Chapter 1: Room Six
St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. Fourth Floor, Spell Damage. Private Room Six. Patient: D. L. Malfoy, 26. Presenting condition: Progressive curse damage, provisionally identified as a Hollowing. Contracted in March this year during supervised reparations work (return of stolen heirlooms from the Malfoy vaults). Previous Healers of record: Healer Strout (resigned from case). Healer Pye (resigned from case). Healer Smethwyck (patient declined further treatment). Healer of record from Monday: H. J. Granger, Trainee. Note in Smethwyck's hand: Good luck.
The first thing I noticed about Draco Malfoy, after six years of carefully not noticing him at all, was that he had no reflection.
There was a mirror over the washbasin in Private Room Six. All the private rooms had one. It was supposed to make them look bigger and more like a hotel, and it mostly made them look like a hospital room twice. I walked in with my clipboard and my new lime-green robes, the ones with the crossed wand and bone stitched over the heart, and I saw the bed in the mirror, and the window in the mirror, and the vase of hothouse lilies on the bedside table in the mirror.
I did not see the man sitting up against the pillows. In the glass the bed was simply empty, the sheets turned down, the pillows dented by nobody at all.
"Granger," he said, from the real bed. "You're late."
"I'm nine minutes early."
"I've been waiting six weeks."
I looked away from the mirror and at him, which was harder than it ought to have been. He was thinner than the last time I'd seen him, which had been across the Atrium of the Ministry some years before, in passing, both of us pretending to be very interested in the fountain. He was still pale and sharp and very blond, and he was still wearing the expression of a man who expected the room to apologise to him. But there was something wrong at the edges of him that I couldn't place at first. It took me a moment to understand it was the light. The afternoon sun came through the window and fell across the bed, and it fell across him too, and it should have left a shadow on the sheets.
It left half of one. A grey smudge where his arm was. Nothing where his chest was. It was as though the light had begun to forget he was there.
"Hollowing," I said.
"Gold star." He folded his hands on the blanket. "Read the file, did you?"
"Twice. And everything St Mungo's has on Hollowings, which is nine pages, most of them in Latin and three of them wrong." I pulled the chair up beside the bed and sat down in it, clipboard on my knee, because Healer Smethwyck had told me on my first day that patients took you more seriously when you sat down. I wasn't sure that applied to this patient. "It's an old Dark curse. Mostly used on family heirlooms in the sixteenth century, to punish thieves. It doesn't kill. It erases. Your reflection goes first, then your shadow, then your warmth, then your voice. And then…"
"And then people stop remembering I was there," said Malfoy. "Yes. I've read it too. I'm told I've got until about November."
He said it the way he might have said he had a dentist's appointment in November. I looked at the hothouse lilies, because they were easier to look at.
"Who sent the flowers?"
"My mother. She comes on Sundays. She brings lilies, and she cries in the corridor where she thinks I can't hear her, and then she comes in and tells me about her roses." He paused. "She keeps forgetting which room I'm in. She's started writing it on her hand."
I wrote that down. It was the kind of thing I wrote down.
Then, because I was his Healer now and there were things I was supposed to do, I took out my wand and ran the standard diagnostics. He submitted to them with the air of a cat being bathed. The charm for pulse came back slow and steady. The charm for magical core came back strong, which surprised me, and then flickered at the edges like a candle in a draught, which didn't. When I reached for his wrist to check the temperature the old-fashioned way, he moved his hand out of reach under the blanket.
"Malfoy."
"It's cold," he said. "You don't need to touch it to know that."
"I'd like to know how cold."
"Very." He looked at the window. "Strout used to flinch. He tried not to, but he did. I'd rather you didn't."
I held out my hand, palm up, on the blanket between us, and waited. I am a very patient person when I want something. It's one of my least attractive qualities, according to at least two people who have known me most of my life.
After a long moment he put his hand in mine.
It was cold the way a stone in a river is cold, all the way through, as though there were no blood moving under the skin at all. I didn't flinch. I counted to thirty, the way the textbook said, and noted it down with my other hand, and only then let go. When I looked up he was watching me with an expression I couldn't read, and then he looked away, and pushed both hands back under the blanket, and said in a perfectly ordinary voice, "Well? Am I dying, Healer?"
"No," I said. "You're disappearing. It's different. I'm going to need you to stop being so dramatic about it."
That surprised a laugh out of him, short and rusty, like a door nobody had opened in a while.
"Why have you refused three Healers?" I asked.
"Strout talked to me as if I were a corpse. Pye talked to me as if I were dangerous. Smethwyck is a perfectly competent Healer who looked at me for four weeks with the expression of a man reading a very sad newspaper article about someone else." He tipped his head back against the pillows. "And they kept getting my name wrong."
"Your name."
"Not on purpose. They'd start a sentence with 'Mr Malfoy' and finish it with 'the patient.' Smethwyck called me 'Mr Malcolm' twice last week and didn't notice. That's how it starts, apparently. It's in the nine pages." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "They're not bad Healers. They just can't keep hold of me. Things slide off them."
"And you think I'll be different."
"I know you will."
"Malfoy." I set the clipboard down. "I started my Healer training eighteen months ago. Before that I spent six years at the Ministry writing house-elf legislation. I'm good, I'm very good, but I am not the most experienced curse Healer in this building by a very long way. If you want the best chance of getting through this, you want…"
"I want you," he said.
He said it flatly, as a fact. Not as anything else. I felt my face go hot all the same.
"Why?"
He looked at me for a long moment. In the mirror over the washbasin, the empty bed looked back.
"Because you remember everything, Granger," he said. "You always have. It's unbearable. And right now I'd quite like someone around who's unbearable."
I went to see Smethwyck afterwards, in his office at the end of the corridor, which smelt of peppermint and old parchment and had a pot of Fanged Geranium on the windowsill that he fed bacon rind.
"He asked for you," Smethwyck said, before I could start. "By name. The week you passed your first-year examinations. Wrote to the Board. Four times. I rather think the fourth letter was the one that did it; it had a legal citation in it." He peered at me over his half-moon glasses. "Are you friends?"
"No," I said. "Absolutely not. We were…" I didn't know what we were. We had grown up in the same corridors, hating each other with tremendous energy. And then there had been a war, and a drawing room in Wiltshire, and his face across that room, and then nothing for years. There wasn't a word for that. "We knew each other," I said finally. "A long time ago."
Smethwyck nodded slowly, as though that was the answer he'd expected.
"Here's what isn't in the nine pages," he said. "There's a counter. It's never been written down properly, because it's never been needed in modern times, and because it's not really a spell. Paracelsus mentions it in a letter. A Hollowing erases a person from the world, and the counter is to anchor them back into it, one true thing at a time, held by someone who knows them." He took off his glasses and polished them on his robe. "Strout tried. Pye tried. I tried. We sat by that bed and recited his file. Born the fifth of June. Slytherin. Ministry reparations programme, 2002 to 2005. Nothing held. Because we didn't know him, Healer Granger. We knew facts about him. The curse can tell the difference."
"And you think I can do better."
"He thinks you can." Smethwyck put his glasses back on. "I don't know what that means, and I suspect I don't want to. But his warmth's started to go. Did you notice? His hands. He keeps them under the blanket." He picked up a quill and turned back to his paperwork, which was how Smethwyck ended conversations. "You've got until November, Granger. Find out what's true."
I went back to Room Six before I went home. I don't really know why. My shift had ended an hour earlier, and the Fourth Floor had gone quiet and dim, the lamps turned low, the portraits along the corridor snoring.
He was asleep. The lilies had been taken away by a mediwitch and the vase stood empty. The mirror showed an empty bed in a dark room.
I picked up his chart from the hook at the foot of the bed to make my evening note. Name, date, observation. Reflection absent. Shadow partial. Peripheral temperature reduced. Patient lucid, combative, and in my professional opinion insufferable.
Clipped to the back of the chart, behind the treatment sheets, was the patient intake form he'd filled in himself when he was admitted in the spring. I had read it twice that morning. But I hadn't turned it over. Nobody turns the intake form over.
On the back, under Is there anything else you would like your Healer to know?, in small, precise, very familiar handwriting, the handwriting I'd once seen on a hundred spiteful notes, he had written:
There is only one person alive who has ever paid real attention to me. She did it out of loathing, but she did it with tremendous precision. If anyone can remember me properly, it's her. Please don't let them give me to anyone else.
And underneath, smaller, as though he'd added it later, in a hand that wasn't quite as steady:
Don't tell her I wrote this.