Draco Takes a Mark

Chapter 36

It was a familiar sound, but that made it no less startling when Snape heard it. The sound was not one he should have been able to hear inside Hogwarts -- the crack of a frantic apparation. He spun around in his study to face the intruder, his wand was drawn, teeth bared, expecting the worst. What stood before him, however, was a tiny house elf he recognized from Malfoy Manor.

"What is it?" he asked with icy caution. For months, nothing had called to him from Malfoy Manor but the burning of his Dark Mark -- nothing, that is, except for one personal visit from Narcissa Malfoy, earlier in the school year.

Narcissa -- his blood ran cold.

The house elf was weeping out a message about the mistress being hurt, dying fast. She reached for Snape's hand, pleading with him to come at once, forgetting to ask his permission as she apparated him away.

When Snape came to himself, he was inside the manor, upstairs in Madam Malfoy's bedchamber. The air smelled different. There was the usual scent of narcissus flowers, stone dust, and something more -- blood.

Bellatrix leaned over the bed, moaning and wailing. "Cissie, no. You stupid girl. How could you? And for that." Her voice was rising ever higher. "Don't you see? He wasn't wrong -- he had to do it. Cissie -- for stars' sake, Cissie, stop bleeding."

Severus bolted across the floor, to the bedside. Sunk into the once white sheets, everything now soaked scarlet in blood, was Narcissa Malfoy, quiet and still, her body moving only as her sister jostled it, working to stop the flow of blood from a wound slashed into Narcissa's chest. She had torn open the bodice of Narcissa's robes, and was now pressing against her chest, just below her collar bones, staunching the flow with a lace-trimmed pillow.

"What was it?" Snape asked Bellatrix, shouldering past her to see the wound. "What did he use? Is it what I think it is?"

"Yes. Sectumsempra," she said. "I know it, of course, but not its countercurse."

No, Bellatrix Lestrange never saw any use in learning countercurses. She fell back to let Snape work, pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her younger sister's blood across her forehead, her clothing already darkened with it.

Snape had begun the song-like incantation, the wandwork over the torn, white flesh beneath the red patina of fresh blood. He took a breath. "How long ago?" he said before beginning the incantation again. The edges of the wound were knitting back together beneath his wand, but if Narcissa had bled for too long, lost too much blood, the mere repair of her tissue wouldn't save her.

"Not ten minutes ago. He let me take her away as soon as he opened her," she said, stifling something like a gag, or a sob, at the memory. "He had to do it, Severus. We had the Mudblood's mother here all morning -- would have had the father too, if it weren't for bloody Yaxley and that Carrow. Yes, she was all locked up until Cissie let her go. I told him she did it only because she was mad but -- she still had to be punished. It was only fair."

When Snape finished the next cycle he pressed his fingers to Narcissa's neck, feeling for a pulse. He pressed hard enough to wonder if he was merely feeling his own pulse in his fingertips. "Yes, the Granger woman made her way to Hogwarts this afternoon, her husband soon after, brought by Minerva McGonagall."

Bellatrix swore, cursing Yaxley and Carrow again.

Severus turned to look her over. "Enough about them. You were made your sister's keeper and yet you failed to stop her from letting the Granger woman go. Is all of that blood on your skirts your sister's, Bella, or is some of it your own?"

She nodded toward the bed. "All hers. Cruciatus for me. I've learned my lesson."

Snape grasped her wrist. "Oh, your lesson is not over yet. To keep your sister alive, we'll need an act of loving grace from you, a donation of your precious, pure Black family blood," he sneered into her face.