Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Seven

He was just preparing to leave the Great Hall, after a half-hour of shoving his dinner around his plate untouched and using his trademark scowl to its customary conversation-discouraging advantage, when a brown owl came plummeting toward him from one of the open windows and dropped a small package in his lap. Pushing his plate toward the owl in invitation it looked a bit blurry around the edges - he weighed the package in one hand and surveyed the mailing label assessingly.

Ah, yes. He’d know that penmanship anywhere.

To the casual observer, Severus Snape’s expression didn’t alter … nor was his demeanor noticeably more hurried as he stowed the little parcel inside his robes, stood, and swept determinedly toward the door. As he passed the Gryffindor table, however, he paused.

The Weasley-Potter contingent - two red heads, one black - was huddled over what appeared to be a slim stack of postcards, murmuring amongst themselves.

" … new familiar …"

" … fabulous office …"

" … pre-med classes? Good grief." That last came from Ron. Snape, darkly amused, rolled his eyes and was about to move on when …

" … having dinner with Bill tonight," Ginny said meaningfully, with a sideways glance at Ron, who glowered. For once, Severus was in complete sympathy with him. Having your flashy, brilliant older brother move in on your Seven-Year Crush couldn’t be easy.

It was bad enough to hear about it secondhand, knowing that he’d had the power of first refusal.

Fixing his scowl more firmly across his face, he swept toward the dungeons.

**

He waited to open the package until he was in his rooms - the fire built, the door locked and warded, water on the boil for tea. Inside the brown paper wrappings were two smaller boxes, rubber-banded together with a folded piece of stationery sandwiched between them. Severus withdrew the note first.

Professor -

As I recall, you mentioned once that this particular grind of coarse Egyptian saffron, which we used in class last year to make our Chameleon Compounds, was rather difficult to come by in the British Isles. I’m enclosing a few grams of it in this package, to replace the bit that Neville spilled; perhaps you’ll find it in your heart to forgive him that particular transgression now?

His lips quirked up at the corners before he could stop them. Typical, that she’d still be worrying about her hapless lab partner, despite the fact that she’d dreaded sharing a workbench with him. If no one else missed her presence at Hogwarts, Longbottom more than made up for that lack, all on his own.

He continued to read.

The other box contains hibiscus tea, which I seem to remember you favouring. I hope it finds you in good health.

I miss you. No one here quite comes up to your standards of artistic bad humour - I’m afraid the Egyptians don’t deal much in sarcasm. I’m getting quite nostalgic for it.

Severus laughed out loud.

Brat, he thought, still chuckling, and continued past her signature to a hastily scrawled postscript.

P.S. Thank you for the jade scarab; it’s beautiful - and has in its own way laid the groundwork for a most intriguing mystery. You don’t happen to know anything about the legend of the Jade Priestess, do you?

The Jade Priestess. Severus frowned.

Where had he heard of that before?

Well, it bore looking into. He’d learned from direct experience that nothing happened to Hermione Granger merely by accident.

Putting the mystery aside for later perusal, he opened the two tiny boxes of spice and inhaled - ahh, there was Egypt, right there; yin and yang, musk and flowers - as complicated and potentially dangerous as Hermione herself.

The kettle whistled - Sal would be along at any moment. With a last lingering glance at the note, he got up to make the tea.

**

"So, how did it end, then?" Bill was asking. "Were you the dumper, or the dumpee?"

Hermione took another sip of wine.

She was halfway through her third glass, and her previous embarrassment hadn’t so much fled, as drowned.

"Dumpee," she said. "According to him, he broke up with me because I - get this - ‘wasn’t in love with him’. How’s that for irony?"

Bill considered this. "Not too shabby," he admitted, then quirked a curious eyebrow at her. "Were you in love with him?"

Hermione inspected the contents of her goblet, as if expecting to find answers in its canary-diamond depths. "No," she said finally, and took another fortifying sip. "Truth be told, I was sort of hung up on someone else." She studied him from beneath her lashes. "I suppose that makes me an awful person."

To her surprise, Bill seemed utterly unfazed by this confession. "Not really," he said. "People have a thousand reasons for intimacy - I’m sure yours were valid in both cases. It’s not as if you act without honour, you know."

Hermione eyed him curiously. "That’s remarkably cosmopolitan of you."

"What can I say? I’m a millenium man." Bill topped off her glass with the remainder of the wine still in the bottle, then took a ruminative sip from his own goblet.

"So," he said. "Do I know this other guy, or not?"

**

Draco was in the Beauxbatons library, working on his History of Magic paper about sorcery in the French Revolution. He had to say this about his new school: their History of Magic professor, Mademoiselle LeBlanc, had old Binns beat hands down.

Of course, since she was a hundred or so years younger, still breathing, and stacked, that wasn’t hard.

Come to think of it, he didn’t have much to complain about - his reception had been cordial, his transition smoother than he could have hoped for. Beauxbatons’ student body could have fit into Hogwarts four times over with room to spare - either the French had a smaller wizarding population than England, or they were more stringent about admission requirements. The campus itself had once been housed in one of the old Norman castles in northern France - "’orrible," Madame Maxime had averred; "’orrible, drafty old place; ve vair rattling about like skeletons" - but had been moved, in recent years, to a magically-constructed and -concealed manor house farther south, in the Tuscan hills. It was beautiful, certainly, and in its own gilded, rococo, throwback-to-Versailles way, every bit as grand as the big Scottish castle. Still, the smaller size meant that getting the lie of the land was relatively easy.

There’d been less competition when it came to Quidditch, too - French schools didn’t have houses, for one thing, which took the competitive edge off - and though his fellow students were undoubtedly elegant fliers, his months of practice head-to-head with Golden-Boy Potter and his fanatic sidekick Weasley stood him in good stead; he had no trouble securing a Seeker position on an intramural team.

He half-expected animosity over this, but the Beauxbatons students - to his face at least - were perfectly civil, perfectly gentil. Many of them came up to him privately, at the start of term, and expressed polite welcome, along with - surreally enough - seemingly genuine regret at the death of Cedric Diggory.

Polite, that was the right word all around. But friendly? He didn’t know if he’d go quite that far.

He was pretty sure they knew about his father - his French was a whole lot better than they thought it was. And pretty sure they knew about Hermione, too; not that the whole bloody world didn’t, by now. What they thought of his role in the whole thing, he wasn’t so certain - but from the looks of it, they’d cast him as some sort of tragic, unlucky-in-love lone wolf … admirable, maybe, and maybe even slightly, vaguely heroic - but not exactly approachable.

Well, whatever.

As soon as he had his diploma, as soon as he could Apparate legally, he’d be in line at Gringotts like that. And after that - after he had the money his grandmother had left for him, Draco thought, his lip curling - he was going to find some place on earth that had never even heard of the name Malfoy; some backward, pissant, one-horse little Godforsaken hole-in-the-wall that thought a ‘wizard’ was another name for a privy, and that ‘Voldemort’ was some sort of runny French cheese.

Lost in grim, satisfied speculation, he heard rustling wings and looked up just in time to avoid being mown down by a rather wobbly brown owl, which slid to a halt next to his notes on the table and immediately began to eye his package of mints hungrily.

Hm, Draco thought. That’s strange - I never get mail.

Well, almost never.

Dumbledore wrote sometimes, probably out of guilt; he’d persuaded Narcissa Malfoy into voluntary detox at St. Mungo’s halfway through the summer holidays - high time, in Draco’s opinion, but still, it put a damper on care packages. Harry and Ron, to Draco’s surprise and their credit, had sent him a box full of the twins’ new fall merchandise, at the very start of term - including their brand-new product Wind To The Wise, a whoopee cushion that not only made a farting noise when sat upon, but stank like old socks and rotting mackerel heads and then continued to offer personalised running commentary on the situation in limerick form, until hexed into silence.

That had been good for a laugh or two, and had even earned him a little momentary popularity in the Quidditch locker rooms.

And then there was Snape - damn him - who had written twice.

Draco had to admit that he actually enjoyed the letters - Snape was as blunt and sarcastic in writing as he was in person - and the missives themselves were long, detailed, and so darkly funny that they couldn’t be read in public. Folded carefully into the sheets of regular parchment, both times, had been a piece of tissue-thin silvery mist; Draco figured Sal could have done the Reverse Perluceo himself, after writing it, but he was sort of glad he hadn’t - seeing it that way made him think nostalgically about the cozy subdungeons, about interminable, hopeless chess matches and comfortable conversation that didn’t sound like the good advice it was until long afterwards.

But this wasn’t from Dumbledore, or Harry, or Snape.

It was from Hermione.

At the realisation, Draco felt elation and anger surge through him in equal parts.

She wrote to me - she remembered, was his first thought, followed closely by That bitch - and just when I was starting to get over her.

Reluctant, yet avid, he turned the card over. The note was brief:

Draco - sorry I’ve not written sooner; I’ve just settled in. Egypt is certainly an adventure! I’m learning Arabic - slowly - and am quite envious that you’ve been let off with French. Hope you’re having a good time at Beauxbatons! Write back.

Yours, Hermione.

Well, that was just lovely, Draco thought. If you were her maiden aunt in Bristol, that is. There wasn’t a single word in it that couldn’t have come out of Postcards for Dummies.

Egypt is certainly an adventure.

I’ll just bet it is, he thought savagely, and before he’d thought about it, had ripped the postcard into two halves in a single vicious motion. The bisected Sphinx - noseless, beardless, time-weathered - stared up at him blind-eyed, its paws forever separated from its chipped-but-noble chin.

Shit, he thought, instantly remorseful, and at the same time heard a small clear voice behind him say in accented but unmistakable English, "Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it?"

Startled - as much by the English as anything else - he spun around. And saw a tiny blonde girl staring disdainfully back at him.

**

Dinner was over, the bottle of wine was empty, and they’d given up on conversation - at least for the moment.

They were kissing instead.

For a moment, Hermione had been half-tempted to spill the whole story about Snape and the Illuminata. Now, she was rather glad she hadn’t - instead, she’d said, "Sometimes I think even I don’t know him," he’d said, "Fair enough," and they’d moved on.

Moved on, that is, to Kissing as a Marathon Event.

"I don’t know if having sex is such a good idea right now," she’d said, forcing herself to look him in the eyes, and he’d shrugged good-naturedly.

"Just kissing, then," he’d said, and paused with his mouth slanted over hers. "No hands. I promise."

He was as good as his word.

They were sandwiched on the couch - had been, for what seemed like hours, like a small eternity - and though she could feel his cock like iron against her thigh, though she herself was tight and itching and irritable with desire, so far they were both playing by the rules: No Touching, Below The Neck.

Hermione thought she might pass out.

When it came to this, she thought foggily, Bill was definitely a classic Type B - more concerned with the journey than the destination. Kissing for him didn’t seem to be a prelude, or a warm-up act - it was the arrival point, a pleasurable end in itself, and there was nothing hurried or perfunctory about it. Rough, tender; teasing, soulful; tongue, teeth - Hermione didn’t know what to expect, be it butterfly or dragon; could only sigh, and close her eyes, and respond.

But as it went on, and on, and on - deep, light, hard, soft, until she was dizzy with it - she found herself beginning to buzz under his lean hard body: let’s have some more of this, chanted her nerve endings in unison; let’s see some hands, feel some skin - let’s trot out the equipment and see if it works, shall we?

She managed to trap one of his thighs between both of hers, managed with a great deal of concerted effort to manouevre herself so that a deep rocking hip-roll would abrade the damp cotton of her underwear against the rougher fabric of his trousers. Technically her gyrations were breaking the rules, but he didn’t discourage them, just chuckled in the middle of his kiss and then turned his head so that his mouth was relocated near to her right ear - a process which grazed her swollen, sensitive lips against the needle-sharp beginnings of his beard, and made her whimper and twist against him in helpless, electrified delight.

He drew his breath in sharply.

"You’re amazing," he said into her ear. "You’re on fire. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen."

Oh, God.

"I want -" She bucked against him, gulped air to clear her fuzzy brain. "I want your hands on me," she said, and felt him breathe another maddening puff of laughter into the quaking centre of her ear.

"Touch you? Pretty girl, I’d burn my hands." He nipped at her earlobe, shifted his thigh into firmer contact with her cotton-covered clit, so that her yelp was lost in a heartfelt groan.

"Oh, yeah," he breathed, and the sheer aching heat-shimmer of that exhalation made her shudder. "You’re nothing but lava - you’ve got bonfires under your skin, can’t you feel them? You’re wet to your knees, you’re going to blow sky-high, and I’m going to lie right here and watch you do it; it’s not every day a man gets to make a goddess beg."

Jesus, why hadn’t anyone told her how hot it was to talk?

She was thrashing, she was twisting. She couldn’t get away from him, either the hard delicious press of his knee into that soft melting scorch that she wanted to touch but couldn’t, or the insidious torment of his words, a whisper so intimate, so close to her ear, that they seemed to have originated inside her own head, a siren call from her own most primeval desires. She scratched at him, and he captured her wrists over her head - oh, yesssss - and then it was even better, struggling that wasn’t a struggle, fighting him because the fight felt as good, or better than, anything else.

He liked it, too - was revelling in it - "do it, go ahead," he urged; "if you want it, then take it -" And she did want it, she did, because at the end of the press and push, at the end of the strain upwards against that firm gentle maddening pressure, against the soft inflammation of his words, there was clear sky and fireworks and dancing on jet streams, the long silver swan-dive off the face of the earth.

The ravenous, pacing beast within her flattened its ears, bobbed on its haunches. Get ready. Get set.

Go.

She took the jump with her eyes wide open.

**

It was much, much later; they were still entwined on the sofa. Bill hadn’t said anything for a while, and his … um, tumescence … seemed to have abated somewhat; Hermione guessed that he was probably asleep.

He was a bit heavy. Cautiously, so as not to wake him, she shifted the side of her body in which she’d lost feeling - and then froze, distracted completely from that tingly needly sensation by the heavy, smooth something brushing the side of her breast, underneath her dress.

Even before her hand flew to her neck - even before she felt the silver chain that hadn’t been there an hour ago - even before her questing fingers touched jade, she knew exactly what it was.

Sekhmet had decided to join the party.

**