'No,' she said. 'No, I don't. That's why I could see it, and they couldn't.'
She lifted her chin, looked at her brother. 'Charlie…'
Charlie leaned forward and put his arms around her, and Ginny let her head fall down on his shoulder and for a moment just allowed herself to lose herself in being held by her brother, in forgetting. Charlie smelled like the kitchen at the Burrow, like smoke and soap and scrubbed wood.
He smelled like home.
But when she closed her eyes, other images came to dance against the backs of her eyelids. Other blue eyes lit the darkness in her mind's eye.
She heard a drawling voice in her ear and felt the bones in her hand snap like twigs. But he didn't hurt me. He could have done anything to me. I was unconscious. But he just left me there. Why didn't he murder me when he had the chance?
Charlie pulled away from her, looking startled, and she realized she had spoken aloud. 'What on earth are you talking about? Who could have killed you?'
She shivered. 'I was thinking about…my first year here. Sorry.'
Charlie expelled a breath. 'I can't make you come home, Ginny,' he said.
'All I can tell you is that I think it would be the right thing for you to do.
We're all exhausted…working around the clock…we could use you. Use your help. And…we miss you.'
Ginny looked tiredly at her brother. It was not that she wanted to stay.
She wanted to go home. She could not help Harry; he was gone. Hermione had never needed her help and did not need it now. And Draco. She would have wanted to help him, but she couldn't; she could see through the coldness in his eyes to what lay beneath: shock, panic-stricken loneliness, abandonment beyond any abandonment she could imagine.
And she knew who would need to help him with that, who would be, perhaps, the only person who could, and it was not her.
And there was something else, as well. Something harder to define. She looked down at her hand. The burn was healed, but it had left a latticework of pale white lines along her skin, from fingertips to wrist. Like a veiling of openwork white lace. She was glad it was there; it served as a reminder. Tom was out there, somewhere, in the world; he was there because she had brought him here. And this time there was no Harry to send him back where he had come from. This time she would have to do it herself.
She closed her hand slowly and looked up at her brother.
'Take me back home, Charlie,' she said. 'I want to go home.'
The last of the sunlight had narrowed to a coppery spindle and the rest of the sky was full of ominous black clouds. A cool wind blew from the Forbidden Forest across the lake, up over the grounds, and broke like a wave against the front steps of the school where three small figures stood in a huddled group. A taller figure, scarlet- haired and wrapped in a dark green cloak, waited at the foot of the stairs.
Hermione said her farewells to Ginny first, embracing the younger girl tightly, and Ginny hugged her back. Then Hermione stepped away and back up the steps, leaving Ginny and Draco to say good-bye to each other with a modicum of privacy.
Draco stood one step above Ginny, looking down at her. Her hair was the same coppery color as the last sunset light. He reached out slowly — everything seemed to be coming slowly now, as if he moved through thickened water — and tugged on a lock of her bright hair and said, 'I suppose I haven't treated you very well, have I?'
'No,' she said. 'But I expected that.'
'Did you?'
Incredibly, the corner of her mouth curved into the ghost of a smile. 'You make it hard to be complacent, you know,' she said. 'I know why you said what you said to me, yesterday. But you don't make it very easy, do you?
On anyone. Yourself least of all.'
'Don?t worry about me,' he said. 'I can take care of myself.'
'Harry's gone, isn't he?' said Ginny.
There was a part of Draco's mind that simply shut down whenever anyone said anything about Harry, and he shut it down now. It was like an portcullis falling; he could hear the ringing sound as the iron spikes drove home, sealing that part of himself safely away. 'Yeah. He's gone. Did Hermione tell you that?'
'No,' she said. 'I could see it in your face.' She reached up, then, and brushed the hair out of his eyes; he withstood the brush of her slim cold fingers against his skin with a twinge of guilt, feeling somehow that touching him might damage her in some way he couldn't quite explain.
'Now I'm worried,' she said.
'We'll find him,' Draco said. 'Don't worry about Harry.'
'I wasn't worrying about Harry.'
'Ginny!' It was Charlie calling, from the foot of the stairs. 'Ginny — we'd better go before it gets dark.'
Ginny, turning, began to lower her hand. Draco caught it lightly and turned it over, palm up. She looked at him, startled, as he reached into his pocket with his free hand; finding what he wanted, he laid it gently on her open palm.
He had picked it up from the Gryffindor common room floor that afternoon. It was all that was left of the destroyed bracelet Seamus had given to Ginny: the remains of the glass heart-shaped charm, cracked in half. He had looked, but had not been able to find the other half anywhere.
'Careful,' he said. 'It has a cutting edge.'
'I know,' she said. She closed her fingers around it. He kept his hand on her wrist. He could feel the faint pulse of her blood even through the thin layer of the gloves he wore. Her heartbeat was steady and rapid. She was so very alive; even at the heart of all the mistakes she had made and the disaster collapsing around them all he could not blame her entirely. Some part of him envied her. At least she had done something. He had done nothing, and it had lost him everything. 'Draco?'
'Yes?'
'It's just you and Hermione now,' she said.
Draco raised an eyebrow. There had been some ugly arguments on topics related to Hermione, months ago. He did not want to have them again.
'So?' he said.
'So work it out,' she said, surprising him.
'Work what out?' he asked, although he suspected that he knew.
'Harry's gone,' she snapped, her voice suddenly flint-hard. 'And if I know him, he won't make it easy for you to find him. Maybe he wants to be found. Maybe he doesn't. I can't tell you. What I can tell you is that with him gone you won't know who you are anymore. So when you find that out, maybe you'll finally know what it is you want, Draco, because you certainly don't know now. And if Hermione can help you figure it out, then fine. Do what you have to do and don't worry about the rest of us. I think we'd all be happier if you just knew what you wanted. If there even is anything you want. God, I hope someday you can at least tell me that.'
It was the most she had said to him in a long time, and several responses suggested themselves immediately to Draco. Some were flippant, a few were denials, one at least was cruel. But a sudden memory had also come to him, of himself standing on these same front steps with Hermione, looking down at their interlaced fingers, gloved in white and black, and then he had looked down the stairs and seen Harry, his gaze on both of them. In some way Harry and Hermione had always been inseparable in his mind. Hermione was a part of Harry, as much as his green eyes, his vulnerable honesty, his willful stubborn pride.
He remembered his father's chair again, the row of knives that ran along the back. He remembered after the parties were over, getting undressed in his room, peeling off his clothes and turning around to see the blood that ran down his back in vertical threads like the marks of a whip. Later the house-elves would be sent with Healfast potions and by the next day all the marks would be gone. It had not occurred to Draco then that there was
