A/N: My lack of updates were pathetic and inexcusable. I'm truly sorry. I cranked out this chapter in 15 minutes. More to come later today/early tomorrow morning. Truly truly sorry. Love you all. *cowers*

Burning heat everywhere – writhing, flaming, debilitating heat. He thrashed around, trying to throw it off, trying, somehow, to find the relief he knew would not come.

"Temperature 41.5 degrees – cool him off right now!"

"Nothing is working!"

"Take off his clothes – cold air on his skin."

A rush of cool, sweet, blissful relief – a start contrast to the swarm of hot pinpricks under his skin.

"Temperature dropping."

"Shouldn't the stasis charm have kept his temperature down?"

"Where is Healer Granger?"

"Sent a patronus – no response."

A crackle of magic and a distinctly female voice "Apply localized cooling charms to wrist and neck. We are coming shortly."

Intense cool applied to his burning skin, taken by his veins and spreading to his fingertips and toes. His head still burned, ached, and there was a weight in the middle of his chest.

The room looked on as Draco's right hand broke from his personal torture and came to rest, clawing at his heart.

The room was abuzz with activity, lesser healers and mediwitches and wizards making things as comfortable as they could for Draco without Healer Granger's knowledge of the case. Even with cooling charms, his temperature was dangerously high and no longer falling. He was still in danger, and all they could do was wait.

An exhausted, disheveled Hermione Granger practically sprinted into the ward, Lucius in tow.

"Lucius – wait in the visitor's area please. You don't need to see what he's going through in there."

Lucius ducked into the brightly lit room, folding his lanky form into a battered waiting chair.

Hermione was handed a clipboard and surrounded by mediwizards, simultaneously clamoring for her attention. She raised a hand for silence.

"One at a time."

"Healer Granger – His temperature was nearly 42 degrees. We removed his clothes and applied cooling charms to his neck and wrists as directed. The stasis spell seems to have worn off. . . It was being renewed every four hours, as you directed."

Hermione stepped into the room and cast her typical anylitical spell on Draco.

The copper fire was spreading – down from his heart to his shoulders, tendrils reaching into his legs and arms. It emanated a glow that, she suspected, was responsible for the failing of her staff's normally excellent stasis charm.

She sighed and rolled up her sleeves, after sticking her wand into the messy bun at the back of her head. For once in her life, she had absolutely no idea what was going on.

Shouts came from the corridor and the door burst open as Lucius strode in, shaking off the healer dogging his heels insisting he wait outside.

"Hermione. His hands. Have you checked his hands?"

Hermione glanced around. Her staff was looking at her with blank faces.

"You mean to tell me that none of you did a physical workup on him? Magic can only get you so far. It won't point out visible anomalies in appearance. You need to learn to analyze things not only with your wands, but also with your eyes and brain."

She moved to Draco's bedside and began to examine him with a clinical eye – honed through practice of looking at very fit, handsome and young quidditch players.

She uncurled his left hand – tightly balled at his side – and lifted it into the light more clearly.

There was a small puncture wound shining with the same bright copper fire that burned in Draco's heart and blood. Burned into his skin around it was a crudely carved Latin script – 'fit autem praevaricor signifier'.

"The breaker becomes the bearer." Lucius said, from behind her.

She turned to see him standing so close he was practically touching her.

There was a silence before she wondered aloud what they were all thinking.

"What the hell does that mean?"

Lucius' brows knit together. "I have no idea. But I have a feeling it has something to do with the pentagram room."

Hermione began barking out orders to her staff – check the strength of the stasis charms, monitor temperature with regularity, renew cooling charms every hour and above all –

"Notify me IMMEDIATELY if there is ANY change whatsoever – Please, Healer Williamson, I need to know. Draco isn't out of the woods; whatever is attacking him is a serious threat to his life. If anything changes, even if you think it's subtle or a fluke, check it, double check it, and LET ME KNOW."

The healer, slightly shell-shocked by Hermione's vigilance, could only nod as her and Lucius apparated away.

They came out of the strange, stretching tube at the gate of Malfoy Manor.

"Lucius – Do you have an idea of something that I don't? I have no idea what this is."

"Due to your actions earlier when you tried to remove a bottle from the wall, I could glean that you know little about stereotypical supernatural forces? Demons, sprites, and the like?"

He took her silence as an affirmation.

"I believe, and he really should have known better – Narcissa and I taught him – that Draco has inadvertently released something that he should not, either that or lost control of something that he intended to keep."

"That helps very little, Lucius."

"Yes and no. While we have no idea why Draco pulled this sophomoric stunt, we can at least find out what he released. Don't raise your eyebrow at me. The manor has a very complicated filing and classification system for our artifacts, and I believe it goes even as far down as those rooms. Though it hasn't been touched for nearly centuries, there is probably a way to cross-index the current contents of the room with the contents the last time it was recorded."

He took the stairs up to the door two at a time – making Hermione match practically three of her strides to every one of his.

"TWYE!" He called. A small elf popped into the room just in front of the main stairs. "Twye, please fetch me the records for the low room – see if you can find one that lists the contents of the summoning chamber."

The elf bowed, and winked out.

Hermione sank into a plush armchair and cradled her head in her hands. "Lucius – I'm way out of my element. I work with 'impossible' cases, but I've never dealt with something truly supernatural before. I honestly have no idea what to do to keep Draco even at the state he is in, much less to fix him."

Lucius walked behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders, rubbing gently at the knots in her neck. "Kitten, I honestly doubt I have much more of an idea than you. The only advantage I have is the extensive ancestral library that hopefully can tell us more about whatever is haunting Draco than the experience you and I had."

Hermione blushed. She had been . . . Intimate . . . with Lucius Malfoy. She had nearly forgotten. It was like a sweet, brilliant, exquisite nightmare – a dream that in theory should delight her more than it should terrify her.

"Lucius – what are we going to do about that? From the sounds of it, after that ritual, we're bound to each other. Unless we can find a way to reverse it, we're basically married."

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, this works in our advantage, allowing you to see some of the more secretive and dangerous parts of the manor, allows you to access the library, and most importantly, gives you an inside look at what may have hurt my son. He's the concern right now, dear. As wonderful as you are, I'm not half as concerned about my maybe marriage as I am about his life."

A crack announced Twye's return to the room. She carried with her a tome that was practically as tall as she was.

"Here is the list of bottles in the pentagram room, sirs and miss!" she squeaked. "Is there anything else Twye can be doing to help?"

"No, that will be all."

"Master Lucius – I's sorry for asking, but how is young master?"

Hermione answered for him. "We're doing all we can for him right now."

The elf nodded, and apparated away.

"They care about him?"

"Of course. I have made errors, but Draco has always been kind to the elves. They love him. Twye took care of him when he was a baby. They have a kind of bond."

He hefted the book the elf had left.

"There has to be a way to see if these titles match up with the bottles."

Hermione thought for a moment.

"We could modify the point me spell. Instead of focusing on a direction, we could apply it to the book, and ask the book to point to the particular bottles that were missing. That way, instead of having to sift through thousands of titles, we would be directly pointed to the ones that are missing."

Lucius stared at her for several seconds, murmured something that sounded suspiciously like 'brilliant' under his breath, grabbed her and kissed her.

"Come on. We have work to do." He said rather breathlessly, a minute later, and dragged her down to the dungeons.

A/N: Am I forgiven? Phew. That was some intense writing I just did. The sooner you review, the sooner you get to find out what happened to Draco and what (or who) he released. . . *cackle*