Lifestyles of the Rich and Pureblooded (Draco/OFC, Draco/Ginny) Rated NC-17, Part 1/2
Title: Lifestyles of the Rich and Pureblooded
Author: eucalyptus
Pairing: Ginny/Draco
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: I disclaim. Anything herein is not mine.
Warnings: Character Death, Dark/Sexual Themes, Cursing
Summary: A life lived wrongly is still a life lived.
Author Notes: My sincerest thanks to my beta, bk11, who always finds a way to see what I can’t. Written for gypso_child.
Original Request
Requested pairings/characters: vamp!Ginevra/Draco…
Special requests:
1) vamp!Ginevra/Draco -
Plotwise: AU; old style, master vamp!Ginevra, centuries old; pampered, aristocrat!Draco, who is arrogant as all fuck, but doesn't know shit about the real world; Ginvera (and use her full name, mostly, please, unless it's as a nickname) wants a new childe/lover/protector/toy/PR to the human world; a love tale, of sorts; Draco is the one who is turned.
Propwise: Victorian clothes; a fuck-me bed; those annoying little dogs you ALWAYS want to kick the shit out of.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Pureblooded
_ _ _ _ _
Part 1
_ _ _ _ _
(This is not a story about karma or consequence.)
Draco Malfoy didn’t know it yet, but this was the beginning of the end of his life.
There was great irony to be found here. He was about to reap the fruits of his labour. Something his father had never managed to accomplish was within his reach, free for the taking if he was smart about it. And the truth was, he had never questioned whether he should do it or not. Draco Malfoy rarely questioned anything. All that mattered was whether it benefited him in the end.
In two days time, this would be the furthest thing from his mind. With a countdown hanging over his head, Draco would not feel time move forward in the same way. Instead, days, hours, minutes and seconds would dwindle and shrink until there was nothing, and he would see himself reborn with new eyes.
He would later wonder at the superficiality of that notion. For most of his life he’d believed that people starting dying the moment they were conceived. They died as they grew from a blob of cellular tissue into something with a distinct shape and sex. They died as they were born, as they developed an awareness of their surroundings, as they began to move and eat and shit and sleep. They died as they learned their mother’s smell and as they first recognized the feeling in their father’s voice as indifference. They are dying as they lose what they all have in common and become themselves in mind and personality. They are even dying when they have sex and create life.
How then was it even possible to feel the passing of time differently, just because death became a ‘here and now’ kind of possibility?
Perhaps, he would also later say, he didn’t really believe any of that bullshit about life being just a thing that happens on the way to becoming maggot food. Maybe he’d resisted the idea that life, all life, is bigger and worth so much more than he ever gave it credit for. And maybe he did it because he was too much of a coward to think critically about who he was, for fear of what it might reveal.
_ _ _ _ _
He bolted upright, hands seeking purchase on the bed. It was 2:42am, deep into the early hours of the morning, and the room was dark with night.
The wards at Malfoy Manor had held without breach for three hundred and five years. Draco, who had only ever heard the stories from his father, thought of this with great annoyance as he grabbed his wand from the bedside table and lit the bedroom with a muttered ‘lumos’.
Something was wrong. He could feel it in the old magic thrumming within the walls. The mansion had woken him.
There came the echo of their dog’s high-pitched yap off in the distance, breaking the silence. Against his every instinct, Draco turned his ear to the sound. The little thing was going ballistic.
His wife of two years sat up in bed and watched him stumble towards the wardrobe for clothes.
“What’s happening?” Nadilla mumbled, squinting against the light of his wand.
“One of the poltergeists getting into something they shouldn’t,” he said with no small measure of irritation. “I’ll take care of it.”
Nadilla accepted this with a drowsy sigh. He heard her lie back down on the bed as he pulled on a pair of trousers and shrugged into a shirt. “Alright,” she said, “but check on Edmund, won’t you, darling?”
Draco turned to her and frowned. “I will not coddle the boy.”
He caught her rolling her eyes.
“Who said anything about coddling?” she murmured under her breath. “He doesn’t even know you as his father.”
Though she had tried to keep her tone light, there was resentment in the way she avoided his eyes. Draco’s mood quickly turned sour. “The boy’s eight months old, Nadilla. He wouldn’t know his thumb from his arse. Besides, he has a nanny.”
“Draco, she doesn’t stay the night.”
“She doesn’t?” He allowed some amazement to be heard in his voice. “Then what am I paying her for?”
With a huff of disgust that told him she knew this game, Nadilla turned her back to him. He was, of course, perfectly aware that the nanny didn’t stay the night. God knows he needed something to amuse him these days and Nadilla was such a fussy little swot. Draco took his wand in hand and strode into the hallway, slamming the door close on his heels. The portraits grumbled sleepy objections to the disturbance.
He stalked through the drafty corridor, heading in the direction of Clementine’s barking. Clementine was a yellow-haired pomeranian given to Nadilla by her mother a few years ago. While he was amused with the dog’s immense bravado, she was ultimately so timid that if he so much as looked at her, she’d scramble away like her tail was on fire. There was no doubt in Draco’s mind that Clementine was no threat to anything that might have happened to find its way inside his home.
As he walked, the candles hovering along the corridor walls flamed to life, illuminating his path and allowing him to extinguish the light of his wand. He followed the barking until he came across a small brown house elf in stained rags hovering outside Edmund’s nursery door.
“What is it, elf?”
The elf yelped in fright and shrank back against the wall. Then, its eyes widening in recognition, it pointed towards the door.
“Someone is being in there, Master Malfoy!”
He leaned in close and listened to the dog barking on the other side. For the first time, true curiosity entered his mind. The wards had been breached. He had only a hazy idea of what sort of magic could accomplish that.
“Go on then,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
The house elf vanished with a relieved snap of its fingers. Draco gripped his wand tightly and peered through the crack of the partly open door. He wondered if the intruder in the nursery had heard him speaking to his servant, for aside from Clementine, the room was eerily quiet.
The thought came to him that if he could just catch the intruder off guard, he could easily disarm it. On the count of three, he took a breath and slammed through the door as hard he could with his wand raised.
“Who’s there?”
The room was dark and still. Heart pumping, he swept his eyes from one dark corner to another. When his eyes came up empty, he cast a revealing charm. The room was deserted, he noted with some satisfaction, and the fuzzball that was Clementine bolted for the hallway. Whatever had been here was obviously gone. Perhaps he’d been right, and it really was one of the poltergeists.
Edmund’s crib was up against a wall near the window. Whether it was the odd disturbance in the night or a desire to actually see the child, Draco decided to spare him a glance. The boy was, after all, of the purest bloodline in all of England. One had to assure the security of one’s assets.
As he expected, the silencing charm around the crib had held during the commotion. Edmund was sleeping on his back in an ivory-coloured sleeper. His blonde hair curled in soft wisps across his forehead and even in the muted darkness, Draco could make out Edmund’s small hand, clenched in a fist.
It appeared the baby had grown.
As Draco stood there, trying to ignore the pleasant sensation in his chest, he felt a shift in his surroundings. If pressed to describe it, he couldn’t have been able to. It was at best just a feeling, of something crawling up his spine, making his hair stand on end. And he knew, with no small measure of caution, that he was no longer alone with his son.
Outside, the wind picked up and howled through the trees.
“You’ve interrupted me,” a voice whispered.
Draco spun around. The spectre of a woman rose out of the dense shadow obscuring the opposite side of the room. Red hair that he would know anywhere was offset by skin an unnatural, ghostly white.
On instinct, he tried to pedal backwards but only succeeded in smacking up against the crib. “What the hell?” he sputtered when he found his voice. In the next moment his wand was in the air, pointing at her.
“Please,” she murmured, stepping towards him. “It’s Ginerva now.”
A memory of a girl he’d gone to school with came to him. That day in the bookshop. Gilderoy Lockhart was there, signing autographs. Potter, Granger…
Weasley. Ginny Weasley.
He allowed his wand hand to drop to his side.
“What are you doing here?” he asked stupidly.
Ginny Weasley grinned with delight and fingered the white fur trim of her silk cloak. It was embroidered with leather along the hem of the sleeves in a technique he knew to be extremely old and rarely practiced. “Was it?” she asked facetiously. “That was just the effect I was going for.”
He paused, unsure of what to make of her words. “I’ll not bother myself with the matter of how you got in,” he sneered. “But I admit I am rather curious about who you had to fuck to get that cloak. It’s been years since you’ve been anywhere near that kind of money.”
To his great disappointment, the amused smile on the woman’s face did not fade or crumple into tears at the mention of her beloved Potter. Instead she opened her mouth, slowly and luxuriously, to reveal white incisors as sharp as knives.
Draco paled. “What the--”
A dark spell rose to his lips and he lunged. Instead of the sound of bones cracking, there was only the whoosh of air as Ginny batted the spell easily towards the window. Its glass exploded outward. In a flurry of movement his wand was in her hands and before he could move she’d snapped it cleanly in two.
“Just a precaution.” She tossed the broken bits over her shoulder.
Real fear began to prick at Draco’s senses. He immediately broke out in a sweat. “You’re a vampire,” he stated as calmly as possible, a manner at complete odds with the nervous thrumming in his chest and he theorized that surely Nadilla or the house elves would have heard the window breaking.
She smiled openly. “Well, obviously I’m a vampire, unless you buy into that ‘wooden stake through the heart’ stuff.”
Draco began to slowly creep backwards, keeping himself between Ginny and the crib. “How did you get in?” he asked.
“Magic,” she whispered. “We are Lilith. No grave could keep me in. No home can keep me out.”
There was something there, something beyond the shock value of her words that made him replay them in his head. His heart pounded painfully in his chest.
“I-I don’t understand.” Draco swallowed heavily.
Her eyes ran up and down his body as she stepped closer. “Vampires have always had their own particular kind of magic, something different from what you have. But I am both of those things. It makes me stronger than you. I can pass through a crack in the wall no bigger than a strand of hair. Would you like to see?”
“No!” he said too quickly before catching himself. “No, I’ve known enough of your kind through my acquaintances. You’re not the first witch or wizard to be turned, you know.”
His face twitched. It was a bold-faced lie, a move of desperation to regain the upper hand. There weren’t loads of them at all. In fact, it was quite rare for a witch or wizard to be turned because of the way their magic was altered. It threw off the delicate power balance of the vampire world, so most vampires were shrewd enough to avoid it.
The next question rolled off his lips with a sense of foreboding, and Draco wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the answer was.
“Why are you here?”
She regarded him thoughtfully as though debating whether the truth or a lie would be more advantageous, and then the woman who was once Ginny Weasley glanced with slow, dark purpose through the fringe of red hair falling into her face, over his shoulder at the crib behind him.
A deep, sick feeling took root in Draco’s stomach.
“Not my heir,” he whispered.
Her eyes rounded playfully in surprise. “What? It’s not my fault. You’d be surprised how many of my kind have a taste for infant flesh. And he’s so…pretty. Just like his father.”
Draco was struck simultaneously by a wave of nausea and anger. “You dumb bitch, you can’t have him. He’s mine!”
She laughed again and clapped her hands. “Oh, I like you much more like this than the way you used to be!”
With a scream of frustration, he swung his fist towards her, hoping to wipe the smile off her face.
It never made contact.
In the space where she used to be there was suddenly nothing. The momentum made him stumble forward with the force of the punch.
Barely catching himself from sprawling to the floor, Draco whipped himself around to see Ginny standing over the top of the crib. As she toyed with the baby carousel, making it spin, she leaned down and made a show out of smelling the sleeping child.
Draco gagged at the sight. Something awoke inside him. He found the jagged edge of a piece of glass and took ahold of it, then rose to his full height. “Get out,” he spat with the threat of violence in his voice.
Her nose curled sharply in irritation as she looked up at him. “Shut up, Malfoy. You’re not in control. I’ll take him if I bloody well want to.”
She flicked her hand in his direction and Draco found himself slammed up against the wall, spread-eagled. Bindings like spider webs slid around his arms and legs, neck and torso, cementing him in place. They cut into his skin as he fought frantically to free himself. As he opened his mouth to scream as loud as he could, the binds suddenly tightened around his throat and he found he couldn’t breathe, much less call for help.
Ginny’s eyes lit up as she watched him struggle.
“I have an idea,” she whispered in a singsong voice. “You might actually like this. I’m going to offer you a deal.”
He groaned as the binds continued to tighten of their own will. His head felt like it was going to burst, and the more he struggled, the tighter and hotter and more painful the binds got got. “N-no deal,” he wheezed in agony. Why hadn’t anyone come yet?
She continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “I’m willing to find something else to feed on tonight, if you give me something in return.”
“Anything,” he gasped immediately, and the binds loosened just enough for him to rasp out a few more words. “I can buy you anything.”
“I’m afraid,” she murmured, “that it won’t cost you a sickle.”
All at once she was close enough that he could smell the dry stench of rot. The binds held him so fully in place that Draco was helpless to stop her from touching him. Her hands ghosted up his bare chest and along his collarbone, fingernails tracing the soft protrusion of his bone. She was cold, so cold.
“I want you, Malfoy.”
He was incredulous at first, and more than a little disgusted. “Are you joking?” he choked out.
Ginny shook her head. Draco found he couldn’t quite bring himself to agree. Any minute now someone was going to come through those doors and rescue him. He would be a bloody idiot to make any deals. Wouldn’t he?
When it became clear that he was hesitating, she called his bluff and darted towards the crib.
“NO!”
She stopped. Whipping around, her laughter echoed in the wake left after his panicked shout.
“So you agree?”
It made him sick to think it, but ter proposal wasn’t altogether…unappealing. He could certainly lower himself to fuck a Weasley if it meant getting her away from him. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time he’d had another woman in his bed thanks to Edmund. Becoming a father had made him more irresistible than ever.
Once he had the thought, his pride began to warm up the idea.
“I knew you’d always wanted me,” Draco said, attempting to mask his relief with some of his usual arrogance. “Let me down and we’ll discuss terms.”
She came over and nuzzled his neck. “I promise that I’ll turn you as painlessly as I can.”
Draco recoiled. “Turn me? No! I am not a monster!”
“How would you know? We live in luxury even you couldn’t imagine. And there are, in fact, very few wizards and witches among us. I rule my kind. You would live better than a king with me.”
“How dare you do this to me?” he wheezed. “There is nothing you could offer that would convince me. I have everything I could ever want. I can buy anything I please.”
“Like the wife you’ve never bothered getting to know, Malfoy? The son who serves no purpose to you other than as a successor? Your hundreds of social contacts, amongst which you couldn’t count a single true friend? Or are you referring to this cold, clammy mansion that has seen more murder in the last three centuries than the remainder of the United Kingdom combined? Yes, I daresay you’re swimming in riches.”
“You’re not one to talk, you vile little cunt. You just declared the blood of an infant a delicacy!”
“Oh, psh,” she muttered, and with a flick of her wrist, the binds were gone. “I haven’t lost my sense of decency, you know. We all fall victim to our more primitive urges now and again…don’t we?”
Draco fell to the floor and lay gasping. He heard Ginny whisper something under her breath and then a peculiar, drunken feeling began to pervade his senses.
To his very distant horror, she knelt beside him, placed her hand between his legs, and began to gently stroke him through his trousers. He was instantly, inexplicably hard and somewhere in his mind, a voice told him he’d been enchanted. His body buzzed with the weight of an unfamiliar magic that crawled into every tiny crevice like an insect.
“It’s your life,” she whispered in his ear, and her tongue darted out, hot and wet, to lick his earlobe and the smooth skin behind it. His mind quickly lost its lucidity, and she easily unfastened his trousers to take his cock in her hand. “Your life, or his. I will give you time, but if you don’t make up your mind in two nights, I will feast on your heir.”
Draco groaned and instinctively pushed his hips up so that his cock pistoned between her fingers. Against his will, he whimpered at the sensation, and the hollow sound of his own pleasure in the nursery struck him like a splash of cold water. Shame settled in his stomach. With a herculean effort, Draco worked up the will to shove her away.
As he stood up and fumbled to fasten his trousers, the remnants of the spell made his knees shake with dizziness and disorientation. “I-I won’t let you near him or me again, Weasley. Stay the hell away from my family.”
She stood up from where she’d fallen to the floor and glared. “You don’t have a choice, Malfoy. You know what will happen. And I will find a way to remind you of me.”
An invisible force suddenly punched him in the stomach. He once again slammed to the floor like he’d been hit with a bludger. As he curled up in the fetal position, a white-hot pain searing behind his eyes and radiating from his gut, he heard her musical laugh.
“And it’s Ginerva, you bloody git. Call me Weasley again and I’ll kill you both.”
He wanted desperately to scream at her, to throw something, to tackle her to the floor and beat her senseless, but her spell had completely winded him and he could barely move. After a moment of gasping into the carpet, he managed to raise his head to meet her gaze. The woman blew him a kiss, then spun around and walked directly towards the north wall of the room.
As the thick shadows sucked the vampire known as Ginerva into them, welcoming her back with their dark caress, her words echoed in his head, and Draco did as anyone would do--he began to rationalize, and to plan.
Somehow she had discovered a weakness in the mansion’s wards, and he needed to know what it was. Draco had always thought she was a poor excuse for a witch when she was alive, on top of being a filthy blood traitor. She was ultimately still a Weasley and come hell or high water, no Weasley would ever get the best of a Malfoy.
So he had two days. Two days to find a way to prevent this all from happening. Two days to twist it to his advantage.
How dare she, he thought in outrage as he climbed to his feet. Didn’t she know she was ruining his plans?
_ _ _ _ _
He would later compartmentalize this first day as the five stages of mourning. A little bit of anger, a little bit of depression, and a whole lot of denial mixed in for good measure. It made it easier to digest.
At some point during the night, Draco decided there was no sense working himself into a rage over this whole thing with Ginny Weasley, so he slept like a baby until morning and awoke in a spectacular mood. Life would go on and he fully intended to be prepared for it.
Nadilla had risen early to make last minute preparations for a supper party they were to host this evening, the last official Sunday of summer. The timing of the party was, of course, no coincidence. He wanted his name to be on everyone’s minds when his plans succeeded. The upcoming week to belong to him in history, and oh yes, he was still going ahead with it.
He took great care to dress to his usual standards of perfection, to breakfast as only befitted a Malfoy, and then he called for Ollivander’s services. Within the hour, a new wand was hand delivered. This pleased him greatly. He also consulted with the most renowned ward caster in Europe, a spindly Frenchman by the name of Francois De Givry. Behind his back, Draco called him Frances. The man was of course a pureblood. This pleased Draco even more. Francois was the best, and he did not come cheap.
As the man examined the mansion’s wards from the outside, Draco followed, humming a little tune of victory. He was confident that any weaknesses would be discovered and strengthened. Clementine, who hadn’t made an appearance since escaping from Edmund’s nursery the night before, trailed after them in order to bark furiously at the stranger, and Draco’s patience with her incessant yapping quickly started to wear thin. To entertain himself, he teased her mercilessly.
It was obvious Francois saw himself as an artist. He was tempermental and difficult to read. He worked through a magical algorithm of the existing wards, testing a number of areas of the Manor and its luxurious grounds for any neutral or faulting areas of protection. Then he conjured a glob of amorphous light to examine a spatial representation of the home’s defenses. This took hours. They side by side in the north gardens long into the afternoon. Though he hadn’t any idea what the man was doing, Draco didn’t want to be thought completely uninformed and so he bluffed his way through most of the conversation. Eventually Clementine abandoned her yapping to wander into the garden in pursuit of a butterfly, and he found himself undeniably bored in her absence.
“I’m afraid,” Francois eventually said, gravely twisting the tip of his handle bar mustache, “dat zer ees no flaw.”
“No flaw? Of course there’s a flaw. There must be. I order you to keep looking!”
“Zer eez no need, Monsieur Malfoy. Your Manor eez guarded better than zee Ministry itself.”
This pleased Draco immensely. He puffed up in pride. “Naturally,” he smirked. “But are you completely sure? What about the neighbouring properties? There could be any amount of magic hidden in these woods that are interfering.”
Francois shook his head. “Eet eez not possible. Zee level of magic zat would be able to suppress your wards across zat distance would bring even greater trouble upon you zan a vampire.”
“Then how could one get in?”
The ward caster tapped the glob of light with his wand so that it splattered on the stone path, then drew a small book from his pocket. He opened it to a particular page and passed it to Draco. “Zere eez one way,” Francois said. “Zee moon passed too closely too zee earth last night, creating an imbalance and a subsequent natural weakness in your wards and everybody else’s. Zat is how doxies were able to get into zee crypt of zee old Wendel clan in zee 16th century and consume zee royal bodies.”
Draco examined the page. In the book Francois had scribbled a number of arithmetic measurements and diagrams, including geographical data on the earth’s rotation. It showed that the moon had indeed passed closer the night before. Since he’d always been rather good at arithmancy, Draco could see that the calculations were correct.
“Well, fuck me sideways. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Draco wasn’t a stupid man. He decided to have the existing wards doubled anyway. Francois also added fail-safes to the existing ward hierarchy to automatically compensate as back-ups for any failures. As Draco paid him for his services, a meagre sum of two thousand, six hundred and eighty nine galleons plus expenses, he planned a trip down to the local village of Wiltshire for some additional insurance.
The wards would stand tonight, but to be truly cunning, one had to have a back-up plan.
_ _ _ _ _
“Your late night visitor,” said old Marcellus, the local exorcist, some time later. “She is a rather serious matter.”
Draco sneered at the rundown conditions of the wizard’s hovel. Marcellus was the one of the last remaining exorcists in England, and an old friend of his father. Like Francois, he was said to be the best, though his expertise was the living dead. Marcellus was nearly eighty, and he squinted through a pair of badly fitted spectacles. He’d given Draco the creeps as a boy, largely due to the rumours about what he did with local children if he caught them in his store past closing. The place was cluttered with leafy, exotic plants that made it smell like dirt.
“Well, I should say she’s a serious matter,” Draco sneered. “Her boots left the ghastliest mess on the carpet.”
Marcellus’s eyes widened comically behind his bottle thick specs. “I’m surprised you have found humour in this. Come.” He gestured for Draco to follow with a hand wrinkled and yellow with age. They passed through a set of faded curtains separating the hovel’s back room from the main section of the store. Draco lifted his robes to avoid brushing up against any of the dirty surfaces.
“She called herself Lilith?” Marcellus asked over his shoulder.
“No, Ginerva. I think it’s her first name. She said, ‘we are Lilith’, and that she had come to feed on my son, Edmund.” Draco curled up his nose in disgust and hate. “The foul monster.”
Marcellus levitated a thick, dusty volume from the topmost shelf of a teetering, old bookcase. The book fell with a loud thump onto a table, and Draco’s eyes were drawn to the title, etched in gold thread.
“Apparitions of the Night and Other Demonly Creatures of Old?”
“Yes, yes. Open.”
At this command, the book sprung open of its own will and turned to page 154. Curious, Draco leaned over the book to read the entry. A passage on vampires entitled ‘Blood Feasts of the Damned’ told the story of the first vampire, born from the invasion of a human corpse by a blood-hungry demon. The demon’s attraction to infants was vengeance for the death of her own demon spawn at the hands of a more godly creature. To his fascination, the demon’s name was Lilith.
“Marcellus, what are you implying?” he said under his breath, taking the book in his hands for a needless closer look. “Surely that’s impossible.”
Marcellus moved closer, the pupils of his eyes lighting up. “And why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because Ginny Weasley isn’t old enough to be that Lilith,” he sputtered. “And she never had children, you old sod.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wanted to take them back. How did he know if she’d had children? He couldn’t remember what became of Ginny Weasley after Hogwarts. There were things he’d overheard his father saying when he was younger--about how she was possessed by Tom Riddle in her first year, thanks to Lucius. About how that would have left a black mark on her soul. About how she was never the same after the Dark Lord’s death, if you believed the rumours. Draco hadn’t really bothered paying enough attention to the girl to know any different.
But then Potter lost the Tri-Wizard Tournament to Diggory in fourth year. Lucius had told him how Voldemort had needed his blood to fully return to power, but after that plan had failed, the Dark Lord hadn’t had another chance. He grew weaker and weaker until one of his own power hungry followers deluded themselves into thinking they could take his place and killed him. The blood movement had been forced to move underground and over time, it became harder and harder to be aggressive. Killing muggles went out fashion as sentences grew increasingly harsher. Instead, they began to pursue other ways to force muggleborns out of their world and destroy their magic. Draco Malfoy was among them.
When Potter was AK’ed by Rodolphus Lestrange after graduation, Ginny Weasley had disappeared altogether. And thinking back, that didn’t surprise him. If there was anything he’d noticed about the youngest Weasel then, it was that she was fiercely loyal to Scarhead. That was the last he’d heard of her. Clearly things had changed.
“Okay, maybe she could have had children,” Draco theorized, drawing his finger along the pertinent sentences in the book. “But she is still only a year younger than I am. It says here that Lilith is a creature of the ancient. Even if Ginny Weasley had lost a child to death, and even if, as a vampire, she preyed on parents and their infants out of revenge, how could she be Lilith? It’s more likely that she’s gone starkers and believes herself to be some blasted vampire queen.”
“That’s the problem with the younger generations these days,” Marcellus growled, prying the book from his hands and returning it to the bookcase. “You think you know everything about everything. Use your imagination!”
There weren’t many people who could get away with being so uncouth towards Draco, but Marcellus was one of them. To this day, the man still freaked him out a little, and at the man’s outburst, Draco took an unconscious step back.
“I-I suppose she could have been reincarnated…if you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Eh, now you’re making some sense,” said Marcellus, giving Draco a toothy grin. “That is exactly what I believe. It doesn’t matter whether she had children or not. She would have had that blood lust passed on to her. But this means she can be stopped.”
Through his wariness, Draco was mildly impressed. “How?”
“Every expert on vampires will tell you of how seriously they take the power of protective amulets.”
“But that’s old magic. Rarely practiced nowadays. My grandmother swore by it, and she was a crazy old bat.”
Marcellus nodded as though this proved everything. “We will create one for young Edmund. Lilith responds to a red string tied around the left ankle, or the placing of stones at the four corners of the bed. Rest assured, she has always refused to feed on a child wearing such an amulet. It awakens her more human, maternal instincts. The same will be true of Ginerva, if she is indeed Lilith reborn.”
Draco couldn’t keep the confident grin from his face. “ And she said it herself, didn’t she? She is Lilith.”
“Then which one would you like?”
He thought for a moment. “Edmund might kick one of the stones out of the crib, so it will have to be the bracelet.”
Marcellus nodded and set to work, crafting the amulet from a piece of standard red wool by boiling it beneath a haze of old spells Draco had never heard, and he wrapped it up in a large leaf plucked from one of his many plants. As Draco headed back up to the Manor where Nadilla’s supper party was sure to be in full swing, the magic within the amulet beared heavy in his pocket.
Ginny Weasley, Lilith, Ginerva, whoever. The bloody bitch was done for. He would gleefully savour every minute of it.
_ _ _ _ _
Part 2
Author: eucalyptus
Pairing: Ginny/Draco
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: I disclaim. Anything herein is not mine.
Warnings: Character Death, Dark/Sexual Themes, Cursing
Summary: A life lived wrongly is still a life lived.
Author Notes: My sincerest thanks to my beta, bk11, who always finds a way to see what I can’t. Written for gypso_child.
Original Request
Requested pairings/characters: vamp!Ginevra/Draco…
Special requests:
1) vamp!Ginevra/Draco -
Plotwise: AU; old style, master vamp!Ginevra, centuries old; pampered, aristocrat!Draco, who is arrogant as all fuck, but doesn't know shit about the real world; Ginvera (and use her full name, mostly, please, unless it's as a nickname) wants a new childe/lover/protector/toy/PR to the human world; a love tale, of sorts; Draco is the one who is turned.
Propwise: Victorian clothes; a fuck-me bed; those annoying little dogs you ALWAYS want to kick the shit out of.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Pureblooded
_ _ _ _ _
Part 1
_ _ _ _ _
(This is not a story about karma or consequence.)
Draco Malfoy didn’t know it yet, but this was the beginning of the end of his life.
There was great irony to be found here. He was about to reap the fruits of his labour. Something his father had never managed to accomplish was within his reach, free for the taking if he was smart about it. And the truth was, he had never questioned whether he should do it or not. Draco Malfoy rarely questioned anything. All that mattered was whether it benefited him in the end.
In two days time, this would be the furthest thing from his mind. With a countdown hanging over his head, Draco would not feel time move forward in the same way. Instead, days, hours, minutes and seconds would dwindle and shrink until there was nothing, and he would see himself reborn with new eyes.
He would later wonder at the superficiality of that notion. For most of his life he’d believed that people starting dying the moment they were conceived. They died as they grew from a blob of cellular tissue into something with a distinct shape and sex. They died as they were born, as they developed an awareness of their surroundings, as they began to move and eat and shit and sleep. They died as they learned their mother’s smell and as they first recognized the feeling in their father’s voice as indifference. They are dying as they lose what they all have in common and become themselves in mind and personality. They are even dying when they have sex and create life.
How then was it even possible to feel the passing of time differently, just because death became a ‘here and now’ kind of possibility?
Perhaps, he would also later say, he didn’t really believe any of that bullshit about life being just a thing that happens on the way to becoming maggot food. Maybe he’d resisted the idea that life, all life, is bigger and worth so much more than he ever gave it credit for. And maybe he did it because he was too much of a coward to think critically about who he was, for fear of what it might reveal.
_ _ _ _ _
He bolted upright, hands seeking purchase on the bed. It was 2:42am, deep into the early hours of the morning, and the room was dark with night.
The wards at Malfoy Manor had held without breach for three hundred and five years. Draco, who had only ever heard the stories from his father, thought of this with great annoyance as he grabbed his wand from the bedside table and lit the bedroom with a muttered ‘lumos’.
Something was wrong. He could feel it in the old magic thrumming within the walls. The mansion had woken him.
There came the echo of their dog’s high-pitched yap off in the distance, breaking the silence. Against his every instinct, Draco turned his ear to the sound. The little thing was going ballistic.
His wife of two years sat up in bed and watched him stumble towards the wardrobe for clothes.
“What’s happening?” Nadilla mumbled, squinting against the light of his wand.
“One of the poltergeists getting into something they shouldn’t,” he said with no small measure of irritation. “I’ll take care of it.”
Nadilla accepted this with a drowsy sigh. He heard her lie back down on the bed as he pulled on a pair of trousers and shrugged into a shirt. “Alright,” she said, “but check on Edmund, won’t you, darling?”
Draco turned to her and frowned. “I will not coddle the boy.”
He caught her rolling her eyes.
“Who said anything about coddling?” she murmured under her breath. “He doesn’t even know you as his father.”
Though she had tried to keep her tone light, there was resentment in the way she avoided his eyes. Draco’s mood quickly turned sour. “The boy’s eight months old, Nadilla. He wouldn’t know his thumb from his arse. Besides, he has a nanny.”
“Draco, she doesn’t stay the night.”
“She doesn’t?” He allowed some amazement to be heard in his voice. “Then what am I paying her for?”
With a huff of disgust that told him she knew this game, Nadilla turned her back to him. He was, of course, perfectly aware that the nanny didn’t stay the night. God knows he needed something to amuse him these days and Nadilla was such a fussy little swot. Draco took his wand in hand and strode into the hallway, slamming the door close on his heels. The portraits grumbled sleepy objections to the disturbance.
He stalked through the drafty corridor, heading in the direction of Clementine’s barking. Clementine was a yellow-haired pomeranian given to Nadilla by her mother a few years ago. While he was amused with the dog’s immense bravado, she was ultimately so timid that if he so much as looked at her, she’d scramble away like her tail was on fire. There was no doubt in Draco’s mind that Clementine was no threat to anything that might have happened to find its way inside his home.
As he walked, the candles hovering along the corridor walls flamed to life, illuminating his path and allowing him to extinguish the light of his wand. He followed the barking until he came across a small brown house elf in stained rags hovering outside Edmund’s nursery door.
“What is it, elf?”
The elf yelped in fright and shrank back against the wall. Then, its eyes widening in recognition, it pointed towards the door.
“Someone is being in there, Master Malfoy!”
He leaned in close and listened to the dog barking on the other side. For the first time, true curiosity entered his mind. The wards had been breached. He had only a hazy idea of what sort of magic could accomplish that.
“Go on then,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
The house elf vanished with a relieved snap of its fingers. Draco gripped his wand tightly and peered through the crack of the partly open door. He wondered if the intruder in the nursery had heard him speaking to his servant, for aside from Clementine, the room was eerily quiet.
The thought came to him that if he could just catch the intruder off guard, he could easily disarm it. On the count of three, he took a breath and slammed through the door as hard he could with his wand raised.
“Who’s there?”
The room was dark and still. Heart pumping, he swept his eyes from one dark corner to another. When his eyes came up empty, he cast a revealing charm. The room was deserted, he noted with some satisfaction, and the fuzzball that was Clementine bolted for the hallway. Whatever had been here was obviously gone. Perhaps he’d been right, and it really was one of the poltergeists.
Edmund’s crib was up against a wall near the window. Whether it was the odd disturbance in the night or a desire to actually see the child, Draco decided to spare him a glance. The boy was, after all, of the purest bloodline in all of England. One had to assure the security of one’s assets.
As he expected, the silencing charm around the crib had held during the commotion. Edmund was sleeping on his back in an ivory-coloured sleeper. His blonde hair curled in soft wisps across his forehead and even in the muted darkness, Draco could make out Edmund’s small hand, clenched in a fist.
It appeared the baby had grown.
As Draco stood there, trying to ignore the pleasant sensation in his chest, he felt a shift in his surroundings. If pressed to describe it, he couldn’t have been able to. It was at best just a feeling, of something crawling up his spine, making his hair stand on end. And he knew, with no small measure of caution, that he was no longer alone with his son.
Outside, the wind picked up and howled through the trees.
“You’ve interrupted me,” a voice whispered.
Draco spun around. The spectre of a woman rose out of the dense shadow obscuring the opposite side of the room. Red hair that he would know anywhere was offset by skin an unnatural, ghostly white.
On instinct, he tried to pedal backwards but only succeeded in smacking up against the crib. “What the hell?” he sputtered when he found his voice. In the next moment his wand was in the air, pointing at her.
“Please,” she murmured, stepping towards him. “It’s Ginerva now.”
A memory of a girl he’d gone to school with came to him. That day in the bookshop. Gilderoy Lockhart was there, signing autographs. Potter, Granger…
Weasley. Ginny Weasley.
He allowed his wand hand to drop to his side.
“What are you doing here?” he asked stupidly.
Ginny Weasley grinned with delight and fingered the white fur trim of her silk cloak. It was embroidered with leather along the hem of the sleeves in a technique he knew to be extremely old and rarely practiced. “Was it?” she asked facetiously. “That was just the effect I was going for.”
He paused, unsure of what to make of her words. “I’ll not bother myself with the matter of how you got in,” he sneered. “But I admit I am rather curious about who you had to fuck to get that cloak. It’s been years since you’ve been anywhere near that kind of money.”
To his great disappointment, the amused smile on the woman’s face did not fade or crumple into tears at the mention of her beloved Potter. Instead she opened her mouth, slowly and luxuriously, to reveal white incisors as sharp as knives.
Draco paled. “What the--”
A dark spell rose to his lips and he lunged. Instead of the sound of bones cracking, there was only the whoosh of air as Ginny batted the spell easily towards the window. Its glass exploded outward. In a flurry of movement his wand was in her hands and before he could move she’d snapped it cleanly in two.
“Just a precaution.” She tossed the broken bits over her shoulder.
Real fear began to prick at Draco’s senses. He immediately broke out in a sweat. “You’re a vampire,” he stated as calmly as possible, a manner at complete odds with the nervous thrumming in his chest and he theorized that surely Nadilla or the house elves would have heard the window breaking.
She smiled openly. “Well, obviously I’m a vampire, unless you buy into that ‘wooden stake through the heart’ stuff.”
Draco began to slowly creep backwards, keeping himself between Ginny and the crib. “How did you get in?” he asked.
“Magic,” she whispered. “We are Lilith. No grave could keep me in. No home can keep me out.”
There was something there, something beyond the shock value of her words that made him replay them in his head. His heart pounded painfully in his chest.
“I-I don’t understand.” Draco swallowed heavily.
Her eyes ran up and down his body as she stepped closer. “Vampires have always had their own particular kind of magic, something different from what you have. But I am both of those things. It makes me stronger than you. I can pass through a crack in the wall no bigger than a strand of hair. Would you like to see?”
“No!” he said too quickly before catching himself. “No, I’ve known enough of your kind through my acquaintances. You’re not the first witch or wizard to be turned, you know.”
His face twitched. It was a bold-faced lie, a move of desperation to regain the upper hand. There weren’t loads of them at all. In fact, it was quite rare for a witch or wizard to be turned because of the way their magic was altered. It threw off the delicate power balance of the vampire world, so most vampires were shrewd enough to avoid it.
The next question rolled off his lips with a sense of foreboding, and Draco wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the answer was.
“Why are you here?”
She regarded him thoughtfully as though debating whether the truth or a lie would be more advantageous, and then the woman who was once Ginny Weasley glanced with slow, dark purpose through the fringe of red hair falling into her face, over his shoulder at the crib behind him.
A deep, sick feeling took root in Draco’s stomach.
“Not my heir,” he whispered.
Her eyes rounded playfully in surprise. “What? It’s not my fault. You’d be surprised how many of my kind have a taste for infant flesh. And he’s so…pretty. Just like his father.”
Draco was struck simultaneously by a wave of nausea and anger. “You dumb bitch, you can’t have him. He’s mine!”
She laughed again and clapped her hands. “Oh, I like you much more like this than the way you used to be!”
With a scream of frustration, he swung his fist towards her, hoping to wipe the smile off her face.
It never made contact.
In the space where she used to be there was suddenly nothing. The momentum made him stumble forward with the force of the punch.
Barely catching himself from sprawling to the floor, Draco whipped himself around to see Ginny standing over the top of the crib. As she toyed with the baby carousel, making it spin, she leaned down and made a show out of smelling the sleeping child.
Draco gagged at the sight. Something awoke inside him. He found the jagged edge of a piece of glass and took ahold of it, then rose to his full height. “Get out,” he spat with the threat of violence in his voice.
Her nose curled sharply in irritation as she looked up at him. “Shut up, Malfoy. You’re not in control. I’ll take him if I bloody well want to.”
She flicked her hand in his direction and Draco found himself slammed up against the wall, spread-eagled. Bindings like spider webs slid around his arms and legs, neck and torso, cementing him in place. They cut into his skin as he fought frantically to free himself. As he opened his mouth to scream as loud as he could, the binds suddenly tightened around his throat and he found he couldn’t breathe, much less call for help.
Ginny’s eyes lit up as she watched him struggle.
“I have an idea,” she whispered in a singsong voice. “You might actually like this. I’m going to offer you a deal.”
He groaned as the binds continued to tighten of their own will. His head felt like it was going to burst, and the more he struggled, the tighter and hotter and more painful the binds got got. “N-no deal,” he wheezed in agony. Why hadn’t anyone come yet?
She continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “I’m willing to find something else to feed on tonight, if you give me something in return.”
“Anything,” he gasped immediately, and the binds loosened just enough for him to rasp out a few more words. “I can buy you anything.”
“I’m afraid,” she murmured, “that it won’t cost you a sickle.”
All at once she was close enough that he could smell the dry stench of rot. The binds held him so fully in place that Draco was helpless to stop her from touching him. Her hands ghosted up his bare chest and along his collarbone, fingernails tracing the soft protrusion of his bone. She was cold, so cold.
“I want you, Malfoy.”
He was incredulous at first, and more than a little disgusted. “Are you joking?” he choked out.
Ginny shook her head. Draco found he couldn’t quite bring himself to agree. Any minute now someone was going to come through those doors and rescue him. He would be a bloody idiot to make any deals. Wouldn’t he?
When it became clear that he was hesitating, she called his bluff and darted towards the crib.
“NO!”
She stopped. Whipping around, her laughter echoed in the wake left after his panicked shout.
“So you agree?”
It made him sick to think it, but ter proposal wasn’t altogether…unappealing. He could certainly lower himself to fuck a Weasley if it meant getting her away from him. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time he’d had another woman in his bed thanks to Edmund. Becoming a father had made him more irresistible than ever.
Once he had the thought, his pride began to warm up the idea.
“I knew you’d always wanted me,” Draco said, attempting to mask his relief with some of his usual arrogance. “Let me down and we’ll discuss terms.”
She came over and nuzzled his neck. “I promise that I’ll turn you as painlessly as I can.”
Draco recoiled. “Turn me? No! I am not a monster!”
“How would you know? We live in luxury even you couldn’t imagine. And there are, in fact, very few wizards and witches among us. I rule my kind. You would live better than a king with me.”
“How dare you do this to me?” he wheezed. “There is nothing you could offer that would convince me. I have everything I could ever want. I can buy anything I please.”
“Like the wife you’ve never bothered getting to know, Malfoy? The son who serves no purpose to you other than as a successor? Your hundreds of social contacts, amongst which you couldn’t count a single true friend? Or are you referring to this cold, clammy mansion that has seen more murder in the last three centuries than the remainder of the United Kingdom combined? Yes, I daresay you’re swimming in riches.”
“You’re not one to talk, you vile little cunt. You just declared the blood of an infant a delicacy!”
“Oh, psh,” she muttered, and with a flick of her wrist, the binds were gone. “I haven’t lost my sense of decency, you know. We all fall victim to our more primitive urges now and again…don’t we?”
Draco fell to the floor and lay gasping. He heard Ginny whisper something under her breath and then a peculiar, drunken feeling began to pervade his senses.
To his very distant horror, she knelt beside him, placed her hand between his legs, and began to gently stroke him through his trousers. He was instantly, inexplicably hard and somewhere in his mind, a voice told him he’d been enchanted. His body buzzed with the weight of an unfamiliar magic that crawled into every tiny crevice like an insect.
“It’s your life,” she whispered in his ear, and her tongue darted out, hot and wet, to lick his earlobe and the smooth skin behind it. His mind quickly lost its lucidity, and she easily unfastened his trousers to take his cock in her hand. “Your life, or his. I will give you time, but if you don’t make up your mind in two nights, I will feast on your heir.”
Draco groaned and instinctively pushed his hips up so that his cock pistoned between her fingers. Against his will, he whimpered at the sensation, and the hollow sound of his own pleasure in the nursery struck him like a splash of cold water. Shame settled in his stomach. With a herculean effort, Draco worked up the will to shove her away.
As he stood up and fumbled to fasten his trousers, the remnants of the spell made his knees shake with dizziness and disorientation. “I-I won’t let you near him or me again, Weasley. Stay the hell away from my family.”
She stood up from where she’d fallen to the floor and glared. “You don’t have a choice, Malfoy. You know what will happen. And I will find a way to remind you of me.”
An invisible force suddenly punched him in the stomach. He once again slammed to the floor like he’d been hit with a bludger. As he curled up in the fetal position, a white-hot pain searing behind his eyes and radiating from his gut, he heard her musical laugh.
“And it’s Ginerva, you bloody git. Call me Weasley again and I’ll kill you both.”
He wanted desperately to scream at her, to throw something, to tackle her to the floor and beat her senseless, but her spell had completely winded him and he could barely move. After a moment of gasping into the carpet, he managed to raise his head to meet her gaze. The woman blew him a kiss, then spun around and walked directly towards the north wall of the room.
As the thick shadows sucked the vampire known as Ginerva into them, welcoming her back with their dark caress, her words echoed in his head, and Draco did as anyone would do--he began to rationalize, and to plan.
Somehow she had discovered a weakness in the mansion’s wards, and he needed to know what it was. Draco had always thought she was a poor excuse for a witch when she was alive, on top of being a filthy blood traitor. She was ultimately still a Weasley and come hell or high water, no Weasley would ever get the best of a Malfoy.
So he had two days. Two days to find a way to prevent this all from happening. Two days to twist it to his advantage.
How dare she, he thought in outrage as he climbed to his feet. Didn’t she know she was ruining his plans?
_ _ _ _ _
He would later compartmentalize this first day as the five stages of mourning. A little bit of anger, a little bit of depression, and a whole lot of denial mixed in for good measure. It made it easier to digest.
At some point during the night, Draco decided there was no sense working himself into a rage over this whole thing with Ginny Weasley, so he slept like a baby until morning and awoke in a spectacular mood. Life would go on and he fully intended to be prepared for it.
Nadilla had risen early to make last minute preparations for a supper party they were to host this evening, the last official Sunday of summer. The timing of the party was, of course, no coincidence. He wanted his name to be on everyone’s minds when his plans succeeded. The upcoming week to belong to him in history, and oh yes, he was still going ahead with it.
He took great care to dress to his usual standards of perfection, to breakfast as only befitted a Malfoy, and then he called for Ollivander’s services. Within the hour, a new wand was hand delivered. This pleased him greatly. He also consulted with the most renowned ward caster in Europe, a spindly Frenchman by the name of Francois De Givry. Behind his back, Draco called him Frances. The man was of course a pureblood. This pleased Draco even more. Francois was the best, and he did not come cheap.
As the man examined the mansion’s wards from the outside, Draco followed, humming a little tune of victory. He was confident that any weaknesses would be discovered and strengthened. Clementine, who hadn’t made an appearance since escaping from Edmund’s nursery the night before, trailed after them in order to bark furiously at the stranger, and Draco’s patience with her incessant yapping quickly started to wear thin. To entertain himself, he teased her mercilessly.
It was obvious Francois saw himself as an artist. He was tempermental and difficult to read. He worked through a magical algorithm of the existing wards, testing a number of areas of the Manor and its luxurious grounds for any neutral or faulting areas of protection. Then he conjured a glob of amorphous light to examine a spatial representation of the home’s defenses. This took hours. They side by side in the north gardens long into the afternoon. Though he hadn’t any idea what the man was doing, Draco didn’t want to be thought completely uninformed and so he bluffed his way through most of the conversation. Eventually Clementine abandoned her yapping to wander into the garden in pursuit of a butterfly, and he found himself undeniably bored in her absence.
“I’m afraid,” Francois eventually said, gravely twisting the tip of his handle bar mustache, “dat zer ees no flaw.”
“No flaw? Of course there’s a flaw. There must be. I order you to keep looking!”
“Zer eez no need, Monsieur Malfoy. Your Manor eez guarded better than zee Ministry itself.”
This pleased Draco immensely. He puffed up in pride. “Naturally,” he smirked. “But are you completely sure? What about the neighbouring properties? There could be any amount of magic hidden in these woods that are interfering.”
Francois shook his head. “Eet eez not possible. Zee level of magic zat would be able to suppress your wards across zat distance would bring even greater trouble upon you zan a vampire.”
“Then how could one get in?”
The ward caster tapped the glob of light with his wand so that it splattered on the stone path, then drew a small book from his pocket. He opened it to a particular page and passed it to Draco. “Zere eez one way,” Francois said. “Zee moon passed too closely too zee earth last night, creating an imbalance and a subsequent natural weakness in your wards and everybody else’s. Zat is how doxies were able to get into zee crypt of zee old Wendel clan in zee 16th century and consume zee royal bodies.”
Draco examined the page. In the book Francois had scribbled a number of arithmetic measurements and diagrams, including geographical data on the earth’s rotation. It showed that the moon had indeed passed closer the night before. Since he’d always been rather good at arithmancy, Draco could see that the calculations were correct.
“Well, fuck me sideways. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Draco wasn’t a stupid man. He decided to have the existing wards doubled anyway. Francois also added fail-safes to the existing ward hierarchy to automatically compensate as back-ups for any failures. As Draco paid him for his services, a meagre sum of two thousand, six hundred and eighty nine galleons plus expenses, he planned a trip down to the local village of Wiltshire for some additional insurance.
The wards would stand tonight, but to be truly cunning, one had to have a back-up plan.
_ _ _ _ _
“Your late night visitor,” said old Marcellus, the local exorcist, some time later. “She is a rather serious matter.”
Draco sneered at the rundown conditions of the wizard’s hovel. Marcellus was the one of the last remaining exorcists in England, and an old friend of his father. Like Francois, he was said to be the best, though his expertise was the living dead. Marcellus was nearly eighty, and he squinted through a pair of badly fitted spectacles. He’d given Draco the creeps as a boy, largely due to the rumours about what he did with local children if he caught them in his store past closing. The place was cluttered with leafy, exotic plants that made it smell like dirt.
“Well, I should say she’s a serious matter,” Draco sneered. “Her boots left the ghastliest mess on the carpet.”
Marcellus’s eyes widened comically behind his bottle thick specs. “I’m surprised you have found humour in this. Come.” He gestured for Draco to follow with a hand wrinkled and yellow with age. They passed through a set of faded curtains separating the hovel’s back room from the main section of the store. Draco lifted his robes to avoid brushing up against any of the dirty surfaces.
“She called herself Lilith?” Marcellus asked over his shoulder.
“No, Ginerva. I think it’s her first name. She said, ‘we are Lilith’, and that she had come to feed on my son, Edmund.” Draco curled up his nose in disgust and hate. “The foul monster.”
Marcellus levitated a thick, dusty volume from the topmost shelf of a teetering, old bookcase. The book fell with a loud thump onto a table, and Draco’s eyes were drawn to the title, etched in gold thread.
“Apparitions of the Night and Other Demonly Creatures of Old?”
“Yes, yes. Open.”
At this command, the book sprung open of its own will and turned to page 154. Curious, Draco leaned over the book to read the entry. A passage on vampires entitled ‘Blood Feasts of the Damned’ told the story of the first vampire, born from the invasion of a human corpse by a blood-hungry demon. The demon’s attraction to infants was vengeance for the death of her own demon spawn at the hands of a more godly creature. To his fascination, the demon’s name was Lilith.
“Marcellus, what are you implying?” he said under his breath, taking the book in his hands for a needless closer look. “Surely that’s impossible.”
Marcellus moved closer, the pupils of his eyes lighting up. “And why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because Ginny Weasley isn’t old enough to be that Lilith,” he sputtered. “And she never had children, you old sod.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wanted to take them back. How did he know if she’d had children? He couldn’t remember what became of Ginny Weasley after Hogwarts. There were things he’d overheard his father saying when he was younger--about how she was possessed by Tom Riddle in her first year, thanks to Lucius. About how that would have left a black mark on her soul. About how she was never the same after the Dark Lord’s death, if you believed the rumours. Draco hadn’t really bothered paying enough attention to the girl to know any different.
But then Potter lost the Tri-Wizard Tournament to Diggory in fourth year. Lucius had told him how Voldemort had needed his blood to fully return to power, but after that plan had failed, the Dark Lord hadn’t had another chance. He grew weaker and weaker until one of his own power hungry followers deluded themselves into thinking they could take his place and killed him. The blood movement had been forced to move underground and over time, it became harder and harder to be aggressive. Killing muggles went out fashion as sentences grew increasingly harsher. Instead, they began to pursue other ways to force muggleborns out of their world and destroy their magic. Draco Malfoy was among them.
When Potter was AK’ed by Rodolphus Lestrange after graduation, Ginny Weasley had disappeared altogether. And thinking back, that didn’t surprise him. If there was anything he’d noticed about the youngest Weasel then, it was that she was fiercely loyal to Scarhead. That was the last he’d heard of her. Clearly things had changed.
“Okay, maybe she could have had children,” Draco theorized, drawing his finger along the pertinent sentences in the book. “But she is still only a year younger than I am. It says here that Lilith is a creature of the ancient. Even if Ginny Weasley had lost a child to death, and even if, as a vampire, she preyed on parents and their infants out of revenge, how could she be Lilith? It’s more likely that she’s gone starkers and believes herself to be some blasted vampire queen.”
“That’s the problem with the younger generations these days,” Marcellus growled, prying the book from his hands and returning it to the bookcase. “You think you know everything about everything. Use your imagination!”
There weren’t many people who could get away with being so uncouth towards Draco, but Marcellus was one of them. To this day, the man still freaked him out a little, and at the man’s outburst, Draco took an unconscious step back.
“I-I suppose she could have been reincarnated…if you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Eh, now you’re making some sense,” said Marcellus, giving Draco a toothy grin. “That is exactly what I believe. It doesn’t matter whether she had children or not. She would have had that blood lust passed on to her. But this means she can be stopped.”
Through his wariness, Draco was mildly impressed. “How?”
“Every expert on vampires will tell you of how seriously they take the power of protective amulets.”
“But that’s old magic. Rarely practiced nowadays. My grandmother swore by it, and she was a crazy old bat.”
Marcellus nodded as though this proved everything. “We will create one for young Edmund. Lilith responds to a red string tied around the left ankle, or the placing of stones at the four corners of the bed. Rest assured, she has always refused to feed on a child wearing such an amulet. It awakens her more human, maternal instincts. The same will be true of Ginerva, if she is indeed Lilith reborn.”
Draco couldn’t keep the confident grin from his face. “ And she said it herself, didn’t she? She is Lilith.”
“Then which one would you like?”
He thought for a moment. “Edmund might kick one of the stones out of the crib, so it will have to be the bracelet.”
Marcellus nodded and set to work, crafting the amulet from a piece of standard red wool by boiling it beneath a haze of old spells Draco had never heard, and he wrapped it up in a large leaf plucked from one of his many plants. As Draco headed back up to the Manor where Nadilla’s supper party was sure to be in full swing, the magic within the amulet beared heavy in his pocket.
Ginny Weasley, Lilith, Ginerva, whoever. The bloody bitch was done for. He would gleefully savour every minute of it.
_ _ _ _ _
Part 2