"How I love her!" thought Draco. "Damn! Why is she dark haired? What is that creepy nose?! Merlin, that's not..."
A tall figure in dark robes loomed right in front of the boy's eyes. Malfoy's vision blurred and he blinked rapidly.
"No! What are you doing? Where is my beloved? Get the hell outta here..."
Draco felt a sickening smell suddenly hit his nose, as sharp as ammonia. From the thermonuclear smell, he coughed and began to come to his senses.
"Mister Malfoy, the brain is needed for more than just controlling the basest instincts. But you shouldn't have problems with this. Drink it all up."
Draco's eyes were round as bowls. He obediently drank the potion and looked at Snape and then at his surroundings with the eyes of a newborn baby.
"Where I am? What's happening?"
Snape rolled his eyes in annoyance and sighed.
"Watch at least sometimes what exactly you are drinking, and from whose hands," he said monotonously, as if he was explaining to a first grader how much twice two would be.
Draco was trying to gather his brains together, and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead from the tension.
"I don't remember anything."
"No wonder."
Draco glared at him with hate. It seemed as though he was slowly realizing what had happened.
"Pack up what's left of your brain and follow me." Draco had no choice but to obey him.
*
Aurora
The first days after our innocent operation called "Revenge on Draco Malfoy" I was at a loss. I expected a well-deserved punishment. But it didn't follow.
I couldn't understand what was happening. Logically, we should have been scrubbing Snape's cauldrons and fending off Draco's hysterical attacks, who would run around the living room, tearing his hair out, and threaten to tell Lucius everything.
Snape would have been chastising Annabelle and me in his office like delinquent juveniles long ago, and his angry tirades would make our ears droop. Even Mimbulus Mimbletonia Longbottom would have died. Or Longbottom himself, whom this story did not concern at all, but such was his unenviable lot — to be responsible for what did not concern him.
But nothing like this happened.
I relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, our joke could not go unnoticed — it was too large-scale and resonant. The whole of Hogwarts was shaking with laughter. The Head's appearance in the midst of Draco's hot nightly serenade must have sobered the latter, abruptly pulling him out of the arms of a love dope. But he didn't say anything. In any case, he did not show that he understood something.
Instead, Draco became more reclusive and distant than usual. The next day, he did not appear at breakfast, and sat in the lessons irritated and self-absorbed. We waited for the storm, we waited for the thunder, and instead we got slapped on the back of the head by McGonagall for "catching flies" while watching Draco in a Transfiguration class.
Always would.
*
After lunch, on our way to Flitwick's classroom on the third floor, I felt a little dizzy and decided to run to the girls' bathroom before class. Anna and the rest of the Slytherins walked into the auditorium while I turned the corner, past a huge portrait of Barnabas the Bruised, clubbing trolls and terribly foul-mouthed. My hand was already on the toilet door handle when a voice behind me made me flinch and pull it back as if scalded. I turned around quickly, but I didn't see anyone. The corridor was empty — apparently, the lesson had already begun. I shrugged my shoulders, thinking that it seemed to me, and suddenly I distinctly heard:
"Help me."
I felt my knees give way, and my insides shackled with pincers of fear. I grabbed the handle of the toilet door to keep from falling and blinked a few times. I didn't believe my eyes. The pale silhouette of a woman with red hair and sad empty eyes, which I had seen in Potter's mind, appeared right in front of me again. Only now Potter wasn't with me, so why am I seeing this? Now the ghost has acquired a much more carnal, and, it seemed, quite real look. I blinked again, thinking that the vision would disappear, like all my failed cavaliers. But no.
"I know you see me. I see you hear me," the woman said confidently.
"Who you are? What do you want from me?"
"I came from a place of no return. Others can neither see nor hear us. My son..."
She broke off in the middle of a sentence, as if she heard footsteps.
The ghost began to dissipate in the darkness of the corridor and disappeared completely in a second.
"To my office, quickly," a voice said softly right behind me, I turned around and saw Snape.
Without waiting for my answer, the professor turned around and calmly moved down the stairs, his robes fluttering up.
"Professor! Have you seen?"
He did not answer, but only quickened his pace and gestured for me to follow him.
*
In his office, with which I did not have the best memories, there was, as usual, twilight, diluted with a slightly subdued greenish light from torches and a table lamp hanging on the walls. It was palpably cold, and I shivered even more after what I had just seen and heard. Snape sat down at his desk in the most casual way and busily invited me to sit across from him. Well, yes, the usual thing, I chuckled, not knowing what to expect at all, and who to be afraid of — a ghost from the other world, or a professor from this. I froze in my tracks, silently staring at him.
"Well. Once again, sit down, Ms. Lestrange," Snape said irritably.
Finding nothing better than to simply obey, I sat down on a chair.
"Sir! I have just seen..."
"I didn't give you permission to speak. You will say whatever you want only after you answer a couple of my questions. And hopefully your answers will be satisfactory."
My memory helpfully slipped me the memory of the love spell and my other faults, but for a moment, terrible visions involving the dead crowded everything else out of it. I wonder which is scarier — dropping out of school, or being eaten by a ghost?
Snape didn't seem to have any intention of bringing any clarity to the chaotic flow of my thoughts.
I got ready for a series of lectures, and my whole being inwardly contracted, as if before a powerful blow from a snake.
"I have to admit that the meaning of our last conversation here, in this very room, flew past you faster than the wind. It seemed to me that during our last meeting, we found out that you were not going to risk your life by violating school rules, and I was not going to waste my precious time dealing with the consequences of your... impulsivity. I, as the events of the past days have shown, was mistaken. Now, this dim-witted daughter of Black and our eternally suffering prince, the unlucky Draco Malfoy, have joined my worries."
At the mention of Draco's name, I realized that my execution was inevitable.
He folded his arms across his chest, leaned back in his chair, and calmly continued:
"And now for a quick question: did you get Mr. Malfoy drunk with a love potion? Did you boiled it together with Miss Black?"
My silence was his answer. I dared to look him in the eye, but I didn't dare open my mouth and say the obvious.
"I did not hear. Bolder."
Silence.
"This is your third attempt. Otherwise..."
"Professor, it was us, and you are well aware of this."
"Do you really think it's the height of wit to play a joke on Mister Malfoy in this way? While he's on the Dark Lord's mission, don't you and your friend find something better to do than put a spoke in his wheel?"
"Dark Lord... are you saying Draco is in danger?"
"I mean, you are in danger."
I stared at him in shock.
"I?"
Snape raised his eyes to the ceiling.
"Of course."
He got up from the table and began to walk slowly up and down the room, his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat.
"I didn't want to tell you the whole truth beforehand, but you left me no choice. And I'm forced to do this before you and Miss Black smash the castle to hell. It's time to occupy your heads with the solution of more pressing problems — for example, banal survival. Unless, of course, you want to prematurely fall into the graves and join your untimely deceased relatives."
I listened to him with bated breath, even though I didn't like what I was hearing at all.
"You are deeply mistaken in thinking that you are not of great interest to dark magic as such and the Dark Lord in particular, having the abilities that you have, and which you probably only began to guess about now. You have what the Dark Lord wants, what he thinks will make him invincible."
He paused and finished his thought: "Your gift."
"I'm sorry, what? What gift?"
What the hell is he talking about?
"You can force dead people, whose souls dwell somewhere between the world of the dead and the living, to take on flesh. For some period. You can call it "resurrection", but I'd rather not use that word. This gift has been given to you from birth — it was apparently passed down as a legacy from your ancestors. Until this year, he hadn't shown up in any way, except for those symptoms of malaise, which those idiots from Mungo gave you a wrong definition, and which you suppressed with potions until a certain point. However, now everything has changed. You have already begun to see... very interesting pictures, right?"
I nodded slightly. The puzzle in my head suddenly began to take shape in the picture.
"Well, certainly. You will continue to see the other world and its inhabitants, and hear their mysterious messages, whether you want it or not. When you reach adulthood, you will not only be able to see various entities of the astral world — you will be able to interact with them, helping, under certain conditions, to acquire living flesh, being for them something like a guide between two worlds — the living and the dead. In some ways, this is similar to the gift of a medium in the Muggle world. But, unlike mediums, acting rather of their own free will, you will be forced to simply obey a force that is higher than you."
"But what if I don't want to see it? What if I... want to get rid of it?"
He paused for a moment and thought.
"It's not that easy to do, Aurora."
"Are you sure about this? It all looks like a bad dream!"
"There is one way that I currently know, but I do not think it would be appropriate to voice it to you right now — you will be severely disappointed. Better, for now, just accept your fate and learn to live with it."
Seeing how upset I was by his words, he softened his tone a bit:
"I understand that it is difficult for you to accept this fact for now. Of course, having a gift of this kind can be incredibly dangerous — first of all, for yourself. This gift is very rare, and certainly, he could not remain unnoticed by the Dark Lord."
I swallowed, remembering the fortune-telling at Malfoy Manor, and barely found the courage to voice an even more disturbing question:
"Why does the Dark Lord need my... how do you put it, power?"
"To create an army of infernals and enlist their support, securing immortality and," he grinned mirthlessly, "eternal glory. All he knows is that your gift will be fully revealed on the day you come of age — and then he..."
Snape hesitated, debating whether to continue to mock my psyche any further.
"The Dark Lord will stop at nothing, striving to achieve his main goal — eternal power in the visible and invisible worlds."
There was an awkward silence, interrupted only by the impatient tapping of the professor's fingers on the wooden surface of the table top.
"What will he do? Professor, we're all in the same boat... We all trust the Dark Lord... And, to be honest, I didn't even suspect that I had... a gift, a power, or whatever else to call it..."
Snape's face remained impenetrable.
"Of course we trust him. However, you should be aware of his possible intentions for you, as well as who you really are — for your own relative safety. I say relative, because you, like Miss Black, are inclined not to obey the arguments of reason and sanity, but simply to throw yourself into the pool with your head without thinking about the consequences. Isn't that right?"
I ignored his derisive remark.
"But, why didn't they tell me a drop of the truth in Mungo? And how do you know it?"
"This information was to be kept in the strictest confidence. I shouldn't have told you this now. Or do you think that the Dark Lord would prefer that you be warned of his intentions in advance?"
"But then... why did you tell me?"
His eyebrows went up, and a sly smile touched his lips.
"Are you saying that something doesn't suit you?"
I suddenly boiled up — it was already too much.
"Why should I even believe that everything you say is true?"
He laughed and looked at me pitifully:
"Of course, you may question the veracity of my words. Instead, you can now return to a more exciting activity — deciphering the message from the red witch from Potter's memories, right?"
Looking with horror at his expressionless face, on which the glare from the lamp fell, towering over a pile of parchment written in oblique handwriting, I tried to digest the information that flooded over me, the wildest in its essence. My brain refused to accept what his lips were saying. They just seemed to move silently, and what they said floated away from the part of my mind that wanted to be knocked out. I was in despair.
"Sir, I think I have something to tell you."