Chapter 9: The Sister in the Shadows
The air in Malfoy Manor’s library didn’t move. It sat, thick and dusty, heavy with the weight of centuries of sanctioned knowledge and things better left unread. Draco worked by the shaky light of a single candle, its flame guttering in the still room. Spread before him were books that had been locked in lead-lined boxes in the cellar, their release authorized by his mother’s trembling signature after a week of silent, desperate pleading on his part.
The dream wouldn’t leave him.
It was more vivid than memory. The warmth of her skin, the shock of connection, followed by the visceral horror. His release, black as spilled ink, not a trick of shadow but a tangible, creeping darkness crawling up the pale skin of her thighs. And her eyes—snapping open, not their steady kaleidoscope green, but a flat, reptilian red.
He’d wrenched himself awake, choking, the sheets tangled and damp with cold sweat, not passion. He’d vomited into the basin, his body rejecting the vision. But it felt like a premonition, not a fantasy. A warning written in his own subconscious.
So he’d gone digging.
The official Black and Malfoy genealogies were pristine, gloriously inbred, and meticulously documented. But his father, in his obsessive quest for pure-blood supremacy, had collected other, messier records. Confiscated family grimoires. Diaries of disowned squibs. Unsanctioned histories from families who had flirted with annihilation.
His eyes burned. His hands, stained with old ink and dust, trembled as he smoothed a crumbling parchment. It was a family tree, but not the kind framed in gold leaf. This was a blood map, drawn in what looked like brownish ink he suspected wasn’t ink at all. It charted the Gaunt family, a snarled, sickly-looking root system of madness and pride.
His finger traced down from Marvolo Gaunt. To Merope. A line led to Tom Riddle. That was the known story.
But next to Merope’s name, the parchment was damaged. A water stain, or a burn. He leaned closer, his nose nearly touching the vellum. There, under the smear, the faintest impression of another line, scratched in with such violence it had nearly torn through. He tilted the page, catching the candlelight at a shallow angle.
The indentations rose, ghost letters.
Morrígan Gaunt.
A twin.
His breath hitched. He flipped through the accompanying notes, a sheaf of loose, hate-filled pages written in a tight, paranoid script. “The elder by minutes, the stronger by leagues. Where Merope’s magic was weak, a simpering thing, Morrígan’s was a devouring tide. She spoke to shadows. They spoke back. She was excised. Her name was burnt from the tree, her existence denied even as she lingered in the places between…”
The next page was worse. A clinical, almost giddy description of a ritual. “The Sanguinis Fumus… to see the truth of a bloodline’s corruption. Upon climax, the deepest magical heritage is made momentarily visible…”
That was it. The dream. It wasn’t just a dream. It was anecho of this foul magic, a psychic backlash from simply wanting her, his blood singing a poisoned song he hadn’t known he carried.
Morrígan Gaunt.
The candle flame stretched thin, then died. Not a draft. A suffocation.
Darkness, absolute and smothering, clamped down on the library.
A woman’s laugh ribboned through the black. It came from the hallway, just beyond the double oak doors—a sound of dry bones tumbling over stone, laced with a terrible, mirthless delight.
The scent hit him next. Not the delicate perfume of the Hawthorne gardens. This was the cloying, sweet rot of a hundred roses decaying in a sealed vault. Thick. Choking.
Draco froze, his wand clutched so tight the wood groaned. He heard no footsteps. Only a soft, sliding whisper, like silk over a dirty floor, receding down the corridor.
He didn’t move for a full minute. When he finally gasped, the air was stale and scentless again. The library was just a library. He flung a frantic “Lumos!” The white light from his wand felt pathetically small.
The parchment with the Gaunt tree lay innocent on the desk. But the notes beside it… the top sheet was different. He hadn’t left it that way. A single sentence was now scrawled across the bottom in a fluid, elegant hand that dripped with malice.
“Like calls to like, little scion.”
He apparated with a crack that shattered the silence, leaving the forbidden books open on the desk.
He didn’t go to his rooms. He went to the one place he felt a perverse sliver of safety: the appointed, neutral ground.
The summer pavilion at Hawthorne Manor was deserted, the marble cold under a shrouded moon. He didn’t care. He paced, the words screaming in his skull. Morrígan Gaunt. Excised. Lingered in the places between.
The “places between.” The vague reports Potter had muttered about: air wavering like heat haze. A vacuum. A between-place, sucking magic and people into it.
And the rose.
His mind, sharper than he was often given credit for, made the connection with a sickening lurch. The black petal at the Ministry. The decaying rose scent in his library. The Hawthorne gardens, bursting with defiant, magical life. Briana.
He was pulling a flask of cheap firewhisky from his coat when the air parted twenty feet away.
Harry Potter appeared first, wand already raised and aimed at Draco’s chest. Then Ron, then Hermione, then Briana. They were dressed for bed, robes thrown hastily over sleepwear, their faces sharp with alarm and suspicion.
“What the hell, Malfoy?” Harry’s voice was a low snarl. “It’s two in the morning. You break the perimeter, you set off every alarm she has.”
“I found something.” Draco’s voice was ragged. He took a swig from the flask, not caring how it looked. “It’s not a disease. It’s not a creature. It’s a person. Or what’s left of one.”
Hermione stepped forward, her fear momentarily overridden by blistering curiosity. “Explain. Now.”
“Merope Gaunt had a twin.” The words tasted like ash. “Morrígan. More powerful. Completely unhinged. The family obliviated her from their own history. Cast her out. But the notes… they didn’t say she died. They said she ‘lingered.’ In the spaces between.”
Ron’s face was pale. “The between-places. Where Theo vanished from.”
“Exactly.” Draco looked directly at Briana. She stood wrapped in a dark green robe, her hair a torrent down her back. She looked like life itself. The antithesis of the decaying scent. “The rituals described… they’re about blood truth. Revelation. The black rose… it’s her signature. It’s decay. It’s the opposite of what grows here.” He gestured vaguely at the thriving gardens around them.
“Why is she active now?” Hermione’s mind was racing, he could see it. “What’s changed?”
Draco hesitated. The dream flashed behind his eyes—the black ink, the red gaze. He couldn’t tell them that. Not the specifics. “The war broke things. Tore holes in the world. Maybe it thinned the barriers to wherever she’s been festering. Or…” He looked at the group, this tight, shining unit of power and love. “Or something drew her attention. A new, powerful confluence of magic. A beacon.”
The implication hung in the cold air. Hawthorne Manor. Them.
“This is a fascinating history lesson,” Harry said, his wand not wavering. “But it doesn’t tell us how to stop her.”
“I don’t know how to stop her!” Draco snapped, the fear turning to anger. “I know she was so terrifying that Voldemort’s own ancestors were more scared of her than of anything else. I know she was ‘excised,’ which in old families means they tried to magically unmake her and failed. I know she’s connected to roses and decay and between-spaces. And I know she was just in my library.”
That silenced them.
“Describe it,” Briana said. Her voice was calm, but her hands were fists at her sides.
“The candle went out. She laughed. It smelled like your gardens, but… dead. And she left a note.” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words ‘like calls to like.’ That felt too personal, too damning. “She’s aware. She’s playing.”
A collective shiver passed through them. This was no longer a ghost story or a missing persons case. It was an engagement.
Hermione broke the silence, her tone switching to brisk, terrified planning. “We need to research ‘excised’ lineages. Magical banishment that fails. We need to map every disappearance against known historical bloodlines, especially purist ones. If she’s feeding on magical essence, she might be starting with the magically potent but socially isolated—the Carrow cousin, Rookwood, Nott. Easy prey no one would miss deeply.”
“She’s working up,” Ron realized, horror dawning. “Starting with the strong but alone. Getting stronger. Until…”
His eyes drifted to Briana.
“No,” Harry said, the word final. “That’s not happening.”
“Weaponizing love didn’t work last time,” Draco muttered, then instantly regretted it as four wands twitched toward him. “I’m not saying it won’t! I’m saying you need more than a strong emotional counter-curse. You need to understand what she is. A rejected twin. A wound in a family’s magic. Hunger given form. You can’t Stun hunger.”
Briana walked to the edge of the pavilion, looking out into the dark. The manor behind them was a silent sentinel. “She’s drawn to life,” she said, almost to herself. “To contradict it. To consume it. My magic… the manor’s magic… it’s about growth. Protection. Sustenance.”
She turned back, and her expression had changed. The fear was still there, but it had been joined by a fierce, cold clarity.
“So we don’t just protect,” she said. “We prepare the ground. We make this place not just a beacon, but a bastion. Something that doesn’t just shine, but burns anything that seeks to decay it.”
For the first time, Draco saw the twist of Hawthorne steel in her. It wasn’t Gryffindor bravery. It was something older, more territorial and ruthless.
“How?” Harry asked, his gaze locked on her.
“We strengthen the wards with more than magic. We weave in our own intention. Our unity. Not just as a shield, but as a… a repellent. We research, yes. But we also build.” She looked at Draco, and her gaze was unnervingly direct. “You’re in the library. Keep looking. Find a weakness. Not a history. A flaw.”
Draco gave a curt nod. He was already calculating which darker collections he could potentially access through his father’s remaining contacts.
Ron let out a long breath, clouding in the cold air. “Right. So. Tomorrow. Hermy starts the biggest research project of her life, which is saying something. I’ll start fucking with ward schematics—see if I can charm some of our joke-shop battle ideas into something less funny and more hurty. Harry… you guard.”
“I guard,” Harry affirmed, his voice a gravelly promise.
They were a unit, assigning roles, drawing lines in the sand. Draco stood just outside their circle, the informant, the contaminated one, the warning sign.
As they turned to go back to the house, Briana paused. She looked back at him, standing alone in the cold pavilion.
“The note she left you,” she said. “What did it really say?”
He held her gaze, the memory of the crawling black ink chilling his blood. He couldn’t lie to that directness.
“It said, ‘Like calls to like, little scion.’”
He saw her process it. She didn’t flinch. She simply nodded, as if confirming a dark suspicion.
“Then we’ll have to be sure what’s ‘called’ here is something she profoundly regrets hearing,” she said.
Then she followed the others inside, leaving Draco alone with the ghost of roses and the terrifying knowledge that he was, in some fundamental way he didn’t yet understand, somehow kin to the hunger that was coming.
The flask was empty, but the cold in his bones remained long after he splinched himself apparating back to the Manor’s gates. Sleep was a treacherous country he had no wish to visit again, but his body, stretched thin on fear and firewhisky, betrayed him at his desk.
The dream didn’t bother with preamble.
One moment he was staring at a blurred genealogy, the next he was on his knees between Briana’s spread thighs in the Hawthorne conservatory. Vines coiled overhead, heavy with white flowers. The air was wet and hot. She was naked, arched back on a bed of soft moss, one hand fisted in his hair.
“Taste it,” she demanded, her voice not her own—huskier, raw with command. She shoved his face into her. “Taste what you’ll never have.”
His tongue delved into her cunt with a desperate, starving rhythm. He could smell her, musky and sharp, a tantalizing perfume that made his cock throb. She was soaking wet, and he lapped at her, fucking her with his tongue, chasing the salt and the slick. He found her clit, a hard little nub, and sucked it fiercely.
“Yes, you filthy pureblood bastard,” she hissed, grinding against his mouth. “Lick me clean.”
The flavor was overwhelming, complex: a coppery tang he knew was her arousal, layered with something else, something impossibly sweet and dark, like black honey. He drank her down, groaning, his own hips jerking uselessly against empty air. He could taste her cum, sharp and particular, as her thighs clamped around his ears and she came with a broken cry against his tongue.
He swallowed it. It burned like fine brandy.
Then she pushed him onto his back. The moss was cool. She straddled him, her hand guiding his aching cock into her with one brutal, sinking motion. She was impossibly tight, searing hot, and so wet he saw stars.
“You want this?” she snarled, riding him with punishing strokes, her breasts bouncing. “This cursed blood? This pathetic, lonely life?”
He could only gasp, his hands gripping her hips, slipping on her sweat-slicked skin. Every drive upward filled him with a blinding, brilliant agony of pleasure. He was going to come. He was going to—
She leaned down, her mouth at his ear. “She sends her regards.”
He erupted inside her. And as he did, he saw it—not black this time, but a viscous, shimmering gold, his release mixing with her wetness, dripping down her thighs. But where it touched the moss, the green fronds withered and turned to grey dust. Briana threw her head back and laughed, and her eyes weren’t red.
They were voids. Empty sockets in which tiny roses bloomed and died in rapid, silent succession.
Draco woke screaming, a muffled sound into the crook of his arm. His trousers were sticky. His mouth still held the phantom, cloying taste of black honey. He trembled so violently his teeth chattered.
This wasn’t a warning. It was an invitation. A profiling of his deepest hunger, used as a backdoor into his mind.
“Like calls to like,” he whispered into the dark, empty library.
The decision was made with a clarity born of utter dread. He couldn’t stay here, surrounded by his family’s poisoned legacy. And he couldn’t face what was coming alone.
At dawn, cloaked in a disillusionment charm, he stood at the edge of the Hawthorne property. He sent his Patronus—a thin, wispy thing that was no longer a falcon but something without a clear form—streaking toward the manor with a message for Potter. Then he waited.
It was Ron who met him at the wards’ edge, chewing on a piece of toast, his eyes narrow. “You look like shit.”
“I need to speak to her. To all of you,” Draco said, his voice stripped bare. “I’m not… safe. To be out there. Or in here. But I have information.”
Ron studied him for a long moment, then jerked his head. “Come on then. And wipe that look off your face. Luna and Neville are inside. Don’t scare them.”
The kitchen was a jarring capsule of warmth. Sunlight streamed in. The smell of frying bacon and fresh coffee was a physical assault after the decay in his senses. Harry and Hermione were at the table, Briana by the stove. And there, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, sat Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom.
Luna was stirring a cup of tea, a radish earring dangling. “Your aura is spiraling, Draco. It’s mostly a greyish purple now, with little black hooks in it.”
Neville offered a tentative, solid smile. “Alright, Malfoy?”
Their presence was so profoundly normal it hurt. “What are they doing here?” Draco asked, unable to mask his confusion.
“They live here now,” Harry said flatly, not looking up from a dense parchment. “Their places were hit last night. Not a disappearance. A message.”
Luna nodded serenely. “All my shoes were turned into living beetles and marched out the door in a line. Father said it was quite a sight.”
Neville’s expression darkened. “Someone set a creeping rot on my greenhouse at Hogwarts. It consumed every venomous tentacula and the mature mandrakes. Nothing else. Just the most dangerous plants.” He looked at Briana. “It’s targeting specific magics. Capabilities.”
Hermione pinched the bridge of her nose. “It’s escalating from abduction to harassment. A show of force and knowledge. Morrígan isn’t just hungry. She’s… antagonistic.”
“She’s vengeful,” Draco heard himself say. All eyes turned to him. He leaned against the cool stone of the doorway, feeling the dream’s filth still on him. “I kept reading. After they excised her, after she ‘lingered,’ her brother Marvolo hunted her. He considered her the family’s greatest shame. He and his son… they trapped her. Not in a place. In a state. They used a ritual that bound her hunger to silence, to stillness. They didn’t kill her. They imprisoned her in her own nature.”
He took a shaky breath. The words from the grimoire were etched in his mind. “Tom Riddle found the lore. He was fascinated. He went to her, not to free her, but to learn. She saw his soul, his ambitions. She called him ‘Little Brother.’ He stole knowledge from her and then reinforced her bonds before he left, fearing what she was. She wants revenge for her brother’s betrayal. For her imprisonment. She doesn’t just want to feed. She wants to kill them all—every descendant of the line that caged her, every branch of magic that sprung from that root. That’s us. The whole, sorry, magical world.”
The silence in the kitchen was absolute.
“So it’s a war,” Harry said, finally looking up. His eyes were terrifyingly calm.
“It’s an extermination,” Draco corrected quietly. “And she’s studying us. Learning what we love so she can take it apart. My dreams… they’re not mine. They’re visitations. She’s showing me what I want so I know exactly what’s being twisted.”
Briana turned from the stove. Her gaze was a physical weight. “What did she show you last night?”
Draco’s cheeks burned with shame, but he held her stare. He would not flinch. “Enough to know she can manipulate desire. To mock it. She’s in my head. Which means any information I have, any plan we make, is potentially compromised.”
He swallowed, the admission costing him everything. “I need you to bind me. Magically. A vow of non-betrayal. Something that will incinerate my tongue if I try to speak a word of your defenses, or stop my heart if I consciously act against this household.” He looked at Harry, then Ron, then Hermione. “Do it. Now.”
The shocking part was that no one objected. They simply looked at one another, a silent conference passing between them in glances.
It was Luna who spoke, her voice dreamy yet precise. “A Chevaliers’ Bind would work. It’s woven on intent, not just words. It would fray if you were being magically compelled, like a tripwire. And it would hurt quite a lot if you broke it.”
“Fine,” Draco said.
“We’ll do it after breakfast,” Neville said, his voice gentle but firm. “You look like you haven’t eaten in a week. You’re no use to anyone fainting.”
The mundane act of sitting, of accepting a plate of eggs and bacon from Briana’s hand, was more surreal than any dream. He ate mechanically. Luna chatted about the possible migratory patterns of the beetle-shoes. Neville and Hermione debated the anti-rot properties of Chinese Chomping Cabbage.
For a moment, it almost felt like belonging.
Then a chill draft swept through the kitchen, though no window was open. The scent of bacon was abruptly overpowered by the faint, sweet smell of rotting petals.
From the center of the wooden table, where there had been nothing, a single, perfect black rose bloomed in fast-motion, its stem pushing through the solid oak like it was soil. It unfurled, damp and velvety.
In its heart, a tiny, articulated thorn puppet of a witch bowed.
Then the flower collapsed in on itself, dissolving into a smear of black sludge that hissed and ate a pitted scar into the table.
The message was clear. She was listening. She was here. And she was just beginning.