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The demon flicked his forked tongue dubiously. His red eyes were narrowed in confusion, and Harry blamed Hermione for everything.
From beside Harry, Draco continued nervously, “...I’d suppose the ring would be next, wouldn’t you? That would be the next easiest for him to get his grubby, boney hands on. So that’s twenty-five percent, and then we divide that by half again…”
Harry pinched his nose and sighed. Perhaps Hermione didn’t deserve the blame. Her inter-house piss-up idea had been a highlight to Harry’s otherwise relatively bleak fifth year under Umbridge, especially once the Slytherins began joining.
But, if the Slytherins had never joined, Ron would never have taunted Pansy after one too many shots of firewhisky by telling her of how her favourite professor had Obliviated himself and caused a cave-in, which would have never resulted in Pansy asking just where that cave-in occurred, which had caused the whole second-year debacle to unravel in a whirlwind of cut-off sentences and grimacing vagaries and waving hands. Draco would never have overheard, from his position holding himself tightly next to Pansy’s aghast visage, and he never would have felt compelled to apologize to Ginny for his father’s nefarious actions the next time he caught Blaise smuggling her into the fifth year Slytherin boys’ dorms.
Draco never would have befriended Ginny. Harry would never have become blindsided by their friendship, and then Harry would have never taken hold of the idea that he and Draco could be anything more civil than public nemeses and clandestine makeout partners in Filch’s unused cleaning closets.
But taken hold it had, unfortunately, and he'd seized the notion in quite the iron grip. If only Draco had a silver tongue to match his mettle.
Harry peered over his glasses back to where Draco was attempting to explain geometric sequencing to a demon who seemed to be teetering dengerously on the ritual dagger’s edge of boredom, confusion, and annoyance.
“So, you see. Once more for clarity’s sake. The diary, that was half his soul, it was his first horcrux. His chef-d'œuvre so to speak. The culmination of all his fanatical research. A bit of an odd choice, a diary, a touch feminine—I would have referred to it as a grimoire, but that’s neither here nor there.”
Draco cleared his throat and cracked his knuckles, wringing his long fingers. There was a thin sheen of sweat dampening his forehead. “The next was perhaps the Gaunt ring. He had half of his soul at the time of its making, so that means twenty-five percent of his soul went to the ring, twenty-five percent to himself. Next, I could only assume that he made this locket, due to the, ah,” Draco winced, and failed at obscuring it with a beaming grin that looked more sickly than saccharine, “unique nature about it. Therefore, we can offer you roughly twelve and a half percent of a soul at this time.”
Draco straightened his shoulders and cocked his head. He raised an eyebrow as though he was not sweating through the best button down he owned in the Forest of Dean, which surely would not have passed muster as a dishrag in his childhood home. His expression tried to convey that his offer was a very good deal indeed.
The demon, unfortunately for them, did not think his offer was a very good deal.
“That’s not a very good deal…” he said, in a voice that was rather whinier than Harry had ever pictured a demon’s to be.
“Well,” Draco said thoughtfully. “I may sweeten the pot with the other soul fragments currently in existence. There’s likely an artifact from Helga Hufflepuff and Rowena Ravenclaw, though I doubt Tom would have defiled himself by even contemplating any pious possession of Godric Gryffindor’s. I have my suspicions on that blasted snake, as well, though Ronald doesn’t seem to think so.” Draco sighed. He put his hand to the side of his mouth, as though Harry would not hear him. Wryly, as though he and this demonic entity were co-conspirators, he added in a dramatic whisper, “I would have offered Ronald to you, as well, but Potter refused.”
“You can’t have Ron,” Harry interjected tiredly. He was unable to muster the same amount of heat he’d injected in this protest the first half-dozen times Draco had proposed this idea.
“Right, but you can have an additional one-tenth and change of a soul, if you add the six and one-quarter in the next artifact, and the three and one-eighth of the one after that, and the one and one-sixteenth of the one after that. I believe that should account for all of them,” Draco finished contemplatively, tugging at his bottom lip in thought as he rechecked his mental arithmetic.
The demon watched on from within the center chamber of his summoning pentacle with a look of great scepticism on his scaly face, while to himself, Draco muttered, “He wouldn’t have made more than six, seven is the most stable magical number, every basic arithmancer knows that.”
“We’re going to die,” Harry lamented.
Draco shot him a disappointed frown. “My mathematical acumen is unimpugnable.”
“It’s not a very good deal,” the demon repeated. He sounded rather like an accountant himself, with his nasally affect. Of course, Draco would have managed to summon a demon, only for it to be from the financial ring of hell. What a bureaucratic nightmare. They may as well have put a pentagram in Umbridge’s DADA classroom and waited for one of her Ministry coworkers to appear inside it. They would have already had the Blood Quill ready and everything.
This was why Hermione should always be included in their plans, Harry chided himself. So they don’t go arse over teakettle, because in addition to having Lord bloody Voldemort on his tail, Harry would now have every financial advisor who ever committed tax fraud crawling after him from the nearest abyss.
“You’d give me one-twelfth of a soul,” the demon reiterated slowly, and Draco was visibly biting his lip to refrain from adding, and a half!, “as well as one-tenth of that same soul if I assist you on this quest of yours that may or may not end in your untimely demises before said soul fragments are even obtained?”
“And the remainder within the Dark Lord himself!” Draco persisted.
“Which,” the demon clarified derisively, “by your own calculations, would be roughly zero and one-half percent of a soul?”
“Is it that small a fraction?” Draco asked, alarmed. Once again, his eyes seemed to lose focus. Harry worried that the strain of the past year had done some incalculable damage to Draco’s mind. Of course it would naturally manifest itself conveniently after they’d managed to summon a demon together, but before they’d managed to bind it, therefore wreaking havoc on an already overwrought world. “Why. He’s certainly thrifty. He’s desecrated fifty generations of Malfoy splendour with half a percentage of a soul.”
Draco shuddered in horror, lost within himself. Harry could see years of Lucius Malfoy’s ancestry lessons crumbling in Draco’s rapidly paling face. “Is the might of my ancestors so meagre beside such a paltry foe?”
“Look,” Harry said, taking over while Draco had an existential crisis to rival that which he’d experienced when he’d realised it had in fact become necessary to renounce his inheritance. That, or become fodder for the innovative new forms of torment Voldemort’s merry band of lunatics could contrive, and it had taken Draco longer than Harry had anticipated to decide which was worse. “How about we start over. Draco and I would like to be rid of this noseless megalomaniac who’s destroying the Wizarding World and his various soul shards spread throughout Britain.”
“What about yours?” the demon asked Harry, his slit pupils dilating.
“Mine?” Harry asked defensively, sticking his wand out as though that would do any good. “My soul? You can’t have my soul.”
“Wait,” Draco interrupted, having only just finished re-doing his mental maths, existential crisis, or whatever else was unfolding between those panicked grey eyes. “You’ve added to the term number. The Dark Lord wouldn’t have half a percentage of a soul unless his regression was furthered by an additional fragmentation.”
Harry groaned. He hated maths. He wished he could apparate himself onto the roof of a nearby building, like he had done while in Miss Applegate’s year-two’s class when Dudley had kept trying to stab him with sharpened pencils.
“Yes,” the demon agreed, still looking straight at Harry. The reds of his irises were hypnotic, flowing like blood, or perhaps like lava, for the fiery sparks that roiled in their depths. Harry blinked hard enough that spots swam in his vision. “That’s what I said. Would the terms of the agreement include yours, as well?”
Harry covered his heart, as though to stop the demon from siphoning his soul out of his chest, and then covered his mouth in case demons operated in a manner similar to Dementors. They hadn’t gotten a chance to cover demons in DADA—that should have been Professor Moody’s job, but as Moody was in fact Professor Crouch Jr. in disguise, he had been too preoccupied with practicing his Unforgiveables in front of impressionable young children. Shamefully, he was still the second-best Defense instructor Harry could recall having, though Draco would furiously refute this claim out of poorly-founded loyalty to his greasy godfather.
“I’d move your hands northward, if you’re so worried,” the demon smirked. His lipless mouth revealed a row of yellowed fangs.
Harry scowled. Unflatteringly, he found that when Draco was in his smarmier moods, the two of them bore an unsettling resemblance. Harry hoped Draco was too egotistical to note their similarities.
It was enough already to have Draco and Hermione in each other’s pockets. Harry dared not contemplate what Draco could get up to if he had an ally with raw demonic force, even if the demon in question did sound like he should be wearing a pocket protector and have a name tag boasting of something like Leonard.
Draco gasped. Harry glanced towards him apprehensively, but, even worse than appreciating Leonard’s likeness, he was staring at Harry’s forehead in shock.
“What?” Harry asked. Draco had only directed such a dismayed expression at Harry’s face once in the time since they’d begun dating. “Do I have a spot again? I’m not using your weird creams. They smell like Pansy.”
Draco swung his head back to Leonard. “If we say you’ve got a deal…” he began, scowling darkly. For the first time in this conversation, Draco seemed to gather all the imperiousness that being the Black-Malfoy scion had bred into him and wear it as the armour he had always been told it was. “You will only take the Dark Lord’s soul? You will harm no one else?”
Leonard glared at Draco. “You’re summoning me, kid. Your main request is that you want me to take this fraction of a soul off your hands, isn't it?”
“And help us find the other fragments!” Draco added. “It’s a suitable recompense. You get two up front, and then another three as the job goes on.”
Two? Harry wondered in alarm, but Draco was unstoppable.
“It’s perfectly reasonable as long as the standards of our agreement are met.” He lifted one pointer finger, touching it to his other as he counted. “No harming Harry Potter’s soul,” he said, and added another finger. “No ending his life or in any way adding to the detriment of his health, mind, body, or spirit.” Leonard nodded curtly, and Draco struck a third finger. “Upon the destruction of the last portion of the Dark Lord Tom Marvolo Riddle Jr.’s soul, you shall retire back to whence you came, with no inclinations to pursue relations with myself, Draco Lucius Malfoy, or my associate, Harry James Potter, nor will you attempt to convene with anyone of our acquaintance whether well or poorly met that you encounter on this mission.”
Leonard blinked. At his sides, his curved, dark claws clicked on his scales as he swung them. “That’s a lot to remember just off the cuff.”
“And none of that to Draco either,” Harry added hotly. He would never say so, but quietly, he agreed with Leonard. The terms were quite a lot to remember. Draco could be head-achingly verbose when he was trying to be precise.
While Harry had shortly begun defending Draco’s soul, health, mind, body, and spirit from the demon in the form of abbreviated verbal contract, Draco had begun rummaging through the magically expanded leather bag he carried with himself at all times, much like Hermione’s beaded bag.
Already out and in place were the salt, bloodstone, a quartz dagger with ancient runes engraved on the hilt, thyme sprigs, and iron nails they had positioned to summon Leonard from his place of residence, but as Harry watched Draco unearthed what appeared to be a jar of dirt, a pot of Fred and George’s Indelible Ink and a fistful of stained and poorly-kept swan-feather quills, a string of white beads that looked like one of Aunt Petunia’s rosaries, an ever-refilling paper bag of curried chicken sandwiches that had Good Luck Little Master, Love, Leedy written on it in tremulous hand, and a gigantic glass bottle of clear liquid that could have been water but was more likely to be Veritaserum, knowing Draco.
Finally, with his arm stuck to his left shoulder in the bag and an exclamation as though he had found a great treasure instead of a slightly crumpled feather, he pulled a Blood Quill from the bag.
He grinned triumphantly. “We shall use this.”
Noting the shudder that Harry couldn’t quite repress, Draco amended stubbornly, “I shall use this. Only one of us needs to sign the parchment, after all. As do you,” he delineated to the demon, casting a slow, judgemental glance at his curving claws. “Do you require a nail file?”
“I do not,” Leonard huffed, as Harry hissed, “I can sign it,” reaching for the Quill.
Draco batted his hand away, securing it behind his ear. He scrawled the deal’s stipulations in elegant cursive on a spare bit of parchment straightened over his knee. His practiced calligraphy, done with the Wheeze’s ink and a crumpled swan quill, flowed more rapidly than Harry could scribble his most unintelligible chicken scratch.
“I took it from Father’s office,” he explained under his breath, gesturing to the Quill. “It’s not hers.”
Before Harry could snatch it from him, uncaring whose it actually was, Draco plucked it from behind his ear and signed his name. His perfect pureblood mask did not slip at the discomfort that Harry knew he felt as his skin was rent.
Harry took his left hand, fearful that the words would be carved forever on that pale skin. As Draco had used the Quill as intended by its makers, the skin was already knitting itself back together by the time Harry lightly ran the tips of his fingers over it.
Leonard signed his name beside Draco’s. His claws were not an impediment, and Harry did not get the chance to see what his actual name was. This time, however, Draco did wince.
“Hey!” Harry protested angrily. The foreign, shifting symbols that comprised Leonard’s name appeared on the scratched skin of Draco’s left hand before fading once more. The skin was left more reddened than before, and Harry scowled tremendously at the demon.
“I agreed to sign it,” Leonard hissed tetchily. “I didn’t agree to sign it in my blood.” He flicked his tongue. “I’m not even sure I have blood.”
Draco tsked. “Alright,” he said with the air of the immensely hassled, withdrawing his hand from Harry’s grasp.
“Where shall we begin?”