Snarling, Draco paced out from his bedroom, eyes feral and gleaming with something other then his usual arrogance. Quicksilver eyes, limpid and shifting grey with something insane lurking in the back of them. His face was paler then usual, dark shadowed eyes gleaming under a disordered fringe of winter silvered hair, fingers curled as if they were about to grasp something. Silent steps brought him up behind Zabini where he stood talking to Snape, a quick hand flashing out caught the other boy's silvery grey hair, a darker shade then Draco's own and pulling him away. Blaise yelped in pain, elegant hands flying to where his cousin held him as Draco forced him to his knees, eyes wide and frighteningly blank. "Blaise, you gave my Cin the book. I know you did so don't bother lying to me." He half sobbed, a dark guttural noise of agony. "I will deal with you later, cousin. Treacherous lying descendent of an Egyptian WHORE!" Blaise went flying into the opposite wall as Draco kicked him in the chest, silvery strands of hair still fixed into his fingers.

There was a sharp audible crack of breaking bone as Blaise hit the stone, before falling to the ground. He lifted his head slightly and spat blood onto the floor of the Slytherin common room. "Maybe. But it's better then being the son of a blood whore, selling family honour for fleeting power from a being of the dark." Draco hissed through his teeth like the reptile he was named for, sharp canines denting the almost pouty shape of his bottom lip. Blaise shuddered in a breath through the pain of broken ribs, before saying in a dead monotone, "Challenge thou me?"

"Challenge you do not deserve," Draco bit out. "Blood of my blood."

"Then what, if not challenge, kinsman?"

"Restitution. Punishment. Payment."

"In blood?"

"What else? Follow then, cousin. Payment is asked, and you have said aye to the manner of monies needed. Scarlet coin, red as the blood now drained from my love's body." Draco howled with laughter, insane ringing guffaws echoing through the dungeons as he headed for the portal to the dungeons. Snape followed, an imposing figure in a dark robe.

"Mr Malfoy-"

"Petrificus Totalis!" Blaise ordered and the Potions Master stiffened then fell to the floor. Zabini got to his feet, licking blood off his lips with a quick pink tongue. "No interference, Snape. You should know that. Not in something like this. Honour must be satisfied, no? Or else I must gift my love to him to pay for the one I have removed. And she doesn't even know I think on her, curses my name and scolds me like a child." He crossed to where Snape lay, silently raging and trapped before crouching down again. "And she will never know. Now. Malfoy can kill me with a thought. It's what Malfoys do. They obliterate. Zabinis…well, we move in shadow and deceit. But this is what must happen. He has asked, and I will pay for what I have done. It is an old blood thing." Blaise rose once more to his feet and followed his cousin out.

Draco yelped and sniggered, grey eyes gleaming with lunacy as he made his way through the corridors to Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. "Out, the damned nature of all men, out! Demons inside the skin of the living, indeed I do see this. Treacherous!" Blaise followed him on cat silent feet, grey-green eyes sorrowful. Draco whirled on him and slapped him full across the face, sending blood trickling down his chin where his teeth cut his lip. The other Slytherin licked his lips, red tinging his teeth before he grabbed Draco by the upper arms and slammed him against a wall.

"Do you want your payment or not?"

"In spades and full, from blood born darkness," Draco snarled, before leaning forward and kissing Blaise hard, biting down on his bottom lip. The other boy made a strangled noise of pain as blood flooded into Draco's mouth, staining their joined mouths with vermilion lifegiving fluid. "Why do you taste so of innocence, when you have condemned my Cin to death? WHY?! My heart is dead within me, and still yours beats? Shouldst I not then tear thy heart from thy breast, or thy love's from hers?"

"Leave her out of it, Draco!" Blaise let his hands drop, stepping back from his grief mad cousin.

"Should I? Or should I drag her down in the filth with the rest of us poor sinners?" Draco hissed, before walking on to the bathroom. He entered regally.

"You can't come in here!" Myrtle squawked indignantly. "This is a girl's bathroom!"

"It's a passageway, also." Draco crossed to the taps, running his hands along the wall and looking for something that Ginny had assured him was there. A snake. He tilted his head, and squinted slightly. "Get your lazy arse over here, Zabini, and open this for me."

Silently, Blaise came over and studied the snake etching in the metal. He licked his lips clean of blood and hissed through his teeth. "Open." Strictly speaking, Blaise was not a Parseltongue. It was more of a hereditary bent through his grandmother to speak with reptiles, the many gods of the Egyptian Pantheon often requiring that their followers address them in the tongues of their sacred animals. Learning the languages was a long and arduous task, undertaken only by the most dedicated of followers. Or, one conferred on them by the gods themselves to their selected few. Nefernehet had been a priestess of Wadjet, one of the twin goddesses that protected Egypt and the Pharaoh. Wadjet's sacred animal was the cobra, who spits poison into the eyes of Pharaoh's enemies from her place on his brow. Blaise had inherited the gift with his grandmother's blood, just as he had inherited the book of Egyptian charms and dark spells.

Nevertheless, the taps started to judder and shake as the secret pathway opened. One after the other, the silvery haired youths dropped down to the ground below them, deep in the dark. Where a great battle had been fought, both for the soul of one young girl and for the fate of the world. The place known as the Chamber of Secrets, fashioned by Salazar Slytherin himself at the time of the school's founding, once populated by an immense basilisk before it was slain by the Boy-Who-Lived. The place of Slytherin's heir.

Snape growled as he stalked down the corridors, following a hunch. It had been immensely humiliating for the House Master to admit that he had underestimated his students, and even more so that he had been Petrified by one of them. It was to his never-ending mortification however, that he had the mutt to thank for applying the counter curse. Once again, he had been saved by one the Marauders, but this time it hadn't even been their fault he'd been in trouble in the first place! His stomach twinged, and he made a mental note to make up a potion for stomach ulcers caused by stress when he got back to his lab. After the last few months, he'd gone through his supply pretty quickly. Remus walked beside him, silent to avoid agitating the other teacher further. Snape was in a truly foul mood, even for him and the werewolf was forced for once to admit that this time, the Slytherin might have very good reason for being as angry as he was.

Remus looked askance at Snape once they arrived at the girl's bathroom and the pale man just pushed in through. Myrtle shrieked and wailed recriminations. Snape touched the taps, looking for what had drawn Draco in during his fit of madness. Found it. A rough etching of a serpent.

"Go and get Potter."

"Severus. Are you-"

"We need a Parseltongue, Lupin. Go and get the idiot boy."

And let us hope it's not too late. Snape stared at his face in the mirror, sallow and haunted while Remus took a few steps back towards the door then fled.

Blaise watched Draco as the other boy yelped, snarled and wept, raving and gesticulating wildly as he roamed the underground space. He was looking for something. Blaise sat on a stone, ignoring the stench that still lingered of the Basilisk's corpse, mostly down to white ivory bones now but the smell of rotting flesh still wafted. Drifted. Trapped. Watching Draco move was like watching a caged Wyvern pace its cage, wings beating futilely against the bars and insane with fury, spitting venom and hissing. Berserk.

"Hand out against the stone, Zabini."

"Time?"

"Time is a fleeting thing, fickle mistress with a whim to lift her skirts for any. Time is a whore." Draco tossed his head fretfully as Blaise got up, walking across to him and placing a hand across the stonewall where the other boy stood. A wicked blade glittered in Draco's clenched fist as he raised it, a knife that was a good foot long but not quite long enough to be called a sword. It was more then sharp enough to cleave through skin and muscle to bone underneath and through again. Blaise shuddered and turned his eyes away, tenseness tightening along his shoulders as his fingers gripped spasmodically at the rock as he waited.

Snape tapped a foot impatiently as Harry bent and whispered to the engraving, opening the entrance to the Secret Chamber.

Miles away, Virginia lifted her head from Melanie's breast, where they lay sleeping in a tangled rats nest of silks and velvets. As the older vampire lifted one elegantly manicured hand to pet her, she laid her head back down against the other woman's body, listening to a heartbeat that no longer existed except in her dreams.

"Haste, Lupin!" Snape hissed at the other teacher as they made their way past the rock fall that cluttered the middle of the tunnel. A scrap of black cloth had been torn off against a jagged edge, brown stain showing blood had been left behind as well. Together, the two larger adult males managed to squeeze through the fissure two younger men had just wriggled through not half an hour before.

"Payment."

Blaise squeezed his eyes shut.

"Must be paid."

He swallowed as Draco spoke, hearing his heartbeat roar in his ears.

There was barely even the sound of displaced air as the machete swung downwards, and Blaise's scream ricocheted off the walls as he immediately clutched at the blood spurting stump of his right arm. Draco looked at the blade curiously, then lifted it to his mouth and delicately lapped at the blood covering it as his cousin cowered and yelled himself hoarse with pain at his feet.

"It is paid, and paid," the Malfoy announced, then dropped the knife on the ground as he turned to leave. It hit hilt first, then spun to fall once again, blade clattering to a halt against the stone near where Zabini knelt.

Severus and Remus exchanged a glance, and then broke into a flat out run, splashing through puddles and risking breaking their ankles on the uneven ground. They found a white faced Blaise Zabini keeping himself alive barely by a thumb on the main vein in his wrist, blood covering the ground around him and a slightly dulled knife lying by him.

Draco was gone.