Love, Hermione?
It was at this point that Blaise's confusion turned into a seething bitterness. Watching Draco and Hermione now, she saw how they looked at each other, and even how he looked at that repellent Weasley boy's little sister, and she realized that this was much more than she had imagined, it was an awful, gigantic Gryffindor conspiracy. As if it wasn't enough that they had to win the House Cup six years running, they had somehow conspired to steal Draco Malfoy away from his house. Draco, the best of all of them, the brightest and the most beautiful, who gave Slytherin something to be proud of even though they were always losing the bloody Quidditch Cup to Gryffindor. It was hateful, it was beyond bearing. And, curled on her bed alone at night, she realized it was more than the disgrace to the House, more than her terror of what would happen to Draco when the other Slytherins found out. More than outraged Death Eater loyalty.
It was the gentleness that had come to Draco in these past months, that would not have been gentleness in anyone else but that was a dulling of his cutting edge truly startling to anyone who really knew him. It was the faint dreaming distance behind his eyes and the cruelty that had gone from his smile and the blade that had gone from his voice. It was that he loved them. Draco Malfoy, who had never loved anything, person or place or object, and now he did, and it was not her. It had been one thing when she had been able to tell herself that he was incapable of love. But now she knew he was not. They had flawed him with their own humanity, her beautiful ice prince, and now he was just like them and just like everyone else. And still he did not want her and it didn't matter because she had lost her faith in him and in her House and in everything that had ever been important.
The foundations of her beliefs crumbled around her and blew away like dust, and in her mind the dust was pale green, the color of Potter's eyes.
Blaise half-closed her own eyes, remembering, but her reverie did not last.
Someone was banging on the bathroom door and yelling. She stood up straight, tucked her hair behind her ears, and yanked the door open.
Millicent Bulstrode, clad in a hula skirt and a coconut bra and clutching an empty bottle of Archenland wine, collapsed through the door. 'Blaise,' she moaned, rolling over on the cold marble floor. 'I think I'm going to be sick.'
Blaise thinned her glossed lips into a cool sneer. 'Go ahead, Millicent,' she said. 'It could only improve the decor in this ghastly bathroom.'
And with that, she stepped over the other girl and went out to the party to rejoin the other Slytherins.
'Ginny,' Seamus said at last, and she shivered again at the sound of his voice: so familiar, so caressing with its soft Irish lilt, and yet suddenly not familiar at all. 'Ginny, it's good to see you again…'
Instinctively, Ginny drew back, her hand rising to nervously touch the charm bracelet at her other wrist. 'Seamus, you saw me this afternoon.'
'Did I?' The edged smile widened with a deadly sort of amusement. 'It feels like fifty years.'
He began to walk across the room towards her. Ginny stared at him, her mind awhirl. Was he angry at her? Was he drunk? She couldn't imagine Seamus drunk. 'I thought you said you were going to go home tonight…won't you have missed your train?'
'Anxious to get rid of me?' He was standing directly in front of her now; she craned her head to look up at him, but with an alarming suddenness, he had dropped to his knees and was kneeling opposite her, their eyes on a level. 'Not that it matters much now.'
'Seamus…?' She heard the uncertainty in her own voice. The fine hairs along her arms and the back of her neck were prickling sharply.
'It's all right,' he said. There was an odd tenderness in his voice — it was like tenderness, but then again not quite. There was a familiarity about that tone that she couldn't place. He reached out and lightly touched the edge of her hair, just at her temple.
At the light touch, her skin exploded into goosebumps. She felt her eyes fly wide with astonishment — she never reacted like this when Seamus touched her. Never.
'It's all right,' he said again, in the same odd tone. And at the same time that he touched her, she saw the corner of his mouth curl in a disdainful smirk. 'I just wanted to say goodbye. You wouldn't grudge me a goodbye, would you, Ginny?'
His hand was cool against the side of her face. 'Why,' she said, 'do you keep saying my name?'
He dropped his hand from her face, skated his fingers along the edge of her shoulder. 'Perhaps, Ginny darling,' he said gently, 'perhaps you haven't been as sensible as you should have been.' His fingers encircled her arm. 'Come here,' he said, and pulled her sharply towards him.
The suddenness of the movement caught her off guard and she half-fell against him. He seemed to expect this, taking her weight easily, his arms sliding around her. They were wrapped together now like passionate lovers, but there was no passion in his voice when he spoke, only a cold and deadly certainty. 'You came looking for me,' he said against her ear.
'All those years I remembered you. You got away from me. You were the only one who ever did.' He jerked her hard against him and nipped at the corner of her mouth — not a kiss but a bite, and it hurt. Ginny tasted a metallic tang in her mouth. But she didn't pull away. 'I swore to myself I'd spill your blood and know what it tasted like,' he hissed into her ear, licking her blood off his own mouth. 'Your pure, wizarding blood.'
Ginny still didn't move. There was a humming in her ears like static electricity and part of her wanted to faint. Part of her was terrified. But that part seemed closed away behind a glass wall and there was only this here, this moment, and his hard grip on her shoulders and his heartbeat against her. 'Tom,' she said. 'You're Tom.'
'And who else would I be?' he said, and it almost made sense, never mind the insanity of the situation.
'Are you going to kill me,' she said. There wasn't enough emotion in her voice for it to be a question.
For a moment he did not move. He felt like Seamus against her, the same lightly muscled shoulders and arms, the same cornsilk hair that smelled like soap and boy. But the voice, under the accent and the softness, was Tom's voice, and his eyes were Tom's eyes. Eyes that opened onto a mind like a cauldron of writhing snakes. 'Yes,' he said. 'You wouldn't deny me that, would you, not when I've waited so long?'
'No,' she said. 'No, I wouldn't deny you that, Tom.'
She felt him smile against her cheek. 'Good,' he said, and, gripping her wrist, bent her back until she was lying on the floor and he was crouching over her and the floor was hard under her slim body cushioned only by the material of her thin nightgown. He had her left wrist gripped in his hand, the charms on her bracelet cutting painfully into her skin. He was left-handed. Seamus had not been. And, looking up at him, it was as if she could see through Seamus' face to Tom's: eyes like blue ink, narrow mouth like a razor cut. And the mind behind those ink-blue eyes was Tom's mind, that clever brain fermenting into poison, a consciousness as slippery as a wall of black glass, and that one chink in it, that one weakness, which was his arrogance. His willingness to believe that she would lie down and die for him because he asked her to, because he was Tom, and everyone always did whatever he wanted.
'The fire,' she said. 'It burns. We're too close to it.'
'You won't mind it for very long,' he said, and smiled with Seamus' mouth. The gold hair fell into his eyes as he leaned over her. He brushed the knuckles of his right hand along her collarbone, along the edge of the neck of her gown. The way he might admiringly stroke a glass figurine he was about to smash. 'You're quite cooperative,' he said. 'I might kill you a little quicker, for that.'
'How did you get here, Tom?' she said. 'Did you come here for me?'
'You brought me back,' he murmured, hands stroking her possessively.
'Your tears, my blood. Sympathetic magic, you remember? You heard me talk about it when you spied on me all those years ago. You must have missed me badly, Ginny. You must have wanted me back,' and as he spoke his hand slid down into the bodice of her nightgown and Ginny fought down the violent urge to jerk herself away, fought it down so hard that she bit her lip savagely. 'Didn't you?' he hissed.
'Always,' she said.
'You used to tell me you'd never kissed a boy,' he said, a lazy smile coursing across his face. 'Is that still true?'
'Never — anyone that mattered. Tom — '
But he was leaning forward, his mouth brushing over her cheek, her jaw, her lips. Like the brush of a
