The Dragon s bride Page 0,103

a chair, continued snoring. Narcissa rolled her eyes at the old creature.

"I'm sorry you had to see that. Your father isn't in the best of moods tonight, darling." She smoothed his hair, which was lighter in colour than hers and did not curl quite as much.

Draco's tutors often told him that he had a fine mind for deciphering riddles. A strong mind for logic, they said. Maybe that was why he asked the question.

"Mother," Draco began, wishing he was as dull witted as Pansy often accused him of being. "Has Father done something with George?"

His mother's blue eyes hardened for a moment. She seemed to be deciding on something. And then, she reached into a hidden pocket located in her robes and pulled put a black, leather collar.

"I'm sorry."

There was nothing that could be done. George was obviously gone. Draco's heart felt like a heavy stone, sinking down and down beneath the dark water of one of the old wells in Thimble Creek.

He took the collar with a small, shaking hand, but he did not cry, not even when his mother gave him a kiss on the forehead before she said goodnight.

"Never love anything more than it loves you, Draco," she whispered. "Never be like your father."

Or you, Draco wanted to say, but did not. It took him a while but he eventually fell asleep, still wrapped in his mother's shawl and the scent of gardenias.

Toolip helped him to bury the collar out in the garden the next day.

**

He wasn't dead.

Hermione knew this because all she had to do was close her eyes and search for him. He was there, somewhere in the back of her mind, breathing and alive, his heart beating steady and strong. He wasn' t feeling much of anything, though. Not pain, not annoyance and not that other phantom feeling which was her own presence in his mind.

Therefore, Hermione concluded that Draco was merely unconscious.

In his panic, Ron had obviously reacted to sheer amount of blood from the cut on Draco's forehead.

As the two injured Slytherins were tended by an extremely harried Madam Hooch and Professor Flitwick, Ron had run to fetch the Deputy Headmistress. McGonagall, once recovered from a near heart attack courtesy of Ron, had in turn gone to fetch Snape.

Harry was with Snape at the time and recalled that he had never seen the Potions Master so furious.

"Apart from the time he found you in his Pensieve," Ron reminded, eager to draw attention away from his admittedly amusing over-reaction.

According to Ron, both students had suffered bludger hits to the head and chest, with Draco taking the brunt of the 'assault'. The injuries were not deemed to be lethal by any means, but the boys would be carrying bruises, lumps and in Draco's case, a concussion.

Once informed of the incident, the rest of the School (with notable assistance from Pansy Parkinson and Ernie McMillan), was torn between being impressed and being amused. There were words of praise for the courage of young Tadpole, who had ensured that his name would live on in Hogwarts annals under the heading of 'Extreme Tomfoolery'.

Not since the Weasley twins had any student exhibited such a reckless disregard for the rules for no other purpose than to cause mischief.

The rest of day passed excruciatingly slowly, in Hermione' s opinion. She was still reeling from her encounter with Draco in the Prefects' Bath, having come away from it with two conclusions. They were extremely problematic, hard to digest, nearly impossible to consider, conclusions, and she didn't like thinking about them at all.

So she didn't. It was a splendid example of emotional procrastination.

Despite how badly things had gone between them on the Wednesday, she could no longer deny that she had feelings for Malfoy.

The trouble was that the feelings were not tender. They did not cause her to day-dream or sigh or draw little hearts around the letters H and D.

The fact was that when she looked at him, she felt ill. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way which meant that she forgot herself. Her unwilling husband had a very dangerous effect on her, whether he knew it or not.

And unfortunately, Fida Mia was not all to blame.

Hermione found it almost obscene to be worrying about matters of the heart when one of their own, Tonks, was probably in mortal danger.

**

It was not unusual to find Harry in the common room at odd hours of the night, packed away into one corner of a couch. Sometimes,

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