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“Can’t you feel it?”
Harry stopped dead in the middle of the corridor and grunted as Ron and Hermione collided into the back of him.
Under the arched entryway to the staircases a delicate girl with tumbling curls touched Malfoy on the arm while he laughed at something she had said.
“Feel what?” said Ron.
“The allure! He’s using it on her, look!”
Hermione looked to where he was pointing and rolled her eyes. “Oh, honestly, not this again. Harry, Draco Malfoy is not a Veela.”
“Then why is that girl being nice to him?”
“That’s Astoria Greengrass. She’s in Slytherin too, maybe they’re friends.”
“Maybe she’s the Veela,” said Ron.
“Not likely, since you haven’t thrown your underpants at her yet,” Hermione smirked.
Ron gasped, pretending this was base libel instead of highly accurate and nudged his girlfriend gently in protest. She responded in kind and they entered into a shoving war which ended with Ron toppling into a suit of armour.
“Oi, you two, stop it! Just shut up a minute and see if you can feel what I feel.”
Harry closed his eyes. He could feel the allure without even looking: it was making his whole body itch.
Hermione and Ron moved to either side of him and dutifully concentrated.
How could they not feel it? The pull was overpowering. He only had to be twenty feet away from Malfoy and a monster residing deep in his chest would raise its head and start to growl. When he caught Malfoy’s eyes it practically breathed fire.
After a minute of concentrating he got the sense that Ron and Hermione were sharing their “our friend is crazy” look behind his back.
But he wasn’t crazy. Neither of them could hear the Basilisk hissing in the walls in second year, could they? And that had been real. He wasn’t making it up — Malfoy was definitely a Veela.
What about in Potions, for example, when Malfoy had glanced over at him and Harry had dropped his measuring spoon and spilled powdered bicorn horn all over the floor? It was the allure making him lose concentration and throwing him off as much as if Draco’d grabbed hold of Harry’s arm and shaken it.
And what about on the Quidditch pitch, during practice? Malfoy’s powers were like an industrial strength magnet pulling Harry’s focus. He couldn’t keep his eyes off that blond hair in the stands for more than thirty seconds no matter how hard he tried. And Harry could resist Imperius, so this was clearly some powerful Creature magic.
“Still not feeling anything,” said Ron. “No, wait… hang on…”
“Yes?”
Harry dragged his eyes from Malfoy’s slim form with difficulty and watched Ron, who had a palm splayed on his chest and a puzzled expression.
He was silent for a moment, then let out a tremendous belch that made both Harry and Hermione grimace. A portrait of a fourteenth century duchess with a niffler in her lap shrieked and covered her ears.
“Only indigestion. Can we go now?”
“For Merlin’s sake, Ronald.”
*
“But it would explain so much,” Harry continued as they clambered through the portrait hole five minutes later and collapsed onto the best squashy sofas in front of the fireplace.
Malfoy had always been attention-grabbing, right from the moment they met. Because he was secretly a magical creature, obviously. Entrancing him. And entrancing that girl, Diphtheria Meadowgrass or whoever, and Parkinson. Why else would anyone have put up with his obnoxious personality?
“What would explain what?” asked Ginny, dropping onto the rug between the sofas and unwrapping a cauldron cake.
“Harry thinks Draco Malfoy is a Veela, and that’s why the Slytherins are nice to him,” said Hermione, using her special voice for when she wanted to be extra condescending.
“Really? I hadn’t noticed. He is good-looking…”
Harry privately thought this was a huge understatement. Draco Malfoy had fallen out of the beautiful tree and hit every gorgeous branch on the way down. Ron spluttered in horror and Harry feared for a moment that he might have read his mind.
“I suppose,” said Hermione. “If you like that sort of thing. He’s sort of fey, isn’t he? And he’s tall.”
“I’m tall,” said Ron inconsequentially.
Harry noticed Parvati’s ears pricking on the other side of the common room and hastily cast Muffliato before she could pick up any more gossip.
“And he’s blond,” Harry said, adding childishly: “So there!”
Ginny frowned. “What’s that got to do with being a Veela?”
“Hello? All Veela are blond. Like Fleur.”
His friends stared back at him as if he’d just announced he was planning to jump naked into a pit full of flobberworms.
Ron shook his head slowly. “Harry… Fleur has brown hair. I know I don’t notice everything but I know what my sister-in-law looks like.”
“No, she’s blonde! Remember the Veela at the Quidditch World Cup? They were all blonde.”
He turned to Hermione for support and found her chewing her lip, eyebrows furrowed in thought. “The Veela at the World Cup had red hair,” she said, “I thought it was a jab at the Irish. And Fleur has red hair, like Bill.”
Ron started. “Are you two crazy? More to the point, are you colourblind?”
“Ginny, sort this out for us?” Harry pleaded. “She’s blonde, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know what you’re on about, Phlegm’s always changing her hair. It was black when we first met her, but it’s blonde now.”
Ginny spotted Neville coming through the portrait hole and jumped up. He hugged her and she promptly forgot everyone else existed.
“Interesting,” Hermione murmured, and jumped up too. “I need to do some research. I’ll be in the—“
“Library,” they finished, and settled in for a relaxing game of Exploding Gin Rummy.
*
A heavy book slammed onto the breakfast table, upsetting Harry’s bubble and squeak. It flew a foot in the air and fell back on his plate with a sad squelch. Harry took another bite and chewed. Mmm, cabbage.
“So, I’ve done some research on Veela, and— Luna, what are you doing?”
Luna Lovegood had four onions arranged on the table in front of her, still in their skins. There were symbols carved into them, but they didn’t look like anything Harry recognised from Hermione’s Ancient Runes textbooks. Luna hovered her hand above one of them and and hummed a discordant melody. The onion twitched and rolled into the mustard pot.
“I wasn’t going to ask,” Neville whispered.
“Cromniomancy,” she smiled. “It’s a type of divination. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it, Hermione, it was never your subject, was it?”
“Does it tell you what you’re going to have for dinner?” said Ron. “Let me guess: onion soup.”
Hermione and a few others around the table snorted. Luna ignored him. The onion beneath her hand sprouted green shoots. She picked up and showed it to Harry; this way up he realised it had his name crudely carved into it.
“Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Uh, no?”
“Perhaps it will, in time.”
“You could say that about absolutely anything,” Hermione muttered under her breath, bristling. “That’s not a prediction, it’s psychology. Pure power of suggestion. Onions, honestly. If I had a knut for every time—“
“Tell me about your research,” Harry interrupted hurriedly, before Luna stopped humming and overheard her.
“Yes, well, what I found was rather intriguing. Male Veela — or wizards with traces of Veela blood — don’t exhibit signs of creature inheritance until they come of age. And they don’t have allure.”
“Rubbish,” Harry said automatically.
“It’s not rubbish. Listen to this: once they come into their creature inheritance they begin to demonstrate ‘extremely possessive behaviour’ towards someone they consider a suitable mate. When they find someone they’re attracted to they feel the need to stake a territorial claim, tracking their movements and showing hostility towards potential rivals.”
Harry blinked. “You think Malfoy’s being possessive towards this Wisteria Bluegrass girl?”
It didn’t sound quite right, Harry thought. She talked to him at mealtimes sometimes, but Malfoy didn’t seem particularly enamoured with her. He hadn’t asked her to Hogsmeade or anything.
Maybe he was staking his territory over another girl? Harry couldn’t be sure; he couldn’t watch him all the time. When Malfoy went inside the Slytherin common room he couldn’t follow him, so he had to watch his dot on the map instead.
“Not quite,” Hermione said archly.
“Do male Veela have wings, like at the World Cup?”
“Full-blooded ones do, but Featherstonhaugh and Volanti say that wizards who are part-Veela only present them under extreme circumstances.”
“Like what, a life or death situation?”
“Yes, and especially one in which they’re trying to protect their mate.”
“Hmm.”
“Oh no. Harry. I don’t like this.”
At the Slytherin table, Malfoy was buttering a slice of toast and chatting with Goyle. Harry watched his dextrous fingers manipulate the butter knife.
“Don’t like what?” he said, quickly swallowing a mouthful of breakfast and facing Hermione.
“That look in your eye. The one that says you’re doing to do something stupid.”
“When have I ever done anything stupid?” he said vaguely, turning his head again. Malfoy sipped pumpkin juice and flicked his hair out of his face. He spotted Harry watching him and stuck his tongue out.
The beast in Harry’s chest thumped its paws against his ribcage, aching to get closer.
“I’ve just had a brilliant idea.”
*
“This is a terrible idea! How do you know Malfoy will be anywhere near you?”
“I know his movements,” Harry said confidently, strolling along the corridor to the Owlery while Hermione’s shoes click-clacked against the stone as she struggled to keep up with him. “Check the map if you don’t believe me.”
“Alright, say he is near you. Who’s to say he’ll be watching you?”
“Oh, he’ll be watching. He’s always looking at me.”
The plan was foolproof: jump out the window at the exact time Malfoy passed under it. This kamikaze dive would surely trigger Malfoy’s latent Veela powers, and he would show his wings and swoop up and save him. He usually spent his Wednesday free period doing homework under the rose bower on the west side of the grounds, so he would definitely notice. Draco Malfoy could never resist showing off.
And if that didn’t work for some reason, he had Ron on the ground to cast an extra-strength cushioning charm on the grass to catch him. Unlike Hermione he’d agreed very quickly, but had said, “When you eventually get arrested for stalking, make sure you tell Kingsley I had nothing to do with it. I don’t want to hurt my chances of becoming an Auror just cause my mate’s a bonafide nutter.”
“But what if he’s not a Veela! I promise you, Harry, I haven’t noticed him behaving any differently. Well, he’s less of an arse since we came back to school, but really, you could get seriously hurt,” Hermione warned, anxiously running her fingers over the length of her wand.
“Look, are you going to help me or not?”
“Help you! I ought to bodybind you and drag you to St Mungo’s…”
Harry hoisted himself onto the stone sill, which was so crusted with white owl droppings it looked like stucco. The window was smaller than he’d expected, forcing him to crouch beneath the lintel. It was a bit hard to keep balance, actually. The sill was angled (as if to prevent people from climbing it, he thought irritatedly) so he had to have half his trainer over the edge to keep upright. Controlling his fall would be a challenge; he didn’t want to knock his head on the castle wall and get concussed on the way down. Not because he minded getting injured, but because he didn’t want to risk missing seeing Malfoy sprout feathers.
A panicked shout from below made him turn his head.
“Are you out of your mind! Do you have a deathwish, Potter!?”
The sudden turn of his head was all it took to make him overbalance and lose his footing. He tumbled out of the tower and was hurtling towards the ground before he’d had a chance to give Ron the signal. Hermione was screaming.
As he fell he realised in a split second that this was the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Forget about seriously hurt, he was going to die. He’d had a cracked skull before, but not even the Boy Who Lived could survive a fall from this height. Stone rushed past in a blur and the bright blue sky stared unfeelingly back at him.
He’d risked his life for Malfoy once before too, but that had been during a real life or death situation, not an invented one. What a bloody waste.
At least he would go out like Dumbledore. There was a poetic symmetry there, he thought as he plummeted. The wind drew stinging tears from his eyes and whipped through his hair like punishing talons. He would finally see his parents again, and Sirius…
Feathers burst into view all around him. An enormous pair of black wings beat furiously and curled around his body, sheltering him in a midair sanctum.
Before he could process what was happening he was gripped by invisible bonds. He struggled against them on instinct, trying to kick out, but it was as if he had been hit with an Impedimenta. He was stranded in the air, weightless, but unable to move. Light as a feather, and stiff as a board.
In what felt like an age he was lowered to the soft grass and Malfoy’s snow-white, distressed face came into view.
“You. Complete. Moron!” Malfoy panted, ending the Arresto Momentum charm and collapsing to the ground, looming over Harry and gearing up to be even ruder. “Are you insane? No, don’t answer that. Why in Salazar’s name do you have wings?”
Ron came running out from the trees, tomato-red and frantic. “Mate, you didn’t give the signal!”
“I don’t have wings,” Harry said dumbly, not sure if he was dead or alive and thinking none of this made any sense. “You’ve got wings.”
Malfoy looked down at him like he’d just professed that he was planning to marry Hagrid and have Grawp be the flower girl.
Thanks to Malfoy’s quick wandwork he’d landed softly, but there was a mysterious pain in his back and shoulders. He supposed he must be alive. Dead people didn’t feel pain, and they probably didn’t feel dew seeping into their trousers.
“Harry, you’ve got wings,” said Ron.
Oh. He was right. There were wings — big feathery wings — on either side of him, twitching and fluttering. He rolled on his side and attempted to get up, but doing so crushed one of them and sent a sick, roiling pain all along his ribs. Trying hard not to vomit, Harry absently noticed that he was shaking quite badly.
“Don’t— Potter, lie down.”
Malfoy’s pale hands guided him gently to the grass and smoothed his hair away from his face.
I’ve got wings, he realised. He tried to draw them in so they would stop flapping about all over the place, but they were near impossible to control. It was like riding a Comet Two-Sixty after three years on a Firebolt: they knew where he wanted them to go, but refused to co-operate.
Still, Harry was a quick learner, and when he looked into Malfoy’s face he found they moved of their own accord. He folded Malfoy within his wings, capturing him. In a cage made of bird, ironically.
Malfoy’s eyes flicked unworriedly over his feathers. Admiring them, Harry suspected, and this thought made the monster in his chest run in circles and howl with joy.
He tried to sit up again without thinking and Malfoy put a hand on his chest to keep him down. The warmth of his palm bled through the soft fabric of his shirt, and now the monster was yipping with glee.
Closer, he thought, willing Malfoy to move.
He did: he sank his head lower, gaze skating across Harry’s face as if looking for something. He must have found it in Harry’s eyes, because he nodded to himself. The scent of calendula and meadowsweet flooded Harry’s nostrils, making him dizzy and light-headed.
Malfoy smiled and touched his hair again, and Harry would have done something very silly if he hadn’t been woken from his daze at that precise moment by a severe Scottish scolding.
"Harry Potter! Are you out of your mind?"
He unfolded his wings to see Professor McGonagall marching across the lawn with Hermione hurrying behind her.
"That's what I said," said Draco, brushing grass off his knees.
"Hospital wing, this instant!"
*
“Let me get this straight,” said Ron, peering over Harry’s shoulder at the letter from St Mungo’s, “you came up with a foolproof plan to prove that Malfoy’s a Veela, but it turns out you’re a Veela?”
His best friend was trying valiantly not to laugh, but Harry didn’t think he was doing a good enough job of it. His lip was quivering and he was visibly biting the inside of his cheeks to stop himself guffawing.
“Yeah,” he said glumly, rereading the test results. Patient arrived at 2:54 p.m. presenting symptoms of arrhythmia, astigmatism and acute lovesickness. Physical examination confirmed Veela ancestry via the paternal line. Genetic make-up of Mr H. J. Potter: 96% human, 4% Veela.
That had been a tedious afternoon, sitting on an examination table in a thin gown while the Healers took all sorts of samples, collected his sweat in an eggcup and checked for extra toes. The wings had retracted pretty quickly at McGonagall’s lambasting — not just folded back, but disappeared completely. According to the Creatures specialist Hermione was right, they would only present during extreme circumstances.
Good thing, because he didn’t feel like cutting wing-holes in his robes and getting gawked at any more than usual.
“Part-Veela,” Hermione corrected, her finger tracing lines of the Potter family tree in a library copy of Nature’s Nobility. “The transformation was triggered by you nearly dying while carrying out your ‘foolproof’ plan.”
“But I’ve nearly died loads of times, why now?”
“Because you weren’t of age.”
“Wasn’t I?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t have the answers to everything. Maybe the wings appeared because this was a situation where they came in handy.”
“Maybe it’s because Draco was there,” said Luna. Harry looked away from where Malfoy was eating a slice of quiche and licking crumbs from the corner of his mouth. While everyone else at the Gryffindor table ate their lunch Luna was building a tower from asparagus, which was now quite an impressive size.
“Huh?”
“Do you ever have, like, a normal year?” Ginny asked pleasantly, tucking into a bacon sandwich.
“Not yet,” he said vaguely, turning back to the Slytherin table. Malfoy was watching him suspiciously through narrowed eyes.
“No wonder everyone fancies you, Harry,” said Ron, gesturing with his fork. “Romilda was obsessed, wasn’t she? And Cho liked you. And Gin. And Moaning Myrtle. I guess they fell for the Veela powers.”
Hermione snapped her book shut. “For the last time, male Veela do not have allure!”
“Oh, yeah. Tough luck, mate.”
“Ronald, you don’t have allure either.”
“Charmed you though, didn’t I?” he grinned, and then winced as Nature’s Nobility smacked against the side of his head.
Harry had a thought. “Hey, did you ever find out what colour Fleur’s hair is?”
Hermione stopped kissing the side of Ron’s head better and smiled. “As a matter of fact, I did. The hair colour of a Veela, or a witch with Veela blood, is in the eye of the beholder.”
“You what? Hair… in their eyes?”
“No, it appears differently to each person, depending on what they’re attracted to. It’s like Amortentia; it’s designed to lure you by taking on the form of what you love most. That’s for female Veela, I should say. But the appearance of male Veela isn’t dependent on the beholder’s personal tastes. Their colouring is fixed, inherited from their parents like everyone else.”
Ron looked at Harry with an uncertain, queasy expression. “So you thought Malfoy was a Veela because he was blond… but actually… you thought Veela were blond because… because you like Malfoy?”
Silence fell over the table. Even Luna put down her asparagus to watch Harry’s reddening face.
“Uh..”
The awkwardness was interrupted by Hermione reading aloud from a different book with a beaky, winged creature on the cover. “The typical adult Veela displays obsessive behaviour towards the object of their affections, along with extreme recklessness and jealousy. Does that sound like anyone we know?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with dignity.
Ginny raised an eyebrow and threw a slice of tomato at him.
*
Malfoy cornered him in the broomshed one sunny afternoon and smirked at him in a very deliberate manner.
“Not going to sprout wings again, are you? Because that’s cheating if you do it during a match,” he said, idly fingering the bristles of a Cleansweep Forty-five.
“Like you’ve never cheated during a match!”
Harry threw a Keeper’s glove in his face on instinct and Malfoy grinned shamelessly, as if riling Harry up had been his intention all along.
“I use strategy and acuity. That takes skill, unlike randomly turning into a bird.”
“What have you got against birds all of a sudden? I’ve seen your Patronus.”
Malfoy looked a little embarrassed; it was Harry’s turn to grin. “You’ve got a beautiful swan, Malfoy.”
The silvery avian creature had glided around the Defence classroom among the menagerie of Patronuses cast by the other eighth-years. Long-necked, graceful, and supercilious, Harry thought it suited him perfectly. Swans appeared to move effortlessly across the water, even when they were working hard under the surface.
And they bit.
“Is it true, then?” Malfoy asked, the words tumbling excitedly from his mouth as if he couldn’t stop them. “That you’re a Veela?”
“Part-Veela. Great-great-great-great-great grandmother or something.”
Harry turned back to the equipment store, not wanting to answer questions about it. He was still getting used to the knowledge and had recently done a lot of soul-searching. Not about being part-Veela exactly, but more about Malfoy not being a Veela.
His birdiness would have very little impact on his day-to-day life, Hermione told him regularly in soothing tones, as if he had contracted some peculiar disease. But then again, he hadn’t told her about the monster in his chest.
The pause in conversation was long enough for Harry to look back at Malfoy, and when he did he saw Malfoy had a wondrous expression on his face, mouth open.
“I knew it! I knew you had the allure!” Malfoy thumped his fist on his open palm and laughed. “Ha! And Goyle said he didn’t feel anything!”
Harry dropped a bludger. The iron ball crashed through the floorboards, leaving a neat round hole by his feet.
Malfoy continued. “Granger said you thought I was a Veela, and that’s why you did that stupid stunt. Impossible, obviously, since Veela have dark hair. Hey, you were using the allure on me, weren’t you? That’s why I went all silly.”
“Er…”
“You’re so obvious, Potter. You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to pull the wool over my eyes.”
The monster in Harry’s chest was roaring. He rolled a snitch between his palms and tried to breathe evenly. “Are you going out with Bacteria Greenland?”
“Am I… pardon? I don’t know anyone by that name, in fact I’d hazard a guess that it’s not even a real name. Wait a moment, do you mean Astoria Greengrass? No, I’m not going out with her, I’m tutoring her in Potions. Why?”
Harry shrugged while the monster danced a jig up and down his ribcage. He attempted to lean casually on a crate of spare quaffles. The wood creaked ominously under his weight.
“Er, no reason.”
“You’re very odd, Potter.”
There was no arguing with that. “Um, there’s a match next Saturday. Puddlemere versus Kestrels. I could get tickets from Oliver.”
Malfoy rolled his eyes. “I could get tickets. They let anyone buy them, you know, you don’t have to be ex-teammates with the Puddlemere Keeper to go to a Quidditch game.”
“Oh. Okay. I might see you there, then.”
Malfoy seemed to understand what he was getting at, as his eyes became noticeably wider and he fiddled with his tie nervously. “Yes. You might.”
“And we could get drinks after,” Harry said, just to hammer it home.
“We could,” he said slowly.
They looked at each other across the shed for a moment. Malfoy looked as dazed as Harry felt.
“You’re doing it right now, aren’t you? I can feel it.”
“Doing what?” Harry asked as Malfoy stepped closer, gliding towards him like a swan across a lake.
“Using the allure…”
Harry opened his mouth with the intention of repeating what Hermione had drilled into him over the past week and a half: male Veela don’t have allure.
And then he shut it again.
“Do you want me to stop?” he murmured, leaning in so close Malfoy’s breath ghosted his cheek.
“When have I ever been able to stop you doing anything?” he replied, which Harry took as permission to slide an arm around his waist and kiss him.
Two black wings burst into life, ripping his shirt into tatters and knocking six broomsticks off the walls.
“Can’t you control yourself?” Malfoy smirked. “What next, are you going to lay an egg?”
Harry sighed. “Do you want to snog or do you want to make bird jokes?”
It was a very close decision for Malfoy. He bit his lip and considered it for a full two minutes.
“Snog,” he said. “Then bird jokes. I’ve got a lot of them.”
“Can’t wait. That’ll be a hoot.”
“Is that you trying to be funny? Goodness. My puns are better than that. Shut up and leave the jokes to me, Potter.”
“Make me,” he grinned, flexing his feathers.
“Merlin help me, I will,” Malfoy breathed, and he did.
end.