Roman Holiday

Chapter Fifty

The minute Lucius Malfoy’s robes cleared his study door, Dumbledore dropped the half-eaten Sugar Quill. “Close the door, Severus, and sit down,” he said; his blue eyes had gone instantly from dreamy to sharp, making him look very much like a powerful wizard and not like Saint Nicholas at all.

He also appeared to be a bit put out, Hermione noted, which explained at least partially why he seemed bigger than he had a moment ago. “Stay there,” he said to her and to Draco. “I want some answers, and I want them from all three of you.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then turned on them the full force of his steely regard.

“Miss Granger, Mr. Malfoy,” he said. “I’ve been the recipient of some extremely interesting stories regarding the two of you.” He looked grudgingly amused. “In the light of current events, I think the most relevant one was brought to me a few weeks ago by Mr. Filch, concerning his cat Mrs. Norris. You are acquainted with Mrs. Norris, I trust?”

They nodded, trying very hard not to look at each other.

“Filch claims,” Dumbledore said thoughtfully, “that the two of you - particularly you, Miss Granger - attacked his cat in the trophy room, and transported her by the use of magic to the library entrance, some hours later.” He studied them intently. “There wouldn’t happen to be any truth to that, would there?”

“I … um …” Hermione chose her words carefully. “I wouldn’t call what happened with the cat an attack, Professor,” she said. “Certainly we had an encounter - but to the best of my knowledge, Mrs. Norris never left the trophy room.”

Well, that much was true, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Sal said she’d been stuck in a time loop there, the whole time?

“Hm.” Dumbledore twirled a strand of his long silky beard between his fingers and spent a full minute in its examination - presumably he was looking for split ends. “Odd. From what Mr. Filch described, the cat definitely went missing in the trophy room, and ended up, rather abruptly, on the third floor. Not only that, but they lost touch for, as I said before, a period of some hours - and as I’m sure you’ve ascertained by now, he and Mrs. Norris are telepathically linked. He was quite frantic, you know, when he lost the connection. Certain she had met with some fatal accident.”

Hermione felt an immediate stab of guilt, which was exacerbated by Draco’s muffled snicker. “How terrible for him,” she said politely, hoping that whatever she was feeling wasn’t finding its way to her face. “But how fortunate that the incident wasn’t tragic, after all.”

“Fortunate,” Dumbledore mused. “Yes, I think fortunate is a very good word, Miss Granger.” His eyes went even sharper. “To the best of my knowledge, there is only one magical incantation that would produce this effect. And it is not contained in The Standard Book of Spells. In fact,” and here he leaned back in his chair, seemingly to peruse the ceiling, “this particular spell that I’m thinking of hasn’t been used, or for that matter, allowed, in the magical community for at least eight hundred years.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Draco, “but how do you know it, then?”

A muffled sound from Snape’s armchair followed this borderline-impertinent verbal salvo. Hermione tried not to stare.

Genuine laughter from Snape? Twice? In one day? Without benefit of magical assistance?

The world was coming to an end.

“It’s the sort of knowledge, Mr. Malfoy,” Dumbledore said in uncharacteristically astringent tones, “that is passed down to one verbally, from a mentor. I happened to hear it as a wizard’s apprentice, well after I’d left school. I had believed, however, that I was the last wizard left in Britain to possess the knowledge - for reasons of my own, I chose not to pass it down myself.”

He looked sharply at Snape. “You don’t know the Entrapment Spell, Severus,” he said. “Lucius doesn’t, either - that much is clear - and I’ll wager even Voldemort himself never uncovered it, in his descent to the Dark. It’s far too useful; he would have tipped that particular hand of his during the last war. So where,” and now his gaze shot back to Hermione, steely-blue eyes fixed with slightly stricken brown ones, “did these two pick it up?”

It couldn’t be easy, Hermione reflected, for someone as generally omniscient as Albus Dumbledore, to find himself in the position of wanting to know information that was being deliberately withheld.

She almost felt sorry for him.

And if she could have spilled the Entrapment secret without implicating Sal, she would have. But it was one thing for Snape to find out about Slytherin by following her. It was quite another to sit in the Headmaster’s office and voluntarily give up his location to Central Administration.

So she looked straight into Dumbledore’s Blue Willow gaze, and opened her mouth to lie for the second time.

She was interrupted by a familiar, but completely unexpected, voice behind her.

“Where did they pick it up, you ask?” Sal said crisply from the corner. “Why, from me, of course.”

**

“That,” Hermione said fervently, “was surreal.”

Lunch was Mulligan stew and crusty, hard-skinned rolls that reminded her of Italy. She tore one apart with some effort and doctored it with a quarter-inch of unsalted butter. Across from her, Draco was eating with the same fervour and intensity: they’d had a full morning, after all, and neither one of them had gone down for breakfast.

They were sitting together at the Gryffindor table, ignoring the open stares of the three Hufflepuffs and two Ravenclaws who were staying at Hogwarts for the holidays. The Great Hall was warm and fragrant with pine and suffused with soft gray light - high above them, the enchanted sky-ceiling was thick with snowflakes as big as their fingertips.

They’d pulled off the Entrapment, they’d flown the bird to Voldemort, they’d ruined Lucius Malfoy’s holidays, giving Snape a good and much-needed laugh in the process, and they’d managed to leave the Headmaster’s office without turning over either information about the pendant or the pendant itself.

In a week’s time they’d have the best chemistry set the British pound could buy, which gave them a reasonable shot at perfecting their Protection Potion.

They no longer needed to conceal from Dumbledore their visits to Sal - as might have been predicted, those two had hit it off very well indeed. (Judging from Dumbledore’s absence at the Head Table, they were probably still yukking it up, up in his study.)

And the Mulligan stew was excellent.

All in all, life was good … so good, in fact, that past a nod of agreement from Draco - it certainly had been a strange morning - neither of them felt the urge to talk at all. Hermione sent a cheery wave to the gawping Hufflepuffs, grinned at a shocked-looking Minerva McGonagall, and tucked into her second roll.

Thank God for the holidays.

**

There was still the matter of dealing with the sapphire pendant. The passage of time didn’t affect the emotions contained in an Entrapment receptacle - Hermione could handle the gold chain all she wanted to, but every time the sapphire itself brushed her skin, she found herself shuddering as if a dementor had just slipped up behind her and run its icy, scabbed hands down her bare arms.

In the end, she’d wrapped the pendant back up in its velvet bag and sewn it into an inside pocket of her robes - to get it out again would take a pair of shears or a Severing Charm, and the thick pile of the velvet contained the worst of the emotions spinning off the surface of the sapphire. She could wear the thing all day and not be terribly affected by it; by the same token, she’d know immediately if it were gone.

So when she opened her Christmas present from Draco, on the morning of the twenty-fifth, and saw a familiar blue glow winking back up at her from the contents of the jewelry box, she had to stifle a scream.

“Is it - is it - how did you -“

“Don’t look so scared,” he said with a hint of patrician drawl. “It’s a Replica - and one that I made before the start of the holidays, so we wouldn’t have two sets of Death-Eater wannabes running around. Nicked it right after you Released Mrs. Norris, a couple of weeks ago, then put it back in your jewelry case.” He sounded rather pleased with himself.

They were still in bed, eating Chocolate Frogs instead of going down to breakfast, in Hermione’s room in Gryffindor Tower - Hermione in a white cotton-eyelet nightdress; Draco in nothing but the soft gray-green cashmere scarf and gloves (mail-order from Hermès; Hermione wasn’t imaginative when it came to gifts, but she wasn’t cheap either) she’d given him for Christmas, looking like a naughty young Oscar Wilde - or the wizarding world’s answer to Playgirl. Hermione picked up the charm bracelet again and examined it more carefully.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “Perfect.” She touched each finely-wrought silver charm wonderingly - a tiny witch’s hat, a miniature cauldron, a wand the size of a matchstick, a small silver cat with topaz eyes that stretched and purred under her touch.

And, of course, the sapphire. She closed her fingers around it and felt no fear, no nausea, only a cool blue stone.

“Perfect,” she said again. Draco beamed.

“The wand’s yours, too,” he said. Hermione looked at him sharply.

“You Replicated my wand?”

“Replicated and Reduced,” he said cheerfully. “And plated in silver. Still works, though. I thought you could use it as a penlight.”

“Huh.” Hermione gripped the tiny wand carefully between two fingers. “Lumos,” she said, and grinned as a sliver of light shot out of its end. “Cool.” She petted the tiny cat again, then shot him a suspicious look. “You didn’t - I mean, that’s not -“

“Crookshanks? No.” Draco chucked the real Crookshanks under his fuzzy orange chin. “The bracelet came with the hat, the cat, and the cauldron. I had them add two more fasteners so I could customise it a bit.”

“Clever,” she said admiringly, and clasped the silver bracelet around her right wrist. “I’ll never take it off.”

“I rather hope,” Draco said, “that the same sentiment doesn’t apply to that bit of lace you’re wearing.”

**

The gleam in his eye told her that he was planning something, but it wasn’t until she’d complied with his request to remove her nightdress that she figured out what it was.

“Turn around,” he said, and gently smoothed back the curls from her forehead. “Close your eyes.”

The cashmere scarf looped around her head and settled there, light as a dream. He tied it off behind her head.

“Can you see?”

“No,” Hermione said truthfully, and heard him laugh as he eased her back down to the pillows.

“Good.”

A moment later, she realized he hadn’t taken off his gloves.

Oh … he must have been planning this ever since he opened the box, Hermione thought hazily, then surrendered thought to sensation. He brought her arms gently up over her head, and she obediently held them there, even when he trailed his fingertips down her inner arms to the sensitive skin of her sides, even when those soft wool gloves found her nipples and squeezed … gently, gently, then harder and harder with a hint of twist, calculated seductive cruelty overlaid with a cashmere patina of tenderness. Oh, God, how it felt - his mouth, his hands, his lips, his tongue, his teeth - and not to see it coming, oh, that was the most maddening thing of all, every caress a bolt out of the blue specifically designed to make her quiver and gasp and twist her body blindly toward where the next one might come from.

Over and over, touch on touch, and she could almost see those caresses piling up on her bare skin, like a canvas overloaded with paint. Killing her, one brushstroke at a time, drawing out her soul whisper by whisper … and those sounds, were they hers, those broken whimpers and pleadings, those breathy name-callings and pleas and exhortations that he so laughingly disregarded?

Oh, she was going to die, she really was.

And then the hands were tugging at her, shaping her, pulling her up so that her knees sank into the comforter-covered mattress and all the blood in her body rushed immediately to her swollen, needy pudenda and the tips of her aching, well-tended-to breasts. He came up behind her then, strong and warm and oh-so-sure of himself, his hands slipping around to knead those pulsing nipples, his teeth nipping at the bare nape of her neck as she arched and bowed and bucked back to take him and it slid in, oh God, so sweetly, such a sweet sweet stretch, and why did it feel so different this way, and what had he been reading, that he knew about this stuff?

And it was slow, oh, slow, and he pulled her up and stretched her out and she flowed into his hands like wet clay for the shaping, pressing her body into those soft expensively-gloved hands and panting for breath, repeating in a throaty garbled voice the whispered endearments he hissed in her ear, and moaning as he rewarded her obedience with a deeper thrust, a new caress.

And then his clever artist’s fingers in their two-hundred-dollar gloves found her aching, distended nub of a clitoris and began to twirl it like a lariat, and Hermione felt herself implode, crying and twisting and then curiously, rigidly stiff, arms splayed back and tremors racing down her spine and blood pounding so hard in her ears it sounded like ocean surf, as all of the soft parts of her body went liquid around him and she headed full-speed into the Little Death.

It was a few minutes before she came back to consciousness long enough to realize that he was still inside her.

He had collapsed back-first onto the bed, rolling over and taking her with him. She was sprawled on top of him, and he was most definitely still interested. Languidly, she reached up and ripped off the blindfold. He grinned up at her.

“Take your time,” he said, and hissed through his teeth as her hips rotated in a teasing circle around him. “I told Dobby to bring lunch up around one o’ clock - there’s no good reason we should have to leave this room today.”

“Good to know,” Hermione said, and leaned down to kiss him.

Revenge, in this case anyway, was undeniably sweet.

**