Draco looked amused. 'I suppose you think that sounded arrogant.'
'I think that boat sailed with the 'flophouse' comment, actually.'
Draco made an exasperated gesture. 'Look, it's just as easy to be low-profile in an expensive hotel. Easier, in fact. A few well-placed fistfuls of Galleons and the management will be prepared to swear on oath that my name's Nigel Todwhacker, and I'm a well-known industrialist with a thriving whelk exportation business and a manor house in Walton-on-the-Naze.'
'You're seventeen,' said Hermione crossly. 'Nobody's going to believe that you're a well-known industrialist. Perhaps you should think of something more age-appropriate.'
'Well, I could tell them my name's Nigel Todwhacker and I spend all my time in my room masturbating and memorizing the liner notes on old Chocolate Frog albums, but that might be more information than they need.'
Hermione burst out laughing despite herself.
Her laughter coaxed a smile out of Draco. He no longer smiled the way he once had, of course, but a smile was still a smile. 'Besides, they don't have to believe me,' he added. 'They just need an excuse to act like they believe me. I don't like lying unless I have to, you know that, but if you're going to lie the key is to give the other person a reason to want to believe you.'
'He's right, you know,' said a silky voice. Hermione spun around and saw, with a flash of alarm, Blaise Zabini standing on the pavement a few steps away from them. She wore an ornately decorated set of silk robes, a colorful cloak, and looked, as always, beautiful. Her scarlet hair was free of clips or other ornaments. Hermione wondered how long she'd been listening. 'He should know — he's the expert at telling people what they want to hear. Still,' Blaise added, her voice dropping, 'you can only get away with that sort of thing for so long…right, Draco?'
Harry found himself being hurried down a long, undecorated hallway so quickly that he barely had time to register his surroundings. His companion had a tight hold on his bare arm and was using his leverage to shove Harry along the corridor so quickly that Harry was having difficulty not tripping over his own feet.
It was freezing cold. Harry had a feeling that they were under the main part of a building, perhaps using a sort of tradesman's entrance. The corridor ended in a stone stairway that curved away into darkness.
Pausing at the foot, the boy let go of Harry's arms and spun Harry around to face him. 'You need to put your glasses on,' he said, in a sharply agitated voice. 'Why do you keep taking them off?'
'I charmed my eyes so I wouldn't need them,' Harry said gruffly. 'Now they make my vision blur.'
'Well, put them on anyway or you'll get in trouble.' The boy cast an anxious glance up and down the corridor. 'Do it now.'
Harry did it, grudgingly, sliding the glasses down to the bridge of his nose so he could see over the lenses. 'In trouble with who?'
'With the manager,' said the boy. 'All our Harrys have to wear the glasses. School robes too, usually, although you look all right, you're all wet, that could be a look, I guess. Bit weird, but…you don't have any Quidditch gear with you, do you?'
'No, I bloody well don't.' Every time the situation seemed as if it couldn't get any more surreal, Harry reflected, it did. 'Maybe I should just go…'
'It's not safe out there and you know it.' The boy's cold hand closed around Harry's wrist — a weirdly familiar feeling, those delicately articulated long fingers he knew by touch. 'Go on up the stairs ahead of me.'
Harry went, not quickly, keeping his right hand out of his pocket. He thought about the alley and his willingness to kill the Death Eaters there and what that said about him. Although wondering about it wasn't the same as regretting it, which he didn't.
The stairway ended in another hallway. This one, however, was far from undecorated. The walls were painted an almost blood-colored scarlet, and the rich Oriental carpets on the polished floor were tasseled with red and gold. Enormous gold-framed oil portraits hung on the walls, and bronze candelabras floated in midair, spilling smoke so heavily scented that Harry could taste it on the air, sweet and musky, like spoiled fruit. He narrowed his eyes and turned to the boy standing behind him. 'What is this place?' he said. 'It looks like a hotel, or an eighteenth century brothel.'
Looking rather helpless, the boy shrugged. 'I don't know anything about the eighteenth century….'
He cut himself off and edged nearer Harry, blocking him, as several people appeared at the end of the hallway. 'Come on,' the boy said, and pushed Harry again, down the hall. They went slowly enough this time for Harry to get a better look at the oil paintings on the walls. They were ornately tinted, all pinks and whites and blues, and they showed nude wizards and witches, festooned with ribbons, engaged in the sort of activities usually featured in the magazines that Fred and George kept hidden under their beds. Eighteenth-century brothel, Harry thought again, rather dizzily, and then something occurred to him was both so logical and at the same time so disgusting that his mind reeled.
He was still reeling when they came out into an enormous circular room, from which many small corridors extruded like the spokes of a wheel.
This room had a floor of black marble, veined with gold, a high ceiling painted with naked angels, chandeliers dripping teardrop crystals. Two spiral staircases rose from the center of the room. Huge couches ran along the walls and there were wizards and witches sprawled in them. Some of them Harry recognized — famous faces, the kind that usually looked out from the cover of Teen Witch Weekly. Some of them he didn't. He saw handsome faces, beautiful faces, and some who were quite ordinary. He felt the boy standing next to him relax slightly. 'Oh, good,' he said, 'the other Harrys, they must be upstairs.'
'Upstairs?' Harry said, his own voice sounding like a stranger's.
'Which is where we're going,' said the boy quietly. Harry began to move, but the boy pulled him back. 'No, not that way, that way is the manager's office and the catalogue rooms.'
'Catalogue rooms?' said Harry faintly, letting the boy steer him towards the leftmost staircase.
'You know,' said the boy, 'the catalogues. I mean, they like it if you bring hair or eyelashes or whatever that they can use to make the potion, but if you don't, or you want someone famous, then you can choose someone out of the catalogue. The price varies by how hard it is to get the materials. You're expensive. But it doesn't matter, they usually keep a few of you around anyway. Someone always wants you.'
Harry's stomach knotted. 'Someone always…wants me? Wants me for what?' he asked, although he had a feeling he knew perfectly well what.
'Well, a lot of them want to be you,' the boy said, his tone hesitant.
'That's why I thought — when I saw you — that you were a customer. You reacted like you recognized me, and I thought you were…you know…playing.' His voice trailed off.
'And Draco,' Harry said. They were at the top of the stairs now, and had turned onto another interminable corridor. More oil paintings lined these walls, but these were not portraits. Harry could see flesh-colored paint, writhing limbs, long trailing scarves of lace and satin. At regular intervals down the corridor were doors, each one set with a bronze numbered plate. 'Someone paid you to…?'
'Well, not specifically. They usually keep a few of him around as well.
Especially since he's been in all the news articles lately…that always ups the demand, and — '
The boy's speech was interrupted by Harry, who had chosen that moment to stagger off into a corner where he could be violently sick. He had eaten so little that day that there wasn't much to come up, mostly stomach acid that burned his throat. When he straightened up and turned around the boy was staring at him.
'I'm sorry,' the boy said nervously. 'I forget, working here, that the idea might upset people who aren't used to it.'
'Used to it?' Harry said savagely. 'It's disgusting, how could you get used to it, or want to? It's using people.'
