The low hiss of his master's words rang in Draco's ears, as the boy closed his weary eyes and tried to summon what little strength he had left. Move me… move my soul… over there…
He toppled off the chair again, landing face-first on the worm-eaten floorboards, missing the cushioning surface of the rug by inches. "I can't…" he moaned. "I can't do it." He pushed himself to his feet, his limbs shaking violently. Cold sweat dripped past his pale eyes.
The dark, towering figure watched him from the opposite corner of the room, not moving, not speaking. His silence only seemed to magnify his anger, and Draco found himself being thrown back into the armchair by the mere thought of his master's punishment.
The wand was raised. "Try again."
Harry stood nervously by Lupin as the latter rapped on the flat door. Apartment 29B, floor 5, the sign on the door rusted and hanging slightly to one side. There was a banging sound from within, like heavy footsteps moving clumsily over the floor, and then Harry heard a click in the lock, and the rustle of a chain being moved across.
"What?" a gruff voice squirmed through the gap between the door and its frame, the chain preventing it from being opened any further.
Lupin cleared his throat calmly and began to speak, while Harry simply stared apprehensively at the large shadow cast by the tenant. "I'm sorry to disturb you," Lupin said, "my name is -"
"What do you want?" the gruff voice barked. "Don't care who you are."
The chain rattled slightly. Lupin merely sighed. "We are interested in the whereabouts of Alice Cartwright, we believe her to be a resident here. Do you know where she is?"
The was a pause, heavy with the struggle of thought from the man behind the door. Harry shifted his feet, while Lupin remained steadfastly still, his tired eyes watching the tenant's shadow wearily. The boy took a deep breath and scrunched even smaller the piece of paper clutched in one hand. Unfolded, it would read:
He had wriggled the information out of the doctor who had witnessed Malfoy's short spell in the hospital, and who had had to "put up with" Alice's presence during that time. Harry wondered briefly why on earth anyone would want to stay anywhere near Malfoy for three months, and entertained the possibility that Malfoy had used some kind of threat to keep her as his personal slave for his time on the run. Surely even Malfoy wouldn't be that stupid? he thought.
Eventually, a reply was uttered through the doorway, and the two visitors were assured that Alice would appear at the door in a matter of moments. The door slammed shut.
Lupin turned to Harry. "Alright," he began, "we're just going to ask her a few questions and then we can leave, ok? Tonks is waiting for us just around the corner, and Kingsley has the car parked across the street." He paused, and looked at Harry's silent countenance as though trying to read his thoughts in his expression.
"Nothing's wrong," Harry said bluntly, avoiding conversation.
"We have to be careful, Harry," Lupin said patiently. Then, "McGonagall was angry that you left purely because she doesn't want you found by the wrong people. You should have told us you were leaving, that's all."
The lock clicked again, and this time the rustle was the chain being pulled back. The door parted from the threshold to reveal a short, skinny girl with matted black hair and dark, grimy make-up round her eyes. She was dressed in an assortment of clothes all various patterns and colours and all in need of repair. Around her neck hung something which greatly resembled a bicycle chain. She looked the pair of them up and down and said, "Yeah, what do you want?"
Harry was, to say the least, stunned. Malfoy would lower himself to live here, and be attended to by someone like her? Was this even the same Malfoy he was dealing with? But he had barely time to absorb the shock before Lupin had begun questioning her; clearly, her appearance came as no surprise to him.
"…We just wondered if you knew anything at all concerning his whereabouts," Lupin was saying, "it's vitally important that we receive every bit of information you can give."
The girl, Alice, narrowed her eyes and took a step away from them, back into her flat. "Don't know who you are," she said in scared tones, "but if you're anything like the one who came to see me at the station I don't want nothing to do with you!"
She almost shut the door, but Lupin called out, "Wait!" She paused, one hand on the doorknob.
"We mean you no harm, Alice, we really don't. But we need to find the boy who was living here with you, the boy who you took to hospital. It is desperately important that we track him down and we need you to do it." Lupin's bloodshot eyes stared pleadingly at her, and the girl's frosty attitude seemed to soften. She stepped out into the dank hallway, and closed the flat door behind her.
"What have I got to lose?" she said quietly. "Look, I don't know whether you're lying or not about what you really want with him, but I suppose it doesn't matter." She paused. "Can you get him away from her?"
"From who, Alice?" Lupin asked gently.
"I don't know," the girl muttered. "That woman with the crazy eyes, black hair, really weird looking."
"Do you have any idea who she was?"
"No. Weird voice, though. Shouted something at me, was like she spoke a different language. She had this weird stick thing, pointed it at me." She seemed to shudder as she said this, and Harry had a good idea what the "weird stick thing" was.
A deep frown line appeared on Lupin's forehead, and a hint of urgency crept into his tone. "What did she say, Alice, can you remember? Were you… affected in any way by it?"
Alice looked as though she didn't quite know what to make of this statement, but answered anyway, after a slight pause. "Um… well, no. There was this - right, this sounds really stupid - but there was this light thing and it sort of missed me, and Drake just told me to bomb it so I just ran off."
"Drake? You mean Draco?"
"What? Oh, yeah, that was his actual name, right?" Alice scratched her head.
Lupin continued to look concerned, but it was Harry's puzzlement which made itself known first. "He told you to run?" he asked, bewildered. "He told you to run away?"
"Yeah," Alice said simply. "Well, what else was he s'posed to do? That woman was bloody insane, I swear she was going to kill me. He was trying to get away himself, but then they just sort of… disappeared…" She trailed off, indicating that she didn't quite believe her own story, and Harry was not surprised by this. If he had been witness to a piece of powerful magic, such as apparition, whilst being unaware of the wizarding world, he would have doubted his own senses as well.
Her description of the woman worried him; she sounded an awful lot like someone he didn't want to encounter again. And if she had Malfoy, that could only mean -
"Ok, er, thanks, Alice," Harry mumbled. "Um, Lupin, can I talk to you for a second?"
If he hadn't felt so battered, broken, brutalised, he may have enjoyed the experience. It was a quiet, calm, floating sensation; he was soaring through the air, utterly weightless. He reached the other side of the room and looked back to see his body still slumped in the chair, hidden by flickering shadows. He breathed a heavy sigh.
"Very good," hissed a voice from the darkness. "Very good indeed."
Hermione sat very quiet and very still on the couch in their flat, still not quite certain of what she had seen. Harry had left hours ago with a few others, after Ron had got his message through to the Order and McGonagall had arrived, furious at Harry for leaving the house. The girl, he had said her name was Alice and that she lived in some run-down block of flats in East London. How had Malfoy wound up in the East end?
A small, black fly was buzzing desperately from the carpet, wriggling and flapping its wings; it was dying. The sound irked the conscious part of Hermione's brain, but the rest was focused somewhere else. He had appeared to her from his cell. He had told her where he was and that it was all hopeless now.
She had not managed to tell any of the Order members who had arrived; firstly, because she hardly believed it herself, and secondly, because they would not believe it even if she did. That was the second time in a few days that Malfoy had somehow appeared before her and asked her for help. Her theory was proving to be more and more possible, but his reasons for subconsciously vanishing from his body and reappearing somewhere else were becoming equally more vague. Why her? Why didn't he appear to his mother or father? Because he trusts you, said a small voice inside her head. He knows you can help him.
She sniffed, then stood up, feeling the blood rush to her head as she did so. He had managed to use a magical method of transportation without being detected, because this method was older than anything invented during the Ministry's time. There were documents describing astral projection in the Muggle world as well, so it was not even solely restricted to the Wizarding population. If it could work for astral projection, then maybe it could work for something else.
Her mind flicked over everything she had ever read about finding a lost person, about every possible way of tracking them. "No magic," she muttered to herself. "But how about some good old-fashioned witchcraft."