Chapter Two
I was startled the next morning by the sound of the television. I lay in bed for a few moments, my heart racing, before I remembered. I glanced at the clock. It was way too early in the morning. Thank God it was my day off. I unlocked my bedroom door and poked my head out.
Draco sat on my couch, his eyes glued to the TV screen. He flicked the remote control at the television, changing the channels. His clothes were rumpled from sleeping on the sofa. His silvery hair poked up in every direction.
I started into the room, and stopped as I saw the screen was filled with nude bodies.
“I can’t believe they show that on cable!” I said. “What channel is that?”
“We learned about these things in school. These tellies.” Draco gazed at the screen. “But Professor Winterwind never told us that Muggles actually have sex on them.” He looked at me suddenly, as if realizing he’d just said something foolish.
“You don’t have a television?”
He shook his head. “No, my father would never allow me to own one. He doesn’t believe in owning Muggle artifacts. He thinks it would corrupt me.”
“Maybe he has a point,” I muttered. I took the remote and changed the television to a channel where the actors actually wore clothing. “Can’t you sleep in?”
“It’s the time difference. It’s messed up my sleeping. In Britain it’s already the late afternoon. I’m still starving by the way.” He looked at me as if he expected me to conjure food out of thin air.
“There’s food in the fridge. Help yourself.” God, I needed some coffee. I was still tired and cranky, and I could feel a headache begin to throb behind my eyes. Caffeine addiction was an unfortunate consequence of working at a coffee shop.
Draco looked horrified. “Me? Cook?”
I rolled my eyes, wondering how many servants he had at home to serve him breakfast. I put the coffee on, and as I scrambled some eggs and ham, I glanced over my shoulder at Draco. He was busy touching everything in my apartment. He studied my phone, my VCR and even my ball point pens, twisting them open to look inside. What was wrong with him? I finally caught him grabbing a picture frame off the shelves, and poking the photograph with his finger!
“What are you doing?” Nervousness made my voice sharp. “Look, I know that things may be a little different here in the States, but they can’t be that different.” There was obviously something a little “off” about this guy. Maybe he needed to take his medication. I was beginning to wonder if bringing a stranger to my apartment hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
He replaced the picture frame, and continued to study my apartment. He began snooping through the stacks of books on my coffee table.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. “My name is Miriel Laveau, by the way. If you want to know.”
Draco finally looked at me sharply. “Your name sounds familiar. I think my father might be looking for someone named Laveau. I wasn’t really paying too much attention. I think she was a lady who sold mirrors or something like that.”
A cold, little chill curled in my stomach. “What’s your dad’s name?”
“Lucius Malfoy.”
“I’ve never heard of him. Laveau is a pretty common name in New Orleans.”
“My father is going to be furious when he finds me.” Draco sighed. He dropped the books onto the table and fell back onto the sofa. “Bloody hell, he’ll never take me anywhere again. It took my mother forever to get him to agree to take me on this trip.”
“But it wasn’t your fault,” I told him. “Things get really crazy here around spring break. The cops are busy all the time. College students always think this place is one big party, and all they do is get drunk, fight and flash people. Maybe he won’t be as mad as you think he’s going to be.”
“He told me to keep close by him, and to pay attention. And I didn’t. I was so interested in that Muggle magic shop-“
“Muggle magic?”
He nodded. “Yeah, it had these little ugly dolls in the window that curse people.”
“Oh, a voodoo shop.”
“And he disappeared. I looked for him everywhere.”
I gave Draco a plate of ham and eggs and grits. He immediately started shoveling the food into his mouth.
“Can’t you say thank you?” I snapped. The feeling I’d had last night of being connected to him in some way must have been some form of dementia. He was really beginning to get on my nerves. I poured myself a cup of coffee, and slurped it down, waiting for the caffeine to kick in.
“You want my thanks, huh? I thought you were doing this all out of the kindness of your heart,” he said with a smirk. “Okay, okay, thank you,” he added when I moved to take the plate of food way from him. “I was just kidding. You certainly are cranky in the morning.”
After a few cups of coffee, I began to feel better. “Does your mouth hurt?” I asked when he wiped his mouth and grimaced. “I have some Neosporin.” His cheek looked scraped and bruised as well.
After he had finished eating, I smoothed the salve gently onto his cheekbone, and his bottom lip, which was still cut and swollen. I couldn’t help it; I ran my fingers through his hair, smoothing it down. Somehow it was wrong that it didn’t look perfect.
“Think you’re my mum, now?” He smirked, but I saw a flash of pleasure in his eyes, as if he secretly enjoyed the attention.
I was putting the dishes away in the cupboard, when I turned around, and saw his eyes flickering over my backside. “Are you looking at my butt?” I said with some indignation.
“I’m not used to seeing girls in those short trousers,” he told me. “Or those little shirts. We wear uniforms at school.” He gazed at my bare legs, and I suddenly felt quite naked.
“Well, I hope you’re not checking me out,” I told him. “You are kind of cute, but you’re way too young for me.”
“What do you mean? I’m old enough.” He wriggled his eyebrows, and a tiny, evil smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
“You wish!”
He sat back on the sofa, studying me further. “You’re too skinny, though. And I don’t like redheads.” He said this last sentence in a disgusted tone of voice, as though he had loads of experiences with redheaded people and had disliked them all intensely.
“Thanks. My natural hair color is blonde, for your information.” I bit my lip. I don’t know why I admitted that, like I should care what he thought.
“Plus, you’re a Muggle.” He winced as if he had just remembered something that was a hundred times more distasteful than being a redhead. I got the impression that he was profoundly disappointed that I was a Muggle.
For some reason, this irritated me more than his criticism about my appearance. “What is it with you and Americans?”
“What? Americans? What do you mean?”
“Well, isn’t that what you mean by Muggles? That’s kind of a rude name.”
He seemed to find this hilarious. He laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall off the sofa.
“You are an obnoxious little Brit,” I told him.
After a moment, he grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him with an expression on his face more pleasant than a sneer or a smirk, and I was forced to admit that he looked rather adorable. Damn.
He picked a book off the stack of travel guides I had on my coffee table. It was a photo guide to New Orleans. “I wish I had some money,” he said, thumbing through the pages. “Just to have a bit of fun. This is the first time I’ve been anywhere without him breathing down my neck.”
“All you have is foreign money, huh? Can I see it?”
He reached into his pocket and dumped the contents out onto the table. There were two American dollar bills, an empty candy wrapper, his broken stick, a few silver coins, and a larger, gold one.
The large coin shimmered brightly. In the light I could see a dragon embossed onto it, and the words Unum Galleon. “This is beautiful,” I told him. “Is this real gold?”
“Of course.”
“Well, you don’t need a bank,” I said, returning the coins. “Just a jewelry store. There’s a jeweler down the street who buys gold and silver. You probably have to be eighteen, though. They usually like to see an I.D.”
“Really?” Draco considered this. “You could go with me.”
“I thought you didn’t like skinny redheaded Muggles. Anyway, don’t you think you should focus on finding your dad?”
“He’s going to be furious with me anyway when he finds me. I might as well have some fun. I’ll find him much faster walking around the Quarter than I will sitting here in this flat.”
I couldn’t argue with that. He sounded so miserable talking about his father that I admit, I felt sorry for him. His father sounded like a control freak.
Draco got $100.00 at the jewelry store for his coin. I took him on a tour on the trolley, and when it got too hot to run around, we went to the aquarium. We walked through all the horribly expensive shops at the Riverwalk market place. He was not impressed with the stories of ghosts and vampires in New Orleans, and thought that the ghost tours sounded boring. Wherever we went, however, we did not catch a glimpse of his father.
“What does your dad look like?” I asked him, peering through the crowds of people.
“You’ll know him if you see him. He was using a cooling charm, for one thing, so he’ll be the only person in this city not drenched with sweat.” Draco wiped his face and sounded as though he envied him.
“He’s using a what?”
“Look.” Draco stopped me on the side of the walkway. “Since you’ve helped me out so much, I’ll give you some advice. My father can be dangerous when he’s angry. He doesn’t like Muggles. If we run into him today, it’s best if you don’t say anything to provoke him.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry about it too much. He’ll be so furious with me, he probably won’t even notice you.”
“That’s comforting,” I muttered. “What exactly do you mean when you say ‘dangerous?'
Draco’s face clouded over with another closed expression that I had also seen before. It said that he didn’t want to talk about it.
We ended the day walking around Jackson Square. I had always loved the excitement of the place, with the swarms of people, the jazz musicians, and the performers who painted themselves gold and pretended to be statues. There were tarot card readers, portrait artists and voodoo priestesses.
I had to keep pulling Draco out of the voodoo shops. He loved looking at the statues of saints, the charms and the wax skulls. The uglier something was, the more he seemed to like it.
For some bizarre reason, the shop owners acted a little spooked by him. One older lady at the last shop even hid in the back of the store and refused to come out until we left.
“That lady acted very odd,” I told Draco when we left the shop. “She looked terrified of you.”
“She probably just senses things about people.”
“But what would she sense about you?”
Draco hesitated for a long time, as though he wasn’t sure what to say. “She just knows about magic,” he said in a quiet, thoughtful voice. “Especially dark magic. I didn’t think that Muggles could sense things like that.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” I told him. He was taking all this way too seriously, and I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. “It’s all just psychology. The curses and the voodoo dolls work because their victims believe they will.”
Draco just snickered at me. He had a very bad habit of doing that, and from time to time a look of smug superiority crossed his face.
He looked tired but content as he munched on the powdered sugar doughnuts at the Café Du Monde and watched the people go by. A sunburn scorched his nose, which made his grey eyes stand out. “I don’t want to go home,” he muttered. “This is the closest thing to fun I’ll have for the rest of the year.”
“You don’t like school?” I asked.
“I hate Harry bloody Potter!” He then went on a long tirade about this boy at school that he disliked intensely. He talked a little about his school in Scotland, but mostly about this arch nemesis. It was a little amusing. For much of the time, Draco acted older than he was. I suppose that came from being so wealthy and having social responsibilities. But from time to time his real age would show through and he’d act like a teenager.
“I’ll go get us some coffee, baby,” I told him, standing up from the table.
“Did you just call me baby?” He looked highly amused. “I think my grandmother is the only person who calls me that. She calls me her baby dragon.”
“People in New Orleans call each other that all the time,” I said, blushing. “Don’t take it personally. It’s just a Southern thing.”
I turned and crashed right into someone. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry,” I gasped. “Are you ...” I trailed off as the long-haired figure turned to face me, and I vaguely heard Draco’s quick indrawn breath beside me.
The man could only be Draco’s father. The eyes that looked down at me were arctic and grey. He had clean, fine features that would have been handsome had they not been stamped with a sneer. He was quite tall and dressed much like Draco, with a black silk shirt, and he held a black and silver walking stick. Long, silver-gilt hair, perfectly in place, was tied back at the nape of his neck with a black velvet ribbon. He glanced first at my clothing, and then that haughty gaze swept upward to encompass my face. The air that swirled around his body felt cool, as if he had just stepped in from a frosty night.
“Mr. Malfoy?” I asked.