Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Forty-Three

Draco hadn’t been quite certain of what to expect when he knocked on Snape’s door, though he’d schooled himself for low-level irritation and a modicum of irony, at the very least. He was less-prepared for what he got instead: a harried-but-determined-looking Snape, fully dressed up to and including a heavy travelling cloak. In one hand he held his wand; in the other, a trunk no larger than a packet of mints. Behind him, Draco saw another monstrous piece of luggage, half-open to reveal neatly stacked books and several small boxes full of phials, tenderly swathed in velvet.

"Yes?"

Clearly, the opening salvo Draco had planned – So sorry to wake you, Professor – wasn’t going to fly. He gulped, bit his lip, and said the first thing that came to mind.

"Are you going somewhere?"

Snape looked as if he’d like to say something cutting, but was reining himself back from the brink. "Yes." He studied Draco appraisingly. "And you, Mr. Malfoy? What is it that can’t wait until morning?"

"I …" Draco trailed off, suddenly, mute, and had to bite back a yelp as Harry stepped hard on his foot. "I … er … I know it’s late, but I was—um, hoping to talk to you about something."

"Ah. Something. How forthcoming of you." But Snape was stepping back from the doorway, and making no move to close it. "Well, I’m leaving in a few moments, as soon as I Reduce this trunk and speak to the Headmaster. If you must talk, it’ll have to be on the way upstairs."

An unseen brush of shimmery fabric across his knuckles as Harry slid neatly through the open door. Draco bit his lip and stepped mechanically across the threshold. "I’m sorry to interrupt you. I don’t know who else to talk to."

"Reducio!" Snape muttered, and bent to pick up the now-tiny suitcase, shooting Draco a sharp glance over his shoulder. "What is it? Trouble with the other Slytherins?"

"Er … no." Draco stuck his hands in his pockets. "No offense, but I don’t really care if they speak to me or not. I’ve got other friends."

"Mm." Snape pocketed his luggage and his wand, pinched some Floo Powder out of a small mosaic-tiled box on his mantle, and tossed it into the fire. "Albus?" he called into the flames. "I’m on my way up."

To Draco, he said only: "All right, let’s go then," and held the door open for him, pausing to mutter something Draco couldn’t catch at it before he closed it again. "Other friends," he repeated, stepping into the corridor and turning toward the staircase. "Then you and the almighty Potter have made up your differences?"

Draco frowned. "He’s not so bad. But that’s not what I want to talk about."

"No?"

"No." Draco circled through his planned repertoire of complaints – France and his father being the two that popped to mind first – and realised that there was only one thing he really wanted to talk about. "It’s Hermione," he said simply, and had the satisfaction of seeing Snape’s hand pause halfway to the rail of the staircase.

"What about her?"

"Well, we never talk anymore," Draco began. This wasn’t the rehearsed part of his speech – regardless of his flip little exposition in the corridor a couple of minutes ago, he would rather have had his fingernails extracted with tweezers than say anything about this in front of Potter. That he was saying it in the presence of his onetime rival was surreal enough; speaking candidly on this subject was a bit like having his dinner revisit him … unpleasant, and entirely unplanned for. "Which is bad enough. The last time we spoke was when she came back for the weekend, and I … um …" He grimaced. "Suffice it to say that I was pretty horrid to her. She probably never wants to see me again."

Snape had begun to climb again, but he’d turned his face away so that it lay in shadow. "Miss Granger," he said drily, "cuts a wide swathe through the field of hearts. I wouldn’t take it personally."

Okay. What did that mean?

"You, too?" Draco asked, half-amazed at his own audacity. Snape cleared his throat loudly.

"I haven’t seen her since that weekend, either," he admitted finally. His expression was pensive. "And I was rather … horrid … myself. Not that it makes so much of a change for me. She might not have noticed."

Draco sniggered appreciatively at this – Snape didn’t make jokes often, but when he did they were dry as dust, and his delivery was impeccably stonefaced – then sobered. "I know something’s wrong with her," he said, a bit more loudly than he’d intended. "Something’s happened to her, or is about to happen. What is it?"

They were in the Great Hall, about to reach the staircase to the Headmaster’s office. Snape halted again, started to speak but thought better of it, and to Draco’s surprise, sat down heavily on one of the lower steps and gestured for Draco to join him.

"I don’t have the time to tell you the whole story," he said. "But I’ll tell you what I can."

**

For an impossible git, Snape had good taste in furniture.

Harry, by now a pro at covert reconnaissance, stood in the middle of the Potions Master’s comfortable sitting room and turned slowly in place, dropping the hood of the Cloak for unobstructed viewing. Shelves and shelves of books. An oversized leather chair, flanked by end tables; one of them bore a reading lamp, the other, a heavy bookmarked volume bound in what looked like dragonhide. Harry bent closer to read the title, then raised one eyebrow at the Cyrillic script. No dictionary in sight, either.

Obviously, Snape had hidden talents.

He toured briefly through the tiny-but-impeccable kitchen—the house-elves, of course, did the heavy lifting in that department, but from the looks of it, Snape liked to make his own tea—then glanced over at an arched doorway. The light slicing into it from the sitting room showed a fussy eighteenth-century desk and matching chair, a muted-but-lush Oriental carpet, and the tall silhouette of the bed. At the far end of the room, through another door, he caught a white gleam of enamel. Bed and bath, Harry thought, and studied the desk thoughtfully.

Might be something there, mightn’t there?

Hardly believing his luck – he’d never in a million years thought that he’d get to explore Snape’s apartment sans Snape – he started toward the desk. And nearly jumped out of his skin, at the lazy, sleep-sultry voice that spoke to him from the darkness.

"Mr. Potter," purred the voice, and Harry, wheeling, could just make out a sleek bare silhouette on the far side of the bed, where he’d thought there was only a jumble of bedclothes.

"Who is it?" he asked, fumbling in the folds of the Cloak for his wand. "Who’s there?"

"Never mind that," the voice said, sounding amused. "And don’t bother going for your wand; I’ve already got mine out." She wriggled out from under the bedclothes, a small sleek Ginny-sized woman with short messy hair and huge dark waif-eyes and a mouth, surprisingly lush in her elfin face, so heavy and kiss-swollen that it looked as if she’d rubbed it with sandpaper. As she rounded the near corner of the bed and sauntered toward him, Harry couldn’t keep his eyes from dropping to her breasts – small and high and crowned with rock-hard nipples the size of pencil erasers. She smelled like sleep and sex and that clean winter-air scent that meant the house-elves had recently changed the sheets. Harry didn’t protest as she flicked the clasp of the Invisibility Cloak open and tossed it aside.

"Ligare," she murmured, and his eyes widened as silk cords began to slither from the tip of her wand.

"Who are you?" he asked again, this time more faintly, but she just shook her head and didn’t answer. He felt the cords wrap his wrists behind his back and tie themselves off in a knot.

"I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind, Mr. Potter," she breathed, an inch from his ear. The next thing he knew, despite his greater size and stature, he was flat on his face on the bed, and her wand was pressed – not-quite-gently – to a section of his anatomy that could only be described as cringing-but-still-interested.

"Severus won’t be back for at least a week," promised those honey-tones in his ear. "And whereas I’m sure you’d be missed before then, I think it’s safe to say that no one would look here. I think you’d better tell me what I want to know."

Harry swallowed hard.

**

Sybil was enjoying herself.

She didn’t bear Harry Potter any particular grudge – far from it; she actually got a little pang of guilt, brief and quickly reburied, whenever she looked at him. He did look so uncannily like James … though sometimes, in unguarded moments, those luminous green eyes of Lily’s seemed to take on a life of their own, making you unable to look past them to see the rest of his face. Not that Sybil had known either of them particularly well … but her guilt reflex didn’t seem to care about that, only that they had been honourable and brave, and that she’d done nothing to halt their deaths.

She sometimes got the same feeling when she looked at Neville Longbottom.

But Neville was pitiable, and Harry transcended pity …a very large distinction indeed. Sybil rather suspected that his near escape at Voldemort’s hands had left him with a fair bit of psychic ability; it was a shame that her Fruit Bat Persona had turned him off Divination so thoroughly, and that she would never be able to speak candidly to him about it as his professor.

On one hand, this was a rare opportunity to do just that.

On the other, it seemed more appropriate at this point to have a few words with him about his habit of illicit snooping – something that six years of close calls had apparently done nothing to halt. How best to scare the hell out of him? Sybil wondered idly, and dug the tip of her wand a little more intently into the tender skin underneath his balls.

"Divestio," she said calmly, and heard him gasp as cool air hit his naked skin. She moved her wand a fraction of an inch, from side to side, grinning to herself as his hips bucked cautiously up to meet it.

"What do you want?" he gasped, his defiant tone belied by his growing erection, by the goosebumps springing up on the backs of his arms. Sybil twirled one finger at the nape of his neck in response, and waited until his frantic squirming died down before she answered him.

"Not very polite, breaking into a professor’s private apartments, is it? I think you need a lesson in manners, Mr. Potter."

He began to struggle. When he spoke, his voice was sulky. "Why should I take lessons from you? I don’t even know you."

"Hardly anybody does," Sybil agreed placidly, and let just the tiniest spark of static electricity escape from the tip of her wand. Harry went rigid. "But then, that hardly matters at the moment, does it? Let’s have some answers, Mr. Potter, and let’s make them polite."

Oh, this was going to be fun.

**