Not too terribly surprisingly, once they found themselves inside the offices of the Department of Transportation and Floo Travel, Hermione found herself going through the stacks of files alone. Draco's contribution was too sit on the edge of the desk, swing his feet, and clean under his fingernails with a heavyweight silver letter-opener with a handle in the shape of a sea serpent.
'You're no help,' Hermione remarked, pushing her hair behind her ears.
The files for even one day's worth of Floo Hub transport were extensive.
Long blue columns of names and destinations showed who had left, while corresponding red columns indicated arrivals. So far she had not recognized any of the names.
Draco's shoulders lifted in a faint shrug. 'I feel my purpose here is largely ornamental,' he said.
'Only because you're not doing anything. You could at least move the parchments I'm done with.'
Draco looked as if he were considering this. 'Nah,' he said, finally. He hopped down off the desk, and looked consideringly around the room.
Then, with an air of gentle determination, he began to scratch words into the soft wood paneling of the wall with the tip of the letter opener.
'Draco?' Hermione asked. 'What are you writing?'
He stepped back so they could both admire his work. It was a limerick.
There was a young wizard from Bournemouth
Who claimed that his wand was enormous
Two naughty young witches
Ripped off his britches
And found -
'Really,' Hermione said, exasperated, 'what have you got against the Department of Transportation?'
Draco shrugged. 'What have I got for them? Besides, they'll enjoy it. A whole new look for their mundane office decor.'
Hermione turned back to sorting through the files. She was beginning to despair. There was a stack of parchments as thick as her wrist, and while the lists of names seemed very complete, the times scribbled next to them were in no particular order. 'If we don't find anything…' her voice was hesitant, 'Do we have a backup plan?'
'I have a backup plan,' Draco said. He had moved on to the opposite wall, and was busy carving rude hieroglyphics under the windowsill. 'It involves going back to the hotel bar, drinking sixteen Slow Comfortable Skrewts, drunkenly staggering upstairs and collapsing into bed, where I will pen an epic nine-stanza poem entitled 'Man, That's Grapefruit.''
'You hate poetry,' Hermione protested.
'Have you ever had a Slow Comfortable Skrewt?' Draco waved the letter opener expressively. 'They're so powerful that two sips will make you hallucinate. Four sips and everyone else in the bar hallucinates right along with you. Eight sips and you wake up a week later in Milton Keynes, naked and tied to a radiator while a bloke named Bradley wearing a pair of your undershorts tells you that two days previously you turned his prized collection of Muggle lawn ornaments into a bowl of suet pudding and if you don't turn them back posthaste, he'll break both your kneecaps with a toffee hammer. Not,' Draco added, lowering his long-lashed eyelids demurely, 'that this has ever happened to me.'
'Draco, you couldn't possibly break someone's kneecaps with a toffee hammer. It would be like trying to decapitate them with a nutmeg grater.
Toffee hammers are about an inch long.'
Draco eyed her resentfully. 'That's not the point.'
'I know,' Hermione said, shoving papers aside. 'You were being funny.
But I'm not in the mood.'
Draco hopped back up on the desk. 'You could at least pretend you still find me amusing, you know,' he said.
'To what purpose?'
Draco had subsided into a full-on sulk. 'You are tired of me,' he declared.
'Obviously, you have found someone more dashing, more alluring — '
'Viktor Krum!' Hermione exclaimed.
Draco let out a wail and dropped the letter opener. 'I was joking! Not that slack-jawed Slavic gorilla! His knuckles brush the ground and he walks like a duck! I never walk like a duck. I prowl, I strut, I slither, I glide — '
'BE QUIET,' Hermione thundered. 'And don't scream like that, someone will hear you. Honestly, Draco. What I was trying to say is that I found Viktor's name in the files. Draco, around what time was it that Harry Portkeyed himself out of the club? Did you come straight to the office afterward?'
For a moment, there was no answer. Finally, Hermione glanced up. Draco was staring at her, his exaggerated playacting and tipsy mirth quite gone.
'I did,' he said. 'I left straightaway to find you.'
'Then it looks like about a half an hour later, Viktor Krum left the Floo Hub with the rest of his Bulgarian teammates. Their names aren't listed but there were seven of them. Eight, counting Viktor.'
'Too many for a team,' Draco said, sitting up straighter. 'One too many.'
Hermione's hands tightened on the parchment. 'Viktor. It has to have been Viktor. Harry knows, him, trusts him — '
Draco leaped down from the desk and came to stand beside her. Together they stared down at the words inked in blue: Viktor Krum (D, Blg. Capt.)
& Teammates (7) London — Sofia. 'They went to the Floo Hub in Sofia,' he said. 'From there I assume Viktor would Apparate or Portkey home?'
Hermione nodded. 'His family's home is outside Sofia. If we had a fireplace we could try to call on him at his house — there's plenty of Floo powder here — '
'But we can't Floo internationally without a Hub,' Draco protested.
'From the Ministry you can Floo anywhere,' Hermione said quietly. 'No restrictions.'
Draco inhaled a startled breath. 'Floo Powder,' he said. 'There must be some in here — '
'In the cabinets,' Hermione said. 'Don't take too much — they'll know we've been here. Although,' she added dryly, looking around at the mess Draco had made of the walls, 'I suppose they're not likely to miss that, are they?'
Draco already had his hand inside the cabinet on the wall. 'They'll think it was burglars,' he said.
'Burglars who broke in and redecorated?'
'Gay burglars,' he said, and with a fiendish grin, retrieved a canister of Industrial Strength Floo Powder from the cabinet. 'Got it,' he said. 'Now, I know where there's a fireplace. A huge one. Upstairs, in my father's office.' He slammed the cabinet door shut. 'Come on, I'll show you.'
Furiously, Rhiannon tossed back her mane of honeyed silken hair, glaring at the man who stood before her — the man who had killed her father, dishonored her mother, driven her brother mad, and doomed her true love Tristan to a lingering, painful imprisonment deep beneath the dungeon moat. 'You cannot break my spirit, Morgan,' she hissed.
The Dark Wizard Morgan chuckled, a deep low rumble like a bassoon. His laugh, like everything else about him, was ineffably manly — from the muscular forearms revealed beneath the foaming lace of his sleeves to the coal-blue eyes and tangles of raven hair, he was a gorgeous slab of masculinity. He was, she reminded herself hastily, also Evil. 'You will cooperate,' he said to her. 'Or your lover Tristan will die by my hand -
although not before I have tortured him sufficiently.'
Rhiannon gasped, and her milky bosom heaved beneath the thin gold satin of her gown. 'You wouldn't,' she moaned.
'I would,' Morgan asserted, leaning back against the enormous ornate stone fireplace in a satisfied manner,
