Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Forty-Six

Hogsmeade, it was said, had been established as a haven against Muggle persecution. Its ground had been seeded with the sweat of terrified wizards fleeing the Muggle torch and pitchfork, and the air had resonated with the keening wails of frightened infants too young to understand the need for silence. The cobblestones that paved its ramshackle, winding streets had been prised from the earth by desperate, raw, bloody hands, and the darker, truer legends held that the cornerstone of each thatched hut and crude stone cottage had been soaked in the blood of a willing sacrifice. Death to ensure life.

Here in this sleepy hamlet, not yet burdened by the looming, sentinel shadow of Hogwarts, the people of Hogsmeade had fashioned lives for themselves, wrested it by force of will from the grudging soil and the boggy lochs. They farmed and wove and hunted. They nourished their children by the toil of their hands, and because many of them still bore the horror of their former lives upon their backs or in their eyes, they did not speak of what had gone before. Better that their sons and daughters never know how dark the night could become.

If any curious child ventured to ask about the wards around the village or the puckered, white lines on their father’s flesh that danced in the candlelight, they were told that monsters lurked beyond the sure protection of magical walls. If they persisted, they earned a slap or a night without supper. Most learned not to ask, and after a while, the matter ceased to trouble them.

And so the knowledge and the memory slipped away, replaced by the complacency of those who have wanted for nothing. The warnings of the aged went unheeded, and the young ventured beyond the safety of their borders to mingle with Muggles, take up friendly discourse with those who had hunted their forefathers with pitchfork and torch and spear. The slavering monsters of old had been supplanted by the congenial face of the textile merchant or the buxom sensuality of the fair village maiden. Enemy became uneasy comrade, though the wizards never grew so foolhardy as to divulge their secrets. Muggle superstitions died hard, and even the thickest or randiest of wizard kind could still see the evil eye or the forked finger if they knew where to look.

The wards remained in place, though the village people told themselves that they were a matter of convenience rather than necessity. After all, it was much easier to conceal magic from prying eyes behind the wards; one need not fear a slip of the tongue or the unwitting magic of the toddler if there were no eyes to see. The shimmering walls became a conceit, a crowning achievement, and the village they surrounded was no longer an enclave of wizards cowering from their vicious, bloodthirsty Muggle neighbors, but a utopia of like-minded souls who simply wished to live unmolested by the outside world.

Whatever it was or had once been, Lucius Malfoy despised it, and he pinched the mink of his traveling cloak between his fingers so as not to befoul it with the dust of these accursed streets. With its gaudy shops and bovine, glassy-eyed peddlers, it was anathema, the very antithesis of everything for which he stood. Here on these filthy, cobblestone streets, wizardry defiled itself in the name of the almighty Galleon. Greedy shopkeepers made no distinction between Muggle-born and Pureblood and took their coin with equal avarice, never mind that the lucre of the latter was crawling with weakness and disease. How any respectable wizard could stand to touch a Mudblood, he could not imagine.

That’s just it, sneered the cold, urbane voice of his long-dead father, a voice which often dissolved into the glottal, gelid-tar hiss of the Dark Lord. They’re not respectable. Oh, they put on their airs and pretensions, and they wield their wand as if they were as entitled to it as you are I, but beneath the silk and the lace and the sickly-sweet smell of cosmetic powder, they’re as vile as the Muggles they adore and pity by turns. They have neither scruples nor honor. Some-even Purebloods unworthy of they air they breathe-have lain with them. But they pay the price, don’t they? They always do in the end; even those who think justice has passed them by. It hasn’t forgotten. It has only been delayed, and, in truth, the temporary stay will only make the gratification all the sweeter, will it not…boy?

He flinched and gritted his teeth. Boy. He loathed that epithet almost as much as he hated the Mudbloods and Muggles who undermined his kind with their very existence. Such an innocuous word on its own, devoid of either malice or benediction, but in his father’s mouth, that single syllable had been perverted into an obscenity, a searing, lashing knout that had stripped him of his treasured dignity and reduced him to a pouting child who could not meet his sire’s unflinching, grey gaze. Boy. Hard and pitiless as a slap and dripping with ridicule and condescension.

How many times had he sat at the family table at Malfoy Manor and listened to his father rail against the steady decay of his world between forkfuls of caviar and ludicrously expensive pate? A hundred? A thousand. By the time he was five, he had lost count, and he was sure that the tirades had been going on long before he was seed in his father’s loins or an unsightly swelling inside his mother’s stomach. He had not been subjected to one of his progenitor’s charming homilies in twenty years, but he could still recall the glint of light off highly polished silver as he jabbed his fork into the air for emphasis and the resonant thump of his aristocratic fist upon the table when passion overthrew propriety.

“They’ll be the ruin of us all, do you hear me, boy?” Thump. Wine from an overturned goblet staining the white linen a glistening crimson.

“Yes, Father.” Head down, eyes fastened on the untouched mutton on his plate. His appetite quashed by the venomous belligerence in that voice. His pubescent voice cracking under the weight of adolescent hormones.

“Yes, Father.” Cruel, uncanny mimicry. “Weak; you’re weak. The taint of your mother’s blood. Sometimes I wonder if you’re mine at all. Perhaps you are a changeling, sent by the artifice of family enemies to bring down the House of Malfoy.” A beady, speculative stare. “Or maybe your mother was simply a trollop unable to keep her knees together. Merlin knows she parted them for me quickly enough.”

A throbbing ache in his knuckles jolted him from his reverie, and he glanced down to see his fingers fisted around the polished shaft of his serpent-headed walking stick. The fine oak creaked and trembled in his grip, and he forced it to relax. The old tyrant was moldering in his well-deserved tomb in the Malfoy crypt in Wiltshire, and he would be damned if he would allow a mere memory to undo him.

He had gotten his just desserts in the end. The son he had so belittled had developed teeth and a formidable will of his own. That much he had inherited from the bilious, self-righteous son of a bitch, whether his illustrious sire acknowledged him or not, and one night, the pompous filibustering came to an abrupt and permanent end when Master Malfoy keeled facedown into his whipped potatoes, his conductor’s baton nee fork clanging off the gold plate with a dissonant, atonal note of finality. Ding dong, the prick is dead.

Reviled as the voice may have been in life, it was even more despised in death, but he had to admit that it was right. There were too few decent wizards left nowadays; most of them had been swallowed up by the tidal wave of maudlin sentiment masquerading as progressive thinking. Even those who believed as he did kept their feelings hidden behind tight-lipped smiles and upraised champagne flutes at the endless rounds of Ministry functions, afraid that if they dared speak the truth, the vengeful Ministry would suddenly find reasons to exclude them from the guest lists and investigate their tax returns from the past ten years. Just last month, he had seen Master Parkinson, one of the most ardent supporters of the Cause when the lights were dim and no one could put a name to the voice, fawning over that imbecile, Fudge, and his policies. It would have been funny had it not been so pathetic.

Not that Parkinson was a shining light of Pureblood superiority. Rumor had it that he had an insatiable appetite for Muggle prostitutes and had contracted syphilis from one of the disgusting wenches. The entire sordid incident had been kept very hush-hush, but even the best-kept secrets had a way of slipping their tether, especially when one is foolish enough to entrust their privacy and dignity to a loose-lipped and equally loose-moraled Mediwitch who could be bought for the price of a few Firewhiskeys and a quick fondling in the squalid lavatory inside her “practice.” A dirty business, that; his hands had been scoured raw for days afterward, but it was all in the interest of the Cause, and if he did not make such noble sacrifices, who would?

He scrubbed his hand on the fabric of his robes to dispel the phantom stink and the viscous, warm egg-white texture of her arousal from his fingers, and his gorge rose in mutinous protest. He swore under his breath, furious at himself for allowing his mind to wander down these tangential paths when there were more important matters afoot. Never had his mental discipline faltered so badly, and that it should happen now, of all times, galled him.

He quickened his pace, and his mink traveling cloak was bunched so tightly in his hand that it was pulled nearly to the discreet, inoffensive swell of his buttocks. The fingers flexed and squirmed, still tormented by the recollection of unrequited lust and slick fish oil heat. His boots clacked on the fissured paving stones with haughty impatience, and the steam rose from his body like a curdled aura.

It’s this place, this gingerbread and spun sugar Babylon. You’ve always hated it. Even when you were a wet-nosed first-year, you couldn’t stand it. While all your ostensible friends and feckless schoolmates swarmed to the cozily smoking chimneys and the heady pleasure of sweets that would make you turn out the contents of your affronted stomach in a steaming pile upon the snow, you remained behind, protected from the pervasive rot of the place by the stones of the castle Salazar Slytherin had helped build. You saw it for what it was, smelled the gangrenous decay beneath the postcard panorama of quaint cottages and smiling, bustling shopkeepers. Your father had done that much for you, at least.

Tyrant, narcissist, misogynist, implacable taskmaster-his father had been all of these things and a thousand more that his refined etiquette refused to name twenty-four years after his unlamented demise, but he had also been an unparalleled educator. With his money, he had filled the sprawling expanse of the Malfoy library with volumes that not even Hogwarts, for all its eminence, could acquire, and there among the hulking, mahogany shelves, under the baleful, marble-bust gaze of his patriarch and with the subtle kerosene scent of wood polish in his nostrils, he had learned the secret history of the world into which he had been born, of the sects and organizations the Ministry had stricken from the public records in the name of preserving the peace and the status quo-Loyal Order of Mithras, eaters of flesh and bloodbathers who deified the sun and held the shedding of blood as the most righteous of sacraments; Cult of Cybele, ascetics who eschewed the pleasures of the flesh and castrated themselves as a show of devotion; Daughters of Dionysus, creatures of carnal delight who turned neither man, child, nor beast from their beds.

The names had danced upon the vellum and papyrus in a sinuous, seductive rhythm until they were all his eyes could see, swaying and undulating to the soporific, sibilant murmur of his father’s voice, each of them a secret whispered in the dark watches of the night, while the Fates slumbered and fallen angels writhed between the legs of the daughters of men. They marched on in an endless litany, page after page. He had read until his eyes throbbed and burned and the tips of his fingers were gritty with crumbling parchment. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. As numberless as the sands, and still he had devoured them.

Of the countless orders, societies, fraternities, and brotherhoods that had fallen beneath his feverish, avid gaze, one had enticed him above all others, lingering in his memory long after the books had been closed and the audience with his father had ended. Now, at forty-one, older and wiser and tempered by the harsh vagaries of life outside the halcyon pages of a storybook, he could look back upon his youthful fantasies with jaundiced amusement, but as a ten-year-old boy snuggled beneath the heavy woolen coverlet, those fancies had been the stuff of heroic legend and epic poetry. He, Lucius Malfoy, had been a general, clad, not in the gleaming white armor of honorable meekness, but in the living darkness of the Knights of Walpurgis. He had commanded the shadow armies that cavorted and gamboled across the canopy of his bed, with his fearless wand, he had driven back the vermin hordes that threatened his birthright, a birthright ceded to every Malfoy since the first had set foot in Saxony two thousand years before. He had done this, and his father had been proud of him, so proud that he never called him boy again.

He had been thinking of the Knights of Walpurgis, he recalled now, as he strode down the street with his back straight and his head held high, on the day his father had taken him into their elaborate tea garden and finished his education. He had been thirteen, and the dew had glistened on the wild roses that struggled to flower amid the strangling ivy. He had been so surprised at the summons; aside from merciless rebukes and drunken harangues at the family table, his father had seldom bothered with his only son, but on that day all those years ago, his father had been almost convivial.

“Come.” Gentle for him, but no less a command. A long, slender hand extended in undeniable invitation. The sun reflected off the spotless silver of the serpent-headed cane clasped loosely in his hand.

“Yes, Father.”

The Boy Who Had Been had been reading on the divan, but he knew better than to ignore the summons. Disobedience had painful consequences, not least of which was the stinging, deceptive heft of the cane across his shoulders. He closed the book and rose to join his father. His stride was measured and light, a crisp clip that denoted purpose without undue haste. Just as his father had taught him.

They strolled through the French doors onto the garden path, a narrow, immaculate, winding creation fashioned of ancient cobblestones and tastefully aging mortar. Not so much as a stray leaf marred its pristine march to the tea garden. Father had taught the elves early and well the price for dereliction of duty, and more than one of the wizened, simpering little creatures had forfeited its meager life for one errant blade of grass. A squirrel darted onto the path, and his father idly raised his wand.

“Crucio!” he drawled, and the little beast thrashed in the throes of scarlet agony.

Its oildrop eyes bulged from its sockets, and the little forepaws drummed and spasmed in a grotesque, arrhythmic dance. Its bottlebrush tail lifted, and urine and feces erupted in an erratic spray. It emitted a shrill keen, and it seemed to Lucius, as he stood rooted to the spot in dazed fascination, that it was looking at him.

“Avada Kedavra!” Uttered with the same laconic precision as the previous spell.

The squirrel stilled, its last cry cut off with ruthless immediacy. It did not fade; it simply no longer was. His father slipped his wand into the sleeve of his robes again.

“Do you know why I did that, Lucius?” he asked.

Lucius did not answer. He stared at the inert form of the squirrel. He was not appalled; rather, he was filled awe and a heady, illicit joy. He had heard of the Killing Curse, of course. There was not a young man among his social set who had not, and it was the chosen boast of those who wished to impress their goggle-eyed peers, though none actually managed to perform it when called upon to do so. But now he had seen it in all its terrible glory, and there was a torpid, tumescent heat between his legs. He swallowed with a dry click.

“Lucius! I asked you a question, boy.” Soft as the honeysuckle breeze that tickled his nostrils, and deceptively benign. If he looked now, he would meet that dispassionate, narrow-eyed gaze.

His first instinct was to lie and say he understood; of course he did. He was the child of his father and a Malfoy, after all. But there was no place for deceit to hide beneath the bloodless scrutiny of pitiless Malfoy grey, and so he squared his shoulders, swallowed his oft-battered pride, and answered.

“No, Father.” Ambrosia mingled with gall inside his mouth, his shame at his ignorance tempered by the lingering wonder of the Killing Curse.

His father snorted. “I suspected as much. Strains of your mother.” He turned away and resumed his leisurely stroll, his hands clasped behind his back. The spring sun winked off the leering serpent mouth of his cane.

Bastard. The thought was venomous and virulent, but his more prudent mouth only said, “I’m sorry, Father.” Precisely what he was apologizing for, he did not know.

A noncommittal grunt. Then, after a bristling silence, “Because I could.”

Lucius blinked at the non-sequiter. “Father?”

His father lifted the hem of his burgundy, silk robes stepped gingerly over the carcass of the squirrel, and his patrician face pulled into a delicate moue of disgust. Fat, greedy blackflies were already beginning to alight upon the body, and their tiny, spidersilk legs groped the stiffening flesh with the inelegant, clumsy fervor of a returning lover too long deprived of a sweetheart’s embrace.

“I killed that squirrel because I could. It was my right,” his father said as if he were explaining to a mentally defective child that the sky was blue. “Man is superior to beast, and as such, we have a duty to remind them of our dominion. Even the Muggles know that. It’s written in their religious texts.”

“You’ve read the Muggle religious texts?” Lucius said hoarsely.

That his Pureblood father would defile his mind and soil his hands with Muggle pulp and propaganda staggered him. Surely his father, he who was so zealous in his defense of wizardkind, understood the poison that flowed through the Muggle quill? Surely he recognized the danger of listening to their deluded ravings or exposing one’s eyes to their lunatic scribblings? His stomach gave an uneasy lurch, and he pressed his fingers to his lips to stifle an indecorous burp. He grimaced at the acidic aftertaste.

His father gave him a sardonic, mirthless smile. “”Know thine enemy. The first rule of engagement, or at least the first rule for anyone who truly wishes to win.” He studied the flawless cuticle of one nail for a moment. “Yes, they are unpleasant and wholly irrational, but then, so are the wretches who crafted them. The utter illogic of them is astounding, really.”

Lucius pursed his lips, fascinated in spite of himself. “How so, Father?”

His father cleared his throat and slowed his already languid pace still further. “’Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am a jealous god and easily wroth’”. A derisive smirk, and then he continued. “For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, so that whomsoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ A bit incongruous, isn’t it? How could a deity consumed by such jealousy have room for any love at all, let alone a love so great that he would sacrifice his only child for the sake of the unwashed, lice-ridden rabble so audacious as to deny his very existence? Quite odd. One would almost think the ludicrous piffle was written by more than one person.” He chuckled at his own wit.

You do father, he wanted to say. You are a living dichotomy, consumed by the divine fire of your convictions, yet cold as winter vengeance. You parade Mother and I around like trophies during the day, flaunt my existence as proof of your virility and revel in Mother’s beauty as evidence of your masculine allure, but when the days draws to its inevitable end, and the bowing, scraping house elf closes the Manor door behind us and shuts the world out, when there is no longer a stage, in other words, all pretension falls away, and where the sophisticated, intelligent, even-handed lord of the manor once stood, there stands a bitter, volatile tyrant possessed of neither strength nor mercy.

The same hand that so tenderly caressed my mother’s cheek on the promenade now reaches for the goblet or pounds on the table in an effort to drive reason into the insensate wood. The gilded tongue that so generously cast praises at my feet and extolled my virtue as the next great Malfoy scion to bring honor to our illustrious line as we sat in the posh drawing room of the Minister of Magic becomes a cutting scythe honed with the liberal application of Glenfiddich and rye, and the Pandora’s Box is opened. All the dirty little secrets are brought to light, and even stuffing my fingers inside my ears cannot shut them out.

The demon brandy does what nothing else ever could-not love, not money, not honor, not even Slytherin expediency. It makes you tell the truth. Under its malefic sway, all the thoughts you suppress in the name of social grace emerge in a foul torrent. I, the pride of your sainted loins, become the disappointment you only allow to live because you are not certain you can father another, better son. Better to have a male mistake than a useless daughter. My mother, in public, the paragon of virtue and the Venus by which all other women should be measured, according to you, becomes the worthless, spent harridan who gave you nothing but a misbegotten son and her too-short youth. You sit upon your throne at the head of the table and spew your venom at us while the world around you whirls and teeters in an inebriated haze.

So, yes, I think love and hate can exist in equal measure in a man’s heart and in a god’s. I know because they live in mine. I love you because you are my father, but I despise you for it, too. At night, I lie in my bed and dream of the day Charon bears you away upon his accursed ferry and frees me of your scorn, but then I remember the fleeting moments when you were the father you should have been-the way you took my hand when I was a small boy and led me through the labyrinthine maze of Knockturn Alley because its dark delights frightened me, the night you sat beside my bed until the dawn, holding vigil as I shivered in the clammy grip of fever and fighting for my life with your unblinking eyes and white-knuckled grip on your beloved walking stick-and I am ashamed. You are my father. My unwavering adoration is yours by right, purchased by blood and future promise. My hatred, unlike my blood, cannot be pure.

Lucius, who was still eleven years removed from the night his wildly swinging emotional compass would fix truth north and land the enormous Malfoy fortune squarely in his lap, and who was already learning the value of holding one’s counsel, said nothing. He tucked his chin against his thin chest and strove for a look of aloof contemplation.

His father mistook his silence for dubious incredulity. “You are skeptical.” It was not a question. “Another example, then.” He narrowed his eyes and swept a stray platinum hair from his forehead with an impatient flick of one fine-boned wrist. “In Leviticus of the Old Testament-,”

“The Old Testament, Father?”

“They divided their religious text, their ‘Bible,’ into two separate and distinct halves, the Old Testament and the New Testament. They’re convinced some filthy, itinerant lunatic was the savior of the world-they even capitalize the word ‘Savior’, if you can believe that. Such self-important creatures.”

“Any road, boy, if the lunatic was meant to be a messiah, he did a rather poor job of it. He and his merry band of witless lackeys traveled far and wide, spreading their message of peace, love, and mortification of all physical pleasure. He only-,”

“What’s ‘mortification’, Father?”

“Do those overpaid incompetents at Hogwarts teach you nothing, boy?” he snapped. He was not accustomed to having his discourses interrupted. “Even if they haven’t, that poncy private tutor should have.” He froze and turned a shrewd, speculative gaze on his only son. “Unless, of course,” he mused, his voice little more than a susurration of spent breath, “the odious little fop was teaching you more than your letters and arithmetic. Was he, boy?” A vague, predatory smile.

Lucius gaped at him. He knew he looked a feckless twit, standing there with his mouth open and his eyes round as tea saucers, but he couldn’t help it. The insinuation was too horrid. Mr. Denueve was fey and willowy and walked like he suffered from perpetually inflamed hemorrhoids, but he had never done anything remotely untoward. Not even a look, and certainly not what his father was intimating. What he thought his father was intimating, at least. His own sexuality was just beginning to blossom, and most of his knowledge was culled from the murmured gossip of older Slytherin boys and occasional surreptitious glimpses into the girls’ lavatory on the fourth floor. Everything else was tantalizing rumor and sly innuendo.

His father tucked his walking stick beneath his arm and began to circle him in a slow, slinking stride, a lynx circling a terrified hare, and the clip of his boots on the cobblestone reminded him of the snick of feline claws on stone. Click. He could feel his father’s smile on the sensitive flesh of his scalp, and it prickled with gooseflesh despite the spring warmth. Click. Click. Click.

He’s toying with me. The thought was dazed and oddly plaintive. My father is toying with me as if I were a novel plaything for his amusement. He knows Mr. Denueve has never done anything, but he wants to see how I’ll react, see if I’ll cry like a baby.

Well, he wouldn’t. He wasn’t a little boy anymore, clutching his father’s hand and plagued by nightmares of the leathery, eyeless head floating in a jar of formaldehyde in Mr. Borgin’s shop, a head that still bobbed in a cloud of hair as thick and dark as rotted kelp. He was twelve, nearly thirteen, almost a man, and he was a Malfoy. That above all, and Malfoy men didn’t weep. Tears were for women and ponces.

Click. Directly behind him now, and so close that he could smell the eau du cologne his father imported from France. Warm silk brushing his narrow back and even warmer breath against the shell of his ear. His own breath caught in his throat, and his heart fluttered in an uneasy staccato against his ribs.

“I asked you a question, boy, and you have failed to answer. How shall I take your silence? Is it revulsion that binds your tongue, or guilt? Have I perchance stumbled upon a hidden truth?” His father’s chin grazed his shoulder, and his voice carried with it the lascivious purr of suggestion.

Lucius fought the urge to squirm. His mouth was dry as steel wool, and his bladder was a hot, shrunken sac beneath his skin. He prayed that he would not wet himself. His father would not forgive such a childish display. But that was not the worst of it. His father was speaking again, using a vocabulary he had never suspected him to possess, and the combination of the lurid words and the illicit heat against the shell of his ear was making him stir beneath his robes.

It was an automatic response, involuntary as a retch, but that did not lessen his shame. He clenched his fists at his sides and closed his eyes, and behind his eyelids, his father’s incessant whispers fashioned themselves into obscene images he could not escape. He twitched almost painfully and stifled a groan.

His father chuckled. “A confession?”

“No, Father,” he rasped, and shook his head violently. His throat constricted, and each word felt like cartilaginous gristle on his tongue. “Mr. Denueve has never done anything.”

“Are you certain?” Fingers plucked idly at the shoulder of his robes.

“Yes, Father.” He swallowed with a click.

“Hmm,” was the only response, and though his eyes were still closed, Lucius knew he was tapping his chin with one thin finger. “If he did, would you tell me?”

He nodded. “Of course, Father.”

“Would you? I wonder. Perhaps you enjoyed it. There are a few of that sort on your mother’s side from what I understand. I did not discover the unfortunate truth until after the wedding. If I had, I never would have married her. She was smart enough to know that much, the devious little bint.” Almost musing now. “I underestimated her once. Never again.”

His father had gone mad. That was the only sane explanation for this surreal episode. Even in his drunken rages, he had never been so erratic, so unfocused. Somehow Leviticus and Muggle religion had shunted them down the path of his burgeoning sexuality, the possible proclivities of his effete tutor, and the legion and ever-growing shortcomings of his mother, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see the connection. Adolescent outrage and stunned perplexity were rapidly giving way to terror. It was fear that hardened him now, and his manicured nails bit into the slick flesh of his palms.

“Women are cunning creatures, boy,” his father was saying now, and there was a hint of bitter admiration in his voice. “ They worship Mammon, and they will stop at nothing to get as much of it as they can. No means are too nefarious, no lie too crass. They will seduce you with sweet lies and even sweeter caresses, and by the time you realize the wicked they have done, it is far, far too late. You are ensnared, trapped by foolish vows and a belly full of child that she claims is yours.” A derisive bark of laughter.

Lucius wasn’t sure what Mammon was, nor did he care. He wanted his father to stop talking, to spare him this unflinching honesty. He did not want to hear it. He wished to be left with the naïve childhood belief that his parents had loved one another and still loved him. He wanted to find rest in the illusion he had been conceived in love and that what lurked beneath his father’s face was not the monster unleashed by drink and disappointment, but the man who had once taken him to the local Renaissance faire and spent Galleons as if they were water between his fingers. He had never asked any questions about the life his parents had lived before he was or what they thought of him in their deepest heart, and he had demanded no answers.

He wanted to fold in upon himself, sink to the ground with his hands clapped over his ears, but his stubborn pride would not allow it. It stiffened his knees and his neck, and he could only stand rigid as a tentpole and listen to his father desecrate every cherished hope he had ever had.

Click. Click. His father was moving again, and for one wild moment, he thought the torment was finally at an end, but then his father said, “’I love you’ is a woman’s poison, boy, deadly as arsenic and thrice as slow. Never trust it. Enjoy their pleasures and their beauty and do what you must to preserve the bloodline, but always remember, boy, that it’s not you they love; it’s your money. Given a choice between an orgasm and a cold Galleon in their palm, they’ll choose the latter every time. Do you understand?” A cool hand squeezed his shoulder in a bruising grip.

No, he didn’t understand. He had never understood anything less in his life, as a matter of fact, but he nodded anyway. He would have agreed that they sky was fuchsia if it meant that he would release him and let him flee to the cool, sterile elegance of the Manor. He nodded until his blond hair fell into his tightly closed eyes and the tendons of his neck creaked, until he was nauseated and dizzy with the force of his assent.

“I’m afraid I can’t hear you.” Laughter in his father’s voice.

Burning warmth on his palms and a saline scald in the corners of his eyes. You are my father, he wanted to shout. You are my father. Why are you doing this? Why won’t you stop? The need for it was massed inside his chest, the weight of a thousand ancient pressing stones, but he would not surrender to it. He was a Malfoy, and he would let no man reduce him to a shivering, sniveling wreck. Not even his father.

The iron grip on his shoulder tightened still further, and he gritted his teeth against a cry of pain. “I believe I asked you a question, boy.” Low and dangerous. “Do you understand what I have told you or not?”

“Yes, Father, I understand.” He was dismayed to find that his voice had risen by several octaves in the extremity of his fear.

A contemptuous snort, but the hand on his shoulder relaxed. “I hardly think so. Just like your mother. Willing to say whatever you must to achieve the desired result.” The hand withdrew completely, but his father did not step away from him. Instead, he pressed closer still. “Now that we have satisfactorily resolved the matter of your truthfulness,” he sneered, “we will return to my previous query. Has that poncy tutor of yours put his hands on you?”

“No, Father, I swear it.” He began to weep, and he hated himself for it. His father would never believe him now. How could he, when he was blubbing like a child not yet out of nappies? He scrubbed furiously at his traitorous eyes until spots of color filled his blurry field of vision.

“Stop that useless sniveling,” his father demanded, and shoved him with the point of his cane.

The next thing Lucius knew, he was on his hands and knees on the garden path, and the rough cobblestones scraped his already bleeding palms. His knees throbbed with the force of the impact, and his chest hitched with a ragged sob. There was a red-hot spike embedded in his bladder, and if his father did not permit him to go to the lavatory soon, he was going to have an accident. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that emerged was a choked mewl.

Click. Click. The tip of the cane appeared on the uppermost periphery of his vision. He studied his ghostly, distorted reflection in the silver. His eyes were wide and rheumy with tears, and glistening droplets clung to his platinum eyelashes and coursed down his mottled cheeks. A runner of mucus dangled from the end of his nose like translucent tinsel, and he had nearly raised his forearm to his nose to brush it away before he remembered himself and let it drop again.

“I said stop that sniveling, boy.”

His father gave the order as if he were addressing a common house elf, and beneath the shame and the fear that coated his throat like bile and squeezed his bladder and his viscera in ruthless, burning, crushing fingers, rage seethed. It was hot and comforting inside his chest, a poultice to chase away the stupefying ague, and he moaned low in his throat, the lament of a wounded beast trapped beneath the cruel, greedy tip of the huntsman’s bow.

I hate you. You are nothing but a coward and a bully, a straw man who hides behind his wealth and his inherited prestige. For all your rhetoric, all your table-pounding and bellowing, you’ve never put your lofty words into action. You’ve waved your goblet and brandished your cherished cane and spread your gospel from your monied pulpit, but I have never seen you practice what you preach. How many Muggles have you killed? How many Mudbloods? Not one. They breed us out of existence, rutting in their dingy hovels like rabbits. For every Pureblooded child to greet the dawn, there come three mongrels. And yet you make no move to boost our numbers. You and Mother sleep in separate beds in separate rooms, and drunken snores and the rustle of shifting bedclothes are the only sounds that drift from beneath your door. No, you do nothing. You are content to talk; you will still be proselytizing when they overrun us and throttle us in our beds.

The realization struck him with the force of religious conversion. Had he been aware of the tale, he would have said that he was Saul on the road to Damascus. The scales had fallen from his eyes, and for the first time, with dirt beneath his nails, his blood drying on his palms, and the sun warm on his back, he saw his father as he truly was. But he did not know the tale. Unlike his father, he had never debased himself by reading Muggle books. His heart and his mind were as pure as the blood in his veins, and so he laughed, a thick, hysterical chuff.

Click. The shadow of his father loomed over him and blotted out the warmth of the sun, but Lucius was unafraid. He had seen the man behind the curtain, and all his childhood terror had drifted away, the lifting of a thick, enshrouding fog. The monster had proven to be little more than shadows and mist. A trick of the light. Or the darkness, if you wished. The knowledge made him giddy, and he shook with laughter.

“Get up, boy. I will not tell you again.”

Lucius made no move to obey. Indeed, he gave no sign that he had heard his father at all. He stayed where he was, hands pressed into the unforgiving stone of the garden path. The truth had set him free, and he was no longer beholden to the voice that had held dominion over him for so long. He watched his blood stain the paving stone with hypnotized fascination.

Look, Father, he wanted to exclaim. Consecrated ground.

The first blow struck him between the shoulder blades, and there was a moment of dazed numbness before the flare of pain exploded in his upper back. Another blow rained down, and then another, and he writhed and wept beneath the assault, but amid the sobs and the blind flailing, there was laughter, a wheezed, triumphant bark that slipped from between grimacing lips.

Hit me all you like, but it will change nothing, he thought as the cane came down on his hip with a wicked, whickering crack.

He shrieked and clutched at the spot with clawed hands, but the cane had already moved on to choicer targets. It smashed across his twitching buttocks with a meaty pop, and mingled mirth and misery bubbled from his throat. There was no part of him that did not ache and throb, and in the morning, he would be so bruised and stiff that the house elves would need to help him into his clothes, but for now, he was lost in a delirium of agonized epiphany.

I’m better than you, and one day, I will prove it. I will do what you could not. Would not. I will kill as many Mudbloods and Muggles as I can before my end, and for every squalling, red infant squeezed from between the legs of a soft-bellied Mudblood whore, I will sire a Pureblooded child to stand against him. The streets will run red with the blood of my enemies and platinum with the tresses of my progeny. If I cannot crush them, I will outbreed them. One way or another, I will snuff them out and restore the family honor, and when I do, I will blot you from the family records and piss upon your grave.

The cane struck him in the kidneys, and his bladder let go in a hot, wet gush, vinegar and peat, and his nostrils pinched to shut out the indelicate stench. He was a refined child, and some things could not be unlearned, not even under torture. He pulled into a fetal position and moaned helplessly, and a frightened thrush took flight from an overhead tree.

“Stop crying, you stupid boy,” his father panted, his face mottled with fury and exertion. “And get up.”

He was tempted to just lie there on the sun-warmed stone and let the urine cool on his legs. The slightest movement brought with it a sizzling aria of untold pain, and if he tried to rise, there was a very good possibility that his breakfast would make an unscheduled reappearance.

How very gauche, he thought stupidly, and then gave up thought altogether.

“Last warning, boy.” His father’s voice, far away and unimportant.

His eyelids drooped with fatigue and blissful indifference. Yes, he would just stay here a while. Here where it was safe and cool.

Rough fingers seized the collar of his robes and jerked him unceremoniously to his feet. Pain swallowed him whole, and if the fingers had not been clutching his collar in a vise grip, he would have fallen to the ground again. His head throbbed like an infected tooth, and when he tried to turn it on his oddly boneless neck, acid-tipped fingers sank into his scalp and scratched bright, kaleidoscopic colors into the inkblots that danced before his eyes. He clutched feebly at his father as he swayed drunkenly on his feet. His left ankle refused to support him. The salt and alum taste of blood puckered his mouth.

“Get up, you puling little whelp,” his father snarled. “Stand on your own two feet. Look at you.” His eyes raked Lucius’ disheveled, sodden robes in slit-eyed disgust. “You’re weak. You allow your emotions to rule you. I had you weeping like a babe within three minutes. You’re no son of mine. No product of my loins would behave so shamefully. Changeling, you are, or fetch, but you are no son of mine. I do not sire cowards.” He straightened his robes with a haughty flourish.

Lucius decided not to point out the irony in that statement. Another blow would render him unconscious, and he had no desire to be found facedown in his own spittle by a privately gleeful house elf. Even at twelve, he understood that dignity was a precious thing, and once it was gone, no amount of railing or bribery could restore it. So he straightened his hunched, bruised shoulders and gazed at his father with bleary, glazed eyes.

“Appalling,” his father huffed. “You’ve wet yourself.” He stared at the pungent dampness that stained the front of Lucius’ robes, and his nostrils pinched in a belated bid for self-protection. “No better than a Mudblood. Would the Fates that you had been a Squib. At least then I could have killed you.” The last emerged in a forlorn, aching whisper, and for an instant Lucius saw the bone-deep misery and cancerous disappointment in his father’s eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by his customary indifference and assured superiority. “As it is, there is no point in continuing this discussion. I can teach you nothing. Get out of my sight. I don’t want to see you again. You will take supper in your room.”

Oh, but you did teach me, Father. More than you know, more than you ever intended. The lesson was painful, but there can be no joy without suffering. These welts will fade, but the knowledge each one bought and paid for is mine to keep, and when the time comes, I will use it. I have to. Despite all your protests, I am of you, a Malfoy, and the pursuit of power is in my blood as surely as the gene for the grey eyes that so captivate the unwary. I can no more not use it than I could cease to breathe, and in the end, I will do what I must, and so will you. It’s in our nature.

His father spared him one last gelid glance, then spun on his heel and stalked in the direction of the Manor. Even in his anger, he moved with a queer, unhurried grace, his strides brisk but unhurried. His shoulders were relaxed, and his spine was straight. I go at this pace because I choose it, and nothing in heaven and earth will change it, that gait said, and in that moment, at least, it was true.

Lucius watched his father go with mingled contempt and pity, and as his figure disappeared from view, a vertiginous longing seized him, and he was tempted to call after him, run in his wake with hands outstretched in silent appeal, the way he had done as a small toddler, when the days had passed in an idyll of games and sweets, and all he had wanted was to grow up to be just like his father.

The compulsion was so strong that his mouth opened of its own accord, and the word was half-out before he closed it with a jaw-creaking snap that made his teeth ache. His heart spasmed inside his chest, and for the second time that morning, his vision was occluded by the glycerin haze of tears.

Daddy. I almost called him Daddy, he thought with swooning incomprehension. I haven’t done that since I was five years old.

He vomited soundlessly onto his shoes and the urine-sticky hem of his robes, bent double with the force of the retching, crescent-scraped palms on his shaking knees. Over and over again, until his stomach was loose and hot and his throat was raw and greasy with bile. He heaved until he was sure he was going to pass out or rupture the minute capillaries in his eyes. Blooming red blots pooled in his vision, and his head felt bloated and soft, an overripe melon left too long in the sun. When there was no more food left, he sent up thick clots of bitter mucus.

Can’t go back. Too late for that. It was too late a long time ago. He wiped a trembling hand over his lips and stared unseeingly at the congealing mass of his former breakfast. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.

When he was certain that the worst had passed, he took a ragged, greedy gulp of air that tasted of warm stone and cooling bile and the rich, cilantro perfume of new growth and wobbled upright again. He tested his left ankle and was rewarded with a bright bolt of pain. He swore under his breath. He would be damned if he would be helped into the house by a simpering, wrinkled house elf. That sort of thing would make fine fodder for their clandestine gossip mill as they lay in their squalid rag piles.

His father was long gone, and the way of life he had always known had gone with him. He spit to rid his mouth of its sour, iodine tang and hobbled and limped toward the Manor and the cool solace of his mother’s fluttering hands, following in his father’s footsteps for the last time.

Except it wasn’t the last time, was it? whispered a voice inside the head of the man he had become. Not by a long chalk.

He quickened his pace. He did not want to hear this. He was nothing like his father, nothing at all. No, he was far superior, and he had proven it time and again. He had killed his first Mudblood at seventeen. He had taken action against the looming Muggle threat, and he had not been afraid. He had enjoyed the kill, relished the death throes of his adversaries. He had killed them with magic and with daggers, and he had spared neither woman nor child, invalid nor aged. He no longer knew how many he had killed, but one was more than the sum total of what his father and all his rhetoric had accomplished, and that filled him with a heady pride.

It was his rhetoric that set you upon this path in the first place. Were it not for him, you might well have ended up like the bleeding-heart, soft-headed inclusionists you so despise. Whatever you are, it was founded on his teachings. You are the sum of your history, and you would do well to remember it.

It was precisely because he remembered his history that he had joined the Death Eaters at seventeen, and imagine his surprise, and indeed, his pleasure, upon learning that he had found his home in what was once the Knights of Walpurgis, the ancient order he had so revered as a boy. His childhood dreams had come to fruition. He was a Knight, sworn protector of the purity of his kind, and with his enthusiasm and his family’s influence, he had set about ridding the world of those who polluted it with their very existence.

It was precisely because he remembered his history that the son deemed to be naught but a multitude of his father’s failings had risen up at twenty-one to bring him down. The boy too thick to understand his ravings had come into his manhood and his inheritance by the cool heft of marble in his hands and the razor-wire burn of anger too fierce to be satiated by prudence or filial deference. He had prised the cane from the stiffening hand of its former master and claimed it for his own, anointed king by the spreading pool of blood at his feet. Six days later, his father was in the ground, victim of a most unfortunate fall, and his dowager mother was sent to the Isle of Man with a kiss and a promise of a monthly stipend from her dutiful son.

It was precisely because he remembered his history that he had taken Narcissa Black to wife at twenty-three. Beautiful, charming, intelligent, Pureblooded Narcissa, who knew her place and who could satisfy him with her wicked mouth and her dainty hands and her heated thighs. Narcissa, whom he adored and to whom he had never raised a hand. Narcissa, whose memory had borne him through the long nights of torture in the Ministry interrogation rooms, and who sometimes still trailed her manicured nails down the white, puckered tendrils left to him as a reminder of his ordeal.

It was precisely because he remembered his history that at twenty-five, he had sired Draco, the wriggling, wailing, wrinkled incarnation of all his hope for the future. How proud he had been when the Mediwitch had lain him in his arms, so proud that he had hardly noticed when the screaming, kicking bundle baptized him in a rush of effluvium. What difference had it made, really? After all, the healthy boy-child had been nothing less than an extension of he and Narcissa’s perfection.

She was not so perfect. You found that out shortly after your release from Azkaban, didn’t you? Oh, my, yes. You returned home after your ordeal intent upon siring more children, more sons, perhaps even a daughter or two for the purpose of forging profitable alliances in the future. An entire brood. You wanted to proliferate, spread your seed to the ends of the earth with an army of grey-eyed, platinum-haired children. You swore that you would when you were but a child yourself, and you were determined to see it done.

The corridors of Malfoy Manor reverberated with the strident creak of bedsprings such as they had never done in your father’s lifetime, and Narcissa, your sacred wife, parted her legs and thought of merry olde England because that was what you required of her. Every night for weeks on end, you sowed your seed within her womb, the seed for which countless fawning young women had vied at galas and cotillion balls, and you hoped and prayed and made offerings to gods in whom you had no belief. Anything to further your goals.

Three times, your seed took root, and three times you congratulated yourself on your virility and swanned through the streets of Wiltshire with your head held high and your bollocks held higher. One son was to become two, and the fear that your illustrious line would be wiped out in a single, calamitous quirk of fate reduced to exorcised memory. If one fell, there would be another to take his place.

But the promised second scion never came. One by one, they bled away. No matter how many Galleons you spent or how many specialists you bribed and threatened, no matter how much of your cherished dignity you shed behind closed doors, you could not persuade them to stay inside the womb until the appointed hour.

The first bled away when it was little more than jubilant anticipation. The entire process was oddly…tidy. You expected blood and gnashing of teeth, but there was only mild discomfort, fatigue, nausea, and an usually heavy menses. You only know it was a son because the pompous Mediwizard told you so. Otherwise, it was an unidentifiable lump of might have been.

The second made it four months. You allowed yourself to relax, to plan. You even bought a lavish bassinet. Then it, too, slipped away in a warm, red tide that smelled of copper and fish oil, and it was very bad, indeed, because the misbegotten child nearly took Narcissa with it. She almost bled to death in the bed in which the child was conceived, a pale, helpless sacrifice to your ambition, but the Mediwizard saved her life and his own that night. That one was a son, too. You looked at it before he took it away, and then you went into the lavatory and retched until you couldn’t breathe. You swore there would be no more.

That was one promise you couldn’t keep. You couldn’t smother the-and pardon me for this pun, oh, yes, indeed-narcissistic urge to recreate yourself again, to do what your father had not. You were so determined to set yourself apart from him that you asked Narcissa to try again, and because she loved you, because she was a good and faithful wife, she put aside her private fears and tried again. And you paid dearly for your hubris, didn’t you? The voice laughed, dead leaves on dry paving stone.

The muscles of his legs cramped with the urge to run, but he was too well-trained to capitulate to their demands, and so he continued at the same brisk, assured pace, his gloved hand fisted around his walking stick, his jaw set in a tight, throbbing line. He would not be chased from here by the restless demons of his past and the impotent shades of desires unfulfilled. He would leave this execrable shantytown behind and kick its tainted dust from his heels, but not until he wished it.

The voice was unimpressed with his resolve, and it continued its soliloquy with implacable equanimity.

The third was the cruelest of all. You and Narcissa were so cautious, so wary. You tended to her with obsessive care, alert for the slightest hint of danger. You became a manservant in your own house; you waited upon her hand and foot, and as each day passed without incident, you gave thanks to the Fates for one more mercy. Six months passed, and then seven, and as she grew round and ponderous with your child, the pride you had banished in the name of prudence reared its head once more. The night she went into labor, you summoned the midwives and the Mediwizards, and when that was done, you ordered the house elves to bring up a bottle of your finest sauvignon in preparation for the celebration to come. But it never came.

He grunted behind gritted teeth and resisted the juvenile compulsion to clap his hands to his ears. He did not want to hear this, did not, did not. These wounds were old, but they were not well healed, and he doubted they ever would be. He was reminded of them too often as he wandered the silent corridors and echoing parlors of his Manor. He wanted the voice to go away and leave him be, but it cared little for either his pedigree or his anguish.

Why should I be silent? it leered, and an image arose in his mind of a black-toothed imp capering in malevolent glee. I have been with you ever and anon, and I will never leave. I am the sum of all your failures. I lived in your father before you, and when you are dust and bones and the fetor of a forgotten life inside your crypt, I will abide with your son. I am your legacy, along with your surname and your wealth.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The third. The wine came, and as the hours came and went, you watched the condensation bead on the glass and listened to the muffled sounds behind your chamber doors, groans and sobbed imprecations that not even the thick English oak could stifle, and when you could take no more, you paced to and fro across your study floor. Back and forth, back and forth, until your footfalls fell into unconscious synchronization with the tick of the clock and the hypnotic swing of its heavy brass pendulum. Time surrendered its meaning, measured, not in minutes and hours, but in steps and screams, and when the door finally swung open, you were so startled that you nearly hexed the sweating, beaming midwife.

That bitch. You’ve never forgiven her for that smile, that brief, glorious moment of false hope in which you thought it was going to be all right. To this day, you don’t understand why she did it. You’ve puzzled over it in the hours before dawn, while Narcissa sleeps and morning steals into the sky to depose the night. Was it malevolence or crass stupidity? The answer doesn’t matter, not really, but you persist all the same, like a man who cannot resist running his tongue over the notch in a chipped tooth to reassure himself it is still there. It serves no other purpose than to stoke your anger, and sometimes that is all you have left.

But enough philosophizing. Whatever her motives, she smiled and placed the bundle in your arms, and you were so relieved by the warm heft in the crook of your arms that you didn’t realize what you held at first. Then you looked down, and the smile froze on your face, and the joyous benediction died in your throat. You blinked, and then you closed your eyes altogether, but when you opened them again, it was still there, and all the while, the feckless cow that called herself midwife stood and gazed at you in beatific, lack-witted happiness, as if she had handed you the world and not a travesty of flesh.

It was in the odd slant of the forehead and the misshapen eyes, in the flattened nose and the logy, drugged reflexes. When Draco was born, he had gazed up at you with an expression of secretive triumph, as if he had known all along that he was meant to be, but that one’s eyes were empty, dull as unglazed glass inside its mongoloid face. Spittle turned to talc inside your mouth, and your knees were wooden joists beneath the skin. You wanted to laugh and scream by turns, but to lose your composure in front of that moon-faced, heavy-bosomed inferior would have been more than your shocked dignity could stand, and so you did neither. You just…stared.

You didn’t, not right away. You waited until all the Mediwizards and midwives had collected their fees and departed, and as you watched them clatter down the Manor steps with your hard-earned Galleons clutched in their grubby fists, you wanted to hex them all, to see them writhe upon the snow with screams streaming from their mouths like obscene Yuletide carols. They had taken your money, and in return, they had delivered unto you, not the coveted second male heir, but a conglomeration of limbs and viscera fashioned into the twitching, dribbling effigy of a girl-child. But you stayed your wand and watched them disappear down the boulevard. You entered the name of the midwife into your ledger for future remuneration, and then you went inside.

It was after midnight by the time you worked up the courage. You stole into the room and stood there for a very long time, just looking. Under cover of darkness, it looked like any other child, all flailing arms and tiny, splay-toed feet, and it was easy, nay, tempting to pretend that it had all been a terrible illusion, that it was hale and whole, a Pureblooded dauphine, but you knew that morning would come all too soon, and when it did, its cruel light would dispel all your maudlin notions.

So you did it. A newborn’s flesh is soft and yielding as fresh taffy, and as you stood there and wrung the life from it with a patient, merciless grip, you marveled at it. So tiny and so misbegotten, and yet if fought for its life. It possessed that much intelligence, at least. In a perverse way, you admired it. A Malfoy to the last.

But that was terrible, wasn’t it, that thought? That meant it was yours, and that was more than you so bear, and so when it was done, you lurched into the lavatory and scrubbed your hands in scalding water until they bled. You scoured the skin from beneath your nails, and while the water swirled rose and crimson down the drain, you offered up a thousand reasons why it had to be done. Each drop and each bit of skin was grace and absolution.

Its existence would have been a misery, for both it and you. It would have been the sordid family secret, locked in a filthy back room, unknown, unloved, and willfully unremembered. A waste of resources and time. Hardly marriageable. No one in their right mind would have had her, not even the social-climbing parasites bent on staking a claim to the prodigious Malfoy fortune, and those who would have were diseased branches no one wanted forking from their family trees. No, it was for the best.

And then there was the Cause to consider. What would her existence have done to the cherished belief that the Pureblooded were inherently, genetically superior to the Mudbloods? She would have been held up by proponents of the Light as irrefutable proof that all your rhetoric was wish and self-delusion. The great Lucius Malfoy, progenitor of a defective. How they would jeer. Her every breath would have brought shame to the House of Malfoy, and visited the rage of the Dark Lord upon your head. Your position, the rank you had clawed from his twisted, bloodless heart and paid for with every sinuous stripe upon your back, would have been forfeit, and that you could not allow. You were a father, yes, but you were a Slytherin above all.

You ordered it burned, and that was the last you saw of it. Draco never knew he had a sibling, and Narcissa never asked you what had become of her second child. There was no need. She knew you too well. You reported it dead that afternoon, and your money silenced the uneasy questions as to the whereabouts of the body. A few more ensured that neither a birth nor a death certificate remained on file at the Ministry. The six short hours of its life were expunged from the record as easily as an unwanted stain, and that’s precisely what it was.

But for all that, the night you crushed your unfinished daughter’s larynx in your hand was the night you secretly set yourself against the Dark Lord. The puling creature on the cot might have been a misbegotten parody of the Divine, but she was yours, and you never ceded a sole possession without exacting a terrible price. You had sacrificed flesh and blood to the cause, and you would have your just rewards.

“I want no more of this,” he spat, and several passersby spared him wary, sidelong glances. “What purpose does it serve?”

Because I choose it, the voice mused idly. Because I want to show you how very like your father you are. You despise your wife and your son, just as he did.

I do not. I love them. I have never raised a hand to them.

You don’t need to. They see it in your face well enough. How could they not? You wear your disdain for them like a badge of honor. You haven’t touched Narcissa since she cursed you with that blasphemous imp, and the mere thought of bedding her turns your stomach and shrivels your testicles. You blame her.

Of course he did. She had promised him the world and an army of flawless heirs, and all that she had given him was a spineless, mollycoddled son and a waste of flesh, sinew, and social currency gone before it was even named. Her delicate, porcelain face had masked the insidious rot of inbreeding, and by the time he had seen the malignant madness glittering in Bellatrix Black’s eyes and smoldering in the lunatic gaze of that mongrel blood traitor, Sirius, it had been too late. His heart had been her plaything, and his wedding band had gleamed on her finger. An annulment was out of the question. A Malfoy never acknowledged failure.

Which brings us to your son, the voice continued with mordant glee. Such a disappointment. Irresponsible, blithely ignorant of all that has gone before and so certain that, as it was today, so will tomorrow be, and the day after, and the day after, with no effort. No sacrifice. He is content to take while giving nothing in return, and to you who has surrendered so much, his entitlement is an insult. You wonder, in the sepulchral silence of your Manor, when the moon glazes the world silver and the only sounds are the rustle of bedclothes and Narcissa’s susurrating breath, how much better your life would have been had your other sons survived. You wonder, and you lament.

His lips thinned. Very soon now, all of his woe and lamentation would be over. The letter from his carefully cultivated associate had hinted at a portentous discovery, and though it was entirely possible it was no more than favor-currying claptrap, he was inclined to believe it. The sender had never been prone to hyperbolic histrionics, and he was keenly aware of the penalty for wasting his valuable time.

I have found something that may prove of great interest to a person of mutual acquaintance. Its proper use could be quite profitable in future joint ventures.

Indeed.