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You must add three drops of molten copper.
Harry snarled through his teeth as he reached for the vial of copper, without taking his eyes from the cauldron. Of course the solution to change his blood would end up being a potion. There was a spell described in the book, too, but the author had admitted that the incantation was not attested to in reliable sources, and offered a dozen different guesses for each word.
Harry was not about to use a non-reliable spell. This was too important, especially because Hermione had declared her intention to interfere with his life and because Malfoy would probably start pressuring him the moment he realized Harry wasn't coming back to him. So that left the potion.
Three drops of molten copper fell from the lip of the vial into the potion. It emitted a foul-smelling, choking cloud of black steam that Harry had to bite his lip to keep from vomiting at. He darted his eyes back to the book, and wondered if the "few fumes" it described were the same as this cloud.
Then he shrugged and reached impatiently for the next ingredient, a chalky powder he'd composed from mixing up real chalk with bits of Scarlet Death beetles. He had no time to worry. What if Malfoy was out there right now? It was night, so he could be.
As if on cue, there was a strong, steady strike against the wards, as though someone had knocked on his front door. Harry's hand spasmed, and the entire wooden bowl of powder fell into the cauldron at once, instead of being scattered smoothly across the surface of the potion the way it was supposed to be.
Harry barely had time to roll out of the way before the potion exploded, showering the entire room with a thick, tarry-like substance. He felt it land in his hair and ducked his face further, pressing it into the floor. He had horrible visions of being unable to breathe, choked by the clinging thickness—
The way he had felt ever since Malfoy had made him feel pleasure. Or at least since he had realized that the Long-Desired bond was a slave bond.
When the tar had settled, Harry sprang to his feet, shaking. A week of sleepless nights, of worry lest Malfoy should find some way to force himself through the wards, of concern about losing his friends, of the shock of seeing the memories of Ginny's death again in the Collector's tower and knowing that Malfoy and the Collector and Lucy, the Collector's Long-Desired, had seen them too—
It was too much. With a shriek, Harry Apparated through his own wards, headed for the white boulder where he knew Malfoy lurked. He had to destroy him. If ordinary magic wouldn't work, then one of the tricks he had picked up in the course of hunting vampires had to.
It had to.
*
Draco reared back in surprise when he felt the wards rippling and quivering. The only thing that should make them do that was someone tearing them down from the inside. For a moment, hope choked him. Had Harry succumbed to the intense need that was eating Draco himself alive, and decided to come to him?
Then the wards dropped, and Harry burst through, his teeth bared and clenched—still not as impressive as a vampire's, but bloody close—and his hair seeming to stand on end and his eyes on fire. He was aiming his wand at Draco.
Draco leaped in the air, gracefully twisting, his limbs flung out, retaining a faint desire to impress Harry even as he removed himself from danger. He knew it had done no good and Harry's wand must have tracked him when he felt the creeping sizzle of a curse along his muscles.
As had happened the last time Harry hit him with magic in the Collector's tower, the spell stung, but didn't damage him much. Draco landed with a feeling that he'd spent all evening in a coffin. He stretched his arms above his head and tilted his chin up and down, letting his hair brush his back. He sighed and shook his head at Harry. "When are you going to learn that you can't hurt me?" He lowered his voice to a gentle, coaxing tone. "And when are you going to learn that I have no wish to hurt you? You are my Long-Desired, Harry, the one I—"
Harry screamed. The sound was pure torment, and Draco shivered in spite of himself. Yes, he didn't mind much when mortals suffered, but this was his mortal.
"Harry," he whispered. "You have to understand that I don't want to hurt you. I couldn't hurt you even if I wanted to, no more than you can hurt me." If he said that enough times, maybe Harry would begin to believe it, or at least acknowledge it. "Please. That's what it means to be each other's Long-Desired and vampire."
Another curse came his way without a response, unless he counted the snarl that sounded as if it were bubbling up from Harry's gut. Draco bent backwards under the curse this time and twisted upright with a weary blink.
"If I can't hurt you, then why do you keep avoiding my spells?" Harry's voice was a vulture's, thick with gore and blood. "I think I can kill you, Malfoy. And certainly, I can kill you the way I slay other vampires, if not with wand magic."
Draco looked at him and caught a glimpse of him manipulating something under his shirt, something that was small and round and probably a medallion, since there was a glimpse of a chain around his neck. Draco covered his eyes, remembering the way that Harry had blinded him with a similar ornament before.
But this time, a fountain of fire exploded from the ground beneath him and enveloped him in flames.
Draco screamed. This was painful, and probably the fire had originated in the sun, or it would not have hurt so badly. Delicate tendrils of pain ran through his muscles like wires and into the core of undead magic that kept him alive. Draco convulsed as that magic itself turned to fire, seeming to hollow him out.
Through the agony, he could hear Harry laughing, and that hurt worse than the fire.
But quite suddenly the pain died. Draco blinked, wanting to believe that Harry had relented, knowing that hadn't happened.
He opened his eyes and looked down at himself. His usually pale skin had turned char-black over most of his body, and his clothing was gone. The fire had gone no deeper than his skin, though, despite feeling as if it had. Draco lifted his head and sought out Harry's eyes.
He was leaning away from Draco, body frozen as if he had stopped himself from fleeing by an act of will. His eyes were wide, and he was hyperventilating. When he looked at Draco, it was easy to feel pity for his sheer terror, though Draco wasn't in the mood for compassion right now.
"Listen to me," Draco whispered. He almost automatically tried to catch Harry's eye, and then grimaced as he remembered that Harry was immune to the thrall. All of this would have been much easier if he wasn't. "I toldyou we couldn't hurt each other. Not permanently. You can use the most powerful pain spell you know and I still—"
"Crucio!"
The pain didn't even touch Draco this time, though he had a feeling like a powerful wind blowing past him on either side. He shook his head, not taking his eyes from Harry's. "Not going to happen, Harry. I told you that already. And, frankly, I'm disappointed in you. I thought you were better than that."
Harry screamed like a hawk and fumbled for something else under his shirt.
Draco sprang.
He landed with his arms around Harry's waist, his chin on his shoulder. Harry struggled under the weight pinning his hands down, his face bright and sharp and wiped clean of anything like human feeling. Draco knew he had to act quickly, because Harry had managed to hurt Draco before when he should have been safely motionless. He leaned his fangs against Harry's throat and scraped down.
In moments, Harry was still again, his face harsh and stern now, but sane. Draco nodded, pulling his head back reluctantly. He had thought Harry's instincts that rejected the feeling of a vampire biting him would take control and bring his mind back to a balance so he could deal with it.
He ignored the temptation to bite again. Without Harry's permission, the blood would taste no better than most of the meals he took while he was in exile from his Long-Desired.
I can't take him as a slave, no matter what he thinks, because his permission makes the blood tasty and powerful. If he would only believe that, then we might get somewhere.
"You are acting disgraceful," Draco murmured. "Is this the way that you want to face your fate? Like a chicken who's seen the chopping block?"
Harry laughed. "Other than the fact that the taste is different, I don't see why you wouldn't regard me as a chicken, Malfoy." He paused tauntingly. "Ah, I forgot. Chickens are meant to die quickly once you cut their heads off, not serve as an everlasting blood source and sex slave."
Draco nuzzled his chin into Harry's nape without replying. Just being this close to his Long-Desired was closing some of the mental wounds he had sustained in their separation. He was no longer restless, no longer bored. He could have sat here by the hour together and simply looked at Harry's face.
"Maybe I can say something important that you'll understand," Harry continued in a savage voice. "You were relieved when you were free from your master vampire, weren't you? You would have rejected any of his attempts to recapture you and make you obey him again?"
"Yes," Draco sighed. The shape of Harry's muscles was intoxicating. He never would have imagined that.
"And that's the way I feel about you," Harry said. "I don't want you for a master, in any sense of the word. Leave me alone, Malfoy." The last words might have come out sounding like a plea, but instead, they sounded like the clang of an iron weapon on a stone floor.
"I can't be your master," Draco said. "I can never be anything but your equal. Why do you think that I didn't tear into your throat the evening after we escaped from Caspar and drink my fill, when you were too weak to do anything to stop me? It's you willing that gives me the magic. I have to woo you. I have to persuade you."
"The Collector didn't have to persuade Lucy."
"Those were the words that she spoke as she was dying, seeking to poison your mind against me," Draco retorted at once. "I don't understand why you can't see that. She received permission long ago and bent Lucy's mind until she was little more than a pet. I don't want to do that with you. I don't think I could, because your mind is too strong and resists bending. I want you by my side, feeding me and lending me magic, not beneath me. That's the truth."
Harry sneered. Draco could smell the tension and anguish rising off him like heat off a corpse with an opened belly. "And what do I get out of this arrangement? The magic that I can wield on my own, without you? Dizziness from loss of blood? Your continual company, which I find less than congenial?"
"You get a companion," Draco whispered. "Someone devoted to you, to whom you'll always come first. I assure you, Harry, I have no other attachments, since the change into a vampire, as you so aptly figured out years ago, killed my capacity to feel most kinds of affection. I can make you live longer. I can increase your magical strength the way I did when we hunted the Collector. I can give you pleasure, the kind of pleasure that you've felt only a few times before." He dared to let one of his hands slip along Harry's chest towards his groin. "You will have a life of power and pleasure."
"Of course I will," Harry said. "Of everything but freedom."
"I don't understand how you're defining freedom," Draco said. He let his frustration ring in his voice, wondering if it would affect Harry to hear him sound almost human. "I'm proposing to remove some of the limits on the things you can do. You'll be able to hunt vampires more efficiently. You'll live longer, giving you freedom from death. And your freedom from loneliness and torment—"
"I am not tormented. I'm not afraid."
"But you stink of fear," Draco whispered, leaning closer still to Harry's throat. He wasn't going to bite, he reassured himself. He merely wanted to soak his face in that scent, so it would last a bit longer when he was forced to leave Harry, as he knew he would be. "You fear getting another friend killed the way you believe you got Weasley killed. You fear becoming my slave, though I have told you why that would be impossible. You fear moving on from the man you are right now, and becoming someone else. You fear living again." He traced his fingers over the puncture wounds he had already left, each one a mark of a time that Harry had yielded to him, no matter how ungraciously. His cock hardened, and he let it brush against Harry's thigh.
"It wouldn't be life," Harry said, his voice shaking, "tied to someone who's undead."
"Your definitions of life and death are not that narrow," Draco said. "They can't be, after hunting my own kind." He leaned closer and inhaled again. "Harry," he murmured. "I want you."
"And that's all you think that you need to say to get me to fall at your feet. You think that's the only justification you need for trying to possess me." Harry had a sharp laugh when he wanted to make use of it, like glass shards stabbing into Draco's ears. "So sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not a possession."
Draco closed his eyes and held still, forcing himself to fold his fangs back. He was indeed too close to biting without permission, despite the feeding he'd already done tonight.
It was Harry's fault. He was too overwhelming, too physically presentafter a week of distance and dreams.
Draco flipped himself into the sky, using the concentration needed to land on his feet to distract himself from Harry. He ended up on top of the boulder, crouched and staring down at Harry. Harry spun around, taking long moments to find Draco and aim his wand, moments that would have enabled Draco to kill him a dozen times over.
If that was what he wanted. If killing Harry was any more possible for him than it was for Harry to kill Draco.
"I have books that describe the true nature of the relationship between vampires and Long-Desired," Draco said. "They're the reason I know more about that relationship than you do. I'll lend them to you. You can read the truths that other people discovered long ago, on their own." He shrugged, never taking his gaze from Harry's. Those green eyes burned again, like the eyes of a wolf in a cage. "Would that quiet some of your fears?"
Harry tossed his head as if he were shaking off a harness. "Nothing will ever reconcile me to the loss of my freedom, Malfoy."
"You're restricted far more by this than you would be by becoming mine," Draco said, showing his fangs as his temper flared. "Huddling in your house, avoiding me, trying to find some solution to that which has no solution except acceptance—"
"That's what you think."
Harry looked tormented, and harassed, and gleeful. Draco paused and looked at him. Harry stepped closer, his lips locked so hard over his teeth that Draco suffered from a temptation to bite through them, his hand clasped about the ornament at his throat.
"You have some plan to break free of the bond?" Draco tried to think of what would break the bond—or, more to the point, what Harry might think would break it. The books he had studied agreed there was no way for either Long-Desired or vampire to back out unless the Long-Desired simply never allowed the vampire to bite him at all, but Harry hadn't read those books. He might think there was a chance that a trick he'd used before would work.
"You plan to repel me from you somehow," Draco murmured. "Not with wards, because you would have stayed behind yours at all cost if that was the plan. You turned your blood to poison when you faced the Collector. Is that it?"
Harry flung what looked like a javelin of light at him. Draco leaped gracefully over it and came down on the other side of the boulder, where he promptly circled around so that Harry could see he hadn't been driven away.
Harry already had his fists clenched, and his breathing had become jerky and swift. "You didn't mean to let that information slip," Draco diagnosed easily.
Harry glared at him. "It will work," he said. "What you want about me is my blood. With that gone, you have no reason to seek me out."
"Not true," Draco said. "It is true that I would be disappointed, but I could bear drinking blood that tasted disgusting to me for a chance at the kind of power you promise. And the sense of rightness your presence brings me. And the pleasure I found in you." He discovered he had lowered his voice and was moving in a spiral towards Harry. It was hard to force himself to stop. The bond affects me as much as it does him.
"No," Harry said, and he sounded as if he wanted to scream but didn't have the power or the breath to lift his voice to that volume. "No. No, you can't. You can't want or like other things about me. It doesn't workthat way."
"Yes, it does," Draco said. "There's nothing that can separate us now. The difference is whether you'll allow yourself to be brought to me on a willing rein—the same rein that controls me—or whether you'll kick your heels and run. And if you run, you'll be caught in the end. It's much more dignified to yield now, I think." He found himself reaching out as if he expected Harry's hand to rise and meet his. He thought part of him did rather expect it.
Harry stared at him with wide, tearless eyes. Then he turned and pelted behind his wards again. Draco dropped his hand and stood looking after him, wondering if anything had been accomplished after all.
I promised him the books. I'll bring them here and leave them. His wards ought to be good enough to tell him what they are.
Harry was the kind of person who needed undeniable proof before he could give up on something. Maybe he would believe the words that he would read in ancient ink, on pages that had been bound long before he was born.
*
"Harry? It's Hermione. Let me in."
Harry opened the door and let her in rather blindly. She had come not five minutes after Malfoy had departed. Harry would have ignored the plea given the circumstances of their last argument, but the circumstances of Malfoy's just leaving made him want human company so that he didn't think about how he was trapped and his solution wouldn't work.
You don't know that. You only know that Malfoy said your solution wouldn't work.
Harry turned to face Hermione. He wasn't about to believe the lying bastard. Why should he? Malfoy had been wrong about everything else, and vampires lied more regularly than they breathed.
Hermione was paler than usual, but she accounted for that by folding her arms, leaning against the door, and saying, "Malfoy told me that he's the survivor of another nest, which belonged to a master vampire called Caspar, and that you're his Long-Desired. Is that true?"
Harry couldn't control the widening of his eyes and his backwards flinch. The fact that he'd been counting on Hermione to be his escape from Malfoy only made it worse. He'd thought he could put those concerns away, and Hermione's words landed on them like whips on tender wounds.
"Finite Incantatem."
The glamour that had been protecting his puncture wounds fell away. Harry knew that not because he felt it happen, but because he saw the way Hermione's gaze turned towards his neck and her face grew pale and her hands tightened on her wand. And there was no other reason for her to cast that spell at him.
"It's a lie," Harry said, speaking the first words that came into his head. "I'm not his Long-Desired. Vampires will say anything to make you spare their lives, you know that, Hermione, and—"
"Except that he was the one in control last night, the one who could have killed me." Hermione took a step towards him. "And I know you, Harry. You never would have left him alive if you had any choice." Another step. "And you do believe it yourself, though I think you hate it. I know by the way you flinched." Another step nearer.
Harry shut his eyes. He was shaking, and could say nothing. The wire beneath his feet was unraveling, and any moment he would tip into the abyss that yawned beneath him.
"I've read about the Long-Desired bond, Harry, and I think it could be a good thing. I think—"
The wire parted.
"Get out."
His magic contracted and then uncoiled, and a wind pushed Hermione straight out of the house and locked the door behind her. Harry crumpled against the wall and prayed that she wouldn't knock again. He might kill her if she did.
Instead, he heard her footsteps walking away, and a moment later he heard what he knew was the crack of Apparition. He could have hoped that she was gone forever, but he knew better than that.
Harry slid to the floor, his arms wrapped around his stomach. He felt as if he were bleeding from a gut wound. A moment later, he lifted his right hand to his mouth and began to bite at his fingers.
He did it over and over, to reassure himself that his teeth were not as sharp as a vampire's, to make himself think that he was still human and not as evil as someone like Malfoy.
That did nothing to still the whirling and the ringing in his head. Trapped. Trapped. What happens if the solution I planned on working doesn't work? What happens if I can't make Hermione go away? What happens if I end up in St. Mungo's, which doesn't have anti-vampire wards and where it would be easy for Malfoy to get to me?
The thoughts scattered like birds, and came back together in a flock, and scattered again, and came back together again, and still Harry had no solution.
Then he lifted his head.
Why am I trying to change something about myself to get out of the bond? That's a level of consideration that Malfoy doesn't deserve.
I need to find some way to kill him. I thought only yesterday that he was the most dangerous vampire I would ever face. I need to conduct the best hunt I've ever conducted, in response.
I'm a hunter. It's what I do.
Harry opened his eyes and stood up straight, his hands clenched in front of him. This time, hope made the thoughts sit still and line up in orderly patterns.
It'll take some time to prepare all the weapons I intend to use, so I'll have to pretend to go along with them for a little while. Pretend to comply. Smile and nod nicely when Hermione asks me questions designed to test my sanity. Pretend that I've reconsidered my stance towards Malfoy.
Then I'll hunt him.
And if the hunter dies at the teeth of the predator as he drives home the killing thrust, that's only proper.
