The Quick and the Dead

"Ron?" Hermione asked. "What on earth are you staring at?"

Ron spoke, and his words seemed to rise through the curiously light feeling inside his skull, as if he might float out of his chair at any moment. "It's him," he said out of the corner of his mouth, and pointed at the back of Draco Malfoy's head on the other side of the room.

There was nothing more to be said. Nobody else had hair of that silver-ash colour, or held himself at that arrogant angle, even when Malfoy seemed to be seconds away from falling off the bar stool.

"About three sheets to the wind, isn't he?" said Harry. "What d'you suppose he's doing here?"

Ron didn't answer right away. Harry still hated Malfoy, of course; always had and always would, quite apart from the suspicions everybody at the Auror college had about the Death Eater activities he could never be convicted for. But the passion had gone out of Harry's hatred after the end of fifth year, and it had become a cold constant. There were times when Ron wondered if it was because Lucius Malfoy had rotted in Azkaban for so long, and then died in the last clash with the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord. And no matter how much Harry despised the son, he knew all too well what it was to lose a father.

But that had never made any difference to Ron. His hatred of Malfoy had grown so deep into his blood and bones that nothing could ever temper it. He slid out of his seat, scarcely aware of what he was doing. Hermione grabbed his arm.

"Ron! You can't, not here!"

"Can't I? Watch me."

"What do you think you're going to do, anyway?"

Ron had no idea. But Malfoy's bright head was drawing him as surely as a lodestone might draw metal, and he got up. Hermione yanked him down.

"Ouch!" He rubbed his arm.

"I've had Auror physical training now, so don't try it," warned Hermione. "You're not going over there."

"But--"

She pushed her own chair back. "I'm going."

"Hermione, you can't," said Harry, sounding alarmed. "He's dangerous. And he wouldn't have any compunctions about doing anything to you."

"After two years of Auror training, I think I can take care of myself in the middle of a taproom in the Leaky Cauldron," said Hermione. "And I don't think he's going to try anything here."

"I won't let you," Harry said flatly.

She bent down to the table and spoke very low. "Listen to me, both of you. We know that Ginny's not at Malfoy Manor, that she can't be. All right. But what you may not have thought of is that Malfoy might know something about what did happen to her. Perhaps I can learn something from him, considering the state he's clearly in at the moment."

"Well--" Harry hesitated. "I always heard that he never could hold his liquor at school..."

She nodded. "Exactly. And so he might say some very indiscreet things now. But he's certainly not going to say anything if Ron charges over there like some kind of demented crusader."

"You're right," Harry said reluctantly. "But be careful, Hermione."

"You know I will," she said airily, and the two young men watched her cross the room. Too late, it occurred to Ron that he should have tried harder to stop her.

Granger was coming over towards him.

For a second, Draco wondered if he was drunker than he'd thought. But no; it was definitely the upstart little Mudblood he remembered from Hogwarts, her robes flapping untidily, her bushy hair in as much need of a competent hairdresser as ever... and she was walking across the room towards him. There was a very determined look on her face. At the moment, it all actually seemed rather amusing.

She stopped a few paces away from him, and cleared her throat, smoothing back a lock of hair from her face. "Hello, Malfoy," she said calmly. There was only a slight tremor in her voice.

Draco turned slightly and flicked a glance towards her, keeping one eye on Ron Weasley's reflection in the mirror at the same time. "I beg your pardon?" he asked.

"Er... I saw you sitting over here, and I thought I'd come over and say--"

"A friendly hello?" he interrupted. She was twisting her hands together very slightly, he noticed. Her obvious discomfort still seemed funny to him--the entire thing was triggering a wholly inappropriate urge to giggle, in fact--but all his nerves jangled on alert, as well. What does she know? Why are all three of them here? What do they suspect?

"Potter and Weasley are here as well, I see." He glanced at the table.

"Yes, we were all having lunch, early supper rather, and--"

"So I've been assigned personalized Aurors now to follow me about, is that it?" As soon as he spoke, Draco could have kicked himself. I'll need to be subtler than that!

"Actually," said Hermione quietly, "I thought I'd come over and offer condolences."

"Condolences?" He looked at her blankly.

"Er, yes. Er..." She fumbled for words, but found no more.

And then he understood, and rage flooded him, wiping out all sense of amusement. This nothing, this slime on the bottom of the wizarding world's shoe, this jumped-up little Mudblood had the nerve to offer him condolences on the death of his father. He couldn't say anything, but he saw in the mirror that his face had gone cold and menacing. She took a step backwards.

"It seemed like the polite thing to do," she said. "Even for someone like you, Malfoy." She turned away then, as if even her Gryffindor bravery had run out at the look on his face.

If Granger goes now, Draco realized suddenly, I'll have no chance to find out if they know anything about me. Or if they suspect that I have Ginny... no, no, they can't. Or they would have done something about it already. But still, I've got to find out what they know...or what they're trying to learn...

He schooled his face to a gentle sadness. Draco was so well trained at hiding whatever he actually felt that it was a very easy trick. "I didn't mean... thank you, Granger," he said. He could barely force the words past his lips, but he knew that he had no choice.

She looked at him, startled, suspicious. I mustn't overdo it, he thought. "It shows that you've learned some manners, anyway," he said, moving the corners of his lips upwards into a slight smile.

Still, Hermione kept looking at him, as if wondering where Draco Malfoy had gone, and who this almost-polite stranger was who had taken his place. She had backed away several feet from the bar, and looked as if she might flee at any moment.

"Wait," said Draco, reaching out to touch the sleeve of her robe. She would probably see that as a friendly gesture, he thought. Merlin knew that all of those idiotic Gryffindors were always hugging, and slapping each other on the back, and holding hands, and doing all manner of ill-bred things involving physical contact.

Hermione looked startled. Ron's face in the glass darkened like a thundercloud. He shoved his chair back from the table and strode across the room.

Ron had been watching Hermione talk to Draco, feeling very much as if he watched an enthusiastic new lion-tamer put her head in the lion's mouth. Some painful emotion started to rise in his chest, although he couldn't put a name to what it was. I don't want her talking to him, he thought. He knew that there might be a lot they could learn, and she had to be the one to learn it. Ron certainly knew that he himself couldn't have spoken to Malfoy without smashing his ferret face in, which would not have been productive in extracting the information they needed. But I don't like her talking to him. That ugly pointy-faced git...

Malfoy turned his head then, in response to something Hermione had said, and Ron got his first good look at him in over two years. The innate core of honesty in Ron reared its head. All right. Malfoy's not ugly, not exactly. But he's not handsome either. He's... Ron, unused to evaluating male appearances, groped for the correct descriptive word. Pretty. That's it. He's as pretty as a girl. The great ponce. But there's something sinister about him, more now than ever, and that pretty face of his only makes it worse. It's like putting lace ruffles on a dragon. And Hermione...

She looked so small and fragile standing next to the bar, although Ron knew how much strength there was in her slender arms. Her skin was so pale, with little shadows under her eyes, like the bruised white petals of flowers. She leaned in to say something and a lock of her hair fell over her face before she pushed it backwards impatiently. Malfoy seemed to be both looking and not looking at her, his grey eyes half-lidded, a strange expression on his narrow face. At that moment Ron couldn't help thinking that Hermione looked like an earnest little brown bird before a pretty snake... a snake who might be about to strike. Then she backed away, and Malfoy leaned forward and said something. His long, pale hand reached out to touch her, and at that sight, Ron was out of his seat in a shot.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he demanded of Hermione, not even looking at Malfoy. If Ron looked at him, he knew that he would punch him. And he wanted to keep a shred of control, still. A little voice of reason in his head kept telling him that wiping the floor with Malfoy's face was probably not the way to find out about his sister. And he might know, he might know... I've got to stay calm.

"She's talking to me, Weasley," Draco said easily. "We're having a friendly little chat. So nice to talk with old school chums."

"Chums?" Ron snorted. He couldn't help it.

"Pity you had to interrupt it," said Draco.

"Come with me now," Ron said tightly to Hermione, putting his hand on her arm. She shook it off.

"I was just about to invite Malfoy to sit with us, if he liked," she said, her eyes clearly snapping a warning of some kind.

Something's going on, thought Draco. Oh yes, it definitely is. And dear gods, I have to do this, don't I? "Oh, by all means," he said. "We can catch up on...er... things. It'll be just like old times."

Ron looked as if he were about to explode. "Old times?" he sputtered.

Draco cocked his head to one side. "Is there an echo in here?"

Draco seldom wished that he had a camera at hand, but this was undoubtedly one of those moments. The expression on Potter's face when he sat down at their table was truly priceless to behold. Almost makes the entire thing worthwhile, thought Draco. Maybe I can have my cloak fumigated after having to share air space with this filth again...

But then he caught sight of Ron's scowling face as they both sat down. I know that expression, thought Draco. I've seen it before, that exact look. Where, though?

"So what uplifting activities are you participating in now, Granger?" he asked, still watching Weasley out of the corner of his eye, his mind still trying to place what he had seen on the other man's face. "Still carrying on with SPEW?"

"That's S-P-E-W, Malfoy," she said. "And yes, well, a bit anyway. I'm quite busy, though. We all are. Harry and I are in Auror college, you know."

At that, Potter kicked her under the table with what he undoubtedly thought was great subtlety. Draco saw it, and restrained himself from rolling his eyes with some difficulty. "Yes, I know," he said dryly. How on earth can even Potter be thick enough to think that I wouldn't already know that? "I've been taking care of various business affairs, myself."

"Oh? What sort?"

Careful... thought Draco. She's not as clever as she thinks, but she's more clever than a mudblood has any right to be. I mustn't get tripped up. "There are a great number of properties to manage, and I've had to visit them all. That sort of thing can't be left to servants," he said.

Hermione scowled slightly at the mention of servants, but her face also filled with a rather reluctant-looking interest. "Really? Where?"

Malfoy shrugged. "A great number of locations," he said evasively. "I've had to check and repair all the wards, and that alone takes a great deal of time."

Granger propped her elbows on the table. "So they're all in locations where they need to be hidden from Muggles?" she asked.

"Yes," said Draco, deciding after a moment's thought that there didn't seem to be anything dangerous in this line of questioning. "You see--"

They spoke for several minutes on the subject of maintaining separate wizarding spaces in the fifth dimension, and he had to admit that Granger did ask intelligent questions. Potter and Weasley still hadn't said a word since he himself sat down at the table, but she talked enough to fill in the spaces in the conversation. And she managed to speak as if they had been on speaking terms at school, when Potter and Weasley would have been happy to kill him and throw his body down one of the pit shafts in the depths of the Hogwarts dungeons--and, of course, vice versa. Grudgingly, Draco had to admire her. Granger might be a jumped-up little mudblood, but she had actually accomplished the feat of seating all four of them down at the same table without some sort of spontaneous human combustion taking place.

Eventually, of course, the subject of wizarding real estate began to run dry, especially since Draco wasn't about to reveal the exact location of anything. He'd referred vaguely to the Malfoy properties in the south of France, on the western coast of America, on the rock of Gibraltar, tucked away in islands somewhere in the Pacific, and in the middle of Charing Cross Road, but the fact that Potter and Weasley contributed nothing to the conversation except murderous stares put a real damper on things. And I still haven't learned what I need to know, Draco thought. Let's see... what else could I bring up? I've got to be careful; she really is clever. Not like Ginny, of course... With a start, he recalled himself to the present.

"So tell me, Malfoy," Granger was saying. "Do the wards actually rely on changing the molecular structures involved?"

"Oh, yes," he said automatically. "The quark subsystems change polarity, you see, and then--" But his mind had gone off into memories.

Draco remembered a bright red-gold head bent low over a library table at Hogwarts, pressed close to the bushy brown one seated across from him now. He remembered all the times he had lurked behind stacks of books or behind shelves in order to spy on the two girls. He had listened to them by the hour, and they had never known. Granger had a rather plodding brain, all numbers and books and cleverness, but Ginny... she had a mind like a bright whirling star, giving off colour and light and fire. A beautiful mind.

He had dreamed of talking to her, during his last year at Hogwarts. On the few occasions he had actually spoken to Ginny Weasley, he had been nasty and abrasive, spitting out the most damaging comments he could imagine. But in his dreams, he didn't talk to her that way, although he was never sure exactly what they did say to each other. They simply walked through green fields in spring, and she spoke to him, her flower-like face turned upwards. Anything of the kind was impossible during waking hours, of course.

It wasn't until after he had killed her and brought her lifeless body home with him that he realized he could never get what he most wanted from her, because she could never speak with him now. I remember how sad I felt, he thought, the first time that really dawned on me. I never knew until then how much I wanted it...

"Malfoy?" asked a female voice.

He blinked. "Yes?"

Granger was looking at him oddly. "Are you all right?"

Potter and Weasley narrowed their eyes in suspicious unison.

"Oh! Yes. Perfectly," he said, grasping at straws. "So what do you think, Granger?"

"You already know what I think," she said. "The entire idea of using a sentient species like house-elves as unpaid slaves is barbaric."

"Yes, yes," Draco said. "Right. So. Do you get to Diagon Alley much?"

"You apparently do, Malfoy," said Harry suddenly. "Ron said he'd seen you going into Gringott's loads of times."

"Of course," said Draco, badly confused by the turn the conversation had taken and starting to feel rather trapped. "Important financial affairs to take care of, you know. Or I suppose you wouldn't. No, well, maybe you would, but Weasley wouldn't. So what else are you up to, Granger?"

The other three exchanged brief, significant looks. "Actually," said Harry, slowly and deliberately, "we're looking for Ginny."

Draco's heart began to pound so loudly in his chest that he was sure they could hear it. "Ginny?" he asked, as blankly as he could.

"Yes, Ginny," said Potter. "I suppose you always found her beneath your notice, Malfoy, but she was--is--Ron's sister. And she disappeared two and a half years ago. You surely must have heard something about it. Remember?"

Draco shrugged. "I suppose." His fingers and toes seemed to have turned to ice. Beneath the table, he rubbed one boot along the other.

"Her family's looked for her everywhere," said Potter, watching Draco keenly. "So have the Aurors. And there's absolutely no trace of her."

Draco forced his voice into a low, calm register. It wanted to squeak. "Well, don't you think she's probably dead, then?"

Ron Weasley made a low, rumbling noise in his throat and bared his teeth slightly in a gesture that seemed involuntary. Granger hissed something into Weasley's ear, and he subsided. But he kept staring at Draco, as if marking him for some inscrutable purpose. His stare had become cold and flat, his eyes like shiny brown buttons that revealed nothing. And Draco knew in the back of his mind that had he been sober, that stare likely would have had him quaking in his boots. But whisky was running through his veins, and he wasn't afraid of anything. He looked steadily back at Weasley. There was too much of his sister in him for Draco to look away. He knew now where he had seen that expression before, and it had been on Ginny's face when she was furious about something. But it had never been filled with such hatred as he saw now.

Ron Weasley's hand tightened around his glass until Draco wondered if it was going to break. "What the hell are you looking at, Malfoy?" he snarled.

"Nothing," said Draco with all the icy hauteur that a thousand years of wizardly breeding could provide. "And I do mean nothing, Weasley."

The redhead shoved his chair back and leaned forward, speaking with a kind of rage-filled deliberation. "Why, you slimy little piece of-"

"Ron," said Potter, quietly. "Enough."

Granger turned towards him again. Her eyes were very bright, and her lips tightly set. "So you think Ginny's dead?" she asked, her voice carefully neutral.

"I didn't say that," said Draco. "I asked if that's what you thought."

"Well, why don't you tell us what you think, Malfoy. Do you think she's dead?"

Draco looked at Ron Weasley's hostile face and saw his sister in it as surely as if her ghost lurked behind his skin. He was so unsettled that he spoke the truth to them all. "No. I don't think she is." He pushed back his chair from the table, and he got up.

He heard them whispering behind him as he left, their voices like the scurrying of mice. Psst-psst. Psst psst psst psst. He doubled back and stood just behind the door in the alley that was closest to their table. Rapidly, he considered and then discarded the idea of using an Amplificatus spell. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Granger had check-wards set up to detect anything of the sort. He pressed his ear to the crack in the door, and his flawless hearing picked up their words without too much trouble.

"Well, that was fairly useless," said Potter.

"I don't see that we're much further along than we were before," agreed Granger.

"He knows something," said Weasley. "I'm sure of it."

"I really don't know about that, Ron," said Granger. "I suppose it's possible, but--"

"What about all those other properties Malfoy was talking about?" Weasley demanded. "Couldn't Ginny be hidden at one of those?"

"No," said Granger. "I thought of that as well. I knew they owned more than just Malfoy Manor. So I spoke with Moody while you were in the infirmary, and he said that if Ginny wasn't at the Manor, she wasn't at any of the other estates, either."

"Oh," said Weasley, sounding gloomy. "But still, Malfoy might know something."

"It's a possibility we can't ignore," said Granger. "But we have to concentrate on other avenues now. I think they're going to get us a lot further."

"Hermione's right, mate," said Potter. "Sorry. But I think the Parkinsons are a better bet. I'll talk to Moody. See what he can find out. He'd be happy to help."

Weasley heaved a long sigh. "All right," he said. "Let's start checking out the Parkinsons, then."

Draco clapped a hand over his mouth to muffle his snicker. Then he walked quietly down the alley.

There was a little spring in his step as he walked down the darkening street, enjoying the sight of the cozy orange light that sparkled from the polished brass fittings of the streetlamps and reflected in the glass shopfronts. He couldn't help it. They were such fools for all their cleverness, and they were on entirely the wrong track. Perhaps it was inevitable that he himself would be brought under suspicion again in the matter of Ginny's disappearance; the case was still unsolved, after all. But all of that suspicion had been deflected now. Some sort of test had apparently been performed by the Aurors, and the wards had held quite nicely; Ginny couldn't be detected at the Manor. So they could suspect him all they liked. Nothing could be proven. And it's even better than that... they think it was Parkinson! They won't suspect me at all, now. Except for Ron Weasley... Draco's step faltered a little.

He stopped, and looked around the street. Why, I'm at Gringott's. I wonder how that happened? I didn't mean to go so far. But then, I'm not really sure where I was going... Slowly, he turned. Directly across from him was the entrance to Knockturn Alley. It gaped like a toothless mouth in the deepening dusk. He walked towards it. Each of the streetlamps in the narrow, crooked alley gleamed in a vague circle of deep orange. Fog began rolling in, covering his ankles, rising to the hem of his cloak. Draco had studied all the magical arts since he was a baby, and he knew the sensation of magic rising. He felt it now, beginning to guide him down Knockturn Alley.

This is the way, he thought. I will be led where I must go. And he entered the dark alley as the fog billowed around him.