"Temporis Et Spatii"

CHAPTER 3.

The late hour lamented an alluvion of southwestern sky upon me. Vermilion inflamed a canyon through my thigh, brimstone pulsated tender cliffaces, and amethyst brooded a slow blade to the bone. Palatially arched marble ceiling materialized overhead, excruciatingly muting them. A spray of authentic emerald coned from the bottom of the staircase, glistening in defeat to my shoulder. I snatched the flutter over my leg.

Draco closed his hand over mine. "I haven't touched you. I promise. Don't worry; I destroyed the portkey."

"Portke - What are you doing?" I exclaimed, flailing panicked arms at him. "Get your mitts off me!"

His hands withdrew open-faced. "I'm sorry. I know, this is very disconcerting for you."

"Disconcerting!" I labored up with a grunt and my eye caught the wand like a red hand. "What are you doing with that - that thing!"

He raised a firm palm to my shoulder, countering my protesting might. "I'm not very good at healing spells, so please lay back."

"Blood -" I stammered. "I'm bleeding -"

"You were bleeding, when the beam fell on you. Deletrius."

Wine-dark dribble ascended to extinguishment until the grisly splash was no more. I outstretched for a bead, dewy and real on my skin, and it disintegrated to passive sunlight.

He met my eyes with a smirk. "I know I shouldn't say it, but the view up here is paradise. Considering."

I rose indignantly, but he bore me back down. "Hellfire, Draco Malfoy, I don't like you drunk."

"I'm not as drunk anymore."

My insides wrenched to the open air, fissuring my breath, and his hand urgently arrived in view. I refused, regarding the ceiling's immaculate alabaster streaked with flowing umbers until his offer left. If he'd slipped, I didn't want to know. "Two years you've secluded yourself in here, only visiting me and only on occasion. Wouldn't it have been less troublesome to just cut and run today? Rather than try to collect a passenger?"

He frowned, delicately pursuing the shape of the wound with his instrument. "All my life I've been more or less alone," he confessed, "and it was fine. But then I made a friend. And now, I dunno, I s'pose I don't want to be alone anymore."

"Reckon you are still drunk," I grimaced.

"I'm just being honest with you. If I lose you, at least I can say I tried. Stay still; I'm almost done."

I obliged. The ceiling remained unchanged.

"Say to whom?"

"It's colloquial."

"What does it do?" I asked, watching him work as best I could from this vantage point. "The wand."

"Almost anything, good and bad." He flashed frost at me. "I'm afraid I'm not as practiced at the good things."

This time, I accepted his offer. He pulled me upright to show me the broad, furrowed scar crossing my thigh. The wand, unfeasibly, had healed me. Draco had healed me. A violet cumulus resuscitated and fell away.

His demeanor solidified inquisitively as I descended his hand. "You're an intoxicant, Draco Malfoy; I hope you know that."

A man's fingers effervesce readily up crumpled drawers, I discovered. He investigated my expression - entreating him - before dispatching like an arrow past his surprise straight to my lips. Here was the appetite I had anticipated earlier. Anchoring to my hip, he ensnared me in his humid mouth, famished for the taste of me, his tongue glissading down my neck, my collarbone, the lace slope conserving my bosom.

Being mounted stole the oxygen from my lungs. He pried at my corset, but found his advancement precluded by more hooks on the side.

"So many buttons and layers," he flustered. "How do you get dressed?"

I chortled, disengaging them with ease. "This is less than usual. I wasn't expecting a visitor today."

It was scarcely over my head when he seized my wrists, pinning me to the sleek marble, and imbibed my whole mouth, pausing to suckle my bottom lip and clamp it in his teeth. My brain was raw batter by the time he cupped my head in his hands with an affectionate peck.

"I hope it doesn't put you off," he murmured into my mouth, "but I love your eyes. The way they change in different lights. Of all the coordinates in all the ages in history, I got to show up at your door and get lost in your green and blue and yellow eyes."

"Do you intend to debauch me, Draco Malfoy?" I could hardly speak the words.

Mild amusement sputtered his respiry. "I can assure you, Cora Lucindra, I have every depraved intention for you. I just want to savor this moment first."

So we luxuriated in his monumental foyer. His hair aureate with setting sun, glacier eyes avalanching through mine, balmy grazes peppering my neck and cheeks: The sum of them conspired to disarm me. I could follow this exquisite man anywhere.

"Shit!" He occluded himself awkwardly and retrieved his wand.

"Watch your tongue, would you?"

A stray shuffle amplified across endless opaline halls.

"This place is too conspicuous," he realized and took my hand, abruptly charging us down a corridor aggrandized with portraits of blondes from ages past.

"Well, why did you build a palace?"

"I - I don't know, okay?"

I confess I felt every bit the trollop, nary but my slip, drawers and skirt billowing in our wake as we cut through a bombastic dining hall, rounding a hawthorn table long enough to seat all of Congress, should such a dinner party ever be necessary. My neck craned to witness the lofty ceiling, its jade argyle mural centerpieced with an arresting serpent set to strike, before we rushed analogously carved double doors. We found ourselves in a rather peculiar kitchen, riotously abuzz with the preposterous iron-and-steam contraptions lining its walls and adjoined to a paneled room which accommodated another, less gregarious meal table. Draco guided me behind a central row of cupboards and silently bid me hush. Somewhere cavernously deep, a masculine voice reverberated to every realm of the house.

"This is an impressive conjuring, Malfoy. But it appears you could only use materials from this period, couldn't you?"

I jolted at an explosion in the next room. Draco bound me in a vigilant arm and drew his wand. "Apparate!" he whispered.

An entirely new room spontaneously surrounded us: a lavish bedroom - likely Draco's - of lush jade velvets surrounding an almighty oak bed intricately engraved with serpents. We clustered in a corner opposite the aberrantly ajar door, to which Draco spartanly steadied his wand.

"You know, it was a helluva trip trying to find you," the voice buoyed humorously, its unidentifiable origin precipitating a terrifying omnipotence. "It took me some time to realize you stole the Necronomicon. No worries; I'll get it back. And you, fugitive, will make me rich."

A crash resounded from a distant tower, and Draco flourished his wrist to place us in an oblong room with what appeared to be an altar at the far end. Above it, a stained-glass window depicting a skulled serpent blazed the room a florid ruby. A throng of candles ignited in succession to flank a direct aisle to the formidable onyx altar, upon which lay a scabrous leather book.

Draco mutely implored the contrary; I breached from him nonetheless, launched by the explicit instinct that this was the Necro-device. He accelerated after me.

"Cora -" he rasped as he seized my arm.

"Maaaaaalfoy," the voice sang directly beneath us. "I can see your boots in the floorboards."

I shrieked as we blasted airborne. A flick of Draco's wand shattered us through a glass stall to collide with stone tiles surrounding a drain.

"Cor - Are you okay?" He helped me to my feet and encircled his sable tailored coat over me, hastily beckoning my arms through. Another blow clobbered uproariously nearby. "Don't be scared, all right? The last time I cast this spell, I ended up in the old west."

"So you have no idea what's going to happen."

"Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

He elongated around the fractured glass and an adjacent mirror erupted to dazzling shards, from which he recoiled. "Right."

"So why are we doing this?"

He turned, exalted my face in both hands and gifted me with his lips, sparking a fuse at the exposed mouth of my nerve endings. "Because it's the only way out."

. . .

"Stop! Stop!" I screeched, propelling from him to swivel haphazardly and retch. "I can't take anymore of this 'appearing' sorcery!"

"Apparating," he corrected distractedly.

"I have no concern for what it's called. Draco, are you listening to me?" I stumbled back toward the obsidian-clad man ignoring the lashing winds. "We need to address your problem-solving skills!"

All around us, the pearly horizon surged and undulated as far as the eye could see. A single iridescent crystal cascaded from the sky, falling past the garnet trickle arriving beneath his sleeve. He shuddered, irises ghosts. "Do you believe in fate?"

I had never seen snow before.