James suddenly wavered on his feet as a bolt of blinding blue shot over his shoulder, emanating from Petra’s raised right hand. She had launched an attack, but not at the giant. Taking advantage of the distraction, she had aimed at the headmaster. The assault drove him backwards with violent force. He struck the dais hard enough to break it, cratering the ruin of the head table, right in the very shadow of the giant. The giant, panicked, reached for the prone human figure at its feet. Its massive hand closed over Merlin and pulled him from the destruction, along with a fistful of broken table.
Merlin’s staff flashed and the giant recoiled, snapping its fingers open again. Merlin tumbled, fell, and arrested his momentum in midair, floating, his arms wide, his eyes glowing with fierce golden light.
But Petra was already advancing, redoubling her attack with merciless intensity. She launched another barrage even as the headmaster arrested his fall. The blast struck him in the chest and bashed him backwards, past the invading giant, through the ruin of the rose window, and into the flaming night beyond.
James’ knees trembled as inexplicable weakness overtook him, making the world fade to grey. He remembered the same feeling when Petra and Merlin had battled in the World Between the Worlds.
Somehow, James was like a battery in Petra’s presence, holding a reserve of her power. She siphoned it from him through the invisible cord that connected them, just as he had siphoned it from her during the debacle of the Morrigan Web, right in this hall, and years before that, when he had first conjured the cord of her power to save her very life.
He staggered in the smoky dark, his head spinning.
Petra strode forward purposefully, climbing the dais and raising one hand to the giant without even looking. The giant blinked, tottered, and crunched to its gigantic rump on the ruin of the table. Its head dipped to its chest and the huge creature snorted a massive, grating snore, even as its bare feet, as large and hard as crypt doors, slid forward, grating on broken glass.
“Petra!” James shouted, clambering forward in her wake. “Petra, wait!”
“I can’t wait, James!” she exclaimed back at him, halting and glancing over her shoulder. “My time here is done! This world is in chaos, and it’s all my fault! You can’t stop me, James! No one can be allowed to stop me!” Her face was terrible in the darkness, illuminated only by the writhing fiendfyre beyond the destroyed window. But her eyes shimmered, and James saw that there were tears in them. She was afraid, and she was driven by guilt, and she didn’t want to leave, and she knew that she had no other choice.
“Don’t follow me, James!” she demanded, firming her gaze, her voice hoarse and desperate. “I can’t be responsible for what happens to you if you do!”
With that, she turned swiftly, leaving him behind and striding out through the broken window, where she was obscured by a pall of smoke.
James struggled over the broken table, his feet slipping on broken glass and destroyed stonework. When he finally climbed over the giant’s feet and the ledge of the decimated window, he could see nothing but smoking lawn and roaring flames beyond. He jumped to the bushes, tumbled to the dry grass, and cast about in all directions, looking for any sign of Petra, squinting against the blinding fire.
A figure appeared in the wall of flames, striding forward through them, untouched. James stumbled toward the shape, shielding his own face from the heat. When the figure resolved, stepping out onto the lawn and marching back toward the broken window, James saw that it was Merlin.
The headmaster was bleeding and disheveled, his robes smoking, but his face was stony with resolve.
“All able-bodied warriors,” he said as he walked, and his voice suddenly boomed, shaking the air and waking echoes all around. “Seal the students in their dormitories where they will be unharmed by those invading. Then, come to me in the entrance hall. The end of our world is upon us if we are not swift and committed to our duty. The villainess has escaped, but we shall track her. I shall summon those who can best assist us, Aurors and harriers alike. Come now and be ready to kill or be killed, for this is our final moment.”
He made to pass James, not even looking down at him.
“Headmaster,” James gasped, turning to catch up to him.
“Merlin!”
“She has captured the brooch,” Merlin said in a low, grave voice.
He stopped but did not turn back. “Nothing stands in her way now.
The Architect has done his work. And the Ransom shall soon do his.
You should have told me what you knew while it yet mattered.”
James had no answer for that. He looked up at the headmaster’s broad back, speechless, wounded, and afraid.
Merlin still did not look back at him. Instead, he tapped his staff to the ground and vanished in a crack of disapparation, leaving only stormy wind, lightning, and roaring fiendfyre in his wake.
A sense of deep, stunning loss filled James like lead. He stared at the space where Merlin had stood only moments before. His mind reeled, stymied with uncertainty.
Merlin would track Petra, he and any others prepared to accompany him. McGonagall would be among them, as would Debellows and Heretofore and any number of other teachers. Perhaps even his father and Viktor Krum and the rest of the Aurors and harriers, if they could be roused in time. James thought it very likely. They would leave the students locked and shielded in their dormitories, trusting that the centaurs would honour their word and not attack unless attacked first.
Merlin and those with him would abandon Hogwarts in pursuit of Petra, since she, they believed, was the cause and source of the chaos that had befallen the world. They would find her and go to war with her. She would kill them all, or they would succeed in cutting her down.
If Judith and Odin-Vann didn’t succeed in that endeavor first.
It was just like James’ dream, years earlier. They were coming to destroy Petra, and they wouldn’t waste time on words.
And with that, a sense of preternatural calm settled over James.
Because he knew exactly what he had to do. After all, he had already done it, in a manner of speaking. He had lived it once already, five years earlier, in that strange and prophetic vision.
He closed his eyes and imagined it, summoned every recollection of that long-ago dream. He remembered a freshly dug grave. He remembered Albus offering the young woman, Petra, his wand. It was necessary, James now understood. For Petra no longer had a wand of her own, having broken and abandoned hers years earlier. Sorceresses used their bare hands to perform magic. Unless, that was, they needed to cast a particularly unique spell that relied on a wand.
A spell like the Dark Mark.
Because Petra had stopped resisting the evil of the Bloodline.
She was channeling it, using it, tapping into the conviction and resolve that only the last shred of Voldemort could provide. And now, tonight, she would finally embrace it. She would fire the Dark Mark into the sky over the cemetery—was probably doing so at this very moment, announcing her final, damning choice.
Whatever terrible evil that such a choice entailed.
James squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He envisioned the cemetery; his grandparents’ leaning headstones; the freshly dug grave like a blot of ink under the stormy dark. He focused, firmed his grip on his wand, drew a deep breath, held it…
And flexed the mental muscle of disapparation.
With a hard crack, he vanished, just as Merlin had done moments before.
Neither would return to the same Hogwarts ever again.
24. – The blood of dearest love
Somehow, amazingly, James sensed the presence of the Dark Mark in the split-instant even before he reapparated. The spell was an emerald chill in the void, like the depths of a moss-choked well. He passed through it somehow as the world resolved around him, depositing him onto a wind-scoured hilltop, beneath the hulking sprawl of a dead tree. He faltered and fell, never yet having apparated such a distance, and unaccustomed to the stra
nge inertia of it. Dry grass collected him, blew and whipped about his face, but he scrambled to his hands and knees immediately, disoriented yet breathless with panic. There was no time left. It was probably too late already. He looked around wildly, trying to make sense of his surroundings.
The moon still glowed here, pale yellow on the horizon, unobstructed by the imminent storm. Next to James, the dead tree reached out of the earth, gnarled and twisted, like a giant arthritic hand with a hundred fingers.
Beyond this, just visible in the pale moonlight, sprawled a very old cemetery. Its headstones leaned like rotten teeth, embraced within the confines of a weed-choked iron fence. A decorative arch marked the entrance. Above this, still rising against the approaching storm clouds, was the ghastly huge skull, phantasmic and terrible, of the Dark Mark.
Its jaw was unhinged, open in a silent scream. From the gaping mouth, a spectral snake poured out, uncoiling, opening its own fanged jaws in a vicious hiss.
“No!” James barked, but his voice came as barely a dry husk, lost in the buffet of the wind. Using the ancient dead tree for support, he blundered to his feet and pelted down the hill, under the crooked arch of the gate, and into the ranks and rows of old headstones.
He heard voices, indistinct on the wind. And then he saw them.
Albus and Petra stood on a low rise, in the corner of the marching fence, their shoulders and heads illuminated from above by the eerie green light of the Dark Mark. Near their feet was an open grave, next to a neat pile of fresh earth.
“Stop!” James shouted desperately, flinging out a hand to them, forgetting that his wand was still gripped in it. It would look like a pose of attack. “Both of you! I know what you think you have to do, but it doesn’t have to be this way! Albus, don’t let it end like this!”
Albus saw him, heard him, but ignored his brother. Even from this distance, James could see the expression of scowling resolve on his brother’s face—the expression that he’d worn almost exclusively over the past few weeks, silent and sullen as he haunted the Slytherin table in the Great Hall and the edges of the corridors, lost in his own dark musings.
It wasn’t simply that he was brokenhearted about his break up with Chance Jackson. James saw it now for what it was. His brother had been steeling himself up for something, preparing for some horrible duty that he believed was his alone to bear. Had Odin-Vann told him even before he’d told Petra? Had he exploited Albus’ natural inner darkness, preyed on his teenage melodrama?
Either way, Albus was the Ransom, ready to give up everything for the sake of the whole world.
Across the shadowy, wind-blown distance, Albus turned aside to Petra. She had his wand in her hand. Slowly, reluctantly, she leveled it at him.
“Do it,” Albus insisted calmly, his voice thin and small, carried on the wind.
“No!” James exclaimed, as loudly as he could. He ran forward, but stopped again as Petra looked at him, her eyes bright and intent, but clouded with blind determination. She would indeed do it, James saw.
He halted again, holding both hands up now, raised in a warning gesture. “The rest are coming!” he heard himself cry out, “and they won’t waste time on words! We only have a few seconds!” He switched his gaze to his brother. “Albus, don’t be a fool!”
“I’m sorry,” Albus muttered. He wasn’t speaking to James, or even to Petra. He almost seemed to be speaking to the nearby graves, as if he was disappointing them somehow. He turned and nodded his assent to Petra.
“Petra!” James yelled frantically, and started forward again, coming with thirty feet of the pair. The storm was blowing in with eerie speed, reaching to blot the moon behind a great, creeping wing of clouds. Wind whipped the grass and rattled the tree branches. “Please don’t! This isn’t who you really are!”
“You’re right, James,” Petra said, her eyes going cold, dead with resolve as she turned to him. Along with her gaze, the wand in her hand swiveled as well, swinging away from Albus, coming around to point at him instead, moving with slow, unmistakable purpose. “As of tonight, I will be known by an entirely different name. I am Morgan now. And since you came after all, despite all of my warnings, I’m afraid it must be you who will die for my cause. Brave Albus was your willing substitute, your surrogate. For his blood is your blood, and therefore able to satisfy the dark magic of the dimensional portal. But now… you are here. And I can’t deny what fate demands.” Tears fell down her cheeks, but her gaze didn’t waver, nor did the wand in her hand. “I’m so, so sorry, my love.”
“No!” Albus cried, and lunged with both hands, even as Petra’s face crumpled and the wand in her hand exploded with vivid green light.
James felt the power of the spell as it blasted toward him, illuminating the graveyard, spraying inky shadows in a radius behind each and every headstone, every individual blade of grass. The killing curse arced across the distance between them and James watched it come, as if time had become plastic, allowing him to stretch his final instant into patient infinity. He saw Albus’ hands on Petra’s wrist, saw the tears wet on her cheeks, her mouth pulled into a frown of wretchedness, her eyes squeezed shut, unable to watch.
And James thought, it’s OK. I’m glad to be the one to serve Petra.Even if it means my death. Even if she’s wrong, and killing me won’t make a dimensional portal, as Odin-Vann surely told her. At least it means that Albus doesn’t have to be the Ransom. She tried to save me. She loved me by sending me away. But it was always supposed to be me here in the graveyard with her, not Albus. If dying is serving her, even if it’s based on a lie and a mistake… then I’m glad to do it.
The killing spell struck and exploded. James felt a spray of grit pepper his face and hair, faltered backward a step with the force of the blast, and then felt himself fall backwards, almost gently, landing in a drift of heather and weeds. And yet, even as he stared up at the terrible glow of the Dark Mark, he sensed that he was not dead, or even particularly hurt. Dazed, he pushed up onto his elbows and raised his head. Directly ahead of him, a headstone tottered, crumbled, and fell apart, still fuming with green sparks. Albus’ intervention had been just enough to spoil Petra’s aim, sending the killing curse into the gravestone instead of James’ chest.
And then, in the breathless silence that followed, chaos broke out all around the cemetery.
A sequence of piercing cracks echoed from every direction and figures apparated into place, surrounding the cemetery and moving immediately into defensive positions. They hunkered behind trees, crouched behind tombstones and mausoleums. There were six of them, and then ten, and then more than a dozen.
“Ware!” a deep voice, Merlin, exclaimed from the darkness near the dead tree. “A killing curse has been fired!”
“Waste no time on Stunning,” another voice commanded.
James had a terrible intuition that this was his father. “But be sure at whom you aim! Innocent people may be present!”
A woman’s voice cried, “I see her! Northeast corner!”
Spells exploded across the graveyard, illuminating it in deadly firework colours.
Albus reached for Petra, but she darted away from him, approaching James at a frantic run. He cringed away from her in sudden fear, but she dropped the wand as she came, running between sizzling bolts of light. As she reached him, she tumbled to her knees and fell upon him.
“You’re alive!” she gasped, and moaned with fear, and hugged him to her.
“Yeah,” he said weakly against her shoulder. “Sorry about that.”
“No!” she said, and squeezed him harder. “I let Albus ruin my aim. I didn’t have the strength to do what I must! I’ve failed everything!
It’s all my fault!”
He hugged her back, and she seemed to go limp in his arms, either with relief or hopelessness. He supposed, under the circumstances, that they might both be the same thing.
“Odin-Vann lied to you,” he said—or at least began to. Halfway through the sentence, a streak of orange light
struck a nearby obelisk, destroying its base. It crumbled, broke away, and began to topple.
James saw its looming shadow in the instant before it struck. With every ounce of his strength, he pushed Petra, throwing her away from him and out of the obelisk’s path. It struck him on the shoulder, crushed him down beneath it so hard and fast that he barely even felt it. Darkness plummeted over him, but not the darkness of unconsciousness. He was mashed into the weeds and heather, face down, his upper body suddenly pinned beneath a monstrous, cold weight, as if a giant was standing on his shoulders.
“James!” Petra screamed, her voice brittle with horror and fear, but the sound was distant, strangely unimportant, like a thing heard on a wireless in someone else’s house. Still, some deep, buried part of James’ mind hated to hear Petra upset. He tried to call out to her, to tell her it was all right. But no breath came to his crushed lungs. When he opened his mouth, only blood came out, hot and sticky, tasting like copper.
He knew, with only vague interest, that he was probably dying, crushed under the fallen monument.
But then, blissfully and suddenly, the weight was gone. His chest spasmed, gasped for air, and pain came instead. He felt the splintering grind of his ribs, sensed tearing as the broken bones punctured things deep inside his body.
“No!” Petra screamed, this time with low, furious emphasis.
There was a rush of terrible wind. A sound like shattering crockery. And then, a series of whumps, thumps, crashes, and distant cries.
“Minerva!” a voice bellowed.
“Hardcastle is down!” a woman called breathlessly.
“Fall back!” His father’s voice, panicked and desperate.
James felt himself lifted from the ground, gently, and yet another pall of pain wracked his body.
Blearily, he sensed movement all around. Large, heavy objects whirled around the cemetery like a cyclone, bashing through trees, clanging from the broken fence. They were tombstones, monuments, mausoleum doors, iron gates, all wrenched loose and powered by Petra’s vengeful will, forming an impassable maelstrom.
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 59
