'Sirius,' she said in a croaky voice. 'Hey.'
His face split into a tired smile. 'You're awake,' he said. 'That's good. Sorry about yelling at you. I don't have my wand, so I had to do the best I could.'
Hermione began to raise herself up on her elbows. Every part of her body hurt as if she had been beaten. She looked around. She was in a dank rock-bound cell with one barred wall. A stone bench ran along the opposite wall. She seemed to be alone with Sirius.
'Oh my God,' she said, sitting straight up and grabbing Sirius' arm. 'Harry. And Draco! Where are they?'
'I don't know,' said Sirius, looking very sober. 'I was hoping you could tell me that.'
She shook her head wildly.
'A group of Death Eaters brought you down here,' he said reluctantly. 'Harry and Draco weren't with them. They tossed you in with me and left.' He patted her shoulder awkwardly. 'Do you remember what happened, Hermione?'
Hermione felt herself teetering on the edge of panicky tears. 'It was horrible,' she said. 'The Death Eaters took Draco. They think he's Harry. And Harry…' The tears threatened to spill over, but she forced herself to speak slowly, filling Sirius in on the whole evening's events. 'And then Draco took off the invisibility cloak and they sort of…closed in around him. I didn't see what happened after that, I didn't see what happened to Harry or to Draco. I think Lucius hit me with the Stupefying Hex.' Now the tears did spill. 'Draco could be dead, Sirius.'
'They won't kill him,' said Sirius. 'They think he's Harry; they're going to put that Lacertus curse on him. And for that, they need Voldemort. So we have a little time.'
'How much time does it take to summon Voldemort?' asked Hermione wildly.
'How long does it take him to get here?'
'Well….' said Sirius reluctantly. 'It's not like he takes the bus, Hermione.
Voldemort can probably Apparate here instantly. But,' he added, 'if I know Lucius, he'll want to have everything prepared and perfect beforehand — no nasty surprises for the Dark Lord when he gets here.'
'I hate Lucius,' said Hermione vehemently. 'He's a freakish, evil, jewelry-wearing pervert who doesn't even care about his own son.'
'He's a lot more than that,' said Sirius, with a half smile. 'He's-' He broke off and looked at her thoughtfully.
'What?' said Hermione.
'What did you say about Lucius wearing jewelry?'
'He has this really ugly pendant he wears,' said Hermione. 'He seems very attached to it. He kept putting his hand on it when he was…you know…trying to have it off with me in the study.' She blushed furiously.
'Describe it,' said Sirius.
Hermione described it: a gold chain with a clear glass charm pendant, in which an object was suspended, an object that looked a little like a human tooth. When she got to the part about the tooth, Sirius jumped to his feet and started pacing back and forth across the cell.
'I thought so…' he muttered. 'It's been in the back of my mind all this time…. I just didn't know how he was doing it.'
'Doing what?' said Hermione, turning her head to follow Sirius' anxious progress.
'Controlling her,' said Sirius.
'Controlling who?' demanded Hermione.
'Narcissa,' he said, sitting down heavily on the bench.
'Sirius,' she said firmly. 'Enough with the free-association. Please speak English.'
'I don?t know how he got her to marry him in the first place,' said Sirius, obviously still thinking out loud, 'She always hated him. I think he must have used some kind of Coercion Charm on her, if not the Imperious Curse itself.'
'Are you saying he forced Narcissa to marry him?' said Hermione, interested despite herself. 'Oh, that's just the sort of thing he'd do, isn't it?' She frowned.
'But it doesn't make sense…he can't have kept her under the Imperious curse or something like that for seventeen years; she'd be dead, or mad.'
'He wouldn't have needed to after the first year or so,' said Sirius quietly. 'He had something much better.' He looked down at Hermione's bewildered expression. 'Have you ever heard of an Epicyclical Charm?'
'Lucius has a book about them in his study. The Lacertus curse is in it.' She shuddered. 'It looks really nasty, the book, I mean.'
'They?re spells that have to do with transferring the essence of people and animals into things. It's hard to explain, but a lot of it is Dark magic for reasons that should be obvious. You can take something from a person… the younger they are when you do it, the better…like hair, or a tooth, and turn it into an object.
Like a pendant. And that object will contain the essence of that person, what the Greeks called the life- spark. If you destroy or damage that thing…'
'You kill the person?' said Hermione.
'Exactly.'
'So Lucius….you think he took one of Draco's teeth when he was a baby?'
'I think,' said Sirius, 'he's been wearing Draco's life around his neck since the day Draco was born. Draco wouldn't know about it, of course. But Narcissa would. All Lucius would have to do is break the pendant, crush it, and Draco would die. If Narcissa left him…if she defied him…'
'But Draco is his son,' said Hermione, 'his only heir, he said so.'
