He nodded slowly. “Right. Fair enough, I guess.” He glanced back at the three in the doorway. “But look, I don’t know what you lot are on about, but you’re completely mental. We’re not anyone’s ‘Golden Trio’.”
“Yeah,” Ralph nodded. “And besides, if you count Zane, we’d be more of a… what you think? A silver rhombus?”
Rose shrugged. “A trapezoid, I imagine. And let’s go with platinum.”
James blinked rapidly at Rose and Ralph. Ralph was simply nervous and blabbering, mostly worried about getting caught. But Rose was fuming with fury. It came off of her in palpable waves, despite her carefully blank face.
Lowering his wand, James turned and retraced his steps back to the white rings under the windows, stepping into the one in the middle.
He turned around and tried to ignore the grinning glares of the three younger students in the doorway. It was impossible, of course. He could feel their eyes like hot little beetles, crawling all over him. He focused instead on Ralph and Rose, who stood in the shadows next to the chalkboard, near the matching three rings. Ralph offered him an encouraging nod, but his face was taut with worry. Rose’s mouth was pressed into a tight line now that she’d turned away from Edgecombe and his crew. Her eyes sparked like flints, although James couldn’t guess what she was planning.
He closed his eyes, fisted his fingers on his lowered wand, and realized with a cold shock that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. All the confidence and assurance had leaked right out of him.
Destination, he recited to himself, Determination… and…? He couldn’t remember the third one.
Eyes still squeezed shut, he conjured a mental image of the classroom. He imagined the desks and chairs pushed together in neat rows on one side, overlooking the practice floor. There, he pictured three rings beneath the rank of windows, with him standing in the middle. Across the dim floor, three more rings lay in a neat row, powdered with chalk dust from the board above. James chose the middle ring, and concentrated on it, willing himself to go to it.
Something flexed deep in his mind. It didn’t happen instantaneously, as he’d imagined it would. Instead, the world seemed to slow down all around, to grow insubstantial, to shrink away, taking all sound and sensation with it. Silence like the first snowfall pressed against his ears. James remembered enough technomancy to understand that he was entering a sort of flux-state now, becoming momentarily incorporeal, unfocusing from the here-and-now and refocusing on the there-and-then.
But then something startled him. There was an explosion of light and sound, illuminating the emptiness behind his eyelids and buffeting him with waves of force. He retreated from the noise and light, and his concentration faltered. His mental image of the classroom cracked, shattered, and he sensed his discorporated form falling back into himself. It happened too soon. He felt the wrongness of it even before his feet stumbled to the floor again, disconcertingly far apart.
He came back to himself with a shock and a gasp.
TWO gasps.
He tried to open his eyes, and realized that he was seeing double.
Or rather, he was seeing the classroom from two entirely different perspectives, each perfectly overlaid over the other, obliterating each other into nonsense. He swayed and clapped a hand to his heads.
Somewhere nearby, Ralph yelped and stumbled backwards, slamming his shoulder against the chalkboard, which rattled and rained bits of chalk to the floor. Rose gasped in shock.
From the doorway, Edgecombe’s voice was thin with mingled awe and laughter. “Look at that! Will you look at THAT!”
“James!” Rose said, moving urgently into the middle of the room, between the rings, and looking back and forth swiftly. “Are you… all right?”
“What happened?” James asked, and heard his voice twice, echoing from both sides of the room. Dimly, he saw himself. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror, one that both distorted your shape into something inhuman and doubled the view. In one view, he saw his own head and shoulders, one arm, one leg, standing before the chalkboard, wobbling slightly. In the other view, perfectly overlaid atop it, he saw an exact duplicate of himself still standing one-legged in the ring beneath the windows.
There were two of him, but only almost. He was stuck in mid-apparation, half-duplicated, with neither part completely whole.
“Holy hinkypunks!” the two Jameses cried thinly, staring at each other across the dark and dusty floor. “I’m still over there!” The two versions of himself pointed at each other with their single arm each, one an empty left hand, the other a right hand still fisted on his wand.
“Well,” Rose said with a helpless shrug. “At least now you know what contrasecting is.”
There was a hiss of hysterical laughter, followed by a thumping of footsteps as Edgecombe, Heathrow, and Ogden scrambled and ran from the door. Their laughter turned to mean hoots, echoing back from the corridor as they hurried away, surely eager to tell everyone what they’d seen.
“Stop them!” James said twice, but Rose was already striding to the door, her wand snapping up in her hand. She leaned economically around the door frame and fired three red bolts in quick succession.
The hooting laughter choked to silence, followed by three messy thumps.
“Oh, this is bad,” Ralph said, his voice an octave higher than normal. He wrung his hands fretfully, glancing from Rose’s raised wand to James’ doubled form. “This is so bad! We’re doomed! We’re seriously, completely, totally—!”
“Ralph, get a grip,” Rose said firmly, pocketing her wand again.
“Go drag those three into a closet or something. Get them out of the corridor until they wake up again. I’ll…” She glanced back and forth between the two partial Jameses. He saw her glance at him twice from his two different perspectives. “I’ll go get help.”
“Not Twycross,” James said with his oddly doubled voice, struggling to keep his two forms standing on one foot each. “Odin-Vann.”
Rose nodded, understanding. Briskly, she turned and bolted through the door, her robes flying.
“Oh, man,” Ralph muttered again, his voice still unnaturally high. “Are you, like, OK, James?”
James rolled his eyes and felt a wave of dizziness at the doubled effect. “Never better. I love this. I can comb my hair without a mirror.
Mum would be so proud. Go move those three twits before somebody sees them.”
Ralph nodded briskly, as if suddenly remembering the stunned first-years in the corridor outside. He turned jerkily, his heels scraping in chalk dust, and hurried through the door, apparently relieved to flee from the disconcerting sight.
James steadied himselves. It was easier to stand on one foot each than he expected, and he realized it was because both versions of himself were still somehow connected through empty space. His consciousness was split between them, stretched across the centre of the room like a rubber band. And some small sliver of his mind, he realized, was still floating in the discorporated ether of the flux. There, the view was not doubled, merely blank. Except not completely blank, now that he focused on it. He could see the faint glimmer of his and Petra’s silver/crimson cord. It stretched off in floating curls, fading into distance. He could probably follow the cord if he wished, leaving behind the alarming split of his form. But he knew instinctively that that would be disastrous. If he fled from his doubled body, he might never be able to come back to it again.
He sighed harshly, fear and annoyance settling in his mind in equal measures. He tried to focus on the classroom again, looking from his strangely doubled perspective, and saw something lying in the centre of the practice floor between the lines of white rings. Bright blue shreds of wrapper surrounded a tiny scorched starburst. James shook his heads, realizing at once what it was. Edgecombe had thrown a Weasley Wizard Wheezes firecracker into the room just as James had attempted his Disapparation. The seemingly planet-sized explosion he had encountered in the flux was barely a crack of noise and puff of spark
s from a harmless novelty.
Harmless under any other circumstance, of course.
Ralph came back a moment later, huffing, with figures clutched under both of his arms. Ogden and Heathrow lolled like life-sized ragdolls as Ralph flung them onto a desk each.
“Not in here, Ralph,” the Jameses sighed. “I don’t want to look at their stupid faces. Especially twice at once.”
“We have to keep an eye on them,” Ralph shook his head, hurrying back to the door. “Odin-Vann will know what to do, right?
He’s a teacher.”
“And you’re Head Boy,” James reminded him. “Use your, what do you call it, executive authority. Forbid them from talking about it.
Give them punishments. Promise to take away a hundred house points if they blab.”
“It doesn’t work that way!” Ralph said with sudden strength, turning to glance first at one James, and then the other. He shook his head with harried annoyance. “Just shut it for a minute. The two of you are giving me a headache.”
He disappeared through the door again. When he came back into view a moment later with Edgecombe’s chunky body heaved over his shoulder, he paused, looking along the corridor. He backed up a step as Professor Odin-Vann approached the door with Rose close behind.
“You,” the professor said, frowning uncertainly and pointing at the stunned boy slung over Ralph’s shoulder like a lumpy bag of sand.
“You didn’t…?” He glanced back at Rose for a moment, and then shook his head. “Never mind. First things first.”
He ushered Ralph into the room ahead of him, and then entered himself, stopping in the doorway and gripping the frame with both hands, as if for support.
“Son of a banshee,” he swore under his breath, his eyes wide, flicking back and forth between James’ doubled forms.
“We were practicing Disapparation,” the Jameses said.
“Failing spectacularly at it, more like,” Odin-Vann said, and gave a low whistle. “I’ve never seen a contrasection this complete. Do you… still think with a complete brain?”
“I don’t think he’s ever thought with a complete brain,” Rose sighed, approaching the Jameses with a shake of her head. She looked back and forth between them. “What can you do, Professor?”
Odin-Vann stood next to her, a studious frown creasing his face.
“Normally this would take a team of healers from the misapplied magic wing of St. Mungos,” he admitted thoughtfully. “But I see you have your wand with you, James. Did you, perhaps, use it to assist your Disapparation?”
“Rose said it was like training wheels!” James exclaimed defensively, his twinned voice louder than expected. “Ralph did it and only left a trail of pink exhaust across the room. I thought it was harmless!”
“It is harmless,” Odin-Vann nodded, his own voice almost eerily calm. “But if you used your wand to fuel your Apparation, I may know a way to undo it.”
The young professor glanced from James to James. James made eye contact with both glances.
“Which one’s the original?” Odin-Vann asked, and then turned to the James still standing in front of the windows. “That one,” he said, pointing. “Your wand made it across the room, to James number two.
That’s good.”
As the Jameses watched, Odin-Vann raised his own wand and pointed it at the James standing in front of the chalkboard, his wand fisted in his single hand. Odin-Vann paused for a moment as a look of doubt crossed his face, and then he cleared his eyes. When he spoke, the word sounded more like a command than a spell.
“Priori invortu!”
A bolt of white lightning connected Odin-Vann’s wand to James’, snaking and arcing for several long seconds. James felt the wand vibrating in his hand, but held on tight, unsure if the spell would work if he dropped it. The vibration built to a thrum that nearly numbed his fingers. Then, with a sound like a whip-crack, the second James flipped back through itself and merged back into the first, who stumbled backwards three steps, struck the window hard enough to rattle the panes, and collapsed to the floor in a clumsy heap.
Rose rushed to James’s side and grabbed his face in her hands, turning his head this way and that.
“Get off,” he moaned impatiently. “I’m fine. Lemme be.”
Rose ignored his protests and continued to inspect him. Behind her, Odin-Vann turned his attention from the re-incorporated figure of James to the wand in his hand. He studied it with apparent satisfaction.
“Do your eyebrows always look like that?” Rose said, squeezing James’ cheeks between her palms and forcing his head up toward the moonlight. “All scrunched together and unruly in the middle?”
“I’m fine!” James insisted, finally batting her hands away.
“Geroff me!” He began to struggle uncertainly to his feet, but his knees felt like rubber and his head suddenly spun with dizziness. He dropped back to the floor.
“It was their fault,” Ralph said, moving alongside Odin-Vann and pointing at the three younger students, who were just beginning to stir. “Edgecombe threw a firecracker at James just as he was beginning his Disapparation!”
Edgecombe moaned loudly, rolled, and fell off the desk where Ralph had tossed him. He hit the floor with a muffled thump and his moan turned into an affronted grunt. Polly Heathrow sat up blearily, her pigtails flopping. Quincy Ogden gave a sudden, snorting snore.
“So you stunned them?” Odin-Vann said, still calm, glancing from Ralph to Rose.
“Only when they started to run away,” she answered shrilly.
“Believe me, they had it coming. And loads more!”
Edgecombe spoke up then, his voice mushy. “They were practicing illegal magic, Professor. They broke into the classroom!”
“Yeah,” Heathrow added, cupping a hand gingerly to her forehead. “And then they cursed us! They cursed us just because we saw them!”
“They cursed you,” Odin-Vann said, his voice as calm and pedantic as if he’d been standing in his own classroom in broad daylight, “because you startled them with a contraband incendiary device. You attacked them. They responded on instinct. You might consider yourselves fortunate that they merely stunned you.”
“But…!” Edgecombe spluttered, his eyes bulging as he glared at James, then Ralph and Rose. “But they were performing illegal magic!”
“Mr. Deedle and Mr. Potter were practicing a prescribed class exercise. This is the only classroom they can do it in. I gave them permission to unlock the door. You, however, were skulking around the halls looking to cause trouble. Do you perhaps have any more Weasley Wizard Wheezes contraband merchandise in your pockets?”
Edgecombe’s face clamped shut tight, clearly understanding that the odds had turned against him. Polly Heathrow slid her feet to the floor and gave Ogden a sharp jab with her elbow. He groaned and stirred.
“We were only having a little fun,” she said sulkily, throwing James a black glare.
“Ah,” Odin-Vann nodded sadly, “the myriad gleeful horrors that have been committed in the name of ‘a little fun’. I suggest you three go directly back to your dormitory before I determine to investigate the matter any further. And if I so much as sniff that you’ve mentioned a word of James’ misfortune to anyone— a misfortune I would be careful to point out was entirely your fault— I shall see that you receive every ounce of the consequences that you are due. Am I quite clear?”
Edgecombe got to his feet, his cheeks burning red and his eyes sullen. He deigned not to reply, but the angry submission in his eyes was answer enough. Head down, he stalked out of the room, followed closely by Polly Heathrow. Quincy Ogden, still swaying on his feet, bumped the doorframe with his shoulder as he ambled along after.
Odin-Vann hunkered down in front of James, pocketing his wand. “Feeling a bit more put together, are you?”
“A bit,” James admitted. “Thanks for handling those three for us.”
“Hush,” Odin-Vann said, glancing back toward the door. “Nary a word. T
hey had it coming, meddling in a first-time Disapparation.
Things might have turned out much worse. Don’t let it rattle you.”
“What was that spell you used, Professor?” Rose asked, sighing and plopping to the floor next to James. “I’ve never heard of a Priori Invortu incantation.”
Odin-Vann glanced at her, then down at his own wand again.
“It’s a… proprietary spell of my own devising,” he answered vaguely. “It simply reads another wand’s most recent spell and automatically performs a counter-spell, if one exists.”
Ralph leaned against the nearby desks and frowned. “So since first-time Apparators usually use their wands to help make the magic happen, your wand was able to undo James’ attempt using a… what?”
Odin-Vann shrugged and pushed his wand into a pocket of his robes. “Couldn’t tell you, precisely. Not because I don’t know, but because the process is purely automatic. I’ve been programming counter-spells and anti-jinxes into my wand for months now, but tonight, I admit, was my first chance to really test it out. If I had to guess, I’d say it probably used a modified lanyard charm to retrieve James’ doubled form and undo his interrupted Apparation.” He seemed both quietly proud of this, and carefully evasive, as if he deeply wanted to talk more about it, but felt the need to protect his methods. Perhaps he didn’t want to reveal too much until the process was perfected.
“I’m just glad it worked,” James said, giving his head a firm shake, as if to clear his mind.
“One of you should probably follow our new friends,” Odin-Vann said, glancing aside at Rose and Ralph. “Just to assure that they abide by my command and return directly to their dormitory. An evening with their thoughts should suffice in convincing them to keep their mouths shut, but if they should meet anyone in the halls tonight, their anger may still get the better of them.”
Ralph nodded, pushing away from the desk. “I’ll do it. They have to listen to me, at least.” He tapped the badge on his chest and shrugged. “See you lot tomorrow. And let’s not do this again sometime.”
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 21
