Chapter 1: Three Things About Draconia Malfoy
There are three things you learn about Draconia Malfoy if you work in the same building as her for seven years, and I learned them all the hard way.
The first is that she sends memos like other people throw knives. The Ministry's interdepartmental memos are little lilac paper aeroplanes, harmless things that flutter round the lifts like moths. Hers arrive at speed. Hers arrive at eye height. Twice I have had to duck one in a meeting with the Minister, and once one went straight into Ron's tea and he drank half of it before he noticed, and the memo, which was about my expense claims, came out of his mouth still reciting itself in her voice.
The second is that she is never wrong about paperwork. I have tried to catch her out. I have spent evenings I will never get back reading the International Statute of Secrecy, sub-clauses and footnotes, hoping to find one error in her cross-border warrant approvals. There aren't any. She writes her corrections on my reports in green ink, small and slanted, and they are always right, and once, on a report about a smuggling raid in Dover, she wrote in the margin next to my description of the suspect's escape: You mean he Disapparated. "Vanished into thin air" is not a technical term, Potter. You are not a novelist. Thank Merlin.
I kept that one. I don't know why. It's in my desk drawer.
The third thing is that she looks at you, sometimes, when she thinks you're not paying attention, and it is not a look of hatred. It hasn't been for years. I'm an Auror; noticing is the job. I've known since Bulgaria. I've just been too much of a coward to do anything about it, and so has she, and the result is that the two of us have spent most of a decade circling each other in lifts like a pair of cats who both want the same windowsill.
All of which is to say that when I walked into the Ministry Christmas party on the twenty-fourth of December and saw her by the fountain in a dress the colour of holly, I already knew I was in trouble. I just didn't know how much.
The Atrium had been done up the way it always was for Christmas: twelve trees down the length of the hall, each one hung with real fairies who glowed and swore at anyone who got too close; enchanted snow falling from the high dark ceiling and vanishing a foot above the floor; the golden fireplaces along the walls banked with holly and roaring merrily for once instead of spitting out commuters. The new fountain, a plain silver basin that the Ministry had commissioned after the war to replace the ones that had lied, was running with something hot and spiced that smelled of oranges. Somebody from Magical Games and Sports had charmed a brass band to play carols in the corner, slightly too fast.
Draconia stood with her back to it, talking to the Bulgarian ambassador. The dress was velvet, long and plain, and it left her shoulders bare, and her white-blonde hair was up in some arrangement of pins that looked as though it would come down if you breathed on it. She was laughing at something Ambassador Petrova had said. She doesn't laugh much at work. When she does, she tips her head back a little and you can see her throat.
"You're staring," said Ron, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of eggnog. "Mate. You're doing the face."
"I'm not doing a face."
"You're doing the face you used to do at the Snitch." He handed me a glass. "Just go and talk to her. It's Christmas. She can't hex you, there are witnesses."
"She has hexed me in front of witnesses. She hexed me in front of the Wizengamot."
"That was one time and you deserved it." He clinked his glass against mine. "Hermione says if you don't do something by New Year, she's going to lock you both in a broom cupboard. She's got a list of cupboards."
I was about to tell him what Hermione could do with her list when I caught George Weasley's eye across the room. He was standing by the third tree with a box under his arm and an expression I recognised from about twenty years of experience, which was the expression of a man who had just done something he would describe later as "a public service."
He raised his glass at me. Then he looked up, very pointedly, at the ceiling above the fountain.
I looked up too.
There was a sprig of mistletoe hanging in mid-air about six feet above Draconia's head. It hadn't been there a second ago. It was small and very green, with a cluster of white berries that glowed faintly, like pearls held up to a candle, and as I watched, it drifted sideways through the falling snow and came to a stop directly above me.
Then it shot back to her.
Then it shot back to me.
"Oh no," I said.
"What?" Ron said, and then looked up. "Oh. Oh, George, you absolute..."
It was too late. The mistletoe had evidently decided that if neither of us was going to move, it would do the job itself. It gave a little shiver, and a thin ribbon of gold light spooled out of it in two directions, one wrapping round my wrist and the other round Draconia's, and then it pulled.
I went skidding across the polished floor of the Atrium with my eggnog held up in the air like a torch. Draconia, mid-sentence with the Bulgarian ambassador, was yanked backwards off her heels. We met in front of the fountain with an impact that knocked the breath out of both of us, my free hand landing on her bare back to steady her and her hand grabbing a fistful of my dress robes, and the band stopped playing, and four hundred Ministry employees turned round to look.
The mistletoe settled above us, smug as a cat.
"Potter," said Draconia, very quietly, with her face about two inches from mine. "What did you do."
"I didn't do anything. It was George."
"Of course it was George." She did not let go of my robes. She had gone pink across the cheekbones, and her eyes, which are grey like the inside of a shell, were furious. "Get it off."
I tried. I had my wand out before she'd finished speaking and I tried a Severing Charm, a Finite, the counter-jinx for a Sticking Charm, and a piece of curse-breaking Bill had taught me that was technically only for Egyptian tombs. The gold ribbon round my wrist glowed brighter with each one and drew in tighter, until we were standing so close I could smell her perfume, something sharp and green, like crushed leaves after rain.
"It's not working," I said.
"I can see that it's not working."
"Well, what do you suggest?"
Someone near the fireplaces wolf-whistled. Someone else, I'm fairly sure it was Percy, said "Honestly," very loudly. And George came strolling out of the crowd with his hands in his pockets, looking delighted with himself.
"It's a prototype," he said. "Mistletoe Manacle. Patent pending. Very simple principle." He spread his hands. "It finds two people who want to kiss each other and won't. It ties them together. It lets them go when they kiss."
"We don't want to kiss each other," said Draconia.
"It's never wrong, Malfoy," said George. "That's the whole selling point."
There was a long, terrible silence.
Then Draconia let go of my robes, took my face between her hands, and pressed her mouth to mine, quick and hard, for exactly as long as it takes to say Quidditch. Then she stepped back as far as the ribbon allowed, which was about a foot.
The gold light did not fade. If anything, it got brighter.
"Ah," said George, looking up. "Yeah, I should have mentioned. It's got to be a proper one."
"A proper one," Draconia repeated.
"You've got to mean it." He grinned at me. "You've got until midnight, after which it sort of... tightens. Nothing dangerous! Just very, very close. Good luck, Harry. Merry Christmas." And he walked off towards the bar, whistling God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs, as the band struck up again and everyone pretended very badly to stop staring.
Draconia closed her eyes.
"I'm going to kill him," she said. "And then I am going to have him brought back with a Resurrection Stone, and kill him again."
"I'll help," I said. "After."
She opened her eyes and looked at me, and for a second, with the snow falling between us and the fairies blinking on the trees, she looked exactly the way she had in Bulgaria, the night of the blizzard, in the tent, before she'd turned away from me and said goodnight.
"Not here," she said. "I'm not doing this in front of the entire Ministry."
"Where, then?"
"Somewhere with a door." She turned on her heel. The ribbon pulled, and I went with her, across the Atrium and past the gaping Bulgarian ambassador and Ron's thumbs-up and Hermione mouthing something at me that looked a lot like finally, towards the golden gates of the lifts.
The lift came. We got in. The grille closed. Draconia jabbed the button for level five, International Magical Cooperation, hard enough to bend it.
The lift rose about twenty feet, gave a long mechanical groan, and stopped.
Somewhere above us, a calm female voice said: "The Ministry of Magic is now closed for the Christmas holiday. Lifts will resume service on the twenty-seventh of December. Merry Christmas."
The lights went down to a dim gold glow. Draconia turned to look at me in the half-dark, the mistletoe hanging between us like a question.
"Potter," she said, and her voice wasn't angry anymore, which was so much worse, "what time is it?"
I looked at my watch.
"Ten to eleven," I said.