Chapter 63

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I was in the middle of a vortex that swirled me around and dragged me with wild speed as if it were trying not to transport me but to tear me apart. All the world around me blurred into solid spinning lines, and after a dozen seconds of such movement, I was literally thrown into a dark room. This time I didn't have to come to my senses-it was all clear from the start.

I felt my bag, belt, and holster with my wand fly to the side. Then I was lifted and turned upside down, landing on a chair, and the paralysis was removed, but I was securely tied to the chair with thick ropes.

"What a pleasant meeting," the familiar voice stretched out the words in the same way as before. But all around was darkness.

The light slowly flared up, letting me see first the general outline and then the figure of the man sitting across from me. Lucius Malfoy, himself. He was sitting in a chair, in a black suit, playing with the cane in his hands. Sitting there, watching and smirking.

"Let me be frank with you, Mr. Knight," Lucius was still stretching his words. And I tried to look around the room with my sideways vision, without losing sight of the wizard. "I was surprised to receive a letter from my son."

There was only a dark room, two chairs in the middle, a door, and a tightly curtained window. There was a simple chandelier on the ceiling with magic lamps - it took too long and too pathos to light up. No outlets, nothing like that.

"To read my son's lines about being defeated in a duel by a Mudblood," Lucius grimaced. "I was disappointed, and when I read that, um, 'Damned Knight stared haughtily at my defeat,' I was doubly surprised. How did you manage to survive there? Never mind, though.

Lucius brushed his own question aside like an annoying fly.

"Since you're alive and my old friend hasn't been in touch, I can only assume he's dead."

Malfoy leaned forward slightly, placing both feet on the wooden floor.

"You are either stupid or brave to be so calm. It cost me a great deal of trouble to organize your trip to Egypt, to arrange this tour, and to hire various people with questionable backgrounds. And here you are."

"So, what's next?"

"What's next?" Lucius smiled. "I'm going to kill you, Mr. Knight. You were supposed to die anyway, but for some reason, you survived. Three times already. That's a good number, isn't it?"

"It certainly is. But why three?"

"Didn't you figure it out? The first time was when you were a child - after all the rituals, you couldn't survive. But you survived against your fate. The second was the last time we met in France. The third was at Hogwarts, in the Chamber of Secrets. Yes, Mr. Knight," Lucius said, nodding to something in his head. "I am aware of those events. To my deepest regret, my greasy-haired friend could not cope with such a simple request. As a result, I was once again convinced of an old truth. If you want something done well, do it yourself."

Lucius took his wand out of his walking stick in an abrupt motion and came toward me in a lightning motion, lifting my face up by my chin.

"It's amazing how much you look like her. It's infuriating. Ready to die?"

"Since birth."

"Well," Lucius raised his wand theatrically, "Avada..."

Abruptly forming bloody blades and slicing through the ropes, I snapped out of my seat in a flash. The small stiletto of blood in my left hand went straight into Lucius' liver, interrupting the spell's reading. He couldn't quite turn around from the painful shock, but he created a tight sphere of Protego and reached into his pocket with his left hand. Without wasting a second, I used the Spirit Weapon in my hand to deliver a single swift and sweeping blow, cutting through his defenses like a knife through butter. Malfoy's head separated from his body, but the body disappeared into the vortex of apparition. But the head was still there.

The head miraculously turned toward me as it rolled across the floor, the pain on Malfoy's face, and the disbelief in his rapidly fading gray eyes. The cut wasn't oozing blood-it was literally burned from the poison. It took less than a minute for the dead head to melt into the disgusting gurgling liquid, but the bones were intact. That's a murder, and I don't... I don't care at all. Weird? I don't know.

I walked around the room and found my things thrown against the wall, so I put back my holster and wand, my belt with all sorts of pockets, hung my bag on my shoulder, took out my wand, and started waving it around.

"Magica Revelio."

It was as if I had a sixth sense, though in my case, it would be more accurate to say "seventh sense. There weren't really any charms around - various concealing ones and the like. There weren't even any locks on the door.

As I pulled the curtain from the window, I saw the familiar forest. Northern latitudes, maybe even the same England. Pulling the window back up, I turned toward the skull and the liquid beneath it.

"I thought it would be a little more... Epic," I said aloud with some disappointment and some relief and moved toward the door.

When I left the room, I found myself in a dark hallway, and I walked toward the light. I walked a little way and came out into a completely empty hall, but there were no curtains on the windows. There was a hallway to the side of the room, and I headed for the front door. I pulled the handle, and the door creaked open.

The place was abandoned and overgrown with grass and bushes. When I walked a couple of steps from the entrance and turned around, I saw an old, half-ruined, and blackened by time house in the middle and a couple of others like it in the distance. What a wilderness.

Without any wands, I pointed my hand at the house and imagined a complex geometric structure in the palm of my hand. I let the magic flow through it, reciting the key at the same time:

"Vaudbarfis," a torrent of fire erupted from my hand like a flamethrower, quickly engulfing the house. No Fiendfyre or dark magic - just the larger equivalent of Incendio. Quite an interesting fact - there was a lot of magic in that grimoire without wands or with other, more powerful concentrators, capable of giving off far more magical power. Wands are cool, too, but perhaps they have less bandwidth? Most of them? It's not for nothing that Potter and Riddle's wand is considered strong, and the Elder Wand is even cooler? According to Ollivander, wands are classified according to their strength. But, never mind. It's time to go.