Malfoy was still looking out the car window when Harry, motivated by the sheer horror of spending another night in the flat reliving a night he couldn’t have back and that wouldn’t ever be repeated, said he was thinking of stopping by Ron’s.
“I’ll drop you off first—”
“Oh, you think I’m letting you go anywhere by yourself until the kidnapper is caught?” Malfoy demanded, not taking his eyes off the city skyline. “Good luck with that. Drive.”
Once they were there, Pansy took Malfoy away to see her wedding dress.
“Wow, the case must be driving Malfoy mental,” Ron said with a measured amount of sympathy. “He didn’t even make one crack about seeing Pansy with the dress off.”
Then he looked at Harry properly and sent the house elf down to the cellars for Firewhiskey. It was from the year 1589 and had probably cost more than Harry’s flat. It burned as it went down.
“Okay,” Ron said. “What’s going on? It’s not the case.”
It was the case too. Harry had promised himself he’d keep all the children safe: it shouldn’t have been just Lavender’s children. He should have been able to shield all of Hogwarts: he’d promised himself, once, that it would never be touched again. Hogwarts had been his shining refuge and his starting point and children should be safe there. He remembered Eugenia Varley’s prim red bun and her small, terribly young face too clearly. He was getting her back, and not in any packets.
He took another swallow of the whiskey, until all he saw was crystal at the bottom of the glass. Then he leaned forward, head bowed over the empty gleaming thing.
“It’s not just the case,” he said.
“Is it about Sinistra’s?” Ron asked. “Is it about—er. Is it about Malfoy?”
He sounded deeply and definitely uncomfortable talking about this, but determined to do it all the same.
Harry laughed. “It’s not about Sinistra’s.”
There was a silence. Ron took a deep but careful breath, as if he was afraid the air around him might be poisoned, and then Harry felt him rest a hand against Harry’s shoulder, grip strong and comforting.
“I thought it had to be something like Sinistra’s because—because you didn’t seem happy about it,” he said. “But it wasn’t, was it?”
“No,” Harry said.
“Oh my God,” Ron exclaimed. “I am not cut out for this. If only Hermione wasn’t so busy with her new bloke, I know she would’ve spotted something by now. And then she’d have a plan!”
Harry looked down to see that his glass had been refilled. Ron and Pansy had trained their house elf to be sneaky so that Hermione would never suspect they owned one. Malfoy’d watched some film that’d given him ideas the week they got the elf, and he’d decided to start calling her Ninja. The name had sort of stuck.
“Thanks, Ninja,” said Harry, and took another burning swallow.
Even moving out wouldn’t solve this. He couldn’t stay away from Ron and Pansy’s house, or from Hermione, or from the bar every Friday night. He couldn’t disentangle his life from Malfoy’s and he didn’t want to: he’d never meant anything to turn out this way but it had, and it would make him happy to be hopelessly, wonderfully tangled up with no way out if only Malfoy could’ve said yes: if he’d thought it would be a good idea.
“So it was Malfoy, then,” Ron said. “Yeah, I’ll be wanting a little more of that too, Ninja.”
“It didn’t mean anything,” Harry told him. “He was just trying to find a way out of the whole mess.”
“Um,” said Ron. “Right. Look, I consider myself a pretty decent friend, but I have to say, Harry, you want licentious sexual favours, you’re on your own. Maybe you should—”
“I asked him out,” Harry said, the words stark in the air, coming out too loud and too real. “He said no.”
“Oh,” Ron said. “Um. Right.” He paused and then said tentatively: “Could we just give Hermione a tiny, tiny hint—”
“No.”
Ron looked moodily into his drink. Harry drank his drink.
“We should remember,” Ron said at last, “that Malfoy is crazy. There is no telling what he will do, because he is crazy. Dribbling and frothing and rejecting Veela: there is no end to the crazy things crazy people will do. You shouldn’t take it personally.”
“No,” Harry said again. Ninja refilled his drink a third time.
They spent the night stretched out on two sofas in one of Ron’s sumptuous parlours, and got through the whole bottle of Firewhiskey.
“There are plenty of other crazy fish in the sea,” Ron said at one point, lying prone and regarding his crenelated ceiling with grave interest. “I mean, if that’s what you’re into, and I don’t judge, I know lots of annoying people. I employ lots of annoying people. I mean, all right, I admit Malfoy may be hard to beat in those stakes. He is sort of spectacularly annoying. But maybe you’d hit it off with my accountant. I really hate him.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Harry said. “Thanks.”
“But Harry, the thing is,” Ron said. “The thing is, this can’t go on. I mean, now that he knows. They can’t. Can they?”
Harry sighed and tipped the glass back again. He was getting good at drinking lying down: only a little spilled over his chin.
“No,” he said, low. “I have to think of a plan to get Malfoy away from me.”
“Sensible decision,” Ron told him. “You’re doing the right thing. So—I guess maybe you should switch partners?”
“What?”
“Temporarily,” Ron said hastily. “Just a preventative measure. You said yourself—”
“I didn’t mean that,” Harry snarled, fighting the urge to go find Malfoy right now and keep him close. “I meant—I have to get Malfoy away from me tomorrow night.”
“Um, I’m not really sure one night’s going to cut it, Harry.”
“No, you see, tomorrow night’s Friday,” Harry explained, making a vague gesture with his free hand towards Ron’s fancy chandelier. “It’s our pub night. Everybody knows about it. And if I set off without Malfoy, I’m hoping I can get kidnapped on my way.”
There was a long silence.
Then Ron said, very gently: “Harry? I think maybe you’ve had enough to drink.”
“No,” Harry said, cross at himself and the stupid alcohol for stopping him from explaining this to Ron so he would see it was perfectly reasonable. “The thing is—all I need is a plan.”
“I would love a plan,” Ron said fervently. “I dream day and night of a plan. But, uh, how do I put this, Harry? You have many strengths. Like Quidditch. You’re brilliant at that. But plans are not exactly your forte. Plans are what Hermione does. Your thing is getting really, really angry until… evil is defeated.”
Ron was obviously considering this, looking doubtfully at Harry as if he expected Harry to be insulted. Harry felt slightly distant from the whole proceedings: from unhappiness and his frantically working brain. He felt a little as if he was floating up on that high ceiling. The corners of it looked like the twirly bits of icing on a cake.
A thought floated up to join him.
“Getting really, really angry,” he murmured, shutting his eyes. The glow of the chandelier lit tiny fuzzy lights behind his eyelids. “Sounds like a plan to me.”
Harry woke up calm, content and with a good grip on Malfoy.
Malfoy was leaning against the back of his sofa, forearms folded and head bent over Harry’s, a hand on his shoulder. He’d obviously been in the process of shaking Harry awake, and then Harry must have reached out—the way he did—out and up, not for Malfoy’s wrist but for his neck, clasp firm at his nape and fingers in his hair. He should let go, he supposed.
Malfoy was looking down at him with a funny expression on his face, eyes wide, looking fond and exasperated and—something else, flickering just before he turned away. Maybe anger.
“As I was saying,” he said, face averted. “Wake up. And let go.”
“Sorry,” Harry murmured, voice rusty with sleep. He let go, the hollow of his hand missing the warmth of Malfoy’s neck as if it was suddenly so cold it ached.
Malfoy leaned back against the glass bookcase full of leatherbound volumes Ron had never read, face still turned determinedly away.
“Splendid idea to drink on a work night, Potter,” he drawled. “We’re almost late for work.”
Harry glanced at the ornate clock and saw that it was ten minutes to ten. “We are late, Malfoy. Work begins at nine.”
“You know I will never accept that,” Malfoy told him. “Why must you keep hurting me by bringing it up?”
He spoke distractedly, trying to pretend everything was normal, which was the stupidest thing Harry could imagine. Malfoy knew how Harry felt, now. He’d turned him down.
On the other hand, they absolutely had to pretend everything was normal, because otherwise everything would fall apart, and Harry did not know how to piece together a life in which Malfoy was not essential. He didn’t want to.
He sat up and cracked his neck.
On the other sofa Ron rolled over and mumbled: “Not the elephant feather.”
Harry didn’t look at him. He kept his gaze fixed on Malfoy, the determinedly averted eyes and lifted chin, the tension running all through his body leaving it taut as a strung bow and as easily snappable. He was daring him to look back.
“You want to spar when we get into the office, Malfoy?” he demanded.
The challenge turned Malfoy’s head as he’d known it would: Malfoy met his eyes in that same abruptly fearless way he’d met them that night right after Harry’d turned on the Veela charm. There were cold walls behind his grey eyes: it was like he was daring Harry to storm them.
“Sure, Potter,” he said. “Let’s go.”
It was one of those days when they whirled into the office and everybody, even Shacklebolt, knew not to say a word: knew to just get out of their way. Malfoy threw his cloak over Harry’s desk and Harry grabbed a bottle of water from the caféteria, pouring it down his throat to drown out the slight nagging headache and the constant sense of unease: to drown out all thought.
When he stalked out onto the practice mats he found Malfoy already there waiting. His back was to Harry, the line of his spine under his worn t-shirt just as taut as before.
Harry did not say a word to indicate he was there, but as he approached Malfoy swung around just the same, eyes too bright and too big. He was shedding the weight faster than he usually did, the idiot, Harry thought with what distant reason remained to him. He needed a keeper.
Far more immediate was the thought that Malfoy’s reflexes would be slower, that he’d be weaker. It would be easier to win and then Harry would feel better somehow, he would, he’d be exhausted enough to relax with all this miserable thrumming tension drained away and Malfoy safe under him saying he surrendered.
“You took your time,” Malfoy drawled, and Harry punched him in the face.
“I’m here now.”
Malfoy touched the bloody side of his mouth delicately with the back of one hand, testing, and grinned a sharp bright grin. “And is that all you’ve got?”
“Guess we’ll have to see,” Harry said, low.
They circled each other, wary and slow, eyes running up and down each others’ bodies watching for the tiny giveaway signs showing which way they would lunge. Occasionally their eyes met, locked, and then Malfoy looked away.
Didn’t matter. Harry could still feel his gaze running over Harry’s skin like burning-hot fingers, his attention never wavering. It was like it had been the night Malfoy destroyed the office, being in the centre of a storm: quiet, so quiet, with electricity and chaos a whisper away.
He could hear Malfoy’s harsh breathing in the hush, and his own. There was nothing else in the world that mattered at all.
There was a lightning-flash of intent in Malfoy’s eyes for a moment and no more. Harry evaded Malfoy’s charge, only to get tripped up and have to roll even as he hit the mat, fast and to the side to avoid a kick, and get a kick of his own in directly below the knee. Malfoy staggered and Harry hit him at waist height, snarling, and they tumbled backwards onto the mats in a tangle of legs and fists. He heard Malfoy snarl back, soft, in his ear: the noise sent a hot thrill chasing down his spine. Malfoy’s chest rose with the sound, hard against Harry’s, and it would be so easy to curve over to him, find his mouth, and oh God, what was he doing?
Harry stopped moving. He was breathing hard and he had one hand curled, fingers almost touching Malfoy’s face, in a gesture that wasn’t anything like fighting, and Malfoy who had learned to take any blow was looking up at him, eyes wide and scared. His eyes weren’t just scared, they were a little hazy, like sudden heat blurring summer air: they were still glittering.
It should have been all right. Harry was used to sparring, he’d had years of training in sparring, doing what they did best together and moving like two essential parts of the same machine. He wanted what he’d always wanted: so what? It shouldn’t have been any different.
But it was. It made no sense, one night shouldn’t be able to overwrite years of habit, but Malfoy’s touch and Malfoy’s body were changed now, stood in a different relation to him, lay shaking in small, tightly controlled bursts underneath him. Malfoy’s hands were clenched in fists at his sides, Harry thought with sudden and almost terrible clarity, not to hit Harry but to stop himself touching Harry.
If he knotted his fingers in Malfoy’s hair, if he kissed him now, Malfoy wouldn’t stop him. Harry was sure of that, down to the blood moving slow and burning through his veins. He had the material of Malfoy’s t-shirt still clenched in one hand. He’d grabbed it to hold Malfoy down, but Malfoy wasn’t struggling anymore. He could feel the heat of Malfoy’s body through worn-thin cotton and it would be so easy to wrench the shirt off. He remembered with memory more visceral than vivid, more body than mind, the sleek movement of muscle under bare skin and the hungry slide of Malfoy’s mouth against his own.
He could do it, get Malfoy home, get him into bed, and then Malfoy would be furious with him and Eugenia Varley might end up in packets.
Harry pushed himself up and away, sitting with one knee drawn up and one arm dangling over it, forehead pressed against his arm. He was disgusted with himself for being tempted, even for a moment.
From the floor Malfoy was cursing in a soft fervent flow. Harry agreed with him, except for the words he didn’t know and guessed were ancient pureblood curses or dark spells.
Actually he probably agreed with those too.
Once he’d exhausted his supply of curses Harry heard Malfoy rise and walk towards the showers. He didn’t look up.
When Malfoy was gone he climbed wearily to his feet and went to see Cuthbert.
Cuthbert was sitting at his little desk murmuring spells to shred used parchment. When Harry said: “Hey,” he jumped violently.
Harry supposed he had kind of barked it out. He wasn’t in the best of moods.
“Augh, Mr Potter,” he said, and then looked up at Harry, sweaty and looming in his practice clothes. “Don’t kill me?” Cuthbert added in a weak voice.
“I want you to do something for me,” Harry said.
Cuthbert still looked vaguely apprehensive, but he brightened as a thought crossed his mind. “D’you want to see my notes on my Suspect now, Mr Potter?”
“No I don’t,” Harry told him, and Cuthbert resumed looking crushed and afraid for his life. “I want you to do something else that’s important for the success of the mission,” Harry said, and Cuthbert looked up with hope in his eyes. “If you do this right, I’ll—commend you, or something,” he added.
He wasn’t sure exactly how you went about that. Malfoy handled most of the office stuff. Well, Malfoy would know how to do it on Monday.
“Just doing my duty is an honour, sir,” Cuthbert chirped helpfully.
“Well—okay. Good. Keep it up,” Harry told him. “I want you to follow Malfoy for a couple of hours after work tonight.”
“Won’t he be with you, sir?” Cuthbert inquired.
Dean, Ginny and Louison passed a little too near their desks. They were possibly on their way to lunch and Louison was possibly trying to listen in. Harry wouldn’t mind at all if he was the kidnapper, actually. He gave Louison a dark look and Louison raised his eyebrows and made a beeline for the door.
“No, he won’t be with me,” Harry snarled. “I have something else to do. We don’t spend every waking moment together, you know.”
“All right, sir,” said Cuthbert, his tone politely doubtful. Then light appeared to dawn and he suddenly looked delighted. “Do you suspect Mr Malfoy of being the kidnapper, sir?”
“What?” said Harry.
“It might make sense,” Cuthbert told him, warming to his theme. “I’ve studied psychology, sir, and he’s a classic case. Volatile temperament, egotistical, and has a lot of issues when it comes to breeding, plus the troubled background—”
“Cuthbert, stop being ridiculous,” Harry snapped. “If you can. Just follow Malfoy around for a while. Don’t let him out of your sight.”
Cuthbert looked dejected about being told off, but underlying that Harry thought he seemed a little excited by actually having an assignment. The poor kid, Harry thought. He’d hate hanging around being taught all the time himself. They should take Cuthbert out into the field when this was all over.
Of course, he might end up getting them killed.
“After it’s dark,” Harry said, throwing the letter down on Cuthbert’s desk. It landed with a solid thunk amid the debris of destroyed paper. “I want you to give him this.”
Cuthbert looked like he might be considering a salute. “I won’t let you down, sir!”
Harry sort of wanted to say something kind to the kid, or at least not crush his soul again, but he didn’t manage it. He was frustrated and tired and sick with dread about what he had to do next, so he just said curtly: “See that you don’t,” and stormed off to find Malfoy.
He found Malfoy sitting at his desk, hands hanging empty and palms down over his knees. His hair, still damp from the showers, had fallen into his eyes. He seemed to be looking fixedly at the floor. He did not even glance up at Harry’s approach.
Harry sat down in chilly silence he made no attempt to break and took out some files. He leafed through them without looking up for the better part of an hour, and then realized he was looking at them upside down. He righted them hastily and hoped nobody had noticed.
The words didn’t seem to make any more sense right way up. There was a bad taste at the back of his mouth. He wished he could take back what he hadn’t even said yet, and what he had to say anyway.
Malfoy broke the silence at last.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “It was a terrible plan.”
“I tried to tell you,” Harry said without looking up.
“I know you did,” Malfoy snapped, and then wrenched his voice down to a softer note with an audible effort. “I didn’t—I couldn’t think of any other way to solve things, but I expect my mind was clouded and I didn’t want to and I certainly should have taken that factor into account. It was impulsive and wrong of me. Sometimes I—are you ever going to say anything?”
“Are you done?” Harry asked.
“No. Yes,” Malfoy said. “I want you to tell me everything’s not ruined!”
The sharp appeal in his voice brought Harry’s head up involuntarily, attention drawn as surely as it would’ve been if they’d been fighting trolls or at a crime scene where there were dead parents or at a political party when someone could bring up Malfoy’s dad.
That was a terrible mistake. Now he was looking at Malfoy, and Malfoy looked desperate and miserable. He was wearing a black t-shirt, the shirt a little damp from the showers too, and it made him look dreadfully pale, the dark circles under his eyes standing out more than ever. He was making himself ill, it was obvious, it was worse than the cases, this was like it’d been with his parents and Katie and Harry just wanted to make him feel better and tell him anything he needed to hear. He couldn’t go through with the plan. He’d explain to Malfoy.
You think I’m letting you go anywhere by yourself until the kidnapper is caught?
Only he had to go through with it, and he couldn’t afford to reassure Malfoy.
“But maybe it is,” Harry said, voice scratching in his throat like a trapped animal. “All ruined.”
Malfoy flinched.
Harry looked away and forced himself to remember seeing Malfoy with Katie all those times, seeing Malfoy hurt or walking away from him, hearing Malfoy say no. None of it had been Malfoy’s fault and it hadn’t been fair for Harry to feel furious, helpless resentment, but there it was. And he could use it, now.
“How do you think things are going to go back to normal?” he demanded. “If we can’t spar, if we can’t even touch each other. I can barely look at you without—it is all ruined. There’s no way back.”
He looked back in time to see Malfoy’s back hunch in on itself, like the wings of a cold tired bird.
“Look,” he said, voice brittle. “I admit that right now I can’t think of what to do, but that’s just—that’s just because I’m distracted and—and unhappy. The thing with Zabini in the holding cell and in the car yesterday caught me off guard and I’m not exactly sure how—”
“Well you can be sure of one thing,” Harry snarled. “It wasn’t about the damn holding cell.”
“I know that, I am not stupid,” Malfoy snapped. “Did you want me to bring it up in front of other people, or should I have waited for that incredibly horrible conversation in the car? When would you have preferred, Potter? What did you want me to do? I’m aware that I’m—territory, and recent events can’t have helped much, but once I’ve thought of a way around the Veela problem then I think we can—”
Harry got out of his chair and threw down the nonsensical files and all at once found it utterly, terribly easy to be angry.
“Do you ever just shut up?” he shouted. “You are stupid. You’re so stupid I can’t even bear to look at you right now. I don’t want to. Would you for God’s sake stop yapping on about the Veela thing?”
“What?” Malfoy asked, sounding lost and uncertain and preparing to be angry right back. “Why? What else are we talking about? That’s the whole issue: that’s why everything’s gone wrong. If we can just fix that everything will be all right.”
“No,” Harry said flatly. “No. It won’t. Everything will still be terrible. I wish you would stop talking about Veela. I’m not one: I’m mostly human. Nobody’s trying to jump me anymore. The problem’s solved and everything’s still terrible!”
The shout rang out through the office. Harry noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that people were unobtrusively but very quickly moving towards the kitchen. Sometimes they stayed in there for quite a while.
Malfoy sat and bore the onslaught with his face growing whiter every second.
“I don’t understand,” he said at last.
“Oh, open your eyes,” Harry said. “That—with Zabini, it wasn’t about territory. Any more than it was with Louison. It was never about territory.” He sucked in a deep breath, reminding himself why he was doing this, trying to force himself to be calm. “I was just jealous,” he told Malfoy quietly. “That’s all.”
He grabbed his jacket and whirled out of the room.
“Wait,” Malfoy said in a strangled voice when Harry was on the threshold, when it was almost too late.
Harry’d been really hoping he wouldn’t have to do this.
He didn’t glance around. “What part of ‘I can’t even bear to look at you’ did you not understand?” he demanded, still softly, staring out at the corridor.
There was silence behind him.
Harry left and walked through the London streets, trying to clear his head, trying not to remember Malfoy’s pale shocked face. He took care to walk past that pastry shop Malfoy liked, to pass Rick’s, to stop by the grocery shop on the corner, visiting places that were familiar to him and would be familiar to anyone who knew his routine. The spring air was warm and pleasant, and Harry lifted his face to it and tried very hard not to think about anything but the case.
It was almost a relief when evening began to fall, the sky bleeding into darkness like blue ink spilled on wet paper, and Harry caught sight of a clock set above a restaurant and saw it was time to go to the pub.
He walked slowly and softly enough so that he heard the footsteps as they fell into a rhythm behind his. He waited long enough to be sure that it wasn’t a coincidence.
He longed to whirl around and lash out at whoever it was following him, to beat answers out of someone and make them pay for a half-merman boy in packets, for Eugenia Varley lost and the way he’d had to make Malfoy look. Only the kidnapper had a lot of tricks up his sleeve: this person following Harry could simply be under Imperius, and then Harry would’ve beaten up a victim and gained nothing.
He had to be taken.
The steps were coming closer and clearer, every one distinct. Each sounded like the closing of the office door when Harry had left Malfoy today, like the click of a cupboard door being shut on him. They were like the echo of his slamming heart. The skin at the back of his neck was prickling: he wondered how the few people passing by could fail to notice the steps that seemed so obvious, the fact he was being tracked, hunted down like prey, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
He heard a heel crunch on the pavement directly behind him, set his teeth and willed himself not to betray his violent awareness of that lurking presence.
Behind him there was a laugh. The incongruity of that low sound broke his nerve and he jumped, and twisted around at last.
The blow fell like thunder crashing down on him, breaking the world into splinters and darkness. He lost consciousness without seeing his attacker’s face.
Harry woke on a freezing stone floor and heard a clink beside his head. He wasn’t able to make sense of the sound until he pulled himself slowly up on his hands and knees, and found himself stopped short by the tug of steel at his throat.
There was a choke collar around his neck, the metal biting coldly into his skin. There was a chain leashing him to the floor.
With care, he was able to stand up anyway and see where he’d been taken.
It was a warehouse, steel rafters and concrete in the shadows. There were small windows high up that could not have let in any light even when it was daytime and the room was filled with cages. There were shapes huddled in most of them. From across the room Harry saw a blaze of red hair under the flickering fluorescent lights.
“Conleth?” he called out. “Conleth Frexley?”
Malfoy was going to be able to return this man to Katie, just like he’d promised. That would make him happy.
“Harry Potter, isn’t it?” asked Conleth, in a voice far more like a banshee’s than the one he’d used at the awards ceremony, as if years of careful civilisation had been torn away from him and left wild sound behind. “How’s Katie?”
“Oh, fine, fine,” Harry said. “Er, I mean. Distraught.”
Conleth paused to digest this. He was standing facing Harry now, at the length of his chain. Harry saw his eyes glitter like shards of moonlight on the water.
“Sorry to see you here,” he said at last, his voice rough, balanced on some serrated knife edge between a snarl and a scream.
Harry grinned at him, feeling content for a moment even in this steel trap as he’d done with his companions in the war and still did with Malfoy in the field, belonging in the presence of dangerous creatures.
“Are you?” he said. “I kind of like it here. It’s homey.”
Then he saw a smaller heap in the cage next to his stir. What had seemed like shadows turned into a pale little pointed face and solemn eyes, with wings of russet hair springing from her ears.
Eugenia Varley said: “Mr Potter?” and without waiting for confirmation she swept on: “Are you completely insane?”
Harry’s confidence wavered, faced with a child. He wanted to save her, to shield her from anything that might harm her and protect her with his life, but he didn’t have the faintest idea how to talk to her.
“There,” he said awkwardly. “There. You’re all right.”
“Mr Potter,” said Eugenia. “I am chained up in a cage. So are you,” she added, as if he might have failed to notice.
“Ah,” Harry said. “Yes. But the thing is—” he wished Malfoy was here—“It’s all part of my plan.”
He wished Malfoy was here. Malfoy soon would be.
Harry closed his eyes for a moment and thought about the letter he’d left with Cuthbert. He knew Malfoy would come, but the question was how mad Malfoy was going to be when he arrived. Harry had tried to explain.
He’d written: Hi, Malfoy. I’m sorry for whatever I said to you so that you’d let me leave alone. I didn’t mean it, or at least I suppose I didn’t. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say yet. You’ve probably guessed I’ve been kidnapped by now. This Galleon is a Portkey that should take you right to where I am. Make sure to take some back-up along, we don’t know how many of them there are. And bring me your spare wand. H.
So there was a good chance that Malfoy was going to be mad as hell.
But there was no chance that he wasn’t coming.
“The being chained up in a cage plan?” said Eugenia Varley skeptically.
He’d thought of her as Eugenia, he supposed, when he’d been thinking of her as a victim, as a soft-eyed child who needed his help. Now she looked at him, small and accusing as a tiny judge, and she seemed more like a Varley.
“I knew they’d take me,” Harry said. “I wanted it to happen.” He felt in the pocket of his jeans for a Galleon, the pair to the one he’d made into a Portkey, and felt a moment’s sinking fear that it was lost and all hope with it. But it was there, like a tiny anchor in his pocket: it would act like a magnet and Malfoy’s coin like an iron filing, moving inevitably until they were together. Harry flipped it and caught it in midair. “My partner’s going to track me through this. And then I’m going to make whoever took you sorry.”
Varley’s composure, perfect when she’d thought she was doomed, wavered a little at the first sign of hope.
“Was your partner the sneaky-looking one who named Ratcliff’s slug?” she asked, and sniffed. The noise could have been either disdainful or distressed. It was hard to tell.
“Er, yeah,” Harry said. “That was him.” He leaned towards her, resting his forehead against the bars. “You can trust him,” he promised her. “You can trust me. I’m going to get you out of here. Less than an hour, and all this will be over. You’ll be back at Hogwarts.”
He used the word Hogwarts like a charm, as it had been to him when he was a child, hanging in the air golden and shining as the most precious Snitch in the world.
Varley looked distraught. “Oh my God, Mr Potter, I don’t ever want to go back to school again!”
“What?” Harry asked. “Why not?”
“Because my mother was a phoenix,” Varley said, sounding at the end of her tether. “My dad met her when he was—he was a bird Animagus and well—look, he’s my dad and I love him and I believe him when he says it was a magical night!” Varley fixed Harry with eyes that defied him to believe anything else. “Only now everyone at school knows that I was born from an egg,” she said, her voice suddenly forlorn. “And when my eyes start watering in Potions class I end up accidentally resurrecting slugs. It is so embarrassing.”
Harry didn’t really know what to say, but he took the fact Varley was dreading her return to Hogwarts as a sign she believed that she would be returning to Hogwarts. He tried to give her a confident and comforting smile.
She looked back at him in flat despair. “That slug has grown to be the size of a spaniel, you know,” she told Harry with a brooding air. “I shudder to think what Ratcliff must be feeding it.”
“Er. Sorry to hear that,” Harry said.
“He’ll never let me hear the end of being hatched, you know,” Varley continued dismally. “Not that I care what he thinks.”
“Better your little boyfriend teasing you than being shipped off down the Amazon,” said a woman’s voice.
Harry looked over at her and saw her sitting a few cages away. She had tumbling brown hair and a wry mouth, and she looked perfectly normal until you noticed that her long legs, crossed daintily at the ankle, were faintly patterned with iridescent scales.
“Down the Amazon?” he asked.
“He is not my boyfriend,” Varley said in tones of deep and dark offence.
Tall, dark and scaly paid no attention to Varley’s mortal affront. “That’s what I heard. The Amazon,” she said coolly. “Those of us who are unique enough. There was a boy when I was first here—he was part mermaid like me, but he looked a lot like a full-blood merman.” Her eyes sought Harry’s. “Did they find him?”
“They found him,” Harry said.
He said no more because of the child, but he could see in the woman’s ocean-coloured eyes that she understood well enough. She bowed her head.
“There’s already been one shipment sent up the Amazon,” she told him, her voice less clear. It had sounded like a bell pealing over the waves and it still did, but now it sounded as if there was a storm rising behind the ringing of bells. “I think they’re getting ready for another.”
Sounded like someone had a buyer for curiosities, then. There was a menagerie being built God knew where, for God knew what purpose.
It was better than children being made into potions ingredients. But possibly not by much.
“I don’t see what could have given you that impression,” Varley muttered on.
“I for one,” said Conleth, “am extremely relieved to see you. When do you think D—your partner will be here?”
Harry appreciated Conleth changing from the name he must have heard from Katie, but even hearing it begun made him scowl.
It was black night outside the high windows. Cuthbert must have given the letter to Malfoy by now, and Malfoy wouldn’t hesitate, no matter how upset he might be or how much he might want to be spiteful and let Harry stew. Not with Conleth here. He’d promised Katie, after all, Harry thought, and felt his mouth twist.
“He should be here to save you any minute.”
Malfoy had said the hell with Katie. Of course, that had been before Harry decided to engineer an argument with him, but there’d been a reason for that. Malfoy would understand.
Malfoy would probably be nasty about it for weeks, but he’d understand.
Harry wished he would just come so that the child would be safe, and Harry could be let out of these chains and could see exactly how much damage he’d done. He wanted to pace but every time he moved his chains clanked, the collar around his neck tethering him to the floor. He had no idea how everyone else seemed to be enduring it so patiently: he wanted to strain against it until his neck broke or he could rip it out of the concrete.
When exactly was Malfoy going to get here?
“He didn’t give you an estimated time of arrival?” inquired the scaled woman.
“He’ll be here,” Harry snarled.
Harry had just started to calculate precisely what time it was and what time he could reasonably expect Malfoy when he heard the footsteps, and his heart sank.
They came from outside the door, measured and careful, and there was clearly only one set. That idiot hadn’t brought any back-up.
There was another step, and then another. There was a stir of unease in the centre of Harry’s chest. Surely Malfoy wouldn’t be moving so slowly, not with what was at stake. And then there was something else bothering him. He wasn’t quite sure what.
The door handle turned, the door opening with a gritty, creaking sound against the concrete. For a moment all Harry could see was a dark shape against an even darker night, and he didn’t care because he’d just figured out what was bothering him. He recognised those steps from when they had echoed behind him and he had refused to let himself turn around, forced himself to become captured prey.
Then the kidnapper stepped from darkness into the fluorescent lights.
“You!”
Harry found himself at the other side of the cage without even thinking about it, his chain stretched to full length behind him, his collar biting deep into his throat. His fists were closed so tight around the bars of his cage that they ached and his heart was sinking, his mind suddenly dizzy as he realised how incredibly stupid he had been.
“I’m afraid he won’t be here, you know,” said Cuthbert, all mock regret.
He grinned and tossed the Galleon Harry had left sealed in Malfoy’s letter into the air. It caught the light, gleamed, and fell.
“I just plain forgot to give him your letter, Mr Potter,” Cuthbert continued. “I’m dreadfully sorry. I hope this won’t cause any trouble for me at the office.”