Hi everyone!
Right! I'm quite proud over myself, I succeeded to finish this chapter off fairly quickly so that you didn't have to wait for so long, I just hope that you will show patience with next update to.
Disclaimer: They are NOT mine, will never ever be - they ARE JK's for the 19:th time
Disclaimer: The lyric doesn't belong to me - belongs in this chapter to Children of bodom and is called "Follow the reaper"
All credit touching grammar, spelling or stuff like that goes to my beta shyngr8 (shy-n-great)
ENJOY :)
Shock
Loosing the war I'm feeling to win
though I never tried to, to strive deep
from within. Life could be beautiful
for anybody it's for, but I'd swear this
mothafuckin' shit is rotten to the core.
"Oh my goodness!"
She felt like she was falling down in a deep, black hole. The image and the text stared mercilessly back at her, she could hear the pumping sound of blood that rushed through her head in her eardrums. She wanted to scream from the horror but still she wanted to stay quiet so that she could disappear from the face of earth. The picture before her was an old ink sketch, it portrayed a woman on her knees, and around her neck Hermione clearly could see the necklace. Before the woman Hermione saw a hooded figure and it held a lead in its hand; the lead was connected to the necklace.
The woman's eyes were shut, she looked like she was in a trance and over her head an hourglass hung, Hermione's eyes looked at the sand that slowly crept down to the bottom of the hourglass, the whole picture was like an ordinary muggle picture, but the sand moved….Hermione was sure of it. She wanted to close her eyes, she didn't want to read what she saw on the yellowish paper, but she had to and the words crept, without any obstacles to stop them, into her head.
'Satan's hjärta (Swedish), Diabolus viscus (Latin), or devil's heart, as it is called in English, is a dark artefact produced in Kirruna, Sweden. From the very beginning it served like the Imperio curse, that was at the time before the Unforgivables. The old magic is close to impossible to stop, once the heart (in a form of a necklace, ring or earring) is on its place on the victim's body. The only way to remove it is to remove the body part on which it's fastened to.'
'Insanity!' Hermione thought and swallowed, 'I can't remove my neck if I want to keep living!'
She nervously wriggled her hands and felt the cold sweat as it broke through and tickled down her back. She turned the page, only to find another old picture portraying a man, who was under the influence of the necklace, seemingly carving his own bowels from inside his stomach.
'Oh my god, can one make another do that to oneself?' she thought and tried to take control over her violently shaking hands, 'Then it wouldn't be any problems for Draco to… to make me lose my child.'
'There has to be a counter spell, a potion, anything!' she frantically thought and scanned through the page, and she found one sentence that awoke a sudden light of hope:
'The heart of the devil flees before bravery and is only strengthened by cowardliness.'
Hermione sank backwards in her chair, staring at the ceiling with empty eyes. How was she going to show bravery? How could bravery be shown to a dead object? Then suddenly a slippery voice from her first year at Hogwarts spoke inside her head:
'You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making. I don't expect that you really will understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins. Bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses... I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death, if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.'
'Bottle fame,' Hermione thought, 'If one could bottle fame, then why couldn't bravery be bottled?'
"That's it!" she cheered and got up from her chair, totally forgetting that she had to be quiet.
She stormed through the library, zigzagged in-between the historical section and the charm section and then passed the astronomy section with hasty steps and was finally in front of the huge potion section; the huge 'advanced' potions shelf to be exact.
"They have to have it here," she whispered and traced the spine of the books with her index finger, reading the titles slowly to herself, "Most Potente Potions, Magical Drafts and Potions, Deadly and Poisonous Potions, Dangerous Potions, Fearful Potions, Famous Potions, Potions for the Potions Master, Potions for the Mind of a Dragon, Potions From the 17th Century and…"
Hermione almost felt happiness as her finger landed on a very eagerly awaited title; 'Danger, Love and Other Emotional Potions'. This book belonged at the restricted section in Hogwarts library, especially since a Hufflepuff student one year below Hermione had tried the love potion on her friend. Hermione sighed, it had ended in catastrophe, and the receiver of the potion ended up falling in love with Mrs Norris as the dumb girl had succeeded to drop a cat hair in the potion.
Hermione wandered back to her comfortable armchair in which she had been resting in before. She flopped down in a lazy manner and then started to browse through the book, hoping to find the right potion. After browsing past the love potion, the hate potion, the joy potion, the fear potion and the danger potion Hermione finally found the right one; the bravery potion.
'This one looks fairly easy,' she thought and traced down the ingredient list.
"Hmm… one bezoar, some black beetle eyes, powdered daisy roots… these things would be fairly easy to find in an ordinary potions cupboard," she hummed to herself, "But the dragon blood will be very hard to find, especially as it's forbidden on the common market."
Her eyes fell on the last ingredient and her heart froze, THAT ingredient would be very hard to find, mainly because that ingredient was only used in the dark arts. It was also so rare, it almost doesn't exist.
"A powdered vampire tooth," Hermione whispered and rubbed her eyes tiredly, "After the war there are almost no vampires left!"
'Well, in a ghostly manor such as this I'm pretty sure that they have a vampire or two,' she thought and sneered.
"Duster…" she whispered.
"Yes friend, Hermione," a squeaky voice called behind her.
"Shhh, Duster!" Hermione hissed and glanced around the library, just to establish that Draco wasn't in sight, "I need you to do me a favour…"
"Oh… Duster will gladly help Hermione; Duster's Hermione's personal servant now, Duster will do anything for Hermione."
"Cut it out already, I told you, you are not my servant; you are my friend," Hermione irritably told the little elf, "Do you know if this manor holds any room for potions making?"
"Oh, yes, yes, yes! Malfoy manor has a huge room down in the dungeon where master keeps his cauldrons and other creepy stuff, yes, yes! Would Hermione like Duster to show her?"
"I would love you to show me, Duster," Hermione told the little elf and petted him on his head.
"Then Duster will show her," Duster happily squeaked as Hermione grabbed 'Danger, Love and Other Emotional Potions' and followed the little elf as he in a hastily hurried through the library.
The portal has been past and it's
time to make a turn, to follow the reaper
until the point of no return.
When your blindly death-raying blade
sweeps the grief's and fears away.
I cross my heart and hope to die thy freedom
will be mine.
Lucius sat in the living room; he was half-heartedly playing a round of wizard chess with the bewitched chessboard. Today was his day off; today he wouldn't raise a finger to convince some slow ministerial employee that he was good Minister material.
One thing worried him though; Hermione. He didn't see her much and the last time he spoke to her she seemed scared, though he hadn't even uttered a word to her which could be taken for a threat, in fact, he hadn't spoken to her that much at all since he got wind of their growing child.
'Draco,' he grimly thought and clenched his jaws.
He had thought that his son would understand the profits with having the new child as the heir of the Malfoy fortune and name. If the legend was true about the Golden Wedding and the Virgin's suit then Lucius was sure about that their, his and Hermione's, child would grow to be the most powerful wizard since the great Merlin. But Draco didn't understand and he refused to accept the fact that Hermione, a Mudblood, would bare the next Malfoy leader.
'But imagine the power…' Lucius thought, 'Imagine the power it would bring to my family name if the next Malfoy would live to be this time's most powerful wizard, even more powerful then the bloody brat Potter.'
He had bad suspicions regarding Draco; he fully well knew what he was capable of, especially after the Great War. That boy had a lot of dangerous feelings, especially lust and hate, a bad combination if one would ask Lucius. A Malfoy should be cool, calculating and superior. Feelings such as hate were below them; hate could make a person do something irrational, which that person maybe would live to regret. Lust though, wasn't a bad feeling; lust was like a craving, a craving that lead to that one day where one would achieve one's goal.
Sinking down in the ocean of severe emotion,
grab a bottle to drink up the pain-relieving potion.
But after all, that got boring too, so no matter
what happens, I couldn't give a damn or too.
Hermione wiped the sweat from her forehead, she had been in this dungeon every day for the past fourteen weeks; she was exhausted and on top of it all her pregnancy started to show. She was in her seventeenth week, which meant that her stomach was now bulging out.
She hadn't seen much from Draco, and Lucius for that matter; she saw him in the evenings, and even then she always pretended to be asleep. It had worked well that way, when he would enter the bedroom she always made sure that she looked asleep. He hadn't tried to wake her and she hadn't tried to disturb him, not a happy marriage, but Hermione had gotten used to it.
'Yes!' She triumphed as she added the last ingredient; the powdered vampire tooth.
One good thing with being a Malfoy was that she could easily get things she otherwise wouldn't be able to even get close to. The powdered vampire tooth she had bought through a strange looking man in Knockturn Alley, and the dragon blood, which she had considered hard to get, was easily handled at Borgin & Burkes, the owner had almost sucked up to her to the limit where she normally would have fainted.
Her potion gave a strange sound and the cauldron shook violently as the last shimmering powder landed on the green surface. There was a violent explosion and Hermione backed away from her potion. When she dared to take a peek she found that her potion had turned blood red.
"Finished," she breathed and stared at her masterpiece.
She drew a deep breath, this was it, and if she succeeded then she would go straight to Lucius and tell him about Draco's plan. She thought it was funny, she, the Gryffindor extraordinaire, the Muggle-born witch would run to the former Death Eater for protection.
'As if I have a choice,' she thought as she filled a mug with the blood red, watery potion.
"Bottoms up," she weakly spoke and gulped down the scalding hot potion.
She became dizzy and had to take support from the cauldron so that she wouldn't fall to the ground. The room spun wildly around her, she drew a raspy breath and with careful motions she seated herself on the cold dungeon floor.
'This isn't the way it's supposed to be,' she thought as she made a weak attempt to throw up.
'I must have made a mistake somewhere… oh no… the dragon blood!'
She lost control over the situation and fell headlong into the awaiting darkness; inside her she could hear the cry of her unborn child. She heard two hearts steadily beating inside her.
The portal has been past 'til the
point of no return. No more lines to cross,
no bridges to burn.
Now when your blindly death-raying blade
swept my grief's and tears away. I'd never go back
to cross that line.
I cross my heart and hope to die.
In one part of the manor Lucius awoke in his chair, he heard a baby's cry, and it echoed inside him and rose in power. Something was wrong, very wrong. He knew that it was Hermione, he just knew it, but he wasn't sure what it was about and…
'Where is she?' he thought, 'Who knows where she is?'
"Duster!"
And in another part of the manor an equally blond man could hear the fanatic sound of a crying child. Draco rose from his chair, a smirk was pasted on his lips; maybe he didn't even need to use the Devil's Heart to get rid of the devil spawn.
Sneak Peak:
What went wrong with the potion? How did that affect Hermione? How is Draco's "plan" progressing? And what are Lucius suspecting?