CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Mortal Peril
"Love?" Lucius sneered, but he was panting, his hair hanging around his face in unruly strands. He had overexerted himself with the Killing Curse, had poured all of himself into it as he'd been schooled, as he'd learned from experience, and it had taken too much out of him for it to have failed.
He had underestimated her.
But he managed a laugh and straightened, raising his wand once more. She had let down her shield, and love or no love, he would end this thing now.
His laughter undid her, his mockery of what she held dear, his slight on her feelings for his son, and she slashed her wand at him once, twice, three times, backhanded then forward and backhanded again.
Rilascio, seiunxi, flamino.
She thought them more than she said them, the words little more than a whisper. Sparks flew, a cut slashed wide across his cheek, and with the last word, he was thrown once more against the wall, blood pouring down his face and under the collar of his robe from the wide gash she'd opened up.
Her ears rang with the explosion she'd wrought on the last pass of her wand, and the sight of his blood affected her dually; she felt herself reel a little, sway forward and back on her feet, and then she felt everything focus to a precise point and a feeling she could only associate with thirst, desperation, starvation.
So much had been taken from her, stolen. Moments and days that would have added up to months had been taken from her time with Draco, and now eternity stretched before her, the options limited to life with a Death Eater and life alone.
She may as well have been left in the Chamber, for all he and his had stolen from her, all he had left her to live for.
She wanted to see what she had stolen from him.
She wanted to look into his eyes, tell him what he had done, and she hoped he begged.
She wanted him to beg before she killed him.
"Your master tried to teach me the way your kind loves," she said in a low voice, her clenched fingers snapping open in a convulsive move and loosing her wand with a rattle onto the floor. "By taking, by stealing, by sucking the life out of the person you love until they've nothing more to offer you." She could feel it as she said it, could feel it as she had back then, the energy sapping from her in leaps and bounds, the free will draining from her.
"The strong prevail," Lucius said, watching her face grow pale. Just a girl, just a Mudblood-loving girl. If he could only get his wand, but he, too, felt weak. Pain burst in bright, colored flashes behind his eyes, nausea fluttering at his stomach with tiny wings, and it took his eyes a moment to clear and see what had happened.
She had knelt… and she had slapped him.
His blood covered her palm, thick enough in spots to form drops, and she looked at it curiously. "How can this be his, too?" she asked, her voice thick. "How can he be part of you?" The thought made her sicker than the blood, the idea of Draco coming from this man, from this monster.
She'd never seen that much blood in one place.
Ginny kept her eyes on her hand, on her hand covered with his blood, the same blood that flowed through Draco's veins, a bond, a chain, a restriction, and that thought enraged her even more.
Draco could never be hers as long as he was his.
She hit him again, her stomach rising up against her as the back of her hand met his bleeding flesh, and she bit back a retch.
His mouth was distorted into an ugly rictus, a stubborn mockery of the seriousness of his situation. "So that's it?" he asked, spitting weakly. She hadn't killed him, hadn't even come close, but he couldn't move, he couldn't move against her. "You want to fuck my son and you think that can happen without my blessing as long as you kill me? You should have been a Slytherin." The multiple sentences cost him both bread and blood, rivulets of it trickling down his cheek with every motion of his mouth.
"If that's all I wanted, I could have stopped wanting a long time ago," Ginny said, reaching back to grasp her wand, staining the fine-grained wood with the evidence of her violence. She raised her arm one last time to strike him down, thinking he had been correct.
She should have been a Slytherin.
Perhaps there had been one hiding in her even before Tom Riddle.
~~~
"Where is she?" It didn't escape Molly, the irony of asking him the question he'd been trying to ask them since the moment he'd come into their home. But that clock on the wall, pointing to Mortal Peril, had changed everything.
She'd seen the look on his face.
Draco gripped the edge of the kitchen table, the thick, scarred wood somehow the only thing in the room that seemed real, and he thought of her words to him.
I want to kill them all for doing this to you.
And the only one who had done this to him-the only one who could have made him a Death Eater, the only one who had ever singled her out, the live man who had saddled her with an unliving one.
"She's at my home," he said, finally standing, the moment he'd given himself to steady over.
He couldn't afford any more time.
"We have to get help," Molly said, already tucking her wand into her waistband and grabbing a cloak. "We have to get the boys, get Bill or Charlie or-"
"No." Arthur's quiet statement literally had her stumbling, and his face was ashen. "We cannot risk the rest of the-" He flicked his eyes to Draco, uncomfortable mentioning the Order in front of him, but unwilling to censor himself. He had killed Death Eaters. It had cost the Order some, that rash move, but it was too late to split hairs. "The Order," he finished, and his wife's eyes widened, either at his refusal or his show of trust in Draco. "Not for her. She is only one woman, Molly."
"She is your daughter!" Molly hissed.
"You don't need them," Draco said, drawing his wand, his face pinched. Every second that passed risked her more. She could not stand against his father. "I'm his son. Don't you think if anyone knows his tricks, it is I?" He turned and faced the fire, trying to draw his concentration.
"Don't Apparate near the house," he said, holding his wand in front of him, lined up between his eyes.
He Disapparated before they could question him further or respond to his command. Holding hands, Arthur and Molly followed suit.
~~~
Her lips trembled and she felt the wand start to slip from her blood-slick fingers even as Lucius's eyes started to slip shut. She had never even whispered the words, only mouthing them in Defense Against the Dark Arts when it had been required of them.
How hard would the six syllables of the killing curse be?
"Expelliarmus." Those five syllables were effortless, and the tenuous grip Ginny had on her wand was no defense for the disarmament. As though the wand had been her counterweight, she pitched forward, one hand landing on Lucius's arm and holding up her weight as she turned and looked over her shoulder, her hair in her eyes, soaked in sweat and streaked with blood where the tips had brushed over her hands.
Narcissa Malfoy held both her wand and Ginny's in her slim, pale hands, her face completely still.
This explained much.
My baby boy, she thought, her heart tearing in two for the thought of him with this young woman, this woman who loved him enough to kill for him. Who loved him enough, Narcissa thought, to give her wits up, her mind over to madness, for him.
"Leave him be," she said, her voice betraying none of the panic she felt at the sight of her husband lying silently, stilly on the floor. He was pale, more so than usual, and she had made him bleed.
This girl had done what grown men had not been able to.
"Mere magic means nothing against my heart's blood," Narcissa said, seeing the young Weasley woman-Ginevra, a strong name, a queen's name, Narcissa remembered-wince at her words being given back to her. "Against my love."
She stepped forward and grasped the girl's wrist with her left hand, like recognizing like as she felt the strength underneath the thin skin, the slender bones. She could not stand to see the woman like that, nor could she stand to see her husband underneath the weight of one who had brought him so low.
His fellows would be coming soon.
"He is a man, Ginevra, and therefore a fool in some ways." Her voice belied no emotion, but she felt many-despair, worry, panic, and somewhere running underneath it all like a current, excitement. Her husband could be free.
If he were too ill, too injured to continue, he could be freed with some of his pride intact.
"My son is no different," she added, watching the shift in the girl's eyes, the way she could not stop looking at the gore she had brought forth. There would be sickness soon if Narcissa could not make the girl move.
Her son needed this woman, that she knew. She had guessed as much, she simply hadn't guessed whom. She never would have guessed this.
She never would have guessed it would come to this.
"I-" Ginny shook her head, trying to clear it.
What had she done?
By all rights, the woman standing before her-Narcissa, Ginny reminded herself. A strong name, a name of beauty-should have killed her, but instead she was staring at her impassively while her husband bled on the floor.
"There will be no battles tonight. Tell your people and go to my son." She thrust Ginny's wand back in her hand, pushing her a little as she did so. When Ginny merely stared at her, Narcissa physically pushed her.
"I cannot tend to you!" she said harshly. "My man needs me and yours needs you, now go!"
Ginny made it outside the front door of the Manor before she was overtaken by her actions, her balance tipping over in one sickening roll and spilling her onto the front step in a heap.