'You have a point,' she said.
His hand tightened on hers. 'All right then,' he said. 'Where do we start?'
When they came back into the place Ron thought of as 'the chess room,'
Voldemort was there, and so was Wormtail. Ron paused in the doorway, Rhysenn beside him, looking from the Dark Lord to the small fat man who had once been his pet rat. Even now, he had a hard time wrapping his mind around the concept that they were one and the same.
'Proof, Wormtail,' the Dark Lord was saying. His voice was a vibrant, unpleasant sort of purr. 'If you wish to convince me that Lucius is treacherous, you will have to provide me some proof. I cannot rely upon your suspicions alone, much as I well know that treachery is something you know a good deal about.'
'I do know about it, Lord,' said Wormtail, his tone sharp with intensity. 'I know the look on a man's face when he's lying. I know betrayal. Let me use that to make it up to you, my Lord — '
' I have learned to hate all traitors, and there is no disease that I spit on more than treachery,' said Voldemort, and laughed softly. 'Your agitation is very admirable, Wormtail. Be that as it may, I require proof beyond your assumptions. I would speak with Lucius.'
'Shall I summon him, Lord?'
'Not quite yet,' said Voldemort. He raised his left hand, and Ron felt himself suddenly stumble forward, his feet moving against his own volition. He went forward, half reluctant and half surprised. The Dark Lord had not really invaded his mind like this before. When Ron stood in front of him, Voldemort raised a hairless eyebrow ridge and regarded him thoughtfully. 'You've been listening, boy?'
'Ron. My name is Ron.'
'Not a very mellifluous name, is it?' The thin etiolated mouth smirked.
'What has happened to your cloak and your pin, boy? And your clothes are torn and filthy.'
Ron looked down at himself. His clothes were grimy with dirt from the roof, wrinkled and unpleasant from so many nights spent sleeping on the floor. He was fairly sure he smelled. 'The wind came up,' he said. 'It tore my cloak off, and my pin.'
Voldemort chuckled. 'Some luckless traveler will find that pin, to his peril,' he said, sounding as if the idea cheered him up. 'In the meantime, it is disrespectful of you to appear before me in such a state.'
'Sorry,' said Ron. 'If I'd known ahead of time that you were going to kidnap and torture me, I would have dressed spiffily for it.'
Wormtail gave a small squeak. Voldemort looked away from Ron, towards Rhysenn, who was standing in the doorway. 'Take the boy to the guest chambers,' he said. 'Find him some appropriate clothes. And give him a bath.' Voldemort looked disdainful. 'He smells.'
'I knew it,' Ron muttered.
It took much longer than Hermione had hoped it would for Percy to respond to her letter. Two days after she had sent the first owl, she received a terse response: No. It's too dangerous.
She hurled the letter into the fire and wrote Percy again, more imploringly this time. She invoked Ron and the danger he was in and the fact that Harry had gone to find him and both must be protected at all costs. She sealed the letter with wax and sent it on with one of the hotel owls.
She decided not to tell Draco about Percy's letter. He had been, despite their uneasily achieved peace, completely unstable since the morning he'd come back from the Floo Hub covered in ashes. He was sweet to her often, with a dangerous and peculiar and compelling sort of sweetness; he would hold her arm absently in the street, or she would catch him staring at her as if he were trying to see through her to something else, something just out of view. He was also bad-tempered, and would flare up and shout and snap and say awful things to her, and the fight to get himself back under control took a little bit longer each time. On the third day in the hotel they went to Gringotts to see if the goblins there knew if Harry had visited his vault since the previous week. When they were sent to the manager of the branch, a goblin who had been in charge of Draco's vault since he was seven years old, and the goblin refused to give them any news of Harry, Draco slammed him back against the wall so hard that the security trolls came running. The goblin choked and wheezed and turned purple as Draco throttled him and when the trolls threw them both out onto the street, Hermione was glad. Or at least, she was glad until Draco punched the wall beside the door so hard that he tore the skin off his knuckles and she had to drag him back through Diagon Alley, trying not to get translucent silvery blood everywhere.
Back in the hotel room, Draco was quiet, sitting on the edge of the bathtub while she bandaged up his hand with a Healfast poultice and bandage strips from the Basic Medi-Magic Kit on the wall. Draco had gotten blood all over his shirt and she had made him take it off, along with his cloak, and had dumped the lot into the sink, where they fizzed among the enchanted soap bubbles.
'You have to stop being so careless,' she said, giving the bandage a hard tug that made him wince. 'The poison slows your healing down.'
'I am not entirely sure,' he said, taking his hand back and examining the neat job she had done on it, 'that punching one's hand into a wall counts as carelessness.'
'Would you rather I said 'deliberately stupid'?'
'I'd rather you didn't say anything at all,' he said shortly, and got to his feet, pushing past her on his way to the door. After it shut behind him, she stood for a moment with the Medi-Magic kit in her hands. She could see herself in the mirror over the sink, all huge dark eyes and translucent skin and her hair in tight braids because she didn't have time to spend to stop it frizzing up and then she flung the kit hard at the mirror. It bounced off and fell into the sink and the water splashed up and obscured her reflection.
When she went into the living room he was standing near the window, one hand on the white floor-length curtain. She could see the shape of him dimly through the curtain as it blew across him: the familiar angle of his head, the long legs and thin shoulders and compact waist and hips. He was just a silhouette, and could almost have been Harry; even his hair was untidy now. But then he pushed the curtain aside and looked at her and he was himself again. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I'm sorry, I can't help it. You should just ignore me.'
'So you're apologizing for what? Being a jerk?'
He shrugged. 'Apparently. Apparently I don't even have the strength of my jerk convictions these days.'
She sighed. 'You would hate it if I just ignored you,' she said. 'You hate being ignored.'
'Perhaps,' he said. 'Although I'd like to think that I've learned to differentiate between positive and negative attention since I was twelve.'
He smiled a little, and the faint light of the street lamps that came through the curtain lit the ends of his hair and his skin and she tried not to look at the narrow line of pale gold that ran from his navel to disappear into the waistband of his trousers. His stomach was very flat and she could see the lightly penciled line of his ribs when he shrugged and beckoned her to come stand closer to him. When she didn't move, he looked exasperated. 'I said I was sorry.'
Hermione looked at him narrowly. In a lot of ways, she thought, Draco often reminded her of a girl: there was a certain brittle femininity to his cruelty, and he used his physicality, his knowledge of the effect his looks had on people, to get what he wanted in a way that went beyond flirtation. It seemed to work a sort of charm even on boys who would never normally look at another boy twice: sometimes when Draco worked up one of his really blinding smiles, even Ron would look dazzled momentarily before seeming to recollect how much he loathed him — and she remembered how Harry, the first time he'd put on formal wizarding robes during fifth year and she'd tried to get him to brush his hair, had remarked that there was no point trying to get him all poshed up because everyone would be looking at Draco Malfoy anyway. She'd been mildly surprised that something like that would even have occurred to him but then Harry had never been blind, just unobservant.
Remembering Harry made her wish he was here again, although not for Draco's sake this time, but rather for her own. In the face of Draco's volcanic and mercurial changes of mood, she longed for Harry's gentle nature and flexible temperament even more. Perhaps he could have calmed Draco down, perhaps not; she had a feeling that he wouldn't know what to do any better than she did, but together they would have had a much better shot at
