A/N: One more chapter and then the names and plot points will start making sense again.
Disclaimer: Don't own JKR's stuff. Do own Calandra &co. Don't own Montague Summers.
Playing with Fire: Chapter Five
By Godforsaken
Calandra's manor house, despite looking like a cracked-out French museum, had to be the most low-key household Draco had ever set foot in. Its inhabitants were randomly disappearing and showing back up without much regard for the other inhabitants, and there were no family meals of any sort whatsoever. The library was usually the noisiest room in the house, as it was the only place where the family members seemed to see each other very often. Odder still, for Draco, was the fact that the family seemed to have no regard for whether the stuff strewn around their estate was magic or Muggle, just as Calandra never seemed to draw any distinction between wearing robes, wearing Muggle clothing, and wearing Muggle clothing that had gone out of fashion three hundred years ago.
The only sort of structure to their day was their sleep schedule—every morning, the entire house went to bed the moment the sun was up, and every evening, Calandra woke him up in some rude and usually very noisy way an hour or two after the sun went down. According to her, the rest of them got up at about sunset. However, once he had been unceremoniously dragged out of bed, the rest of their day was usually spent in an indolent mix of reading, listening to music, wandering around the house gawping at the various things that most museums would kill for, and—Draco's preferred pastime—playing with Calandra's snake. She'd christened it Edward Teach, on the basis that she was running out of good names for pets, and remarked gravely that when Teach died her next snake was probably going to get stuck with a name like Errol Flynn and she just wouldn't be able to take the poor creature seriously.
Draco hadn't really understood a word of that particular comment, and thus ensued a four-hour discussion on pirate history in which Draco learned that Edward Teach was Blackbeard's real name, that two female pirates had once sailed on the same ship, and that his friend knew so much useless crap she could probably show up Hermione Granger; and utterly failed to retain anything else.
By the third day he'd gotten used to the completely directionless way of life, and so of course Calandra went and sprung actual information on him.
"My parents are having a party this evening, and we're not going."
It took him a moment to realize she'd said anything, and another to realize that "this evening" meant when they next woke up. "Why?"
She pursed her lips, still looking at the snake rather than at him. "My parent's friends are… weird. It would be best if you didn't meet them."
Draco raised an eyebrow: considering Calandra was wearing vinyl pants, a corset, and green eyeliner, he didn't think "weird" was quite something she should be accusing other people of, let alone positing it as a reason to keep them away from him. "Mm-hm."
There was a moment of silence as Edward Teach coiled himself around Calandra's arm.
"What are we doing instead?" Draco asked.
"We're going into town," she answered. "Not much is open at night but there's one of those bookstore-coffeeshop thingies that just opened, and we can probably spend a number of hours there." Noticing Draco's skeptical look, she grinned. "What, you can't spend four hours in a bookstore?"
"You have the oddest ideas of fun," he commented. Calandra shrugged; she knew that.
At that moment a pompous-looking owl flew through the open window, landing on Draco's shoulder. The snake hissed at it; Draco, recognizing it as his fathers, untied the message from its leg.
"Well, that certainly took them long enough," he remarked after reading it. In response to Calandra's quizzical look, he clarified: "They want to meet you."
"What, are we getting married?" Calandra replied.
"They say to come by Floo powder at noon on Thursday. Er… tomorrow," he corrected himself, still unused to the idea that it was Wednesday when he'd woken up on Tuesday.
"Tell them seven at night," Calandra grumbled. "I'm not getting up for a noon appointment on my Christmas break." Draco scribbled a reply as she addressed her snake: "Qui pense-il qu'il est, le Roi du Monde? Nous dormirons à douze heures, n'est-ce pas, monsieur le Capitaine ? "
"Does everyone in this house speak French but me?" Draco inquired, sending the owl off again.
"Yep, although Mariseta's still learning, and ditto for German. You should be grateful everyone but Teach here speaks English," she replied serenely.
It was exactly fifteen minutes to seven on Wednesday evening and Calandra was multitasking, trying to simultaneously do her eyeliner, mentally berate herself, and verbally argue with Mariseta.
"You've been even more high-strung than usual since you got back; I can feel it. If you calm the hell down you'll be alright," her fledgling was advising.
"I've made a mistake. I've gone completely mad. And I have fifteen minutes to get that stupid human out of here before Nikolai or one of the others bloody eats him, and I don't even know if he's up yet."
"You're not mad," Mariseta protested. "And he seems rather promising."
"Yes, but I've got six months left until the end of the school year and I'm this close to letting the secrecy slip." She dropped the eye pencil irritably. "Three thousand years is way too long to live; I should do myself a favor and kick the bucket soon," she grumbled.
"Don't talk like that!" Mariseta cried, shocked.
"Oh, shut up," snarled Calandra. "You're young. Your stupid civilization hasn't been obliterated yet. You're not off your bloody rocker yet, so don't talk to me about how crazy people should talk. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm in a hurry."
Mariseta stuck her tongue out as Calandra swept out of the room. She just didn't have any other response.
Calandra glanced at the clock in the main hall as she half-dragged a still fairly sleepy Draco down the stairs and out the front door. Six fifty-nine. Stupid human.
They had barely reached the sidewalk when a deep red convertible pulled up and stopped directly in front of them. Calandra yelped "Shit!" and tore off down the street towards the town, ignoring the driver's protests. She never slowed her pace until they reached the doors of the bookstore downtown. There she let go of Draco's arm, to his great relief, and he wondered vaguely if the bruises on his wrist were going to last until they got back to school.
"What… the hell… was that?" he asked breathlessly as they entered the brightly lit store. He blinked; he hadn't seen light that bright in days.
"Nikolai," Calandra grimaced. "He's a friend of mine. Sort of. He's annoying as hell and I really didn't want to have to see him tonight, but…" She seemed to lighten up as she looked over the rows and rows of shiny books. "Let's go check out their Occult section."
"They have an Occult section?" Draco inquired, wondering what the hell Muggles would put in an Occult section if they didn't believe in the occult.
"Sure, they're superstitious little buggers. It's all nonsense though, so it's really rather amusing… haven't you ever been in a Muggle bookstore before?"
"Not since I was about nine," Draco replied haughtily. "Why do you come to places like this, anyway?"
"It's amusing," Calandra answered, sinking to her knees in front of a bookshelf labeled "Supernatural – Occult." "Here, come look at some of this trash…"
"Twenty Galleons says there's not a single mention of the Dark Lord on this entire shelf," Draco drawled, unable to stop himself from picking up a copy of the Necronomicon out of curiosity.
"Of course there isn't," Calandra laughed. "Barely a damn thing on this shelf has any basis in reality at all." After a moment, she added, "I wonder if the Dark Lord gets annoyed that nobody uses his name."
Draco put the book back on the shelf in disgust before Calandra's comment registered. "Wait… what?"
"If I'd gone to the trouble of making a spiffy name for myself like the Dark Lord's, I'd get very annoyed if nobody made any use of it," Calandra explained blandly.
Draco snerked appreciatively. "Don't let him hear you say that."
"Oh, I've no intention of doing so, don't worry," she said dismissively. "Oh!" She moved over a few feet, peering at the bottom two shelves. "Get away from that Wicca crap; I've found the Montague Summers," she informed him.
"Found the what?" Draco asked, dropping to the floor beside her.
"Montague Summers, a priest from the 1920s. He's a leading Muggle authority on witchcraft and magical creatures. Take a look; it's hysterical—" she handed him a copy of The History of Witchcraft and Demonology— "and at least half of the other books on this shelf are going to reference him at some point, especially the ones on vampires."
"Ooh, vampires," was Draco's immediate reaction, which Calandra seemed to find rather funny for some reason as to which Draco did not inquire.
"D'you think the Dark Lord's going to try to court the vampires again, now that he's back? I'm entirely sure he'll be after the giants and the werewolves, but nobody's said anything on vampires…"
"Vampires don't work for anybody," Calandra replied disdainfully. "Least, not as far as I've heard."
"I'm fairly sure he'll be able to offer them something good," Draco argued. "He's usually pretty effective at recruiting whoever he feels like recruiting."
"Guess we'll just have to wait until the next book comes out to be sure," Calandra replied, directing the comment mostly at a red-headed girl on the other side of the shelf who appeared to be eavesdropping.
"Thing is," she continued, turning back to Draco, "the vampires that people know are vampires and then would have any grudge against vampire hunters and 'part-human' prejudices and such don't last very long. The rest of the race just gets insulted at his whole immortality-seeking thing, and to be honest I think he'd be able to recruit the bloody centaurs first." Calandra scowled at a copy of the Compendium Maleficarum as she flicked it off the shelf and it tumbled into her lap.
"Why would he want the centaurs?" Draco asked disdainfully.
"Why would he want the vampires?" was Calandra's rhetorical reply. "Their modus operandi is entirely antithetical to his. Even the wizarding world doesn't usually register vampire attacks, as they're very rarely 'suspicious deaths,' which is sort of what the Dark Lord goes for." She refrained from mentioning that the first vampire created— miraculously still undead and kicking after several thousands of years— had vowed to personally dismember and eat any of her children that joined forces with Voldemort.
"I still think you're giving the vampires a little too much credit," Draco replied.
"Maybe." Calandra shrugged. "Although I thought your class had never studied vampires?"
"Well… no," Draco admitted. "Have you?"
"Would I be lecturing you on them if I hadn't?"
Draco regarded her suspiciously for a moment. "Where'd you transfer from?"
"Durmstrang," Calandra replied promptly.
"I was going to go there," Draco commented, somewhat wistfully.
"D'you want some coffee before we get kicked out of this place? I think it closes at nine-thirty…" Calandra, having never set foot in Durmstrang, didn't want to be dragged into a conversation about it. "I'll pay."
"What time is it?" Draco asked, standing up.
"Like… quarter to eight, or so." She grinned somewhat sheepishly. "It's gonna be a long night."