His eyes flicked back and forth between his friends, and he smiled smugly, secretively.
“You three are new to this school,” McGonagall announced archly, glaring down at the backs of the three Ravenclaws’ heads. “But I can assure you, everyone in this room already knows how to read. We do not require your services on our behalf.”
Crisply, she folded the newspaper, glanced piercingly around the room, and then dropped the bundle back onto the table before Edgecombe’s bowed head. He snickered silently, still flitting his eyes back and forth between his cronies.
Gradually, the noise of conversation filled the hall again.
James’ face was hot. He knew he was blushing and hated himself for it. Keeping low in his seat, he watched Professor McGonagall stride toward the open doors. Students began to drift to their feet and gather their things, heading disconsolately to their classes.
“That’s two points for Edgecombe, zed for you,” Scorpius muttered in James’ ear as he stood. “Sanjay is right. You can’t allow it to go on. The longer you let the teacher’s fight your battles, the worse you look.”
James pressed his lips together in anger and embarrassment.
Scorpius was right, but he wasn’t about to admit it aloud.
“What do you think, Ralph?” he asked with a sigh as they made their way to the greenhouses for a double Herbology class.
Ralph shrugged and shook his head. “Makes me wish Zane was still here.”
James smiled weakly at that. Ralph was right. Zane would know exactly what to say to put Edgecombe and his little entourage in their place.
He slowed in his pace as an idea came to him.
Edgar Edgecombe wasn’t the only person Zane might have some half-decent advice about.
Considering it all throughout the day, James waited until dinnertime, and then dashed up to the Gryffindor dormitory, knowing that the common room would be deserted at this hour. Retrieving the Shard from his trunk, he tramped back down the stairs and flopped onto the sofa before the cold fireplace. It was several hours earlier in America, which meant that there was a good chance that Zane was either in class, at Quidditch practice, or just skiving around the campus of Alma Aleron with his friends. Still, James spoke the incantation that summoned the view into his friend’s dormitory room.
The silvery clouds of the Shard’s face cleared, as always, but the view that appeared was not the cluttered dormitory desk and perpetually unmade bed. It was, in fact, perfect blackness.
James shook the Shard in his hands. It was apparently malfunctioning somehow, although he wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible. The glass of the mirror remained perfectly blank.
And yet, James thought he could hear faint voices coming from it. He raised the Shard to his ear and listened intently. Sure enough, there was the faint murmur of a voice. Zane’s? Had he taken the Shard down from his closet door and stuffed it into his backpack?
“Zane!” James called, placing his face close to the Shard. “It’s me, James. Can you hear me?”
A faint scream came from the Shard. James withdrew suddenly, his eyes widening. It had been a girl’s voice.
A moment later, the blackness of the Shard fluttered, and then fell away. In its place was Zane and the sunny mess of his dormitory room. The boy was dressed in his Zombie house white shirt and yellow tie, but the tie was loosened and his blonde hair mussed. A black tee shirt draped from his right hand, having apparently been hung over his side of the Shard only moments before.
“James,” he rolled his eyes with a smile. “Don’t you ever knock?”
“Kind of hard to do,” James replied, “but I’m glad you’re there.
Isn’t it about lunch time there in the States?”
“It’s make-out o’clock, if you must know,” the blonde boy grinned. He turned aside. “It’s OK, Cheshire. It’s just James.”
James was slightly mortified to see the face of Cheshire Chatterly, Zane’s longtime girlfriend, appear in the Shard. She patted down her own blonde hair and smiled. “Hi James,” she called with a quick wave. “Good timing.”
James had a moment to think that suddenly everyone but him seemed to be leading an exciting and romantic dating life. “So I hear,” he shrank a little on the sofa. “Sorry.”
“We snuck past Yeats to come up and study for a Mageography quiz,” Zane bobbed his head and gestured toward a pile of books on the nearby desk. “But what can I say? My animal magnetism got the better of her.”
Cheshire poked Zane sharply in the ribs. “I should get down to the caff anyway,” she said, turning back to James. “I can’t face Professor Wimrinkle without at least one butterscotch brownie under my belt.”
“I’ll meet you at the dome in a few minutes,” Zane nodded.
“Bring me one of those brownies.”
The view of the room swept sideways for a moment as Cheshire opened the door, then swept back with a clunk.
“So what’s Petra up to?” Zane asked, pushing his tie back up and threading his fingers through his hair.
“What makes you think it’s about Petra?”
“Oh, did you interrupt me in the middle of the day to get my recipe for Salsa Grenado?” Zane raised his eyebrows. “You’re going to have a hard time finding Peruvian Plimpy-Peppers in the Hogwarts cupboard, and believe me, salsa without Plimpy-Peppers is basically just chunky ketchup.”
“All right, fine,” James sighed impatiently. “It’s about Petra.”
“And you don’t want to talk to anyone else about it because they already think she’s got one foot in old Voldy’s boots.”
“Zane,” James said, meeting the blonde boy’s eyes through the glass of the Shard. “She’s made a Horcrux.”
Zane took a step back from his own Shard, his eyes widening and his hand frozen in the act of finger-combing his hair. Slowly, he lowered his hand and stepped closer to the Shard than before.
“But,” he said, more seriously than James had heard his friend speak in a long time, “Horcruxes mean you have to kill someone.”
“She did kill someone,” James said in a hushed voice, sinking lower on the sofa. It wasn’t a topic they discussed much, but they all knew it. “Her stepmother, Phyllis. She was a perfectly horrid woman by every account. Hated her own daughter, Izzy. Drove Petra’s grandfather to suicide and may have been responsible for her first husband’s death, according to some. She and Izzy killed her together, somehow. They sent a tree after her.”
Zane was nodding, his eyes deep in thought. “But it was an impulsive thing. She didn’t do it in order to make a Horcrux. She did it because she was angry and brokenhearted about her grandfather. She lost control.”
James shook his head. “I don’t think that matters.”
Briefly, he explained to Zane how he had travelled along the silver and crimson thread between him and Petra, how he had found her in Tom Riddle’s family home, seen her raise the ugly dagger and pronounce the incantation that infused it with the fracture of her soul.
When he was done, Zane gave a low whistle. “You need to tell everyone,” he said after a moment. “Rose and Ralph, at least. It doesn’t look good for Petra, but there’s no getting around that now. You don’t do well trying to handle this sort of thing all by yourself.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” James allowed the Shard to fall flat onto his lap.
“That’s why you came to me,” Zane went on, now talking to the ceiling of the Gryffindor common room. “I tell you the hard, ugly truths that no one else will say. Like, it’s high time you got over your puppy love for Petra and started seeing her the way she really is.”
James startled and raised the Shard again, angrily. “Not you, too!” he exclaimed. “First, Scorpius, and then Albus, and now you?”
Zane shrugged in the Shard. “OK, so maybe I’m not the first one to speak that particular hard, ugly truth. But it’s true, and you know it.”
James slumped again. “If only it was that easy.”
r /> “Just as long as you’re thinking about it,” his friend nodded.
“But in the meantime, there’s another person you need to talk to, as soon as you let Ralph and Rosie in on Petra’s latest excursion into the Dark Side.”
“And who is that?” James asked limply.
“This new professor of yours, Van Odin or whatever. The one you said appeared with Petra.”
“It’s Odin-Vann. And he couldn’t really have been there. My mind stuck him there because I’d been thinking about him, that’s all.
There’s no way he could’ve gotten all the way from Hogwarts to wherever Petra was last night.”
“Maybe,” Zane agreed doubtfully. “But maybe not. Sounds to me like none of what you saw last night was technically a dream. You have to ask Odin-Vann to be sure. He might be your best bet to help Petra, if help is still possible.”
James nodded reluctantly. Zane was probably right, although he, James, would look a fool—perhaps even a dangerous fool—if he confronted the new Charms teacher about meeting Petra Morganstern and Odin-Van had no idea what he was talking about.
“I have to go,” Zane said soberly. “Time and Professor Wimrinkle wait for no man, especially not Zombie students who are already barely passing his class by the skin of their teeth. But keep me informed. And if you need anything, you know where to find me.
Experimental Communications has some cool new techniques, so I can always find a way to be there if you need me.”
“As long as it’s not make-out o’clock,” James smiled wanly.
Zane nodded. “Precisely.”
A moment later, the Shard filled again with silvery waves of smoke. James sighed and tossed the glass aside onto a cushion, contemplating what he had to do.
It was hard enough to consider asking Professor Odin-Van about Petra.
Much harder still was the prospect of somehow, someway, abandoning his love for her.
James waited until the following weekend to share his latest secret, although by then Rose and Ralph knew that something was up just by looking at him, since he had never been especially good at hiding his thoughts. When Saturday afternoon came, he accompanied Rose to the Room of Requirement once more, knowing that it was the one place they could speak of such things without even the slightest chance of being overheard. Now more than ever, secrecy seemed absolutely imperative, not only for Petra’s security, but their own.
“Why couldn’t we have met down by the Lake?” Rose groused.
“It’s too nice outside to be stuck in the musty old Room of Requirement. And we don’t have many warm days left, you know.”
“The Lake makes me nervous now that we know there’s a big hole at the bottom that drops down into some underground harbor.
Anyone could be down there. You said yourself that sound travels clearly through water if you know how to listen.”
“The portal is very small compared to the bottom of the whole Lake” Rose said, not exactly disagreeing with James. “Otherwise where would the Merpeople live?”
“Them, too,” James said. “I don’t trust those creepy water-dwellers much, either.”
“That’s speciesist,” Rose commented without much feeling as they met Ralph near a large painting, where he seemed to be engaged in a discussion with the portrait of Barnabas the Barmy.
“So you aren’t barmy after all,” Ralph said doubtfully, frowning and scratching his head. “S’just a title?”
“Indeed,” the portrait replied in a high, nasally voice. “Before the twelfth century, ‘barmy’ merely meant ‘inventive or prone to overheat if one wore a wig in the sun’. I’m just as sane as you or the potted plant or that rather fetching girl behind you.”
Ralph glanced back and was relieved to see Rose approaching, “Of course,” the portrait went on, its face clouding slightly, “there was the matter of my attempt to teach trolls to perform ballet…”
Around and behind the painted visage, pale elephantine legs in pink silk slippers rose and thumped down, shaking the ground in a clumsy, prancing circle.
“I’ve got to stop getting into conversations with paintings,”
Ralph breathed, stepping to join Rose and James. “So what’s this all about, then?”
Rose summoned the Room of Requirement, which materialized, as usual, opposite the portrait of Barnabas and his prancing trolls. The portrait still mumbled to itself uncertainly, and then gave a tittering laugh.
“Inside,” James nodded toward the door as Rose opened it.
The sound of lightly running feet echoed from the hall and James glanced aside, alarmed. A shadow capered into view, preceding the form of his sister, dressed in weekend jeans and a maroon jumper.
“Oh good,” she said, “I’m not too late again.”
“Who invited you?” James exclaimed, taken aback.
“I did,” Rose answered challengingly, poking her head back around the door of the Room of Requirement. “It gets a bit boring being the only real brains in the room, especially since you didn’t bring Walker along this time.”
James sighed. “That’s because he already knows. He’s the reason I’m telling you lot. It’s fine,” he said, turning back to Lily, who gave him a slightly petulant look.
Following Ralph, the group filed into the Room, which looked just as before: smallish and private, dominated by a round table with several chairs and a large Foe Glass on the rear wall. Just as the door started to swing closed, it bumped and swept open again, admitting the figure of Scorpius Malfoy, who blew out a disgruntled breath and flung himself languidly onto the nearest chair.
“I had to interrupt a perfectly good chess match for this, Potter,” he commented importantly. “I was beating Nolan Beetlebrick rather handily. And I had a galleon riding on it.”
“You didn’t need to interrupt anything,” James declared, knitting his brow in annoyed surprise. “Because I deliberately didn’t invite you!”
“Ah, because you’re a good enough wizard to block the Protean charm from any ducks except the ones you want to quack.” The blonde boy produced his own Weasley duck from his pocket, showed it to James and gave it a brief squeeze.
“Sod off!” the duck quipped in its squeaky voice. Written on the duck in blue ink was James’ own handwriting: OotP meeting Saturday 3:30 PM. NO SCORPIUS.
James sank in his seat and muttered under his breath.
“Excuse me, Potter?” Scorpius clarified innocently. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
Ralph blinked in surprise and glanced from James to Scorpius.
“I think he said ‘duck yourself’…?”
“Shall we get underway, then?” Rose said, raising her voice suddenly. “I’m sure we all have things we’d rather be doing.”
Behind Rose, the door clicked and shoved open again, admitting a push of air and another figure. Exasperated, James jumped to his feet.
“Hey everyone,” Albus said, stopping in the doorway and looking around. “I figured I’d find you all in here.”
“Anyone else out there we should invite in?” James asked, glaring around the room. “Mrs. Norris the cat? The Wyrd Sisters? Myron Bleedin’ Madrigal and Wizarding Wireless News?”
“Cool your cauldron, James” Albus said in a bored voice, closing the door and falling into a chair. “I’m just here with a message from Professor Debellows. But first, what’s the big news this time?”
With the door finally closed and everyone who could enter accounted for, if not invited, James drew a deep breath, suddenly unsure if he really wanted to share the secret, despite Zane’s advice. He fell back into his chair and studied the tabletop.
“Petra,” he said simply, “has made a Horcrux.”
There was stony silence in the room as everyone seemed to absorb this in their own way. Scorpius studied James sharply, his eyes narrowed tensely. Ralph looked both bewildered and horrified. Lily covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes shocked wide. Albus, however, merely stared into the shadows, his face thoughtful bu
t unfazed.
“Are you certain?” Rose asked breathlessly. “How could you know that? Last we spoke…?”
“I hadn’t even seen her,” James nodded, unable to meet his cousin’s gaze. “She was locking me out. But that’s all changed. I don’t think she can keep it up. I think the harder she freezes me out, the harder the Thread tries to connect us.” As briefly as he could, he explained his experience with the dream, traveling to Petra and observing her, actually standing in the same room with her, transported purely by magic.
“But Horcruxes are seriously specialized dark magic,” Lily said, her voice nearly a whisper. “I heard Dad talking to Uncle Ron about it once, and they both agreed that no one had created one ever since Voldemort’s time. Uncle Ron said that no one alive probably even remembered how it was done anymore. How can you be certain that Petra…?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish.
“I’m certain,” James nodded dourly. “There was no mistaking the meaning of the incantation. And once Petra saw me, the look on her face made it clear. She was ashamed of what she had done. But…” He didn’t want to say it, but even now in his memory he could see her eyes.
There had been shame and sadness there, yes. But beneath that, almost buried in the depth of her surprised gaze, there had been defiance.
Ralph asked, “But, why would she do it?”
“Well that, at least, is obvious,” Scorpius said, giving the table a sharp rap with his knuckles. “She needs to survive long enough to replace the Crimson Thread in the destiny that the now-dead Morgan came from. With every Auror, Harrier, and vengeful git with a wand out looking to cut her down, she needs assurance that she won’t be killed before she can complete her task and save the universe.”
“But a Horcrux,” Lily said, dropping her eyes gloomily. “Ever since Voldemort, people know dark magic like that stains a person’s soul, makes it twisted and broken. Can her goodness survive those effects long enough to finish her plan?”
“You forget,” Albus said suddenly, glancing from face to face.
“Petra was born with ‘twisted and broken’ already in her. The last bit of Voldemort himself survives in her blood. She can call on his dark strength to make the Horcrux. And she can transfer the poison of that dark magic to him. The last shred of Voldemort is sort of like a magical tapeworm, sucking up all the toxic effects and giving back strength and resolve.”