Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"The Portkey is in there," he said, pointing. The room itself was almost completely bare, with slick stone walls. The only item of furniture in it was a round walnut-wood table with gilded legs. A thick rope of gold chain wound around the table and was attached at the top via a padlock to a round, heavy-looking bronze ring. The other end of the chain was sunk into the wall. "The ring is the Key," said the boy. "It's the kind you don't have to take with you. Just touch it, and it should work."

Harry nodded. He turned around and cleared his throat, wanting to say, Thank you, but the words seemed stuck behind his teeth. In the dim light, he could see only the outline of the other boy looking at him, that he had blond hair and was thin, and if Harry squinted he could imagine that the resemblance to Draco was no more than a superficial similarity of coloring and build. But if he stepped closer…no. Harry couldn't thank him. "Look," he said, finally. "Have you got a name? An actual name?

Because…"

But there were footsteps in the corridor outside, and the boy, with a startled look, fled, slamming the door so hard behind him that Harry jumped. A moment later there were more noises outside the door and Harry saw the doorknob twist and heard the unmistakable click of a bolt sliding home: he was locked in.

Not that this was necessarily a bad thing. At least it meant there was no immediate pursuit on his trail. He turned to the table, reached a hand out to touch the Portkey — and paused. He leaned closer, examining it: it was nothing more than a round, solid-looking bronze ring, padlocked to the last link in the gold chain that wrapped the table. He could, of course, simply touch it and be flung to whatever destination it led to, but wouldn't that make it awfully easy for anyone following him to know exactly where he'd gone? Much better to take the Portkey with him, and cut off — or at least slow — any chance of pursuit.

He dug into his pocket and pulled out the penknife Sirius had given him for his fourteenth birthday. One of the attachments was a thin-bladed short knife, which Harry had discovered early on doubled spectacularly as a lockpick. Leaning forward, careful not to touch the Portkey, he went to work on the padlock.

Next to the door of Room Twenty-Eight was a small gilded table on which rested a cut-glass candy bowl full of colorfully wrapped, tiny packets that looked like bags of Fizzing Whizbees. On closer inspection, however, Hermione discovered that the contents of the bowl were not in fact edible.

"Every Flavor condoms," she muttered under her breath to Draco. "Do the Bertie Botts people know about this?"

"Perhaps a strongly worded letter to them is in order," Draco murmured back.

"And downstairs — so many Oliver Woods!" Hermione added, sounding bewildered. "Whoever thought there was a need for thirteen Oliver Woods?"

"I never saw a need for one Oliver Wood," Draco pointed out.

"And that one that was wearing the tutu…"

Hermione trailed off, shaking her head. Draco shot her a sideways look, trying to hide his concern. He hadn't actually really paused to think, before charging into the club, how its attractions (so to speak) might affect her. Bookish though she was, Hermione was not actually very prudish. He supposed it came from having spent most of her adolescent life with boys for constant companions. Still, the Midnight Club would shake anyone up. They'd walked through rooms where the writhing shadows in the darkness had looked up at them with familiar faces, winked and smiled and beckoned…

He dropped his voice to a whisper so that Thorvald the troll, who was currently fiddling with the lock on the door of Room 28, which did not seem to want to cooperate with his efforts, couldn't overhear. "Hermione, are you bothered?"

She glanced up at him, eyes clear and curious. "What? Oh, no, not bothered. Bit bewildered." She glanced around. They were standing in an ornately decorated corridor, which was currently deserted. It hadn't been when they arrived, but at the sight of the troll bodyguard, the few club denizens there had melted away. One of them, a tall woman in backless silver robes wearing a cat mask, had pinched Draco in a very inappropriate place on her way down the hall. "I did feel bad for Filch when we saw him in the sauna room. He looked so embarrassed. I'm sure he recognized us both."

"Maybe it wasn't really him," Draco suggested, leaning back against the red-wallpapered corridor wall. Seeing Filch hadn't bothered him much.

He'd been to the Midnight Club before, as a child, although at the time he hadn't quite understood why anyone would pay money to "play" with Polyjuiced celebrities, or Polyjuice themselves into a celebrity. But then, of course, he was Draco Malfoy, and until he'd met Harry Potter it had never occurred to him that he might ever want to be anyone else.

Hermione rolled her eyes. Draco tried not to look sideways at her. She was leaning against the wall next to him, idly playing with one of the buttons on the top half of her blouse. He wondered if she had forgotten he was there or if she simply didn't realize that from this angle, when she did that, he had a clear view down the front of her shirt. Not that this was of interest to him in any way.

"You honestly think people are paying good money to sleep with a Polyjuiced Filch?" she said dubiously. "I mean, the warts alone…"

"There is no need to be judgmental and dismissive," Draco said. "Sure, to you, Argus Filch might be a barmy old coot with an unsettling cat fixation and enough ear hair to choke a walrus. But to someone else out there, he might be a radiant sex god."

Hermione looked at him through her hair. "Would you sleep with him?"

"Don't be disgusting," Draco said. "I'd rather die."

"AUUUUUUUGH!"

Both Draco and Hermione jumped. Thorvald had hurled his ring of keys to the floor in exasperation and was swearing in Trollish. It was an unpleasant language and sounded like a bag of grapefruits being dumped down a well.

"Is there a problem?" Draco inquired.

"Door charms broken," the troll muttered. "Talk to manager. Get counterspell. Be right back. You stay here."

He glared at them.

"Of cou-" Hermione began.

Draco quelled her with a glare. "Si le poisson, ou jeudi matin!"

Hermione blinked at him, then shut her mouth. With a confused glare, the troll lumbered away. Draco leaned back against the wall.

"You're not supposed to speak English," he reminded her sternly.

Hermione was looking at him curiously. "Did you just say, 'Either the fish goes, or Thursday morning'?"

"Possibly," Draco admitted. "I didn't know you spoke French."

"Well, you never said you spoke it, either."

"I never said I didn't."

Hermione shot him a considering look. "And you were looking down my shirt just now," she said, in a mildly observational tone. "I did, actually, notice."

Draco jumped and cleared his throat. "I was being in-character."

"Congratulations." She sounded annoyed. "It was very convincing."

Draco ignored this. "I feel like we've been at this for hours, and all I've learned so far is that there are a lot more uses for Fizzing Whizzbees than I ever thought there were. And still no sign of…"

"Harry," Hermione said. "Can you not even….sense him, a little bit?"

Draco shrugged. "A little. Maybe. I'm not sure."

The tramp of heavy feet approaching cut off any reply that Hermione might have made. It was Thorvald, carrying what looked, from a distance, like a crowbar. He waved the bar at them as he drew closer. He seemed slightly sheepish, although Draco thought he might perhaps be imagining that. "Door charms broken," he said. "Got crowbar."

"That much is evident," said Draco, stepping back. "Go to it, then."