Aerial Entanglement and the Golden Snitch (8)

His teammates let out a suppressed burst of laughter. Flint laughed the loudest, Montague's laughter sounded like coughing, and Warrington was more restrained, but the curve of his lips gave him away.

"Trash like you," Draco's voice suddenly turned cold. That layer of fake concern shattered like thin ice, revealing the naked, icy, blade-sharp contempt beneath. "Can only score by accepting charity from us Slytherins."

He glanced down at the Golden Snitch in Harry's hand, smeared with mud and blood, and the curve of his lips widened.

"Break your arm? Heh, what a perfect ending for a Gryffindor brute." His voice grew colder and slower, every word seeming to have been carried out of an ice cellar. "Lie in the mud and wait to die, Potter. That's where you belong."

Harry's hand clenched into a fist in the mud. His nails dug into his palm, and muddy water squeezed through his fingers. He could no longer feel his left arm, but that did not matter. His forehead hurt, his scar burned, as though something inside it was about to burst out.

There was a fire in his chest. It had been burning since the match began, fueled by every one of Draco's taunts, fanned by every Golden Snitch that had slipped just beyond his reach. Now, at last, it had burned up into his throat, his eyes, every pore of his body.

"You... you..."

He struggled to raise his head, to argue back, to curse, to stand from the mud, to punch that hateful face with his still-functional right arm. But the agonizing pain and Draco's venomous words pierced his heart like ice picks, and an uncontrollable metallic sweetness surged up his throat.

Draco's face, filled with malice and triumph, rapidly blurred and spun in his vision. Not because his