chapter eight: instincts
One weekend in November found them sitting on top of the crop of rocks on the part of the lakeshore that they had claimed for themselves and their flying practices.
Weasley was bundled up in a scarf and gloves, a jumper and a cloak, while Draco sat next to her, shirtless and shivering. His wings were spread out behind him, trying to capture as much sun as possible in order to dry faster.
These experiments would soon be impossible as winter approached. Draco was just as susceptible to the cold weather in his Veela form as he was in his human form. Sitting next to Weasley, her thigh pressed against his, generated just enough heat within him to keep him comfortable, but the combination of the frosty air and damp skin made his wings ache. On top of that, the lake would freeze over soon, and Draco did not fancy falling feet or face first into solid ice.
“You’re getting better at staying in this form,” Weasley observed.
In the beginning, it didn’t take long after Draco crashed and fell into the water for him to involuntarily transform back into his human shape, as if the water had reversed the magic that turned him into a beast. Now, he was able to remain a Veela long enough to dry off. As soon as he was dry, however, he transformed back.
Draco was frustrated with the lack of progress, but most of his frustration could be credited to the lack of control. He still had moments when his anger got the best of him and triggered the transformation. For instance, during an argument with a classmate in a corridor or after discovering new messages calling him a monster painted on a wall. But those moments were dwindling as Draco learned to avoid confrontation and as his anger transformed into defeat.
He still had nightmares about fires and lurking beasts. He had yet to decipher their meaning, but sometimes he woke up with wings and claws and shredded sheets. He missed breakfast those mornings because it took too long to calm down enough to suppress the Veela. If this happened on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, Weasley would meet him in Charms with some toast and a handful of bacon.
The uncertainty of when he might transform and how long it would take him to transform back nearly drove Draco mad. He felt as though he was in a constant state of anticipation and on the verge of doing something reckless.
He still didn’t understand why Weasley stuck by him, especially if she was a compatible mate. There was no compulsion on her part to be with him, not like the bond Draco felt toward her. Sure, she’d given him an explanation months ago, but she had gone above and beyond the kind of help Draco had asked for. She’d fulfilled her part of the bargain and then some. Draco could not have asked anything more of her and never had. She volunteered her time and attention without Draco requesting them.
Despite his inability to understand her obligation to him, he was relieved—no, more than that… glad—that she continued to join him for flying practice and to conduct research with him in the library. He was even grateful to Granger. No matter how much she hated him, no matter how often she insisted she helped him for Weasley’s sake, Draco was indebted to her.
“I wish I could do more,” Draco said after a long pause.
“Hm?”
“I wish I could control it. When it happens; how long I’m like this.” He gestured to himself, which drew her gaze. The comfortable heat under his skin intensified as she eyed his bare chest before looking up at his face. She turned back to the water quickly, her hair whipping over her shoulder with the sudden movement.
“Have you tried following your instincts instead of suppressing them?”
They looked at each other again, twin expressions of confusion burrowed in their brow, for neither of them had spoken.
“Luna?” Weasley climbed to her feet to peer over the side of the rocks opposite the clearing they used as their base for flying practice.
Draco tucked his wings in close, but he couldn’t do anything to hide how they loomed over his shoulders. His face, too, was impossible to hide while his clothes were down in the clearing, sitting on a lower rock.
Lovegood stepped back far enough to be seen over the brush she’d been digging through and waved. “Hullo!”
“What are you doing here?” Weasley asked. “Did you follow us?”
“No, I’ve been searching for gurdyroots around the edges of the lake because they typically grow near water. I quite miss having an infusion of gurdyroot with my breakfast.”
“What does that ward away? Lunacy?” Draco asked with a roll of his eyes.
Weasley glared and elbowed him.
“Gurdyroots don’t have magical properties, silly! I just like the taste. An infusion a day cleanses the bowels straight away, you know!”
“I wish I didn’t,” Draco muttered.
This time Weasley snorted. “Meet us on this side, will you?”
They climbed down from the rocks while Lovegood went around them, until they were all in the clearing together. Now Draco could see the basket Lovegood was carrying, which was filled with various root vegetables of disparate size and color.
“Did you know about this?” Draco shrugged his shoulders to indicate his wings, which opened and closed tetchily and of their own accord.
Lovegood tilted her head, her bulbous eyes on Draco. “About what?”
He stared incomprehensibly at her for a moment. “The wings? The beak? The fact that I’m barely human?”
“No. I just found out about it right now.”
Draco closed his eyes, his patience already wearing thin. This was why he preferred spending time with Granger and Weasley when Lovegood wasn’t around. She also seemed to irk Granger to the same degree, and as much as Draco enjoyed watching Lovegood obliviously push Granger’s buttons, Granger became insufferable when Lovegood was being herself.
Granger wasn’t around now, of course, which meant Draco couldn’t get any enjoyment out of Lovegood’s erratic behavior.
Weasley seemed to sense Draco’s short tether on his sanity because she stepped in—physically and verbally. “Then why did you say that? About Draco’s instincts.”
Lovegood shrugged. “I find magic works best when you do what it wants instead of forcing it to your will. You should try it sometime.”
“How in Slytherin’s name am I supposed to do that?” Draco asked.
“It’s harder for people like you, people who use magic as a tool instead of letting yourself be the tool for magic to use. Once you let go of the idea that you are in charge, it’s easy. It just happens. You don’t even have to think about it. And—” Lovegood leaned in, her voice lowering. Draco and Weasley couldn’t help but move closer to her as well. “You don’t even need to use a wand.”
“But that’s what a wand is for. If we don’t channel and control the magic, it becomes unpredictable and explosive.”
Lovegood was already shaking her head before Draco finished speaking. The expression on her face said, You poor sod! Don’t you know anything?
“You don’t need the wand to channel it. You just need to trust the magic to do the right thing. I saw you fall off those rocks over there; it’s the same idea. You’re not following your instincts because you don’t trust yourself or your wings. You’ll never fly if you don’t trust yourself not to fall.”
“Luna,” Weasley said, mouth falling open in admiration. “How do you know these things?”
A frown carved itself in Lovegood’s forehead. Her brows knit together in disapproval. “Because no one pays attention to their instincts anymore. When I do it, people call me Loony. Everyone would be able to fulfill their potential if they only listened to me!”
Draco shook his head in confusion as Lovegood—clearly offended, but by what, Draco couldn’t fathom—marched back to the other side of the rocks, presumably to continue her gurdyroot hunt. He and Weasley looked at each other, matching speculative expressions on their faces.
“I’m done falling for today,” he said. He was one fall away from giving up on flying, but this—whatever this was about to be—was his last-ditch effort to accomplish something.
Weasley nodded, seemingly understanding what Draco was saying. She sat down on one of the low rocks next to his dry clothes, her chin perched on her fist as she waited for him.
Draco drew closer to the water’s edge, stopping only when his feet met icy dirt. Closing his eyes, he straightened his back and took a deep breath, concentrating on how the breath felt when he sucked it in and then expelled it. He kept his hands loose at his sides, and with each breath more of his body relaxed.
He didn’t know what he was doing; he was just following his instincts.
Inspired by his dreams, he imagined a tiny flame flickering inside himself but growing bigger with each pull of air into his lungs. He imagined his magic living inside that flame, his life, his love, everything important to him but intangible.
The flame grew. It didn’t know where to go. It brushed against his internal edges, testing its boundaries, searching for a road to follow. So he imagined one within his veins and nudged that growing inferno toward the highways of his arteries. The flame took to its new path and curiously explored it.
Draco continued to breathe in and out, steady, controlled. He no longer felt the cold pressing against his naked torso. In fact, he had stopped shivering. The water that lapped against his feet felt as balmy as bath water.
A new sensation figured into the calculation of his growing instinct: a touch on his shoulder. Weasley’s hand.
“Draco,” she said, voice awed and soft, full of wonder.
His eyes opened.
His hands were on fire, but he didn’t feel the flames. His skin didn’t bake and peel. He was whole and he was a conflagration.
The beast from his dreams—realized.
As he raised one of his hands, the fire that surrounded it concentrated into a ball. Following his instincts, he drew his arm back and threw it like Quaffle, and the fireball sailed twenty feet over the lake, only to be extinguished when it touched the water.
“Well,” Weasley said as she looked up at him with shining eyes, “I guess you do have all the same powers as a full-blooded Veela.”
Drained and distracted by her proximity, the cold began to encroach on the heat he had generated, sending goosebumps up and down his exposed skin.
Weasley led him out of the water, her hands running over his arms, his shoulders, his wings, lingering within his palms as if to check that the fire had truly gone out. He assumed her touch was meant to be soothing, and in a way it was. In another way it just ignited him again.
He brushed her cheek with his cool fingers, prompting her to stop. “Weasley, I—”
“Oh, don’t mind me! I think I dropped some gurdyroots over here earlier. I just need to get those back.”
Draco and Weasley broke apart, almost guiltily, as Lovegood clambered through the bushes into the clearing again.
“Excuse me. I think you’re standing on my gurdyroot,” she said to Draco before shoving him aside. “Oh, no, that’s just a rock.”
Weasley snorted, which escalated into a giggle, and then full-blown laughter.
Draco watched as Lovegood walked around while peering at her feet, searching for her lost root vegetables. And then he couldn’t help it either—peals of laughter spilled out of his mouth, entwining with Weasley’s and echoing across the clearing.
Lovegood looked up in outrage. “Missing gurdyroots are no laughing matter!”
And then she disappeared back into the brush with a huff.
December descended upon Hogwarts with record-breaking accumulations of snow. The Hogwarts professors took advantage of the terrible weather by over-preparing their students for the Christmas holidays and loading them down with enough homework to distract them from the outside world they were missing out on.
Draco and Weasley had not had flying practice in weeks, not since the day Draco had created the fireballs in his palms. Instead, all of their free time was spent in the library revising for midterm exams that would be held hours before departing Hogwarts for Christmas.
Draco was in the middle of trying not to think about the upcoming holiday. He had already informed his mother that he would not be returning home, and the letter she had sent him in return had indicated he had made the best choice, even if she hadn’t said such in quite so many words.
He assumed Weasley would spend Christmas at home. Pansy of course planned to stay with him at Hogwarts, but Weasley’s absence would make the holiday in some ways agonizing. He itched underneath his skin every time he thought about being away from her, and that wasn’t necessarily a reaction borne from the bond between them.
Over the last three months, they had spent an inordinate amount of time together, whether in the library or out on the lake learning how to fall. He had grown… accustomed to her. That’s all it was, all it could be: good old fashioned familiarity. Draco would never say he was fond of her, because that would be downright absurd and it wasn’t true. So what if he laughed when he was with her? So what if he forgot what he was when they were together? Ginny Weasley did not make Draco feel like a monster. Instead, the sparkle he occasionally saw in her eyes as she regarded him made him feel like a miracle.
He didn’t deserve that kind of attention, but he craved it all the same. And he would miss it while she was away for the holiday.
Granger’s head popped up from where it had been resting in her arms on the table. “I forgot the incantation, Professor!” she cried, blinking sleep away owlishly.
Almost immediately, an admonishing Shhhhhhhh! came from the stacks. A split-second later, Madam Pince poked her head around a bookshelf to glare at their party.
Granger blinked some more as her grogginess faded and she realized she had fallen asleep while revising. She pulled her textbook up in front of her and lowered her head, her bushy hair and red forehead the only part of her visible.
Pansy stifled a snicker behind her own book, which wasn’t like her at all. She was normally quite open with her mockery. Draco didn’t dwell on that thought long, because the only one at the table who didn’t laugh at Granger was Weasley, who was frowning at a letter she had received at breakfast that morning.
“Has something happened?” Draco asked, his own amusement dying at the worry that crossed her face.
She sighed and laid the letter flat on the table. “I contacted the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures to inquire about any Veela that might have associated with your family.”
Granger peeked over her book, her blush well under control now. “Did they find something?”
“They wouldn’t talk to me. I asked Fleur to see if she could get some answers for me—I didn’t tell her about you, though.”
Draco nodded. By now he trusted her to be discreet.
“They did find something.”
“A link to a Veela in the Black family?” asked Longbottom, who had been informed of Draco’s condition soon after Lovegood had found out. At that point, hiding the secret from the last member of the group had seemed more difficult than just telling him, and Draco hadn’t trusted Lovegood not to blurt out the secret to Longbottom accidentally anyway.
“No,” Weasley said uneasily.
She met his gaze and searched his face for permission to continue.
“It’s fine,” he assured her. “We’ve all come this far. Go ahead.” Despite giving his consent, Draco still felt himself defensively building walls. His Occlumency shields snapped into place, even though there was no one left in the castle proficient in Legilimency anymore. His body straightened and tensed, bracing for impact. It all happened automatically, without Draco having to think about it.
Weasley sighed again, bolstering herself for the news she was about to deliver. “There is a Veela tied to your family but not the Black side of it.”
“The Malfoys?” Pansy said. “But, Draco, your father—”
No, Lucius Malfoy’s reaction made perfect sense now. The anger, the disgust, the unwillingness to speak about Draco’s transformations. His father hadn’t been angry that he had been duped into marrying into an impure bloodline. The secret of his own bloodline being tainted was in danger of being revealed by Draco displaying the traits and powers of a Veela. The very possibility had threatened Lucius, causing him to lash out. Of course he would be disgusted by Draco.
“What’s the connection?” he asked, his voice sounding distant and strange.
Weasley only had eyes for him. Her compassion rankled, but Draco wouldn’t revoke his permission. He was right; they had all spent too much time researching this topic to let Granger and Pansy’s curiosity go unresolved. Why not let Lovegood and Longbottom in on his dark family secret, too? Why not tell the whole world at this point?
“A complaint was filed with the Being Division in 1954. An old Veela, the leader of her tribe, appeared at Malfoy Manor claiming that Abraxas Malfoy had stolen her daughter and killed her. She would not leave Malfoy property until someone from the Ministry came and took her away. But before she left, she spoke a curse over your family.”
Lovegood gasped. “What kind of curse? Veela magic is extremely powerful, especially when used for acts of vengeance!”
Ginny pushed the letter toward the center of the table, and everyone leaned in to read it.
Draco scanned through Delacour’s letter until he found the part Weasley was talking about. According to whatever information Delacour had obtained from the Ministry, the curse had been one of reclamation. The Malfoys had stolen what was most important to the Veela and her tribe, so the curse would claim that life back from them. Draco read through the rest of the letter, but it didn’t explain what the curse meant.
He looked up to find Weasley frowning at him, not in displeasure, but with sympathy. “Your father was two months old at the time. He was mentioned in the report filed at the Ministry because the nanny had been distraught by the disturbance. I don’t want to speculate about something like this, but Nature’s Nobility mentioned that your grandfather and grandmother married in 1955….”
Draco didn’t see her point. “So?”
Weasley stared at him long and hard, with resolve, before saying, “Your grandparents were brunets, according to their portraits in Nature’s Nobility.”
“Yes, I remember their hair colors,” he snapped.
“Just spit it out, Weasley,” Pansy said. Her face had lost all its color, and she, too, looked as haunted as Weasley, as if she knew where this story was going.
“I could be wrong, all right? We’d need to do more research or make some more inquiries with the Ministry…. But I think your paternal grandmother was a Veela. Then she died, maybe in childbirth, and your Veela great-grandmother laid a curse on your family that would claim a life to replace the one lost. Your grandfather then married and passed off his wife as your father’s mother. I think the curse has claimed you. Maybe instead of killing you in order to claim your life, it turned you into a Veela, claiming your humanity instead.”
Granger sat up straighter, her book shield forgotten. “That’s quite a stretch for a single letter full of second- and third-hand information.”
But Draco felt the truth of it as surely as he felt the draw towards Weasley. There was something deep in his gut, in his blood, something primal and instinctual that sang after hearing Delacour’s findings. Draco had been cursed, his whole family had. He had been chosen for a reason he didn’t understand to deliver justice for a Veela tribe’s loss. A human life taken; a Veela life gained. Replaced. Had his great-grandmother understood that the curse would activate in this way?
“Draco, you’ve gone completely pale,” Pansy said, a note of alarm in her voice as she touched Draco’s cheeks.
He ducked away from her hands and stood. “I’m fine,” he lied. “In fact, I’m superb. So superb, I’m going to go do something else now.”
As he stumbled away from the table, he heard Pansy tell someone that he needed to be alone.
Too right. Alone. That’s exactly what Draco needed to be. How did Pansy always know?
One weekend in November found them sitting on top of the crop of rocks on the part of the lakeshore that they had claimed for themselves and their flying practices.
Weasley was bundled up in a scarf and gloves, a jumper and a cloak, while Draco sat next to her, shirtless and shivering. His wings were spread out behind him, trying to capture as much sun as possible in order to dry faster.
These experiments would soon be impossible as winter approached. Draco was just as susceptible to the cold weather in his Veela form as he was in his human form. Sitting next to Weasley, her thigh pressed against his, generated just enough heat within him to keep him comfortable, but the combination of the frosty air and damp skin made his wings ache. On top of that, the lake would freeze over soon, and Draco did not fancy falling feet or face first into solid ice.
“You’re getting better at staying in this form,” Weasley observed.
In the beginning, it didn’t take long after Draco crashed and fell into the water for him to involuntarily transform back into his human shape, as if the water had reversed the magic that turned him into a beast. Now, he was able to remain a Veela long enough to dry off. As soon as he was dry, however, he transformed back.
Draco was frustrated with the lack of progress, but most of his frustration could be credited to the lack of control. He still had moments when his anger got the best of him and triggered the transformation. For instance, during an argument with a classmate in a corridor or after discovering new messages calling him a monster painted on a wall. But those moments were dwindling as Draco learned to avoid confrontation and as his anger transformed into defeat.
He still had nightmares about fires and lurking beasts. He had yet to decipher their meaning, but sometimes he woke up with wings and claws and shredded sheets. He missed breakfast those mornings because it took too long to calm down enough to suppress the Veela. If this happened on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, Weasley would meet him in Charms with some toast and a handful of bacon.
The uncertainty of when he might transform and how long it would take him to transform back nearly drove Draco mad. He felt as though he was in a constant state of anticipation and on the verge of doing something reckless.
He still didn’t understand why Weasley stuck by him, especially if she was a compatible mate. There was no compulsion on her part to be with him, not like the bond Draco felt toward her. Sure, she’d given him an explanation months ago, but she had gone above and beyond the kind of help Draco had asked for. She’d fulfilled her part of the bargain and then some. Draco could not have asked anything more of her and never had. She volunteered her time and attention without Draco requesting them.
Despite his inability to understand her obligation to him, he was relieved—no, more than that… glad—that she continued to join him for flying practice and to conduct research with him in the library. He was even grateful to Granger. No matter how much she hated him, no matter how often she insisted she helped him for Weasley’s sake, Draco was indebted to her.
“I wish I could do more,” Draco said after a long pause.
“Hm?”
“I wish I could control it. When it happens; how long I’m like this.” He gestured to himself, which drew her gaze. The comfortable heat under his skin intensified as she eyed his bare chest before looking up at his face. She turned back to the water quickly, her hair whipping over her shoulder with the sudden movement.
“Have you tried following your instincts instead of suppressing them?”
They looked at each other again, twin expressions of confusion burrowed in their brow, for neither of them had spoken.
“Luna?” Weasley climbed to her feet to peer over the side of the rocks opposite the clearing they used as their base for flying practice.
Draco tucked his wings in close, but he couldn’t do anything to hide how they loomed over his shoulders. His face, too, was impossible to hide while his clothes were down in the clearing, sitting on a lower rock.
Lovegood stepped back far enough to be seen over the brush she’d been digging through and waved. “Hullo!”
“What are you doing here?” Weasley asked. “Did you follow us?”
“No, I’ve been searching for gurdyroots around the edges of the lake because they typically grow near water. I quite miss having an infusion of gurdyroot with my breakfast.”
“What does that ward away? Lunacy?” Draco asked with a roll of his eyes.
Weasley glared and elbowed him.
“Gurdyroots don’t have magical properties, silly! I just like the taste. An infusion a day cleanses the bowels straight away, you know!”
“I wish I didn’t,” Draco muttered.
This time Weasley snorted. “Meet us on this side, will you?”
They climbed down from the rocks while Lovegood went around them, until they were all in the clearing together. Now Draco could see the basket Lovegood was carrying, which was filled with various root vegetables of disparate size and color.
“Did you know about this?” Draco shrugged his shoulders to indicate his wings, which opened and closed tetchily and of their own accord.
Lovegood tilted her head, her bulbous eyes on Draco. “About what?”
He stared incomprehensibly at her for a moment. “The wings? The beak? The fact that I’m barely human?”
“No. I just found out about it right now.”
Draco closed his eyes, his patience already wearing thin. This was why he preferred spending time with Granger and Weasley when Lovegood wasn’t around. She also seemed to irk Granger to the same degree, and as much as Draco enjoyed watching Lovegood obliviously push Granger’s buttons, Granger became insufferable when Lovegood was being herself.
Granger wasn’t around now, of course, which meant Draco couldn’t get any enjoyment out of Lovegood’s erratic behavior.
Weasley seemed to sense Draco’s short tether on his sanity because she stepped in—physically and verbally. “Then why did you say that? About Draco’s instincts.”
Lovegood shrugged. “I find magic works best when you do what it wants instead of forcing it to your will. You should try it sometime.”
“How in Slytherin’s name am I supposed to do that?” Draco asked.
“It’s harder for people like you, people who use magic as a tool instead of letting yourself be the tool for magic to use. Once you let go of the idea that you are in charge, it’s easy. It just happens. You don’t even have to think about it. And—” Lovegood leaned in, her voice lowering. Draco and Weasley couldn’t help but move closer to her as well. “You don’t even need to use a wand.”
“But that’s what a wand is for. If we don’t channel and control the magic, it becomes unpredictable and explosive.”
Lovegood was already shaking her head before Draco finished speaking. The expression on her face said, You poor sod! Don’t you know anything?
“You don’t need the wand to channel it. You just need to trust the magic to do the right thing. I saw you fall off those rocks over there; it’s the same idea. You’re not following your instincts because you don’t trust yourself or your wings. You’ll never fly if you don’t trust yourself not to fall.”
“Luna,” Weasley said, mouth falling open in admiration. “How do you know these things?”
A frown carved itself in Lovegood’s forehead. Her brows knit together in disapproval. “Because no one pays attention to their instincts anymore. When I do it, people call me Loony. Everyone would be able to fulfill their potential if they only listened to me!”
Draco shook his head in confusion as Lovegood—clearly offended, but by what, Draco couldn’t fathom—marched back to the other side of the rocks, presumably to continue her gurdyroot hunt. He and Weasley looked at each other, matching speculative expressions on their faces.
“I’m done falling for today,” he said. He was one fall away from giving up on flying, but this—whatever this was about to be—was his last-ditch effort to accomplish something.
Weasley nodded, seemingly understanding what Draco was saying. She sat down on one of the low rocks next to his dry clothes, her chin perched on her fist as she waited for him.
Draco drew closer to the water’s edge, stopping only when his feet met icy dirt. Closing his eyes, he straightened his back and took a deep breath, concentrating on how the breath felt when he sucked it in and then expelled it. He kept his hands loose at his sides, and with each breath more of his body relaxed.
He didn’t know what he was doing; he was just following his instincts.
Inspired by his dreams, he imagined a tiny flame flickering inside himself but growing bigger with each pull of air into his lungs. He imagined his magic living inside that flame, his life, his love, everything important to him but intangible.
The flame grew. It didn’t know where to go. It brushed against his internal edges, testing its boundaries, searching for a road to follow. So he imagined one within his veins and nudged that growing inferno toward the highways of his arteries. The flame took to its new path and curiously explored it.
Draco continued to breathe in and out, steady, controlled. He no longer felt the cold pressing against his naked torso. In fact, he had stopped shivering. The water that lapped against his feet felt as balmy as bath water.
A new sensation figured into the calculation of his growing instinct: a touch on his shoulder. Weasley’s hand.
“Draco,” she said, voice awed and soft, full of wonder.
His eyes opened.
His hands were on fire, but he didn’t feel the flames. His skin didn’t bake and peel. He was whole and he was a conflagration.
The beast from his dreams—realized.
As he raised one of his hands, the fire that surrounded it concentrated into a ball. Following his instincts, he drew his arm back and threw it like Quaffle, and the fireball sailed twenty feet over the lake, only to be extinguished when it touched the water.
“Well,” Weasley said as she looked up at him with shining eyes, “I guess you do have all the same powers as a full-blooded Veela.”
Drained and distracted by her proximity, the cold began to encroach on the heat he had generated, sending goosebumps up and down his exposed skin.
Weasley led him out of the water, her hands running over his arms, his shoulders, his wings, lingering within his palms as if to check that the fire had truly gone out. He assumed her touch was meant to be soothing, and in a way it was. In another way it just ignited him again.
He brushed her cheek with his cool fingers, prompting her to stop. “Weasley, I—”
“Oh, don’t mind me! I think I dropped some gurdyroots over here earlier. I just need to get those back.”
Draco and Weasley broke apart, almost guiltily, as Lovegood clambered through the bushes into the clearing again.
“Excuse me. I think you’re standing on my gurdyroot,” she said to Draco before shoving him aside. “Oh, no, that’s just a rock.”
Weasley snorted, which escalated into a giggle, and then full-blown laughter.
Draco watched as Lovegood walked around while peering at her feet, searching for her lost root vegetables. And then he couldn’t help it either—peals of laughter spilled out of his mouth, entwining with Weasley’s and echoing across the clearing.
Lovegood looked up in outrage. “Missing gurdyroots are no laughing matter!”
And then she disappeared back into the brush with a huff.
December descended upon Hogwarts with record-breaking accumulations of snow. The Hogwarts professors took advantage of the terrible weather by over-preparing their students for the Christmas holidays and loading them down with enough homework to distract them from the outside world they were missing out on.
Draco and Weasley had not had flying practice in weeks, not since the day Draco had created the fireballs in his palms. Instead, all of their free time was spent in the library revising for midterm exams that would be held hours before departing Hogwarts for Christmas.
Draco was in the middle of trying not to think about the upcoming holiday. He had already informed his mother that he would not be returning home, and the letter she had sent him in return had indicated he had made the best choice, even if she hadn’t said such in quite so many words.
He assumed Weasley would spend Christmas at home. Pansy of course planned to stay with him at Hogwarts, but Weasley’s absence would make the holiday in some ways agonizing. He itched underneath his skin every time he thought about being away from her, and that wasn’t necessarily a reaction borne from the bond between them.
Over the last three months, they had spent an inordinate amount of time together, whether in the library or out on the lake learning how to fall. He had grown… accustomed to her. That’s all it was, all it could be: good old fashioned familiarity. Draco would never say he was fond of her, because that would be downright absurd and it wasn’t true. So what if he laughed when he was with her? So what if he forgot what he was when they were together? Ginny Weasley did not make Draco feel like a monster. Instead, the sparkle he occasionally saw in her eyes as she regarded him made him feel like a miracle.
He didn’t deserve that kind of attention, but he craved it all the same. And he would miss it while she was away for the holiday.
Granger’s head popped up from where it had been resting in her arms on the table. “I forgot the incantation, Professor!” she cried, blinking sleep away owlishly.
Almost immediately, an admonishing Shhhhhhhh! came from the stacks. A split-second later, Madam Pince poked her head around a bookshelf to glare at their party.
Granger blinked some more as her grogginess faded and she realized she had fallen asleep while revising. She pulled her textbook up in front of her and lowered her head, her bushy hair and red forehead the only part of her visible.
Pansy stifled a snicker behind her own book, which wasn’t like her at all. She was normally quite open with her mockery. Draco didn’t dwell on that thought long, because the only one at the table who didn’t laugh at Granger was Weasley, who was frowning at a letter she had received at breakfast that morning.
“Has something happened?” Draco asked, his own amusement dying at the worry that crossed her face.
She sighed and laid the letter flat on the table. “I contacted the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures to inquire about any Veela that might have associated with your family.”
Granger peeked over her book, her blush well under control now. “Did they find something?”
“They wouldn’t talk to me. I asked Fleur to see if she could get some answers for me—I didn’t tell her about you, though.”
Draco nodded. By now he trusted her to be discreet.
“They did find something.”
“A link to a Veela in the Black family?” asked Longbottom, who had been informed of Draco’s condition soon after Lovegood had found out. At that point, hiding the secret from the last member of the group had seemed more difficult than just telling him, and Draco hadn’t trusted Lovegood not to blurt out the secret to Longbottom accidentally anyway.
“No,” Weasley said uneasily.
She met his gaze and searched his face for permission to continue.
“It’s fine,” he assured her. “We’ve all come this far. Go ahead.” Despite giving his consent, Draco still felt himself defensively building walls. His Occlumency shields snapped into place, even though there was no one left in the castle proficient in Legilimency anymore. His body straightened and tensed, bracing for impact. It all happened automatically, without Draco having to think about it.
Weasley sighed again, bolstering herself for the news she was about to deliver. “There is a Veela tied to your family but not the Black side of it.”
“The Malfoys?” Pansy said. “But, Draco, your father—”
No, Lucius Malfoy’s reaction made perfect sense now. The anger, the disgust, the unwillingness to speak about Draco’s transformations. His father hadn’t been angry that he had been duped into marrying into an impure bloodline. The secret of his own bloodline being tainted was in danger of being revealed by Draco displaying the traits and powers of a Veela. The very possibility had threatened Lucius, causing him to lash out. Of course he would be disgusted by Draco.
“What’s the connection?” he asked, his voice sounding distant and strange.
Weasley only had eyes for him. Her compassion rankled, but Draco wouldn’t revoke his permission. He was right; they had all spent too much time researching this topic to let Granger and Pansy’s curiosity go unresolved. Why not let Lovegood and Longbottom in on his dark family secret, too? Why not tell the whole world at this point?
“A complaint was filed with the Being Division in 1954. An old Veela, the leader of her tribe, appeared at Malfoy Manor claiming that Abraxas Malfoy had stolen her daughter and killed her. She would not leave Malfoy property until someone from the Ministry came and took her away. But before she left, she spoke a curse over your family.”
Lovegood gasped. “What kind of curse? Veela magic is extremely powerful, especially when used for acts of vengeance!”
Ginny pushed the letter toward the center of the table, and everyone leaned in to read it.
Draco scanned through Delacour’s letter until he found the part Weasley was talking about. According to whatever information Delacour had obtained from the Ministry, the curse had been one of reclamation. The Malfoys had stolen what was most important to the Veela and her tribe, so the curse would claim that life back from them. Draco read through the rest of the letter, but it didn’t explain what the curse meant.
He looked up to find Weasley frowning at him, not in displeasure, but with sympathy. “Your father was two months old at the time. He was mentioned in the report filed at the Ministry because the nanny had been distraught by the disturbance. I don’t want to speculate about something like this, but Nature’s Nobility mentioned that your grandfather and grandmother married in 1955….”
Draco didn’t see her point. “So?”
Weasley stared at him long and hard, with resolve, before saying, “Your grandparents were brunets, according to their portraits in Nature’s Nobility.”
“Yes, I remember their hair colors,” he snapped.
“Just spit it out, Weasley,” Pansy said. Her face had lost all its color, and she, too, looked as haunted as Weasley, as if she knew where this story was going.
“I could be wrong, all right? We’d need to do more research or make some more inquiries with the Ministry…. But I think your paternal grandmother was a Veela. Then she died, maybe in childbirth, and your Veela great-grandmother laid a curse on your family that would claim a life to replace the one lost. Your grandfather then married and passed off his wife as your father’s mother. I think the curse has claimed you. Maybe instead of killing you in order to claim your life, it turned you into a Veela, claiming your humanity instead.”
Granger sat up straighter, her book shield forgotten. “That’s quite a stretch for a single letter full of second- and third-hand information.”
But Draco felt the truth of it as surely as he felt the draw towards Weasley. There was something deep in his gut, in his blood, something primal and instinctual that sang after hearing Delacour’s findings. Draco had been cursed, his whole family had. He had been chosen for a reason he didn’t understand to deliver justice for a Veela tribe’s loss. A human life taken; a Veela life gained. Replaced. Had his great-grandmother understood that the curse would activate in this way?
“Draco, you’ve gone completely pale,” Pansy said, a note of alarm in her voice as she touched Draco’s cheeks.
He ducked away from her hands and stood. “I’m fine,” he lied. “In fact, I’m superb. So superb, I’m going to go do something else now.”
As he stumbled away from the table, he heard Pansy tell someone that he needed to be alone.
Too right. Alone. That’s exactly what Draco needed to be. How did Pansy always know?
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