Draco Malfoy Promises To Be A Good Boy This Year

Part Thirteen

The Mysterious Journey

*********************************************************************

Professor Snape found me collapsed in the hallway, crying, holding onto Pansy's body. She had become too heavy for me to carry and I had fallen. I had started to cry from the sheer misery of it. Snape gasped and pulled me off of her. "Draco, what happened?" He knelt down next to her and started feeling for a pulse. His face remained the same as always, but I could tell he was terrified.

"It was Tom Riddle!" I started to babble incoherently about Tom and Ginny and Nathaniel and Pansy, ending it all by screaming out for Harry.

"Draco, stay here and don't move, do you hear me?" Snape lifted Pansy's body and swept down the hall with her.

But I didn't stay. I ran like hell to the Gryffindor common room and burst in. "Harry!" I screamed before collapsing.

They were alone in the common room. Everyone else must have been celebrating the Christmas season elsewhere.

Ron quirked an eyebrow at me from across the room, but Harry came over to me. "What happened?

"What is it? Where's Ginny?" Hermione was up in a flash. I rarely lost my composure and she knew it.

"Voldemort took her!" I tried to catch my breath.

"Again?" Hermione cried.

"I know, it's getting repetitive! But for some reason, he took her with him!" Why on earth did he do the same thing over and over again? It was getting really old. I expect that Ginny was becoming tired of being kidnapped. What a doof!

"I told her not to go to your place with Thomas being there. I told her!" Harry was furious.

"What? Thomas was Voldemort?!" Ron yanked on his robe in a hurry.

"He was Tom Riddle! And I told her not to go!" Harry likewise prepared to go with me.

"Never mind that! We have to go save her!" I yelled.

"Didn't we just do this last summer?" Hermione unfolded her arms and pulled on her own robe.

For as worried about Ginny and Nathaniel as we were, we were starting to get pretty fed up with Voldemort kidnapping our friends. It was getting ridiculous! Was Voldemort loosing his touch, or did he have some master plan? I was starting to think Ginny was just being used as a pawn. He had said, "Catch me if you can". I think we were supposed to follow him. But how?

We headed for my flat again right away. We wanted to look around the place before the Ministry made their way in there and tore everything up. Events from the previous summer replayed in my mind. We were disobeying the rules again, and Ginny's family would be all panicked again and my mother would be worried about me, as well as Hermione's parents and everyone who loves Harry. Did we really have to do all of this again for some villain who seemed to be clinging to his teenage roots? For someone who was supposed to be so terribly evil, he didn't have a great deal of imagination.

I really had to admire Ron, though. As soon as we had arrived in the closet, he took off into Tom's room and started trashing the place, searching for anything that might point to the whereabouts of Ginny. Ron was someone who I never considered to have a whole lot of brilliance, but when his family and friends were in trouble he really knew how to take charge of a situation. All arguments of the previous day were forgotten and we were a team again. It was us against the terror teen from hell and we had our work cut out for us.

Hermione decided we had to let the adults know where we were going. "We need to write a note for the Ministry to find so they all know where we've gone."

"How sensible." I rolled my eyes. But I sat down to write a little something, just so they wouldn't worry too much.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Mr. and Mrs. Granger, Mother, Mr. Black, Ministry Blokes, Professor Snape, and any of you lot who care:

Voldemort has kidnapped Ginny and Nathaniel. Yes…again. We have gone to find them since we are the best cut out for it. You couldn't really destroy Voldemort, now could you, and we don't think there's any way to find Ginny unless we go. We're good at this sort of thing, you know. Some help would be appreciated, of course, but otherwise we'll see you lot as soon as we capture Voldemort and bring him on back to jolly old England.

Sincerely,

Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, and Mister Draco Lucius Malfoy, Esquire.

Harry read over the note and tossed it onto the table. "Well, one can certainly tell you wrote it…"

"Shut up, Potter. Did you find anything?"

"Nothing! He has absolutely nothing in his room that would lead anyone to believe that he's anything more than a normal Muggle boy. If only Ginny and I could have figured it out sooner. And the dreadful thing is, we knew. As soon as we saw him we knew we had seen him before! But it didn't quite snap in. He was just so…nice." Harry shrugged and bit his lip, turning away.

"Look, old man, he fooled the lot of us. But he couldn't have just told me to catch him, as if he wanted me to follow him, and then not give us some way to do it. He said he wanted us all."

Hermione studied the ceiling. "But I wonder what we have to offer him?"

It was my turn to shrug. "Company? He seems to like being a teenager. He seems almost…happy-like."

Ron had emerged from the bedroom where he had been banging the walls in frustration. His attention focused on a shiny object on the floor. "What's that?"

Harry looked. "It's just a Muggle coin." He bent down and reached his hand out to pick it up. As soon as his fingers grasped the coin, he vanished into thin air, his wand clattering to the ground next to mine where Tom had dropped it.

Ron yelled out and jumped back from it. "Harry!"

Hermione cried out. "It has to be some sort of teleport! Where did this come from?"

"Tom flicked it at me when he disappeared with Ginny and Nattie! I thought it was just a coin!" I looked at it in fascination.

"Draco, you're such a git! Why didn't you tell us?" Hermione bent over and picked up Harry's wand.

"Excuse me, Dr. Granger, but I'm not as good at this hero and rescue stuff as you are! Get over it!"

Ron cracked a smile.

Hermione rolled her eyes and tossed me my wand next. "We'd better hurry. We don't know where that coin took Harry and he's wandless." Once I had bundled into my Hogwarts robe, she reached out her hands and we walked to her. We grasped onto her hands and touched the coin.

*********************************************************************