Betrayal of the Black

thirty-six

Pushing the door open to the top of the tower, she found her cousin and the headmaster. Relief flooded through her when she saw that Draco was okay.

In fact, he seemed more than okay. He was pointing his wand at Dumbledore, his hand shaking slightly. Dumbledore stood disarmed, his wand discarded on the floor by Celestia's feet. She picked it up in case he tried to do any wandless magic to get it back.

"Sweet cousin, what do you think you're doing?" Celestia demanded.

"I can handle this, Celeste. Go back to bed, no one has to know that you were here," said Draco, his gaze not straying from the headmaster.

She scoffed. "If you think I'm going to leave, you're out of your mind."

Celestia moved to stand beside her cousin. She slipped her wand out of her pocket, and pointed it at Dumbledore as well for good measure.

"Don't do this, Draco," said Albus.

"Don't do this? It's already too late for this, Dumbledore. You don't know what I've done and what I will do," Draco replied.

"Oh yes, I do," said Dumbledore mildly. "You almost killed Katie Bell and Ronald Weasley. You have been trying, with increasing desperation, to kill me all year. Forgive me, Draco, but they have been feeble attempts; I truly wonder whether your heart has been really in it."

"You don't know what you're talking about. My heart—"

Celestia turned to face her cousin and placed her hands on her hips. "Seriously, Dray, taking credit for my work now, are you?"

Her cousin slanted her a look. "Not the time."

She was cut off from her rebuttal when somewhere in the depths of the castle there was a muffled yell. She looked over to see Theo leaning against the doorframe to the Astronomy Tower, who'd just been glancing down the stairwell.

"Somebody is putting up a good fight," said Dumbledore conversationally. "But you were saying, yes, you have managed to introduce Death Eaters into my school, which, I admit, I thought impossible... How did you do it?"

"Yes, why don't you share with the class, Draco?" asked Celestia.

He'd somehow managed to keep it a secret for the past couple months. It had infuriated her, but she'd forced herself not to push him on the subject. Though, now that Dumbledore had asked, and Draco had planned on doing this alone, she wasn't going to hold back.

She instantly felt bad for asking. He looked as though he was fighting down the urge to either shout, or to vomit. He gulped and took several deep breaths, glaring at Dumbledore, his wand pointing directly at the latter's heart.

Then, as though he could not help himself, he said, "I had to mend that broken Vanishing Cabinet that no one's used for years. The one Montague got lost in last year."

Dumbledore's sigh was half a groan. He closed his eyes for a moment. "That was clever. There is a pair, I take it?"

"In Borgin and Burkes," said Draco, "and they make a kind of passage between them. Montague told me that when he was stuck in the Hogwarts one, he was trapped in limbo but sometimes he could hear what was going on at school, and sometimes what was going on in the shop, as if the cabinet was traveling between them, but he couldn't make anyone hear him..."

He paused for a breath.

"In the end, he managed to Apparate out, even though he'd never passed his test. He nearly died doing it. Everyone thought it was a really good story, but I was the only one who realized what it meant — even Borgin didn't know — I was the one who realized there could be a way into Hogwarts through the cabinets if I fixed the broken one."