inexorably about the Ministry's ineptitude and ill-disguised prejudice against Slytherins and Purebloods smart enough to know the dangers Muggles and Mudbloods posed.

Weary as he had grown of his mother's prattle, he was sure the story wasn't far from the mark. He'd been a mere infant at the time of his father's trial-which his mother vehemently referred to as The Persecution-but the Flourish and Blott's periodicals archive was well-stocked and open to the public, and he had spent many an afternoon in the summer after his first year entrenched amid the musty, moldering stacks inhaling ancient dust and reading of the trial for himself.

He supposed he could have spared himself the trouble, tedium, and grime by simply asking his father, but he had wanted to see it in black and white, view it from the enemy perspective. His father never asked where he went during those long, stuporous summer afternoons. He had been too busy organizing and regrouping Voldemort's scattered forces after his spectacular defeat at the hands of Potter. It was likely he never noticed his long absences, and even if he had, it wouldn't have mattered. As long as he was accompanied by Crabbe and Goyle, he could go wherever he pleased.

For a week that summer, he sat cross-legged on the floor, nestled awkwardly in a corner and all but buried beneath old issues of the Daily Prophet, learning the truth as the unwashed rabble saw it. By the time he was finished, the tops of his hands were raw from constant rubbing, and his fingertips were gritty with newsprint. Dust coated his nose and throat and misted on his wintry eyelashes. But he had the knowledge he had sought, been dizzy with it.

Things were much as his mother had said. A week after the Dark Lord's defeat, Aurors had come to Malfoy Manor and arrested his father. A picture on the front page of the 6 November issue had shown him, thin-lipped and regal, being led away while his mother watched, dry-eyed and bland. He had been in his mother's arms, one tiny fist crammed into his mouth. Three months after that, his father's trial had begun.

The papers had been overflowing with lurid details of night raids on Mudblood homes and the savage butchery of Light supporters. Sobbing survivors had recounted atrocities, each more horrifying than the next, sending trial observers into ecstasies of self-righteous rage. When asked to identify the ringleaders, each had pointed a quavering finger at his father, and with each new accusation, the courtroom had seethed in anticipation of seeing a Kiss administered.

That had not counted on his father's solicitor, who turned out to be a bitter, ingenious bastard as cunning as Salazar Slytherin himself. One who actually paid dividends far exceeding their cost. He had let the victims wail and keen and point their damning fingers at his client with nary a whisper of outrage. As the days had stretched into one week and then two, he sat behind the defense table with his hairy, large-knuckled fingers tented beneath his jutting, square jaw and his squinting eyes riveted to the testimony box. No matter how graphic the description, he never quailed, and he never, ever spared Lucius, lock-jawed and strapped into a chair in the center of the room, a glance.

He hadn't gleaned all of this from the papers, of course. Most of the intimate details had been gleaned from eavesdropping outside his father's study door on the nights when he invited one of his sycophantic lackeys to the Manor for drinks and strategizing. Soon enough, after one too many swallows of brandy, the real talk would begin, his father's cultured, clipped voice seeping through the thick wood like perfumed fog, blunted by distance and too much drink. The other never spoke, or if he did, Draco had never heard him, and in those rare few moments when his father's cautious tongue was loosened, he came to the truth. As close as he was likely to get, anyway.

After the prosecution rested its case with an eloquent oratory damning his father as a soulless, craven coward who had betrayed his world for his own gain-a statement that prompted a boisterous standing ovation from the gallery-his father's solicitor rose, walked to the center of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, stood beside his father's chair, turned to face the hostile gallery, and told them that Lucius Damocles Malfoy had done everything of which he was accused.

There was a moment of dumbfounded silence, and then pandemonium erupted. The chief solicitor for the prosecution leapt to his feet and accused the defense of trying to win a mistrial by virtue of incompetent representation. A victim's widow swooned in the gallery and was nearly trampled by the seething mass of witnesses and unabashed gawkers hoping to see a tidy death. The Chief Warlock pounded his gavel until it snapped, and when that did nothing to quell the surging mob, he beat upon the bench with his fist and bellowed for order.

Through it all, his father's solicitor never moved. He watched, and he waited, and when the crowd had spent its wrath and flustered Aurors had removed the most vocal of the onlookers and the unconscious widow, he continued as though there had been no interruption. Mr. Malfoy, he told them, in a voice that dripped surety and rationality, had done those terrible deeds because he could not not do them. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had usurped his will, forced a good and decent man of noble birth beneath his merciless yoke through the Imperius Curse. His will and his mind were not, and had not been, his own, and under their laws, he could not be held morally or criminally responsible for any acts committed beneath its thrall.

There were sputters of outrage from the prosecution and the gallery, but they did not change the intrinsic truth of his statement. If a person had committed a crime while under magical duress upon his faculties, or while his will had been supplanted by the will of another through magical means, then he could not be held accountable for those actions, no matter how heinous or detrimental to the public. In other words, if his father were under the influence of the Imperius Curse, then he could admit to every last atrocity and still leave the courtroom a free man.

The legal wrangling and fallout had raged for a week, but in the end, his father walked down the Ministry steps, flanked by his wife and infant son and smirking as if the outcome had never been in doubt. In truth, it hadn't been. The moment his solicitor invoked the possibility of the Imperius Curse, there could only be one verdict. It was the perfect defense. While it could not be definitively proven that one was operating under Imperius, neither could it be disproved, and rather than risk sending an innocent man to his death, the court had no choice but to err on the side of caution and set him free.

The Light ensnared by its own lofty ideals. Imagine that.

He sneered as he sorted through the various crumpled, tattered parchments and forgotten trinkets strewn at his feet. He picked up a cracked Remembrall, shook it, and dropped it again. He thought of Longbottom, that simpering, fat twit from Gryffindor. He was always getting them in his owl post, though Draco couldn't see why for all the good they did. The brainless sod was constantly misplacing them, which defeated the entire purpose of having one. Anyone who needed a Remembrall to find their Remembrall was a blithering idiot and had no business being at Hogwarts.

Then again, the idea of standards had never troubled Dumbledore. He let anyone with a wand through the school doors without a thought for the consequences. Mudbloods, Squibs, half-breeds, and freaks, all, and he welcomed them without a care, with open arms. Ridiculous. And dangerous. That brainless, lumbering oaf with the dubious title of Care of Magical Creatures Professor was a case in point. He'd nearly cost him his arm with his bumbling ineptitude, and nothing had been done about it. The bloody bird had been sent to its just reward, but Hagrid still had a job.

Any feeble hopes that he might have learned better since then had vanished with the arrival of that wretched, cheeky transfer student. Any wizard worth his robes could see that she was a disaster waiting to happen and an affront to the sensibilities, but Dumbledore refused to be swayed. Professor Snape had spent the past two months waiting for his classroom to be blasted from beneath his feet while he tried to drag the loony Headmaster into the scalding light of reason, but the old man was intractable as the devil.

Professor Snape. There was no denying that he was in a great deal of trouble. Fudge was a fool, and one didn't have to be a seer to realize that he had already determined the professor's guilt. He was frothing to have him away to Azkaban, where he could torture him at his leisure, no doubt. For all the hue and cry the Ministry raised about the evils of Unforgivables in public, they certainly had no aversion to using them and lesser hexes when it suited them. His father still bore the scars of his brief internment there, thin, faint lines of bloodless, puckered flesh that winnowed from the pale curve of his shoulders to the small of his back.

There was little worry about him divulging sensitive information to the Aurors. Professor Snape was a loyal follower, and he would kill himself before he betrayed his cause. Not like, Father, who though he believed every tenet espoused by His Lordship, would turn from it the moment it was no longer prudent or profitable. Father called it prudent strategy. Draco called it prudent cowardice.

Cowardice or not, it saved you from a life of disreputable penury. Had it not been for his shrewd renunciation non voce, Malfoy Manor and everything in it would have been ceded to the assets of the Ministry and ended up in the hands of Mudblood gentry. As it is, one can hardly accuse you of bravery in the face of danger. Left Potter in your dust that night in the Forbidden Forest.

He had been eleven, not twenty-six, and he wasn't about to risk his skin for Potter when his father was busily weaving his noose. No Malfoy would ever shed his blood for the sake of a Potter. No Malfoy would shed his blood at all, if it could be helped. It was too precious to waste on fruitless martyrdom and useless heroics. In that instance, discretion had been the better part of valor.

And yet your father was a coward? Bit selective in your application of the term, are you not?

My right as a Slytherin.

Questions about his father's character aside, he wondered why he'd done nothing to hinder the Ministry investigation. Surely the owl had arrived in time? His eagle owl was the fastest, most reliable in the school, and he could easily cover the distance from here to the Malfoy estate in a matter of days. He should have arrived no later than last evening. If it turned out that the beast had botched things, his feathers would be in Draco's pillow before he'd landed on the window eave.

That owl has never bollixed a delivery, not even in a driving blizzard. If your father isn't here, it's because he's chosen not to be.

More selective cowardice, then?

If it were, it was an extremely inopportune time for him to misplace his usually formidable spine. Malfoy family money and connections were Professor Snape's only hope. The leeway extended to others accused of murder was not offered to Slytherins, especially not those suspected of being Death Eaters, and the professor, by virtue of his terminal misanthropy, had made sure even his Slytherin pupils preferred to leave well enough alone.

He couldn't imagine his father refusing to help Snape. It wouldn't sit well with the Dark Lord, for one thing. His Lordship enforced a strict policy of group cohesion among the members of his inner circle. Internecine personal squabbles were put aside in the name of achieving greater ends, and dissent was quashed with breakneck force. That was, until His Lordship grew weary of someone within the ranks. When that day came-and it always did-support was covertly, unceremoniously withdrawn, and the offender was abandoned to his fate, or, if the Fates seemed predisposed to kindness, throttled in his bed or assassinated in his tea garden along with his family and servants.

Maybe that day has finally come for the good professor, and your father is discreetly distancing himself. He's always been able to smell blood in the water before anyone else. It wouldn't be the first time.

He paused in the middle of crumpling a blank piece of parchment, his heart thudding painfully in his chest. The thought made a horrible sense, but it couldn't be true. According to his father, Professor Snape was a valuable member of the Dark Lord's inner council, their eyes and ears in this otherwise unbreachable castle. They needed him and the information he provided, and they would until the coming war was over and Potter's bloody, defaced corpse lay crumpled at Lord Voldemort's victorious feet.

Politics aside, he admired the professor and his discerning eye, not to mention his utter disregard for the established rules of etiquette. He unleashed his poisoned wit on anyone he chose with no fear for repercussions or eventual comeuppance. He thought his father did, as well. Or had. The professor had often been a guest for drinks at the Manor and attended the lavish summer dinner parties his father hosted.

He didn't come last summer. Four parties, and he never came. He stopped coming for cocktails, too. Your father's owl delivered hundreds of cocktail invitations from June until the end of August, every single one of them penned in his graceful script, and none of them bore Professor Snape's name. And you thought that was odd, because until then, an invitation a week had gone out.

He let the ball of parchment drop and rubbed his hands together. His mouth was dry and his stomach was a heavy, shrunken ball. Things were clicking into place in his mind, sliding home with a sound like rattling bones, and they were forming a chain of thought he did not wish to pursue.

If His Lordship has wearied of Professor Snape, who has proven to be of incomparable value, and who has never disavowed him, what will he do to Father, whose schemes have failed, and who claimed no willful affiliation with him? What will he do to me?

That didn't bear thinking about, and he was almost grateful when Millicent Bulstrode thundered down the stairs and clapped a sweaty, beefy hand on his shoulder.

"Me and Dina didn't find anything," she told him between breathless pants.

"Dina and I found nothing," he corrected irritably, and shrugged her grimy hand from his shoulder.

He dropped the parchment he'd been absently examining and sighed. He hadn't expected to find anything. Professor Snape was no fool, and he would never leave incriminating evidence lying about for the world to see. He had just needed to do something. Anything but sit on his hands and wait for the next capricious whim of Fate to decide the House's direction. There had been too much waiting, too much biding of time, too much acquiescence to Gryffindor will. It wasn't right for such a proud House to suffer such subjugation without a whimper. It was time for them to act, to prove that the Slytherin serpent still had fangs.

Surge of inexplicable civic-mindedness aside, such inactivity reflected badly on him, on the family name. Their wealth and powerful had made them the de facto student leaders of the House, though most of the time, they were content to bask in the grudging reverence and toadying of the title without doing anything to earn it. His father had never organized so much as a Common Room party during his time here, and with Professor Snape at the helm, Draco had neither reason nor motivation to aspire to more.

If His Lordship has truly singled the professor out for excommunication, now is not the best time to assert your claim. Better to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.

Maybe so, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Professor Snape was too valuable a Slytherin to lose, and sending him to Ministry clutches unopposed went against his nature. Malfoys never gave the other side what they wanted, no matter how useless and insignificant it was. What was theirs remained theirs until they were finished with it, be it man, beast, or trinket, and Professor Snape was his Head of House. He'd be damned if they'd take him.

But His Lordship-

Didn't own him. Not yet. Not until the brand was seared into the flesh of his forearm and tears streamed down his cheeks like blood. Until then, he was free to make his own decisions. Besides, neither his father nor His Lordship had ordered him not to interfere. If and when they did, he would leave it alone. But galvanizing the Slytherins, who had spent far too long in the coddling, stultifying sway of their own apathy, would look splendid when it came time for his initiation. It might even catch his father's notice.

"Goyle, Crabbe, gather everyone and get them in here now," he ordered. "And when you've finished, go watch for those damned Aurors. Now that they've gotten the professor out of the way, they'll be frothing to take this place apart."

Professor Snape had never returned to the Common Room. They had waited until dinner, glancing uneasily from their homework each time the portrait hole opened, and when he failed to turn up for his customary adjournment in his office, they had marched to the Great Hall in a stiff, formal line, stomachs and footfalls heavy with apprehension. They had expected to see him in his seat in the Great Hall, but the magnificent chair had been empty, and it had dawned on all of them then that things were terrible indeed, the realization sweeping through their ranks like bitter winter chill and turning their warm suppers to frozen rubber in their mouths.

One by one, Housemates trickled into the Common Room, coming from the dormitories and the lavatories. Some clutched textbooks or satchels, but most came with nothing but their wands and a befuddled expression. They perched themselves on sofas and chairs, and as they gathered around, all elbows and knees and black robes, they reminded him of clustering ravens-awkward, watchful, and silent. Some of the younger ones sat cross-legged on the floor and clutched sofa pillows.

He wasn't sure what he was going to say. He'd never tried to assume leadership. It had always been handed to him as a right of his bloodline. He saw it ever day in the simpering, sycophantic worship of Crabbe and Goyle, a worship ensured by generous financial bonuses on Boxing Day. He'd never tested it to see how far his supposed authority actually stretched. Suppose he tried to assert control only to find it was an illusion, a farce in which his life of privilege had allowed him to indulge? Did he really want to find out?

Professor Snape's fate was already sealed. Fudge would throttle him with his own hands if it came to it, and that barmy, biased fool, Dumbledore, wouldn't lift a finger to stop him. He had been undercutting the professor's authority for years, particularly when it came to the blessed Gryffindors. Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw could languish under his venomous lash until the sundering of the world, but let a Gryffindor feel the sting of his discipline, and along would come McGonagall or Dumbledore with a soothing balm of fifty points to Potter for blowing his nose to the tune of "God Save the Queen."

Then why bother?

Because they cannot have what is mine, and it's as good a way as any to hone my skills. You can't take over the world if you can't even master a Common Room.

He smiled, a cold, cruel smirk that made a few of the first years squirm behind their shielding pillows and did not reach his eyes. There was that, wasn't there? As much as Malfoy tradition as blond hair. Each Malfoy son wrested power and the family fortune from the cold, dead hands of their father. Lucius had smothered his father in his bed and ordered his brothers assassinated. One day, Draco would murder his father and claim his inheritance. It was his duty as a proper Malfoy son.

He rose from his crouch and stepped lightly over the piles of parchment through which he had been sifting, the joints of his knees and hips popping like castanets as he stretched. He stepped into the center of the room and smirked at the circle of upturned faces. They were waiting for him to speak. He was the center of attention, and a wave of excitement and smug pleasure cramped his groin, made him stiffen in his trousers. He deftly shifted his weight to conceal the bulge from wandering eyes.

When he was sure all were present, he began to circle in their midst, his stride an unconscious emulation of his father, long and sinuous and swathed in inveterate confidence. "Everything you were doing before now no longer matters," he said.

"What? Why?" demanded a thin, button-nosed fifth-year. "We've got O.W.L.S."

"And I've got N.E.W.T.S.," huffed a seventh-year girl afflicted with gargantuan buck teeth and a nearly solid brown mask of freckles. There were murmurs of assent.

He scowled at her. "And as of this afternoon, you have no Head of House," he snapped. "Or did you think the incident in Potions was a mass hallucination?" He fixed his cool, grey eyes on the whinging fifth-year and was gratified when he reddened and dropped his gaze.

"What can we do?" The freckled girl again. "Dumbledore will take care of things."

Draco's mouth twisted into a contemptuous sneer. "Dumbledore? You place your faith in Dumbledore?" He eyed her in frozen disgust. "With naiveté like that, how did you end up in Slytherin? That old fool only cares about Gryffindor and precious Potter. Without Professor Snape as our Head of House, he can do as he likes with us. Who knows who he'll appoint as interim Head of House? What if he gives us over to Trelawney? Or that mongrel, Flitwick?"

"But they're not even Slytherin!" protested Pansy shrilly. "It's against the rules. The Head of House must have been a member of the House over which he presides."

"How astute of you, Parkinson" he drawled, careful to use her surname, lest she think he was flirting.

Useless precaution there, I'm afraid, said a doleful voice inside his head. As smitten as she is, spitting on her would be taken as foreplay.

The voice was right. Despite his obvious sarcasm, she was staring at him with misty, rapt adulation. She reminded him of a pole-axed mooncalf. He quickly turned away. "Since when has our esteemed Headmaster given a damn about the rules? Oh, he makes a great show of them, but he bends and twists them any way he chooses. Remember the House Cup five years ago?"

There were disgruntled mutterings from those students old enough to remember the House Cup scandal. It was still a sore spot with the professor, and anyone with a modicum of sense knew not to broach the subject in his presence. Sly, it had been, and humiliating. Dumbledore had let them think they had won the House Cup, and then, at the last moment, in full view of the other Houses, added just enough points to the Gryffindor total to let them snatch it from Slytherin's deserving grasp. Professor Snape had been seething when he handed the coveted trophy to the unbearably smug McGonagall.

The things Draco remembered most about that day, though, were the triumphant gleam in Dumbledore's eyes and the cacophonous cheers of the other Houses as Slytherin was stripped of what was its by right. They had pounded the tabletops and stood upon the chairs, applauding the disingenuously modest Gryffindors, oblivious to the blatant fact that Dumbledore had wronged them just as much. After all, Gryffindor had been in fourth place at the Leaving Feast. In wresting glory from Slytherin and giving it to Gryffindor, he had disregarded their achievements as well, meaningless as they had been. Yet they had celebrated. Sitting in his place at the Slytherin table and watching them exult in the corrupted, fraudulent triumph of the clay-footed lion with bovine exuberance, he had realized that his father was right. In that moment, his choice to follow the Dark Lord had been made with a glad and fervent heart.

"But what can we do?" Millicent, hunkered on the arm of the sofa, her wand pinched between her knees.

"What we do best. Wait. Watch. Create as much difficulty for the Ministry officials as we can. Write to your parents. Tell whatever lies you must to convince them to rail at the Ministry. Nothing is too inflammatory, too taboo. Create chaos and doubt. Start rows. Anything to keep them off guard. We need to create time to find a scapegoat."

"But why? If he did it?" A second-year near the front.

"Because, you twit, I'll be damned if a Gryffindor is going to decide my fate. And the professor is too valuable."

"Too valuable for what?"

"If you have to ask, you weren't meant to know," he snapped. "Any questions?"

"When do we start?" Millicent asked.

He wasn't surprised. She reveled in bullying and intimidation. Hardly a day passed when she couldn't be found divesting a cowering Hufflepuff of their care package from home or the Galleons they had set aside for a trip to Hogsmeade. She seemed brighter in those moments, more vital, as though she had found her true calling. Maybe she had. Her finest hour, he thought, had been the melee during Lockhart's doomed Dueling Club in second year. She'd had Mudblood Granger in a headlock, and as she'd lurched across the floor with her adversary's bushy head lodged in her sweaty and pungent armpit, her beatific expression had made her oddly mesmerizing.

He tapped his chin with a long, lily forefinger. "We should know what we're up against by morning. By tomorrow night at the latest. No doubt Dumbledore will want to keep this sordid mess quiet, so get the owls out as soon as you can, before either he or Fudge decrees a moratorium or screening of the post."

The group broke up then, some talking in low, excited voices, but the majority grave and silent. Confusion and illicit excitement warred on their faces. Many had dreamed of bucking the establishment, of confronting the superior, complacent demagogues that trampled them underfoot and ignored their rights and goal in the interest of fairness, but none had dared attempt it. Now the fantasy had come to life, and they could scarce believe it.

They think it's a grand adventure, most of them.

Doesn't matter what they believe. All that matters is what they're willing to do, how far they're willing to go. If fancies and ridiculous heroic daydreams get the results I need, so be it. The ends justify the means.

"Bulstrode," he called.

She paused, one foot on the stone riser leading to the girls' dormitory. "Yeah?"

"Tell Crabbe and Goyle to come inside. They'll stand out there like fenceposts all night otherwise."

She guffawed. "Thick as bricks, they are," she agreed, and went to the portrait hole.

The irony of Millicent Bulstrode calling someone thick was not lost on him, but he stifled the sardonic retort poised on the tip of his tongue and settled on an aloof smirk. He was going to need her muscle before the end, and it was best to keep her happy and willing to act quickly.

Crabbe and Goyle clambered through the portrait hole and shambled to their preordained positions at his flank. "Need something, Draco?" grunted Crabbe.

"Clean up this mess." He gestured to the piles of parchment he had dumped from the drawers. "Then get some sleep. If you drown in your morning porridge, you'll be of no use whatever."

He left them as they began to gather the mess and toss it haphazardly into the first available drawer, and ascended the stairs to the boys' dormitory. His mind was awash in thoughts and half-formed strategies, and he needed solitude to sort through them. This was a high stakes game, and he had no intention of losing it.

At half-past six the following morning, a bevy of school owls left the owlery, one bearing a letter bound for Malfoy Manor in its clutching talons. The Slytherin counterattack had begun.