Astoria hurried into the house, and Harry nearly had to jog to keep up with her long strides. The foyer, parlor, and staircase were all well-kept, though tumbleweeds of coarse, black fur blew along the edges of the rooms. She guided Harry to a second-floor bedroom, knocked (a gesture that was probably meant to be a polite rap, but her massive strength ended up rattling doorknobs down the hall), and walked in.
"Hello," she said.
"Did you deal with the uninvited…" Draco trailed off as Harry walked into the room. "Potter."
Harry nodded. "Malfoy."
"Potter."
"Um...Malfoy."
"Potter."
"Will you stop that?" Harry asked. Astoria made a snorting, horking sound that may have been the strangest giggle ever.
Draco smirked, an expression Harry instinctively wanted to remove from his face with a fist. "I'm lying here with a head injury, no wand, and you waltz into the room. I decided to have some fun with you and either enjoy it or receive the sweet release of death. Either way, I win."
"Damn it." Harry sighed. "Listen, as much as I would love to curse that smirk off your face, your mother was hurt and I need your help."
The smirk disappeared instantly, regardless. "If you hurt her," Draco snarled, "I won't need a wand to end your miserable existence."
"I'm sorry," Astoria said, genuine contrition somehow coming through her bestial rumble. "We thought you two were still Death Eaters."
Draco threw his head back against the pillow. "Damn it! That's why you brought that up. If I'd just said something! I'd only just awoken and my head was still so fuzzy."
"Let me try to get you on your feet," Harry said as he walked over to Draco's bedside. "I missed all of last year, so the only training I have in healing charms is what I learned in the field. Astoria said you have more practice."
"Astoria?" Malfoy blinked. "Merlin, Tori, what happened?"
"It's a long story," she said. "You need to help your mother first."
Harry ran a diagnostic charm and found only a mild concussion, so he targeted a couple of low-power Episkey charms at the area to slowly bring down the bruising and swelling. "I think that will help," he said. "How do you feel?"
Draco rubbed his head. "Like I have a terrible headache, but I'm not so fuzzy anymore and the light doesn't hurt. I think I can do this."
"I'll get your wand," Astoria said. She hurried off, her heavy footsteps thundering down the hallway away from them.
Harry sighed and held out a hand to help Draco up. Draco shrugged and took it. He expected the boy's hands to be smooth and soft, but they had a bit of the toughness his own did. "I'm sorry about Narcissa," he said as they made their way back to the stairs. "I couldn't fight both of them and protect her."
"I couldn't even protect myself," Draco muttered. "I don't know if I can forgive you, but I can't say I'd have done better."
There wasn't much Harry could say to that, so he just shrugged. He couldn't imagine he'd take it all that well, either.
Astoria ran up a moment later and handed Draco his wand. He accepted it gratefully, but had a quizzical expression on his face as he did so. "You'd trust me with this?" he asked.
"We have to," Astoria said. "We don't want anyone else to die, except maybe Death Eaters." She led them toward the stairs.
Draco looked down at his wand. "I'm trying to decide if I deserve this," he said, softly enough that only Harry could have heard.
"Your mother thought you did," Harry whispered back.
He sighed. "I hate you, Potter," he said, though without any of his usual fire.
Harry smirked, enjoying the opportunity to turn that particular table on Draco. "I hate you, too, Malfoy." Ahead of them, he swore he saw Astoria stifle the bestial equivalent of laughter and wondered for a moment how good her hearing really was in this form.
They followed Astoria down the staircase, and Harry had to admit it was an impressive one. A grand lady in a gown could make a brilliant entrance on that staircase, and he wasn't even normally impressed by that sort of thing. This was just an amazingly well-designed staircase.
The staircase took them down to the foyer, and Astoria led them back outside where her sister was keeping patient watch over Narcissa. "Harry was able to help Draco," she said.
"Oh, and you gave him his wand back already," Daphne said. "Brilliant. Harry damn near kicked our asses last time around with a witch who was barely better than a meat shield, and now Draco has his wand back, too."
Draco whipped around to stare at Harry. "You did what?"
"I'm sorry!" Harry said. "I didn't know it was Daphne and Astoria and they were trying to kill us."
"You used my mother as cannon fodder?" Draco raised his wand as he spoke.
Harry stepped back and instinctively drew his own. "It wasn't like that!"
Astoria stepped between them and gently laid one massive paw on Draco's wand hand. "I was trying to rip him to pieces the whole time. He disabled me for a moment and protected your mother from Daphne at the cost of giving me the opportunity to get my hand around his throat. He was very brave."
Draco allowed her to lower his wand. "Damn it," he said, almost crying, "even when you're effortlessly better than me, Potter, you're still not good enough."
Before Harry could even begin to figure out how to respond to that, Daphne cut in. "Tori," she grunted, "why are you giving Potter a perfect shot at your back? We still don't know if we can trust them."
Tori growled a little in response, a sound that again reminded Harry of laughter. "Harry," Tori asked without turning around, "have you ever in your life hexed anyone in the back?"
"I...um...don't think so, no," Harry said.
Daphne sighed, the flow of air making her loose, vulpine cheeks ripple. "I don't know what annoys me more about my sister: her unflagging faith in humanity or the fact she's so often proven right."
"She has that knack." Draco had regained most of his composure, which registered to Harry as a mysteriously increasing desire to punch him. "I'd better check out my mother now, if you don't mind."
The others took a step back to allow Draco full access to his mother. He performed a diagnostic charm and sighed. "I don't know if I can fix this. Ironically, she probably could have. She was the best of all of us at this." He took a deep breath. "I'll start with the head injury. I've had a lot of experience dealing with nerve damage and secondary injuries like concussions sustained while thrashing during a Cruciatus Curse."
Draco ran his wand carefully over the back of his mother's skull for about five minutes straight before sitting down and allowing himself to fall flat on his back. "I think I've dealt with her head injury," he said, weariness dragging down his voice. "She'll probably survive the night now."
Daphne put a clawed paw on his free hand. Draco flinched a little at the contact, but forced it back and had the grace to look sheepish. "I'm sorry," she said. "We've had so many Death Eaters after us that I attacked first rather than asking questions."
"Death Eaters?" Harry asked. He was curious about what was going on at the mansion, but Death Eaters took priority. "Do you know who's backing them? I'm worried they'll come after me and my friends, too."
"Lord Selwyn," Daphne said. "He's the wealthiest and most powerful surviving Death Eater now that Theo's family is dead and Draco's has turned away. A couple of dozen Death Eaters and sympathizers, mostly small-time thugs, have coalesced around him, but he's keeping a low profile for the time being. That doesn't mean he's not keeping an eye out for advantages, though, and he knows what we have."
"What do you have?" Draco asked.
Tori growled, as if the mere memory made her angry. "Something Father bought from a creepy Russian artifact broker. The old wanker spent the whole negotiation leering at me, and I learned later Father only brought me along because he knew the man had a weakness for black-haired girls."
Draco rolled his head around to look at Tori. "I'm sorry. That's disgusting."
"It gets worse," Daphne said. "The device was an old Cossack artifact, a hand mirror, that allowed them to turn prisoners into monsters fast and brutal enough to help with their raids. It hadn't worked for nearly two centuries after one of Tsar Alexander's wizards damaged it to ensure it couldn't be used against him, but Voldemort was interested in its potential to rebuild his army after the losses he knew he would take assaulting Hogwarts." Astoria twitched again at the name, but didn't say anything.
She turned to Draco. "You've met our father. He could be nasty, yes, but he wasn't a fighter. He could barely even jog. So Voldemort let him skive off the Battle of Hogwarts and focus on mastering and repairing the artifact, which is where we found him when we ditched the evacuated students and snuck home hoping to destroy the mirror."
"We were hoping he was at the battle," Tori said, "but we were...ready when we found him. We hammered him with disarming charms and Daphne eventually took his wand, but he wouldn't give up. He turned the mirror on us." She shook her head. "I collapsed as soon as I felt the change coming, but Daph was stronger than me and blasted Father out the window with an Expulso before it took her."
"Did that work?" Draco asked.
"The lab's on the third story," Daphne said.
"Ah."
"I'm…" Harry shook his head. "I don't even know what to say. I've had a hole in my heart my entire life where my parents ought to have been, but to find out that you killed your father after he turned a Dark Artifact on you...I just feel ill."
"Rethinking your decision not to kill me, Potter?" Daphne asked. With her bestial voice, Harry couldn't tell if she was making a dark joke or genuinely curious.
"Nah, just rethinking my decision to come back after Voldemort killed me," Harry said.
"You were dead?" Tori asked.
"Briefly," Harry said. "It's a long story."
"My parents were there," Draco said. "I am so put out that I missed seeing him get killed. Would have been the highlight of my year."
Tori smacked him on the top of his head. "You are such a prat."
Draco moaned and rubbed his head. "Ow. I do not need another head injury just now."
"Sorry," Tori said. "I'm still not really used to this form."
"It looks to me," Harry said, "like you've got the hang of it nicely."
Tori glared at him, which he had to admit was fairly intimidating.
"So how do we get you out of this form and render you incapable of giving me any more accidental head injuries?" Draco asked.
"We don't," Daphne said. "Tori and I have been looking through my father's notes. He'd mostly fixed up the mirror, but it doesn't have the same efficacy it once did. It can only turn two people at a time now, rather than ten. Also, a prisoner used to take only a month to turn, but his notes said he'd only gotten it down to four months before he...he died." Harry got the sense that dueling her father to the death had been harder than the girl had let on. "There's no way to stop the transformation. On September second, our personalities will die and we'll become mindless beasts."
Draco's eyes widened and he pushed himself up to his elbows. "What?"
Tori nodded. "Father's notes said there used to be a way to undo the transformation, but he'd worked to limit its effectiveness. Now, the only way is to see through it without magic, whatever that means. Father wasn't even sure, but was confident it would be impossible."
"So you have only two days to live?" Harry asked.
"Hopefully a little less," Daphne replied. "If you can destroy the artifact, it'll kill us instantly and we don't have to worry about our minds being eaten alive from the inside. That will also keep the Ministry's grubby little paws off of this thing. I'm guessing they won't go back to using Dementors after those things turned on us in the most obvious betrayal of the decade-not that I'm bitter about that-and the Ministry probably thinks this is a great way to turn life-term prisoners into their own guards."
"Had I known," Draco said, "I'd have told the Aurors to bugger off. Nobody deserves this."
"I see," Harry said weakly. "So we just have to indirectly kill you."
"Or do it personally if the beast claims us first," Daphne said. "Your choice."
"That's not much of a choice," Draco said.
Daphne shrugged. "That's life...at least till it's not, anyway."
"Ugh." Tori leaned over and smacked her on the shoulder. "I told you I would put up with your awful dark humor as long as it was witty. That wasn't even close."
"It's a fair cop," Daphne said. "Anyway, speaking of the damn thing, we're not doing any good out here. Potter, you want to come in with me and see if you can figure out how to destroy it?"
"I might as well," Harry said. "I hate just sitting here and staring at yet another person I couldn't protect. In there, the worst thing I can do is not kill you."
Draco shrugged. "I can't say I want to stare at you right now, either, Potter. I'll keep working on my mother. I want to try to get the broken bits of her ribs far enough away from her lungs to move her inside safely."
"Good luck," Harry said. Daphne nodded and headed back into the house. Like her sister, her strides were long enough to force him to hurry to keep up, but Harry suspected the older girl knew what she was doing and did it anyway.
After once again climbing the grand staircase, Daphne took a left and headed toward the end of the hall. "We use the third floor mostly for storage," she said as they walked, "but Father's lab is up here, too. Mother insisted he Charm the hell out of the floor so nothing ever leaked through."
Harry chuckled. "Smart woman. What happened to her?"
"She and father fought more and more after Voldemort returned. She was alive when Tori and I left for Hogwarts last year, and when we came home for Christmas, she...wasn't."
"I'm sorry," Harry said. "That's awful."
Daphne nodded as she climbed the smaller staircase to the third floor. "Last year was awful, and most days it feels like it never ended."
"I know what you mean," Harry said as he followed her. "Most nights I wake up and I think I'm still on the run."
"I was wondering where you'd buggered off to last year," Daphne said. "Tori said she heard you'd been on some sort of secret mission, but we obviously haven't been able to get any news since we came here."
"It's a long story and I can't tell most of it," Harry said. "Let's just say that Voldemort won't be coming back again."
"Good." The word rumbled in her throat. "I'm glad you finished the job this time."
Harry stopped as he was about to reach the top of the staircase. "I was a bloody baby last time!"
"Hurr, hurr," Daphne snorted. "Sorry, Potter, I couldn't resist. I can't say I wasn't a little annoyed with all of those idiots fawning over the 'Boy Who Lived' for my entire time at school, but I guess you've really earned it now, haven't you?"
"Yeah." Harry didn't even try to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "Only cost me my parents last time and the rest of my family this time."
Daphne stopped for a moment, as well. "Come on," she said when she started walking again. "You need to figure out how to kill me."
As he followed her into the lab, Harry wondered if having trouble with apologies was a Slytherin trait or just a Daphne one.