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The Library of Hades	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 4439 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Seven—Blue Eyes



            “It’s been seven days without a murder. That’s something, at least.”

            Harry’s shoulders twitched. He hunched further over his cup of coffee and hoped that Draco would find something else to talk about. Or, better, read the newspaper. Harry wasn’t in the mood to talk this morning.

            “Unless you had a vision of a murder and didn’t tell me, of course,” Draco added casually. Harry looked up to find him buttering a piece of bread, unfairly smoothly when his eyes were fixed on Harry all the while. “I would be dreadfully upset if that happened and you didn’t tell me, you understand.” He folded the bread and cut it into triangles, his smile faint and bright and not funny. “Dreadfully.”

            Harry shook his head. “You know I can’t hide them from you.” The visions gave him the sensations of the victim as they died, and it was hard to keep Draco from watching as Harry was impaled, or fell from a height, or succumbed to the poison or the magic that the twisted had introduced into the victim’s body.

            “Then tell me what’s wrong.” Draco swallowed a triangle of bread and leered at Harry in a way that made Harry smile in spite of himself. “Now that we’re partners in every sense of the word, your mood affects my sex life. You don’t get to go off alone and be a brooding hero anymore.”

            Harry took his hand across the table and held it there a minute, watching as Draco switched to eating his bread with his free hand. Yes, there was really no one like Draco, and while at times that made Harry want to yell more than anything else, at the moment he was deeply, quietly grateful for it.

            “I can’t help thinking that the relaxation means something,” he admitted. “That our twisted has changed his mind, or is waiting for the vigilance to relax, or that he’ll choose a different target. Or that he might have murdered someone else and we’ll never know just because no one has happened to find the body.”

            Draco rolled his eyes. “Aside from your gift,” he said, dabbing at butter on the corner of his teeth, “and the warning it would probably provide us, I find that hard to believe. Twisted don’t change their minds for normal reasons. They’re insane.”

            “Not all of them,” Harry muttered. “Not us.”

            Draco’s hand tightened on his for a minute. “What have I told you about that?” he asked, mildly enough, but his eyes flashed a warning at Harry, and he looked as if he would have rather preferred to snarl and spit than be gentle. “We haven’t driven ourselves mad studying the Dark Arts. We haven’t killed anyone innocent. The minute those lines start blurring for you, please tell me. I’ll need time to Stun you properly and get you in to see the Healers.”

            “As long as they’re Mind-Healers,” Harry said, giving him a wan smile. “Banned from St. Mungo’s, remember? Another of my many badges of distinction.”

            Draco paused. Then he said, “Of course. It would be Mind-Healers because they’re the ones who deal with afflictions of the brain. If some of our twisted had gone to Mind-Healers when they first began experiencing their delusions, before they decided that they were arbiters of truth or justice, then we wouldn’t be as busy.”

            “What are you planning?”

            Draco turned his neck to the side like a swan and fluttered his eyelashes. “I? Me? Nonsense. Nothing. I would tell you.”

            Harry narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know that you would,” he muttered. “Not everything. If you had a plan to get me accepted by St. Mungo’s again, for example, that you didn’t think would hurt me when I found out you were keeping secrets, that would please me because you planned it as a surprise—”

            Draco broke in with a laugh that sounded almost pained. “And that’s another downside to having a partner in all things,” he murmured, leaning forwards to breathe along Harry’s face and stir the small hairs on his chin. “You know me far too well. How am I going to keep your birthday presents secret from you?”

            “Please don’t try,” Harry said. “You don’t have to get me anything.”

            “Because you distrust my taste?” And Draco was silent and bristling again, a milk-white, frozen falcon, his head tilted backwards and his face as still as though he hadn’t just laughed at Harry, which was unnerving when he was so close.

            Harry dredged up a sigh from the bottom of his belly. “No. Idiot. I mean that you get me something every day already. Another smile, another witty saying, another reason to appreciate you. You don’t have to get me a birthday gift and keep it secret just because that’s what everyone else does.”

            Draco paused, and then said, “You escape my censure on the grounds of being romantic enough to melt my teeth. This time. Another time I might give you a proper scolding.”

            And he tightened his grasp on Harry’s hand, and went back to eating one-handed.

*

            Draco grabbed his left arm the instant they came through the door into the Socrates office. His Dark Mark burned as it had when he ran into the twisted outside the door of the Three Broomsticks, as though someone had poured a whole pot of boiling water over it. Harry immediately moved in front of him, turning his head from right to left, his hand on his wand as though he expected to curse someone.

            But the only one in the room was Macgeorge, head bowed as she sorted through the materials in front of her. The vial of blood, Draco saw, and strips of skin, and the green lens she had been looking at the blood through yesterday. Draco relaxed and opened his mouth to ask her what kind of necromancy she had used, that the whole office stank of it.

            Then Macgeorge raised her head.

            And her hazel eyes were blue.

            Harry leaped.

            Draco reached out and caught his arm, dragging him back. He thought Harry’s instinct to attack and his instinct to pull him back were both done without many words, without enough words, maybe, given the way that Harry was almost constantly snarling under his breath. But he had done the right thing, he thought, given the way the blue-eyed twisted guided Macgeorge around the desk and pulled her up like a puppet in front of them.

            “You should think about what you are doing,” whispered the blue-eyed twisted, popping Macgeorge’s jaw up and down as if it was on a particularly loose string. “What you hope to accomplish, by pursuing your particular targets. Your kin.”

            Harry trembled like a wild Abraxan under an unfamiliar hand, so it was up to Draco to speak. “You knew from the beginning what we were,” he said. “Aurors that hunt twisted. I’m surprised that you’ve appeared to us so often, and not to the others.” Warren and Jenkins had been with the Socrates Corps for far longer than Draco and Harry, and as far as he knew, this was the first time the blue-eyed enemy had reached out to either member of Macgeorge and Rudie’s pair.

            “You were more troublesome than the others,” the blue-eyed one said. “But I consider myself merciful.” It drew out the word that Draco knew Macgeorge would, and he kept his hand firmly in place on Harry’s arm. Harry was the sort who would attack simply because an acquaintance was being held under the blue-eyed twisted’s thrall. “I am giving you one more chance. You can transfer from the Socrates Corps. Ask your superiors about it. I will touch the right minds, give you permission. You can still be ordinary Aurors again.”

            “No,” snarled Harry.

            Draco entertained a wistful thought about the world in which Harry had gone along with it and they could have lives free of threats like this, but had to dismiss the idea. There was no such world. “No,” he echoed.

            “Then to the end,” the blue-eyed one said, and made Macgeorge’s body bow to them. “To the end of the chase, and the end of the hunt, and the end of my mercy.”

            Abruptly, the blue light blinked out of existence, and Macgeorge had her hazel eyes back again. She staggered against her desk and caught herself with both hands braced behind her, gagging as if she would throw up. Her eyes were far too wide. “What was that?” she whispered. “What was that?”

            Draco raised the sound-dampening wards; Macgeorge’s voice had reached the level that might attract attention. “That was the blue-eyed twisted,” he replied. “Someone who can possess other people and speak through them.”

            “The sensation in my mind is foul.” Macgeorge lifted her hands in front of her and examined them as though she thought there might be a coating of slime on them.

            “It is.” Harry stepped towards her and touched her shoulder. Draco watched closely, but Macgeorge didn’t show any sign of flinging herself on Harry’s shoulder and weeping hysterically, which meant she could keep her arms and her eyes. “That’s what happens to those who belong to him. Do you remember anything of what you just said?”

            Macgeorge shook her head. “There’s—a blank in my memory. I saw you walk in, and then I saw you there, and that’s it. Is that normal?”

            Harry nodded. “But you’re a trained Socrates Auror, and that might mean you can tell us more about what it feels like than someone else. Can you close your eyes and analyze the feeling? Tell us anything unusual?”

            Draco shifted his weight. He wanted to say that they needed no more descriptions of the experience than the foulness, and he also wanted to compliment Harry for thinking of such a tactic. He decided that he should hold his silence for this once, because that was more important—perhaps—than getting Harry away from Macgeorge.

            One can sometimes get over a crush on someone like Harry. Sometimes.

            Macgeorge closed her eyes and stood there with a wrinkled brow and bowed head, one hand reaching out in front of her as if to close on an invisible gate. Then she opened her eyes again. “The sensation is already fading,” she said quietly. “As if he took something else out of my head with him when he went.”

            “You don’t remember anything about him?” Draco asked. He was sure that he would, if the blue-eyed twisted tried to possess him. He remembered what it had felt like to suffer from Alto’s possession, although that had been a far more confusing, lengthy, and disorienting sensation than it seemed this was.

            Macgeorge looked at him, and her eyes had a cold blue flicker all their own. “No,” she said, and turned to look at Harry. “You think that he might have possessed me because he knows that I’m helping you on this case?’

            “He might,” Harry said, patting her arm as he thought. Draco moved up and took his hand, so that it wouldn’t wander anywhere it shouldn’t wander, and Harry let him do it, although he was still frowning. “We don’t really know what he knows and doesn’t know, or where he gets his information. What do you think about studying the blood at a distance from us for a few days? That might convince him that you’ve made helping us a lower priority, and make you a less tempting target.”

            Macgeorge nodded. Draco curled his lip. He found that kind of concern condescending when Harry showed it to him. He was a fully-trained Auror, every bit as much as Harry was, and with as much experience in the Socrates Corps as Harry had, even if he hadn’t been an Auror as long; he’d entered training in the year that Harry finished it. Macgeorge, however, wasn’t Harry’s partner, so it might be different for her.

            Another reason that she will never be a match for him.

            “I will do that,” Macgeorge said, and gathered up the vial and the lens and something else from her desk—Draco thought it the mummified hand paperweight, because after a moment of searching he didn’t see it—and whirled through the door of the office, gone before Draco could ask her what she had found in the blood so far.

            “There were other things we could have suggested,” Draco murmured, moving up behind Harry. “Things that might have told us more about the blue-eyed twisted.”

            “We know as much as we need to know about him for this case,” Harry said firmly, and stepped towards his desk.

            He froze. Draco moved up beside him at once, offering his body without comment as a wall for Harry to brace against. It looked as if he were in the grip of one of his visions, and Draco had seen him froth, had seen him fall over, had seen him almost die in sharing the death. He would have traded flaws with Harry if he could.

            “No,” Harry said after a moment, opening his eyes and shaking his head. “I thought—but it’s gone. I saw—someone—taking a stone from a case, an opal from a glass case like one in a museum.” Draco tilted his head in silent commendation, since those were the next questions he would have asked. “But I didn’t see anything more.”

            Draco frowned. He wondered if the blue-eyed twisted had discovered a way to interfere in Harry’s visions. For them to vanish like that and not go through with a murder was strange enough to be worth commenting on. “Do you feel that same foulness in your mind that Macgeorge talked about?”

            “No.” Harry stretched out a hand and groped in front of him, though, and Draco silently stepped into the gap, putting his shoulder there so Harry could get hold of it. “But perhaps he’s come up with a way to interfere that doesn’t leave that trace.”

            “Let’s not speculate on that until we have some solid proof,” Draco said, resolving not to tell Harry about the idea he’d just entertained. “In the meantime, I think there might be something else we can do to track down Smoke and Mirrors.”

            Harry at once turned to smile at him. He was happiest when he was acting, Draco thought, charging straight ahead or fighting or coming up with a plan. It was one reason that Draco couldn’t imagine him ever leaving the Aurors. “What? If we could trick him into leaving a message, we might at least know who he plans to make his next victims.”

            Draco shook his head. “He seems dogged enough that I don’t think he’ll abandon Sarah, whichever one of them he intended to kill, unless he’s forced.”

            Harry sighed. “All right. But what’s your idea, then?”

            Draco silently took a vial from his pocket, after glancing over his shoulder to make sure that Macgeorge was safely out of the room. Harry stared at the vial and shook his head back and forth.

            “Draco…”

            “It’s only a piece of the skin that she pulled off Moxon’s corpse,” Draco said. “Not the whole thing. I did nothing to interfere in her reading of the necromantic message. But I’ve been reading up on the techniques, the things people can do to contact the dead even if they don’t have the flaw that Macgeorge has shown. Burning this should bring Moxon’s spirit before us for a few minutes, and we can ask him questions.”

            Harry folded his hands in front of him as though he had to stop his intestines from leaking out of his stomach. “Necromancy is always dangerous.”

            “So is everything we do,” Draco said, and banged the vial down in the middle of the desk, though he’d judged well and it wasn’t with enough force to crack the glass. Harry stared at it and said nothing. “I still have some of Moxon’s blood, too, out of that amount I collected to give to Macgeorge. If we burn it at the same time as the skin, then his spirit will be practically forced to appear to us.”

            “What if Macgeorge is trying to contact him at the same time?” Harry looked back and forth between the vial and Draco’s hands, as if he thought Draco would produce the blood right then. Draco did have it on him, but he would keep it hidden until they performed the ritual. Either by itself might be excused, but someone seeing skin and blood together would know what they intended to do if they were at all familiar with necromancy. “Then we would tug his spirit back and forth between us. I don’t want to do that.”

            “You don’t want to do that, but it’s an excuse,” Draco said. “You know that we aren’t likely to end up speaking to his spirit at the exact same time as Macgeorge is.” His hands rested for a moment on Harry’s, and he smiled into his face. He knew that stood a good chance of weakening Harry, no matter how determined he had started out as. “You’re worried about what could happen to us as a result of this, but we have to solve this case.”

            “I’m worried about what could happen to you.”

            Draco rolled his eyes. “I’ve told you that you’re allowed to worry about your life as well, that no one’s going to chastise you for that, and in fact I’ll go after you if you don’t care enough about it.”

            Harry only shook his head, gaze steady on Draco. “I meant that you’re the one who’s enthusiastic about necromancy, and the one who was badly burned by the Dark magic that the twisted used. What if the same thing happens with this?”

            Draco touched his Mark, the source of that burning, before he could stop himself, and saw Harry nod as if he had proved a point. Draco restrained the urge to roll his eyes and only said, “I don’t think the same thing will, Harry, but if it does, then I’m prepared to accept it. I’m the one who came up with the plan. I wouldn’t have done that if I thought it didn’t give us a good chance to find Smoke and Mirrors.”

            Harry still checked Draco’s eyes and his face as though looking for some signs of outward corruption, but at last he nodded and said, “If you think that we can do this and get some benefit out of it, I’ll agree.”

            “Thank you, oh wise leader.” Draco swept him a bow, ignoring the way Harry pushed him. “Where should we do this?”

            Harry hesitated. Then he said, “Your house would probably be the best. Your wards are stronger than mine, and if we do it in the Ministry, then someone is going to catch us.”

            Draco chose not to remind him that Macgeorge had performed her own necromancy in the Ministry without getting caught. He had won a victory, one he didn’t want to destroy by scratching at the surface of Harry’s complacency. He kissed Harry and said, “Then my house it is.”

*

            Harry sat on the couch that Draco had told him to sit on and stared at the brazier that Draco had placed in the middle of the drawing room. His sweat was still chilling on his skin, and he found it hard to breathe. But he did his best to keep his face still and his hands immobile in his lap, because Draco wouldn’t like it if he reacted more than that.

            He didn’t like this plan.

            He knew, better than anybody, that some of the Dark Arts the Ministry was prejudiced against were simply harmless, and others were spells that he had used himself, out of necessity or because they were the best spell available at the time. But necromancy was in a different category for him.

            And you know why. The Gina Hendricks case.

            Harry pushed his hand flat over his face and groaned. He hated that case, and the memory of it that he had had to live through more than once.

            It was the case where Lionel had died. The case that was named after the first victim, and not the criminal, unlike most of the other cases that the Aurors had on file, because no one had ever found out what the creature that did the killing had been. Whether it was human, and if it was, what its name had been then.

            Harry had seen necromancy used then. And he knew that it had been involved in the case that had seen Draco assigned to the Socrates Corps, too, the case that Draco still couldn’t talk about. Harry thought it wasn’t a wonderful idea to start practicing it now.

            But he had no other leads, no other clues, no other ideas. And seeing the blue-eyed twisted take Macgeorge this morning had rattled him. Perhaps, if their enemy found her important enough to focus on, then it was important to look into her methods and see if they could use them.

            “I have the skin and the blood.”

            Harry looked up. Draco had come back into the room, and he carried the vials with him, as well as a sort of flat-bottomed basket made of what looked like coal. Harry blinked and sat up.

            “What do I have to do?” he asked.

            Draco handed him the basket. His hand was hot where it touched Harry’s, and his body trembled a little. Harry held his hand for a moment, stroking the fingers apart, trying to show him without speaking how strange this all was. Draco only tilted his head to the side and pulled his fingers away.

            “Hold this while I prepare the fire,” he said, and knelt next to the brazier with the vials. To Harry’s relief, he didn’t open them yet, but he took out his wand and began to chant, long and falling words that seemed to continue on their way down a slippery slope to some obscure destination, never actually arriving.

            Harry listened, but if there were Latin words he knew in that chant, Draco pronounced them too differently for him to make them out. He stared at the basket and ran his fingers over the rough sides. He shuddered when he did. It felt ugly, the same way that it looked. Harry would have liked to put it down and go have a wash.

            But he had agreed to come this far, and he wouldn’t abandon Draco to face necromancy on his own, so he sat and waited.

            Draco finally finished the spell and sat back, watching the flame in the brazier for a few seconds. It was small, to Harry’s eyes, and had a bluish tinge that stirred memories he clenched his teeth over, but it must have satisfied Draco, because he turned towards Harry and snapped his fingers impatiently.

            Harry extended the basket. Draco took it and set it in the center of the fire. Harry squinted and made out the way it seemed to hang from an invisible spit, which sometimes became less invisible and showed as a flicker of steel or silver.

            Into the basket Draco poured the blood, and then cast another spell that made the brazier flare bright and followed it with the skin. Harry wrinkled his nose as the smell made its way through Draco’s house. Although he had suggested that they come here for the wards, he found himself grateful that the stink wasn’t going to pervade his own rooms.

            “Now,” Draco said, and then began another spell that Harry couldn’t comprehend, but which he recognized. He had heard it cast over Lionel’s body.

            Harry closed his eyes and counted his breaths, making sure that his lungs continued to work, laboring until he thought that he could lift a house with them. Then he opened his eyes and looked again.

            The skin had caught fire, but still burned, a thread in a bigger corona of fire. It turned blacker and blacker, though, crisping, and Harry licked his lips and held his breath, this time, so that he wouldn’t vomit.

            “I summon Michael Moxon,” Draco said, his voice clear and strong despite the reeking smoke that had begun to fill the house.

            There was a surge and a sharp movement in front of them, and Harry saw the skin grow a small head, human and not snake as would have fit the shape. The jaws moved, the eyes blinked, the skin stretched. Harry clenched his fingers beneath him in the carpet, ready to move back if he could. He reckoned that was how Moxon had looked, from the photographs he and Draco had seen in the last few days.

            It still disgusted him.

            Draco opened his mouth to ask the first question, and Moxon’s head moaned and stretched out of shape. The eyes that fixed on them in the next second were blue, bright as supernovas, bright as the color the fire had originally turned.

            “Stupid of you,” said the head conversationally.

            And Harry felt the magic sweeping into his mind.

*

            unneeded: Yes, I liked finally writing the smut part!

            Skeeter is dangerous, but in this case, she’s more inclined to like the juicy details Harry and Draco can feed her than the details from anyone else.

            SP777: Harry isn’t the most original thinker. What can I say.

            And glad you liked the romance scene.
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The Library of Hades