'Harry, could you go see if Ginny's all right?'
Harry, snapping back to the present, agreed with a slightly mournful air: Hermione had a feeling that if he didn't find Ginny, he'd be back in the kitchens shortly. He left, taking his abstracted mood with him.
'Don't say it,' Draco said, as soon as the infirmary door had closed behind Harry.
'Say what?' Hermione's voice was severe. 'That Harry might not show you how upset he is, but that doesn't mean he isn't? He's only making you sandwiches because he doesn't know what else to do.'
'I know that,' Draco said quietly. The affected air of haughty weariness had left him, replaced by a grave seriousness Hermione found infinitely more sympathetic. 'And I'd rather he had something to do, honestly.
Otherwise he just feels like he ought to be doing something else, something bigger. And there's nothing to do. This isn't the kind of enemy he can fight. He can't crawl inside my veins and kill the poison before it kills me.'
'You're not going to die,' Hermione corrected him sharply.
'I am,' he said. 'You know I am — '
Thwack! Draco broke off as the Liber-Damnatis hit him square in the chest.
'Don't you ever,' Hermione said, her voice trembling, 'ever, ever, say that in front of Harry. Don't you ever.'
He stared at her. In his white face, his eyes were the color of rain: luminous but leaden. All his previous playacting had hardly moved Hermione's heart, but this Draco, eyes dark with haunted apprehension, made her ache inside. She hated the poison that, as it killed him, seemed to burn away all impurities from skin and hair and eyes, turning his eyes to flaring crystal, lighting the roses of fever in his pale cheeks, paring away all excess flesh from the lovely arcing bones of cheek and chin and jaw. He had never been as eerily beautiful before and it bothered and upset her.
'I wouldn't,' he said. 'Of course I wouldn't.'
'Oh, Draco,' she said. A sudden weariness came over her, and she hugged her arms about herself, feeling chilled. 'What am I going to do with you?
You make everyone you meet either love you or hate you and sometimes I wonder which is worse.'
A faint smile touched the edge of Draco's mouth. 'A keenly felt observation,' he said. 'Thank you.'
'And you treat people appallingly.' Hermione's tone was glum. 'Blaise, for instance. Paying her to date you. That's just eewy.'
'Please clarify for me the exact dictionary definition of 'eewy,'' said Draco, sounding unforgivably amused.
'Unethical,' Hermione said darkly.
Draco cocked his silvery head to one side. 'Nope, I don't think I know that one either,' he observed. 'Is that like having three equal sides?'
'That's equilateral,' Hermione snapped. 'And you're really despicable sometimes, you know that?'
'Now there's a word I know,' Draco said with a beatific smile.
'I mean, how do you justify an arrangement like that? It would be one thing if it was just for show entirely, but you actually did things with her.
Didn't you?'
'Define 'things',' said Draco. 'You mean like did we spend time together knitting booties for underprivileged infants? Because if so, no. If you mean did we occasionally take off our clothes and — '
'That's what I meant,' Hermione interrupted hastily. 'And please, spare me the details.'
Draco crossed his arms behind his head and arched his back like a cat in the sunshine. 'Well, what did you expect me to do, anyway? Realistically speaking. I'm seventeen years old, you know. I ought to be having sex with everything that has legs and isn't a table. So I messed about with Blaise a bit. I didn't sleep with her.'
Hermione felt relieved despite herself. 'You didn't?'
'Not that it's any of your business, but no. I could have. On occasion, I wanted to…'
Hermione chuckled to herself. 'So using sex to get what you want didn't work out, then?'
Draco shrugged and pushed his fair hair out of his eyes. 'I'm a boy. I can't use sex to get what I want. Sex is what I want.'
'Just not with Blaise.'
'No,' he said, a little more quietly. 'Not with Blaise.'
'It wouldn't have been fair to her,' Hermione said. 'So I'm glad that you didn't, for what it's worth.'
Draco looked merely confused. Hermione knew he didn't understand, and probably never would understand, that what he had done to Blaise was wrong. With an inward sense of here goes nothing, she reached into the pocket of her robes and drew out the small box she'd been carrying for the past three days, opened it, and took out Blaise's three barrettes. She handed Draco one.
Draco's expression changed to one of complete confusion. 'Blaise's barrettes? What the bloody…?'
'She gave me these to give to you,' Hermione said shortly.
'She what? When? How?' Draco looked flabbergasted.
Hermione smirked. 'Look, she just did, okay? She said they had protective magic of some sort. I don't know why. They look like perfectly ordinary barrettes to me.'
'They're basilisk scales, actually,' Draco said absently, looking down at the one in his hand. 'Tiny baby basilisk scales, overlapping — there was a custom among pureblood families generations ago to wear ornaments containing bits of Dark creatures: Hellhound teeth, dragon blood pendants, werewolf bones. My signet ring — ' he held up his hand — 'has gryphon blood in the stone. It's a traditional thing.'
'Well, she seemed sincere about wanting you to have one,' Hermione said.
'I worried about giving it to you…'
'You shouldn't,' said Draco, with a supreme and obnoxious confidence.
'She loves me.'
'Everyone does,' said Hermione wearily. 'Pin it on your shirt, then, will you?'
'Suddenly I feel pretty,' said Draco, doing as instructed. 'Is there one for Harry?'
'Yes, and I'll give the other to Ginny,' said Hermione.
'Is there another one for you?'
'Yes, she gave me four,' she lied. 'Stop fretting.'
Draco narrowed his eyes at her, but before he could speak, the door opened and Harry came back into the room. He was carrying another plate, and this time he was surrounded by at least nine house-elves, all carrying plates, bowls, and platters. He looked very proud of himself.
'I didn't know what you might want,' he said to Draco, 'so I got a little bit of everything.'
Draco burst out laughing.
'Oh, honestly,' said Hermione, and threw up her hands in despair.
'What department do we want again?' Lupin asked, studying the embossed Ministry Directory with some confusion.
Sirius, leaning against the wall nearby and fiddling with the lid on his coffee cup, glanced over with a slight yawn. It was still early morning, and neither of them had gotten much sleep lately. 'Department for the Regulation of Underage Wizards,' he said. 'It's usually on the third floor on Tuesdays.'
'I don't see it,' said Lupin, and turned back to the directory. Privately, he thought they were wasting their time and knew that Sirius did as well. But Ron had now been gone for three days, and Molly and Arthur were panicked. The clock on the wall still showed him to be traveling, and the goldenrod in the window box, planted the day of Ron's birth and linked magically to his health and well-being, was blooming and upright. But Ron was nowhere to be found. Owls had been sent to all relatives, the old crowd dispatched, Dumbledore notified. It now remained to make it an official matter of a missing underage wizard. That Arthur still trusted the Ministry surprised Lupin. But then, he had never trusted the Ministry himself.
There was, however, something very peculiar going on with the Ministry directory. Lupin scanned the list of
