James Potter and the Crimson Thread

by G. Norman Lippert

  “Go!” Petra panted as James pulled her onward, onto the hissing grass. “It’s not over! He’s still coming! GO!”

  She struggled to regain her footing and pelted onward, now pulling James along beside her.

  Behind them, an explosion of dull grey water, as high and broad as a mountain, roared into the air, blotting out the dull sky and casting gloom over the plateau.

  Zane was running ahead of James and Petra, but glanced back over his shoulder at the noise and the sudden shadow. He stumbled, wide-eyed, and Petra caught his collar with her free hand dragging him forward as well.

  Lightning shot prisms from the wall of water, which fell away in torrents now, revealing a bright nucleus beyond. James didn’t have to ask what that nucleus was. The shape descended out of the air and set foot on the rubble of the castle’s former footprint, shaking the entire plateau.

  “PETRA MORGANSTERN!” Merlin called in a voice of thunder.

  “Run!” Petra panted thinly, breathlessly. “Run!”

  The three ran. They ran like they had never run in their entire lives.

  They reached the stone stairway and nearly flung themselves over the ledge in their panic. Turning and taking two, even three, steps at a time, they bolted down, following the curve of the cliffs and descending toward the crashing waves below.

  Merlin was coming. The plateau shook with the tremor of his footsteps. The light of his staff bloomed back from the low sky, throwing hard, moving shadows into every crack and fissure. Merlin, somehow, was his own battery. And his power, even if only temporary, was still terrible.

  Finally, exhausted and panicked, the three stumbled into the cave of the portal.

  Only the portal, they now saw as they skidded to a horrified halt, wasn’t there.

  James’ eyes boggled in the dimness. He knew what they should have found: the door of Apollo mansion, seen from the inside, hanging open and showing the comforting slope of victory hill and the quadrangle beyond. But there was no open door, no comforting evening light. No escape.

  The ground shook. The angle of the purplish light outside changed now, reflecting directly down onto the crashing, heaving waves.

  Merlin had reached the stairs.

  “Where’s the door?” Zane cried, his voice an octave higher than normal. He stumbled forward and felt around blindly, waving his arms.

  “It should be here! This is the spot! Our footprints are still right there from when we arrived! Door, please! Pretty please, with sugar on top!”

  A high-pitched, muffled voice suddenly squawked from James’ right side.

  “Farty Fopdoodle!”

  It was the Duck in his pocket, of course. Frantically, he tugged it out and looked down at it. A single word was now scrawled on it in all capitals: MERLIN!

  “Great,” James nodded, stuffing the Duck back into his pocket.

  “Real helpful, Rose.”

  “He’s had to remove the horseshoe,” Petra said quietly, her eyes thoughtful. “Don had to close the portal for a moment. Someone must have come. He’ll put it back. We just have to wait.”

  “I don’t think waiting is going to be an option for much longer!”

  Zane exclaimed with manic cheerfulness.

  “Come here,” Petra said, reaching out to Zane with her right hand and taking James’ in her left. “We have to be ready.”

  Zane came to stand next to Petra, but kept his face to the entrance of the cave. Trembling, he stretched out his wand.

  “What’s the best spell to use on a sorcerer?” he asked, his voice cracking glassily.

  Petra considered this for a moment as the ground shook.

  “What’s the worst spell you know?”

  “Umm…!” Zane blinked.

  Petra nodded briskly. “Not that one.”

  A shadow moved outside the mouth of the cave. Pebbles and grit rained from the ceiling.

  In the darkness of the cave, the door of Apollo mansion appeared, blooming with evening glow.

  “Now!” James shouted, yanking Petra forward as he lunged. She dragged Zane behind her, even as a shape heaved in front of the cave mouth, blocking the light.

  James’ next footstep stumbled onto the porch steps of Apollo mansion. The door slammed behind him as Zane barreled through, nearly bowling him over.

  “The horseshoe!” James cried, his breath nearly gone, barely producing a dry croak. “Take it out! Take it out!”

  Standing next to the cornerstone, blinking in surprise with his hands still on the silvery shape, Donofrio Odin-Vann plucked the horseshoe from its engraved bed.

  The brilliant rose-gold lights in Apollo mansion winked out.

  The portal was closed.

  James collapsed past Petra, down the steps and onto the lush grass of Victory Hill. Zane followed, panting and nearly laughing with hysterical relief.

  “Someone came back for a scarf!” Odin-Vann breathed, rushing to meet them, the horseshoe in his hand. “Somebody named Perkins! I told him he couldn’t go in yet because of the poison snails. He argued with me! Said that if that crazy zombie Zane Walker could handle them, so could he! I had to let him in! I put the key back in place as soon as I could!”

  Wordlessly, James held up the rubber Duck in his hand, showing Odin-Vann the word scrawled across it in Rose’s hasty capitals.

  The professor’s face went slack and ashy with shock. After a second, his eyes darted from the Duck, to James, to Petra.

  “Did you get it?” he asked, his voice a breathy husk.

  Zane nodded wearily, still tittering with nervous laughter. “We succeeded. It was close, but we succeeded.”

  James looked up at where Petra still stood on the steps. The knees of her jeans hung in frayed strips, stained with her blood. Her hair was wild and matted with dust, clinging to her sweaty cheeks and hiding her eyes. She raised a hand and showed her open palm. In it, looking like nothing more than a ball of red lint, was the crimson thread.

  “We got the thread,” she said, her voice a low, hollow monotone. “But we didn’t succeed.”

  And suddenly James understood what she meant.

  Petra may have told everyone, even Odin-Vann, that their mission was to retrieve the crimson thread. But Petra herself had gone to the World Between the Worlds for her own reason, a reason she may have cared about even more.

  She had gone to replace her father’s lost brooch.

  And in that task, sadly, she had failed miserably.

  9. – Peeves plays his part

  James slept long and late the following morning, awaking well past Saturday breakfast to an empty dormitory and feeling little inclined to get up. The leaden grey sky outside his window concurred with his lethargic mood. He stared at it from the rumpled mess of his bed, replaying the night’s events. The grit of the destroyed black castle was still in his hair. Its dirt was grimed into the palms of his hands and beneath his fingernails. He was still wearing the jeans and tee shirt he had worn to greet Zane at Alma Aleron, only now they were sweaty and grass-stained.

  He longed to spend an hour or three soaking in the fifth floor prefects’ bathtub, and considered asking Ralph for the password. This, of course, would likely necessitate an explanation for why he was so grimy after a night’s sleep, and while he did intend to tell Ralph everything that had happened, he didn’t feel up to it just this morning.

  Thus, instead, he merely lay in bed blinking at the autumn clouds as they rolled dully past his window, grumbling with distant threats of rain.

  He’d assumed that his dream-journey would end once he, Petra, and Zane returned from the World Between the Worlds, but in fact he had spent another hour or more there with them, in the basement game room of Apollo mansion, explaining their adventure to Donofrio Odin-Vann and discussing what still remained to accomplish.

  Petra was morose and quiet throughout, seated next to James on a low, sprung couch with her feet splayed in front of her, her shoes kicked off. Izzy seemed to sense Petra’s mood, and joined her, lying h
er own smaller body on the arm of the sofa beside her sister, crossing her arms over her chest, mimicking Petra’s pose perfectly.

  Odin-Vann was ashen-faced at the idea that Merlin had somehow discovered the plan, and had somehow been summoned to confront the three of them.

  “Not us,” Zane shook his head. “Petra. She said it herself. The only person who can touch the thread is the person who it represents. I expect that means even old Merlin Magic-pants.” He tried to give the nickname his usual familiar irreverence, but even he was still shaken by the memory of Merlin’s terrible pursuit. “Maybe he has his own way of getting into the Double-you Bee Double-you.”

  Odin-Vann shook his head doubtfully. “I would say that absolutely no one can access the World Between the Worlds without the dimensional key,” he said. “But this is the great Merlinus we are talking about, he who spent centuries suspended in the Transitis Nihilo, who traveled beyond death for a year only to return at his own strange bidding. Even if he couldn’t cross the Nexus on his own, he may well have been capable of establishing a sort of beacon to summon him should Petra ever touch the thread.” He shivered at the very thought.

  “But if that’s the case,” James realized, sitting up in alarm, “then that means we trapped him in the World Between the Worlds when we left without him!”

  This time it was Zane who shook his head. “The black castle was full of portals,” he said, standing and heaving open a nearby refrigerator. Bottles rattled in the door and he plucked one out, popping its top with a brief hiss. “Remember? They were escape routes for anyone who found themselves stuck there, taking them back to their own dimension. The castle may have ended up a ruin at the bottom of that dead ocean, but the portals are still there, and I bet they work just fine. Merlin will find his way back, somewhere and somehow, but drummels to donuts he’ll be as wet as a drowned Glumbumble when he does.”

  “And as angry as a fire-demon,” James sighed.

  “He didn’t see you,” Petra said dully. “All of his attention was focused on me. I made sure of that. He will be in a rage, but that rage will belong to me alone.”

  James glanced at her. There was rage in her voice as well, albeit cold, banked to a deep-freeze of deceptive calm. She had run from Merlin, escaped from him, but only barely. How could that be?

  Shouldn’t the two of them have been very nearly matched there in the World Between the Worlds, each separated from their elemental powers?

  Was her strength divided, somehow? Had she spent a portion of it hiding Zane and James from Merlin, protecting them? Or was there something more to her seemingly reduced power?

  He thought of the weakness he’d felt when she had summoned her powers in force. He thought, I’m her battery.

  “Right,” Odin-Vann nodded curtly. “The point is, we’ve succeeded in collecting the crimson thread. All that remains now is to replace it in the Loom of the Vault of Destinies. This shall be my challenge, as it may well require some spell or enchantment to power it back up again, sending it back to its native dimension and returning us our original destiny.”

  Zane shrugged. “Or maybe just getting the thread back in the same place as the Loom will cause it to magically snap back into place, like a stretched rubber band being let go, or two magnets getting close enough to get caught in their own attraction, snapping together.

  Professor Jackson said something like that, back when the thread was first stolen. The destinies want to realign, he said.”

  Odin-Vann frowned at Zane. “Your professor Jackson spends too much time toying with theory and too little time in actual magical practice. He thinks he knows much more than he does, which is precisely why he must not be involved in this mission at all, or know anything about it. When the time comes, Mr. Walker, I will summon you to assist me in returning the thread to the Vault of Destinies. I understand that you are wily enough to procure a key to the Alma Aleron archive, where it is housed?”

  Zane shrugged. “I’m wily enough to get you a live orchestra to play The Blue Danube while you do it, if you want. You just say when.”

  Odin-Vann agreed with a nod. “Once I am prepared, I shall indeed say when. If all goes as planned, the moment the thread is returned, Petra shall assume her new role as the Morgan of that alternate dimension. The original Morgan of that dimension, now dead and buried here, will become our version of Petra.”

  Still lying on the sofa arm next to Petra, Izzy rolled onto her side and buried her face against Petra’s shoulder. She wasn’t crying, James sensed—she had surely already shed more than her share of tears over the impending loss of her sister—but neither was she ready to allow it to happen just yet. Probably, she never would be.

  James found he was shaking his head, finally hitting on an objection that had been brewing in the back of his mind for some time.

  “But it can’t be that simple, can it?” He turned to look aside at Petra.

  “That other dimension’s version of you, the Morgan version, was evil.

  She partnered with Judith to steal Izzy from you, since she accidentally killed her own dimension’s version. She was willing to see my dad and Titus Hardcastle killed by the W.U.L.F.”

  “She wasn’t evil,” Odin-Vann corrected with grave certainty.

  “Morgan wasn’t evil any more than Petra is, regardless of what the rest of the magical world may think. She was simply heartsick by the consequences of her choices. People will do surprisingly desperate things when they are heartsick. Morgan wasn’t evil. She was simply broken, and crushed, and bereft.”

  “And when I go to replace her in her world,” Petra said, still staring blankly into the shadows. “I will be broken and crushed and bereft as well. I will be more Morgan than Petra myself. I’ll have lost the people I love the most. It will be exactly as it should be.”

  The chill in her words was terrible to James. She sensed this.

  Without looking at him, she felt for his hand between them, squeezed it, and held it.

  You’re one of those people, the touch of her hand seemed to say.

  He didn’t know if the thought came directly from her, via the invisible cord that connected them, but he didn’t doubt the sentiment, either way. He squeezed her hand back and drew a deep, shaking sigh.

  Odin-Vann suggested that he be the one to safeguard the crimson thread until the time of its final use. “For the very reason it was hidden in the World Between the Worlds by Morgan: because it is far too magical to go unnoticed. Despite recent events, Hogwarts is still one of the most magically fortified places on earth. There, I can keep it hidden.”

  “Just like Madame Delacroix did with the Merlin throne,” Zane nodded and shrugged, “back during our first year, when we were all still just wide-eyed innocents, untainted by the tribulations of responsibility.”

  Petra rolled her eyes at Zane, but there was a ghost of a smile there as well.

  Odin-Vann held out a small leather-bound jewelry box, open like a clamshell. Petra stood and placed the crimson thread in the box, which Odin-Vann snapped closed, never touching the thread himself.

  James had an idea that the professor wouldn’t have been able to hold the thread even inside the jewelry box if Petra had not placed it there with her own hand, granting her unspoken permission.

  James also had an idea that Ralph, were he there, would object strongly to Odin-Vann’s possession of the thread.

  “And this,” Odin-Vann said, tugging the unicorn horseshoe from his pocket and handing it to Petra, “I assume you can return to its rightful place of protection?”

  Petra accepted it with a weary nod. “The curators of the Tower of Art will never know it was gone.”

  Shortly, James felt the pull of the collapsing dream-visit. The walls of the game room darkened. Voices became insubstantial, like noises heard underwater. And then, for a long time, there was only darkness. He returned to his bed via the dark, much more quietly and subtly than he had left.

  James spent most of that Saturday midday listless
ly haunting the common room, making halfhearted attempts at his Herbology reading assignment and other homework. He had just begun an essay on the seventeen-point mental checklist required before Disapparation (he had only recently begun the class on the subject, but would not be making any actual attempts for several weeks), when Rose came through the portrait hole, followed by Scorpius.

  Joining James at a corner table, she demanded explanations of everything that had happened the previous night, and James, in turn, berated her lateness in warning them of Merlin’s departure.

  “Late nothing!” she hissed at him, leaning close, her eyes stern.

  “He never left at all! At least, not in any way that the Map showed.”

  James frowned. “But you sent the Duck warning. One magical battle too late, of course, but you sent it. What do you mean he never left?”

  Scorpius unslung his knapsack and pushed it across the table to James. “The Map,” he gestured at it. “It’s there inside. It shows the headmaster all right, just as expected. We followed his movements precisely, all night, from right here in the common room. He started out in the entrance hall. Then he went to the library.”

  Rose nodded. “And then he went down to the laundry. We wondered about that, but what do we know? Maybe he checks in on the house elves every night. He’s the headmaster.”

  “But then he went to the girl’s third floor bathroom,” Scorpius went on, arching an eyebrow. “So we got a bit suspicious.”

  Rose counted off on her fingers as she recited, “Then he went to the Ravenclaw common room. Then a broom closet. The potions classroom. An empty teacher’s lounge. The kitchens. A supply cupboard.”

  “And then he spent some time at the top of the stairs just down the hall,” Scorpius said, tilting his head. “So we poked out to see what he was up to.”

  James looked from Scorpius to Rose, baffled. “So? What was he doing?”

  “Who knows?” Rose said meaningfully. “All we found was Peeves defacing a statue with a stolen lipstick. Peeves wearing Merlin’s black ring on his finger!”