Chapter Text

…may be avoided by the careful conservation of resources. However, even for those who wield magic, there are moments when the wisest course of action is to run for your life. In war, time cannot be bought, but it exacts a heavy cost whenever it is squandered. Likewise, magical stamina is a finite asset, the vitality of which may be increased through only one known method. The cautious and intelligent soldier accounts for this and supplements his fragility with his comrades’ strengths. Unless cast by an extremely proficient wizard, protego is a flawed defense. Its efficacy and utility are expanded exponentially when modified for group use. Consider the variant protego testudo…

Portion of Senior Cadet Defense Lesson Plan by Instructor Draco Lucius Malfoy, Durmstrang Institute, December 2010

αΩ

He can smell her blood.

It calls to his own, pumping through veins, taunting furious limbs as he tears through a blanketed wood.

Every inch of her screams to every howling fibre of him. He wants to deny the excitement that has his heart forming a fist to pummel his ribs, that has him wanting to cast aside his wand and simply use his hands to rip away the flimsy gold she’s been wrapped in, like an offering.

His.

No.

He is more than this, better than this. And more importantly, he is not alone.

The minds of her pursuers are filled with ugly notions and lascivious memories that spur him on. He practically flies over feathery soft snow on feet he has charmed to step light, faster and faster. They cannot have her. Not her.

He is drawing nearer. He knows because he can smell the earth that has no place in deep winter, rich and flowing with milk and honey. And he knows because he has found her mind again. She had seen death before, and tonight she has seen it again. She is stubborn, he can practically taste it. Proud.

But she is also afraid.

Her fear chokes him, tightening arms around his neck until his head pounds. From behind a snow-laden larch, he permits it to pass through him until he can breathe again.

Closer and closer and…

αΩ

Five Hours Earlier

It was an ugly morning.

The square panes in the office window had been overtaken by delicate fern fronds of silvery ice, rendering the view of the lake totally obscure. If not for the insulating layers of a dress uniform, and the effects of an aestus, Draco Malfoy might have also iced over. The crackling white flames in the grate behind his desk were of no use. For light and transportation, yes, but not a single flame within Durmstrang’s fortress compound—not even a candle—radiated warmth.

When he’d first stepped foot in the building as a twelve-year-old, newly fled from England, he’d secretly agreed when he overheard Flint mutter, “—cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass clabbert!” And he was too numb to question the frigid traditions of their safe haven any further. When he’d returned again at sixteen after Durmstrang had reopened under the Dark Lord’s control as a military training camp, it had been the flickering backdrop to his newly recruited exhilaration, casting shadows on his unbloodied muzzle. Unending war had chewed him up, and spat him back out into his role as instructor, far behind the front lines. Now thirty years old, he considered the fires nothing less than absurd.

Like many traditions, it was clung to by some as evidence of a grandiose past, rosier in retrospect than reality. He had heard florid arguments about the icy flames weaving together moral fibre, and building magical stamina in Durmstrang’s inhabitants. If true, this was only because every soul within the walls was forced to employ a constant warming charm and swathe themselves in an impractical amount of fur. In briefings, Draco had suggested on more than one occasion there might be merit to adjusting the castle enchantments to sustain fires that actually produced heat, but he’d been overruled, and if he knew anything it was how to pick his battles. The fires endured.

A wizard with lesser bearing might have stooped over the complex diagram he was studying, but he did little more than incline his rigidly-set neck and shoulders over his desk, scanning the sheen of ink on his nearly completed lesson plan. This particular directive was for senior trainees regarding the use of co-operative shield charms in groups of three or more infantrymen, highlighting the importance of spatial enchantment. The desk beneath his work was on the larger side of necessity, but there was value in the expanse of oakwood between him and any visitors. As he told his cadets, up close one couldn’t see the intricacies of wand movements. Up close other weapons became an option for any potential assailant; protego became impractical at best, inutile at worst.

Draco had learned to create distance.

A shadow fell across the parchment at the same moment his nose flooded with the smell of woodsmoke and bubbling caramel. His ink pot was knocked over in the sonic wake of a loud bang.

An enormous crate had just been slammed onto his desk. Draco muttered a tergeo and looked up with a scowl—and then further up—into green eyes, so pale as to be startling. His visitor’s reputation did not align with his face: brutality was boyishness, bloodlust was a rosy flush across his cheek bones—the same flush that adorned the tip of his nose when the wind was up. Soft lines warred with dark circles. From under half-cocked brows Theodore Nott sent him a knowing glance.

“I said ‘where should I put this?’”

Draco peered over the top of the crate and immediately drew back at the potent stench of nundu pheromones. “Is that for Astoria?” He couldn’t keep mild horror from dripping off his tone, but he supposed at least if it made the potions lab reek she wouldn’t be able to smell it with his acuity. “Take it downstairs.” The flutter of one of his hands met the barest definition of what might be termed a wave towards the office door.

“I can’t—she said you could bring it down later. I’m working today.” He imbued the word with the weighty burden of its meaning. “I have to oversee a prisoner.”

“Why can’t Goyle do it? Isn’t that supposed to be his problem?”

Theo glanced meaningfully in the direction of the General’s Office—one floor above them and several hundred metres away.

“He didn’t tell you?”

“I have an appointment with him in the banya in ten minutes,” Draco said testily. “Didn’t tell me what exactly?” He coated the sharp golden point of his quill in black, and returned to the last paragraph of his lesson plan. In war, time cannot be bought, but it exacts a heavy cost whenever it is squandered. There was never enough time.

“They’re running an omega tonight. Zabini dragged her in at two a.m.”

Draco didn’t bother to look back up from his parchment. “And?”

“It’s Hermione Granger.”

The name left Theo’s mouth and everything slowed. Stilled.

Draco was jarred out of a moment stretched long and thin by wind rattling the frosted pane.

He tried to hide his reaction. There was no one else in the world who would have spotted it: the half-speed blink, the tightening of his fingers on the dark quill. But this was Theo, who knew him like no one else did, and Draco suspected he noticed.

Draco took the mental blade he’d been whetting and squared off, beginning an advance. He’d possessed a talent for mind magic since he’d been introduced to the first principles of occlumency at age thirteen. The swell of power synonymous with becoming an alpha had built upon his raw materials and melded with near constant practice to become a towering entity; by now few could deny his entry to their thoughts and fears. Legilimency, and its rarer subset empathomancy were his tools, his weapon, and his salvation. He deepened what had only been surface level thought skimming into a more thorough excavation of the mind he knew like cold in his bones. Suspicion became confirmation.

Theo had seen it.

Draco had been raised to carefully consider his every action, to step only when he was sure of the integrity of the terrain beneath his feet. To be controlled by one’s impulses—to react—was a concession. Concessions paved the way for defeat. And yet, despite what his cadets might think of him, he was human; made of flesh, not stone. In his life, he’d made some decisions based on nothing more than the acid burning the pit of his stomach, or in the half second of held breath before another thwarted end. Sometimes his knee jerked, and he made a call. His thoughts were a melee, his decision was pure instinct…and absolute madness.

“Where is the auction for berths?” he asked casually.

Muggle hunts were held every full moon but it had been over a year since the last time there’d been an omega run in one, and several years since the one before that. The chance to participate was usually highly sought after, but for Harry Potter’s right-hand witch he expected the amount of interest it was going to draw would probably fill the entire cathedral at the old monastery complex.

“What?” Theo laughed for exactly two breaths and then looked at him in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

Draco didn’t respond, knowing there was no way he could parcel his thoughts up into a form Theo would accept, but his silence served as answer enough.

Waiting for a reply that wouldn’t come, Theo’s brow furrowed. The very air in the office seemed to contract and grow tense alongside the rise of his shoulders and the slow curl of one fist. As always, Theo’s growing anger had an aura, like a whole other being in the room. “I thought we saw eye to eye on this.” Theo’s presence spoke with a volume Draco couldn’t hear in his voice. “No omegas.”

“It’s just a little run through the woods. I could win her with my eyes shut, besides—” Draco trailed an index finger meaningfully down his temple.

“And what about afterwards?” Theo demanded. “I can’t believe you would be willing to put someone through that. Put yourself through that.”

He leaned in closer across the desk showing Draco the layers of his mounting fury. “Say you win, hm? They’ll expect you to watch as she’s forced to her knees to honour the entire hunting party. It’s been so long since the last one…they’ll take their time, punish her for being Potter’s.” There was a livid set to his mouth, each word forced out through gritted teeth.“And I know you can’t fathom something not going perfectly to plan, but if you’re wrong and you lose—to have to watch her get—”

Draco did not rise to Theo’s provocation. He would not. “—I’m not concerned about it.”

“Why the fuck not?!” With a broad sweep of one hand, Theo shoved a pile of papers from the edge of the desk onto the parquet floor. It was an obvious bid to capture the entirety of Draco’s attention, but Draco had no interest in engaging in the recursive folly of an argument with Theo. That was a dead end road if ever there was one.

He flicked his hawthorn, the paper neatly restacking itself. He was still barely looking at Theo. “Let me worry about that. If there’s a decision to be made, it’s mine. I don’t require your input on this matter.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

The temper gathering on Theo’s horizon broke through and became a stormfront. The shadows of it danced across his face.

Draco worked quickly, dipping into the wellspring of his empathic magic to pull the rapidly deteriorating situation back under control.

He sat back in his chair and allowed spears of the potent red rage he’d become well acquainted with to enter his nervous system. Bile rose up his throat—hmm, that was new, and troubling—but he had no time; there was never enough time. Before him, Theo deflated. For a moment, his eyes remained closed and his breath streamed out in an artifice of calm, but when his dark lashes fluttered open, betrayal lingered.

There were some ills Draco couldn’t erase. Some burdens he couldn’t take upon himself.

“You need to be more careful,” he said. A part of him knew it was an enormously unfair thing to expect. “Especially around the Dark Lord.”

“Spare me the lecture, I’m not one of your cadets.”

As if on cue, there was a knock on the office door from someone impertinent enough to enter without leave to do so. Flora Prince, wiry in a student’s crimson uniform, froze in the doorway at the sight of Theo.

“Sir?” she ventured with uncertainty.

“Get out. Come back in—” Draco took up his wand in his favoured left hand and cast a tempus into the air. “Fuck, I have to go.” A breath of magic had the ink on his parchment dry, and he retrieved his cloak from its hook on the wall. He didn’t look at Theo as he shrugged the heavy boiled wool over his shoulders, and swept past Prince and whatever question she hadn’t managed to ask.

Theo followed, shadowing him until the dim, stony corridors called Draco left and Theo right.

“Stay calm,” Draco bade him over his shoulder. Someone else might have taken it as a taunt, but Theo would know it was meant only as the warning it always was.

“We’re not done with this discussion.” Theo’s growl reverberated down the hallway on Draco’s heels.

Draco ducked beneath a heavy stone arch and out of view.

He left Jörmungandr wing behind him as he emerged below the heraldic tapestry of the giant sea serpent and into the heart of the castle. Descending the next wide limestone stair brought him to the vast chamber centred in the keep.

Munter Hall was quiet. It would remain so for another thirty minutes before cadets filed in for their midday meal, but for now the echo of his boots sounded loudly against the granite. It often felt very empty traversing the massive building. Large parts of the castle were abandoned, not to mention haunted; all resident ghosts had been forcibly relegated to unused portions of the fortress. It was much less utilised than it had been a few decades prior when it still served European pureblood students of all ages and not merely the current fraction over sixteen, training as soldiers.

He passed the old mark of Grindelwald inscribed on the wall near the hall’s entry point and scratched off-handedly at his arm as he walked by, an old habit by now. Impossible to remove, Grindelwald’s defacement had instead been covered over—like ink over a scar—with a mark the Dark Lord had twisted to suit his objectives and embraced as his own. Perun’s eagle with the Deathless One’s egg, encircled by the World Serpent. All three houses of Durmstrang accounted for. Draco had worn the same symbol on the skin below the elbow of his wand arm since the day he’d become an alpha at twenty-two. For all intents and purposes, Draco was a Death Eater like his father before him, but the term was hardly used now; only alphas were marked, and designation had slowly superseded blood and gold. Tom Riddle’s preeminent concern, after all, had always been power.

He paused before he reached the enormous wooden doors leading out to the Vulchanova Courtyard to gird himself and cast another aestus. His destination was all the way across the white, open extents of the outer bailey—he’d need the insulation.

The wall attached to the largest bastion had either crumbled centuries ago or had never existed in the first place—magical defensive architecture prioritised different things given the existence of wards—either way it had allowed the forest between the institute and the small island it was sited on to creep and slither past Durmstrang’s perimeter. This was where the little wooden snow capped house sat, on the edge of the wood. A round stone pool set in the ground next to it was currently frozen over.

The bell in the far east tower tolled twelve times as he stepped through the door and wispy warm air escaped.

In the small antechamber Draco’s nose filled with the scent of heated cedar. He stripped off every stitch of his uniform and hung it neatly, with the deference he constantly told his students it merited; the double row of gold buttons fastened—by hand, not wand—and boot heels perfectly aligned.

He’d been directed here countless times over the years, and there was no mistake in the selection of this hot, humid place as the favoured meeting location. No clothes, no wands, no pretence. Each and every time Draco felt a surge of unease when he stowed his wand in its holster and left the knife he kept in his boot behind. Only the sight of the matching uniform on its peg on the opposite wall, and the reminder he wasn’t the only one undressed and disarmed, allowed him to follow protocol.

He entered the warm belly of the banya.

“Good afternoon, Instructor Malfoy.”

“‘Instructor Malfoy’?” Draco repeated dryly, as he situated himself on the bench opposite the man who raised him, but avoided spreading himself quite so proudly across the wood. “Am I in trouble?”

“I have to assume so, given that you are on time for this meeting for once.”

Draco had long maintained he always arrived precisely when he meant to, and was therefore never late. He also doubted, even if he had owned to tardiness, he’d missed much—many sessions were spent in silence among the steam and secrets which suffused the atmosphere as intensely as the scent of eucalyptus. Draco suspected the meeting was often intended as some warped approximation of family dinner.

In many ways, his grandsire was a creature of habit, but to focus on his occasional eccentricities and thereby underestimate him would be foolish indeed. Abraxas was as untroubled by the ravages of time as ever, and such unnatural youth was even more apparent when he was stark naked. Sometimes it was difficult for Draco to recall visual memories of Lucius, but nearly two decades later Abraxas’ appearance was the same; he was an undeniably powerful wizard in his prime. Draco occasionally wondered if the day was approaching where he would appear to be his own grandfather’s senior. Even now the surface of their kinship looked to be fraternal, rather than paternal.

It didn’t bear to dwell on it. Today Draco had an agenda.

“I hear we took prisoners after the offensive yesterday…” he began.

“Did you now?”

“What is to be done with them?” Draco asked carefully.

The silence elongated. Blue eyes—the shape a mirror of his own—found his. Draco was not to look away. “You know I don’t like it when you ask questions to which you already know the answer,” Abraxas said. “Speak plainly.”

“Very well then.” Draco spoke as plainly as he was willing to. “I intend to win the right to claim the omega Hermione Granger.”

Abraxas didn’t miss a beat. “And why is this your intention?” he asked calmly, but there was a whip crack beneath his words.

“How many years have you encouraged me towards this path, and still you would question my motives?”

“Naturally. You have always been short-sighted regarding blood and legacy. Your pride is focused inwards and will remain so until you understand what it is to sire an heir. For years you have refused to entertain the prospect of a Beltane match no matter how advantageous, and completely eschewed the hunt which is a much messier affair. You will explain yourself to me.”

There was much that Draco couldn’t say. He couldn’t say she knows too much. He couldn’t say that he had precious few bargaining chips, but she just might be a kingmaker.

So he simply stated the obvious. “It stands to reason that Potter’s omega is quite a prize. Claiming her will be a high profile event, and the alpha that wins her will be seen as formidable. What better time to give you what you want, and ask for something in return?”

“And what more would you need if you have marked an omega and received the power promised by her flesh?” Abraxas considered him closely, sweeping the length of his hair from one shoulder to the other. “Your potential is near limitless, Draco. You could rival Tom himself.”

Draco had an appetite for power, and it would have tasted like a lie to say this hadn’t crossed his mind over the years whenever he saw a bite scar on soft skin. Claiming her was likely to substantially amplify his magic, although he wouldn’t discover how until after his bite was complete.

“I ask only for your leave to visit England. Unescorted, without surveillance.”

“To gift wrap yourself for the enemy, perhaps?”

“My reasons will not be a part of this negotiation. You can be assured that I will return.”

Abraxas considered him in the space of an elongated, steam-weighted silence. He was not to look away. He would not look away.

“You will win,” his grandfather predicted. “You will fulfill the claiming rites.”

They’d struck upon Draco’s other sticking point. “With conditions.”

“Name them.”

“No audience.” What was about to happen might not be agreeable to her, but he knew it would be unimaginably worse if she were claimed by someone else. “I was raised knowing that Malfoy men honour their wives. I would have my omega held in similar esteem—she won’t kneel for another.”

αΩ

It had been eighteen long years since Draco had lived in England. Even so, he vividly recalled damp and dreary Wiltshire winters, yet also crisp clear mornings perfect for flying. He pulled the cinnamon fur of his hooded cloak closer, to protect his cheeks from the fangs of the changing wind. He could live here two more lifetimes and never adjust to this cold.

He would have simply disapparated the second he crossed the lowered drawbridge and through the outer defensive ward that surrounded the Institute’s island perimeter, but he was under strict instruction from Astoria not to jostle the crate currently trailing in his wake under a levitation charm. It had been relieved of its nundu pheromones and was now filled with highly unstable scintilla potion. Given the precarity, the lingering stench, and the biting cold, it was fortunate his destination was only a few miles away.

Located as the sole structure on an unnamed island—one of dozens which formed the archipelago in the midst of Lake Ladoga, Durmstrang Institute had always been magically concealed. But when the Dark Lord had decamped here almost two decades ago, the entire chain of islands had been wiped clean of any muggle inhabitants and made fully unplottable.

There was one thin connection point at the southern tip near the castle gates—a road which could be traversed when the bridge was down.

Potemkin, once there merely to serve the occasional Durmstrang student, and only definable as a village in the loosest of senses, was located on the next island over. Over the years it had sprawled and expanded as the magical population that inhabited it did, pureblood survivors fleeing to perceived safety in the wake of The Event.

It was there that Draco was currently headed, crate in tow, doing Astoria the favour of delivering its contents. He’d made sure to stress he’d collect on it—Astoria was a useful sort of person to have in one’s ledger—but in truth he hadn’t minded. He needed to speak with his aunt in town anyway.

A picturesque vista unfolded beside the path he picked his way along—the washed out lace of blues and whites and winter silvers, occasionally punctuated by the grandeur of a decaying monastery, which had been present in this place for centuries.

Most of the many monasteries, now empty, had remained abandoned after the muggle purge, but the largest, located on the opposite end of Potemkin, had been repurposed and employed as a base of operations, barracks, and for many other less savoury wartime purposes.

He would be there this evening for one of them, but for now his task lay in Potemkin itself and he started idly scanning faces as he arrived on the outskirts. If Zabini was still on the island, he had some questions for him.

Much of the village was eye-catching in a desultory way. It was a mélange of stately buildings and brutalist concrete with the shimmer of a few ostentatiously magical structures—the elevated residence on stilt-like chicken legs at the outer perimeter came to mind—but the one he sought was meant to be found only by those who already knew what they were looking for.

Someone had told him the establishment’s real name once—some poetical Slavic word for the afterlife—but as it possessed no exterior signage other than an enormous painted version of the same symbol marked on his arm, which prominently featured a bird and egg in a circular ouroboros setting, people had been calling it ‘The Nest’ for as long as he could remember.

The building was intentionally deceptive in every way. Built by the muggles at some point during their cold war to hide a large weapon, long since disappeared. Only a small portion of the stark, dark grey structure was visible above the earth, enough to suggest a squat, single-storey concrete building. But much like an iceberg, it possessed vast hidden depths.

Without magic, reaching its sprawling main floor would have taken a substantial amount of time, effort and downward trajectory, but when the borders of Potemkin had broadened enough to consume much of the island it resided in, that had become a non-issue.

Accessing the cavernous subterranean space was a simple matter of stepping through the discreet door below the painted insignia and finding oneself suddenly thirty metres below the earth.

Without the omnipresent crimson glow that illuminated the club at night, the concrete and steel innards of The Nest were brutal in a fashion quite at odds with its moniker. He made his way through an old tunnel lined with elaborate pipework, and past the low dark tables and cubic leather furniture, giving a nod of acknowledgment to Helmi, who was taking stock of the prismatic wall of liquor and potions behind the bar.

Helmi was quite beautiful—from the front anyway. Her silky hair and clothing covered most of the strangeness of her back, which was twisted and rotted like an old tree, yet she took no care to hide the fur covering her spindly ankles, her hooves, or indeed the tail that swished from side to side as she worked. ‘The Huldra’ some people called her, a nod to the creature she so resembled. The truth of her condition was much darker, like so many realities were.

He took the spiralling black stairs in the back two at a time, sparing no concern for the crate shadowing his steps, and pushed through the double doors at the top of the landing without pausing to knock.

The large desk that faced the door was unexpectedly empty; the woman he was here to see was instead standing at the massive arched window overlooking the main floor below.

“Hello, Andromeda.”

αΩ

The blanket of white outside the cloisters was a brilliant orange as the long, low rays of the sun prepared themselves to set.

Inside the cathedral Draco discovered nothing so peaceful.

He had anticipated a crowd, but the gathering had exceeded his expectations by some margin. Between the recessed, golden walls stood what seemed like every unbound alpha in the Dark Lord’s service. There was a hum vibrating in the air, flattening and pulling taut, winding around and through him like an insect he couldn’t swat. As he scanned the room, he ran his thumb slowly down the smooth wood of his wand in its holster, a soothing gesture. Or threatening, he supposed, if anyone happened to mark it.

Crowds suffocated him; there were too many minds, running mouths and unchecked tempers for any sort of legilimental comfort. Too much indistinct noise and too much risk inherent in opting for silence. Basic legilimency was a common enough skill among wizards, but not at the level he possessed—the Dark Lord would never have stood for it. Maintaining its secrecy allowed him to keep both its advantageous edge and his life. To use it though meant he was beset on all sides by spiky impulses that were not his. Desires that clawed at his skin and turned his stomach.

He took care to merely graze his eyes past those who sought to snare his attention, until his gaze came to rest upon the dais where several golden candelabras stood sentinel. Vases alongside it overflowed with conjured lilies, gleaming with further enchantments to protect them from the touch of the cold, and the sight of the summer blooms amongst the pomp and pageantry was a further agitation. It was worse knowing the altar lurked somewhere beyond it, screened and shadowed, than it would have been if he could see it plainly. He couldn’t shake the thought of its purpose. Depravity under the guise of divinity.

He felt breath on his neck and turned to face whoever had been presumptuous enough to stand so close, tuning in to what he was saying.

“—is a surprise to see you here.”

“I suppose I’m not as predictable as you are, Dolohov,” Draco replied, with little enthusiasm.

Such nearness meant that Antonin Dolohov’s ravenous thoughts trickled over him like sticky sweat. He believed that Draco had finally come to his senses, and was here to acknowledge his own appetite.

“There is nothing like it, boy.”

Boy. As if Draco was a smooth-faced cadet that didn’t know one end of his wand from another. As if he couldn’t addle Dolohov’s mind so creatively he’d rip his own limbs off without a second thought.

Dolohov wasn’t done. His tongue flicked out to wet his bottom lip. “When you are so close and you can smell their fear—” He inhaled theatrically through his nose. “Even the most primitive creature can sense his own end.”

“I have no interest in muggles,” Draco said coldly.

“Потому что ты лучше етого, да?” ‘Because you’re better than this, yes?’ Dolohov’s voice went low, lost amongst the drone of the crowd but Draco saw the shape of his thoughts.

He was better than this, because this was pyritic nothingness. This was rot dressed up with the false shine of doctrine.

This was a fucking farce.

Draco made to move away from Dolohov and the conversation he was more than done with, but he found the man’s audacity without limit as he laid his hand on Draco’s forearm, right over his mark.

“Still just a boy with his pretty new mark, playing at being a man. You really think you would know how to break in an omega?”

Draco shook off Dolohov’s touch along with the urge to flay him from navel to nose. His mark was hardly new but Dolohov, with his earlier version, snake coiled around skull, was not the only member of the old guard to resent younger initiates into the Dark Lord’s fold. Draco had been marked here in this very church, standing at the altar currently hidden from view, and the sudden memory of that night hardly eased his disquiet. Drawing his wand here would be a folly, so he simply stroked his thumb down the wood once again.

“Unlike you, I would never be so careless with my things. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

Draco made his way through the crowd to find a quiet corner, if such a thing existed. He brushed past Marcus Flint, who shot him an uneasy glance and projected loud thoughts. He hoped Draco wasn’t here to bid; his pockets were too deep, and the competition was already fierce.

It wasn’t surprising. From what Andromeda had told him, the already limited number of entry bids available had been whittled down further by the Dark Lord’s so-called benevolence. For valour at Nottingham several alphas had been awarded the rare chance to claim an omega.

And the opportunity to murder a muggle or two in cold blood, naturally.

Someone else wondered —why is Malfoy here now, after all this time?— Draco could shake the errant thought off as long as they didn’t wonder why her?

As removed from the crowd as it was possible to be, Draco leaned against the wall and considered the dais in front of the massive glowing templon which screened the altar beyond it.

On a high-backed chair to the far left, with one long leg crossed loosely over the other, sat a lone figure dressed in unadorned black. The shadows gathered around him like a cloak were in direct defiance of the low sun that streamed in through the cathedral’s arched windows. Light seemed to bend curiously around the man, as though he were a force equal or greater than the might of the sun itself. He too was ageless, his hair shining like a coal seam, his skin as white as milk.

Draco assiduously avoided the gaze that pierced through shadows and marked him immediately, but he knew intimately the shape of the dark eyes that were corrupted with streaks of crimson and fringed with thick, curling lashes. He knew that unnatural stillness, refuted by terrible beauty.

The influence Draco could wield over other men meant nothing in the Dark Lord’s presence. He was as powerless as one of the penned-in muggles awaiting the hunting party.

A sudden hush fell over the room, and the crowd parted to make way for someone noteworthy. Through the press of bodies, Draco caught sight of the sweep of a long cloak, and the rigid cut of shoulders that had once appeared impossibly broad to his young eyes. His grandfather’s long hair was half tied, but the colour was an heirloom, passed on down a long line.

From behind, he could’ve been Lucius.

But he took his place on the dais, at Tom Riddle’s right hand, and he could be no other.

“Abraxas,” the Dark Lord said softly without leaving his chair. He didn’t need to raise his voice for every soul to hear him. “You may proceed.”

With a prideful tilt to his chin, General Abraxas Malfoy surveyed the crowd. The hum had finally died down. The men awaited his word. But Abraxas was looking for something.

Blue eyes found his, and one dark brow rose slightly, enough to remind Draco of what he’d agreed.

“I see no reason to delay the formalities; such things must come before there can be revelries. We take vows and observe the sanctity of our traditions to venerate the magic that flows through our veins, and to honour our magnanimous Lord. Let any alpha who wishes to join the nobility of this hunt speak his name now, within these hallowed walls.”

Draco waited for the renewed buzzing to die down as the hurried, clamorous shouts of names he knew, and some which were unfamiliar, echoed off the walls. He drew a deep breath, running for the final time through the calculus of the multi-tiered bargain he’d made with his grandfather in the banya several hours prior. Once he opened his mouth there was no going back.

He pushed himself off the wall and found his grandsire’s sharp gaze once again.

“Draco Malfoy,” he called out. And he traced his thumb once more down the comfort of his wand.

αΩ

There was a restless, animal energy among the men who stood behind the line gouged deeply in the snow.

Draco’s nostrils flared at the acrid scent of Flint’s cigarette. He thought about cursing it out of his mouth, but he needed to focus. He’d placed himself at the opposite end of the line to Dolohov; he could feel his bloodlust battering at him like the blunt object it was.

He was aware of the interested glances being tossed his way, motivated largely by curiosity—it had been years since he’d fought, or even duelled publicly.

Ah. He could have laughed. They didn’t see him as a true threat.

The feral anticipation was an infection, but for his part he kept his body perfectly still, his mind quiet. Listening.

His place behind this line had not been a question—he had been certain how the bones would fall for hours.

The real question lay somewhere out there.

Scanning. Searching. It was difficult to pick out.

And then—

The red glow of an airborne flare bathed his face while a small, savage smile carved across it.

Got you.

A ragged scream rent the bitter air from deep within the forest at the same time he loosed a single message like an arrow.

Run.