Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Fifty-Two

The appearance of Lucius Malfoy in the Great Hall at supper was cause for fervid speculation, and whispers rippled down the lengths of the House tables, passed from anxious lip to burning ear in an endless chain of cupped hands and furtive, rounded shoulders. Younger students who had heard the legends of their elders craned to look at him until their more prudent Housemates brought them to heel with clandestine jabs of their forks beneath the table.

None was more pleased than Draco, who sat beside his father at the Slytherin table, relishing the awed, disbelieving expressions on the faces of his fellow students. Even the professors at the High Table regarded him with wary respect, though Dumbledore was pointedly ignoring the Slytherin table, and McGonagall's lips had disappeared into her craggy face.

They remember, he thought smugly. Blood still speaks, and honor, and while they may claim that my father's name holds no terror for them, they still avert their eyes when he enters a room, still incline their heads in unknowing deference. Those who don't fear his magic fear his wealth, and that is just how it should be.

And so will they one day fear you, murmured a voice at the base of his skull. It danced along his nape in an erotic shiver, and he closed his eyes in momentary satisfaction. How delicious.

"Much has changed since I was a pupil," his father mused, and dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a linen napkin. He was watching Hermione Granger, who was bludgeoning a crumpet with her butter knife, her face a mask of pinched concentration.

Draco reached for a crumpet of his own from the brimming basket in front of him. Seeing Granger in paroxysms of impotent indignation did wonders for the appetite. "Yes. I should think they were more selective."

"Mmm. Indeed." His father took a modest bite of braised veal and wiped his mouth again. "I would say it was because Hogwarts was governed by a man of sense and dignity, but it wasn't so. Dumbledore was in charge even then." Bite. Wipe.

Draco snorted. "Why all the madness now? Senility? I wouldn't be surprised. I've thought him potty for years." He sliced his crumpet in half and slathered it with butter.

His father scowled. "Moderation, Draco. You'll give yourself gout. Dreadful malady, that. Rumor has it that's how your grandfather died." A wry smile. "Though I wouldn't be sure of that."

Something in his father's tone brought him up short, and he froze with the crumpet hovering halfway to his mouth. It was sly and knowing, portent and promise, legacy from a rotting crypt, and he put down the crumpet and reached for his goblet of pumpkin juice instead.

"Yes, father." A dry, uncertain rasp. He took a swallow, and then another. "Did-?"

"I was bereft, of course. A son should always mourn the loss of his father." That fleeting, humorless smirk again. "Don't you agree?"

He blinked, perplexed. "Of course. Mother and I would be devastated without you." He took refuge in another sip of pumpkin juice.

"Would you?" Sardonic amusement.

Draco set his goblet on the table and pressed the soles of his feet into the floor to reassure himself that it was still solid beneath his feet. When his father had appeared in the Slytherin Common Room in a billow of black silk and glittering silver and announced that he would be staying for the foreseeable future, the room had been swept by a wave of euphoria. Here at last was the leadership for which they had been searching in the Professor's absence. The presence of an elder Malfoy meant the time for action was at hand.

He had expected, therefore, to discuss the matter of Professor Snape's imprisonment and the status of the Ministry investigation into Potter's collapse or the brilliance of his owl campaign in the face of Ministerial oppression. He had not anticipated a discourse on his father's eventual mortality and the dubious nature of his grandfather's demise while Goyle watched the baffling proceedings with whipped potatoes dangling from his chin.

"Chin, Goyle," he said absently.

Goyle grunted in surprise and reached for his napkin, which was wadded in an untidy heap beside his plate. "Right, Draco. Sorry."

Draco considered an acerbic mot juste, but let the matter drop. He was suddenly far too tired to care about Goyle and his slovenly habits and napkins smeared with grease and assorted stains he could not place. The fulcrum of his world, so long anchored in the glittering Gringotts' vaults and his father's careless arrogance had shifted with an unceremonious lurch, and he groped for a handhold with blind, clutching fingers.

The world has a nasty habit of that of late, said the voice at the base of his skull, and there was nothing erotic about it now. It was grating and brittle as shale in his ear. The old ways have passed away with the tink of a falling phial, and nothing is as it should be and has been since this world became your birthright with the boarding of a train. Golden gods have feet of clay, and that which you thought immutable has become fluid as water between your fingers. The first time you saw Professor Snape, he seemed a man of iron and adamant, stronger than the walls that sheltered him and ageless as time. His rule was unshakeable, and his stolidity comforted you even as you walked in the shadows of the lion and the badger and the raven. He was your father when your father could not be, and he stood against the tide of weak-willed sanctimony that threatened to wash you away. He was your bulwark, and now he rots in Azkaban while Potter lies in state, a saint canonized before the breath has left the body.

Your father was the same. When you were small, still chasing your equilibrium on wobbling, unsteady legs, you looked up at him and saw Apollyon. You were convinced that the world spun at his command, and you were sure that he slew dragons with naught but his convictions and his walking stick. There was none bigger or higher or better than him, and when you met the Minister of Magic for the first time, you wondered why the people all bowed before the dolt in the lime-green bowler hat and ill-fitting robes when it was obvious that your father was the one with all the power. You knew he would live forever. Now...

Bollocks, he thought fiercely. Nothing has changed as far as my father is concerned. Fudge still understands the lay of the land well enough if Father managed to breach Dumbledore's formidable defenses, and everyone in this room still acknowledges his superiority, whether they like it or not. They smell it the way feral dogs smell the musk from the alpha male.

Mmm, said the voice. Old habits die hard. If he is so powerful, then why isn't Professor Snape back on the dais with the rest of the teachers? Could it be that his influence no longer extends as far as it once did?

It's because it's Potter. He was seized with the urge to kick his feet and pound the table like a tantruming child. Potter makes everything more difficult.

Perhaps, but why this talk of death? A Malfoy dies at the hour of his own choosing or at the hands of a traitor. Disease cannot touch him. Such deaths are for Muggles and reprobates. Why should he fear his end?

Why, indeed? Draco took a bite of crumpet and chewed it slowly as he studied his father. Lucius' clothes were as immaculate as ever-silks and heavy wools and finely embroidered brocade-and his hair was neatly tied away from his face. His hands moved with the same measured grace they always had, and his countenance was serene as he looked at the sea of slack-jawed, gawking faces.

But there were subtle changes, too. Lines nestled at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and a thin, milky film of saliva coated his lips in spite of constant dabbing. Worry needled his gut with gleeful, icy fingers; Unsightly mouth crust was a tradition for Vincent Crabbe, not his father, who often changed underclothes twice a day so as to prevent unpleasant odor and chafing.

And genital itch, offered a crass voice inside his head, and he shoved it away with an irritated snort. Such maladies were not discussed in polite circles, and besides the foamy, gummy froth represented a far graver danger. If his father were being targeted by enemies, then his own position was at risk, as was his formidable inheritance, and he was certain life as a pauper would not suit him.

Visions of penury dancing in his head like rancid Christmas puddings, he asked warily, "You've not been threatened, have you, Father?"

Lucius arched one delicate eyebrow, fork poised over a piece of succulent veal. "What fool would dare?"

"Of course not," he agreed, and hid his pathetic relief in a sip from his goblet. "Then, why all this talk of death? I'm no threat, surely?"

His father's answering dismissive snort stung more than his pride would allow him to admit.

"Indeed not," Lucius assured him. "You are my son, and I have taught you well. Respect for elders and for tradition, values the majority of your schoolmates-," he scowled at a Hufflepuff third-year with a clot of spinach between his uneven front teeth, "-have forgotten." He narrowed his eyes. "Mudblood?" he asked through imperceptibly moving lips.

Draco nodded. The spinach-eating dolt was indeed a Mudblood, a fact he had unwisely broadcast within earshot of Slytherin first-years at the beginning of term. He had paid for his thoughtlessness with a tumble down the first-floor stairs and a badly broken wrist. The Slytherins had earned detentions with Professor Snape and owls to their parents from same. Insofar as he knew, the owls had never been sent. The Hufflepuff had never mentioned his parents again.

"What do you expect? He's a Hufflepuff. They're all rubbish."

There was an approving guffaw from Goyle, and Draco narrowly avoided being spattered with a fine mist of spittle and breadcrumbs.

Lucius considered that. "Yes, but their bovine stolidity can be easily manipulated. Convince them of a cause's righteousness, and they'll work until they drop. Not that one, of course. Straight to the charnel house with him." He smiled in grim satisfaction.

Draco bit into another crumpet with renewed relish. "Most of them are celebrating Professor Snape's downfall," he said.

"Are they? I shouldn't wonder. No doubt the unrefined hellions consider his peculiar brand of discipline oppressive. Another consequence of Dumbledore's liberal hand, I'm afraid." He clucked ruefully. "Pity; when I was a student, the Heads of House and the Headmaster often ordered ten lashes with the knout. The more severe offenders earned twenty. In my third year, one unfortunate fool bore fifty strokes. His back was in ribbons when they carried him out."

Draco leaned forward, elbows balanced on the table. "Did you ever get whipped, Father?" he asked eagerly.

As soon as he spoke, he realized his mistake, but he was not fast enough. His father's hand darted out and fetched him a stinging backhand across the cheek. His head recoiled from the blow, and the sharp report of the slap pealed throughout the Hall like distant thunder, a flat, rolling echo that stilled the clink of cutlery and the hum of nervous chatter.

There's no pain, he thought in dim incredulity as he gazed through watering eyes at Goyle, who was gaping in open-mouthed amazement at the unexpected turn of events and affording him an unpleasant, tear-blurred view of chewed bread. He blinked to clear the stinging in his eyes and stared at his father, whose lip was curled in a sneer.

"Clearly, Dumbledore's permissiveness has affected you as well. Your impertinence will not be tolerated. Is that understood?" His father's eyes blazed with fury, and he tugged on the sleeve of his robes as if to emphasize his pique.

"Yes, Father," he said dully, and now the pain did come, a bright, warm flare of heat in his cheek, and he brushed the burning skin with his fingertips, the better to map his shame.

His father pulled his chair closer to the table and spread his napkin primly over his knees. "Good." He picked up his fork again. "And no, I was never disciplined. A Malfoy is no man's whipping boy. If you remember nothing else, remember that much, b-,"

The word caught in his father's throat, and all the color drained from his face. He dropped his fork with a clatter, and his mouth worked as if he were going to retch. He closed his eyes and covered his mouth with one trembling hand. The Hall, which had begun to stir again, silenced once more, and on the periphery of his vision, Draco could see two hundred Slytherin faces turned toward his father in stone-faced confusion. A first-year down the table watched the scene in riveted silence, and a scrawny finger disappeared inside a nostril with dreamy precision.

A funereal bogey, he thought with lunatic clarity, and bit the inside of his cheek to stifle a bray of hysterical laughter.

The faces at the other House tables were watching, too, but there was no concern, only a perverse, morbid anticipation. Eyes gleamed at the prospect of watching a patriarch fall, and the mute throng craned its collective neck for a better view. Parvati Patil stood on the Gryffindor bench, wobbling precariously on pointed toes, and Lavender Brown hunkered beside her at the table, a frozen, lupine grin on her too-red lips, a crouching fetch come to bear away his father's soul.

Blood or lipstick? he wondered with numb detachment. Only his cheek was alive now, a bloom of blood and heat in his otherwise frozen face, and he kneaded it compulsively as he gazed into his classmates' upturned faces. Colin Creevey, eyes bulging, was scrabbling frantically for his beloved camera.

Take a picture, Creevey, and before I kill you, I'll photograph your face as the light fades from your eyes and send it to your parents on the day of the funeral. My father is not a spectacle for your amusement. The blood surged in his temples at the thought of his father's death throes splashed across the pages of The Daily Prophet for the world to see.

Oh, he could well imagine it. How the dregs of society would crow to see such a prominent Pureblood come to such a sorry end, gone to death before the twinkling eyes of his most bitter nemesis and the leering faces of a thousand Hogwarts pupils. They would gather in squalid pubs and dilapidated shanties and recount the tale hunkered over plates of stew and cheap chipped beef, wiping the gravy from their chins with the coarse fabric of their sleeves and congratulating themselves on surviving their better. Drunkards, dilettantes, and droop-bosomed whores-all would point their grubby fingers at the irrefutable proof of irony, and laugh. There went Lucius Malfoy, they'd crow, bleary eyes alight with beery good humor, died on the floor of Hogwarts, he did, and good riddance, too. Then they would laugh, the high, shrill sound of celebration, and raise their tankards in derisive salute to the dearly departed.

Not that the reaction of the wealthy would be much better, he supposed. To the outside world, they would present a façade of respectable grief, and the cream of British wizardry would attend the lavish funeral, garbed in the finery of deepest mourning. They would murmur condolences into the blank, grief-scoured face of his mother and offer her a handkerchief with which to dry her perpetually weeping eyes, and they would pay due deference to him as the sole heir, but when the doors of their manses upon the hill closed behind them, more than one would caper in pernicious glee with the grave dirt still lodged in the soles of their shoes. The months following his father's death would be a flurry of teas and conferences as the Slytherin families jostled for the vacated throne, and assassination plots would dog him like restless spirits.

Perhaps you should make sure he is dying before contemplating your grim future.

He blinked, startled from his hysterical reverie by the stark practicality of the suggestion, and looked at his father. Goyle had half-risen from his chair and was hulking over his patron in heavy-lidded consternation, one beefy hand hovering indecisively over his father's narrow back. His father sat motionless in his chair, handkerchief pressed to his mouth and his fingers convulsively clutching the delicate fabric.

"Master Malfoy?" Goyle said. "Are you choking?"

"If he were choking, you lout, he wouldn't be able to answer you," Draco snarled. Besides, he's not purple."

Goyle considered this.

No, his father was not purple, but he was not entirely there, either. His grey eyes were distant and vacant, lighthouses whose searching beacons had been abruptly extinguished, and his breathing had an unpleasant liquid rattle that prickled the hairs of his nape.

He's not here, he thought suddenly. He's somewhere else, somewhere I've never been and can never go. He's retreated to the time before me, and whatever he sees in the shadows of old memory, he doesn't like it. In fact, he's appalled. It's turned him to stone, a Medusa of his own making, and he cannot escape it.

He watched, fascinated, torn between alarm and a sordid satisfaction that coiled in his belly and groin with seductive heat. His father was always the cool one, the Rock of Gibraltar who never wavered in his purpose never misstepped on his path to glory, while he, Draco, was the puling boy-child who could never do right, revered in the pitiless light of Malfoy Manor and the obsequious din of gala dinner parties, but ridiculed behind the closed doors of his father's study. No mark was high enough to earn his approbation, because Granger's were always higher, and no matter how many times he caught the Snitch on the Quidditch pitch, there would be no plaudits because Potter always caught it a second faster or one game more often, and besides, Quidditch was a barbarian's game. So to see his customarily unflappable father so thoroughly and inexplicably discomposed was as titillating as it was disconcerting.

He reached out to touch his father's wrist, and he hesitated as he drew near. What was the harm in letting him stay like that for a while, lost in the twisting, labyrinthine terrors of his mind? He could think of a thousand sins for which his father had never done penance, expiated from consequence simply because he was older. The reminder of his father's sudden slap still smarted on his cheek, insult and fire on his skin.

Then again, it could be a test of your loyalties, a ruse to see how deeply filial fealty runs in those sainted veins. Hesitate too long, and that inheritance of which you have dreamed since the day your father took you to the family vault could slip away, bequeathed to a respectable institution such as the Buecherwelt Repository of Ancient Magicke in Berlin, with its endless stacks of magical history piled high on dusty, teetering shelves and its thin-lipped, pomaded stewards gliding through the rows with blank, politely expressionless faces, moldering tomes of forbidden knowledge in their white-gloved hands. And under their silent feet the damp and secret catacombs, filled not with the bones and dust of the dead, but with power, spells that have not seen the light from sun or torch since the shaping of the world. The pages of some are sworn to be mere rumor by those who know better, and possession of them carries a sentence of death. Wizards have forfeited their lives in search of them and likewise surrendered their birthrights for the briefest of glimpses. One thousand years of legacy would fill their coffers, and the line from father to son would be broken.

He snorted. His father would no more pass Malfoy money to outside hands than he would give his body over to the leeches and grave maggots. He was too fierce, too proud of the wealth his bloodline had wrought through prudence and careful alliances over the ages. The silver and gold that filled the vault and his coin purse was his and his alone. He would cede the fortune to him even if he had become a weak-kneed ponce, and those brazen enough to steal the coins from his eyelids at the hour of his death would be cursed and hounded to the ends of the earth.

The voice did have a point, however. His father may well be testing him. His childhood had been filled with moral lessons disguised as children's play, morality plays in the guise of Lords and Ladies or tag. A right choice earned him sweets and praise and the most coveted prize of all, a glimmer of pride in those stern, grey eyes. A wrong answer earned isolation and days of frosty silence.

He cleared his throat and brushed his fingers over the sleeve of his father's robes. "Father?" he said quietly. The flesh beneath his inquisitive fingers was warm and taut, baked clay, and he fought the urge to recoil.

His father gave an undignified squawk of surprise and upset his goblet, which spilled red wine on the table linen in a rich, red pool that bloomed outward in a steady, surreptitious seep.

The virgin deflowered, Draco thought stupidly, and watched the stain's progress in dumb fascination as it bled into the fabric.

"Well, what are you gaping at, you idiot?" his father snarled, and for a moment Draco thought he was talking to him. His voice was high and reedy and uncharacteristically tremulous, and his eyes bulged from their sockets.

"Y-yes, sir, Mr. Malfoy," Goyle stammered, and he rose from his ponderous crouch behind the elder Malfoy to seize a napkin and blot ineffectually at the dark and ominously growing stain.

His father watched Goyle's fumblings in seething silence, his nostrils flaring. Suddenly, he snatched the sodden cloth from Goyle's hand with a hiss of disgust.

"Bloody imbecile. Any thicker, and you'd be a Squib." He threw the napkin to the floor and withdrew his wand. He pointed it at the mess with an imperious flick of one fine-boned wrist. "Evanesco!"

The wine disappeared in a flash of blue light, leaving pristine tablecloth in its wake, and the overturned goblet was righted by an unseen hand. His father stowed his wand and ran his palm over the cloth to smooth an errant ripple. He inspected it for signs of discoloration. Satisfied with his work, he sat back with a sniff.

"Idiot," he murmured to Goyle. "Hasn't that doddering fool Headmaster of yours seen fit to teach you any magic, or is he too busy indoctrinating you into the unquestioning worship of Potter?"

Goyle shuffled from foot to foot, flushed with embarrassment. "We..uh...," he grunted.

Lucius flapped a hand in angry dismissal. "Oh, sit down. You weren't meant for thought, I can see. Your inarticulate gruntings are giving me a headache."

Goyle sat in his place on the bench with a disconsolate flop and drew concentric circles in his cold mashed potatoes with the tip of his spoon.

"Are you feeling well, Father?" Draco ventured.

His father rounded on him with a snap of starched wool. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Fear mixed with savage vindictiveness in his reply. "Because you're flushed, and you're making a scene," he answered coolly. His stomach had turned to molten lead, and his testicles sought refuge in the hollow beneath his navel. He was in an ecstasy of terror at his own audacity. His cheek could very well earn him a matching slap.

But no second slap came, no serrated barb of malicious wit. Instead, his father merely blinked at him, thunderstruck. "A scene?" he repeated blankly, as though his only son had suddenly begun speaking Hindi. "Flushed?" He wiped his forehead with his palm and stared at the perspiration that beaded there in befuddlement.

"Quite," Draco assured him.

"Bollocks," his father protested, but there was no conviction in it.

Glee at his father's discomfiture gave way to genuine concern. His father was behaving oddly, indeed, and insanity was hereditary. If his pater familius saw fit to lose his mind in front of the Slytherin pupils, his own standing in wizarding society would be gravely imperiled.

"You don't remember slapping me?"

"Of course I remember. You were being impertinent." More forceful, and the flush on his forehead and cheeks and the vacant glaze in his eyes receded.

"You acted strangely for a moment. Like you were going to faint."

"Rubbish," his father spat contemptuously. "I was thinking. Perhaps if you employed such an invaluable stratagem in your own affairs, I would not be forced to endure so many disappointments."

The casual malice in the remark stung more than the handprint emblazoned on his cheek, and he stiffened, his shoulders swallowing the slender stem of his neck in an unconscious bid for protection.

Bastard, he thought savagely. "It was my idea to send the letters," he countered petulantly. He hated the childish whine that had crept into his voice, but he was powerless to stop it.

His father's aegis was a blessing, sheltering him from the disagreeable onus of being responsible for one's own welfare and the even more frightening specter of gainful employment, but for every protection it offered, it demanded recompense in kind, not in blood or coin, but in time, shaving the years from his age until he was naught but a toddler, a child to be petted and humored, but not taken seriously. Never that. His fingers curled around the table linen, and it was an effort to relax them again.

His father sniffed over the rim of his goblet. "A rare instance of good judgment managed to overcome your mother's inferior genetics," he murmured dismissively.

His fingers closed around the table linen once more, and dull heat rose in his nape. His mother's name was as old and revered as his father's, a noble house that could trace the purity of its lines to the time of the Founders and displayed its pedigree on a tapestry that spanned the length of a wall in the family's crumbling ancestral ruin. He had once traced his chubby, little boy finger over the branches of gold filament and marveled at the exotic spice of forgotten names on his tongue-Xerxes, Ptolemy, Nero, Hera, Angelique, Commodius, Phillippa-Greek names, and French, honorable and distinguished names all. Names of which he could be proud. No, his mother was no common guttersnipe, damn what his father thought.

"Mother is just as Pure as you," he snapped.

His father made no answer, only offered that smug, infuriating half-smile he had been fortunate enough to inherit, and said, "Tell me about the transfer student, Draco."

Goyle, who had taken refuge from the brewing discord in his whipped potatoes, grunted in surprise, fork fisted in one meaty hand.

For once, Draco knew precisely how he felt. His father might as well have asked him why cheese was green for all the sense the question-and indeed the whole conversation the more he thought about it-made. He stared at his father in dumbstruck incredulity.

"Stanhope? Why do you want to know about her? Diseased little Mudblood." His fingers clenched at the memory of her frail wrist bones against his palm, and he grimaced.

"She interests me."

"Merlin knows why," Draco scoffed. "No good for anything but trouble. Sits in that rolling rattletrap of hers and watches the world go by through half-lidded eyes. Hardly know she was alive except for Potions and Arithmancy." He jabbed dispiritedly at a piece of meat with the tines of his fork and pushed it to the edge of his plate. The prospect of discussing Stanhope had robbed him of his meager appetite. "I'm telling you, Father, she's a waste of breath."

"If I were interested in your assessment of her value, I'd ask you for it," his father said sharply. "However, I did ask what you knew of her. Spare no detail, but keep it brief. The company is giving me a headache."

Anger coated his throat like ash, but he was too accustomed to luxury's yoke to rebel, and so he swallowed his bruised pride behind clenched teeth. "Yes, Father," he muttered, and began to talk.

While Draco was sparring with his father and losing badly, Rebecca Stanhope lay in the infirmary and watched the supine form of Harry Potter. She could not properly call it a sleeping form since he did not sleep; he wandered in the netherworld between darkness and light, in the places only God and conscience knew. The coverlet rose and fell in rhythm to his walking, and in the watery, illusive light of the moon, she could see the white crescents of his nails, neat and smooth despite his long night. Madam Pomfrey trimmed them every few days with the patience of a mortician.

Propped in her bed with her cheek resting on the back of one bony hand, she wondered what he saw in the secret gardens of his soul. Was it peaceful, or did he relive nightmares older and stouter hearts could not fathom? She had heard the tales in the Gryffindor Common Room, the stories of Dementors and the dying wails of his martyred mother that the morbid, wide-eyed first-years devoured like sweets and kettle corn before the hearth. And there was Cedric Diggory, of course, the dead-weight mannequin Potter had been clutching in lieu of the coveted Tri-Wizard trophy. That one was still fresh enough to carry the scent of obscene glee. Someone else, the firsties said as they hunkered on the hearth rug and cast distorted shadows on the walls, goblin children over the bones of a kill. Not us. We live. Maybe that was why Ron Weasley was so quick to scatter the circle whenever he saw it.

Then again, maybe his dreams were a pleasant reprieve from the waking nightmare of his life. Maybe the hinterlands of his mind allowed him to live in a better time and place, forever young and strolling with his parents through the botanical gardens in Kew or rambling through the dirt lanes of Godric's Hollow with a picnic hamper over one arm and a pretty girl on the other. There, the sun was always warm on his face and gentle on his nape, and Voldemort was a bogey in a children's tale. Perhaps he had found utopia amid the nothingness, and if that were so, then maybe he had run away as fast and as far as his dream-legs could carry him.

Could you blame him? her grandfather asked.

No, I wouldn't.

She had dreamed of running away, too, of fleeing to a place where the sun never set and muscles never spasmed or atrophied. They all had, the denizens of D.A.I.M.S., hostages to whitewashed walls and broken bodies. It was Valhalla and hope, the mythical land of Better Than Here, and it was unique to the mind that conjured it. In Better than Here, the soles of her feet were tough and leathery, not fragile as tissue paper, and covered in sand. She was brown as a late summer berry there, and if the mood took her, she could spread her wings and fly, soar into the heavens until the Aegean Sea was sapphires and diamond dust against the shore.

So, no, she could hardly fault Harry if he had decided to pull up corporeal stakes and search for greener pastures. If he was lucky, he had retreated far enough not to feel the intrusive probe of the rubber tube they'd inserted into his stomach to feed him or the undignified prodding of its counterpart at the end of the digestive disassembly line.

"Harry." A singsong whisper carried on the silver wings of the moonlight.

Harry did not stir, but Mr. Dagleby, sprawled in a chair by the door, gave a honking snore and shifted into a more comfortable position, and Rebecca flopped gracelessly onto her pillow and closed her eyes. Her breathing was too fast and too loud to fool anyone more than half-awake, but she suspected the old Auror was neither, and Madam Pomfrey had long been slumped over the desk in her office, dreaming to the smells of varnish and camphor. When there were no further creaks, she opened an eye and peered cautiously at the outline in the chair.

One hand dangled over the side of the chair, and the old man's head lolled bonelessly on the wattled stem of his neck. In the shadows, his Adam's apple looked like a tumor. His Auror's hat had fallen off while he slept, and lay disconsolately at his feet, the shattered helm of a fallen warrior.

I could tear his throat out while he slept, she mused, and though it had been intended as an idle mental aside, she was surprised to find that the temptation to do exactly that was a heady, narcotic pull.

Yes, you could. You could cross the room on your hands and knees, and while he slept and dreamed of tits and pints in equal measure, you could wrap your hands around the arms of the chair and rise to your knees, a mad, ravening specter of swift judgment, twisted harpy from the devil's own Hell. You could bury your teeth in his exposed throat to the jugular and taste blood in a spurting, copper freshet. His skin would taste of leather and sweat, age and too much booze, and if you were lucky, it would shred like rice paper beneath your canines. You could bite and tear and thrash until his larynx and trachea were crushed and his vocal cords glistened in the moonlight. The bastard would die gargling on his own confusion.

The world came into sharper focus, and she licked her lips. It was such a sublime fantasy, and she could envision it with exquisite clarity. She would be a crouching succubus, and she would crush his feeble bleats of protest between her jaws until bone gave way with a wet snap. She would taste fear and vengeance, and when they pried her away, she would offer them an unrepentant, cannibal's grin.

Bullshit, snapped her grandfather impatiently. That old coot may be slow on the draw and an old-fashioned, condescending prick, but he'd still drop you in your tracks with a wave of his wand and yawn while he did it. Get a grip, girl, and stop letting the piss and vinegar in your veins override the sense I gave you. There will be a time and a place for reckoning, but it isn't now, and you know it.

The voice was right, of course, but that knowledge did nothing to dispel the longing that lingered in the pit of her belly and simmered at the base of her brain like eros remembered.

Not remembered, not yet, she reminded herself, but yet to be. She smiled at the thought.

When there came no further movement for nearly a minute, she opened her other eye and reached out to brush her finger over Harry's cheek. It was cool and smooth despite his prolonged stay here, and she wondered if Madam Pomfrey included a shaving Charm in her daily ministrations.

Probably right after she squeezes that abominable nutritive paste into the stomach tube, her grandfather offered helpfully. Would you like a complimentary shave with your wheat puree, Mr. Potter? It was a horrid image, and she gagged even as she recognized the urge to titter.

"What do you see, Harry?" she whispered, and brushed milky film from the corner of his mouth. "Where do you go, china doll?" The only answer was an indelicate, groaning snore from Dagleby.

You could find out, you know, leered an insidious voice inside her head, and she recoiled, tucking her chin to her chest and retracting her outstretched arm until it nestled at the hollow of her throat in a protective brace. There were fangs here, too, long and silver and full of poison. Beneath the sheets, her legs spasmed in painful protest.

No, no, no, she thought feverishly, and counted off the seconds of the spasm to the rhythm of her shaking head. No, I won't do that. Then, in the voice of a rebellious, terrified child, You can't make me. It's too dangerous.

Too dangerous, or too tempting? the voice asked slyly. You know you can do it, and behind the flimsy safeguards of your conscience, you want to do it. All you have to do is say the words, murmur that infernal invocation, and you can riffle through the contents of his mind with impunity, trace his path from the stink and hush of this bed to the moment of his creation in his mother's womb. Further, if the rumors are true. All umbilici lead to Lily. All you have to do... His birthday is as the days of the week, and why not? What harm could it do to look? You might even find the answers you seek.

She closed her eyes and pressed her ear to the pillow to block the voice and the allure it carried in its seductive whisper, and wondered if the sounds of violent retching would be sufficient to rouse Dagleby. Her heart thundered in her chest, and the spasm in her leg, which had begun to fade, renewed its vise grip.

I will not. I will not, she mouthed frantically, but her hands paid her no mind. They threw back the coverlet and tossed it indifferently to the floor.

Besides, you've already done it once, the voice insisted gleefully. What was that incident in the Potions classroom but a call to the Game? The world disappeared, and with a blink of your eyes, you walked within your Potions Master's walls, trod in places never meant for prying eyes. The magic is strong here; the Game can be played with the merest breath of will. All you have to do is think it, and it is within your grasp. They don't know, not even Headmaster Dumbledore. If they suspected the existence of the Game, you would be as captive as your mentor, sequestered in the Headmaster's office or a room in the bowels of the Ministry and subjected to the sadistic vagaries of Ministry Mediwizards.

When you were in that squalid institution, that Game was your lifeblood, the sole ambrosia of your existence. You hungered, lusted for it, and even after you foreswore its pleasures, you remembered it fondly. All of you did. How many times did you roll toward the basement in the dead of night, only to find Jackson Decklan standing at the top of the stairs, slippers over his square, pneumatic feet, staring into the blackness pooling there? Or Hattie Turkle, muttering and stuttering as she shuffled down the hall? You all came, summoned by the irresistible pull of the forbidden. You huddled there in pairs and trios and let the taint of it seep into your pores even as you traded guilty looks and tried to pretend that there was nothing amiss at all about students gaping at the basement at three in the morning with fire in their bellies and rapacious, dirty, unslaked want.

The want has not changed, only the place. So why not indulge while you can? He is hardly in a position to protest. All your life, you have fantasized about power, absolute and unwavering, and here the opportunity lies. What greater conquest than the unguarded mind of the greatest avatar of the age? It would be painless, and with what you find, you could be the fulcrum upon which the wizarding world rested, ignored no longer, perhaps even feared.

She was hyperventilating now, her breath a warm eddy against her cheek. The voice was liquid and glottal and absolutely right, and its wheedling intimations lapped at her faltering conscience, swamp water seeping stealthily beneath its cornerstone with tenacious, loosening fingers. She hungered for power and all its trappings, pined for the day when invisibility would be of her own choosing and not a penalty for her twisted limbs. Dominion's diadem had rested on her head in a thousand unfinished dreams, and the Game offered it to her if she would but partake.

She fisted her hands around the bedsheet. She would not succumb to its lure, to the poppy and laudanum blindness of its addiction. Potter may have been a tin idol of the masses and an arrogant, self-absorbed twit, but he was also unmistakably human, a boy of flesh and bone burdened with an impossible weight, and if she capitulated and ransacked his mind for no other reason than the ability to do so, she and the Auror in the chair would be beasts of the same stripe. She would not stoop to that level.

Oh, but you want to, don't you? jeered the voice, and in her mind's eye, she saw a black-eyed, red-tongued imp with the devil's grin peering salaciously from behind a linden tree. You almost did with Professor Snape.

But I didn't, she countered. The bedsheets slackened in her slick-fingered grip as the corners surrendered their hold on the mattress. And I won't.

The imp laughed and capered merrily around the withered bole of the linden tree. Sooner or later, you will, it told her, and cackled. It is inevitable. Already your resistance is weakening.

She sighed, and after a brief struggle, she sat up and swung her spindly legs over the side of the bed, her socked feet dangling just above the floor. Bitter cold burned the soles of her feet through the flimsy cotton, and she resolved to buy thicker socks the next time she went to Hogsmeade. She scrubbed her face with the back of one stiff hand and stifled a yawn. Her bones were heavy inside her skin, and her eyes were raw and gritty from too much wakefulness, but the leering voice of the imp made sleep impossible. Instead, she stared at Potter in the moonlight.

She had only intended to look, to study him for clues more prejudiced eyes had missed, but her body acted of its own volition, moving in the thrall of the imp's terrible, singsong voice. She threw out her hands to brace herself against Harry's bed and dropped to her knees. Her knees screamed in protest at the unexpected weight and pitiless scrape of the stone floor. The pain was sharp and crushing, shark's teeth and iron hands, but she did not rise. The need to know was too great, and there was no respect to stay her hand.

Victory! the imp shrieked inside her mind, gamboling around the linden tree in an ecstasy of triumph, but she did not hear it, nor did she pay heed to her grandfather's plaintive shout. Both were drowned out by the roar of anticipation.

She closed her eyes, bent over Harry, and sniffed the hollow of his neck, a predator savoring the jungly odor of fear in the seconds before the killing bite. He smelled of starch and wool and the bland, pencil-shaving tang of medicinal soap, and fine hairs tickled her nose. Freshly scrubbed skin and a hint of bitter almond and the lingering, stale reek of those whom death has marked, but not yet claimed.

She sniffed lower still, over the thin wool of his hospital robes and the parasitic hump of the stomach tube. There were more smells here-the dry-pasta scent of rubber tubing, the coppery stink of old blood, the cool piquancy of adhesive. She lingered here, lips parted in a vampiric half-smile. The tips of her hair brushed his stomach in a furtive caress.

There was a grotesque eroticism in the pose, an unconscious sensuality that would have given an outside observer pause had there been anyone to see, but the old Auror slept on, and Madam Pomfrey, whose ears were usually sharp enough to catch the faintest of cries or sniffles, did not emerge from her office. There was only Rebecca, and she was lost to everything but the gnawing fire in her blood.

Play the Game, insisted the imp, and her hand rose dreamily into the air and began to scribble names and numbers onto the nothingness. The pitch behind her closed eyes began to recede, replaced by the undulating tendrils of time and possibility.

That's right, crooned the imp. Yours for the taking. Just reach out your hand and say the words. Her frantically scribbling finger swung in a wild, uncontrolled arc in the air above Harry's bed.

Her lips pulled back from her teeth to mouth the words. Listen, my children, and you shall hear a tale of woe and pain and fear. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and the red and green threads filled her vision. With her other hand, she reached out and plucked the life thread of Harry James Potter from the sea of undulating strands.

For such a short thread, its weight was staggering, and it seethed with despair and impotent rage and flailing, furious bitterness. Her fingertips and the palm of her hand sizzled and crackled with magical current, and it reverberated through her unseen forearm and into her shoulder, rattling her teeth and stuttering her heartbeat inside her chest. She tasted ozone in her mouth, and it was a conscious effort of will to control her tongue.

The power, she thought stupidly. How can there be blood in his veins with all of this power?

And then the images flooded in.

Snape, dark and brooding and greasy at the front of the room. Footfalls reticent and heavy as stone. Mud and sulphur in his mouth. Chilly glass between rapidly numbing fingers. Ginger-red and unkempt auburn. Friendship and loyalty in the leonine tower. Horse's teeth and ruddy, mustached faces. Porcine shadows that blotted out the sun. Hippogriffs and hope. Fear and the heft of a sword in his hand. Stars and moons and half-moon spectacles, and a cupboard full of scuttling spiders under the stairs.

She was crying now, silent, panting huffs of expelled air, mouth working and head thrown back, eyes wide and vacant. Her spine arched at an impossible angle, and her abused knees wept blood onto the greedy stone.

I don't want to be here. I shouldn't be here. It's not right. Oh, God, how can he stand it? Too much! Too heavy for such young bones. He's smothering. Can't they see? Wearing away like a worry stone too often used. They'll grind him to nothing if they don't stop, but even if they did, he wouldn't. Vengeance is all he has to call his own.

The thread pulled her inexorably backward, past the dark and mildewed cupboard, past a bulldog with drooping jowls and an owner to match.

Grandpa, help me get out, she pleaded. There is no anchor here.

Her grandfather's voice sounded from across the void, but it was feeble and helpless. The magic was too strong, and she hurtled on.

Holidays spent in a cabbage house and feline feet on his lap. Figs and hand-me-downs. Face rubbed in the dirt with the weight of the world on his back. Christmas with barren chimneys and sacks full of coal. Tottering steps in a spotless kitchen. Green suns and Irish eyes that did not smile. The comfort of a pram in God's Hollow. Going to the market, Harr-

It was overbalance that did what discipline could not. Her knees, no longer able to support her, gave out, and she toppled sideways with an ungainly flop. One outstretched hand struck the night table between her and Harry's bed, and the glass of water Pomfrey had placed there before retiring fell with the shrill tinkle of shattering glass. Her wand rolled off the table and onto the floor, and she lunged for it without thinking.

"Hngh!" cried Dagleby as he awoke with a start. "Lumos!"

The sudden brightness hurt her eyes, and she closed them instinctively as she lay, panting, between the beds. Water from the shattered glass soaked her nightclothes, and her stunned fingers scrabbled frantically for her wand.

Oh, Jesus, Jesus, what do I do? Tell me I didn't. It was a nightmare. It had to be. But even as she seized the possibility, she knew it for a lie. Her arm still thrummed with residual magic, and her skull throbbed with stolen memories. Harry's melancholy and unfocused rage still clung to her skin in a sticky sheen. Her free hand scrubbed the hem of her nightgown.

I'm sorry, Harry.

Bet he's heard that a lot, her grandfather muttered.

The beam of light drew closer, and Dagleby squinted woozily at her. "What'r you dng, girl?" he asked.

Before she could answer, Madam Pomfrey appeared in the doorway to her office, wand upraised. "What in blazes in going on in here?" she demanded. Then she spotted Dagleby looming over her. "Dagleby! What are you doing? Harassing a student?" She advanced on him, wand pointed at his gobsmacked face. "Should have known that the Professor wouldn't be enough."

Dagleby flinched and took two hasty steps back. "Madam! I'll have you know I did nothing of the sort. I merely heard a noise and came to investigate," he protested indignantly.

Pomfrey snorted. "Are you all right, Stanhope?"

"Yes, ma'am. I-was following Harry-had a nightmare and fell out of bed, is all."

"There! You see?" Dagleby said. "Preying on a student, indeed."

Pomfrey pointed her wand at Rebecca. "Wingardium leviosa!"

Rebecca floated back into bed.

"Now then," Pomfrey said briskly as she pulled the sheets over Rebecca and tucked them beneath her chin. "What was this nightmare?"

Rebecca blinked at her. "It was...about D.A.I.M.S.," she said finally. Close enough to the truth.

"Is that all?" Shrewd.

No. I was really ransacking Potter's mind, and it got a bit out of hand. So sorry. "Yes, ma'am. It was a bad place."

"I see."

Pomfrey turned to smooth Potter's bedclothes and stopped short at their disarray. She turned to Stanhope again, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. She straightened the coverlet and absently smoothed Harry's untidy hair.

"Wake up soon, won't you, Harry?" she whispered fondly.

After a few more moments' fussing, she shambled back into her office with a last baleful look at Dagleby. The old Auror settled into his chair and resumed his heavy-eyed vigil, and Rebecca curled beneath the sheets and scoured the roof of her mouth with her tongue to rid it of the taste of bile. Her hands fisted in the pillow as though its solidity could anchor her to the world.

That's twice, yammered a voice inside her head. If it happens again, you have to tell the Headmaster. You can't control this. Not here. Magic flows too freely.

You won't tell, jeered the imp indolently. You'll need it ere the end. You knew that a long time ago. That's why you wrote the letter to Jackson. You knew it would come to that, and the truth is, you hope it does, because the old addictions die hard and sometimes not at all.

"Only if I have to," she slurred in sleepy defiance.

"Hungh?" grunted Dagleby.

"Nothin'," she said thickly.

The only answer was a resounding snore.