How to Make a Villain - [Sebastian Sallow x F!OC]

[seventeen]

If only he'd let them take her...

As it always did when danger lurked, tingly magic prickled at the periphery of her trembling form. But there was something else, too, lurking beneath the familiar buzz of her Ancient Magic.

Something darker.

Something wrong.

Beside her, Sugar pawed nervously at the ground, her scaly head thrashing from side to side. No longer interested in the bucket of feed, the contents of which were strewn across the hay where Aurélie had dropped it, the beast backed away from her, whinnying when her hind quarters bumped into the too-small confines of her stall, trapped.

A prickling of cold, scratchy darkness clawed under Aurélie's skin, rattled her rib cage, squeezed her heart.

Even death fears you.

She didn't hear Poppy's cry of alarm nor the frightened baying of the Thestrals as she fled the stables into the cool night beyond — only a voice that reverberated deep within her; like her blood had been given speech; like her bones were talking.

You did this, it said in a voice like black tar and sharp needles. This is your fault.

The world spun beneath her feet.

Stumbling over uneven ground, fighting to contain the tendrils of black and silver that were coiling around her fingers, she headed not for the beacon of light offered by the castle in the distance, but away from it; beckoned not by warmth or sanctuary, but by the darkness that lay beyond — and there she sat, wrapped in the cold embrace of oblivion until the only light that remained came from the blue flames in her pocket.

-x-

'Have you eaten?' Sebastian peered anxiously into Aurélie's face, checking her temperature with the back of his hand for the third time in a row.

The first thing she'd noticed upon waking in the hospital wing was the smell: the familiar scent of healing herbs — dittany, mandrake, and wormwood — mingled with the heady, slightly astringent smell of medicinal potions reminded her so strongly of her father's apothecary that for a moment she thought she was back home. The second, slightly more alarming thing to catch her attention had been Sebastian Sallow, whose gentle touch and look of tender concern felt like being home in an entirely different way.

But that had been three days ago, and Sebastian had scarcely left her side since.

'Yes, maman, I have eaten.'

Sebastian rolled his eyes. 'More than half a carrot?'

When she didn't answer, he tutted impatiently but continued his pointless examination unabated: temperature, heart rate, reflexes, blood pressure. Some of these he conducted with fancy little healing spells that shivered pleasantly through her body, while others he carried out with his hands. Those made her shiver, too, but in a wildly different way than his spells.

'Still dizzy?' he asked.

'Not really,' she lied.

'Tired?'

'N-no,' she replied with an eye-watering yawn.

Sebastian heaved an impatient sigh.

'You're as bad as Anne was,' he muttered, reaching for yet another vile-tasting potion she absolutely didn't need, to cure the illness she definitely didn't have, but which he vehemently insisted she drink anyway. At this rate, she was more likely to die of perpetual vexation than succumb to whatever had landed her here in the first place — which, according to Hogwarts finest trainee-Healer-who-thinks-he-knows-everything, had been a burst of destructive energy caused by the long suppression of her natural magic. In other words (and this Sebastian had told her with the smug expression of someone who dearly longed to say 'I told you so' but knew better than to say it to someone on their sickbed), she was showing signs of becoming the Obscurial he'd warned her about during her first visit to the Undercroft.