James Potter and the Crimson Thread Read online

  That night, for the first time in months, James dreamed of Petra.

  He heard her voice through a fog of what felt like great time and distance. He couldn’t make out her words, but the tenor and lilt of her voice was unmistakable. It awoke in him the unguarded truth, irresistible and implacable in the uncomplicated core of his sleeping heart: he loved Petra. He had loved her for years, despite rarely seeing her, despite the complexities of her mysterious past and her uncertain future, despite even the doubt that sometimes haunted his waking mind.

  He loved her with the sort of hopeless, unabashed devotion that surpassed reason and intellect and shot straight to the bright solar centre of his heart, charging and dominating it like a permanent lightning bolt.

  Petra owned and occupied his deepest love. He could pretend otherwise while awake. But here, in the depths of the dream, the truth was an iron weight, heavier than the world.

  He approached her through the fog, tuning her in, following the silver and crimson cord that bound them, and her voice began to clear.

  There was another voice as well—a man’s voice? Was it the Muggle private detective she had partnered with back during the intrigue of the Morrigan Web? James thought not. Marshall Parris was an American.

  This voice was British, and a bit younger. James recognized it, but only vaguely.

  Gradually, their voices became clearer, closer, although still hidden behind great heaving masses of fog. James propelled himself onward, whumping through the cold greyness.

  “I won’t dissuade you,” the man’s voice said, still thin with distance. “In fact, you’ll recall that it was my idea, almost two years ago, when you found me again.”

  “I do recall,” Petra said. “But I dismissed the idea as your usual foolhardy blathering. You’ve always tended to be a bit emotional and thoughtless when it comes to protecting me.”

  The man seemed unperturbed by this. “So what’s changed?”

  “What you suggested thoughtlessly, I’ve given serious consideration.”

  James pressed on, and finally the fog broke into tatters. Silver-frosted clouds stretched around him like arms, blocking the moon, casting shadows over a dark landscape: a small town with only a scattering of glowing windows, a scarcity of lit streetlamps. And then, past this, a huge building on a hill, encroached on all sides by forest and bramble, almost claimed by creeping vines and tangled roots. It was a mansion, though very old and utterly dark except for a single upper window, which flickered with the faintest suggestion of light. James approached it, slowing, listening, wanting nothing more than to hear Petra’s voice again, to see her, even if it was all merely a figment of his sleeping mind.

  “You have what you need,” the man’s voice said. “What do you require me for?”

  “No one grasps the underlying magic and spellwork like you do,”

  Petra said. “It’s your particular genius to understand the magic behind the wand.”

  The man’s voice, even more familiar now, seemed to smile doubtfully. “Petra, your visit to the Armory of Forbidden Books provided you everything you need to know regarding ‘the underlying magic and spellwork’.”

  “Then maybe I just need a friend,” Petra sighed. “Someone who’s known me long enough to tell the truth. Someone impartial enough to see my real intentions. You know why I’m doing this, don’t you?”

  James slowed as he neared the window. His dreaming mind rippled through the old glass without a sound. He entered a dark room with nothing but a small fire illuminating it, guttering and spitting in the hearth. The rug, as James’ bare feet touched it, was greasy and threadbare with age. The walls were filthy, cracked, leaning. James brushed them and his fingers came away thick with damp grime. The only furniture in the room was a pair of high-back chairs, facing the fire.

  Between them, sitting close to the light of the flames, collecting their glow and glinting brightly, was a silver tray.

  Something sat on the tray. Not a cup or saucer. A butter knife?

  James drew closer, not sure he wanted to see. Mostly, he just wanted to approach Petra, to look upon her face, to see the glimmer of her eyes and the dark lustre of her hair. He missed her. His heart burned for her.

  “You’re doing it because the world needs you,” the man said soberly. “But the world doesn’t know it. The world wants to stop you, by whatever means necessary, even if it means killing you. They blame you for everything.”

  Petra sighed deeply. “They may not be entirely wrong in doing so.”

  “That’s beside the point,” the man went on. “Even if you are the problem, you are also the solution. They cannot be allowed to stop you.

  For the good of all, both the Muggle and magical worlds, you must survive. Your life is more than yours. It belongs to the world. To the universe. No matter what, you… must… survive.”

  James occupied the deep shadows of the room, creeping closer.

  He could see the top of Petra’s head over the back of her chair now.

  The firelight flickered on it like burnished bronze.

  “I must survive,” she repeated the words with mingled regret and resolve. “So, even though we are here, in the house of the one whose bloodline I am cursed with, even though I am willingly calling on his power now instead of thwarting it, as I’ve struggled to do at every step so far…”

  “He did this for his own selfish aims, for power and destruction.

  You do it for the good of the world.”

  In the darkness, James blinked, as if coming fully awake in his own dream. What was happening here? Swiftly, he replayed the conversation he’d been barely hearing, having been too enthralled by the sound of Petra’s very voice to attend to her words. He glanced around at the room he was in. The smell of mold and rot filled his nose. What was this place? What had she just called it? The house of the one whose bloodline she is cursed with…?

  James suddenly understood, knew with the unshakable certainty of the dream: this was the mansion of Tom Riddle’s father, long abandoned, overgrown, and falling to rot.

  He looked down, toward the silver tray that glimmered in the firelight. Upon it was a dagger, its handle encrusted with jewels, its blade dark and sooty, tarnished almost black. He recognized it immediately.

  It was the dagger that had killed Morgan, the Petra from another dimension, wielded in the hand of Judith as part of her chaotic plan.

  How had Petra gotten it? More importantly, why?

  Fear and horrible suspicion suddenly welled in James, and yet he crept forward still. It’s just a dream, he told himself. I’m only dreaming… none of this is real…

  Petra finally came into sight as she leaned forward, reaching for the dagger, collecting it into her thin hands. She cradled it in the firelight, her eyes wide, bright as she looked down at it. She drew a deep breath and shuddered as she let it out. Without raising her gaze from the dagger, she began to speak to it. As she did, James’ eyes widened in horror. The fire responded to her words, first growing restless in the hearth, and then flaring with bursts of hungry green, almost seeming to breathe. As Petra reached the end of her recitation, wind entered the room, coming from nowhere and everywhere, lifting the limp curtains, carrying dust and grit into the dank air, moaning throughout the dim, empty rooms of the decrepit mansion.

  James could scarcely believe the words that came from his beloved’s lips, spoken with slow, undeniable emphasis:

  “Extinguished soul’s essence risen,

  “Final breath from murdered host,

  “Enter now, this, your prison,

  “Slave to my fragmented ghost.”

  Petra held the dagger higher, her voice rising even as the rushing air combined with the flames of the hearth, carrying them around the room and illuminating it with green fire. She ignored this, her voice becoming a low boom through the growing tempest.

  “If I should die before I take,

  “The course of my intent design,

  “Then from this prison reawak
e,

  “Immortal now… my dread Bloodline!”

  Petra’s voice became thunder, not shouting, but amplified over the sudden cyclone of wind and fire that burst throughout the room, lighting it, tearing at the ancient wallpaper, whipping the curtains, condensing into a whirling maelstrom around the slight girl, now standing with the upraised dagger in her hands.

  “Petra!” James called out, breaking his paralysis and finally finding his voice. She couldn’t hear him, of course. This was just a dream, despite how terribly, frighteningly real it felt.

  And yet, from the midst of that swirling, horrible cloud, even as it caught her hair, whipped it about her face and flashed in her stern, glowing eyes, Petra glanced aside at James. She saw him, blinked in a sort of waking flutter, and her face changed. Fear, and shame, and heartbreak suddenly filled her features, clouded her eyes.

  The man in the other chair stood then, blocking James’ view.

  He turned toward James, his own face full of surprise and wariness and more than a little fear.

  It was, bafflingly, Donofrio Odin-Vann. He recognized James, opened his mouth to call out to him, but no sound could be heard over the roaring vortex of Petra’s spell.

  The whirl of fire and green light sucked all light into itself and contracted, taking both Petra and Odin-Vann and even the sprawling, dead mansion with it. Everything condensed into one brilliant, terrible point, and the point was shaped like a dagger, as blinding and merciless as the deaths it had caused.

  And then, with a shock that was both icy and deafening, the point exploded.

  James shocked awake at the sensation of it, as if thrown the many miles and leagues back into his bed by pure force, nearly crashing through it to the floor at the strength of it.

  He flung himself up instead, and gasped as if he hadn’t drawn a breath in minutes. His eyes blinked blearily around the dim silence of Gryffindor tower. His fellow Gryffindors were still asleep, sprawled variously across their beds, completely immune to the horrendous vision that James had just returned from.

  But was it a vision? Had it truly only been a dream? Helplessly, he remembered the look on Petra’s face as she had seen him, recognized him in the midst of the spell she had conjured.

  He looked down at his hands in the darkness. Something was smudged on the tips of his fingers, dark and greasy by the moonlight.

  He touched his hands together and felt the filth of the mansion’s walls on them. The smell was still in his night-clothes, the reek of ancient rot and mold and death.

  Somehow, he had not only dreamed of Petra. He had gone to her. He had physically stood in the same room with her, touched its grimy walls, taken its air with him upon his return.

  What he’d seen had not been a dream or a vision at all.

  Somehow, James had seen Petra and the inexplicable figure of Professor Odin-Vann perform some terrible spell, make some momentous decision that James sensed was irreversible, terrible, and portentous.

  He tried not to know what that spell had been, but his deepest heart told him what his brain resisted. Petra had gone to the abandoned mansion that had once been the home of her cursed soul’s-twin, Tom Riddle, the Dark Lord Voldemort. She was no longer resisting his poison influence, but channeling it, using it, bending it to her own will.

  And with it, she had repeated that villain’s most awful, damning spell. James flopped back onto his bed again, still breathing hard, his eyes wide and unseeing in the darkness. He could barely believe it. It was too awful to consider. And yet there was no question in his mind, even now, fully awake and in the comfort of his own bed in Gryffindor Tower.

  Petra, the young woman that he loved, the girl who had once doodled happy fairies in the corners of her textbooks and sucked on the tips of her black hair during examinations, had done the unthinkable.

  Amazingly, dismayingly, she had fulfilled the black promise began by the death of her stepmother years earlier, a death that Petra herself had caused in a fit of blind, righteous rage.

  Petra… had created a Horcrux.

  5. – Junior Aurors in training

  At breakfast the next morning, James considered telling Rose and Ralph—or even Albus or Scorpius—what he’d learned via his previous night’s dream. It wasn’t a matter of whether they would believe the part about how he’d actually been transported to a different place, travelling the mysterious thread between himself and Petra like a sort of high-speed conduit. It was the simple, damning reality of what she had done. He was afraid of the looks that would appear on their faces, the shocked disappointment, the suspicion that perhaps the rest of the magical world was right in opposing Petra, that James and his friends may have been on the wrong side all along.

  Worst of all, he didn’t want to have to defend Petra to them. Because deep in his heart, despite the love he harbored for her, he wasn’t sure he could defend her. Horcruxes were the worst sort of dark magic imaginable. That’s why she’d had to learn about them via illicit breakin to the Armory of Forbidden Books. The Unforgivable Curses were one thing. But Horcruxes were another level of dark magic entirely.

  He couldn’t eat, merely pushed a smattering of scrambled eggs around his plate until he heard the noise of the morning post. He looked up at the flutter of owls as they swooped through the upper reaches of the Great Hall. One, a small tawny barn owl that James recognized as the Weasley family messenger, swooped low over the table and dropped a newspaper before Rose, thumping it neatly between her juice and a platter of toast.

  She glanced at it, as did James. The headline, even upside-down, was plainly visible:

  POTTER PROGENY ON MERLIN HEADMASTER: HE CAN BE SCARY SOMETIMES!

  Without raising her head from the newspaper headline, Rose tilted her eyes up at James.

  “I didn’t say any such thing!” James declared, pushing back from his uneaten breakfast. “Seriously!”

  Rose scooped up the paper and flipped to below the fold. Her eyes flicked as she scanned. After a moment, she began to quote from the article. “‘He can be a bit scary sometimes,’ the young Potter answers, clearly concerned about reprisals for his honesty. ‘He knows how to keep order, that’s for sure. And he does it with more than just rules.’ His downcast eyes flick nervously up, as if begging me to imagine the alternative methods the Headmaster might choose, clearly worried about incriminating himself. Being familiar with Mr. Ambrosius’ rather infamous past, I can all too easily imagine what the poor young man faces on a daily basis. Fortunately, being a seventh-year, Mr. Potter’s ordeal is near an end. It is his younger classmates that he worries about.

  ‘Ask them,’ he suggests, clearly hinting at their corroboration.”

  “I said no such thing!” James insisted again, grabbing at the newspaper. Rose jerked it away from his grasp and folded it again.

  “It’s rubbish,” she shrugged, stuffing the newspaper into her knapsack. “Nobody knows how to twist a person’s words like Rita Skeeter. Frankly, I expected better from her.”

  “Headmaster Merlin won’t even give a thought to it,” Graham nodded. “If he reads it at all, which I doubt, he’ll probably like it.

  Nothing breeds order quite like a fearsome reputation. I think that’s an exact quote from him, in fact. When you look at it that way, seems like Skeeter’s doing him a favor.”

  Cameron Creevey leaned across the table to be heard over the clatter of silverware. “I know my parents would just love it if they thought the headmaster was bringing back the thumbscrews and stretcher racks. Keeps out the riff-raff, they’d say.” He grinned, showing an expanse of pink gums and teeth.

  From nearby, a yodel of derisive laughter pierced the air. James turned to see Edgar Edgecombe and his friends reading aloud from their own copy of The Daily Prophet.

  “Regarding the magical world’s enemies,” Edgecombe read loudly, raising the newspaper and snapping it open for all to see. “The young Potter grows misty-eyed at the remembrance of his former schoolmate, turned Undesirable Number One: �
�Yes,’ he sniffs, ‘Petra is my friend,’ and turns away to hide the tears that tremble on his lashes…”

  Quincy Ogden and Polly Heathrow dissolved into gales of laughter as Edgecombe raised his head over the newspaper to peer at James. He frowned and trembled his lower lip, as if about to burst into tears himself. He had an audience, as many students from around the Great Hall perked up to watch, some with confusion, others with bemused smiles, watching to see what James would do.

  James drew his wand.

  He expected Rose to stop him, but she merely watched, her eyes bright, even eager, as she awaited his reprisal.

  It was Ralph that stopped him.

  “Don’t do it, James,” he said, coming from behind and placing a large hand on James’ arm, not to restrain him, but merely to give him pause. “The little git’s not worth it. Let him have his laugh.”

  “Easy for you to say!” James hissed from the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s not you he’s quoting in front of the whole school!”

  “Yeah,” Graham nodded. “Stay out of this, Deedle. This is Gryffindor business.”

  “Or join in,” Scorpius suggested from further down the table.

  “All for one and one for all, eh?” He waggled his own wand, one eyebrow cocked provocatively.

  Ralph ignored Scorpius and Graham. He looked at James, offering no more warnings, merely letting the weight of their friendship speak on his behalf.

  Feeling a mixture of frustration and relief, James slid his wand back into the pocket of his robes. Rose, Scorpius, and Graham deflated visibly.

  A squawk of anger erupted from Edgar Edgecombe as someone jerked the newspaper from his hands. James looked up to see Professor McGonagall standing behind the boy, the newspaper held in her upraised fist. She was glaring down at Edgecombe, who wheeled around angrily, saw the Professor’s steely gaze, and then shrank beneath it, turning his face back to the table in front of him. James saw the boy’s expression, however. He was neither afraid nor ashamed, merely caught.