Blood Magic

Blood Magic

This is Lucius's seventh day in Azkaban and Narcissa's seventh day alone. Her wedding ring is heavy on her finger.

.

When Bellatrix arrives on her doorstep, her face is hollow as a skull, like the dark mark on her arm.

"He is angry." Her voice is hoarse.

Narcissa looks coolly at her. "Why is Lucius still in Azkaban?"

"He is angry," she repeats, and says nothing more until Narcissa tips a priceless healing potion down her throat. The primary ingredient is mother's milk.

.

She drinks her husband's best cognac and lets it burn her throat until her vision blurs.

"You haven't introduced me to your son, Narcissa," murmurs Bellatrix, her voice smooth. "Are you afraid I'll take a fancy to him and fuck him raw? I just might, if he looks like you."

Narcissa sinks further into the Lucius's armchair, her blue silk robe flowing like water over the curve of her flesh. "I can't decide whether it's fanaticism or imprisonment that's rendered you so vulgar, Bella." The words tumble out with ease, only slightly slurred; she feels some vague, irrelevant satisfaction at that.

A salacious smile. "Crude? Mmm, yes, but rough more than anything. You never had objections to that, did you?"

Narcissa's body feels supple and drowsy and lonely, and the embers in the fireplace are the colour of her liquid in her glass. "I never..." she starts to say, and then curls up next to her sister. Bellatrix's arms snake around her, fingers digging into her flesh.

"I never did," Narcissa continues, and her cognac-moistened lips tingle as they touch her sister's.

.

Draco is sitting outside, dressed in white linen and reading a textbook when Narcissa finds him.

She smoothes his hair, her fingers running through the fine strands as easily as through water. Her nails lightly, tenderly graze the back of his neck and she thinks of how different he is with her, how much more affectionate, how like a little boy. She feels like she's betraying innocence with this introduction.

"This is Bellatrix Lestrange, love. She's my sister."

His head snaps up in surprise, and he looks at Narcissa for a questioning instant before greeting Bellatrix politely.

Bellatrix's lips twist up, gleaming with dark lipstick. She's gone back to wearing the heavy makeup she did in school and it melts in the summer heat. "Have you ever read Mein Kampf, little boy? You might find it useful..."

.

That night, Narcissa burns Lucius's copy in the fireplace.

.

"Your husband wastes you, walks all over you, you know. I wonder who he's fucking in Azkaban."

"Simply because yours prefers little Muggle boys..."

"Shut up," says Bellatrix savagely. "At least I have control over mine. At least I'm ambitious enough to want control."

A sneer. "Why is that, Bella? Are you just repeating what your master taught you?"

Sharp eyes glare at her under hooded eyelids, black with shadow and sleeplessness, but there's the stamina of an old, long-noble race in the eyebrows' heavy arches.

"You're envious..."

"Envious? Of what? Not having blood on my hands and a cock in my mouth? Keeps you warm at night, does it?"

A look of hatred - Narcissa's never seen it directed at her before - and with it comes a jolt in her stomach, a rush of arousal deep in her belly.

.

And she is envious, because Bellatrix belongs to death now.

.

Bellatrix's knees are rough as sandpaper from crawling and kneeling, and that gives Narcissa a hard twist of satisfaction - an affectation of power she can't quite grasp even though she's writhing on her own cold silk in her own cold mansion.

Limbs are sharp, too; her bones stab like knives covered in leather.

Narcissa can almost feel that she's bruising, can feel purple and black and blue flowering on her skin besides thin lacerations, broken blood vessels twined with burning nerves and the surges of pain and pleasure that are both cause and effect.

She arches away from and into nails that feel like claws; feels her skin break in half-moons. Her muscles contract and release in syncopated rhythm as Bellatrix pushes, cuts, withdraws, and Narcissa knows that she uses the same technique with Cruciatus.

There is silence in the room but for shudders and hisses of pain because her sister likes the ones who scream, the ones who are completely at her mercy.

"You're made of ice, my darling," says Bellatrix with mock-sweetness, her breath like frost against Narcissa's hot, burning skin. "But not with me."

Her fingers are cold and rough as tombstone, and Narcissa's delicate, translucent skin, soft from cream and perfume and good genes, inflames and breaks beneath those marble-chip fingers, leaving swollen pink arrow lines that end between her thighs.

Her sister kisses her then and her tongue is warm and wet and Narcissa surrenders to this tenderness, this long, lingering kiss free of sharpness and blood. But then Bellatrix bites down on her tongue, hard, and Narcissa cries out from the pain, her eyes welling with tears. There's the tang of blood, and it fills her mouth, salty and sweet and unfamiliarly thick.

Bellatrix smiles, and her white teeth - sharp, like fangs - are halfway red.

"Do you know...I cut off Benjy Fenwick's tongue and made him swallow it...it wasn't the only part, either." She licks the blood off her teeth. "I should do the same thing to you, shouldn't I?" - voice is high and girlish and mocking now - "All those cruel, cruel things you said...and what if I'd cried? Wept pretty warm tears and tasted them..."

Narcissa registers the glint of metal an instant before it slices along her inner thigh, closer and closer to the core of her nerve endings, and she doesn't know how she can balance on this edge, endure this mix of tongue and blood and metal everywhere but where it matters most. Finally - oh god, finally Bellatrix's fingers scrape against moist skin and ash-blond curls, twisting, tracing, digging, swelling the wave higher and higher until her world narrows to a tip.

"I want you to bleed for me," hisses Bellatrix, and the cold knife that leaves burning in its wake slices across her, between her legs, and Narcissa can't choke the cry as her spine curves upward and she cuts herself deeper, gold and sepia bursting and staining behind her eyelids.

Bellatrix's hands come away glistening with fluid and Narcissa feels her trace something across her stomach, but right now she feels too weak, too wounded and wet, and the lightest touch sears like a brand across her skin.

Bellatrix kisses her again and her lips come away bloodstained. "My sister," she says, and laughs. "You're bleeding. Pure red blood on pure white skin...there's something beautiful about that symmetry. How I love you," she murmurs, and in a way it's true.

She leaves the scent of blood behind her, and later, when Narcissa looks at herself in the mirror, she finds 'pureblood' written in red across her stomach.