Exsanguine!
"Le sang noble ne dira pas de mensonge. – Good blood will not lie." (French Proverb)
Two house elves had just levitated a large porcelain soup tureen onto the spotlessly clean white tablecloth as the double oak doors to the dining room opened once more and admitted the Lord of Malfoy Manor himself. Eleanor smiled as she saw him. He would not deviate from protocol, even if the dinner guest proved to be only a mere auror barely out of her teens.
He had freed his long blond hair from the leather strap he had worn earlier that day and had dressed in an off-white silk shirt with an elaborate lace necktie. An emerald green damasked waistcoat and black pants and coat completed his wardrobe. With an appraisinglift of his arched brow he observed the two women who had already taken their seats at the dinner table.
Eleanor was acutely aware of the fact that she and Marigold both wore plain black dueling robes which consisted of soft pants and a button-up knee-long tailored coat. She cast a quick look at her former student whose hair was looking rather disheveled from her fighting and sighed inwardly. 'Beauty and the beasts,' she thought. 'And he's rubbing it in, and he knows it…'
However, Lucius did not comment on the slightly grungy appearance of his company. Instead he stepped over to his fiancé and kissed her formally on the cheek. "Excuse my tardiness, dear," he said gravely. "I had just received an owl with an important business message I needed to take care of." He gave a curt nod in the direction of the young auror before settling in. "Miss Brannock."
The house-elves meanwhile had begun filling up the plates with a wonderful warm and fragrant rosemary and barley soup. Nibbs offered freshly baked bread, and for a moment everyone concentrated on their meal.
Eleanor found she was rather hungry, and after she had finished her soup and the plates were cleared she looked forward to the main course as the elves filled their goblets with velvety red wine. Lucius lifted his monogrammed silver drinking vessel after a brief tasting. "To success in our fight," he said, and the two women repeated his toast and drank.
"So, Miss Brannock, what news since the last week?" was the wizard's next question. He was of the opinion that the auror ought to start earning her dinner now.
Marigold cast a quick, nervous glance at her former teacher and cleared her throat. "Well, Mr. Malfoy. There have been two Death Eater arrests over the last two days: Mr. Goyle and Mr. Jugson are back in Ministry custody."
Lucius nodded slowly. "I am surprised Goyle lasted that long. I would have thought you'd be able to apprehend him much faster. How did you find him?" He helped himself to some of the rack of lamb that the elves had now put before them.
"Well, he solicited a prostitute in Knockturn Alley, who unfortunately for him was an undercover auror observing Death Eater activities at the Bats' Roost bed and breakfast. She actually haggled with him over the price for a blow-job for a few minutes and then had no problem putting a petrificus spell on him," said Marigold regaining some composure.
Lucius chortled briefly in amusement. "Well, I guess he was missing the attentions of his wife, poor chap, now that all their houses are being watched by the Ministry. But still, he should know there are times in your life when you better keep your pants buttoned. At least he went out in his customary lack of style. Jugson surprises me, though. He should have more sense. Anyway, have they been questioned yet? Anything we need to know?"
Miss Brannock took a sip of her wine. "No, they are going to put them under Veritaserum tomorrow morning. I'll owl you if they reveal any information that has bearing on your security situation. We hope they can provide us with some new insights into You-Know-Who's latest plans."
The wizard gave her a curt nod. It seemed in his mind tonight's information had not really warranted having to share his dinner table with an auror.
"How did the workshop go?" he asked Eleanor. She swallowed a fork-full of potato and decided not to mention the incident with the chandeliers, but just as she opened her mouth to answer she blinked in shocked surprise.
A bloody tear had gathered on the lower lashes of Lucius' left eye, dropped and rolled down his cheek to land in a splash of vivid crimson on the immaculate white lace of his necktie. "Lucius!" she choked.
With an irritated gesture the wizard dabbed at the sudden wetness on his face and flinched as his eyes fell on the blood on his hand. "What in the name of Merlin…" Blood spilled over his lips as he spoke and he pushed himself away from the table.
"Oh goddess," cried Eleanor as she jumped up and ran over to him. He staggered out of his seat. His eyes were blinded now by the blood that suffused them. A soft groan of pain escaped his lips.
"By Azrael, I'm on fire," he moaned as he lurched towards the sound of her voice. She barely caught him and then felt herself pulled to the ground under his weight as his legs collapsed under him. Blood spilled everywhere now, flowing out of his eyes, nose and ears. She couldn't even make out the features of his face any more. His breath came in choking, labored gasps, and she suspected that blood had begun to fill his lungs, suffocating him. She knew she had almost no time left.
"Marigold, alert St. Mungo's! I will try empathicura to keep him stabilized. This looks like some blood poison. We will both be in a bad way when the mediwizards arrive. I'm counting on you!" She didn't even wait for the auror's assent, but began to concentrate on her healing skill she had learned so many years ago as a student at Durmstrang.
The man in her arms convulsed. She cried out loud in fear. "I am here, Lucius, I am not going to let go. Hold on! Just hold on!"
It took all of her willpower to focus and to override her own survival instinct. This might very well cost them both their lives. "Empathicura!" she intoned and began to absorb his injuries into herself. Immediately she felt as if every cell in her body had just been immersed in acid. She gave a hoarse shout of pain as she sensed blood fill her mouth and blackness took her.
Lucius Malfoy awoke in complete darkness. Every nerve in his body was screaming with agony. 'Cruciatus,' he thought for a brief, panicked moment. Someone had him under the cruciatus spell. The Death Eaters, Voldemort, had finally got to them.
"Eleanor!" he gasped, feeling the sickening taste of blood on his lips as he moved his tongue.
A moment later the darkness was lifted from him as someone removed something wet and heavy from his face and eyes. He blinked up into some red-tinted blurriness that looked vaguely like a human face.
"This one's come to," said an unfamiliar female voice. Another darker oval swam over him as someone else was peering down at him.
"Well, let's sit him up," answered a man. "We don't want him to choke on his blood again."
Hands lifted him under his arms and unceremoniously pulled him up into a half-way upright position as he groaned in pain. Moving hurt like hell. Someone pushed some pillows down his back for support and the female voice said. "Hecate, he is still hemorrhaging. We're running out of leucographus elixir here pretty soon, particularly with her needing so much of it, too. This stuff is evil!"
He tried to talk, but all that came over his lips was a horribly wet cough and what tasted like yet more blood. He felt something cold and metallic lifted under his chin. "Well, I'll tell Dr. Septimus in Potions to make more elixir. We have to keep them both going until we have found and prepared the appropriate antidote. Whoever mixed this poison is a Dark Arts master of the craft."
With a rustle of robes the male person left and he felt the woman who had spoken before pass a wet cloth over his face.
For a moment his vision cleared and he saw a small witch in her late forties in mediwizard robes perched on a chair at his side. She had her pepper and salt hair pulled back into a severe bun and peered at him over a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. In her hands she held a bloodied towel. He blinked and focused.
"Mr. Malfoy?" she said looking him over.
He nodded, unsure of his voice and unwilling to just cough up more blood.
"Can you tell me how you got poisoned? What did you swallow?"
Now he had to talk. "Don't know. During dinner?" he managed to squeeze out, then took the metal dish from her that she had held under his face before and spat out another mouthful of his blood.
"How is Eleanor?" he asked when he could speak. His vision began to blur again.
Impatiently he dashed blood from his eyes, noticing that the sheets that covered him looked like nothing more than scarlet, sodden rags. The pain had receded a little, but now he felt horribly weak and dizzy and nauseous from the taste of his own blood. He tried to take in the room and gasped in shock as he saw a bed standing next to his, the sheets soaked in the same terrible red. A shock of blood-drenched hair spilled down one side of the pillows and the few strands that still remained dry bore a striking coppery color.
He tried to lift himself up and sank back with a sickening, lurching sense of weightlessness. "Eleanor!" he said again, and then with his last remaining strength grabbed the mediwitch by her robes.
"Damn you, woman! Tell me how she is!"
The witch had no trouble freeing herself from his grip and got up. She looked down sternly at her patient as she stepped around the bed and pulled shut some curtains that separated the two beds.
"She lives," she said curtly and then busied herself at a small table out of his view.
He heard her voice through the fog of weariness and pain that seemed to overtake him again. "She saved your life, she and the auror who brought you in. Appears she is a trained empathicurus – pretty rare skill. She got in so deep while absorbing your injuries, she almost died. But she had no poison in her. At least we don't have to find an antidote for her. Once her internal lesions heal, she'll be fine. However, if we don't manage to brew up something to counteract the poison in you, you might continue bleeding indefinitely for all we know."
He felt her step up to his side as blood blinded him yet again. "Here, drink that!" she commanded him. He grimaced as he swallowed more blood.
"What is it?" The rim of a cup rested against his lips and he drank down some thick, sickly sweetish liquid as the witch explained.
"Leucographus elixir. It helps your body replenish your blood. We estimate the poison causes you to lose about two pints every hour. We're running low, though. And anyway, even with the potion your body will be exhausted after about one and a half more days. You'll simply bleed to death."
Lucius couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard some small measure of self-righteous satisfaction in the woman's voice. He sank back into the pillows with a groan. Obviously bedside manners were not reserved for ex-Death Eaters. It rarely surprised him. At least Eleanor would live.
She had performed empathicura for him once before, on a cut on his arm, an insignificant injury in comparison to his current state. He couldn't even begin to imagine what she had put herself through this time.
As his mind submerged back into half-unconsciousness, part of him remembered her facing him sitting on the living-room floor of her small house in London, the seriousness in her deep green eyes as she had told him she loved him. Part of him tried to solve the riddle of how he got this damn poison into his system.
If he found the bastard who had done this to them, he would personally see to it that the guilty party got an intimate taste of every curse and torture technique he had ever learned from his father and the Dark Lord himself.
The next time he remembered anything he felt a soft, cool hand against his forehead as someone gently wiped a cloth over his mouth and stroked his blood-drenched hair. The touch felt very different from the forceful, businesslike movements of the doctors and he opened his eyes.
The face smiling down at him looked deathly pale, exhausted and lined, but he would have recognized it anywhere.
"Eleanor," he rasped, trying to smile back, knowing full well he looked like nothing more than a hideous image of butchery and slaughter. Nevertheless his lover bent down to him and placed a kiss on his forehead.
"It's okay, Lucius," she said. "Just stay strong for a little bit longer. They have analyzed the poison and they are mixing an antidote as we speak. You will make it. Just hold on. Just hold on…"
He saw the worry in her eyes that she tried to hide from him and squeezed her hand. "I want to live at least long enough to kill the poisoner," he gritted out. "Do you think I'll allow myself to die before I am avenged?"
She shook her head, her smile reaching her eyes now. "Malfoy vengefulness and stubbornness," she sighed. "This time they will actually keep you alive, Hecate's blessings!"
"Help me up," he told her and saw her nod as she felt the firmness of his grip on her forearms when she pulled him higher against the pillows.
"How's the pain?" she asked.
"It comes and goes, but better now," he said.
She leaned over to the side of the bed and lifted a glass beaker filled with some vivid green liquid. "It's time for your elixir again."
'Stay alive, crucio the bastard,' he thought and drank his medicine without argument.
"Do we know how it happened, yet?" he asked Eleanor as she put the potion back. She wiped his face once more and then settled into the chair by his bed.
"I know a few things," she explained. "Marigold came round with Nibbs and some fresh clothes about four hours ago when I was finally getting myself back together. When you collapsed last night she flooed in an alarm to the Ministry and got some mediwizards on the site after I tried empathicura on you. That didn't work so well, but the staff here say it probably bought you the time they needed to stabilize you.
The mediwizards took us away, but she had aurors go over Malfoy Manor with a fine-toothed comb all of last night and this morning. They found only one thing: poison residue on the rim of your dinner goblet, and your goblet only. No other spells, no traces of forced entry, nothing. The scary news is that it seems that someone who had a right to be in the house, who had been told the wards, decided to kill you."
She paused, looking at him. He coughed up some blood. "Well, that's a short list," he answered grimly. "You, me, Draco, four house elves, Miss Brannock and two of her auror guards and Severus Snape, that's it."
Eleanor looked at him, lost in thought. "Well, rule out the house elves. They cannot harm their own master, even an imperius does not compel them. All of the others could have acted under an unforgivable." She paused.
"That includes myself," she added soberly. "Both Marigold and I submitted to an imperius detection spell, and we both came up clean, as did the other two aurors. Draco and Severus have an alibi. Everyone saw them in the Great Hall at Hogwarts celebrating the beginning of term the entire evening. Believe me, the aurors have already checked into that. And we are all stumped."
Lucius seemed to be considering this, though it was hard to read his face underneath its covering of fresh and congealing blood.
"There is one clue we have," he said slowly, his pale eyes looking at Eleanor intently. She met his gaze without flinching.
"Who made damn sure that every single bit of protection we ever had against the use of poison would leave Malfoy Manor and go to Hogwarts with Draco? Who left us defenseless against this sort of attack? Who played us?"
His fingers reached for her hand, squeezed it for emphasis.
"Who?" he asked again.
He saw her eyes go wide in shock. "Severus – his message in Diagon Alley! You don't think…?"
His lips compressed in a grim smile. "I heard the mediwizards talk earlier – the poison really had them confused. They said a Dark Arts master of potions made it. I'd expect it's not something you'd buy off a shelf, not even at Borgin and Burke's."
Lucius saw disbelief in his lover's eyes.
"Lucius, he warned us against the attack in August, he has done nothing against Draco, we have not caught him lying to us once. I can't believe…"
The wizard felt another sickening wave of blood suffuse his mouth. This time he simply turned his head and impatiently spat the coppery-tasting liquid over the other side of the bed. The damn place looked like an abattoir anyway.
"Think! Would he compromise his position in the Order by harming one of Dumbledore's charges? He's not that stupid. He also needed to gain our trust by feeding us information. Who says the attack wasn't a feint anyway? I am telling you, he is playing both sides. Merlin knows where his loyalties really lie. Don't you dare defend him! It doesn't matter he didn't come to the Manor himself, the plan has his name written all over it. He drew our defenses off and he mixed the poison."
Lucius sank back into the pillows with exhaustion after his outburst. His lungs felt on fire and pain threatened to take over again. He concentrated on ignoring it, closing his eyes. The next moment he sensed the mattress dip and cool hands cradle his face. Her voice sounded close and soothing.
"I believe you, Lucius," she reassured him as her thumbs gently wiped more blood from his cheekbones. "I truly don't trust anyone but you, but this is so hard."
With an effort of will he looked at her again and was appalled to see tears streaking her face now. She blinked angrily, but did not wipe them off.
"We cannot live like this, Lucius," she said. For a moment she regarded him, then suddenly turned away.
"Accio speculum," she commanded and faced him again, now holding a square mirror that had hung over a small sink at the far end of the room.
"Look at yourself! Look at what they did to you! Look at what I have had to see!" she said, her voice breaking on a suppressed sob, her body shaking.
He was unsure whether she trembled in fury or with an effort to keep at least some of her composure. The next moment he was absorbed in the image of horror that stared back at him out of bloodshot eyes from the depth of the looking-glass.
His face was covered with a smeared patina of fresh, drying and flaking blood. No one could have guessed that the wet gory tangles that limply hung around his temples were normally pale blond in color. He found he recoiled at his own likeness in shock and disgust. The mirror quivered in her fingers and he put a steadying hand over hers, then gently pushed down and lowered the glass.
"What will I have to see tomorrow? What is the next thing that will happen? Do I have to watch you die in my arms one of these days? I cannot do this. I can't stand it any more! We can't live like this!" Her voice had grown progressively louder and more agitated.
He watched as she got up from the bed and started pacing the narrow room. "So far I have been thinking about defense, about sitting it out, about lying low, just surviving this. After last night…"she stopped, looking at him intently, "After seeing you like this, after having the doctors tell me that we both barely made it, that you might still die, that just isn't enough any more."
She licked her lips. "I want revenge, Lucius. I want to kill these bastards. I want to get back at them for what they did. I want them to suffer! I don't think I have ever felt hate like that before. And I fear and hate myself for what I feel." Huge green eyes stared at him, wet with tears, yet blazing with fury. She held her hands clenched before her, her knuckles bone-white.
Lucius wiped blood from his face, a small smile tugging at his lips. "Yes, my love, yes: hatred, anger, revenge – you can finally understand," he said gently. "Don't hate yourself for your hate. Hate them instead. Revel in your darkness. Draw your strength from it. Don't fight it. Your hate will keep you alive."
She shook her head and sat down wearily. "It is not your true will. The one you hate governs everything. The object of your revenge is the one in control, not you."
"Yes, but have you ever tasted the triumph of it, the way it seduces you? If you could stand over someone as frighteningly powerful as the Dark Lord and he writhed at your feet imploring your mercy when you had none to give, what would you feel? What would it be like, after what he'd done to you and yours?" There was a gleam in his grey eyes now.
"Like you stood over your sister-in-law that evening in summer when you killed her, cursed the very skin off her living body," she answered softly, shuddering at the memory.
"You called me Lucifer then," he said quietly. "You saw the power, the terrible beauty of it, the strength and mastery. You said you feared me, even you, who knows me better than anyone, you, whom I have never harmed. It is also in you. It is in every one of us. It can render you invincible if you make it serve you. Don't fight it, love, let it happen."
She took a deep trembling breath and closed her eyes for a moment. When she answered she spoke with a new firmness and conviction. "I will find the Mirror of Battle for us," she told him. "We will turn and attack. We will not flee any more. If I have to become fire in order to fight fire, then so be it. I will let myself hate. I just hope I can find my way back when we are done."
At that moment the door to the sick room opened and Lucius watched several mediwizards enter followed by Miss Brannock and another auror. The first wizard, an older man with a long brown beard flecked with grey carried a slim vial filled with liquid of an intense sapphire hue.
"Mr. Malfoy? I'm Dr. Septimus, head of Potions and Remedies. I believe we have found an antidote for the philter that you ingested. I believe it was exsanguinium potion, a very powerful poison, nearly always fatal."
Lucius was sure that the mediwizard felt mightily pleased with himself. He watched Eleanor step out of the way as Septimus filled a glass beaker with most of the blue antidote and passed the glass to him. The wizard held the liquid against the light for a moment, then sniffed the contents of the glass. He lifted an eyebrow. "So, Dr. Septimus, before I drink, I have one question for you: how strongly do you believe?" he asked.
