Malfoy Manor looked worse now than it did during the war, which seemed a backwards thing. The last—and only—time Hermione had ever been on the property, it loomed sterile and ominous and pristinely well-kept despite a war and a murderer in residence.
Now though, the hedges meandered and sprawled, crowding out walkways with new growth exploding in every direction. Weeds shot up through pebbled paths and flower beds, supplanting orderly, planned landscaping with whatever dared thrive instead. A mashed mosaic of grey and green, organic and inorganic, crunched beneath Hermione's feet. Vines crawled up vertical stone columns. A crack spiderwebbed through a second-floor windowpane. She might have found it unsettling, expected unease to creep its way up her spine or lodge itself in the base of her throat, had she not seen it during the war, had she not known what it looked like perfectly maintained while people died by the dozens every day.
The grey, overcast sky bled into the grey stone that comprised most of the Manor's exterior, blurring lines.
The Manor certainly didn't look occupied. But according to the new case file dropped on Hermione's desk that morning, it was meant to be.
Perhaps the Ministry had his current address wrong. Malfoy Manor served as the historic seat of the Malfoy family, after all. But this place, this place had died and been left to the elements, rotted, with bones bleached white by the sun.
Hermione definitely did not jump when a gaggle of garden gnomes sprang from a withering azalea bush, scuttling away. She stopped on the doorstep and flexed her fingers around her beaded bag.
She smoothed her skirt, straightened her spine, felt absolutely nothing resembling unease, and lifted the enormous, ornate metal knocker on Malfoy Manor's ridiculous, ostentatious, and honestly offensively extravagant front doors.
She let it fall; a muffled echo barrelled through what she could only assume were the laughably cavernous corridors on the other side of the door. Hermione released a breath and dropped her hand.
She waited.
Tapped her foot.
Continued waiting.
Shifted her weight from one foot to the other, fiddling with the beaded fringe on her bag.
Knocked again. More force. Bigger echo.
She listened, standing closer to the door this time, ear nearly pressed against the wood.
Poised for a third knock, she shifted back when the door clicked, hinge creaked, opened just a crack.
She blinked, waiting. Expecting the door to swing fully open.
It stayed cracked. Just enough that she knew she could be seen, but that she saw nothing but a black vertical sliver in the space between double doors, the suggestion of a shadow. Hermione did not care for the imbalance of it, knowing she could be seen, but seeing very little herself.
"Malfoy?" she asked, voice coming out sharp, too representative of her irritation to be truly professional. She cleared her throat, swallowed, tried for something more neutral, more imminently-promotable, if one were thinking along such lines. "I'm visiting on behalf of the Ministry; I am your representative for the duration of your transition into a Non-Wizard, Part-Human lifestyle. May I come in?"
She still couldn't see him, couldn't see anything but that black crack between the doors. But she heard him, heard the hollow, broken laugh.
And she certainly heard the door slam shut.
She stuttered a retort, something along the lines of indignation, but her surprise hijacked it halfway up her throat, transforming it into what must surely have been an utterly ridiculous squawking sound.
She surged forward. Slammed her fist on the door, metal knocker abandoned in favour of three rapid knocks with her knuckles, hard enough to hurt.
"Malfoy?" she lifted her voice, trying to project through the solid wood. Though, as the general consensus suggested vampires had excellent hearing, it might have been unnecessary. "I recognize it's a very funny reversal to ask a vampire for permission to enter his home, but I do need to speak with you."
She paused, taking a step back from the door, realizing she'd pressed herself right up to it, so close she could feel the intricacies of the woodgrain, the weather-worn splinters laying in wait.
The door did not open again, not even a crack.
"Malfoy!"
She shouted it this time. She nearly stomped her foot, pulling an annoyed breath through her nose. She would not allow him to compromise her promotability by being uncooperative.
He was rare, he was interesting; an actually registered vampire returned to British soil by the French Ministry. The things she could learn from him, the papers she could write, the books. The research available on vampires through the Beings Division in The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures had been laughable. Woefully misunderstood beings, vampires. More so than Werewolves, than Hags, than Veela. And always so secretive.
And then her supervisor handed her Malfoy's casefile, a complicated vampire situation, he'd called it. An opportunity to prove herself. Which dovetailed perfectly with the fact that she absolutely deserved a promotion. Unveiling vampire secrets certainly seemed like the perfect testament to her competence.
Malfoy didn't open the door again.
She waited on the Manor's impressive doorstep for an embarrassing amount of time. Occasionally knocking, resisting the urge to shout, but definitely sighing more than one might deem becoming.
She waited because she had work to do. Because she cared about her work. Because she cared about doing her work well.
And she absolutely did not wait because of the violent curiosity rooting her to the spot.
Nor the darkness that hid something she wanted to know, just out of sight.
Nor the urge to know what Malfoy looked like as a vampire. Or what had happened to him. Or why he lived in a crumbling manor.
She waited until the grey sky darkened, drizzling.
—
Colour-coded meetings and an obsessive awareness of her coworkers' calendars made rescheduling Hermione's entire day a simple thing. She rose early, caffeinated robustly, and arrived at the Ministry before anyone else in her department, supervisor included. She reshuffled her day, shooting so many flying memos around the office that by the time she'd cleared her entire morning and most of the afternoon, idly flapping parchment generated a rhythmic white noise, drowning out the buzzing hum made by the Ministry's ward spells.
Gravel shifted beneath Hermione's shoes as she marched herself through Malfoy Manor's front gates at around the same time she suspected most of her coworkers were beginning to meander into the Ministry, just barely beginning their days.
Hermione didn't hesitate to knock. Didn't give herself the chance to think about the safety concerns posed by moss-slicked steps leading up to the front door. Didn't stop to consider what it might mean that a first-floor window adjacent to the doors now had an enormous crack bisecting it. Didn't entertain the difference between the things she could do and the things she should do.
Or rather, the line between couldn't and shouldn't, as it were.
The door swung open—all the way, this time—on her sixteenth knock, twenty-two minutes after her arrival.
Darkness spilled from inside the manor, stealing her breath as she watched it stream, the way sunlight did, out onto the landing. It enveloped her, shadowed her, sucked her in. She blinked, adjusting to the way the darkness inside the Manor robbed the doorstep of sunlight, dimming everything around her.
"It's a spell," he said. Crisp consonants, derision, annoyance: Malfoy sounded exactly as she remembered.
"Light sensitivity. You're still adjusting." Stated as fact, one of few she'd managed to learn from the scarce information available on the limits to vampire biology.
"Get off my property."
She most certainly would not. "May I come in?"
"No." Sharp, surgical. Cut straight to the point.
The door slammed louder than it had the day before. Fully opened, it had more space to travel, more time to build momentum. The cracked window beside the stoop shattered, glass cascading into the bushes, bouncing off hawthorne hedges. Gnomes scattered.
Hermione didn't wait on his doorstep, not again. She'd embarrassed herself enough for the week. Besides, she finally had more information, a peek into the unknown she'd been so curious about.
Malfoy looked unwell. Severely unwell, even for a vampire, especially for a vampire, in fact. Darkness could only do so much to mask the bags beneath his eyes, the drowsy pull at his posture, the sunken, sallow texture to his skin.
Hermione returned to the Ministry, rescheduled the last of her commitments that afternoon, and buried herself in research.
Malfoy was anemic. Which was hilarious, in a not-at-all-hilarious sort of way, of course.
An anemic vampire was a starving vampire, which meant he wasn't eating. Well, drinking. Hermione sent an owl to St. Mungo's, confirming their receipt of her request to enroll him in their magical blood dispensary program. She'd done so the moment she'd taken control of his case; he shouldn't have had any difficulty sourcing food. Though, she supposed, he'd have to leave that Manor to get it.
Another idea—a sort of stopgap plan while she waited to hear back from St. Mungo's—careened into focus. She needed to make a trip to Honeydukes.
She preemptively rearranged her schedule for the next day, shooting several memos around the office as she lost herself to the sound of parchment rustling and the sensation of impending discovery. Of imminent promotability. So close; she simply had to reach out and take it.
—
Hermione knocked for thirty-seven minutes, off and on, before her temper got the better of her. She'd tried, valiantly, not to let the fact that she was being ignored slide beneath her skin and needle at her good senses. But with each knock on Malfoy's stupidly aristocratic front doors with their height, and their carvings, and their metal knockers that he'd clearlyraised so that she could no longer reach them, she grew more and more incensed.
Words like ferret and prat wormed their way to the forefront of her brain.
If he intended to be an incorrigible arse about things, ignoring a Ministry-mandated house visit required of all Non-Wizard, Part-Humans, then Hermione wouldn't bother feeling guilt for what she did next.
Specifically, the illegal entry part.
Not exactly breaking and entering since the window had been broken the day before and Malfoy clearly hadn't bothered to board it up. So it was just right there, an entrance to the Manor, unconventional, sure, but Hermione took no issue with unconventional entrances and exits. She'd used a dragon to exit Gringotts once, after all. Sometimes strange circumstances necessitated creative problem solving.
She uprooted and removed the hedge below the window with a bit of gardening magic she genuinely never thought she'd ever use when Molly had forced it on her one summer. The bush landed with a sad thump near the azaleas, but she doubted Malfoy would notice or miss it; it clearly hadn't been tended to in years. She made use of several cracked stone pavers, avoiding those slicked with moss, and stacked them beneath the window.
She vanished the scattered glass shards and took the sort of deep, fortifying breath she often took prior to bending the rules just a bit. She stepped up onto the pavers, into the shadow cast by whatever spell blanketed the Manor's interior with an uncanny blackness, and hoisted herself up onto the windowsill.
A moment for balance. A moment for breath. And then, feet on the floor.
"What the fuck are you doing in my house?"
"Language." A reflex; armour against an impulse to tense when startled.
She couldn't see him, couldn't see much of anything, blinking rapidly in an effort to adjust. A flare of panic rose in her chest, fluttering against her ribs in the pervasive unnaturalness around her.
She swallowed it back, fighting the shiver that tickled her spine.
"I asked permission to enter as a nicety, Malfoy. You're being uncooperative."
The darkness moved. Or perhaps, something in it moved.
Hermione held up her hand in a cautious experiment. A foot from her face, she could see it. Much further than that and it sank into the dark, swallowed by the spell. Her tiny panic flutters twisted, transformed, and felt too close to fear for her liking. She lifted her chin, cleared her throat.
"Come here, Malfoy. I have a pamphlet for you. And could you—could we allow some light in? I can't see a thing."
Perhaps she shouldn't have admitted that. Her neck tensed as she resisted the urge to turn, to seek the window behind her in search of light and, perhaps, an escape. Logically, she had no reason to fear. The Ministry knew her whereabouts. Malfoy had worked with the French Ministry before his deportation owing to his recent vampirism. He'd done something contract-based, but reputable. He'd been vetted. Operated as a normal, functioning member of society. Presumably harboured no impulses towards murder. Presumably.
He'd served probation after the war, and had a spotless record since. Hermione knew, because she'd done her research. She had nothing to fear, from Malfoy as an individual or Malfoy as a vampire.
And yet, she could nearly taste her pulse.
"You have a pamphlet for me?" he asked.
She did not jump. But it was a close thing, tension snapping her joints straight: back ramrod, knees locked, elbows glued to her sides.
He'd moved closer.
She swallowed.
"Several pamphlets, actually." She dug into her beaded bag, distracting herself with its depths. "You should know your rights and your"—she sensed him moving, that time, closer, a shift in the air pressure—"restrictions. There are groups you should know about, those that promote tolerance for your kind. I have a copy of Guidelines for the Treatment of Non-Wizard, Part Humans."
Her fingers closed around something else.
"I also—I brought you lollies."
"Lollies?"
Gooseflesh erupted across the back of her neck. She could feel his question, breath brushing up against her.
"Do you—are there no lights at all you could turn on?" The question slipped out in a fit of frustration, engaging all of her willpower in a different endeavour, one that begged her not to turn around. Or maybe, that begged she do just that.
"If I let the light in, you might feel compelled to stay, Granger. And I would much prefer you leave."
She exhaled. His voice came from somewhere in front of her now, further away.
"It is difficult to conduct a conversation and a wellness check when I cannot see you."
There, that brought her request around to something more professional in nature, based purely on the functions of her role, and utterly divorced of the slithering discomfort twisting in her stomach.
The darkness did not abate, not even by a fraction. When she looked down, she couldn't even see her own feet, see the tiles on which she stood. Nor could she see Malfoy, still hovering somewhere beyond her field of view.
She finally pulled the candy and her pamphlets from her bag. She'd thought it was a rather ingenious idea: blood lollies. Malfoy liked sweets; she remembered that much from school. And he had to like blood, what with the whole vampirism situation.
She held the lolly out in front of her, half hoping Malfoy might step into the small sphere of visibility around her.
"I don't want it. You need to leave."
Hermione very seriously considered chucking the lollipop in the direction of his voice, mostly out of spite.
"Just take it, Malfoy. You didn't look like you've been eating—well, drinking. So I brought the blood lollies in case you needed a snack. Have you been to get your supplies from St. Mungo's?"
"I don't want them, Granger."
His voice came from beside her again, and if she didn't have so much annoyance coursing through her, she might have spared a thought for how unnerving it was, the constant moving in the darkness.
"And why not?"
"I'm not eating on purpose."
"Well, you can't do that forever. You'll die."
"That's the point."
Breath against the back of her neck.
She whipped around this time, refusing to balk at his games of hide and seek in the shadows.
He looked worse close up. Taller, too.
His skin had a blueish tint to it, bordering on grey, like his eyes. And it looked dry, parchment-like, brittle in a way that made her wonder if he creased and crinkled.
"Why?" she asked, hand on her hips as she looked up at him. Belatedly, she connected that the backlight from the window meant that he stood between her and her exit. She flexed her jaw to hold the discomfort at bay. "Malfoy, there are plenty of ways to live a full and enriching life as a Non-Wizard, Part-Human."
She felt his anger. Sensed it.
He didn't shout. He didn't crowd her. He made no noise. He didn't even shift, not a millimeter. But he stared. And when he inhaled, his nostrils flared, chest and shoulders lifting, expanding, taking up more space, shadowing more of the light behind him.
Not even rabid werewolves—with all the growling and snarling and snapping with sharp teeth and long jaws—could so cleanly and surgically injected adrenaline straight into her heart, not like that stare.
That he spoke slowly, carefully, made it so much worse.
"They took my wand, Granger. Put tracking spells on me." He pulled the bundle of pamphlets from where she crushed them in her fist. "I've already got these. Been informed of my rights, few as they are, and my restrictions, much more plentiful."
He held a pamphlet for The Society for Vampire Tolerance between them.
"I have no interest in being tolerated. Is that what you do, Granger? Tolerate, me?"
Oh no, no. He would not bait her like that. Not with such outrageous irony pouring from his little pureblood mouth.
She lifted her chin higher, angled more toward him.
"Yes. But not because you're a vampire. Because you're an otherwise intolerable git."
She didn't breathe for a moment, watching her minor insult land. She exhaled when he laughed, teeth flashing.
Pointed teeth flashing, sharpened canines. Nothing ostentatious, probably no worse than some cases her parents had filed down at their practice. Canines were supposed to be somewhat pointy, after all.
Oddly, they looked entirely purposeful inside his mouth: pointed teeth to match his other pointed features. Everything about Malfoy had always been sharp, from his tongue to his face, cut from stone, honed for slicing efficacy.
If she really considered it, apart from his unwellness, Malfoy didn't look much different as a vampire than he did the last time she'd seen him shortly after the war. Still pale, still pointed, just more so. Perhaps more imposing, a subtle sort of understated threat pulsing beneath his surface.
With a start, she realized those things also made him quite painfully attractive. Was that part of a vampire's charm? She'd need to find more research; she couldn't recall coming across such a thing in the past.
"Keep your pamphlets and your lollies, Granger. Leave me to rot in my oversized mausoleum in peace." His voice held no real vitriol. He spoke with bite, but without the sort of passion she truly expected of him. His words faded into a shadow, like an echo, not quite the real thing.
Hermione opened her mouth to respond, refute, return to the issue at hand, which involved more than pamphlets and lollies. She needed to assess his well being; she had to write a report. More than that, she needed to learn from him.
But whatever she might have said spilled as a disbelieving squeak when he put his hands on her, palms to shoulders, squeezing and lifting, as he easily picked her up and deposited her outside the window, precariously balanced on the stacked pavers.
She wobbled, blinking against a sudden intrusion of light. She'd almost grown accustomed to it, the darkness. On one blink, Malfoy stood there, framed by the window, grey in pallor and a curious cross between bored and furious. On the next blink, gone.
—
The matter of Malfoy's attractiveness bore no evidence as a general vampire trait, at least not in any of the research Hermione spent most of her night sucked into, reading the same bare-bones reports over and over again as if some new glimmer of knowledge might suddenly appear. The paucity of available research on vampires both exceedingly annoyed her and solidified her belief that she needed to uncover that information, share it with the world.
Because honestly, if Malfoy had to be a vampire, if he had to be ill, could he not at least have had the decency to look bad while doing so? Could there be an explanation for it, at least?
Instead, he had presence. And that intrigued her. And annoyed her. But mostly intrigued.
She arrived at the Manor the next day, more meetings reshuffled, and with more blood lollies in her beaded bag, having apparently dropped the others when he forcibly removed her from his home.
She knocked for seventeen minutes this time. Got fed up. Pulled a lollipop from her bag and unwrapped it. It would be more enticing that way, perhaps call to him like a siren song, lull him out of the shadows long enough to open his door and stop pretending like he wasn't home.
Hermione stared at the unwrapped candy in her hand.
Up close, it looked an awful lot like a run-of-the-mill cherry lolly.
Bright red.
Slightly sweet smelling.
Sure, there was the hint of something metallic, but was that…meant to be off-putting? She wasn't sure.
She'd never actually tried one. It seemed like something she should consider, for the sake of knowing her material, being as informed as possible about the Non-Wizard, Part-Humans she was meant to shepherd and champion as a representative of the Ministry's Beings Division.
These lollies were sold in Honeydukes; sold to humans without a blink or second glance. They—couldn't possibly be harmful, if she were to try. Could they?
She very seriously, almost, brought the lolly to her lips.
But then the door swung open. And bleeding from the shadows, barely in her field of view, Draco Malfoy.
"I'm not getting rid of you, am I?"
Startled, Hermione hated the single step she took away from the door as it swung open, sucking in the air around her before spilling its darkness out onto the doorstep.
"No. You're not," she said, straightening her posture. "And I have a snack for you." She held up a lolly.
"I don't want any of those."
"You do want something, then?" she asked, throwing all caution to the wind and pushing into the Manor past him. Theoretically, she knew that if he truly wanted to stop her, he could, and with hardly any effort.
But he didn't.
And that was her first true win. A sign she could push a little more, test his boundaries.
"Nothing you can give me," he said as the door shut.
If she closed her eyes, she saw the same darkness as she did with them open. She let her eyes fall shut, lacking a reason to keep her eyes open, constantly searching for an anchor, for anything to latch onto.
"And what is that?" she asked.
The darkness felt less frightening when it was her own, self-imposed behind closed eyelids.
"My wand," came his voice. In front of her this time, not behind. "And for this tracking spell to be lifted."
"I can't do that, Malfoy."
"Then you can leave."
"Not until I prove that you have properly acclimatized to your lifestyle."
His laugh sounded farther away. She kept her eyes closed, in control.
"What lifestyle?" he asked. She heard what she suspected was the sound of fabric, of a soft cushion groaning beneath his bodyweight, a creak of wood. An antique chair, perhaps? "The one where I can tell you ate something with garlic in it last night and it's making my skin crawl?"
It took a tremendous effort for Hermione not to veer off course, to stay focused on the conversation at hand, and not to consider every last ingredient in the late-night takeaway she'd indulged in while she researched.
"As I've said before, vampires have plenty of long, healthy, satisfying—"
"What's your blood type, Granger?"
"I'm sorry—wha— what?"
Her eyes flew open, noting no discernible differences between the darkness brought by closed lids versus open ones. He had to be doing this on purpose. Vampires experienced some sensitivity to bright light and ultraviolet rays, especially in the first few months of their transition, but they did not require total darkness. Nor, to her understanding, did they operate best in it.
At this level of darkness, he likely handicapped himself nearly as much as he handicapped her.
"It doesn't smell dirty at all, garlic notwithstanding," he said, from whatever piece of furniture he'd chosen to perch upon. And she suspected he perched, not lounged. Something about his tone, the posture in the way his words rode the air between them, felt poised to action. "Not that I expected it to smell dirty, that is. Not now, after all this time, at least. But it smells better than my mother's did. I wonder if that's because we're related."
"I—thank you?"
Why had she thanked him?
"Is it a compliment?" he asked.
"I don't know. Probably not. I have no control over it. No point complimenting me on it."
He snorted. It reminded her so keenly of being stuck in a Defense Against the Dark Art Class with him that she had to screw her eyes shut again.
"How practical of you," he said. "Do you say the same when a man tells you how beautiful you are? You blame fate and label the nicety pointless?"
Hermione rolled the candy between her fingers, trying to decide if she wanted to fight the veracity of his statement. Because honestly, genetics were hardly something within her control, and if a man called her beautiful, what did it matter? She'd gotten lucky? Her parents had a favourable combination of chromosomes that resulted in the way her face looked?
But beyond that, as she rolled a blood lolly between her hands, her face heated, pulse quickened, awash in the sensation of being desirable. Of being desirable by Draco Malfoy, recently undead. He'd paid her a sideways compliment, after all. At least, it seemed like one.
It was utterly absurd.
She tapped the lolly against her palm.
"Take it Malfoy. Eat something. If you don't, you'll just lose your faculties and go on a rampage. And if that happens you'll have far fewer freedoms and far more restrictions."
Malfoy made a humming noise from somewhere in his darkness.
"That clause about not being able to indiscriminately kill vampires, paragraph seventeen, I believe, only covers up until they can, actually, discriminately kill me. For example, if I go on a hunger rampage."
Exactly, that was exactly it.
And yet, the following silence felt like condemnation. Or judgment. Or something equally as unsavoury as she imagined the way his face contorted, presented only with darkness and her imagination to extrapolate.
She heard fabric rustling and when Hermione opened her eyes, she saw that he'd pulled a curtain open. The darkness lifted, a hazy light seeped its way in, behaving in a way entirely contrary to how she knew light to behave. In this place, under this spell, light and dark moved in opposites of each other. Strange and unnatural and, if she stopped to examine it, breathtaking.
Hermione inhaled, breath coming in shaky, unsettled, as the darkness around her dissipated, blooming into something more tangible, something her eyes could capture.
From a shadow, Malfoy's figure emerged. He wore a frown, a scowling expression, as he plucked the lolly from her fingertips. He looked at it, calculating, careful.
Then his eyes met hers, a grey stare.
She couldn't tear her focus from his face.
Or his lips.
Or the way his tongue flicked out for a taste of the lolly she'd offered.
One lick, and then brought to his nose, eyes fluttering, inhaling.
"Pity," he said, quiet, appraising. "You smell much better."
Hermione flushed, heat burning her cheeks.
He walked away, disappearing into the consuming darkness shrouding the interior of his estate.
Only after an embarrassing amount of time standing in wait did Hermione finally retreat, admitting defeat, and preparing for her counterattack the next day. She left the pamphlets, too. Just in case.
Hermione avoided garlic over the weekend. Not for Malfoy, but as a professional courtesy, generally speaking. If she would be working with vampires regularly, it only seemed fair that she avoid garlic as a courtesy. An amorphous courtesy offered to vampires as a collective, and not a certain, very specific one.
And only as a courtesy. Honestly, it seemed like a professional imperative.
Hermione stopped by the Ministry Monday morning, long before any of her coworkers arrived, to settle and reschedule her meetings as necessary.
An emergency memo flapped above her desk. She snatched it from the air, read it, and then read it again. She set it down, picked it back up, and read it for the third time. For good measure, she glanced around, half-curious if anyone else knew about the information she'd just been sent.
But of course not, no one else had even arrived at work yet.
By the time Hermione stepped out of the lifts and into the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, she'd managed to parse her annoyance from her amusement, her concern from her exasperation, her anticipation from her delight.
Malfoy sat in a cell in the DMLE and Hermione, try as she might to resist the unflattering quality of having found enjoyment in someone else's misfortune, couldn't deny her rising thrill at the idea of seeing Malfoy on the Ministry's terms. Well lit. Her turf. None of his obfuscating, cloaked-in-darkness, nonsense she was convinced he did purely to keep her off-kilter.
And Hermione was nothing if not sure-footed, especially in her own domain.
Hermione handed a memo to the Auror on guard, trying to ignore the dazed and sort of wondrous look he gave her. Annoyance seeped into her brain; being marginally famous had its problems. People not knowing how to behave around her, how to manage their reactions to her, ranked high on her list of irritants.
Two cells awaited Hermione in the holding area. One empty. The other, occupied by a very pale, very blonde, very prone, Draco Malfoy.
"Why are you here?" Hermione asked, coming to rest in front of his cell, head tilted as she looked at where he lay face down on the concrete floor.
"Can you have them turn down the lights?"
He was certainly less intimidating when hiding from fluorescents.
"No. I imagine you deserve it."
Draco lifted his head, eyes closed, and pushed himself to a sitting position. That one shift completely transformed the way he occupied the space in his cell. Even though he sat on the floor, looking up at Hermione, she couldn't help but feel dwarfed by his presence.
"Why are you here?" she asked again.
He opened his eyes and it was all Hermione could do not to gasp, not to openly stare and ogle. What had looked like his normal grey in low lighting, under bright Ministry lights bled so close to a shining, pale silver that she could barely see where the whites of his eyes ended and his irises began.
He smiled, but it held no warmth. Instead, Hermione watched as he pushed his tongue against his left canine. Against the back of it, at the tip of it, pulled back, away.
"Someone thought it was a smart idea to give a mostly starving vampire a taste of blood with a lolly," he said.
"Your point?" She felt an urge to wrap her hands around the metal bar in front of her, to pull closer. As such, she took a step back, squashing whatever it was inside her that dared to be fascinated.
"Started feeling a bit better. Thought I could do anything. Tried to flee the country, got caught."
"Why would you want to flee the country?"
"Why not? Seems better than staying and being haunted by you for an indeterminate amount of time."
He'd descended into insults and humour, only sideswiping at the truth. She didn't labour under the false hope that she would get anything else from him, or at least, not anything useful.
She tapped her wand to the cell lock, releasing it.
"Come on, then. Our portkey activates in two minutes. I couldn't get you cleared for a side-along."
"I'm being released? The Ministry is just—" A casual, graceful wave of his hand and wrist.
"I reviewed your intake file before I came down. I had to Floo call Harry before he'd even woken up for the day and I made a very impressive case in your favour. I had to lean heavily into the vampire transition process temporarily affecting cognitive function, especially where reasoning and impulse control is concerned."
The fact that Malfoy wore a look of genuine, naked awe heated Hermione better than her morning coffee, better than a hot shower, better than some of the best sex she'd had. Buoyed by that feeling, she added, "I also threw terms like legal culpability and state stewardship at him. Not sure he caught most of it. He's a bit sluggish in the mornings."
"You confused Harry Potter into releasing me."
"You're welcome. Suffice it to say you've spent your one chance at Ministry leniency, however. So let's not try to flee the country again."
Malfoy rose. In real light, where Hermione could actually get a look at him, he definitely seemed taller than he used to be. Still lean, lithe and angular. But solid, like stone. She imagined if she rapped her knuckles on his chest it might sound like a granite countertop. Distinctly inorganic.
Confusingly, she felt something that suggested life emanating from him. A current, of sorts. Liquid or electric, she couldn't tell. Either pulling her in or lighting her up. But she certainly felt it.
He took a single step towards her, still contained within his cell, and stopped.
"If you've already read my file, why ask what I did?"
"I wanted to see if you'd tell me."
Had that been the answer he wanted? He gave no indication, not from the way he watched her with a slight downturn to his mouth, a twitch away from a sneer. Hermione let him look; she had nothing to hide.
A minute later, when the portkey in her pocket buzzed in warning, she moved without thinking, stepping right up to Malfoy, wrapping her hand around his wrist at the same time the kerchief in her pocket whipped them away, spinning.
As she spun with portkey magic, eyes screwed shut and refusing to let the torque unsettle her stomach, her hand practically burned where it connected with Malfoy's skin. Warm, soft, and absolutely, positively, indisputably organic.
Hermione landed with a bit of a stagger. Her vice-like grip on Malfoy's wrist prevented her from toppling under the force of jolted momentum, ripped away as the portkey stopped their spinning and deposited them in a world of darkness: Malfoy Manor.
Gathering her balance, Hermione blinked but saw nothing. Instead, she felt a warm, solid form; she'd stumbled right into Malfoy. Entirely at the behest of biological impulses she could not control, she felt that same heat rising from the pit of her stomach, to her chest, to her cheeks.
A hand at her waist, certainly not hers, but also unnoticed until that moment, flexed before it dropped away.
She heard Malfoy inhale, a deep draw through the nose. With a jolt, she knew what that meant. She'd flushed, embarrassingly so, blood shooting to the surface of her skin. And he could smell it.
She stepped back, away, releasing her grip on his wrist. And then, with enormous frustration, she yanked her wand from her pocket.
If she'd just been thinking every other time she'd been here, none of this darkness would have been a problem. She'd just closed her eyes and accepted it, as if she'd wanted to let him have the upper hand. Gods, how embarrassing. She'd had the answer, the ability, to put a stop to all his posturing if she'd just used her brain long enough to think of it. Instead, she'd let him push her around.
"Finite Incantatum," she cast, cancelling whatever spell had turned light to dark.
She'd expected to find Malfoy lounging on a piece of furniture, or standing back, watching her.
She hadn't expected to find him in her face, pointed teeth bared as he recoiled against the light.
"I swear to Merlin Granger if you don't change that back before you leave I will rip your pretty little head off your shoulders."
Hermione didn't much care for threats. She responded poorly. She dug her heels in. Squared her shoulders. Pushed back, even when she probably shouldn't.
"I'd like to see you try Malfoy. I just got you out of jail, do you want to go back for threatening your Ministry liaison?"
If anything, Malfoy showed more teeth, not just the pointed ones, but all the rest too. She got the distinct impression that he could chew her up and spit her out if he really wanted to. Inadvisably, she pushed harder.
"Redo the spell yourself, you entitled arse. I won't be conducting any more meetings in complete darkness just so you can have an upper hand."
"I can't."
She shouldn't have pushed. She knew that. She'd dug in anyway, slung a bit of mud because, to be honest, sometimes that felt nice.
Hermione realized her mistake the moment his hand closed around her throat, the moment her skull and her shoulder blades slammed into the wood-paneled wall, the moment the rest of her body made contact, too. Teeth still bared, still just as distracting as ever, and she knew she shouldn't have pushed.
She didn't know throats could shift like that, didn't know how much the precious things inside her neck—bone, muscles, cartilage, trachea, nerves, arteries, veins—could give with enough force. She opened her mouth on instinct; it did her no good, not with his thumb digging into the left side of her neck beneath her jaw, a singular pressure point so severe she wondered if he might puncture her skin. Nor with his fingers wrapped so far around the other side of her throat they gripped at muscles just beside her spine.
She'd pushed and pushed and pushed for a reaction.
And now she finally had one.
Something in her throat shifted again, a disconcerting suctioning sensation, compressed beneath the squeeze of his long fingers.
She'd dropped her wand in surprise. Perhaps as she'd tried to gasp, tried to breathe.
She clawed at his hand in the space of a blink. An inhuman growl tore from his chest as he released the clawing pressure. He kept his hand in place, but lacked the same kind of choking force. Hermione sucked in air.
She wondered how many millimeters separated his face from hers, how many milliseconds separated his rage from something else. "They took my wand, Granger. I'm not allowed magic anymore—what kind of fucking Ministry liaison are you? My mother cast that spell as a parting gift." He pushed against her, fingers tightening again with each word, with every puff of heated breath.
Without warning, his mouth snapped shut. He inhaled again, through his nose, grip on her neck loosening as he leaned in, shifting his fingers to make room for his face. Her body betrayed her, pulse pounding.
Irritation burned inside her veins. She'd be a much better Ministry liaison if there existed more comprehensive information on vampires. As it stood, she'd read all the research, four times, since she'd taken his case, including Gilderoy Lockhart's less-than-reputable Voyages with Vampires .
She'd probably learned more in the twenty or so total minutes she'd spent in Malfoy's company than in all those hours of research combined.
She could hardly be faulted for learning, could she?
For instance, she'd just learned that vampire strength, while typically described as above average, had been grossly underestimated in most publications and handbooks. Between picking her up and pushing her through a window to the way he'd maneuvered her by her throat, strength felt like an understatement.
She'd learned that he looked the same as he did before he became a vampire, but more. More point, more presence, more.
She'd learned he could move almost silently, clearly took no issue with near-complete darkness, and could go much longer than estimated without blood. When anemic, he looked bluish grey and when he'd had a taste of blood after starving, he thought he could flee the country.
And she'd learned, much as she wished she hadn't, that there was something compelling about him. That presence, that draw, that curiosity. It annoyed her as much as it fascinated her. And it was probably why she'd hadn't stopped him yet, hovering at her neck, breathing very, deadly slowly.
The implications of such a thing caught up to her, pulse hammering. His breathing stuttered at the same moment. She'd never been this close to him before. She had to stop it. Only on the tail end of that thought did the acknowledgement that she was probably in considerable danger even cross her mind.
"Malfoy." Her voice caught, scraped through a manhandled throat. Raw, and painful. She swallowed as his thumb ran a line down her neck, following the movement, head still buried on one side of her neck, hand still gripping the other. "Malfoy. Let me go."
If anything, his grip tightened. Fingertips at the back of her neck, bracketing her spine, digging in, defiance. He sucked in another deep breath and then—tore himself away. Stepped back.
The look he gave her—balancing between murder and disgust—shot significantly more fear through her than his physical manhandling or neck nuzzling.
Lacking anything else to do, not knowing how to properly pull the reins on such a runaway situation, Hermione reached into her pocket and withdrew a couple of blood lollies.
"You clearly need to eat."
Unsaid: you almost ate me.
Malfoy locked eyes with the two lollies she held out.
"Is there any other way to get you out of here?"
"No."
He snatched one of them and stepped back again, even more distance forced between them. Hermione released a breath, finally feeling like she'd made progress. The sound of the paper wrapper crinkling pulled her focus to the lollies again.
Malfoy dropped the paper to the floor. Looked at it. Looked at her. Speared her with a feral, wicked sort of grin that carved even harsher angles into his features.
"If you want me to eat one"—he inclined his head towards the lolly still in her hand—"you have that one."
"What?"
"You must be curious. That's your thing, isn't it? Hermione Granger has to know everything."
"I'm not a vampire."
"They're sold at regular sweets shops."
She'd thought the same thing to herself—yesterday? Had it only been yesterday?
He took a step closer to her again; yet to find their equilibrium. Distance ebbed and flowed with dangerous conversation and something that tasted like ultimatums. She tapped the lolly against her thigh, thinking.
"Just because they're sold in—no, no thank you."
Another step, almost as close as he had been when he had his hand around her throat. But much, much more terrifying. Her pulse throbbed painfully in her neck. She wondered how long until the bruises formed.
"Do you want me to eat or not? I'll have a taste every time you do."
Her pulse sank, far below her neck, below her belt, between her legs. Nothing in her research mentioned this, yet another gap in vampire knowledge. But Malfoy held her hostage and, this time, he hadn't put a hand on her. No, she'd been transfixed, held in stasis by a sort of incomprehensible tension thundering in her blood.
As if he'd compelled her to do it by the power of suggestion alone, she brought her own lolly into view and unwrapped it. The tiny wrapping paper fluttered to the ground, navigating the nearly nonexistent space between them to find the floor.
Malfoy exhaled, watching. He breathed a low, "Good," that nearly buckled Hermione at her knees.
More in-person research needed to be done into this. Whatever this was. She couldn't move. She might have stopped breathing. Narrowed her focus on the lolly in Malfoy's hand as he lifted it to his lips, pushed it into his mouth, jaw relaxing as his tongue swirled around it, before pulling back out again, shiny.
It was obscene, honestly: bright red and shiny and wet and just right there.
Her brain had clearly short-circuited. Something lost in translation, or transmission; a transmutation of intentions and actions and executive functions collapsing beneath her as she leaned forward, her own lolly entirely forgotten.
She took it in her mouth, incapable of tearing her eyes from his astonishment, as a metallic tang bloomed on her taste buds, tempered by a sickly sweetness that almost choked her. She breathed through her nose, swiped with her tongue, and then pulled away, letting the round lolly rest, just for a moment, on her bottom lip before she pulled fully back, bewildered by her own actions.
Cognition caught up to her in slow motion.
Body on fire, brain clouded over, adjacently aware of her absurdity but at a loss as to how to stop herself, she breathed a question at the same time his free hand planted itself against the paneled wall behind her. "Good?"
Malfoy narrowed his eyes, sucked in another deep breath through his nose. He stared at the lolly, lips shifting towards a grimace before he brought it to his mouth again.
Hermione didn't know what kind of noise forced its way from her throat when his eyes slipped shut, but the sound tasted warm, hot, heavy, and she knew she'd certainly never heard herself make it before.
He finally answered when he opened his eyes, pulling the lolly from his mouth. He swept his tongue beneath his top row of teeth, coming to rest at a canine.
"Anything's good when you're starving." He sounded annoyed, disgusted by that fact, words forced out with condescension and derision.
But the lolly moved closer to her as he said it. Or rather, and Hermione felt like the distinction bore weight: he still held the lolly, which meant he moved it closer to her.
If she hadn't been so strangely enmeshed in whatever trap he'd laid for her, so consumed with the steady bonfire burning in her blood and the inexplicable, overwhelming desire to push, push, push as far as she could, she might not have done what she did next.
But as it stood, she had very little control over her own actions outside of the thrumming want that had latched onto her nervous system, a parasite obsessed with the strange momentum spinning her like a portkey until delirium made about as much sense as reality.
She relaxed her jaw, let it fall open, and pushed out her tongue, waiting.
The lolly landed on the tip of her tongue, then slowly, he slid it back. She closed her lips around the hard candy, only part way in her mouth. She swirled her tongue: metal and sugar. Malfoy pushed again, and the lolly hit her teeth.
He leaned in closer. "A little more," he said. He might as well have Imperiused her; she relaxed her jaw again, creating clearance between her teeth. Another barely breathed good rolled through her, lighting her up.
Malfoy stood so close now he'd bent his arm beside her so that his elbow and forearm now rested on the wall next to her head, no longer his palm. She could feel the rustle of his robes tickling her knees. And when she looked him in the eyes, refusing to balk, in this lighting they were silver: a pure, liquid metallic.
"Now suck," he said.
And she did.
The lolly made a faint pop as he pulled it from her mouth again.
"I want my wand, Granger." Spoken so low, so close, she could nearly taste the lolly on his breath as much as she could on her own.
"I can't just give you your wand; it's not legal for you to have one."
"Change the law."
She struggled against a haze to answer with coherency.
"You want me to introduce legislation to allow Non-Wizard, Part-Humans wands? Should goblins and full-blooded Veela have them, too?"
"Get vampires reclassified. Remove the Non-Wizard designation."
"But they are non-wizards."
"I certainly don't feel like a non-wizard. I still have just as much magic in me as I did before this fucking bite." He'd pressed closer to her, touching from knees to chest. "If anything, I have more."
"Language. Also, that's not—what the designation really means."
The haze lifted, burned away by the look on his face.
Hermione was glad they'd taken his wand.
Otherwise, he might have killed her, just then.
"Of course it's not. It means vampires are being kept in their place, away from too much power." His breath, hot and sickly sweet and smelling like blood, clung to her skin as he spoke, words low and furious. "Keep your fucking lollies, Granger. Keep your Ministry mandated concern. My transition is complete. And my new lifestyle? Fantastic. Simply splendid. Now kindly fuck off."
He shoved off the wall, whipped away from her, lollipop shattering as it landed on the floor. She heaved a breath, stomach churning. She stared at shards of shiny red candy all over the floor. He'd gone, disappeared. Mortification burned her alive, unsure if it stemmed from the taste of blood on her tongue or the heat between her thighs.
—
Hermione couldn't sleep, unmoored from the moment she stepped out of Malfoy Manor.
She'd felt dirty, confused, embarrassed, and distressingly aroused, truth be told. As much as a larger part of her wanted to walk into her flat and shove her hand in her knickers to take care of whatever vampire-related magic Malfoy had performed on her libido, she couldn't bring herself to sink quite so low.
That felt like letting him win.
And she would not let him win.
Instead, she slathered her neck in bruise paste and pulled out all her books. Read more. Indexed and referenced, searching for anything and everything that related to presence and draw and allure and sheer sexual energy. Nothing. Of course, there was nothing. But there should be. There needed to be.
Because if there wasn't, then it was just Malfoy. And if it was just Malfoy affecting her in this way, well, honestly that was worse than if he'd used some sort of influencing magic on her.
She tossed and turned, line after line of research flitting behind her eyelids in an orangish-black that stained her sleep with more questions. Beyond the torment of what had happened that afternoon, Hermione couldn't stop herself from fretting over what might happen now .
When Malfoy had one lolly he'd thought he could escape the country. Now he'd had another—in addition to some strangely charged energy—would he do more of the same? Would he try something worse?
It felt an awful lot like paranoia.
It also felt like it wasn't her problem.
But it was.
Professionally at least.
And that grated enough to rob her of sleep.
She also, maybe—perhaps—bore some moral responsibility. At least possibly.
Malfoy just needed to have a real meal. Real blood to get him out of his constantly anemic state, balance him out a bit.
Not unlike when Hermione sometimes forgot to eat while engrossed in a project. If she grabbed a cookie from the break room and tried to return to work she'd fall apart entirely, horrible hunger suddenly awakened. Harry used to force her to eat real meals, or at least check in on her throughout the day.
She'd eventually scared him off with her irritability.
Ron used to bring her food, too. Not so much anymore, of course. What with all the yelling and arguing and his propensity to want to not work when that was all she wanted to do.
Hermione gave up. Sleep wouldn't happen.
Instead, she pulled on a pair of leggings, a cotton tee, and Floo'd to the Ministry. She breezed by her desk, past the break room, and into the supply rooms. They kept blood on hand for exactly this kind of scenario: stubborn vampires, starving vampires. Vampires starving because they were stubborn. Those sorts of situations.
She yanked open the freezer drawer with a touch more force than a two-in-the-morning trip into the Ministry required. But she would get him blood. Then she would make him drink that blood. And that would be that.
She stared at a row of little plastic cups, medical and impersonal and somewhat unpleasant looking. She grabbed one, examined it closer, and resisted the urge to scrunch her face in disgust. It was cold and sterile and—she looked at the crinkling foil cover—two years past its expiry.
Hermione picked up a different one. Also expired two years before.
A third: almost four years beyond its acceptable consumption date.
Her stomach twisted in sympathy. The Ministry could do better than this. Why had these reserves not been replenished?
She shoved the little plastic cups back in the freezer and slammed it shut, turning on her heel.
She Floo'd to St. Mungo's next. Thank the gods for hospitals being open all night, because otherwise, she might have had to resort to something else—probably a little unsavoury and illegal—to acquire blood. Not that she would have done such a thing. Stooped to rule-breaking, that is. Not for Malfoy, anyway. And not in the middle of the night.
Legal acquisition of blood past midnight was absurd enough.
Hermione held her Ministry ID up for the receptionist in the Creature Ward. Waited as the girl—she couldn't be long out of Hogwarts—popped her enormous bubble from what Hermione assumed was Drooble's Best Blowing Gum.
"Yes?" the girl asked.
"I need to pick up a blood allotment for Draco Malfoy. He's a newly registered vampire. I'm his Ministry liaison. I don't believe he's been in yet."
The girl blinked, sighed, and sent a memo zipping through the ward.
Hermione waited. Tapped her foot. Almost reached out and popped the next bubble the receptionist blew because, honestly, how childish.
After an aggravating length of time, a memo flapped back into the ward and landed with a small fluttering flourish on the desk. The girl looked at it, smiled, and watched as it fluttered in a—was that meant to be cute?—sort of way.
"Well?" Hermione asked, resisting the urge to reach over the counter and snatch the memo for herself.
"I haven't read it yet."
"Perhaps you should."
The girl rolled her eyes.
Evidently, Hermione had very little patience at half-past two in the morning because she started mentally compiling a list of professional deficiencies she could owl to the department head regarding the competency of their overnight staff.
The girl popped open the memo's wax seal, read silently, then folded it again. Hermione almost committed a crime, annoyance boiling beneath her skin.
"Well?" she asked.
"It looks like Mr. Malfoy declined to set up an allotment with our program, citing an alternative source of nutrition."
"That's ridiculous."
"It's right here," she said, holding up the memo for reference.
"He has no alternative source. He needs to participate in the program."
"Would you like to submit a request as his liaison?"
"Yes, I would."
"You'll need to come back in"—she glanced at her watch—"six hours."
"Six—no, no. I need blood now."
Hermione realized then that her voice had pitched, just enough that the middle of the night quiet rang with her agitation.
"We can't distribute blood without an active account."
"Well, then I need to set up an account now."
"The person who handles accounts doesn't come in until eight. I'll pass your request on."
Hermione didn't often think of herself as someone quick to anger. Perhaps the lack of sleep had something to do with it. Or the lack of answers from her research. Or the lack of orgasm that had her body nearly doubled her over with wanting earlier in the day.
But she very seriously considered, just for a flicker of a moment, leaping across the counter and strangling this teenager.
Hermione breathed instead.
"Well," the girl continued, evidently unaware of her near brush with strangulation—"I won't pass it along. I get off in four hours. But I'll pass it along to the person who'll pass it along."
Hermione spun, livid, and marched straight to the lift, straight out the front doors, and then straight to the nearest apparition point.
She didn't stop to think until she'd reappeared, body reinflating after decompression via apparition, at the gates to Malfoy Manor in the middle of the night.
She didn't have to knock for any number of minutes this time. The door swung open as soon as she stepped onto the stoop.
"Little late for you, don't you think Granger?"
She bristled as the absolute impulsiveness of the situation finally caught up to her. Showing up at the Ministry had felt perfectly normal—she'd worked later than this before, and Aurors were in and out at all hours.
St. Mungo's literally never closed: completely reasonable.
But this. This was Malfoy's home at nearly three in the morning.
This was a vampire's home at nearly three in the morning.
She wondered what order she was meant to think those things in. Something prickling the inside of her ribs suggested she'd gotten it wrong.
She cleared her throat, stepping up to the front doors.
"I thought it would be polite to abide by your natural circadian rhythms."
"Of course you did, Granger."
He did seem more lively, a little less tired. A little less gray-tinged. But the darkness might have had something to do with it.
She realized, then, that she hadn't recast the spell inside his home.
"I forgot to fix your spell."
"That you did."
"I don't know it."
"Is that what has you so worked up, Granger? Your heart is racing."
It happened again. As if she'd lost all sense of impulse control and simply couldn't stop the questions and the need to know from bubbling to the surface.
She heaved a breath. "Can I come in?" she asked, walking in anyway, trying to ignore the jump in her pulse, dancing in her throat as she passed by him.
"Why yes, of course. Do come in," he said to her back. She heard the door close.
Unlike the spell for the darkness that shrouded the Manor before, middle-of-the-night darkness left room for Hermione to see, moonlight sucked into stone walls, reflecting.
"Not planning on fleeing the country again, are you?"
"No concrete plans as of yet."
"Not funny."
"Neither is showing up on my doorstep in the middle of the night. And yet—" He waved his hand.
She wouldn't have had any reason to be there if he'd cooperated. If there had been any satisfactory information about his kind to sate her unquenchable thirst to know. He'd stolen her sleep by being so gods damned interesting and it infuriated her.
Hermione crossed her arms and spilled her curiosity, lest it explode in annoyance instead. "What happened to you? How did you—get like this?" She'd be happy with one answer, something—anything—to reduce the number of questions hammering inside her head, even if just by one.
Malfoy smiled. "That's none of your business. If you want information like that, get vampire designations changed. Get me my wand."
"I can't do that. I can't do much of anything. I'm a glorified paper pusher with a specialty in Non-Wizard, Part-Humans. I won't have that kind of authority until I'm promoted."
"Looks like you won't know until you're promoted, then."
"What else do you want? I can bargain."
"Not with me. You don't have anything I want."
"Blood? What if I got you blood, fresh. Is that why you declined the dispensary program at St. Mungo's?"
Malfoy stood very still, narrowing his eyes.
"Did you know the British pamphlets are significantly different from the French?" He pivoted, grabbed a copy of the Guidelines for the Treatment of Non-Wizard, Part-Humans from the entryway table, holding it up. "Different legislations and all that, obviously. The French gave me their own version before they shipped me back here. Did you know French vampires are allowed to drink directly from the source? Here though, I have several options for procurement. But magical blood is protected differently, you see."
"Does it make a difference? Where it comes from?"
He laughed, tossed the pamphlet to the floor.
"What do you think?"
"I don't know. I doubt the Ministry does, either. We don't know much about vampires, truth be told."
"By design, I'm sure."
"So"—she cleared her throat—"from the source is better?"
"I presume so. Can't possibly be worse than the vile little plastic cups the Ministry wants me to survive on for the rest of my infuriatingly extended lifespan."
"What if I offered?"
"Excuse me?"
Hermione did not enjoy repeating herself. "What if I offered," she said again, clipping each word.
Malfoy's posture shifted entirely. Shoulders sinking, limbs relaxing, something about his cold stone exterior melting, magma made man.
"Are you—offering?" He almost looked as if her answer didn't matter. As if having simply spoken the possibility into existence had changed everything, planted an idea that took control.
"Would you answer my questions? Promise to eat—drink—with regularity? Stop trying to starve yourself?
"Those are a lot of conditions."
"This is a hypothetical." The clarification felt necessary. Or perhaps unnecessary. Irrelevant.
"Is it?"
"Of course it is. Since it's not allowed, right? Even if I offered?"
Malfoy took a single step forward; breathing suddenly felt entirely optional. She opted not.
"I certainly wouldn't tell. Would you?" His smile flashed teeth, gleaming and predatory and intended to frighten, she knew that, but it only made her tense in anticipation. Momentum made itself known again, traveling downhill, demanding she follow.
"I—" Her words stalled, stuck. Hermione had been hunted before. By murderers and madmen and snatchers and a whole slew of bigots who wanted her dead.
But she couldn't say she'd been hunted for anything else, to be caught but not killed. The way Malfoy took another step, watching her so carefully, knowing what she knew about his strength and his senses and that she'd literally walked into his home in the middle of the night; she couldn't help but wonder if that made him an excellent hunter or her exceptionally naive prey.
And for all that he looked alive for the first time, more interested in not being dead.
She didn't mean to whisper, but her voice seemed to vanish with her senses. "No," she said. "I wouldn't tell."
Malfoy took several more steps in rapid succession, to her, past her, inhaling deeply as his robes brushed her side as he passed.
He exited the foyer, stepping into an adjacent room. He glanced back at her as he crossed through the archway, a tiny nod of his head that told her to follow.
Uncertain of what she'd just agreed to, or set into motion, she followed.
Malfoy sat on a black leather sofa, arms spread casually across the back, one leg crossed over his knee at the ankle, looking as relaxed as Hermione had ever seen him.
"If you want to get any information out of me, come sit."
"Sit?"
She didn't exactly mean to ask.
"And put that hair up. It's a mess. Couldn't possibly access your neck with it down, could I?"
The command pulled her in, inescapable, flushing Hermione with a heat she should probably acknowledge as arousal. And that was exceedingly annoying. Why was she so aroused in this dark Manor with Malfoy's stubborn refusal to cooperate and his irritating intrigue?
She put her hair up, tied in a haphazard bun.
Her legs carried her to the sofa entirely without her permission. In fact, she very seriously considered fighting them. Felt like she should. But she didn't. She'd been drawn in, caught. Trap long since snared. Momentum already built, she'd only just joined in.
Hermione barely breathed, shoving away a sensation not unlike shivering as she sat on the edge of the sofa. Malfoy's chuckle ran right through her, over her, liquid slipping beneath her skin.
"You just have to know everything, don't you Granger?"
She focused on the doorway she'd walked through, utterly disinterested in giving him the satisfaction of her attention. So instead, she watched the door, her potential escape, far beyond her reach now.
"I don't know what you mean," she insisted, despite the betrayal brought by her tight breath.
"You want to know what it's like. Maybe you need to know. And that's fine, we can both get something we want."
Malfoy did not get to pretend like he knew anything about her.
"Because you're hungry and you'll deign to drink from me? Anything is good when you're starving, right?"
She felt him shift closer, hated the way the fine hairs on the back of her neck lifted, tingling and prickling. His laugh swirled in rivulets against her skin.
"Something like that. But it's a good bargain. I'll tell you a little, take a little"—the word take forced a gasp—"maybe I'll tell you a little more. Take a little more."
Hermione gripped the cushion beneath her, channeling tension into her fingertips, willed into supple leather.
She jumped when he ran a finger from just beneath her ear, down the side of her neck, and swept towards her shoulder. He tugged a curl, pulled it taut, made a disgruntled sort of sound, and tucked it into her hasty bun with the rest of her hair.
Breath joined his finger, gliding up and down the side of her neck, tracing the spots he might—
Oh.
Her spine arched, toes curling, brain lighting up in a brief flare of panic before the sharp sting of what had to have been his teeth vanished, replaced by heat.
All she felt were his lips. And his tongue, literally laving at her. His hand, holding the side of her neck, stayed steady—long fingers cradling her skull and cheek, grip hovering just below a threshold of what she might call painful.
And his other hand—where had it come from?—now spread wide across her stomach, anchoring her, pulling her into him.
Hermione most certainly did not like the situation happening in her knickers because, gods, what if he could smell her? No—she refused to entertain that mortifying possibility. He smelled blood because it was his food, a source of life.
The suction against her neck broke.
"Fuck," breathed right against her neck.
Hermione swallowed, throat painfully dry as she realized she'd angled her head towards the ceiling and couldn't seem to tear it away now.
"Language." Tepid. Quiet. Barely spoken.
"Fuck," he said again, before dragging his tongue up her neck, hand at her stomach flexing.
She realized, so woefully late, how completely he controlled her in that moment. Hands on her, teeth still so close to her, something dangerous and humming, sparking and flaring and igniting between them, jumping scant spaces to illuminate new destinations.
She could hear him breathing, heavy inhales through his nose, right at the juncture between her head and her neck.
"You owe me information," she said. So proud she'd managed it at all.
His tongue traced her throat again, back down towards where he'd bitten her.
Where he'd bitten her.
Where Hermione had allowed him to do such a thing with, genuinely, an astonishing lack of forethought.
"What is there to say, Granger?" he whispered. "I'm sure everything worth knowing was already in my file. I moved to France after the war"—he flicked his tongue against her neck again, a brief jolt of desire barreling through her—"started doing some contract work with the French Ministry. Got roped into atoning for my war sins by negotiating with vampires." His voice trailed off, shoulders shifting against her. Hermione wondered if that motion had been a shrug, or perhaps a deep release of tension, or maybe just an excuse for friction of any sort.
"And now you're one of them."
"Shit happens, Granger. I was spying on them for the Ministry." A pause. "They could have killed me, but they bit me instead"—he must have felt her tense, chuckling against her ear—"different from a feeding bite, Granger. You think I'd do that to you?"
Honesty gushed from her lungs. "I do."
"Smart." A pause, the word settled. "I imagine it was more fun to torture me than kill me. I woke up with a bag of blood next to me. A turning bite kills you if you don't drink." His voice had dropped dangerously low, almost impossibly low. And for as precarious as her circumstances were, Hermione thrummed with excitement. Her skin felt electric, alive, as she absorbed and memorized every iota of information he dared to share.
How many people in the world knew this information?
"Drink or die," she concluded for him.
"I didn't think it through." She felt his tongue again, warm against her neck as both his hands shifted, fingers flexing, drawing her closer, caging her in. "To be barred from magic…well, I've found it takes much longer to die from starvation after completing the process."
"You don't have to, you know. Just because I can't change the designation now—it doesn't mean I couldn't—"
His fingertips would leave bruises across her stomach, on the side of her neck and jaw, purpling points of interest mapping his travels across her body, evidence of his control over it. His tongue traced a broad swipe up her neck. "I've gone and ruined all that effort by tasting you, anyway."
Malfoy stayed very still. Hermione stayed very still, refusing to breathe, to blink, to think too loudly or too quickly lest she expose whatever this dance was for—whatever hunted her beneath the surface. For one impossible moment, Hermione marveled at how she'd gotten to this place, put herself here, allowed herself to be captured. And for what? That inexplicable rush of new information, of knowing something before anyone else? For the discovery of something?
And was it worth it? What happened next? Because Hermione saw in the stillness, in that pause between actions, something would come next.
His hand on her midsection moved again, dipping, and her brain, her thought processes, all her rationalizations exploded in a firework lit from overloaded nerves.
Oh fuck. Had she said it? Thought it? Or simply manifested it by sheer vibrating magic and energy threatening to twist her spine in knots if she didn't move against it.
His lips latched onto her neck again, a hot swipe of his tongue over her flesh, a suck, a pull of blood from her body to his.
"You taste delicious," he said and, with a firm tug at her navel, pulled her over his thigh to sit between his legs, lined her up from arse to shoulder blades against him. That statement, that movement, neither should have made her shiver in the way she did, a cascade from scalp to toes.
She'd stopped breathing again. But her heart pounded in her chest. She could hear its uneven beating, which meant Malfoy knew exactly the way it stuttered and sputtered and started every time his fingers dipped a little lower, reaching her waistband.
"You have two options here, Granger."
She didn't care what they were. She didn't care about anything, not anymore. All that curiosity, that intrigue, that thirst to know, had evaporated, crowded out by a different need crawling through her veins.
"You can tell me to stop," he said, and she felt his teeth grazing her neck again, a different spot. But no sting followed. "You can leave. You can go back to trying to reform the Ministry and forcing me to do whatever it is they want from me."
Her mouth dropped open, the word or sitting right there, at the center of her mouth, a round noise for parted lips and hollowed cheeks. But she had no air left to power it, no control over her vocal cords. He said it for her.
"Or you let me keep going. And I'll taste the rest of you."
Her heart leapt, a surging, thundering fire in her chest. It gave her away, she knew it did. And it wasn't that she was normally so ruled by her impulses, but normally she could suppress them. In lacking the ability to hide her truth, she'd been liberated from lying.
"If I have sex with you," she said, determined to speak and not whine, to control the urge to rock her hips and her arse and her spine. "You have to eat more regularly."
For the first time since she'd felt the sting of his canines in her neck, she lifted her head off his shoulder, angled towards him to see.
"Are you a prostitute, then? Whoring yourself out to whichever creatures you're assigned to in order to get what you want?" He dipped his hand inside her leggings, beneath her knickers, cupping her. "I can't decide if that's ruthlessly brilliant or pathetically sad."
"This is not—it's not a normal—"
Her protest died, silenced by a different sound escaping her as he pushed two long fingers inside her without preamble. She nearly combusted then and there, squirming against him, hating that she needed this from him. She'd hate him more if he stopped.
His other arm left her neck for the first time, encircling her waist, pressing her painfully tight against him, pushing some of the breath from her lungs by way of force against her diaphragm.
Her skin had caught fire, that was how it felt, as he twisted his fingers inside her, setting nerves ablaze. His arm crushed her ribs, she could barely think for all the adrenaline and lust shooting through her.
It wasn't romantic in the slightest.
It was almost claustrophobic, overwhelming, too much sensory input.
And that was the last thing she remembered, the last thought latching onto a neuron capable of filing it away for later. That, and another sharp sting at her neck, fading quickly, followed a hot mouth, a tongue on her skin, fingers curled inside her, twisting and pulling against his other arm, holding her to him, against him.
—
She woke on the sofa as an errant ray of sunlight slipped through the drapes. It pierced through her lids and washed out her vision, far too bright, far too early, head throbbing. She felt hungover, as if she indulged in an obscene amount of liquor.
Her tongue felt light sandpaper, her throat a desert. She needed something to drink, maybe a Pepper Up Potion. She'd be willing to tolerate the steaming ears if it might help with the throbbing inside her skull.
She forced herself to a stand, wincing at the eruption of several different aches: along her neck, around her ribs, between her thighs. She rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath, tried not to think too hard about that last part.
With a churning stomach and new pains blooming by the second, Hermione reached for her beaded bag, abandoned on the floor near the sofa. She searched for her wand, incapable of thought without water; an augamenti would have to do until she found the kitchens, or a bathroom, or her sanity.
She withdrew her hand, empty.
She swiveled her head, searching the room she'd barely even glanced the night before, or perhaps more appropriately, much, much earlier that morning. Had she been carrying it? She didn't see it abandoned on the floor, or on a table. Nor did she have it in the extendable pocket inside her leggings.
She found it sitting on the other end of the large sofa.
Not her wand. A little plastic cup of blood. And a pamphlet.
She hissed against the sudden flood of saliva in her mouth, the warm sting shooting through her jaw.
With a shaking hand, trying to corral a new stream of panicked thoughts zipping through her brain, she picked up the pamphlet for Guidelines for the Treatment of Non-Wizard, Part-Humans. Beneath the title: neat, narrow scrawl in what she assumed to be Malfoy's penmanship.
I'd be willing to exchange your wand for mine.