Of Doves and Dragons

Chapter Thirty: The Tipping Point

"Oh, the storm is raging against us now. If you're afraid of falling, then don't look down."

-Imagine Dragons, Walking the Wire

She fantasized of running away so much these days that it seemed her fantasies were the only thing keeping her head above water. The harsh brand on her forearm was a constant reminder of what Lucius had once told her. The mark was a two way link; a way to always locate his followers and let them locate him in return. There could be no running when you had been marked and leashed. Which begged the question constantly circling in her mind; how had her parents done it? And that path of thinking always brought her to questioning why she couldn't find Voldemort when she tried to see if she could apparate to him. He had touched her before, briefly, but every time she tried to look for him, to gain some leverage, she came up empty.

But with that failure, she found another liberating revelation. She had thought about it before in passing when it had first been burned into her skin, but since then it hadn't crossed her mind. She glanced down at her arm, at the brutally scared skin, and flexed her arm. Her patronus came to her in slow waves and she sighed in the knowledge that she had been right.

That night there was going to be a meeting in the dining room of Malfoy Manor. Everyone was to be in attendance. Draco had been silently floundering all afternoon. Ember knew he was right to be worried. This would be the first time that he would see Voldemort since his failure at the Battle of the Astronomy Tower. There was little she could do to comfort him, no words would ebb the inevitable. And logically she knew that Voldemort would not convene the first general meeting in months purely to humiliate and punish Draco. Oh that definitely might be part of it, but if that had been his goal he would have done it back in June.

Still it was concerning that Voldemort hadn't convened a true meeting all summer. Instead he had been favoring intimate meetings with fewer, trusted, followers. This was uncharacteristic. Voldemort always thrived at the superior attention of others. He liked to flaunt his prowess and he never did anything that wasn't meticulously planned. Then again, it wasn't news that Voldemort had trust issues. Perhaps he had been waiting to hold a true meeting until he got closer to annihilating the threat that was Harry Potter.

Ember was anxious for what the night might bring. There were always too many variables when it came to Voldemort. She just wanted the days where she had to hold her tongue and live in unwavering fear to be over, but there was no end in sight. A second wizarding war was already upon them, and Voldemort was only growing stronger. If the outcome of this war was to be different than the first, Ember would be stuck in this nightmare forevermore, however short that might be.

~

Draco sat down in his father's study with a twitchy disposition. Lucius had bid him come for a chat before the nights events unfolded.

Lucius himself was riddled with anxiety over the basically impromptu meeting. He had once been at the direct side of Voldemort. He had been trusted with delicate information, been given all the respect he could have ever wanted, and yet just as he feared; Draco's failures only emphasized his own. The Malfoys had been worse than simply cast further down the Death Eater hierarchy; they were being ignored. And though Voldemort may ignore them for a time, he knew that the snake would not forget and that karma was encroaching on them. Tonight need only be its' catalyst.

"Draco stop staring at the liquor cabinet. You're effectively cut off tonight. You cannot go in there without a clear head."

"I-I wasn't" Draco responded, mildly baffled. He hadn't even noticed that his eyes had trained on the cabinet. He had been lost to thoughts of deep seated betrayal by his own father. The man who held the name Malfoy above all, would help conspire to turn one of his own into a werewolf. Had he simply forgotten that little bit of information? That it was by his own doing that Ember was a part of their family.