The Curse of Loki Trickster

CHAPTER TWO: A Hot Time In the Old Town Tonight

Draco Malfoy opened his eyes early Sunday morning and realized he was in a spectacularly pleasant mood. The messy, humiliating death of a long-hated foe always made him feel rather chipper. He stretched lazily and snuggled back against the warm body sharing his bed.

All too soon, sleeping Slytherins started to wake. Harry lay wide-eyed, listening to the commencement of morning fun and games, Slytherin style. He flinched at a particularly loud squeal courtesy Tracey Davis, and winced at the sounds of flesh hitting flesh drifting through the drawn hangings around the bed.

"They're so. . . so. . . loud," Harry said, cringing as Pansy shrieked in rage.

"Harry," Draco sighed, "my friends feel the same way about you that I do."

"Oh, God, I hope not," Harry replied fervently, shuddering at the mental picture only he could see.

Under threat of clothing, Slytherin House had long ago made a deal with the house elves that they would have breakfast delivered to their rooms on Sunday mornings. This morning, the smell of finally drove Draco to throw open the curtains separating him and his boyfriend from the rest of the world.

It was tradition with the Seventh Years that Sunday morning breakfast was the one meal of the week for which they did not dress formally. In fact, they did not dress at all for this meal, but gathered around the table wearing exactly what they had slept in, which was usually the altogether.

Blaise strolled by in all his nude glory and said, "Arise, Potter, the time has come to gormandize," giving him a wink. Harry gaped at him in astonishment. Crabbe glared at Harry, who let out a startled 'eep' and dove under the covers. Everyone around the breakfast table looked at each other, then at Draco, and snickered.

"Harry," Draco coaxed, "come out and have breakfast. Dobby sent extra lime jelly; he knows it's your favorite."

The lump under the covers moved, and two emerald green eyes peeked out at Draco. "I can't eat breakfast naked," he said sotto voce.

Draco rolled his eyes as his classmates muttered and laughed behind him. "You have to," he said. "It's tradition that we eat Sunday morning breakfast nude."

"Not naked," Harry said obstinately, shaking his head.

Draco gave a long-suffering sigh and sat down on the bed beside Harry. "You won't be naked, Harry, you'll be nude, just like everyone else," Draco explained patiently. "Naked is being seen without clothing when you're not expecting others to see you and nude is being seen unclothed by others when you are expecting to be seen."

"I can't do it," Harry whined. "It's obscene."

Draco sighed and frowned at his roommates to keep their mouths closed. "If you won't follow tradition," he threatened, "then you'll have to go eat in the Great Hall."

"Fine, I will," Harry pouted, and pulled the hangings around the bed so he could get dressed in privacy. He still adamantly refused to change clothes in front of any of the Slytherins, even Draco. Draco walked him to the door after he was dressed, and sent him on his way with a kiss and pat on the bum.

"Not a word," Draco warned his sniggering roommates as he sat down to eat.

Now it certainly could not have been out of fear of Draco that his friends all kept quiet. They had started eating sooner than he had, and before he was done with his kippers, Goyle was already wiping his mouth and ducking under the table cloth, quickly followed by Crabbe. Daphne squeaked loudly, echoed by Tracey as Millie also slid to the floor.

Damn it, how was he supposed to eat his link sausage when his hormones were being teased at every turn?

Now how both Crabbe and Goyle managed to fit under the table was a question for physicists. Blaise certainly wasn't in a frame of mind to answer academic questions (though he probably could, if one wanted his answer punctuated by gasps, groans, moans, and occasional outbursts of, "Intensify your lingual muscle action!"

Tim now disappeared as well, and Pansy's sharp gasp gave no doubt at all to what he was doing. Despite the four blissful faces around him, Draco was all alone at the breakfast table.

Deciding he wasn't hungry anymore, he drank the last of his juice and slouched off for the showers, in a decidedly frustrated mood. He set the water temp as cold as it would go and stood there, shivering, as he waited patiently.

Five minutes later, he was still aroused, and he cursed his fellow Slytherins for taunting him. Why did Harry have to be such a prude? All ten of them could have been having fun under the breakfast table, or on it for that matter.

He sighed, turning the temperature to something warmer. He washed, running the bar of soap meticulously over his body. Then he did it again. And again, and again after that.

"I now call this second meeting of the Weasley Must Die Society to order," Draco said, stepping back into the room dripping wet, for he had forgotten to bring a towel to the bathroom with him. He saw that the elves had cleared away the breakfast table, working around the eight Slytherins who were still busy.

At his instruction, though, they ceased their amusements, righted the chairs, and sat down to determine who would be responsible for the next death of Weasley, and plan that death.

"First order of business," Draco said, and produced the green velvet bag. He passed it around, and everyone except Goyle drew a stone from it. Again, they waited until the eight of them held a stone in their hands before displaying their choices.

The wet-looking red stone was in Daphne Greengrass' delicate hand. Goyle beamed proudly and gave her a gentle kiss of congratulations.

"Damn!" Tracey spat. "I want my turn!"

"I'm disappointed, too, sweet-ums," Millie consoled her, rubbing her back in small circles. "But look at how much more time we have to plan for our turns."

Tracey stuck her lip out and sulked. Crabbe grunted his dissatisfaction. Blaise sat on his lap and rubbed at his brush-cut hair.

"Don't be melancholy, my love," Blaise soothed his massive lover. "Another day of anticipation will only pique your enthusiasm for the gratifying task once it falls to your hand to implement yet another ghastly execution of the miserable Weasley. Until then, I would be content to acquiesce to any suggestions you may have for a mutually titillating manner of passing the languid afternoon."

"Afternoon?" Crabbe said. "But we haven't had lunch yet, Blaise."

"Stop thinking about food, fathead," Draco fumed. "You can't possibly be hungry right now. We just had breakfast."

"My head's not fat!" Crabbe exclaimed.

"I'm ready for my turn, too," Pansy bitched. "I'm tired of waiting."

"I'm tired of listening to you run your mouth, Pansy," Tim snarled, and slapped her. Pansy screeched like a harpy and jumped at him, knocking him out of his chair and onto the floor. They both growled at each other as they wrestled.

Draco shook his head in disgust. One of these days they were accidentally going to kill one another.

"It's fine, Draco," Daphne assured him in her bell-like voice. "I decided what I wanted to do yesterday. All I need is your help in making a Potion. The rest, as they say, is just details."

~*~

Daphne told Draco that the recipe she wanted to use could be found in Moste Potente Potions. None of them were allowed a copy of their own while still at school, so they had to refer to the one copy kept in the Restricted Section of the library. Madam Pince required a note from a teacher if one wanted to even look at any of those books, but the Slytherins were determined to be sneaky.

They didn't have to actually take the book, just the recipe they needed for the proper potion. Daphne sent Goyle to Madam Pince with a fabricated line of inquiry. With the librarian occupied, it was simplicity in itself for Daphne and Draco to duck into the stacks of forbidden books, pinch the proper volume from the shelf, copy the recipe out, replace the book, and be gone. The whole operation took less than five minutes.

Current sneakiness completed, the three Slytherins adjourned to a secondary Potions classroom and began their preparations. The ingredients list was hard enough to acquire in full, even Professor Snape didn't have all the ingredients in his private storage cupboards, but several urgent owls to two suppliers in Knockturn Alley had everything assembled in short order.

Draco, as leading Potions student, took charge of the brewing. He set up his self-stirring, solid gold, size ten cauldron and filled it with a base of dragon's blood. This he brought to a boil and added in five grams of shredded salamander skin.

"This had better work," Draco said as he looked at the recipe again. "This dragon's blood cost a Galleon a millilitre."

"Recipe says we only need thirty mils, boss," Goyle said. "What's that compared to the Malfoy fortune?"

"So why the hell did we buy sixty?" Draco demanded. "Just because I spend money doesn't mean I like to waste it."

"If you do the potion properly, we won't need the other thirty," Daphne told him. "If you're not up to it, maybe we should go ask Granger to help."

That

shut Draco up and made him focus on his work. He pulled better marks in Potions than Granger, just barely, but he did ever strive to show that purity of blood did matter.

"I'll brew the potion correctly," he said darkly. "Then I might just do it again and slip it into Granger's drink, too."

Daphne finished pulling the heads off of a pile of red fire ants and measured out ten grams. These were added slowly to the bubbling blood.

"'Let simmer for twenty minutes,'" Draco read off. "Ok, what to do until then?" His question was answered as he looked over to see Goyle and Daphne kissing tenderly. It made him wish he had someone with him at the moment. He felt his trousers tighten.

They certainly made an incongruous couple. Goyle was a big man, even among big men. He looked like a bouncer or a bodyguard, maybe even a professional wrestler. Daphne was tiny, delicate, and fragile. It seemed she might break if touched too roughly, like drawn glass. Still, the care they showed for each other was obvious. Their love was pure, sweet, and true.

Damn, he was horny just from watching them.

At the ten-minute mark, the potion had turned from black to bright red. The self-stirring cauldron eliminated the most tedious part of potion-making, but also left him with nothing to do. He should have brought a book. He consulted the recipe. It called for the addition of the catalyst.

"One, two, three, four, five, six," he counted off as drops of firewhiskey fell into the cauldron. "This is the catalyst, which is what he's going to have to ingest in order to trigger the effects. We add some now so the potion knows the proper signal to commence reaction. Are you sure you can get him to have firewhiskey? Weasley doesn't strike me as much of a drinker."

Daphne looked over from where she had Goyle's face cupped in her two small hands. "Trust me, Draco. Weasley will do whatever I want him to."

"Imperius?" Draco said doubtfully. "I think that might violate the spirit of our rules of engagement."

She laughed, a wicked little sound. "It was never forbidden, therefore it's fair use. But no, I don't plan to use Imperius."

Draco shrugged. "Well, this is your turn, so I guess it's all up to you."

"I appreciate the help you're giving me with the potion. Have you figured out what it'll do to him yet?"

Draco frowned. "I've never even heard of using salamander skin with fire ants. And dragon's blood as the base? No idea what this could be for."

She smiled sweetly. "That's going to be part of the surprise. Why do you think I didn't copy the name of the potion onto the recipe?"

~*~

Ron was just finishing up securing his melon cart after the close of the day's business. He'd had an odd feeling all day about the melons being dangerous, but shook it off as unfounded paranoia. Maybe he'd had a bad dream the night before. At any rate, he was glad to be free of the oppressive cart for another week.

"Oh, Ron," came a soft voice from behind him. "Do you have a moment to spare for me?"

Ron Weasley turned around to see a slim, dainty brunette standing with her hand on her hip. Her brown hair was medium length and covered the House crest sewn to her robes over the left breast. Inwardly he frowned, for he couldn't place her, nor remember her name.

So he decided to fake it. "Hi," he said, smiling pleasantly. "Isn't it beautiful today?"

The weather was bright and sunny. One could not ask for better Quidditch conditions. After the last match, the Quidditch Cup had been awarded to Slytherin, but only on account of villainy. He squashed that bitter memory, for it had been his own failings as a Keeper that had prevented Harry's catching of the Snitch from meaning anything.

The girl nodded. "It is a beautiful day," she agreed. Ron still couldn't remember her name, but he thought she was in Hufflepuff. "What are you doing the rest of the evening?" she asked, her voice still soft. It seemed as fragile as she appeared to be.

"Not much," he replied. "I'll probably have some butterbeers with Harry and Hermione. Maybe have a bit of firewhiskey and play some games, sing a few songs."

She smiled at him. He noted that she had a very pretty smile, one that lit up her entire face. "Do you think maybe you might like to have a drink with me?" she asked him.

Ron was not used to pretty girls asking him to have a drink. Usually it was Harry who got those offers (as well as other, not so innocent offers), even though he'd announced his homosexuality at Christmas.

"I'm sorry," he said with genuine regret, "but I have a girlfriend."

"Do you now," she said, licking her lips slightly. "And does this lucky girl have a name?"

She had full lips, tinted pink. He caught himself staring. "Hermione," he said hastily. "Hermione Granger."

The girl looked amused. "So you're saying that Daphne Greengrass is not a better date than Hermione Granger?"

Inwardly he groaned. Girls were so irrational. Why did she have to misconstrue what he'd said? "I'm saying that I love Hermione," he said carefully. "It's not anything to do with you; I think you're very pretty." Now why had he said that?

She smiled even more. "Just what I wanted to hear." She drew her wand, quick as a flash. "Confundus!" she said. Ron's eyes glazed over. "Now then, would you like to go for a drink with me?" She smiled, showing her teeth.

Ron thought for a few seconds. "I'd love to," he said sincerely. It was hard for him to think. Why shouldn't he have a drink with this pretty girl? Harry always got all the attention, now it was Ron's turn. He ignored the small voice in his head telling him that this was a very bad idea.

Daphne smiled at him, and his heart went all flip-floppy. "Wonderful. I'll meet you at the Three Broomsticks at half eight."

"Half eight," he confirmed, glancing at his watch. That was in two hours. "I'll be there."

She blew him a kiss and walked away. He stood there for a few moments, grinning like a fool. He had woken up with a black rock in his pocket that morning. He had no idea where he might have found it, but it was comforting to toss it from hand to hand as he strolled down the street. He wandered towards the joke shop in a bemused state, giving not a moment's thought to his original intention of going to the jewelry store to look at rings for his precious Hermione.

Two hours later, he was sitting at a table in the back of the Three Broomsticks sipping a butterbeer. He didn't understand why, but he had felt almost compelled to sneak in through the back entrance to avoid the notice of his soon-to-be-fiancée and his best friend. Harry and Hermione were sitting at a table in the front when Malfoy sauntered in with his goons in tow and joined them. Though Ron couldn't hear what was said, Malfoy had obviously made a nasty comment, for Hermione stood up sharply and stormed for the door.

That should have bothered him, but it for some reason it did not. He couldn't remember why he was supposed to care. Every time he tried to recall, it kept slipping away from him. He turned away as Harry leaned over to whisper something in Draco's ear.

No one noticed Loki as he prowled the pub like a stalking cat, eavesdropping on a conversation here, whispering in an ear there, but always with one eye directed toward the Slytherins spread out around the room.

"Hi there," said a soft female voice near his ear. He turned to see Daphne smiling at him. Her smile rearranged the pattern of light freckles on her face and did a little minor rearranging with his heart.

"Hi yourself," he breathed. She looked lovely. "Please, sit. He stood and pulled out the chair for her. She sat down.

"Let me get us some butterbeers," he said eagerly, gesturing to the waitress. She nodded her dainty head on a smooth, white neck. Her skin was like fresh milk.

"So Ron," she said. "Tell me about yourself." She took the mug of butterbeer that the waitress brought over and cupped her hands over it.

Weasley began to babble about nothing in particular. Everyone knew there wasn't anything all that interesting about him, but Daphne acted very interested anyway. When he excused himself to use the loo, she signaled for another butterbeer and put her untouched mug at his place. She drew her wand and whispered a Cooling Charm as she tapped the glass. It frosted over.

"Hey, a fresh mug," he said enthusiastically as he sat back down. "Thanks, Daphne."

"Don't mention it, Ron," she said, with what almost looked like a smirk playing around her lips. "I'd like a shot of firewhiskey, wouldn't you?"

He took a long drink, and before he finished the mug, was babbling again, almost drunkenly. He fanned himself with his hands and inquired if she felt hot. He ordered another butterbeer and two shots of firewhiskey.

When the mug was gone, he lurched to his feet. "I need some fresh air," he croaked, his throat raw from the firewhiskey.

She looked up at him, extremely amused. "You Gryffindors can't hold your liquor," she teased him. "It's only a quarter past nine. My fellow Slytherins could each out-drink ten of you."

"Fellow what?!?" he choked, alarmed. "Slytherins! You're all evil! I can't be here! Why am I here? I love Hermione! You've tricked me, you, you scarlet woman, you! I shouldn't be here!" He staggered for the front door.

Nobody who witnessed it could later tell you just what had happened. Weasley was almost to the door, having run screaming in panic across the room in full view of the entire establishment. Then, less than a meter from the door, he spontaneously combusted.

Flames burst out from his eyes, his ears, his nose and mouth. His body caught fire in a spectacular manner, and the air filled with the reek and sizzle of burnt hair. He shrieked in agony and thrashed around. Then his body was nothing more than a charred husk, and it fell through the door.

Loki laughed gleefully along with the Slytherins. A chill ran up Millie's spine. She shrugged it off and snuggled tighter against Tracey.

"Oh my God!" shrieked a sixth-year Hufflepuff girl. "They killed Ron!"

Ginny Weasley, sitting at that table, looked up drunkenly from her butterbeer. "Who cares?" she slurred loudly. "He's always been a prat."

Outside the pub, Crabbe and Goyle picked up the crispy corpse of Weasley and began dragging it up to the Shrieking Shack for storage in the dungeons.

Back inside the Three Broomsticks, her fellow Slytherins joined Daphne for a celebratory drink. Each of them congratulated her in turn on an outstanding job. She smiled and accepted their compliments demurely, sipping at her own drink that was quite free from the Burning Blood Potion that she'd slipped into Weasley's drink.

~*~

Ron awoke with a shriek and a feeling of half-remembered pain. He wrapped his arms around his body and wept, rolling on the cold stone floor like a hurt child.

"Do stop that, Weasley," Malfoy said scathingly. "While it looked rather spectacular, you were soused and couldn't possibly have felt a thing. You may not be so lucky again."

"What- what happened?" Ron asked, his voice trembling. "Malfoy! Why are you here? Why am I here? What's going on?"

"Sorry, Weasley. As much as I would enjoy describing your fate in exquisite detail," it might have been Ron's imagination, but Malfoy actually did sound regretful, "you wouldn't remember, so..." Malfoy drawled in his excessively bored tone of voice. He pointed his wand at the prone boy on the floor. "Obliviate!"

Weasley's eyes went blank. Draco pointed his wand again. "Obdormiscere!" Weasley's head bounced off the stones as he went into a deep sleep.

Draco tucked a second black stone into the sleeping Gryffindor's trouser pocket and turned away with a satisfied smirk. Two down, seven to go. It had been a very good Sunday for him and his friends, and tomorrow promised to be even more fun. He sauntered off to the seventh year's dorm room, where Harry was waiting for him. Draco intended to not satisfy Harry at all tonight, as punishment for not partaking in their traditional Sunday breakfast. He would get a good night's sleep, then it would be time to once again plan the next death of Weasley. Maybe tomorrow he'd be the lucky one. Mondays weren't always bad, he reminded himself. Sometimes you had Weasel-killing to anticipate.

End Chapter Two