Chapter One
The orange glow of the sun did little to brighten the air as the warm humidity hung over everything, setting wet beads of moisture on the backyard. The only item in the grassy lawn that seemed unaffected by the humidity was the large stone bird bath near the oak tree. The water inside the basin grew and seemed to relish the chance to grow and prosper.
Even the large white bench beneath the overhang of the tall roof was covered in little beads of moisture, partially contributed by the young woman lying on top of it. The painted wood scratched at her calves, forcing her to adjust which only caused her cotton shirt to stick to her sweating skin mercilessly. She tried to lift it off her arms a little, but only succeeded in allowing the thin fabric to saturate with the moisture from the air; it had been weeks since it had rained and the humidity kept rising, causing people to grumbled more and more daily.
The cool air conditioning of the house beckoned for Adrienne to follow the frosty lighting and occasional wafts of cold air from under the door.
No, I can't go in. Not until she is done Adrienne argued with herself and struggled to ignore all the sweat and perspiration gathered on her arms, legs, and the rest of her body. Her skin itched to feel the cool rush of air felt when walking into an air conditioned house and her hair stuck to her neck, urging her to want to feel the trickle of clean water down her back and smell the soapy scent of shampoo.
Inside the large home, the sound of dishes clinking together and metal on metal hit Adrienne's ears.
She can't take that much longer. Father will be home soon and he usually likes to eat right when he arrives home. As if on cue, a loud crack came from inside the house and the sound of a broken china plate told Adrienne her father was home. Adrienne's mother's agitated voice came at the house elf, scolding her for dropping the plate and ordering her upstairs.
"Yes, ma'am," came the weak voice of the youngest house elf working for the Marcellus family. Her tiny head poked over the top of the window, and as Adrienne sat up, she saw the older house elf lead her away toward the attic before coming back and finishing the table setting. Before the older elf was back, Adrienne heard her father mumbled something to her mother who shook her head. What then surprised Adrienne was that her father started walking toward the door to the backyard. She bolted upright and smoothed down her hair down as best she could while making sure she didn't have a stain on her clothing.
"Hi, Father!" she said excitedly and put a huge grin on her face.
"Hey, kiddo," he smiled and Adrienne groaned at the reference to being a child.
As far as David Marcellus was concerned, Adrienne would always be his little girl. But tonight, he seemed especially happy to see her and engulfed her in a hug, a rare sign of physical affection that no one ever saw from Mr. Marcellus. Adrienne almost felt a slight wave of unease wash over her as they pulled back from each other. She hungrily drank in her father's appearance: his curly blond hair, leathery skin showing slight signs of aging, and sharp, almost criticizing green eyes. Emotion swept over her and to prevent herself from doing or saying anything, Adrienne pulled her legs up to her chest and onto the bench. The silence hung in the air like added humidity, pressing down on her and her father. The awkward silence stretched on until they both heard Mrs. Marcellus' voice from inside the house, swearing and bewitching the broom to clean up something while the older house elf Yaddy hand swept the smaller things.
"We'd better go make sure mum didn't kill anything," Adrienne joked awkwardly and heaved up from the bench. The long pair of shorts stuck to the back of her thighs as she and her father walked into the kitchen. The cold air-conditioning chilled her as Adrienne's sweat cooled and clung to her skin.
The kitchen before them was nothing how their normal kitchen looked. Where the pots and pans normally hung in neat rows, now dangled a mess of pans all dirtied and in a jumble. The normally spotless floor was covered in spaghetti sauce and Yaddy sweeping bread crumbs. The mother and wife stood in front of the oven with a tray half full of burnt bread and it then made sense why the elf was on the floor.
"I just can't do it! Other mothers cook all the time without house elves! I can't even do it with two!" Nichole Marcellus screeched, dropped the tray of bread on the counter, and pulled at her dark hair. "Why? I have to be some kind of failure as a mother now!" She carried on and threw one arm over her face dramatically.
"Nichole, don't make this into one of your theatrical productions. It's just dinner. It isn't like Yaddy and Cimop can't fix dinner." Mr. Marcellus glanced at the house elf who yelped and skittered off to fetch his younger companion. David walked over to his wife and put an arm around her shoulder and she only let out one more sniffle of self-pity before walking with her husband to the living room.
Great, now what?! Adrienne thought angrily and walked after her family in a huff. As she followed, her parents' voices got gradually quieter sinking into their private conversation. Adrienne dropped back, but not before she heard her name. At the corner before the room, Adrienne stopped, her constantly curious instinct taking over. Her parents took their customary seats for talking but their faces seemed troubled somehow, their eyes full of worry and their mouths hard lines.
"David, what if she figures it out before we get there?" Her mother's worried voice and talk of a secret sent a chill down Adrienne's spine.
"How would she, unless you've been dropping any kind of hints," Mr. Marcellus said skeptically and looked at his wife with interest.
"Of course not! We both agreed not to tell her until we got there." The room was silent for a few moments before Mrs. Marcellus broke out in a trembling whisper,
"What is she says no?" Not even her husband had an answer to the question and Adrienne took this as her cue to jump in.
"Hey!" she said brightly after making sure she made no signs of hearing and had a fake mask of happiness plastered on her face. Both parents held their mouths in a sharp line and tried to smile when Adrienne popped in from around the corner.
"So…" Adrienne lulled, just to break the silence. "What's been happening?" David and Nichole Marcellus exchanged nervous glances before both saying at the same time,
"Not much."
'Saved by the bell' would have been the appropriate phrase as the little bell on the oven signaled the finishing of the bread.
"I'll go see if the elves need any help," Mr. Marcellus offered with a grimace and left the room, leaving his daughter and wife in the living room.
"So, Adrienne,"" her mother started and peeked nervously around the corner to make sure her husband had actually gone down the hallway and around the corner to the kitchen. Adrienne sat down and kept her eyes focused on her mother and had every intention of keeping what she heard a secret. "What do you think of the Malfoy's?"
The question caught Adrienne off guard. She was expecting a question about travel maybe, considering what she'd just heard, but not the Malfoys.
At one point, her mother and Narcissa Malfoy had been exceptional friends. As most pureblood families, they had been almost inseparable through their pregnancies, for they had become pregnant about the same time, both positive they would both have boys. Imagine both families' surprise when they saw one baby in St. Mungo's nursery in a blue blanket and the other in pink.
From that point on, the families grew increasingly apart. Narcissa and Nichole rarely saw each other, and because neither were the type to write, no letters were exchanged. And then, from the age of two until a fateful day at Diagon Alley, they'd not seen each other. That day sparked little, and although they shared a house unity, Adrienne and Draco saw almost just as little of each other as they had for the majority of their childhood.
"Well, I guess they're okay. I mean, I haven't seen much of Mr. Malfoy but Mrs. Malfoy seemed pretty nice, if not a little-"
"No dear," Mrs. Marcellus cut off her daughter before continuing, "not really the Malfoys as a family: more specifically, their son." The increasingly surprising questions jumped on Adrienne and she quickly lost her mask of fake ignorance to replace it with one of pure confusion.
"Well, um, Malfoy is…something." Adrienne's slow choice of words and tone obviously hadn't gotten across to her mother because she clapped her hand together with a huge smile on her face before shouting,
"Wonderful!" and jumping off the fine leather couch and nearly skipping like a school girl across the room and down the hall, humming something suspiciously familiar, yet somehow Adrienne couldn't place her finger on it.
"Hurry Adrienne dear, dinner's ready!" Mrs. Marcellus sang down the hall and continued to sing a tuneless song and Adrienne had no idea why. Confusion still plain on her face, she made her way into the extravagant dining room. The dinner of spaghetti, meatballs, and garlic bread topping the painted china and the clear crystal glasses were filled with each members of the family's drink of choice. Adrienne walked into the dining room just as the smallest house elf set a plate of fruit in the middle of the table and skittered out of the room with an excited yelp as Yaddy told Cimop that the burnt bread was still on the counter.
Dinner that night was a strange affair. While Adrienne's mother tried to contain her excitement about something unknown to both her daughter and husband, Adrienne poked around at her plate, moving the vegetables around in a circle. Her father kept looking nervously between his wife and daughter and no conversation was passed between anyone other than the normal talk of what went on today, according to the Daily Prophet. After said questions, all was silent until Nichole started humming. Adrienne sighed in exasperation and threw her hands down on the table.
"Mum, just stop already!" Everything from the humming to the small noises of the house elves in the kitchen down the hall stopped and Adrienne continued to stand with her hand on either side of her plate.
"Adrienne Nichole Marcellus. Take that tone with either your mother or I again and you will fully regret and curse the day that you every learned to slap anything with a solid surface. Now," David said in a voice both calm and scarily normal, "Have I made myself clear?"
"Yes, sir," Adrienne mumbled and crossed her arms across her chest.
"Don't cop an attitude with us, young lady! You're lu
cky we didn't make you change into something nicer for dinner and now you're being so bold as to yell at me and defy your father?" Mrs. Marcellus shrieked and stood up from the table with her hands flat on the blue linen table cloth. The air between the table and her palms made a dull 'clap' when they hit the table and Adrienne snapped her head up to stare her mother straight in the eye. "Now, go upstairs and go right to your room. We'll deal with your punishment tomor-" Nichole Marcellus cut herself off when she realized her threat and backtracked.
"Just go!" she yelled and glared down at her daughter, her dark hair falling over her face and shadowing it with dark circles under her eyes and in the hollow of her cheeks. Adrienne glanced once up at her mother before nodding obediently and standing sharply from the high backed chair.
As she walked from the dinner to her bedroom, Adrienne noticed quite a few things out of place or things abnormally set out in the open. At the dresser by the door, its polished cream surface was nearly overcrowded with old wedding photos of Mr. and Mrs. Marcellus. Her mother's long gown was covered in pink pearls, the silk fabric draped across her lower stomach. The couple looked genuinely happy, much like her mother had when she'd asked about Draco.
Come to think of it, why had she asked at all? Adrienne thought and tried to shake off the strange feeling. She'd barely seem the man- or boy when you consider his attitude- at all. In reality, the only time she saw him regularly was at mealtime and even then his constantly following group was around him, always including the monstrous Goyle and Crabbe and Pansy, who fawned over his as though her were a god.
And boy did he soak it up.
Adrienne couldn't, or at least tried not to, form an opinion about Draco, as she'd never talked to him that she could remember. The only thing she had to base any decision about him on was in first year while buying school supplies. Adrienne shuddered at the thought.
As she stomped up the stairs, her foot steps thundered through the house and shook the wooden banister on her way up. The family portraits of the three of them shook against the wall with a crack and a pop. As she watched the pictures of the family she saw that her father gradually grew more somber, and in the last photo, taken last summer, he wasn't smiling at all. Even his clothing had gone from the bright colors Adrienne remembered from her childhood to the grey and black he wore everyday to work at the Ministry of Magic.
The plush carpet filled around her feet as she finished walking to the second floor. She veered left as the stair case continued like a never ending line. The doors on both sides of the hallway continued down, narrowing until it hit a small staircase and continued on. The doors before her were all closed, except the last few on the left, their small lights shining from inside.
As she walked down the hall, the hair on her arms stood up and she had a strange urge to be somewhere she could have her back to the wall and covered by a blanket. Such feelings were not uncommon in the hard times that had hit the Wizarding World. Adrienne sped up her pace, her heart suddenly started to race. When her hair tickled her neck, making her jump, she started to pump her arms and slam down the hallway.
As she neared the second to last door from the stairs, Cimop opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The small house elf squealed in surprise and Adrienne yelped when she toppled over the elf, landing flat on her face, the carpet smashed into her mouth and her chest pushed painfully up against her ribcage. She pushed herself up from the floor with a heave and picked an invisible piece of string off the hem of her shirt.
"What the hell?" Adrienne screamed and turned around to find the house elf looking extremely frightened behind her.
"What in Merlin's name was that for?" she yelled at the elf before turning back around on the soft carpet so fast she almost fell over again. Behind her, she swore she heard the house elf begin to hit her head against the wall. In the process of listening, Adrienne heard her mother yell upstairs as a warning.
The stairway ahead loomed in the darkness before Adrienne grabbed the small box of matches on the stand that held the first candle. As she struck the match and lit the wick, the candles leading up the stairway lit up, their flickering light casting shadows all over the walls. She began the ominous climb slowly , unwilling to go to her bedroom for the night until she heard her father's monstrous footsteps rumble up the main flight of stairs when she then began to take the polished wooden stairs two at a time until she reached the landing. She heaved a huge breath before continuing to pant and flung the door open at the top of the stairs.
She walked quickly to the back of the room where the dresser stood and snatched pajamas out of the drawer and threw them on the bed. She lifted one t-shirt over her head before slipping another back down. Just as she slipped the waist of her pants down, she heard her father begin the climb up the second flight of stairs. Yanking them down to her ankles, she stepped out of the bottoms while putting her other foot in the pajama shorts. Adrienne literally flung herself on her bed just as her father knocked on the door. She quickly cast a hurried glance around the room before spotting a book and grabbing it before yelling in a as normal voice as she could manage,
"Come in!"
Mr. Marcellus merely poked his head around the door with a look of surprised distain before closing the door again. Adrienne heaved a sigh of relief and fell back onto her bed. The night's events had started normal enough as they replayed through her head but had taken an almost scary turn when they went into the main sitting room. Adrienne racked her brain for something, anything that could explain the events of the evening. Even after her almost mind numbing brain search, she still had nothing that would clue her in at all. She adjusted the pillow her head had barely landed on and locked her eyes on the ceiling over her bed.
What are they keeping from me? Why'd mum ask about Malfoy, and what the bloody hell was she humming?
All three questions and dozens of others swam around inside her head as Adrienne rolled onto her side, pulled her legs up, and slipped her folded hands under her cheek. As the first peek of summer moonlight that Adrienne had seen at her home since her return from Hogwarts shone through the window one question sat on her mind:
Where are they – or rather we- going?
Author's Note: Well, this is a new chapter of a new story and I hope it isn't totally horrible. Please please please reveiew because I need them to survive!