Author's Note:

Team: Dragons

Spooky Trope Bingo Card Prompts

BIngo Card 1, Middle Horizontal Row: Wandcores/Magic, "True Evil."


Chapter 2: Veiled Truths

Hermione's shock was short-lived. The weight of the heaving form above her was no ghost. The rasping whistle of his breath and the fog of his sour breath on her cheek was uneven, as though he was trying to get the hang of breathing. Maybe, if she'd been the girl she'd been back at school she would have been intimidated, but that girl was long gone, lost to years of being a muggle-born in an unforgiving magical society.

"Get off of me," she hissed back, when she finally found her voice again.

It was his turn to look shocked. "What?" It was more the movement of his lips with his escaping breath than an actual word.

"I said." Hermione paused, giving him a well-practiced glare. "Get. Off. Of. Me."

His eyes went wide and he scrambled backwards until he was pressed against the gnarled iron. Hermione could see where his hands shook, even as he gripped her wand like it was all that held him together.

"My wand, please," she said, standing and handing her hand out. She noticed that she was looming over him as he cowered, his eyes fixed on her like a terrified animal. His gaze was wide and unfocused, but he nodded, seeming to understand her, and he raised his shaking arm to do as she said.

The moment her fingers touched the wood, Hermione realized what she'd neglected to notice. It was then that she realized her mistake.

Beyond his deathly pale shoulders, Snape's body was blanketed in an inky shroud of darkness. Hermione had foolishly thought they were some sort of robes, but on a second glance, even his fingers were so dark that they seemed to repel the flickering light around them. The moment her fingers touched the wood, she felt as though a cord of wire had been driven through the core of her and she bit her lip to stifle the cry that threatened to escape. Her wand let out a shower of sparks, and for a moment, the core of her wand was visible through the wood, golden light striking out to and twisting around the fingers of her right hand. This was mirrored around the charcoal outline of Snape's fingers, and before she could stop it, her right hand was pressed palm to palm with his left.

Hermione had never considered herself a prude. She'd had sex before, of course, but nothing prepared her for the full-body jolt of pleasure that radiated down her wrist and arm. Her fingers tingled and pulsed in an unnatural manner, and she felt herself growing flushed. Her lips parted and she let out a soft sound of pleasure. When she heard an answering sound in a deeper register, she opened her eyes to find him in a similar state. Then, a flood of power from her wand's core pulled her forward until she was practically on top of him.

She stared at the man cowering below her. She only had a moment to recognize Snape's terrified expression, only for his face to suddenly…sharpen in nature. His pupils spread across the surface of his eyes until they were as black as pitch. Smoke escaped his lips and puffed against her face, smelling of spiced earth.

"As you have called me to the mortal plane, so shall I be your daemon and serve your will."

It was his voice, but the way he said it reminded Hermione of how Trelawney had spoken her prophecies. She could see the warring emotions on his face as he went silent and clenched his jaw in silent fury at this loss of control.

The light tightened painfully and sunk into them both, then dissipated in a shower of golden sparks. Hermione flew backwards, landing uncomfortably on her arse.

"So." Hermione said, after a long moment.

Snape glared at her, and it was then that she could see a dark form twitching back and forth behind him.

"Do…do you have a tail?" She asked, incredulous.

He grabbed it and tucked it into the dark pool of his body without a word.

"So, you're a daemon?" Hermione tried again. "So…beyond the Veil…you were…in hell of some sort?"

He nodded curtly, his eyes on the floor.

"And you…will serve my will?" Hermione continued.

"Don't test me." His voice was sharp and cold.

The audacity of the man! Hermione scowled, then smirked as a wicked idea occurred to her.

She pointed to the back of her hand. "Then you shall kiss me right here, daemon."

Immediately, he stood as if compelled, and pressed his dry, cracked lips against her skin as she'd indicated. The touch gave Hermione a jolt of pleasure, a memory of the pleasure she'd felt before.

"You feel it, don't you?" Snape's voice was resigned. "When we touch."

Hermione nodded. "Yes, but I don't understand—"

"If you allow the polluted soul of a lich to touch your own, then the afterlife punishes you for what you covet by giving it to you in overabundance," he said, his expression grim.

"So you…" Hermione trailed off, trying to think of why his skin would have such an aphrodisiac quality.

"I wanted to be valued. Loved. Desired. Instead, I lost the woman I loved, was responsible for her death, and died a virgin." His voice was flat, emotionless. He didn't seem to be afraid of her anymore, rather, resigned to his fate.

"I've read that your kind cannot lie, but why tell me this much? Surely it is embarrassing," Hermione said, furrowing her brow.

"You wouldn't be wrong. But I'm still me, I'm just also…more." Snape's tail had escaped and was swishing violently from side to side. "I've had to endure or experience all manner of debauchery in the cold, misty realm where I resided before you called me here. However, it was as meaningless as my spartan, celebate life as a mortal. In this way, even the things I thought would bring me pleasure have been lost to any meaningful enjoyment."

Hermione went scarlet at the implication of what he meant by debauchery. She'd read a bit on daemons, of course, but had never thought she would accidentally summon one, much less one that had been someone she'd known years ago at school The scariest thing was that the march of time had left him behind, but she was now nearly older than he had been at his time of death.

"So…your skin…er…when you touch people…" Hermione trailed off, feeling extremely self-conscious.

"I could make you come by squeezing your wrist if you like," he said, his expression matter-of-fact. "I could make you squirt across the room by licking your pussy eight ways to Sunday. Is that what you would like me to do, Granger? Or should I say, ``Mistress?"

Despite what he was saying, his voice was the opposite of alluring, but Hermione still took a step back, her heart racing. "H-Hermione is fine. None of this Mistress stuff."

"Yes, Hermione," he said, but his inflection was the same as when he'd said Mistress before.

He was still on the floor, and she was still standing over him. He had been so tall, always looming over the students in school, but now he was crumpled into a mere shadow of himself.

"Stop looking so glum, Snape," she replied, tucking her robe's sleeve over her hand and reaching down to help him up to his feet. He was a head taller than she was, but he stooped a bit, his posture leaving a bit to be desired. "I'm not going to force you to fuck me, if that's what you're fretting about."

She forced out the words with a nervous giggle, as though she swore like a sailor all the time. Truth was, she did tend to enjoy a good swear, but not in the presence of others.

"You know, if you want to, you can call me Severus, M—Hermione," he replied, and for the first time, when he looked at her, she could see the tired old headmaster he'd been before Nagini had ended his life.

"I'll think about it," Hermione said. "Now, first thing's first. You need a shower and a change of clothing. I have some spare robes I can modify for you, but we may need to use a glamour if you want to go out into public with me. We can't be starting rumours that the ghost of Snape is wandering about. There'd be a panic."

"I didn't realize I was still such a topic of great fear for anyone other than the ankle biting dunderheads at Hogwarts," Snape said, his voice growing sardonic.

Hermione snorted. "Between the people who literally worship you to those who keep trying to find the location of your grave specifically to desecrate it, I'd say you're a rather polarizing figure."

"I wasn't buried."

Hermione stared. "What?"

"I wasn't buried, Hermione." He was staring at the Veil, now. "My body and the bodies of all the other Death Eaters were thrown through the Veil, specifically to prevent any of us from returning."

"And yet…here you are." Hermione was frowning again. Something in the back of her mind itched with a nagging feeling of deja vu. She looked at the ground, spying the various papers and items strewn about from her summoning spell.

Snape saw it first and, in one graceful movement, his tail shot out like a tentacle and wrapped around the notebook. It almost looked as though the tip had opened up for a moment and grabbed it, but it had been fast and Hermione couldn't be sure.

He leafed through it, then looked up at Hermione with a look of horror. "Where did you get this?"

"I didn't steal it, if that's what you're asking," Hermione replied.

"No, that's not the problem," Snape said, running his fingers over the inky pages. "The problem is that this notebook is mine, and it is the culmination of my research on a true evil energy that lurked behind Voldemort, behind Grindelwald, even behind the great evils of this world."

Hermione looked skeptical. "You'd better not be telling me that the devil is real."

Snape shook his head. "No, it's far worse. It doesn't have a body. It's more like… a miasma. And there are ways to travel there if you have a bit of the entity or one of its followers to triangulate its true location. That's why I'd studied the Veil. I'd started out wanting to bring Lily back. Not as some kind of inferi, but as she had been before she died. Hell, I'd been willing to bring James back as well after my involvement in their deaths and the orphaning of their child. But, alas, I didn't get far enough before Voldemort returned and my energies were required…elsewhere."

"Why are you telling me all of this?" Hermione asked, her suspicions growing by the moment. While she knew that a daemon could not lie, they could twist the truth and were known to delight in causing chaos. She thought back to the crass things he'd said about her body and shuddered with some undefinable emotion hanging between anticipatory pleasure and horror.

"I'm telling you," he said, looking serious, "because the miasma, the true evil that we have been forced to beat back again and again, is trying to exploit thin points in our world to reemerge, and if we can close them or at least bar anyone from using them, then we might be able to stop it from happening again."

"There's something you're not telling me, Severus," Hermione said, trying out his name in an effort to shock him into showing his head. It made her belly swoop to call him by name, but she tried not to show any emotion.

The Severus in question across from her didn't so much as twitch.

"There's a lot of things I am not telling you. Shall I list them all in alphabetical order?" Severus gave her the sort of enimagic look that made her want to slap him. She refrained, though, and simply stomped off to her study.

"Come or don't come," she blustered. "I don't care."

"Oh?" he asked, eyebrow arched. "Is that a challenge?"

Hermione threw up her hands. "If what you're saying about this evil thing is true, then I need tea. Stat. You can do what you want."

Snape nodded. "I shall partake in tea with you."

"Oh, now you want to be formal," Hermione groused.

They walked to the kitchenette in silence and oddly enough, they both shared the small space without ever touching one another. Once the tea was finally steeped and steaming in the pot between them on the small wooden table Hermione kept near the far wall, Severus sipped on his cup, then put it down daintily.

"Hermione?"

"What?" Hermione winced as she scalded the tip of her tongue.

"I wanted to thank you," he said.

"What for?"

"For bringing me here, even with the limitations on my body. There is no tea in hell, you see."

Hermione snorted, then looked a bit chastened when she realized he wasn't joking.

"Oh, don't worry. It was meant to be funny," Severus replied, waving his coal-black hand dismissively.

Without thinking, Hermione reached a hand across the table and gripped his. She nearly swooned forward with the instant wave of pleasure and wetness that filled her body more quickly than the other times she'd touched him skin to skin. With a gasp, she dropped his hand and stammered a few apologies before retreating to her stacks of books.

"You know what?" Severus said, suddenly behind her as she grabbed a book. She could smell his earthy, spicy scent as it rolled off of him in thick waves.

"What?" Hermione asked, trying to keep herself from hyperventilating.

His lips were nearly tickling the lobe of her ear as he whispered, "I wasn't lying when I offered you as many earthly delights as you could stand. Perhaps you might even enjoy it."

"Hah!" Hermione barked out a laugh, jumping away. "I'm sure you'd like that, wouldn't you? So you could suck my soul out of my…body!"

"Not unless you asked me to do so," he replied, his grin just a little too wide to be comforting.

"Finish your tea and then help me with the research," Hermione instructed, her temper beginning to flare.

He retreated, his voice only giving off a hint of a mocking tone. "As you wish, Hermione."