Chapter 1: The Only One
The fever started at half past six, while Draconia was doing up the hooks on her dress.
She noticed it the way she noticed things on the ward: clinically, with mild irritation. A warmth under the skin of her wrists. A flush at the base of her throat that wasn't the wine, because she hadn't had any yet. She took her own pulse in front of the mirror in her flat in Kensington, found it fast, decided it was nerves, and was furious, because she didn't get nerves. She was a Healer. She had reattached a man's ear on the floor of the Leaky Cauldron during a brawl. A Ministry gala was nothing.
It was the Remembrance Gala, though, for the tenth anniversary, and her mother had asked her to come, and Narcissa Malfoy almost never asked for anything. So Draconia wore the black silk with the low back, and painted her mouth dark red, and went.
The Atrium had been transformed. Floating candles by the thousand, white lilies down every wall, the Fountain of Magical Brethren running with silver light. Every witch and wizard who mattered in Britain was there, and a great many who only thought they did. Draconia moved through them with her mother on her arm and her chin up, and accepted the cool nods and the warmer ones and the glances that slid away, and the fever crept up her arms like a slow tide.
By eight it was in her face. By half past, the air around her had started to do something odd.
She noticed it first in the waiter, a young wizard with a tray of champagne who stopped dead in front of her and stared, his mouth slightly open, while the tray tipped by degrees until her mother put out a hand and righted it. Then in Cormac McLaggen, who crossed the whole Atrium to tell her that she looked like moonlight, which was the most original thing he'd said in his life. Then in old Elphias Doge, who was a hundred and twenty if he was a day, and who kissed her hand and kept hold of it and looked up at her with wet adoring eyes until she pulled free.
"Mother," she said, low. "Something's wrong."
Narcissa had gone pale. "Your hair."
Draconia looked down. The long straight fall of it over her shoulder was shining. Not catching the candlelight. Shining, soft and silver-gold, from within.
All around them, men were turning. A ripple went through the crowd, head after head, and the expressions on the faces were all the same: dazed, soft, hungry. A Wizengamot elder took a step toward her. Then another. Somebody's husband dropped his glass.
And at the far end of the Atrium, by the fountain, Harry Potter turned around.
It went through her like lightning through a tree. Every nerve in her body lit at once. The fever, which had been simmering, boiled over into a hot rush that started under her breastbone and spread outward to her fingertips, and her heart slammed so hard she put a hand flat to her chest. She could smell him from across the room. That wasn't possible. She could smell him, sharp and clean, broom polish and cut grass and something underneath that her body recognised before her mind did, and she wanted, with a violence that frightened her, to walk across the Atrium and put her mouth on his throat.
He was looking at her. Just looking. Not dazed. Not soft. He was frowning, the way he had frowned at things that needed fixing for as long as she'd known him, and he set his drink down on the edge of the fountain and started toward her through the crowd of besotted men, frowning harder at every one of them.
He was the only one in the room who looked normal.
"Malfoy," he said, when he reached her. "Are you all right? You're..."
"Don't," she said. Her voice came out wrong, low and rough and laced with something that made two men nearby sway on their feet. "Don't come any closer, Potter, I swear on my wand..."
He came closer anyway. He always did. He put two fingers on the inside of her wrist, the way she would have checked a patient's pulse, and the fever dropped.
Just like that. As if he'd put his hand in cold water and drawn the heat out through her skin. The relief was so total and so sudden that her knees went, and a sound came out of her that she would remember with shame for the rest of her life: a soft, broken moan, right there in the Atrium, with her mother at her side and half the Wizengamot watching.
His eyes went wide behind his glasses. His fingers tightened on her wrist.
Draconia snatched her hand away, and the fever came roaring back, and she turned and walked out of the Remembrance Gala with her silver hair streaming behind her and every man in the room but one staring after her like a lost dog.
"Veela," said Healer Miriam Strout, an hour later, with enormous satisfaction.
They were in a side room off the Spell Damage ward at St Mungo's, the ward Draconia had worked on for six years. She was sitting on the edge of a bed in her black silk with a cooling charm on her forehead that wasn't working, and Strout was examining her hair through a monocle with the delight of a woman who'd been waiting her entire career for something this interesting.
"I'm not a Veela."
"No, dear. You're a very small fraction of one, I'd guess. On your father's side." Strout peered at her. "Did your mother never mention it?"
"My mother," said Draconia, through her teeth, "is sitting in the corridor having a quiet cup of tea and refusing to look me in the eye."
"Ah. Well. It's rare. Very rare. Mostly the blood sleeps for a dozen generations and nobody's the wiser. But now and then, in an adult descendant, it wakes. Usually in response to someone." Strout let the monocle fall. "Who was it?"
Draconia said nothing.
"The fever, the glamour leaking all over the Atrium, the hair. Textbook. It's the bond waking up, and it wakes for one person. Your mate. And the way you can tell..." Strout tapped the chart. "Your glamour will affect every wizard who comes near you, except one. Him, it doesn't touch. He's the only man who'll ever see you as you are. That's how the old Veela knew. So." She smiled. "Who looked at you tonight like a normal person?"
Draconia shut her eyes.
There was a knock at the door. It opened before anyone answered it, because of course it did, and Harry Potter stood there in his dress robes with his tie undone and his hair worse than ever.
"Your mother said I could come in," he said. "She said it was probably about me." He looked from Strout to Draconia. "Is it about me?"
Strout explained it all over again, with diagrams. Potter listened. He took it better than Draconia had. He sat in the visitor's chair with his elbows on his knees and asked sensible questions, and she sat on the bed and burned.
"So what does it want?" he said. "The bond."
"Closeness," said Strout. "Contact. Proximity. Skin, ideally. Nothing more than that, to begin with; it isn't a love potion, and it can't make either of you feel anything that isn't there already. It only points." She glanced between them. "Once she accepts it, it'll settle, and the fever with it."
"And if I don't accept it?" Draconia said.
Strout's face changed. For the first time, she looked like a Healer delivering news. "Then it'll keep climbing. The glamour will get worse. The fever will get worse. I've read two cases where the Veela refused outright." She paused. "I'd give you a month."
"Then I have a month," said Draconia.
"Malfoy," Potter said.
"I'd rather die, Potter. I'm sorry. I really would rather die than spend the rest of my life on a leash held by Harry Potter, because some French ancestor of mine had appalling taste and passed it down."
He was quiet. She made herself look at him. She'd expected anger. What was on his face was worse. He just looked at her, steady and green and unimpressed, the only man in Britain who could.
"Right," he said, and got up, and left.
She didn't sleep. The fever wouldn't let her. She lay on top of the covers in her flat with the windows open to the May night and burned, and her hair lit the ceiling silver, and every time she closed her eyes she felt two fingers on the inside of her wrist.
At seven in the morning, someone knocked on her door.
She opened it in her dressing gown with her wand in her hand. Harry Potter stood on the landing, unshaven, holding a roll of parchment and two coffees.
"I drafted a contract," he said. "Since you'd rather die." He held out the parchment. "I'd rather you didn't."