Chapter 1: Lift Number Four
The first I knew about Draco Malfoy's Veela inheritance was that it set fire to a lift.
Ministry lift number four, Wednesday, twenty to nine in the morning, going down. I was holding a coffee and a stack of incident reports I hadn't finished, and Malfoy got in at the Department of Magical Games and Sports looking like he hadn't slept since June. He saw me, and his face did the thing it has done every time he's seen me since we were eleven, a sort of flinch that he tries to turn into a sneer. Then the lift jolted, the way it always does between levels six and five, and his hand came down on mine on the brass rail.
That was it. That was the whole of it. Two fingers on the back of my knuckles for maybe a second.
Malfoy went white. Then he went whiter, which I didn't know a person could do, and he made a sound like he'd been punched. The lift filled with heat, the way an oven does when you open it. The paper memos fluttering around the ceiling lit up one by one like tiny lanterns and dropped in ash on our heads. Someone from the Improper Use of Magic Office screamed. My coffee boiled in its cup.
And I saw them for maybe half a second, behind him, pressing against the lift's grille: wings. Pale and enormous and half there, as if someone had drawn them in smoke. Feathered at the edges and something harder at the joints, the shine of scales.
Then the lift doors opened on level two, and Malfoy shoved past me and ran.
I'd like to say I didn't follow him. I'm an Auror. I've been one for seven years. I've been trained in threat assessment and not doing stupid things on instinct. I chased him down the corridor past the Auror Office anyway, with a burning incident report in one hand, shouting his name, and I caught up with him in the gents', where he was bent over a sink with his shirt torn open at the back and his shoulders bleeding.
"Get out," he said into the sink. "Potter, get out, get out, get out."
"You're bleeding."
"I'm aware I'm bleeding." His knuckles were white on the porcelain. Under the torn shirt, on either side of his spine, there were two long raised welts, red and angry, like something was trying to push its way out of him. "Get out before I set fire to you as well."
"You didn't set fire to me. You set fire to Mafalda Hopkirk's memo." I put the coffee down on the hand dryer. "What the hell's happening to you?"
He laughed. It was a horrible laugh. Then he turned his head and looked at me, and his eyes, which have always been grey, were gold all the way through, molten and bright, and I took a step back before I could stop myself.
"Congratulations," Draco Malfoy said. "Apparently you're my mate."
Augustus Pye has been a Healer at St Mungo's for as long as I've been getting injured, which is a long time, and he has always looked at me with the specific weariness of a man who has stitched me back together more often than he'd like. That afternoon in his office on the fourth floor, Spell Damage, he looked at me like I'd personally come in and complicated his week.
"It's well documented," he said. "Dormant Veela blood. Very common in the old families, very rarely talked about. The Malfoys had a French great-grandmother on the maternal side who apparently wasn't as human as the family tree would like." He tapped a file. "The inheritance wakes on the twenty-fifth birthday. Mr Malfoy turned twenty-five in June. Since then the creature magic has been looking for a mate. He's been avoiding people very carefully all summer. Then this morning he touched you."
"By accident," I said. "In a lift."
"The bond doesn't care about intent." Pye took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Mr Potter, I'll be blunt with you, because Mr Malfoy has refused to let me be blunt with him. A Veela who has chosen a mate and is kept away from them sickens. Fever first. Wing surges, like the one you saw. Magical instability. Fire. If the separation goes on too long, the creature magic starts burning through the host, and I don't have a potion for that. He needs proximity. Daily touch, at minimum. Ideally a great deal more than daily."
I looked through the glass panel in the door. Draco was in the corridor outside, sitting on a bench with a blanket over his shoulders and an expression that could have curdled milk. Every few seconds his back twitched.
"What does he say?" I asked.
"He says he would rather die."
"Course he does."
"I told him that those were, broadly, the options." Pye put his glasses back on. "There is one other thing you should know, because it's relevant to your consent, and I take that seriously. The bond is on his side, not yours. Veela allure, the famous charm, does not work on a chosen mate. It's well recorded. You'll feel nothing from it you wouldn't feel anyway. You are entirely free to walk out of this office and never see him again." He paused. "It would very probably kill him. But you are free to."
I sat there for a while with that. Then I got up and went out into the corridor.
Malfoy didn't look at me. He was staring at the opposite wall, where there was a poster about the dangers of untested love potions with a cartoon witch whose heart kept exploding. He'd been given a hospital shirt, white, open at the back. I could see the edges of the welts.
"Pye says you'd rather die," I said.
"Pye talks too much."
"I'm not letting you die out of spite, Malfoy."
He turned and looked at me, and his eyes were grey again, just about, with gold swimming at the edges like something moving under ice. "It isn't spite," he said. "Don't flatter yourself. It's dignity. I'm not going to follow the Chosen One around like a lost Crup for the rest of my life because some French witch in seventeen-whatever couldn't keep her wings to herself." His voice cracked on the last word, and his back spasmed, and he gripped the bench so hard the wood creaked.
I sat down next to him. Not close. Close enough.
"Grimmauld Place has six bedrooms," I said. "Kreacher will hate you. You'll hate the wallpaper. You can brew in the basement, there's a whole lab down there my godfather used to blow things up in. We'll do the touching thing however you want. Shake hands at breakfast. I don't care. You can keep hating me. You can hate me from the other end of my kitchen table."
Malfoy stared at me. A memo flew past us towards the lifts, and caught fire, and fell on the floor in ash.
"Why," he said flatly.
I could've said a lot of things. Because you got me off the hook at the trial when you didn't have to, all those years ago, standing in front of the Wizengamot in your awful grey robe and saying what you saw. Because I've watched you at the Ministry for three years working twice as hard as anyone, and being treated like something on a shoe. Because I've noticed that you take your tea with lemon and that you touch your left forearm when you're nervous, and I've noticed it for long enough that it's become a problem.
"Because Pye's right," I said. "It'd be bad for my reputation if you died. People would think I did it."
He stared at me some more. Then the corner of his mouth moved, and for the first time all day he looked like himself.
"Six bedrooms," he said. "I'll want the biggest."
He took the biggest. Of course he did.
He arrived that evening with two trunks, a crate of potions equipment and an eagle owl called Calliope who took one look at Hedwig's old perch and screeched at it. Kreacher met him in the hall, bowed lower than he's ever bowed to me, and called him Young Master Malfoy in a voice of such trembling reverence that I thought Draco might actually cry. Then Kreacher saw me standing behind him, and his face fell back into its usual shape, which is disappointment.
We shook hands at the bottom of the stairs, formally, like two Ministers agreeing a treaty. His hand was hot. Hotter than a person's hand should be. He held on a second longer than a handshake, and I watched his shoulders drop half an inch, and the tight line around his mouth soften, and I felt something low in my stomach turn over that had nothing to do with any bond.
"Better?" I said.
"Tolerable." He let go, and flexed his fingers, and didn't look at me. "Goodnight, Potter."
I lay awake for hours. Grimmauld's never been a quiet house. The pipes knock and the stairs creak and Walburga's portrait mutters to herself behind her curtains. That night it was quiet in a way that kept me listening. Down the corridor, I could hear him moving. Pacing. Stopping. Pacing again.
At ten past three, he knocked on my door.
I opened it. He was standing in the corridor in a pair of silk pyjama bottoms and nothing else, and he was shaking. His skin was flushed and damp and his hair was stuck to his forehead, and behind him, in the dark, the wings flickered in and out of being, pale and enormous, brushing the walls on either side.
"Don't touch me," he said. His teeth were chattering. "Don't. Just… I can't sleep. It's worse at night. Pye said your voice might help. Just talk. Say anything. Read me the bloody Quidditch results."
"Malfoy…"
"Don't touch me," he said again, and I realised it wasn't an order. It was the way you'd say it to yourself.
So I didn't. I sat down on the floor of the corridor with my back against the wall, and after a long moment he sat down too, a few feet away, with his back against the door frame and his knees pulled up and his wings folded tight around him like a cloak. And I talked. I told him about the incident report I'd been carrying in the lift, a bloke in Chorley who'd charmed his garden gnomes to sing carols in August. I told him about Ron's new beard. I told him about the time Kreacher tried to serve me a sandwich he'd made out of a dead mouse, out of what I'm fairly sure was love. Somewhere around the mouse, Malfoy's teeth stopped chattering. Somewhere around Ron's beard, he started laughing, quietly, into his knees.
"You're a terrible storyteller," he said.
"You're still here."
"I'm dying, Potter, I haven't got anywhere else to be." But he'd edged closer. I don't think he knew he'd done it. There was maybe a foot of floor between us, and one of his wings had unfolded slightly and was resting on the boards, the very tip of it an inch from my leg. I could see it properly for the first time. The feathers at the edge were white going silver, so fine they looked wet. Where the wing met his shoulder, under the feathers, there were scales, small and pale and overlapping, catching the light from the landing like the inside of a shell.
"They're beautiful," I said, before I could think better of it.
He went very still. Then he folded the wing back in against his body, so fast it made a sound like a sheet snapping.
"Don't," he said, quietly. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Be nice to me because some creature in my blood has decided you're its… its…" He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "You don't understand how it works. Pye didn't tell you the worst part. The bond doesn't choose at random. It doesn't pick whoever happens to touch you first. It picks the person the Veela already…"
He stopped dead.
The corridor was absolutely silent. Even Walburga had shut up.
"Already what?" I said.
Draco Malfoy took his hands away from his face and looked at me, and his eyes were gold, gold all the way through, burning in the dark like two lamps. He opened his mouth. Shut it.
Then he got up, walked back into the biggest bedroom, and shut the door in my face.