Roman Holiday

Chapter Fifty-Seven

The Three Broomsticks was too crowded, by the time they reached it, for the five of them to find a table. Instead, they backtracked two blocks to Fly-By Bite, a trendy soup-and-sandwich café that catered to a slightly more upscale, older crowd.

Since three hours had passed since they’d entered Hogsmeade, and nothing awful had yet happened, their spirits were high; while they waited for their food, Ron kept them entertained with the VentroloQuill he was field-testing for Fred and George. Speaking into it allowed you to send your voice anywhere in the room, meaning that the evil possibilities were endless. After a few trial runs (during which Ron told a small bald wizard surreptitiously reading a romance novel at the back table that his waitress found him irresistible, and crooned a few bars of “La Vie en Rose” into the ear of an elderly witch with horn-rimmed spectacles and large false teeth), he settled into his most riotous trick yet - repeatedly requesting a water refill from the the snooty headwaiter at the front station, at an interval of thirty seconds or so, and watching his elaborately waxed moustaches quiver as he spun round and round again, trying to identify the speaker.

Great fun, had by all. Hermione, however, was acting very strangely, and Draco couldn’t quite put his finger on it. It wasn’t so much that she was laughing as hard as the rest of them at Ron’s misdemeanours, though it was true that normally she’d frown on that sort of thing.

No, he thought, it wasn’t that; it was the questions. Odd questions - simple questions, really - and all about the Protection Potion: how was it made? what did it do? - things she knew far more about, truth be told, than he did.

Either being out in the cold all morning had frozen her brain, or she’d bumped her head really hard on the dressing-room door at Madam Malkin’s. Come to think of it, she was acting a little spacey - when she wasn’t asking questions whose answers she already knew, she was staring up at him with gooey calf-eyes and tickling his thigh under the table.

Bizarre.

The third time he gave her a puzzled look instead of an answer, she finally shut up about the damned potion, took her hand off his leg, and reached into the pocket of her robes, drawing out a small bright-green canteen.

“What’s that?” he asked her curiously, and she shrugged.

“Distilled water,” she said, and grimaced toward the goblets on their table. “No telling what’s in that stuff.”

Draco frowned. Since when had Hermione given a damn about designer water?

And then he did a double take, looked her over more carefully, and froze, so cold with sudden horror that goosebumps rose on his forearms.

“Hermione,” he said casually, “where’s your bracelet?”

For just an instant, she looked blank. And in that second, he knew, and cursed himself for a million kinds of idiot.

“You bitch,” he said softly, and ignoring the shocked stares of the table’s other occupants, grabbed her canteen, wrenched off the lid, and upended the contents into his empty water goblet. The fluid inside was thick and sludgy and the colour of clover honey, and wouldn’t in a million years of trying be mistaken even once for bottled water.

“Polyjuice,” he said with a sinking heart, and Ginny gasped.

Harry’s wand was the first one out. “Immobilo!” he cried, and the ersatz Hermione, about to go for her own wand, froze in mid-motion. Ron reached over and plucked the wand from the inside pocket of her robes, snapped it in half, then drew his own and calmly finished off what Harry had begun with a Binding Spell.

“Ginny,” he said, “run and find Snape, as fast as you can. Whoever this is -“ and here he prodded their captive hard under the chin with the sharp tip of the VentroloQuill - “she wouldn’t be sitting here eating lunch with us if Hermione weren’t already long-gone. We’re going to need to know who her accomplice is - with any luck, Snape will have some Veritaserum about him.” He glared at the now-cowering impostor. “Or a whip.”

“It won’t do you any good,” Whoever-She-Was said sulkily as Ginny pushed back her chair and streaked out of Fly-By Bite like a small panicked flame. “I don’t know anything.”

“That’s too bad,” Draco said icily - his hands were shaking with anger and an awful debilitating fear, but his voice stayed clear and steady. “Because if anything happens to her - anything at all - all that’s going to keep you out of Azkaban is what you claim you don’t know. Assuming, of course, that the three of us don’t hunt you down and kill you first. So you’d better start talking.” Steadying his grip with his other hand, he pointed his wand menacingly at her throat. “You can start with your name. Who are you?”

The impostor opened her mouth, presumably to reply - but a verbal reply was no longer necessary.

The Polyjuice Potion was wearing off.

Soft honey-coloured curls darkened before their eyes to a brassy red permanent wave. The young slender body of a seventeen-year-old girl shortened and thickened until her Hermione-sized robes were stretched over this woman’s larger frame like a sausage casing.

And in place of Hermione’s sweetly stubborn pre-Raphaelite features, appeared a petulant, heavily-lipsticked face they all knew far too well, and for all the wrong reasons. Ron’s mouth dropped open.

“Rita Skeeter?”

**

Hermione supposed it could have been worse - though not much. About the only happy thought she could summon right now was that she had at least an hour before they could kill her.

Apart from that, life sucked swamp water.

They were in an old-fashioned sitting room, furnished with heavy dark brocaded furniture thoroughly slipcovered in dust and illuminated by a wall of cobwebby mullioned windows through which Hermione couldn’t see. No telling where they were, she thought, but she was guessing they hadn’t left the British Isles - for one thing, the pale washed-out light was the same; for the other, the room’s furnishings reminded her vaguely of the backgrounds in old Granger family portraits.

Not that it mattered, really. Location was the least of her worries.

Someone - Lucius, maybe, or one of the other Death-Eaters - had imbedded an iron ring in the floor - it added a charming touch of Medieval Dungeon to the room’s décor, Hermione thought sarcastically, and managed to say as much aloud before two dark-masked minions grabbed her arms, allowing Lucius to manacle her foot to the ring by way of a heavy iron chain. After that, they undressed her - or rather, the Minions pinioned her arms behind her back, while Lucius-not-Draco cut off her robes and everything underneath them with a wicked-looking bejeweled stiletto.

For a few extraordinarily bad moments, she thought she might cry. Then rage took over - no calmer an emotion, perhaps, but better by far than terror.

And then she managed, somehow, to summon out of all that anger a small useful bit of the stubborn rock-hard core that was her, and that might save her if she could use it. She closed her eyes for a moment, planning her offensive strategy, then gritted her teeth and faced her abductor.

Damned if she’d let him see her sweat.

Besides, he couldn’t really do anything to her for almost an hour - and surely she’d have figured out a way out of here by then, wouldn’t she?

“Pretty little dagger you’ve got there,” she said coolly, staring him straight in the face - Lucius, not Draco; remember that! - and pretending to appraise the gems on the handle while he used it to slice through her brassiere. “Borrow it from your wife?”

“It’s an heirloom,” he said sharply, surprised at her equanimity and clearly offended at the insult to his weapon. Ha, Hermione thought, and decided to press her advantage.

“I thought it must be,” she said sweetly. “My grandmother uses something just like it to open her fan mail. I’ve always admired her for keeping her femininity as she aged - that’s so important, don’t you think?”

One of the Minions laughed, then disguised it as a cough. Lucius looked disgruntled.

“If I were you, I’d keep that clever little mouth closed,” he said warningly. Hermione blinked innocently.

“Oh, no,” she protested. “I think it’s wonderful. So many men never really find their softer side, no matter how much Leo Buscaglia they read.” She looked askance at the sparkling knife. “A pity it’s mostly for show, isn’t it?”

Lucius-not-Draco reddened. “Oh, it’s sharp enough, all right,” he said, an ugly smirk on his face, and slid the razor edge of the blade insinuatingly over one of her cheekbones. It seemed to infuriate him that she didn’t cringe away. “I was going to save this for later, but if you want a taste now -“

It gave Hermione great satisfaction when the stiletto veered sharply away from her skin at the last minute and gave him a nasty cut on his thumb.

“Uh-oh,” she said, and put on a moué of faux concern as he swore and sucked on his injured digit. “Better go home and let Narcissa put a Band-Aid on that. You can tell her you managed to cut me, if it’ll make you feel better.”

The Minions sniggered. Lucius looked furious. Hermione grinned.

This was more like it: Hermione 1, Death Eaters 0. And forty-five more minutes before they could turn the tables.

Her hopeful frame of mind slipped a bit when she noticed the matching ring in the ceiling. Putting on a cheap girlie show for her boyfriend’s evil father and his henchmen was one thing. But she’d been counting on having her hands free, once they got her naked.

This was the thing.

All she had to do, to get out of here, was get to the key and the Keyhole hanging around her right wrist. But in order to do that, she’d have to take off the bracelet. As a fuming Lucius-not-Draco - God, don’t crack now, Hermione; it’s his father, it’s not him - looped rope around her wrists and tied them off to the ceiling ring, she felt that particular escape route slipping inexorably away.

Hermione 1, Death Eaters 1.

Forty minutes.

He sent the Minions away and carefully wiped dust off one of the brocaded chairs with a monogrammed handkerchief before sitting down and giving her a slow once-over with cold grey eyes that made her skin crawl. “Not so brave now?” he asked knowingly, and Hermione scowled at him.

Not only was he evil, she thought irritably, but this was a scene straight out of a Gothic bodice-ripper. Couldn’t he at least have moved his bondage fantasies into the twentieth century? She channeled Gram for a suitably imperious look - think Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine - and looked down her nose at him, trying to block out Draco’s face and features and see only those flat, mad eyes that gave away the deception.

“Lucius, you’re a cliché on two legs,” she said dismissively, and saw his teeth clench. Good. A cranky Death Eater is a careless Death Eater.. “A fourteen-year-old could do better than this with ten minutes alone with Quidditch in Bed. Inartistic, heavy-handed, completely lacking in imagination and class. Really, I’d have expected more from you. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the ring you put in the floor is crooked.”

She rolled her eyes so she could surreptitiously check the time on her watch. Thirty-eight minutes; she could afford to piss him off a little more. “You’re compensating for a small penis, aren’t you?” she asked, lowering her voice conspiriatorially, and watched red blotches dance across his - no, NOT his; get it together, Hermione - pale cheeks. Deliberately, he stood up.

Score another point for the Damsel In Distress, she thought wildly, and tried to keep her gaze from wavering.

“You’ve got an awfully smart mouth, for a Mudblood brat,” Lucius-not-Draco said softly, and crossed from the chair to cup her left breast with one long-fingered hand. “Think my son’s going to save you? Your vaunted Headmaster? Your beloved friends?” He leaned so close to her that she could feel his breath on her cheek. “No one knows you’re here,” he said with malicious satisfaction. “You’ve made more enemies than just the Dark Lord, my little plum pudding. It wasn’t so hard to find someone more than happy to oblige a father in distress by doing you a bad turn. You might say she was just … buzzing … around.”

He laughed at his own weak joke and leaned in a little closer yet. “No one’s going to know you’re missing,” he whispered in lover’s tones against the beating pulse in her throat, “until you float down the Thames into London. And by then, they won’t even recognise you.”

Hermione gulped. Okay, that evened the score. Ewwww. And I wish he’d morph back into his own body already. Hearing those words from Draco’s lips did cold, crawling things to the state of her stomach.

As did his hands on her body - oh, God, if she had it to do over again she’d formulate a Protection Potion so strong that he wouldn’t even be able to fucking touch her. She was sure he was being deliberately brutal, but under the shielding effects of the Protection Potion, she registered his touch as light and teasing and lover-like.

Just like his son’s.

Hermione wasn’t sure that wasn’t worse. Right now, she’d sooner be tortured than feel those hands - Draco’s hands, yet not - moving over her skin in that travesty of a caress.

How could something that didn’t hurt feel so wrong?

Despite herself, she whimpered, and heard him laugh. Think about something else, she counselled herself, and began to apply downward pressure to the ropes on her wrists.

He’d tied them fairly tightly, which was good. Distraction. Don’t think about where his hands are, she told herself grimly; think about forcing the heel of your hand through that loop of rope. If only the bracelet weren’t in the way -

The bracelet.

She flexed the fingers of her right hand cautiously, bent her knees slightly to apply more weight to the ropes on her wrists, and felt one of the delicate silver charms - the kitten - slide into her palm, pushed up by the pressure on the rope. Oddly comforted by this, she stroked the little cat with one finger, and felt the faint vibration of its purr travel all the way down her arm.

Thirty minutes. Tie score.

She could still get herself out of this.

And then the door opened.

“Lucius,” someone behind her said in a cruel, cold voice, “do stop mauling Miss Granger for a moment. She’s a famous scientist, you know.”

Abruptly, the invading hands dropped away from her body. This fact, however, reassured Hermione not in the slightest.

She’d never heard that voice before. But an introduction wouldn’t be necessary.

Even before he walked into her line of vision, she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she was in the presence of Lord Voldemort.

**