This is the first story I've published that I'm not promising I will finish. I have a lot of other demands on my time, and this is not my primary writing focus for the summer. I am also not promising to update it regularly. If you are fine with those constraints, then please enjoy. As always, reviews are likely to spark more interest on my part. Many thanks to JKR for the world in which my imagination rambles.

The evening was the worst of his life.

Draco looked at the mess on the street of the Muggle hamlet. The scent from the Muggle blood was particularly noxious to him now, but there was nothing to be done about it. At least this lot had the tender mercy of being killed instead of taken elsewhere for less salubrious 'delights'. Thus far he had only been given the task of mopping things up and casting Morsmordre. There were some small advantages to being decidedly out of favor, if it meant passing up such 'pleasures' as torture and murder.

"That's enough!" Yaxley's voice was emotionless and cold; pretty well like the man himself, in Draco's experience. He vastly preferred missions with him or Rowle over his aunt or that lunatic Dolohov. Not that Dolohov was doing all that well at the moment, either, he thought with a vicious twinge of satisfaction. He idly watched as Yaxley double-checked the strewn bodies, the distant sound of Muggle sirens an invitation to more havoc, if he so chose. For the love of Merlin, just be done with it, Draco thought to himself.

It was bad enough that Draco's new handle as the junior Death Eater who did not kill Dumbledore had caused Voldemort to send him on increasingly sick forays with other Death Eaters to kidnap, torture, kill, curse, or whatever other twisted desire crossed the Dark Lord's mind. However, his birthday had caused the onset of the most painful transformation of his life, which he had to keep secret from his own mother, not to mention his crazy ass aunt, and definitely the Dark Lord. Thank Merlin Snape had been teaching him Occlumency since fourth year, or he would have been Crucio'ed and Avada'ed before he could blink.

Yaxley nodded at Draco.

Thank Salazar.

Draco pointed his wand skyward, watching the snake writhe into the air. Another night in purgatory finished, it seemed. Disapparating in a puff of black smoke (for such dramatics were required), he soundlessly appeared in the foyer of the Manor, a privilege permitted only to the permanent residents of the house and the Dark Lord himself. He grinned for a split second at the thought before the noise reached him. Bellatrix was shouting at someone—torture, again.

On the Manor's first floor, how tasteless could she be? Draco thought to himself, before the scream reached his ear. It was followed by a scent…more blood, but not like anything he'd ever smelled before—

His blood felt like it had been set alight, every corpuscle quivering as a white hot sensation overpowered every sense. That blood…

Draco gasped and fell down to one knee, keeping himself upright by sheer willpower alone.

Salazar, Rowena, Helga, Godric…the smell!

His entire being roared, his magical core coalescing in a fire of need. Another scream rent the air, and Draco was hit with a rapid fire succession of soul-deep realizations. His mate was here, and his aunt was torturing her. And he had to stop it. Now.

Another bone wrenching scream pierced him to the core. It didn't matter that she had to be on the side of the Order, or that he didn't yet know who she was. Every primal part of him was firing and in control, the plan assembling itself with a rapidity and cleverness that was unlikely to elicit any suspicion. Draco was playing a dangerous game already, but this would either damn him to the deepest pits of hell or propel him to the heights of the heavens.

Silently he approached the doors to the drawing room. The blood smell was stronger, overwhelming him with a feeling of rage. Dimly his rational brain asserted itself. He couldn't react from pure emotion, he had to be calm. Calm, calm, she will be safe in a moment.

A silencing spell on the door.

A Confundus charm on the entrance to the room.

There, he was in. His aunt was screeching at a prone figure on the floor. He couldn't tell who she was, the wave of her blood scent hitting his nostrils again. Every part of his being was focused on executing the plan. No hesitation was possible.

He kept walking, silent thanks to the charm he had used on himself. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his father, there, watching with that cold numbness that was the only refuge other than insanity. Lucius' head jerked slightly—he saw him.

Before his father could give away his presence, Draco's wand flicked out and cast a nonverbal Stupefy! with more power than he had ever wielded nonverbally. Bellatrix Lestrange didn't see who had hexed her, and he quickly knocked her out the Muggle way with a heavy candlestick as she lay facedown on top of the girl. He saw dark maroon blood ebbing from the wound through her crazy curls, and he heard his father shouting at him.

"What have you done, Draco? WHY?" Lucius' voice was manic, the suddenness of his son's action dissolving his torpor. He leapt forward, but Draco actually snarled at him as he crouched over the prone forms on the floor, his head snapping up as his teeth bared, the incisors elongating with the deadly elegance of a Veela.

"Oh no," Lucius whispered, horrified. Draco ignored him and turned back to the task of removing Bellatrix from the nearly unconscious girl. His only priority was his mate. Another wordless spell had Bellatrix's frozen body off the girl and he finally saw her face, her caramel eyes wide with shock.

"Fuck. Granger." Draco said, closing his mouth quickly before she saw his incisors. He turned to his father pleadingly. "Help me, Father! It has to look like she and her friends escaped. Quickly!"

"Malfoy?" Hermione's voice was shaky, the tears still trickling down her face, an unconscious series of twitches from the Cruciatus still sending sheaves of pain falling through her frame.

Another breath and wave of sensation hit Draco as the scent of her blood filled his nostrils. He itched to sink his teeth into her, to claim her NOW. Were there no bounds to which the universe would go to torture him? he thought as he looked at the Muggleborn girl he'd always despised.

"Shut up!" Draco hissed, standing and approaching Lucius, desperate for distance before he fucked them all over due to his damn instincts. His teeth cut painfully into his tongue as he instructed his father. "Get down to the dungeons, get her friends up here! Keep your part in it cloaked, I'll deal with the girl."

"Draco, your mother—" Lucius began, but Draco hissed, "Just do it! I know!"

"Draco? Why did you do that?"

Draco's head snapped back to Hermione, watching as she struggled to get up, forcing his nails to dig into his palms instead of touching her again. Draco still smelled the blood. God, he wanted her! She touched her forearm and tears sprang to her eyes again, causing his gaze to zero in on the wound his aunt had inflicted. He grabbed her arm wordlessly, a bit more roughly than necessary, examining the word that Bellatrix had been carving into her flesh.

"Be quiet and let me heal this," Draco ordered harshly, resisting claiming her with every fiber of his conscious being. Some quick probing spellwork showed the Dark magic in the wounds. Gritting his teeth against the pain razoring against his own aura, he silently thanked his father for his merciless tutelage in the Dark Arts, pulling out the seeping tendrils of black magic with his wand before healing the cuts. She stared at him openmouthed, another tremor shuddering through her frame. It worsened and Draco realized that her stare had drifted to Bellatrix's unconscious form. He roughly shook her arm to get her attention again as he finished healing her wounds.

"You have to get out of here. I'm going to help you, Granger. Just…trust me. I need your memory of me coming in here. Please."

Draco's voice was pleading, but he could see that her distrust of him was going to cost them precious seconds.

"What? Draco, I need my wand! I need—"

They didn't have time to negotiate. For the first time in his life, he used his essence on his mate.

It was not as he'd imagined it would occur. Hermione's expression grew more trusting, and he quickly pulled the short string of memory from her, placing it in an unbreakable vial and sending it to his room, to his hiding place. Immediately following that he hit her with the Imperius. She fought him every inch of the way, and it was only because she was his mate that he was able to get away with it, the rich smell of her scent deepening in response to his essence. His tongue was thick, his blood roaring as he garbled out,

"You're going to wrestle me for my wand, Granger, and when your friends show up at the door there you're going to get it, and Stupefy me. A little blood wouldn't go amiss, either. And then you're going to take Bellatrix's wand and get the hell out of here, and do a better job of being careful not to get caught. And as soon as you get wherever you're going to Disapparate to, you'll throw off this curse. Understood?"

He removed the Stupefy and she nodded, then began struggling with him in earnest. If it hadn't been so tragically comical he would have enjoyed it, the close contact and panting as they rolled around on the floor, his tongue cutting against his eyeteeth from the near mad desire to just taste her. At last the door opened, and with a move that caused a spurt of blood to erupt from his nose as she broke it, she snatched his wand and Stupefied him in front of her friends' fixed stares. It happened so fast—Hermione's panicked voice calling to his traitorous house elf—he would have applauded her for suggesting Dobby as a means of escape if he had been able to do so. His eyes tracked on the bedraggled prisoners, then fixed on the unmistakable, swollen visage of Harry Potter. Shit fuck!

He had to figure out what that meant, what Bellatrix had done, why she hadn't already called the Dark Lord. Before he could pursue that train of thought, someone (probably that weasel, Weasley) kicked him hard in the head and he passed out.

When Draco came to again, he hoped it was because his father had come back and they had time to get their stories straight. If not, this could be hairy going. Instantly he felt the painful, red hot agony of the Cruciatus curse.

Only one person had that much power.

"I'm so sorry, my lord!" he ground out between screams, his body twisting violently enough that he feared his wings would erupt from his back. He saw the scuffed tips of his godfather's dragonhide boots, knew that both of his parents were probably there to witness his humiliation, and had probably felt the sting of the Dark Lord's wand as well. The intensity of the curse grew after his apology, but he kept uttering it again and again, not even feeling it when he lost control of his bladder. When he was finally tortured to within an inch of his life, Lord Voldemort finally allowed him to gasp a few breaths that were, blissfully, devoid of the white hot agony, possessing merely the burn of extreme muscular pain.

"Now, Draco. Perhaps you can shed some light on the circumstances of the escape of the Mudblood and Weasley, along with your other prisoners, hmm?"

Draco painfully pulled himself up to kneel, groveling, before Lord Voldemort. He didn't even dare to look at the Dark Lord, but began his explanation. He prayed to every deity that his father had given a similar tale. "I arrived home from the raid and my aunt was torturing the mudblood in the drawing room. I entered the room, and someone must have entered behind me. I was stunned, but it only hit me partly. I stumbled and saw a curse hit Bella, kicked back and hit something. The mudblood rushed at me and wrestled me for my wand. I was about to overcome her, I swear it, but the others came up from the dungeons and I was hexed again. I don't know, one of them hit me. That's the last thing I know."

"And did you see anyone else of interest, before you were knocked out?" Voldemort's tone was sharp, and Draco knew this was the key question. This had to stick. "I recognized the redheaded weasel and the airhead, but no one else. Oh, and Ollivander…" he allowed his tone to trail off, as if he were afraid his master didn't want that to be general knowledge, his shoulders hunching for a dose of the Cruciatus instinctively.

Voldemort's wand pushed his chin up painfully and he thrust his way into Draco's mind, shuffling through his recent memories like tissue paper. It played out in his memories exactly as he had said, the true version of events buried tightly in the primitive part of his brain that was the Veela, secure behind his Occlumency shields. The Dark Lord thrust him away with a hand to his forehead, throwing a half-hearted Crucio for thirty seconds at the boy while he pondered the outcome of the attack. Bellatrix had laid her mind more than bare before him, and their accounts matched up, for the most part. Bella could not remember anything beyond Cruciating the girl and cutting her up with knives, and the girl's refusal to tell them where they had been hiding Potter.

Draco looked carefully up to his right as the quivering from the curse subsided, and saw his aunt Bellatrix giving him a disgusted look. Clearly she didn't suspect him of anything other than the incompetence she had come to associate with a Malfoy, and he kept his head lowered, subservient and as quiescent as possible despite the stench of urine and wracks of muscle spasms.

"Tonight has been a disappointment of the highest order. But they faltered, my loyal servants; they faltered. This proves the power of the Taboo, and the value of the work of the Snatchers. Greyback, perhaps this fool of a boy would be an adequate reward for your valuable efforts."

Voldemort's voice rang out in the hall, which was doubtless crowded with all the Death Eaters. Draco shivered. One bite from Greyback and he would maul the wolf right back, his Veela more than a match for a lowly werewolf. However, then his secret would be well and truly out. He heard someone clear their throat, then the sibilant and low tones of Severus Snape filled the crevices of the Inner Circle.

"My Lord, if I may—this boy might be put to a more useful occupation at Hogwarts. Since assuming the mastery of the school, I, your most humble servant, have been nearly unable to keep up with the potions required for our good work. Since he possesses a talent for potion making, and I am surely to become busier with the staff changes you have suggested, perhaps he could be required to assist me in my work?"

The Dark Lord paused in his steps in front of Draco, and he could tell from the growl of the werewolf behind him that Lord Voldemort must be giving the matter some thought.

"Yes, Severus, you are correct. This would suit me, for now." The Dark Lord grabbed his chin and forced him to look up at his dark red eyes. Draco did not have to fake the fear he felt at the sight of his master, and the Dark Lord's lips twisted most cruelly. "Do make him earn his place beneath my feet, Severus. How crushing, for the pureblood heir to sink to scrubbing cauldrons."

"It will be as you say, my Lord," Severus replied assuredly, and the Dark Lord released him, walking off and leaving Draco in the pool of his own urine.

"Widdle Drakey, you've wet yourself!" Bellatrix cackled, then clapped her hands together with glee before she followed her master.

"Fuck me," Draco said as the echo of footsteps departing behind him gave him permission to slump down, pressing his head to the cold flagstones, piss or not.