Chapter One.

In which I am kidnapped by a mad bomber playing at mixology

You will pardon me for failing to recognize Weasley when I first laid eyes on him. For one thing, he played a central part in certain incidents from my adolescence that I had spent the better part of my twenties trying diligently to forget. For another, I hadn't seen him in seven years—ample time for the particular details of his hideous freckled face to fade somewhat from my memory. And for a third thing (as if one were necessary) he was impersonating the bartender, so it is a miracle I even noticed he existed.

I wouldn't have gone to the bar if the party had not been so stultifying, in fact, so I intend to blame my hosts for the whole fiasco. They were Mr. and Mrs. Elwood Q. Stiffle of Kansas City, and I shall shortly be sending them a hex. It was perhaps a sign of how low my estate had fallen that I was even socializing with such excuses for wizards as these, but one does what one must; Mr. Stiffle was a member of the board of a business I was very interested in acquiring, and if I had any hope of persuading them to sell I had to make nice-nice with a man who reminded me of nothing more than a enormous bearded blancmange.

"Tennis, Mr. Malfoy," he was saying just prior to the onset of the entire fiasco. "Have y'ever heard of a game called tennis?"

"Oh, don't start with the tennis, dear," Mrs. Stiffle said.

"Why not?" Mr. Stiffle boomed. "Lovely game, tennis. Muggle game."

Mrs. Stiffle snorted. "It's entirely pointless."

"It is not!"

"You run around in short pants whacking a little bird with a paddle."

"It's called a racket, and the bird isn't real, it's that...whatchamacallit...Muggle stuff..."

"Plastic?" I offered.

Stiffle slapped his thigh with his hands and laughed like I'd just said something immensely entertaining. "That's the ticket! You know something about tennis, Mr. Malfoy?"

"No," I said, with half a hope that this might end the conversation, "I'm afraid not."

"Well, maybe they don't have it on the Continent. It's a wonderful game, tennis. Very stimulating."

"Excuse me," I said, "I think I need another drink."

I ignored the house-elves with the champagne trays and went straight to the bar. I leaned against it, watching a pack of badly dressed Americans who thought that referring to Europe as "the Continent" qualified them for entry into the upper class gleefully schmooze with one another. Perhaps no one is ever exactly where they anticipated they would be at the age of twenty-five, but I certainly had never believed I would be spending my nights sucking up to a blancmange in short pants. It was all terribly depressing.

"Can you get you anything, sir?" the bartender asked.

"Vodka martini."

"Coming right up."

At this juncture I would like to answer those who have alleged that I am completely oblivious to everything that goes on around me. This is slander. I had indeed noted the existence of the bartender previously in the evening, because going out and hiring human help when there's an excess of house elves on hand is just the sort of tacky bourgeoisie thing that people like Stiffle did for parties. I had noticed that the bartender was male, tall, and brunette, with broad shoulders and a nice arse. The sort of bloke I might've picked up after the festivities, under other circumstances. But, honestly, what do you expect me to do—he was a bloody servant. Aside from improving the décor and giving me alcohol, he was utterly insignificant. It's a miracle I even noticed his arse.

"Lovely weather out, isn't it," the bartended said while he mixed my martini

"I suppose." I do not enjoy making small talk with servants, but among Americans it seems to be expected. However—despite the slurs of my detractors—I had noticed something unusual about this servant, though I could not have immediately said what it was.

"There you are, sir." I heard the glass click down near my elbow and turned around to pick it up. "Enjoy it while you can."

I looked up at the bartender and I blinked. I suddenly realized what was out of place—his accent was English. A very low class English, but all the same—English accents are difficult to come by in a place like Kansas City. "Excuse me?"

The bartended smiled the vapid smile endemic to the service sector. "I said enjoy your drink."

For a moment I stared—there was something terribly familiar about that smile—but I shook my head and began to walk away from the bar. I was overtired, depressed, probably suffering from some sort of polyester poisoning; I was liable to mistake a potted plant for an old schoolmate next.

"I wouldn't go over there if I were you, sir," the bartender said.

I paused and looked back. "Why not?"

"A bomb is about to go off."

I stared at him for several moments, waiting for the punch line. He kept smiling. "A bomb, did you say?"

"Oh, yes. In just a few minutes."

I set my drink down very carefully on the bar, because I had a feeling that adding alcohol to this situation was not going to help things. "And how do you know about this, exactly?"

"Because I planted it."

"...I see." I looked around the room, but it was still tacky, so I assumed that I wasn't dreaming. "And, er, why did you do this, exactly?"

"To help get your sorry arse out of here."

I stared at him; he'd stopped smiling, and that vague sense of familiarity became stronger. His face, something about his face...an extraordinary nose, a somewhat weak chin, blue eyes, and a prodigious amount of freckles...his hair was brown, but his eyebrows were lighter, almost reddish....

No. It couldn't be. Oh, bloody buggering hell, it was. "Weasley?"

He smiled again, not the dumb servant smile, but something rather more knowing. "Took you long enough, didn't it?"

"Weasley, what the hell are you doing here?"

"Tending bar."

"And planting bombs?"

"Keep your voice down!"

"I most certainly will not!"

I was not, for the record, hysterical. It was just that I had gotten used to the universe working in an orderly fashion, and discovering the Ronald Weasley was a mad bomber playing at mixology does not meet my definition of 'orderly. I had not come to this horrible party to relive my last year of Hogwarts

"Keep your voice down and drink your drink," Weasley said firmly, and pushed my martini at me.

I picked it up, put it to my lips and then put it back down again. "Weasley, what are you doing in America?"

"Tending bar," he said, "and kidnapping you."

"What? Why?"

"Let's just say your friends at Greenplate and Company don't appreciate being ratted on."

I stared at him, but there was still no punch line. "Weasley, I can confidently say I have no idea what you are talking about."

"We'll discuss it later." He checked his watch. "You might want to duck now."

"Why would I—?" Oh, yes, the bomb. I dove to the floor and covered my head just as the mirror behind the bar exploded in a cloud of fire and smoke.

The rest of the guests reacted more or less as usual—screaming, running, fits of hysterics. I considered attempting to escape with them. But then Weasley's head, left arm and upper torso emerged from the side of the solid oak bar, seized my arm, and half-dragged me through the concealed passage before I even had a chance to draw my wand.

Behind the bar was just as bad; the alcohol supply had mostly caught fire and was burning dramatically. "I thought you said the bomb was over there!" I said, trying to avoid igniting any bits of myself.

"I didn't say that," Weasley said, "I said you didn't want to go over there."

"But the bomb was over here!"

"And if you'd left the bar area after I tripped it countdown, this would've all blown up for nothing, now shut it."

Weasley had shrugged off his outer layer of robes; he was wearing Muggle clothes underneath. It was strangely comforting to see him sweat (though that may have been from the fire) and gnawing his lower lip as he peered around wildly: crazy people, in my experience, do not get flustered. Weasley transfigured his robes into a surprisingly good approximation of a blackened corpse, sat back on his heels for a moment, then nodded. "Care to let me on in the secret?" I asked. "Before we end up cooked to a crisp?"

He glared. "Follow me."

"Why should I?"

"I'm a friend of Tobias O'Guin."

"Which means what, exactly?"

"Malfoy—"

"You're trying to kidnap me, Weasley, you just bombed an innocent idiot's bar—"

He seized me by the front of the robes and pulled me after him, straight through a sheet of flame. I cringed and braced myself for the worst, but I felt no more than a rather unpleasant tickling sensation, and then we were though. Magical fire, then, or a badly cast Flame-Freezing charm.

He let go of my robes before I could get my balance properly, and I came precariously close to falling on my face. "Weasley," I hissed, trying to right myself, "Weasley, what the hell sort of a bomb was that—"

"You can stop talking any time, Malfoy," he growled. He'd stopped in front of what looked like a barrel of mulled mead, jabbing at it with his wand. The stamp on the side began to swirl and change colors.

"I think I have a right—" A bottle exploded next to my head, and I ducked; I felt pieces of glass hit my face, but not the razor-sharp bite I'd been anticipating. Looking down, I noticed that I was in fact kneeling without ill effect in a large pile of broken glass. I picked up a piece gingerly, ran my finger across what should've been the razor-sharp edge, then tasted it.

"Sugar." This was unreal. "You transfigured all the glass into sugar."

Weasley ignored me; he wrestled with the lid of the barrel, then pulled it free entirely, spilling a tide of mead onto his trousers and the floor. "Aha! Bloody password..." He waved his wand in my direction. "In you go."

"In a barrel?"

"It's a way out."

"What, are you going to conjure a waterfall?"

He growled. "It's a passage, you stupid arse, now get in."

"I'm not entirely sure," I said, "that a wooden barrel in a puddle of alcohol is the safest place to be right now," because I was still holding out some hope of escape, which would be bloody difficult if Weasley sealed me into a barrel.

Weasley seized me by the front of my robes again. "Listen, Malfoy, I spiked that martini with a slow-acting poison, and if you don't get the antidote in the next fifteen minutes you're going to be rolling around on the floor, trying to rip out your own guts from the pain. That antidote is on the other end of this passage. Is that perfectly clear?"

"Crystal," I said, reeling. Sugar glass, cool fire, and virulent poison—what a beautiful combination.

A second explosion rocked the building to its very foundation. Sugar bottles crashed all around us both, and more smoke—thicker, darker—began to fill the room. "What the hell was that?" I demanded, briefly forgetting the poison.

Weasley climbed to his feet and peered over the edge of the bar, squinting against the smoke. His face went alarmingly white. "Dies."

"What? What dies?"

"Get in the fucking barrel, now."

Something about his tone of voice—namely, the note of unadulterated panic—suggested to me that I'd pushed him about as far as he would go. I crawled into the barrel; it was entirely dark, redolent of spices and alcohol, and Weasley didn't give me a chance to find my wand, much less light it, before he started shoving me forward. The wet wood under my hands suddenly gave way to rough stone, though, and a faint breeze wicked away the vapors stinging my eyes. I felt Weasley wedge himself into the barrel behind me, and the last rays of light disappeared as he fitted the lid back on. "Where are we?"

"Under the building. Keep going forward."

I crawled forward a few feet, and the stone changed to wet earth. These robes, I thought, are completely ruined. When, Weasley lit his wand, I could see the rough tunnel that wound forward into darkness. "How far does this tunnel go?"

"Two blocks."

"You expect me to crawl—"

"Yes," Weasley said, "I expect you to crawl two blocks, and I expect you to shut up, and I expect you to do everything else I say, because I just saved your miserable life."

I stopped and tried to look behind me. "From what?"

"You think that other bomb was there for shits and giggles?"

"You mean you didn't plant that one?" I hadn't thought so, but hope springs eternal.

 

"Of course I didn't fucking plant it! It was probably Dies's way of saying thanks."

"Who is Dies?"

Weasley sighed. "Malfoy, don't play stupid with me."

"I've never heard of any Dies! Why the hell would he want to kill me?"

There was a silence, and I peered between my legs; Weasley's eyes were closed, and I had the impression he was slowly counting. Then he said, "Malfoy, look. My job is just to get you out of there and deliver you to headquarters. If you could please make this as painless as possible for both of us?"

"I'm sorry, but I don't see why I should make things easy on the man trying to kidnap me."

Weasley did an extraordinary thing then: he put his hand on my arse and shoved. I fell on my face and got a lovely mouthful of dirt. "Because if you don't, the man trying to kidnap you is going to Stun you and drag you the rest of the way by your hair."

I pushed myself back up on all fours, spitting dirt and wishing him a thousand painful deaths. "There's no need to get Neanderthal here..."

We crawled. My hands went numb. So did my knees. The tunnel was significantly longer than two blocks—it zigged and zagged, dove and climbed precariously. Muddy water had collected in the low spots, yellowish-brown, and Weasley gave me no time or opportunity to navigate around it. A small stone embedded itself in my palm, and my nails were encrusted with mud and the fine roots of plants. Weasley shoved me whenever he thought I wasn't moving quickly enough, which was not exactly the circumstances under which I would've like to have him touching my arse. All in all the whole experience was quite traumatizing; I hope to eventually have the chance to inflict it on some of my worst enemies.

Finally the tunnel ended: it bored straight through solid concrete and came out in a small, cramped metal tube. Weasley shoved his way past me, which is a lot more painful and unpleasant than it sounds, given that the tunnel was only about three feet across; I am quite certain he deliberately put his knee in my stomach. He jabbed at the sides of the tube with his wand for what seemed like ages and ages, until a hatch swung open near the ground.

"After you," he said, rummaging around in his pockets.

So I squeezed past him—very deliberately treading on his toes—and through the hatch. It came out into the dim, dingy basement of some godforsaken building, full of rubbish and dust. I went for my wand before I could even straighten my aching knees, wondering if I could or should Disapparate—Weasley obviously knew more about the situation than I did, and I always believe in knowing your enemies.

I jumped when a series of echoing explosions began behind me. The metal tube, I realized, was a broken hot-water heater: a cloud of dirt and Weasley emerged from the hatch. "What is it with you and high explosives?" I asked.

"I was collapsing the tunnel behind us." He looked at my wand, which I'd pointed at him, and sighed. "Malfoy, don't start..."

"Start what?" I shouted. I was dirty, sore, and kidnapped, and not feeling particularly charitable. "You seem to have done all the starting by randomly kidnapping me!"

"Like I said, I'm a friend of Tobias O'Guin," he said, in the sort of mock-soothing voice people use on children and animals. "I'll explain everything else in the car."

"What car?"

"The car that's waiting for us upstairs."

"Ha. Yes. You'd like that, wouldn't you?" I advanced on him slowly; his failure to look alarmed was bothering me. "Pardon me if I'm disinclined to get into a car with a kidnapper..."

He shrugged and shook his head. "Why do I bloody bother?" he asked the ceiling, then turned on his heel and started to walk away.

"Hey!" I shouted; this was not what he was meant to be doing. "Hey, come back here, I haven't asked you any questions!"

"I'll answer them in the car," he called over his shoulder, "if you're coming."

He was opening a heavy steel door set into the wall, he was fucking walking away from me. I started to say "Impedime—"

"Expelliarmus!"

My wand zipped from my hand to his; he waved it at me, smiled, and stepped out the door.

I considered, for a brief moment, staying where I was out of sheer spite. Surely he'd come back after me in a moment, he'd gone to all this trouble to kidnap me, he wasn't about to just let me wander off in some strange...basement, and possibly get away. I paced a bit, and trying to brush some of the disgusting yellow mud from my clothes. Weasley didn't come back. Damn him, damn him, damn him...

I shot through the steel door and stumbled up the concrete stairs outside it, into a glum and rain-damp alley. "All right, Weasley, give me back—"

"Shut the fuck up."

Weasley was standing in the middle of the alley, staring about wildly, revolving slowly in place. I realized after a moment what was wrong with the situation: there were several large dumpsters in the alley, and a large quantity of garbage, and a scavenging cat, but there was definitely not anything that one might hope to classify as a car.

"Lose something, Weasley?" I asked.

He raked his fingers through his hair, staining his fingers brown, still staring. "We've got a bit of a problem."

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