Dragon Hunted

1~ Death Awaits

"Years ago, I knew a boy who made all the wrong choices. Let me help you, Draco, please."

"I don't want your help! Don't you understand?" His breathing was heavy and uneven, almost as though he were holding back tears.

"I have to do this! I have to kill you... Or he's gonna kill me... And my parents." He raised his wand higher, aiming it directly at the headmaster's chest. "So don't you see? I have no choice."

"Draco, you are no assassin."

"No one knows what I am. Not even me."

Dumbledore sighed, looking sympatheticly into Draco's eyes.

"Avada Kedavra!"

A beam of green light erupted from the tip of Draco's wand, hitting Dumbledore square in the chest, and down, down, down the headmaster fell from the Astronomy Tower.

Draco felt tears form in his cloudy grey eyes that reflected the brewing storm in the sky above. He stood frozen to the spot as his wand arm slowly lowered, letting tears roll down his pale cheeks like raindrops on his face.

The boy opened his eyes; he was laying peacefully in his emerald duvet bed at Malfoy Manor. Tears continued slowly and silently rolling down his cheek and across the bridge if his nose exactly where they had been that night only two nights ago.

Draco sniffed and wiped the tears from his face, then tiredly got out of bed and shifted his half-closed eyes toward the grandfather clock that had just chimed midnight.

Knock Knock Knock.

Draco cleared his throat as he went to grab a tie from his wardrobe. "Come in."

The door opened, and in walked Bellatrix, her big curly hair bouncing with each step as usual. She looked over to her nephew who was still applying his tie and smiled in a way that Draco couldn't decipher, but could tell it wasn't scheming nor genuine.

"The Dark Lord is very impressed with you, you know." She walked over to where Draco was standing in front of a large, black-framed mirror and inspected both of their reflections.

"Oh is he now?" Draco replied, just managing to hide the squeak in his voice of how parched his throat was.

Bellatrix nodded, and ran a claw-like hand through Draco's platinum hair. "None of us thought you would actually do it."

"Neither did I." Draco mumbled under his breath as he grabbed his black blazer from a coat hanger in the wardrobe (This was a different but identical one to the one Draco had worn the night he killed Albus Dumbledore - that was sent to the House Elves for cleaning and damage repair.)

"We're waiting for you, you know." Bellatrix came up behind him in the mirror once again, speaking quietly and patiently which she only really ever did with her sister Narcissa and Draco.

"Why?"

"He wants to speak with you."

As much as he wanted to, Draco didn't push the stalling questions further as he knew his aunt Bellatrix had limits when it came to patience.

He followed her through the dark, murky halls of the manor, though nowhere inside the palace felt a small bit like home since Voldemort and the Death Eaters had invaded the house. Apart from his own bedroom, which consisted a large wooden trunk at the end of his bed, where no one besides himself knew kept rows upon rows of letters from his friends at Hogwarts over the years.

Every. Single. One. He'd kept.

But he wouldn't let anyone know that, though he was quite sure a few House Elves had seen them one day when helping to pack for another year at school, they just didn't say anything.

Draco and Bellatrix arrived at the large set of doors leading into the dining room, and they walked in seeing every seat but a few at the table occupied by a glaring Death Eater.

At the head of the table sat Lord Voldemort himself, whom Draco despised with even more hate seeing him in his father's seat like he should be king of the house. You never will be. Your cause is killing off non-pure-bloods, right? (Not) welcome to the household, stinking half-blood.

Not that Draco ever felt the same about non-pure-bloods as he did a few years before, though the exception was sitting in his father's former seat at head of the table.

"Welcome, Draco, come sit." Voldemort gestured ever so politely to the empty seat in between Lucius and Amycus.

Draco obeyed the order silently and sat down at the blood-covered table he used to be able to eat meals at.

"Impeccable job well done with your succession of the task I gave you." He sounded as if he were masking the disappointed tone.

"You don't seem all that pleased, my lord." Draco dared say, all the while refraining from making a disgusted face at the words 'my lord'.

Voldemort nodded slowly in a deadly calm way. He looked Draco up and down in his seat with a scowl gradually finding its way across his ugly, inhuman snake-like face.

"Draco, have you ever heard of The Deathly Hallows?" He asked in an eerie voice.

"The gifts of The Three Brothers children story?"

"Yes."

"Then, yes, I know a bit about them."

"Likewise, and it appears you have something of mine."

"What would that be?" Lucius spoke up, his voice rising a channel louder than his usual calm voice.

Everyone at the table looked expectantly at Draco, but the teenage wizard just looked down at his pale hands in his lap. "What do I have of yours? And what does this have to do with the Deathly Hallows? They're just a children's story."

Voldemort's sneer bent into an evil grin, and he slowly arose from his -Lucius'- enormous chair.

"The tale goes; the witch or wizard that kills the Elder Wand's current owner becomes its new master from then fourth."

He slithered around the long dining table, and begun walking behind the chairs of Bellatrix, then Narcissa, then Lucius, and finally rested with his talon-like, grimey clasps on the back of Draco's chair.

The boy didn't dare move a muscle.

"And it just so happens," he tightened his grip on the leather chair back. Lucius held his son's hand tightly underneath the table, sharing a second's glance of fear in both pairs of stormy grey eyes.

"... That Draco here, murdered our beloved old man Dumbledore just two days ago."

Draco still didn't look up from his hands, but furrowed his brows. He peeked another glance at his father in a mix of both fright and confusion.

Draco could feel the Dark Lord's killing stare glaring daggers into the back of his head.

"You see, the Elder Wand is said to be made of elder wood with a core of Thestral tail hair. I believe Albus Dumbledore had that exact wand. Did he not?"

All eyes glared like knives at Draco's figure.

Voldemort let a dark and sinister smirk trace across his (non-existent) lips.

"I do need that wand, Draco. But since you are its master now, it can never truly be mine. I will see you in a few hours. Death awaits you." He taunted, then apparated from the room, leaving Draco frozen and trembling in his seat.