Chapter Eighteen of 'An Alchemical Discontent'- Against the Barriers
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Chapter Eighteen-Against the Barriers
Draco came gasping out of the latest experience that had flowed over him like bloody water. Or was it a dream? Or a combination of one of the memories Daphne had returned to him and something she had been doing to his body at the same time? She had a previously unsuspected talent for using Legilimency at the same time as she deployed a whip, a scallop shell, or a sharp-toothed comb, causing Draco to lose his hold on reality and tumble into her reality.
He was still bound with the wire, he found when he tried to move, and his ribs had a tender soreness about them that made him suspect he was at least bruised there. But this time, instead of hanging upside-down, he was bound to a chair. He was naked, and when he looked down, he could see a glittering curl of wire uncomfortably close to his groin. He shuddered.
“Ah. You’re awake.”
Daphne stepped in front of him. Draco blinked and stared. There were bleeding crescent moons on her belly, the mark of scrabbling nails, and a sharp bite on her right breast that looked human. Had he done that? If so, he retained no memories of it from their latest encounter.
Then he reminded himself of how clever Daphne was. She could have given the marks to herself and displayed them on purpose to confuse his sense of time. Draco lifted his chin and glared at her, not choosing to speak.
Daphne held out her wand, still smiling. Draco jumped and cried out, the bonds tightening and cutting into his flesh. His hipbone had suddenly rotated in its socket, causing a sparking, blinding pain that reminded him of nothing so much as his body turning against him.
“Watch it, Draco,” Daphne murmured. “I wouldn’t like it if you somehow thought you had authority here.” She turned slightly away from him, and for the first time, Draco noticed a mirror hanging on the opposite wall. They were in a bedroom, but it didn’t look like the ones his scattered memories had returned to him, chambers buried deeply inside her fortress-like home where they often fucked. Daphne pointed her wand at the mirror, and an image blurred and flickered to life.
He had to swallow to keep his resolution of not speaking. The image showed Harry and Granger leaving the Ministry entrance by the broken phone box. Granger was consulting what looked like a map, her mouth set in a grim line and her fingers moving from place to place on the parchment with astonishing rapidity.
And Harry…
A combination of pleasure and distress sent a long shiver down Draco’s spine. Harry’s face was pale and quiet. He showed no sign of anger outwardly, the way Granger did. He had no expression at all, in fact, and might have been passed by people in the street as someone having an ordinary day.
But Draco had never seen his eyes glow like that, not even the first time they had brewed the Desire potion together and Harry had so far forgotten himself as to lick Draco’s hand. It was rage, and not pleasure, that made Harry so pale. And Draco could imagine the magic and power brewing beneath that still surface, ready to explode on the nearest available target.
Merlin, let it be Daphne.
A snap of Daphne’s wrist, and the image in the mirror vanished. Draco looked up as she turned to regard him again, tapping her wand on her arm. She looked thoughtful, assessing, the way she might if she were buying a fine house or investing half her money in a chancy business. Draco knew what that expression meant, and he didn’t like it.
But what would he gain from cowering and acting afraid? His task right now was to stay alive until Harry found him. Annoying Daphne was not the way to do so, but giving her what she wanted would only afford her more reasons to torture him, so as to inspire more fear. He stuck his most neutral mask on his face and waited for her to complete her appraisal.
“I have had many lovers,” Daphne said. “And most of them have come, in turn, to love me, or at least feel some degree of liking for me.”
Draco kept his bewilderment at the change of subject off his face. Stay alive. The more strange things she says to you, the less time she spends hurting you. And there might be a clue in one of these statements.
“Even in cases where they were unwilling to indulge my-particular preferences, we have come to an understanding,” Daphne continued, her voice soft and lulling. “An arrangement.” Her green eyes shone, and though they really weren’t that different in color from Harry’s, just a little less intense, Draco could only marvel at the difference in effect on him. “They gave me what I wanted. I gave them what they wanted. We parted mutually satisfied.
“And yet, I find myself unable to do so with you. The disadvantage of using Legilimency in the ways I have trained myself to do is that any lover subjected to it reacts with a restricted range of emotions. Uncertainty, doubt, fear-one may adore them and yet grow tired of them with time. Whereas someone who knows what I have done with him feels reluctant pleasure, disquiet, disgust with himself, perhaps some weariness as we near the end of the arrangement.”
She cocked her head and began to pace around him. Draco hated it when she passed behind him, then paused and pressed her wand into the back of his neck. But he held himself still and didn’t react except in the ways he couldn’t help, half-closing his eyes and letting out a single tense breath.
“I see no other way than to tame you with these unknown spells and with Legilimency, however,” Daphne continued. “The first time we met, you bargained from too great a position of self-respect to bow to what I wanted of you. And this time, your own shame preoccupied you, and then the fear caused by my spells. To earn anything from you, I need to accept that I will not get everything I desire.”
Draco blinked. He wasn’t sitting directly in front of the mirror, but he was sure it would have reflected his bewildered expression if he was.
“But now there is something new involved,” Daphne said. “Something that was not in your eyes when you first came to me, shivering with desperation to have forty thousand Galleons.” An odd contempt touched her voice for a moment, and then vanished as she continued. Draco would have snorted if he dared. She had some nerve scorning him for whoring himself out for money, considering the crimes she had committed, both moral and sexual. “And that new thing makes me less certain than ever that I will get what I want, even if I kill you.”
Draco judged it might be time to respond when the pressure of the wand on his neck increased with his continued silence. He cleared his throat. “What is this thing?” he asked. “You may be sure that I would have tried to conceal it if I knew about it. Any strength unknown to its possessor is a weakness.”
Daphne laughed a little, and the wand eased up. Draco felt free to breathe again. She stepped in front of him and studied him thoughtfully.
“You are considering commitment, and not to me,” she said. “I know that look in the eyes of a lover. When someone who shares my bed begins to dream of other flesh, to see that body imprinted before his waking eyes, to feel the shape of shoulders and a chest not my own molding to him, I always know.”
Draco frowned, not understanding. He had already been attracted to Harry when he came to Daphne, after all, and he could not believe she would not have sensed that, particularly when she could read it out of his head. “I am not in love with anyone,” he said.
“There are other forms of commitment than love,” Daphne said. “Indeed, love is chancier than most people think it, when it can veer and change as infatuation often does, and when it is subject to such deep wounds in case of betrayal. But loyalty, friendship, the desire to trust and to stay trusting, instead of the desire to stop when one feels oneself getting too involved-that is what you are feeling that you did not before. That is what other lovers of mine have felt in the past, when they were ready to pair with someone who was not me. And often I have had no choice but to let them go, because I would never derive as much satisfaction from them again, and I knew it.”
Draco caught his breath. Could Daphne have kidnapped him and given him back his memories simply because she intended to surrender him when Harry arrived? It would be strange, but Slytherins had done stranger things for excitement, and she might like the notion that his life and his chance of happiness with Harry were gifts from her hands.
Daphne leaned forwards. “Your thoughts are so plain on your face,” she said softly, “I do not even need Legilimency to read them.”
Perhaps not, then. Draco drew into himself and tried to look as if he were a wary man of the world, ready for anything.
“With you,” Daphne said, “so hard to tame, and so intent on settling for someone else even before you came to me, there is only one thing I may do to gain the satisfaction I desire.” She turned her wand over twice in her hands, then looked up and into his face.
“I will let this Harry Potter you are so fond of come before me,” she said, “though I will test his magical strength with a few trials beforehand, of course. And then I will kill him.”
Draco ducked his head, but it was too late. She had seen the way his face changed. She chuckled.
“No, that is not quite the expression I want,” she said, “but for now it will do.”
*
“And you are certain this is it?” Harry stared at the enormous house in front of them with his hands clenching around the stalks of the tall bushes that hid him and Hermione. The house itself looked fairly ordinary, not even as imposing as Malfoy Manor had looked when they “visited” it during the war. The façade had beautiful Classical columns, but the gardens surrounding it were shaggy with dark green bushes, and the house itself was neat and self-contained, made of brick, without spreading wings to either side.
“This is the address Daphne Greengrass has on record with the Ministry,” Hermione said. She had been nearly as tense as Harry ever since they had acquired the map to Greengrass’s house. She shadowed his every movement, clearly not intent on letting him charge into danger alone. Now she looked down at the map as if checking it, though Harry knew well enough it didn’t show individual buildings-he had memorized it before he would let Hermione touch it-and nodded. “The Ministry does require some knowledge of where people live, you know, so it can tax them appropriately.”
“She might have a hidden lair,” Harry breathed. He found it hard to think, but as long as he concentrated on the goal immediately in front of them, he could maintain a calm eye in the center of the rising storm of rage in his head. Right now, he had to work out where Draco was, so that was the overriding determination.
“Really, Harry, she’s not an Acromantula,” Hermione snapped. Then she paused, as if reminded by her words of the battle with Cordelia, and moved behind him. Harry glanced over his shoulder at her as she waved her wand and murmured a soft spell. A moment later, he yelped as his back flared with light. Luckily, Hermione had already cast a concealment spell to cover the light, or Harry would have cast one himself and then yelled at her. This way, he could proceed straight to the yelling.
“Hermione! What-“
“You didn’t heal that wound that Cordelia gave you when we fought her,” Hermione interrupted in some disgust. “You just stopped the progress of the curse. The stasis spell might have worn off whilst we were fighting Greengrass, and what would you have done then, I wonder?” She clucked under her breath and shoved him forwards, so Harry had to hang on to two stalks of the bushes in front of him in order to keep his balance. “Hold still so I can heal it.”
Harry rolled his eyes, but didn’t protest. Hermione was right; the curse could indeed have become a problem when they went into the house to fight Greengrass.
And he wanted absolutely nothing to distract him from finding Draco.
The rage roared through him at that, as red and fast and large as the Hogwarts Express. Harry closed his eyes and welcomed it, luxuriating in the way it made his muscles lock and tremble and the adrenaline pound up and down in his head. He should be doing things.
The rage gave him the strength to do them.
He had to admit now that Draco was right, that giving up this emotion had been like locking a piece of himself away. Of course, it was a piece he had managed to do very well without for six years; he could live without getting tumultuously angry over minor things every five minutes.
But that he had forgotten what it was like to hurl curses in battle, to want to hurt someone for hurting someone else he loved…
That is not moral and you know it, Harry, his conscience said, and presented him with the image of his casting the Cruciatus Curse in retaliation for Carrow spitting on McGonagall during the war. That had not been justified. McGonagall had been in no pain, simply insulted, and the Cruciatus was a means of causing pain, unendurable enough when Harry had experienced it in the graveyard that he would not have wished it on any other human being.
At the time, anyway.
But he had changed enormously between the end of his fourth year and the end of his quest for the Horcruxes, and part of him had deepened and ripened into an appreciation of hatred for his enemies. Dumbledore had been quite wrong to think that Harry was capable only of love. The very desire for vengeance he’d felt when he considered how Voldemort murdered his parents was an indication of that. But Harry had never confronted that desire in himself because he’d been too young and callow, and when it called attention to itself, he panicked and imprisoned it.
Now he would have to take his thirst for revenge in hand if he was to have a hope of rescuing Draco. Daphne Greengrass was subtle, skilled in Legilimency and in magic that Harry had never heard of before, as well as the creation of new spells. What Harry had against that was brute strength and the slight added advantage of his potion enhancing his magic.
And the rage.
Harry licked his lips, glad at that moment he’d never told Draco exactly what his magic had done to Ginny so that Greengrass wouldn’t have a chance to read it out of Draco’s mind and anticipate his actions, and raised his eyes as Hermione finished removing the curse from his back. The house looked back at him, calm and ordinary on the surface. Hermione had told him that Greengrass had probably used wizardspace inside, however, so that she could have more rooms, and more luxurious ones, than the house would otherwise let her contain. They might have to find their way through a maze before they reached Draco, or they might have to fight cunning and elaborate traps.
Harry didn’t care.
The force of his indifference to the danger struck him like a bracing wind, and stole his breath away in the same manner. He didn’t care. Greengrass could have imprisoned Draco on top of a volcano crowded with dangerous magical creatures maddened with a clever Imperius curse, and Harry’s only fear would have been that she would drop Draco into the volcano before Harry could reach her.
He would tear her limb from limb if that was what was required. Or he would bind her hand and foot and meekly deliver her up to the Aurors. There was nothing he would not do to ensure Draco’s safety.
Harry shivered. He wondered at how long it had taken him to recognize the manner in which the potion had changed, or, for that matter, his own feelings for Draco. Even though his potion suppressed his sexual jealousy, it didn’t suppress love; it had never changed the way he felt about Ron and Hermione, and only time had altered the gentler emotions he felt for Ginny.
I suppose I became so used to lying to myself about my emotions that I automatically concealed them when something changed.
Well, no more. Harry would do anything required to reach Greengrass, and anything required to make sure Draco was happy and safe after that-court him, give him up to some other lover, visit him with flowers every day, help him brew two dozen cauldrons of the Desire potion. That was what he wanted to do, and if his own will and his own potion couldn’t keep him from doing it, who did Daphne Greengrass think she was to try?
“There,” Hermione said abruptly, and Harry jumped a little. “That’s every wound from the last battle healed. I of course didn’t need any healing magic myself, since I fought them rationally.” She stepped up to Harry and stared into his face for a moment. “Be careful.”
“I know that,” Harry said. The rage roared through him like a dragon again, and he trembled with eagerness.
“You don’t look like you know it,” Hermione muttered, and then sighed. “Malfoy’s going to be a permanent part of our lives if we get him back, isn’t he?” she asked the air.
“Glad to see you recognize that,” Harry said, and then cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself and started walking towards the house, leaving Hermione, grumbling, to follow.
*
Nothing happened until they had crossed the porch and come in among those Classical columns. Harry couldn’t even feel wards. Of course, that meant they were there and he just couldn’t sense them. He was tense and ready, despite what Hermione might think, to move in a moment if anything coiled around his legs or tried to strike at his back.
But the first strike, it turned out, came from above. Stone shifted, and then small gargoyles that had crouched out of sight on the pediments of the columns came swooping down at Harry and Hermione, shrill screeches tearing out of their throats.
Harry turned to the side, so that the first gargoyle swooped over him, and lifted his wand. He hadn’t seen the point of putting it away from the moment they’d stepped out of the bushes. “Reducto!” he shouted, and the force of the spell caught the gargoyle in the chest and smashed it to the steps.
Cracks radiated through the stone with such quickness and force that Harry was surprised. He understood, though, when each fragment grew wings, a head, and taloned hands, and then there were two gargoyles where there had been one. They both sprang at him, one rushing his knees, one diving at his head.
Hermione, from the sound of it, was using the same spell she had on the Acromantula, gathering up her attackers into one silken net. Harry favored different tactics, and he had the chance to think about which one he might use; for some reason, the gargoyles seemed to come at him in slow motion.
He laughed aloud, and the magic moved without his directing it, the way it had when the young witch came to the door of his flat.
Ice covered the gargoyle attacking from above, and it fell heavily to the steps. This time, though, when it tried to crack and divide, the ice wrapped itself more firmly around the stone, thickening and holding on like permafrost. Harry leaped the gargoyle that tried to grab his knees, receiving no more than a nick from its claws in passing.
The gargoyle turned around to come back, and then his magic took over. A glittering ball of ice crystals simply appeared around it; no matter how fast Harry looked at it, he knew he couldn’t have caught the ice in the process of formation. And the magic gave the gargoyle no chance to land on the steps at all. It hovered in midair, bulging and rippling with odd blue shadows as its prisoner struggled futilely to break free. Harry laughed again and looked about for more gargoyles, eager to see how his magic would unite with his will this time.
Hermione was just Summoning the last one into her silken bag, which she wove extra tight with another wave of her wand. Then she looked at him sternly. It was obvious she found either his laughter or his wandless magic entirely inappropriate.
“Is it best to show her all our advantages before we even enter the house?” she snapped at him.
It would be his wandless magic, then. Harry tried to calm the joy flooding through him, but he seemed to have utterly lost his ability to build dams in front of his emotions. At least thinking of the possible danger Draco could be in allowed him to channel them. It was more important to press forwards and try to find Draco than to stand about looking for things to hit.
“I’m ready,” he said, and smiled at Hermione, and cast a spell that should detect traps on the door. Nothing. Then he cast a spell to detect wards. Nothing again. At last he opened the door from a distance with a charm that worked like an invisible hand pushing on it. It opened on darkness. Greengrass would not have been obliging enough to have lit rooms she wasn’t occupying, and of course she wouldn’t have Draco on the ground floor of her house; that would be too easy.
Let’s find out where she has him, then.
Harry stepped forwards.
*
“Interesting,” Daphne said, and swirled her wand at the mirror, making it change its image from the porch of the manor house to the front room, a dim, shaded place. Draco could just barely make out heavy furniture covered with cloth in the darkness. Harry was taking the lead, of course, whilst Granger scuttled along behind him and cast detection spells. “I did not expect them to defeat the gargoyles so easily. However…” Daphne moved her wand sideways and whispered a spell.
Draco tightened his hands inside the wire, and said nothing. Because she wanted a reaction from him so much, he would not give her one. And that might occupy her more with trying to get a rise out of him than with hurting Harry.
*
Harry heard the rattling a few steps past the door, at the same moment as Hermione called out sharply, “Harry!”
But both warnings were too late; the manticore had already sprung and jabbed its scorpion-like tail into Harry’s shoulder, and he could feel the warmth of the poison flowing into his veins.
Gritting his teeth, Harry turned to deal with the latest threat. He had to remember this was just another obstacle on the path to Draco, to be dealt with and thrown out of the way accordingly.
Ignore the pain. Draco’s the important thing.
The manticore roared at him and reached out with one paw as if to rip his face off.
Harry attacked.
Chapter 19.