Behind James and Odin-Vann, the canyon of ice wrenched, heaved, and gave a huge, splintering crack. Water boiled up, surged into the troughs of the frozen waves. James turned to look back, still stumbling in Odin-Vann’s wiry grip.
The Gwyndemere was breaking free into a field of shattered ice, even as figures on the deck attempted to climb down, to chase James and Odin-Vann. As he watched, the ship sloshed to starboard, cracking away from its icy bed, cutting off any pursuit.
Petra couldn’t maintain the ice spell. She had used the last reserve of her strength to force Judith away from the ship, to save those aboard. That, at least, seemed to have worked, if only for the time being.
The ice rumbled beneath James’ stumbling feet. Odin-Vann nearly fell, but maintained his fistful of James’ shirt, jerking him forward, into the howl of a dark ice valley.
Petra was there, facing Judith across the gully. Their magic lit the shimmering walls, reflected deep in the ice like prisms. Petra was backing away clumsily, shielding herself but no longer launching any attacks of her own.
Judith was like a dynamo. She flung jets of blinding light first from one hand, then the other, striding forward, still grinning, propelling Petra ever back, back, until there was nowhere left to go.
James cried out to her, but Odin-Vann yanked him forward, threw him down onto the wet ice, and kicked him in the side.
“How does it feel?” the young man seethed. “Being the weak one? Being the one about to be beaten!?”
“Stop!” Petra screamed, turning from Judith to Odin-Vann.
The moment her attention failed, however, Judith lashed out with her ice-tentacle arms. She slammed Petra backwards violently, bashing her against the slope of a massive, frozen wave. The water wraith raised her club-like arms and beat Petra again, and again, until she no longer attempted to rise. Petra fell back, her hair plastered to her forehead, dangling in wet ribbons. Her pale face and arms were the only things visible in the gloom.
“Use the boy’s wand,” Judith said, speaking to Odin-Vann but not taking her eyes from the prone form of Petra. “Let it be his last thought before the water swallows them both.”
“Nuh—!” James began, but Odin-Vann kicked him again, hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. The young man was like a person possessed, maddened and blinded with poison avarice. He strode forward, raising James’ wand in his hand, sighting down it.
James tried to get up, to lunge forward and throw himself upon the crazed man. But his arms shivered with frailty. He could scarcely push himself up onto his elbows, barely lift his head to watch. He was feeling Petra’s deathly exhaustion, sharing it with her. And yet, even now, the cord between them thrummed, invisible but potent, making them one.
“It may be difficult for you,” Judith said, her own voice rasping with greed. She raised her chin and took a step back. “But Petra has nothing left to live for anyway. Regardless of what she says, she desires this. She wishes to die here, to sink to the depths, to be claimed by defeat. It’s what fate demands. Do it. Save her from herself.”
Rain poured into the frozen ocean wasteland. The storm raged, still strengthening. Thunder shook the ice beneath James. Water bubbled up through spreading cracks.
Odin-Vann’s fist trembled as he stretched James’ wand out toward Petra, sighted carefully down it. But even from his position on the ice, watching helpless from ten paces away, James saw that it wasn’t regret that made the young man’s arm quiver. It was anticipation. He was finally living the fantasy that he had harbored for so many years, to overpower and destroy those who opposed him. Petra had been his confidante, his one solace. But in the end she was merely an obstacle to true power. He would kill her and marvel at the feeling of it—of taking the life of a young woman that he had once called a friend—simply as payment to become Judith’s new host, for the immense power that his petty, broken mind had craved for so long.
Petra began to get up. It was a struggle. James could feel it, broadcast to him through the invisible cord.
“Don,” she said, and raised a hand to him, as if asking for his help.
“Avada Kedavra,” he barked, hoarsely, seeming almost to relish each syllable.
James’ wand burst green. The bolt spat, sharp as a needle, flashed the canyons of ice and curtains of rain into unearthly emerald daylight.
The spell struck Petra just below her throat. It blasted her back down again, slamming her against the ice hard enough to make her head jolt, her damp hair to flail and fall over her open, knowing eyes. The hand she had raised recoiled across her chest, and then flopped down to her side, where it lay suddenly still, horribly still.
She was dead.
James could feel it. The cord was still there between them, connecting them hand to hand, soul to soul, but in that instant her length had gone completely, finally dark.
James screamed. The sound was bestial, utterly bereft, empty of words. He drained his lungs completely and then seemed unable to draw another breath. His chest was locked tight, clenched with shock, and loss, and horror. He no longer noticed Odin-Vann as he took James’ wand in both hands, broke it, and tossed it away. He barely even noticed as Judith approached Petra’s dead body, reached down, and plucked the moonstone brooch from her jumper, smiling at it in her hand before pinning it to her own robe, claiming it as a trophy of smug triumph.
How is this possible, James’ mind raged. Petra had a Horcrux!
Only she didn’t, of course. Not in this timeline. She had travelled back to her previous self, but the dark magic of the Horcrux had not accompanied her. Here, she hadn’t yet created it.
And now she never would.
Together, the two murderers strode away into the darkness, the goddess of chaos with her new human host, leaving Petra’s last sorceress spell to crack and heave apart behind them, melting away, soon to drop her corpse to the depths, claimed by the very waves that she and James had once cheated.
And James would soon follow. Just one more casualty at sea, lost forever to the deep.
But he no longer felt weak. With Petra no longer summoning from the power that he had collected for her, his own strength returned.
In the wake of everything, this felt like a mockery. A dark insult.
He sat up in the lowering gloom, even as the ice cracked all around and water sloshed past him. He raised his hand, looked at it.
The ribbon was visible as a moon-colored glow, no longer tainted with any trace of crimson. The thread wafted back toward Petra’s body.
Her power, her very essence, was still in him, banked away, albeit useless.
But… how was that possible?
Somehow, through some enchantment that he barely understood, he had served as a battery for her. He had used her stored power himself on occasion. And she had drawn it from him, right up until the very end, via the cord that bound them.
After all, Petra’s power was the city. There were no cities here, in the middle of the ocean. Here, she had been at her weakest.
But James had been to many, many cities since he and Petra had become bound together. He had been to New York and New Amsterdam. London and Philadelphia. He had spent weeks with Charlie in Brasov, and nearly a month’s holiday in Cairo with his parents. As he thought back, even now, he could count them, city after city. Dozens of them. Their power had stored up inside him, growing greater by the hour, nearly limitless, all banked away…
And all ultimately unused.
Because there was only so much power that Petra could siphon off through the invisible thread between them. He had hoarded it, unwittingly, unable to plumb its depths himself, but neither releasing it to Petra.
Because, simply put, he had refused to let her go.
Let me go, James, she had asked him, begged him, four years earlier.
But he couldn’t. He’d held onto her instead, divided her power between them, because he couldn’t bear to give her up.
He pushed to his feet, steadied himself on the shifting icy surface. The storm ra
ged all around, battered him with blasts of wind and pelting rain, dragged hungrily at him. He didn’t feel any of it.
He moved to Petra’s body, sat down next to her, and took her hand. It was cold. He wanted to cry over her, to pay with tears for the loss, but somehow he couldn’t. His grief felt beyond even tears.
The frozen ocean cracked and broke around him. He felt the remaining floe lower and heave over the waves.
“I’m sorry, Petra,” he said, holding onto her cold hand. “It’s probably too late now. But I’m finally doing it. I’m doing what you asked. I’m letting you go.”
He closed his eyes and focused his inward senses on the clasp of their hands. He located the point where his palm stemmed power into hers, binding them together, connecting them ever since that fateful moment on the back of the Gwyndemere.
Let me go James…
He did. He let her go.
The release of her power was a palpable sensation. It streamed out of him first like a ribbon of soft wind, and then like a stream of water, and then increasing to something like a rushing river.
It began to hurt, to strain like muscles flexed past their limit.
But there was also a dizzyingly sense of release, like putting down a massive burden that one had forgotten they were even carrying. And still the power flowed out of him, faster and harder, growing to titanic force, like every waterfall in the world forced through a James-sized hose.
His body trembled. He shivered from head to toe, so hard that his eyes seemed to vibrate in their sockets. He tried to breath, but his throat was locked tight. His fingers curled into helpless fists. His right squeezed Petra’s cold hand, his left dug fingernails into the flesh of his palm.
Days and weeks and months of stored energy roared out of him, every moment that he had spent in the many metropolises, soaking in their webs of light and noise, their hives of human interconnectedness.
The surge grew to a blur of colour, of honking horns, and roaring crowds, and steaming vents, and rushing traffic…
And then, with a spasm like a breath gasped only a split second before drowning, James recoiled backwards, limp and exhausted, his heart broken with loss, but his mind and body blissful with relief.
And in the darkness, wet and slick with rain, Petra’s hand warmed. He assumed it was only the heat of their clasped fingers, and the surge of her released power.
But then he gasped.
As her fingers squeezed his.
26. – the Shackle of the brooch
James jerked his head to look down at her. Her eyes opened, but they were changed. They were pure white, glimmering and flashing like diamonds before a winter sun. She did not look at him, but her hand continued to grip his, to squeeze avidly, as if trying to communicate through touch alone.
A warm wind rose up around her, spinning into a soft cyclone, drying her wet hair and clothes, lifting her up to her feet, and then raising her into the air.
James let go of her hand as she arose, straightening, her features firming into a taut expression of severe calm. She raised her hands, held them out at her sides, palms open, fingers spread. She was summoning and controlling the hot wind, using it to repel the viciousness of the storm. Light accompanied her, pale as moonbeams, coalescing in waves around her form and building like a halo.
With a subtle sweep of her hand, she extended the force to James. He leaned, swayed as the air rushed around him, cocooned him in a tempest of warmth, and lifted him away from the sinking ice.
Petra’s power was surging still, increasing, building like a whine in the air, a thrum underfoot, a pulse that seemed to penetrate into the very ocean depths below.
And yet James felt no siphoning of strength from his own inner core. The cord no longer connected them. He had let go of Petra, given it all to her, poured into her the entirety of all that he had stored for her.
And now she was using every last ounce of it.
He arose alongside her, bathed in her power. He found that he was afraid to speak to her, worried that he might somehow break whatever strange enchantment had brought her back. It was Petra, and yet, in some indefinable way, even beyond the unearthly glitter of her eyes, she was changed.
Together they scanned the dark, storm-swept ocean all around.
The spell of ice was shattering into choked shards now. Floating ice fields rode the waves once again. Lightning stabbed down in staccato strobes. In the middle distance, the Gwyndemere floundered before the gale.
And approaching it, walking atop the water alongside her human host, herself transformed into a giantess of ice and water, swollen with purpose and drunken with triumph, the Lady of the Lake stalked, reaching forward, ready to crush the ship and all aboard it like a broken toy.
Petra saw her, narrowed her flashing diamond eyes, and surged forward through the air, supported on her cyclone of warmth, taking James alongside her.
The ocean sped away beneath them. The peaks of the waves reached for them, but never touched them, or even so much as cooled them with mist at their passage.
Odin-Vann was like a child next to Judith’s bloated form, stumbling uncertainly atop the waves, his robes and hair battered by wind and rain. Ignoring him, Judith stalked forward, made of the ocean and drawing it up into herself, feeding from its power to grow to behemoth proportions, intending not only to kill, but to terrify first.
Petra did not slow to confront Judith. Instead, she raised her fists and blasted through the hulking figure at shoulder level, plunging into her back and bursting from her engorged sternum, emerging fully dry on the other side even as the water demoness half-collapsed, cascading over Odin-Vann, who fell into the waves, spluttering.
Judith roared and rebuilt her form, sucking dense green ocean back into herself and bulging even larger and more terrible.
“How are you here?” she bellowed in rage and surprise.
She reached with tentacles like freight trains, groping for Petra and James where they floated in their personal typhoon of light and warmth.
Petra’s voice boomed over the thunder. “Be still and resume the form that granted you entry into this world!”
The tentacle arms fell away, breaking into rushing torrents of loose water and crashing to the waves below. The behemoth herself shrank and writhed, mounting an agony of resistance, but seemingly unable to disobey. She screamed and twisted in on herself, constricting into a shape like a hundred tentacles, bound into a thrashing, tightening knot. And then, the tentacles obliterated into spray and Judith herself emerged from their centre, soaked and streaming, her robes dense with icy water, her hair hanging in sopping, coppery streamers around her face.
She dragged up into the air, captured in the iron grip of Petra’s implacable power, thrashing and screaming, her face contorted into a rictus of affronted hate, apparently robbed of words.
Petra lifted the Lady of the Lake before her, suspended her with a barely raised right hand and a calm glare, until they were eye to hateful eye, ten feet apart. Judith spat and hissed, twisting like a snake, snapping her body in enraged convulsions.
“Come, Donofrio,” Petra said, and lowered her left hand. With a slow flick of her wrist, he lofted up from the waves to join them, gasping and cascading torrents of water. He arose alongside Judith, and James saw that his eyes were utterly terrified. His throat constricted rhythmically, as if he was trying to scream but couldn’t summon the breath.
James did not pity him. The horrible, deluded little man deserved no remorse. And still James found himself turning aside to Petra.
“Don’t kill him, Petra,” he said, and found that his own voice resonated like thunder over the storm and waves. “He may deserve to die. But you don’t deserve to kill.”
Petra looked askance at him, blinked at him with her inscrutable shining eyes. Judith and Odin-Vann twisted and writhed in the force of her effortless power. And still James saw the intent on her face, even as she seemed to reconsider, if only for a moment.
Judith screamed,
roared, clawed with her hands. Her hair whipped and flailed about her head, stuck to her face in clumps.
And James saw Petra’s face harden again. Slowly, she turned back to the pair suspended before them.
Her gaze swept from Odin-Vann to Judith, then focused on Judith’s wet robes. They were dark, as always. But something glimmered softly beneath her left shoulder. It was the brooch. Its pearlescent moonstone flickered with the lightning, shimmered in the reflected glow of Petra’s swirling power.
With a flick of one finger, Petra caused the brooch to pluck from Judith’s robes. The demoness shrieked and swiped at it, clumsily, unable to reach. Behind the brooch, a ribbon of pale light streamed, connecting back to its origin on Judith’s breast, a tentacle of intent.
Deftly, Petra maneuvered the brooch between them. It turned gently in the air like a ballerina, its moonstone shining, its silver scrollwork flashing with lightning.
But Petra did not take it back.
Instead, she returned her gaze to Odin-Vann. The brooch lofted toward him at her direction, still trailing its streamer of strength.
His eyes bulged. He gawped with his mouth, but managed only choked gasps. His Adam’s apple jerked up and down in the stubbly stalk of his neck.
His robes stretched across his shoulders, and then tore open, revealing his heaving, skinny chest. James watched, equally curious and horrified, as Petra used her powers, her innate understanding of the human body, to open his skin like that of an orange, to peel back the muscle, and lay bare the white cage of living ribs beneath. Odin-Vann looked down at himself and screamed. It was not a scream of pain, James understood, but of abject terror. His own body was flaying open before him. His breath came in hyperventilating gusts, each plainly visible as a spastic expand and contract of his ribs, a shuddering bulge of the pulpy lungs beneath.
James glanced at Petra, afraid but speechless. Was she slowly killing the awful little man? Torturing him as she did so? She seemed to be studying Odin-Vann’s open chest, squinting with clinical intent. She manipulated the fingers of her left hand.
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 63
