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The Dark Lord never showed at dinner.
Jiang Fengyue waited in the prefects’ dormitory until the patrol hours were long over.
Still nothing.
Maybe he’d already left.
Or maybe the Polyjuice had worn off, and the Dark Lord’s dramatic little field trip had ended with Dumbledore catching him and torturing him with lemon sherbets.
Jiang Fengyue thought up the joke, then immediately laughed at it himself.
After waiting a while longer, he gave up.
He grabbed his key, slipped out of the dungeons, crept carefully up to the third floor, and picked Slughorn’s office clean of the potion ingredients he needed.
He was locking the door to leave when he spotted a figure descending the staircase.
He pressed himself into the shadow of the wall, stilled his breathing, and watched.
Black robes billowed like liquid night.
The figure walked down at his leisure, snakeskin boot heels clicking against stone, stride as relaxed as a man strolling through his own garden.
Those eyes swept over Jiang Fengyue’s hiding spot from above.
“What are you hiding for?
Come here.”
It was the Dark Lord, who had been missing for nearly an entire day.
Jiang Fengyue shot out of the shadows and fell into step beside him.
The Dark Lord glanced at the potion ingredients cradled in his arms, raised one eyebrow, and continued downstairs without breaking pace.
“My Lord, I’ve been looking for you all day,” Jiang Fengyue said, trailing behind.
Voldemort gave no answer, but he stopped dead in his tracks.
Jiang Fengyue leaned around to see.
At the second-floor landing, a cat was staring at them.
Mrs.
Norris arched her back and let out a piercing, wretched yowl.
From the far end of the corridor came Filch’s shuffling footsteps and a stream of curses.
The Dark Lord looked at the cat.
He raised his wand.
Jiang Fengyue lunged forward and grabbed his arm.
He met the Dark Lord’s withering look head-on, seized his hand, and ran.
“In your great magnanimity, please spare the cat, if it dies there’ll be complications,” Jiang Fengyue gasped, dragging the Dark Lord at a dead sprint toward the Black Lake.
“I know it’s an indignity, but Slytherin needs a three-peat.
I have to ask you to run.”
The Dark Lord, who had been about to cast a Disillusionment Charm, found himself forcibly yanked into a full sprint.
He crushed the instinct to sever the hand touching him.
“Let go,” he said, cold and flat.
Jiang Fengyue had a fistful of potion ingredients in one hand and the Dark Lord in the other, speaking through ragged breath.
“My Lord, if we get caught — with my identity, and with ‘Argus’s’ identity — Dumbledore will take notice.
That would be a real problem.
I’m sorry for the trouble.”
He absolutely refused to get hauled before Dumbledore by Filch and docked fifty points.
The Dark Lord could dust himself off and disappear, but he still had to live here.
Even being a Malfoy wouldn’t save him from the gossip if he cost Slytherin the House Cup.
He kept talking as he ran, reasoning and pleading in equal measure.
His platinum hair streamed out behind him.
The Dark Lord didn’t shake him off.
He let that warm hand pull him forward, like a god who had been slighted and chosen, for now, to tolerate it.
He was dragged composedly into what was, by any measure, an absolutely ridiculous escape.
The Dark Lord’s scarlet eyes dropped slowly to the hand clasped tight around his.
There was no fury in them.
There was something else, strange and quietly amused.
“My Lord, I’ve put you through such trouble,” Jiang Fengyue called ahead.
“Have mercy on me, just think of it as, ”
He stopped.
Something was wrong with the grip.
The hand he’d been holding began to change.
The slender fingers belonging to “Argus” swelled under his palm, elongating, expanding, the bones thickening to something hard and rough.
The warmth disappeared.
What replaced it was the cold of marble, dense with a crushing, obliterating force.
Jiang Fengyue stopped running.
He turned.
Through the sparse trees at the edge of the lake, moonlight fell directly across the profile of the person behind him, and it was no longer “Argus.”
That unremarkable face peeled away like melting wax.
The figure shot upward, tall and overwhelming, eclipsing Jiang Fengyue’s shadow entirely.
Cheekbones carved high and sharp.
A nose like a blade.
Thin lips pressed into a cold, flat line.
Scarlet pupils, slit and fathomless, looked down at him from above.
The Dark Lord’s devastating beauty and sheer force of presence emerged from the night, unstoppable.
Jiang Fengyue’s mind went white.
One word.
Run.
He seized that ice-cold hand with everything he had, gripped it like a lifeline, and hauled.
The Dark Lord moved like a divine statue being dragged against its will, but Jiang Fengyue kept running, throwing words back over his shoulder through gritted teeth.
“When I was in second year — when you publicly declared the Death Eaters, Dumbledore set up monitoring across the whole school!
Every magical fluctuation inside Hogwarts, outside the Forbidden Forest, gets detected!
The moment you cast anything offensive or high-powered, he’ll know and he’ll come!” That was why the Dark Lord had used Polyjuice in the first place.
And Hogwarts, already sealed against Apparition, would become a perfect cage.
Jiang Fengyue didn’t doubt the Dark Lord’s power for a second.
He wouldn’t come to any real harm.
But to force his way out, he would slaughter every Gryffindor in the tower without blinking, just to make Dumbledore stand aside.
Jiang Fengyue had dragged him into this Muggle sprint precisely to avoid triggering the monitoring.
He had planned for everything.
He had not planned for the Polyjuice to run out now.
A sharp, wretched MEOW tore through the dark.
He looked back.
Mrs.
Norris was hurtling toward them from the castle.
Behind her, lantern swinging, came the limping silhouette of Filch. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“My sweet, I smell troublemakers!
They won’t get away this time!”
Jiang Fengyue clocked the distance.
His mind moved fast.
Voldemort could not be discovered.
Could not be glimpsed, not even for a second.
They had to break Mrs.
Norris’s scent trail.
He snapped his head toward the Black Lake, and his grey eyes blazed like stars.
He didn’t look back.
He didn’t see the Dark Lord watching his retreating figure with calm, unhurried amusement, those scarlet eyes carrying no fury, no dread at being exposed.
What was there instead was something else entirely: the ease of a man who already knows how everything ends, watching a clever little performance play out below him.
The Dark Lord, it seemed, was in quite a good mood.
There was something genuinely entertaining about watching this cunning little platinum serpent throw himself headlong into “protecting” him.
Moonlight lay cold and still over the Black Lake.
Jiang Fengyue reached the shore and bent double, gasping.
Voldemort, beside him, calmly straightened the creases at his cuffs.
Not far behind, Mrs.
Norris was closing in fast.
Filch was still a distance back.
Jiang Fengyue took one steadying breath and grabbed a fistful of Voldemort’s robes.
The Dark Lord glanced down.
His scarlet eyes settled on Jiang Fengyue without urgency, taking in the flush across his cheeks, the platinum hair gone loose and slightly wild from running.
Moonlight poured over him.
He looked, almost, like something that belonged to it.
The moon hung in the sky above.
Its reflection stood before him.
Jiang Fengyue straightened, stepped deliberately in front of him, and positioned himself as a shield, putting his own body between Voldemort and any angle Filch might see from.
He looked up and said, quietly, “My Lord.
Forgive me.”
He threw both arms around the Dark Lord and held on.
Voldemort’s expression flickered with something close to surprise.
It didn’t last.
Jiang Fengyue was already leaning back, committed, no hesitation, and taking them both over the edge.
The Black Lake swallowed them in an instant.
The cold hit like a wall.
The only sound was a faint, soft splash.
When Mrs.
Norris finally reached the bank, she nosed low along the grass, sniffing in tight circles.
Every trail ended here.
She paced back and forth, baffled, tail lashing.
Filch caught up behind her, lantern swinging, and stared at the empty shore.
Nothing moved.
Nothing breathed.
He erupted in furious, helpless cursing at the dark.
➤ Next: Neither Willing to Part