Professor Longbottom himself still attended some night league matches, albeit anonymously, dressed in a deep hooded robe and rarely speaking. Nor was he the only secret observer. On any given night, the grandstands were peppered with as many as two dozen robed and disguised figures, most seated well away from each other, all slipping away wordlessly as the matches concluded. James was quietly certain that one of the observers was, in fact, Professor McGonagall, as evidenced by her familiar purposeful walk and rigid posture.
Unlike daytime matches, which were wild and deafening affairs, the night league was characterized by feverishly hushed matches, punctuated only by harsh whispers, the whoosh of the gently glowing Bludgers, and the occasional bone-rattling crunch and yelp as one of the balls struck its mark. The loudest moments were when rasped arguments broke out over the always nebulous and changing league rules, or when goals were made, whereupon hoarse cheers and jeers would waft over the pitch, accompanied by the dull thumping of gloved hands, applauding by moon glow.
At the end of the third match of the season, as Scorpius was summoning the blue-glowing Bludgers and forcing them into the old trunk, James approached with his skrim clutched under one arm, dripping sweat, his shoes soaked with pre-dawn dew.
“There’s one thing the Night League is still missing,” he said, half whispering in the misty dark. “Something to really set it apart from the daytime matches.”
“Playing in the pitch dark of the wee hours on one of those daft flying ironing boards isn’t enough for you, is it?”
“Game magic,” James nodded, ignoring Scorpius’ grumpy mood. The Gryffindors had just lost to Hufflepuff, after all, although James himself wasn’t particularly upset about it. The daylight teams were set to compete later that week, and James was confident of a solid win for that matchup.
“Game magic?” Scorpius scowled, his face lit blue by the glow of the struggling Bludgers. “That’s from that ridiculous American game.
Cudgelclutch. We don’t do that.”
“We don’t, but we should,” James insisted. “All we’re doing now is playing Quidditch in the dark.”
“With skrims optional,” Lily suggested, coming alongside James and mopping her brow with her sleeve.
“And snitches only worth twenty points,” Julien Jackson piped up smugly. “Sorry James. A good catch isn’t enough to seal a victory when the moon’s up.”
James nodded, unperturbed. “Night league’s different enough, but it could be better still, while also keeping us sharp with our wands.
When I first started, we used to use dueling spells, remember? But that got too dangerous, with people getting blasted right off their brooms or getting petrified and running into the grandstands. Game magic is specially designed for use during sport. Imagine using a gravity well charm to redirect a Bludger away from your head. Or a Bonefuse hex to make your opponent drop the Quaffle!”
“Gravity wells? Bonefuse hexes?” Lily frowned. “Those aren’t in the Caster’s Lexicon.”
Coming alongside his team captain, Stanley Jasper nodded, warming to the idea. “Yeah, I’ve heard of that! Spells invented only for sporting matches! I’ve used magic during scratch games back home, playing against my older brothers, although it was never legal or anything. Just a way to keep things interesting.”
“You’re just looking for an unfair advantage,” Julien suggested, narrowing her eyes at James. “You’re already good at those spells. We’d all still have to learn them.”
James shrugged, switching his skrim to his other arm. “Game magic isn’t hard to learn. Most of it’s just variations on traditional dueling spells. But if you don’t feel like you’d be up to facing off against me…” He blinked up at the dark sky mournfully.
Julien frowned. “You’ll have to try harder than that to bait me, Potter,” she said, poking him in the stomach with her broom handle.
“But if you want game magic, we’re more than a match for you. You get us a Clutchcudgel rulebook with approved spells and watch what happens. You want gravity wells? We’ll give you gravity wells deep enough to suck the paint off your skrim.”
James grinned. “Now you’re talking!” He realized as he said it that Zane Walker seemed to have rubbed off on him over the years, at least a little.
The only class James had any serious difficulty with—apart from his usual lackadaisical attitude towards studying and essay deadlines— was Apparition. Despite its only being a twelve-week optional course offered by the Ministry of Magic for qualifying seventh years, he’d become so bored with the class that he wished he’d never asked his parents for the nine Galleon laboratory fee to sign up. This was because the first ten weeks of the course, much to his disappointment, were devoted to an intensive study of Apparition technomancy, its myriad dangers, and the seemingly endless legal ramifications of improper use.
The instructor, a Mr. Wilkie Twycross, was a very old man with white hair as fine as dandelion fluff and glasses so huge and thick that James feared an errant sunbeam might cause the man’s eyebrows to burst into flame. He insisted, in his high, tremulous voice, that Apparition was “a binary process, allowing no luxury of a learning curve. You will either do it perfectly and properly, or you will fail abominably. There is no in-between. Apart, of course, from the very real possibility that you may Reapparate in-between two floors, or much worse.”
He eyed James as he said this, his pale blue pupils magnified to the size of eggs behind his bulbous eyeglasses. James pretended to take notes. On the top of his parchment were the words Destination, Determination, and Deliberation. He had foregone any further note-taking, choosing instead to studiously apply more and more emphasis to Twycross’ initial “three Ds”, adding multiple underlines, quotation marks, circles, and arrows. As Twycross droned on, beginning again his prescribed pre-Dissaparation checklist, James sighed and lay down his quill.
He knew he’d be excellent at Apparition when the time came.
He longed to try it for the first time, even considered attempting it on his own, outside of class. He sat up again at the idea, telling himself he could recruit Millie and Ralph to do it with him. Ralph was less eager to attempt Apparition himself, but he would probably be glad of the chance to practice it first without an audience.
He picked up his quill again and, underneath the Three Ds, wrote: Who’s ready to bunk all this and just try it?
Keeping his eyes on Twycross, he nudged Ralph on his right and slid the parchment toward him. Ralph read the note and shrugged a little uncertainly. James repeated the gesture on his left, for Millie’s benefit. He half expected her to give him one of her eager, precocious smiles, but she merely blinked at him in awed surprise, and then scribbled a note beneath his.
Apparition scares the hair off me! I would pay NOT to do it!
James was mildly surprised, but didn’t press it. He supposed it was possible to be frightened of Apparation, especially in light of Twycross’ hectoring warnings. But James knew it was mostly quite safe, if you understood what you were doing. He’d side-along Apparated with his mum and dad on many occasions, and they’d never been splinched, skunched, contrasected, unverted, or any of the other dire things Twycross warned about. They’d never left behind even a single fingernail or had so much as a sock turned inside-out.
At dinner, James suggested to Rose that the three of them sneak back to the classroom that evening to give it a try.
“Fine,” Rose agreed, “But don’t tell Scorpius. For once, I want to know how to do something before he does.”
“You know how to do everything before everybody,” James blinked at her, but Rose shook her head, glaring down the table toward her on-again, off-again boyfriend, with whom she was apparently back off-again.
“His parents hire tutors for him every summer to ‘prepare him for the rigours of the next scholastic term’.” This time she implied the quotes with a snarky tone, but James heard hurt more than nastiness in her voice. “But I doubt even he’s been allowed to practice
Disapparation before he’s of legal age.”
Regardless of Rose’s reasons, James was glad of her accompaniment.
Seated a little further down the table from Scorpius was Albus, once again joining the Gryffindors to accompany Chance Jackson, whose crush on Albus was finally, apparently, being reciprocated. He allowed her to feed him strawberry slices with her fingers while he regaled her friends with some story or other. As James watched, the group dissolved into laughter and Chance threw an arm around Albus, leaning her head onto his shoulder.
“Ugh,” James shook his head, turning away.
“Now you know how the rest of us feel whenever you bring Millie Vandergriff over for a snog,” Graham commented.
“We study, that’s all!” James insisted, surprised. He’d been very careful not to let anyone see him kissing Millie.
Deirdre rolled her eyes. “You two are snogging even when your noses are buried in books. It’d be adorable if it was a bit less painfully obvious.”
James’ face heated and he knew he was blushing fiercely. The truly embarrassing part was, deep down, he knew he wasn’t as infatuated with Millie as everyone thought he was, probably even her.
As he gathered his things and left the Great Hall, he realized that he felt, more than anything, like a total clod. After all, despite the heady thrills of kissing Millie and the tremulous mystery of dating her, he knew he was mostly using her as a sort of human shield, a distraction from the hopeless, doomed love that he felt for Petra.
He determined it couldn’t go on. It wasn’t fair to her.
But he also didn’t want to break her heart. Not yet, at least.
The holidays were coming soon. Maybe he could do it then, while they were apart for a while.
He felt slightly better having decided this, and relegated the worries to a back corner of his mind until the time came for him to act on this new plan.
That evening, he and Rose met Ralph outside the Apparition classroom.
“What do you keep looking for?” James asked, noticing Rose’s backwards glance for the third time as they gathered around the classroom door.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I keep thinking someone is following us.”
“Who cares? We’ve got the Head Boy with us. We can’t be up to mischief.” James reached for the door handle and gave it a tug. The door rattled but didn’t budge. “Oh. Well. Unlocking a classroom door isn’t mischief, exactly. Especially the way Rose does it.”
Rose hid a look of pride as she fingered her wand. “I might have left my notes in there, after all. Or we might have heard a suspicious noise. We’re just doing our duty, checking it out.”
A suspicious noise suddenly echoed from the depths of the hall behind them—a scrape and a thump, as if someone around a corner had dropped a book. Ralph jumped, and then ran a hand over his face in nervous annoyance.
“Stop winding me up,” he nudged James with his elbow. “If we’re going to do this, let’s get it over with. There’s no rule against practicing stuff we’re learning. And this classroom is usually unlocked.”
James had an idea that the classroom was locked right now because it was temporarily exempt from the anti-Disapparation spell that blanketed the school, but chose not to remind Ralph of that fact.
Rose spoke the unlocking spell and her wand burst a spark of golden light. The bolt clicked and the door budged open. James gave it a push and the well-oiled hinges swung silently, revealing the darkened classroom. The three crept inside.
By moonlight, the empty half of the room looked like a haunted dance floor, decorated strangely with pale hoops, three ranged beneath the windows, matched with three more beneath the chalkboard. The class tables and chairs were pushed close together in the rear of the room, overlooking the as-yet unused practice area.
“Well?” James asked, glancing aside at Rose and Ralph with an unexpected stab of trepidation. “Who’s first?”
“This was your idea, cousin,” Rose said, prodding him forward.
“You have the honours.”
James nodded and swallowed hard. But then, suddenly, Ralph moved past him, stepping carefully inside one of the hoops.
“I’m Head Boy,” he gulped. “It’s, like, my duty to go first. To make sure it’s safe and all. Also,” he admitted, offering James a sheepish grimace, “if I don’t get this over with now, my nerve will go right out the window.”
James blinked at his friend, both impressed and suddenly worried. What if something did go horribly wrong? What if Ralph got splinched, or skunched, or contrasected? James realized he didn’t even know what contrasecting was. He cursed himself for not paying more attention in class.
“Rose,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “what’s contrasecting?”
Rose glanced aside at him and frowned. “Why do you ask?”
James raised a cautionary hand to Ralph, opened his mouth to offer a warning, but at that moment the big boy squeezed his eyes tight shut, fisted his hand on his wand, and gulped a breath. The oversized wand in Ralph’s hand sizzled suddenly with pinkish light, and then vanished, along with the boy himself, leaving only a bang of rushing air.
An agonizingly long moment later, the pink light of Ralph’s wand illuminated the opposite side of the classroom and Ralph reappeared with a pop. He thumped to the floor and his knees buckled slightly.
“Brilliant, Ralph!” Rose said, moving to examine him, her eyes sharp. “You look fine. No visible splinching. And only a little residual magic,” she commented, glancing back over her shoulder. James saw it as well: a faint trail of pink light was still settling to the classroom floor, drawing a line from where Ralph had begun to where he now stood, breathing hard, his eyes wide and startled.
“Why did it do that?” Ralph panted, frowning worriedly at the settling pink glow.
“Magical exhaust,” Rose nodded, as if she’d expected this. “It’s all in Twycross’ book. First timers rely too much on the magic of their wands, rather than their own intrinsic power. They propel themselves a little, like disapparation is a spell to cast, not an ability to hone. It’s perfectly normal. You’ll learn to let go of the wand as you practice.
Think of it as magical training wheels.”
“Wow,” Ralph breathed, and then gave a nervous laugh. “Look at me. I did it!”
James clapped his friend on the back, happy that his own momentary worry had gone unspoken. “I knew you were up to it, Ralph,” he lied. “Just wait until we tell Zane you nailed your first Disapparation! He’ll hate that he wasn’t here to see it!”
Rose shrugged. “Ralph could just Apparate to Alma Aleron and tell him himself.”
“No way,” Ralph raised both hands and took a step backwards.
“Let’s not get crazy. A step across a classroom is way different than a trip across the ocean.”
Rose rolled her eyes impatiently, “Actually, no, it isn’t. Neither of you pay the slightest attention in class, do you?”
“Your turn, James,” Ralph gave him a friendly push toward the rings beneath the windows. “If I can do it, it’ll be a cinch for you.”
James nodded and approached the windows, placing his feet carefully inside one of the white rings. He gripped his own wand in his right hand, happy to use whatever “training wheels” were available to him for his first solo apparition. He turned around to face the opposite side of the room, and blinked in startled surprise.
Behind Rose and Ralph, three figures stood huddled in the partially open classroom door. Despite their silhouetted shadows, James could still make out their nasty grins and beady eyes.
“What do you, want?” he asked, masking his surprise with anger.
Rose and Ralph spun on the spot to see the three younger students peering around the door frame. Edgar Edgecombe was in the middle, flanked as usual by his mates, Quincy Ogden and Polly Heathrow. Ogden’s greasy black hair hid one eye as he glared at them, while Heathrow, the tallest of the three, narrowed her eyes with unmistakable gle
e.
“Get out of here, all of you,” Rose said, jamming her fists onto her hips. “This is a closed practice. You won’t even be in this class for six more years.”
“You’re not in this class,” Polly Heathrow said, raising her pointed chin at Rose. “And practicing Apparition is against the rules.
Surprised I need to remind you of that, Granger. ”
“The name’s Weasley,” Rose said, rising to her full height.
“Granger is my mother, and I’m not her. Too bad for you, because she’d never even think of doing the things that I’m considering.” She took a step forward, brandishing her wand meaningfully.
“That great lunk-head behind you is the Weasley of the threesome,” Polly wrinkled her nose and pointed at Ralph. “The incompetent clod who’s only along for comic relief. ‘Head Boy’ my grandma’s knee-length knickers!”
“The Golden Trio, reborn!” Ogden sneered. “Potter, ‘ the chosen one’; Weasley, the bumbling prat; and Granger, the insufferable know-it-all. Think they can do whatever they want. Even curse a bunch of precious first-years.”
James raised his own wand now and took three brisk steps toward the door, opening his mouth, not even sure which hex or jinx was going to come out, hoping distantly that it wouldn’t be something too awful.
“I’ll tell you what, Potter and Granger, ” Edgar Edgecombe interrupted James, still smiling nastily. “You pocket your wands and do a little Disapparation demonstration for us, and we won’t run off to the library to tattle on you for breaking into the classroom and performing illegal magic. Professor Heretofore’s on duty, and she’s in a detention sort of mood, I’d wager. Your call.”
James still had his wand out, pointed at Edgecombe. He bit back the spell that had been forming on his lips (the Dancing Feet jinx—he’d been a bit too careful, perhaps) and glanced aside at Rose. She was still glaring at the three, her wand raised but tilted slightly up at the ceiling. Suddenly she shrugged and dropped her hand to her side.
“Fine,” she said breezily. “I think you were up, James.” She turned to look at him, her face carefully composed to display no emotion at all. James knew his cousin, however, and recognized that this was her most dangerous expression of all.