James Potter and the Crimson Thread Read online

  But were Lucy’s words true? Were lost things ever really lost forever?

  Petra had been teased with such bargains before, but they were always false bargain, empty hopes, mere capricious tricks intended to manipulate.

  But what if she, Petra, could conjure the answer herself? What if, purely by the strength of her own immense power and prosaic intelligence, she could write her own bargain?

  Was there any price worth paying, no matter how high, to find out?

  She wondered. Over the course of the following years, Petra wondered that more and more.

  1. – The interview

  “Looks just like the first time we rode it,” Ralph commented jovially, making his way along the corridor of the Hogwarts Express to the raucous noise of boarding students and the nearby hiss and chuff of the crimson engine. Rafters of steam, brilliant white in the morning sun, drifted past the windows. “It’s easy to forget the whole world’s about to drop straight off a cliff, isn’t it?”

  Rose hefted her bag past a gaggle of nervous-looking first years.

  “I really wish you’d stop saying that. You’re just repeating what your father says.”

  “Well,” James bobbed his head, “Denniston Dolohov is chief Muggle advisor to the Minister of Magic. It’s his job to know all the ways the magical world is breaking out into the Muggle, and the other way around. He’d know better than anyone. Here.”

  He pointed toward an empty compartment near the end of the corridor. Noisily, they shunted open the door and filed in, unloading their knapsacks and duffles and hoisting them up onto the luggage racks.

  James leaned to peer out the window before sitting down. The usual crowd milled on the platform— knots of families saying goodbye, students hurrying with carts of trunks, tall porters in red coats directing people and tweeting their whistles— but the collection of wizarding news people were still evident in the foreground, holding court near the engine. The Daily Prophet photographer’s flash poofed over the crowd as he snapped more pictures. Next to him was Myron Madrigal from wizarding wireless news, who appeared to be conversing with Cameron Creevey, broadcasting live with his wand held between them. James grimaced, knowing that the boy’s infectious enthusiasm would probably fill ten breathless minutes of air-time, whether Madrigal wished it or not, and nine of those minutes would probably be about James Sirius Potter.

  “She doesn’t seem to be down there anymore,” Rose commented, cramming in next to James and blocking his view with her bushy reddish hair.

  “Probably already on board,” Albus suggested, joining them in the compartment and tugging the door shut with a bang. “Getting all set up for her big interview, I imagine. Your public awaits, James.”

  “Just shut it, will you?” James shook his head in embarrassed annoyance. “She’ll probably be interviewing loads of us, not just me.

  Besides, it sure wasn’t my idea.”

  Rose sniffed. “But you didn’t say no, did you?” Suddenly she raised a hand and waved energetically. “Bye mum! Dad! Love you! See you at Christmas!”

  The train shunted and clattered as it began to roll forward. The chuff of the engine rose both in pitch and rhythm, becoming a steady, noisy beat in the air. The faces on the platform began to drift sideways, receding away. James shouldered his cousin aside as much as possible and spied his own parents watching, smiling in the sunlight. His mum saw him and waved. He waved back tentatively, nervously, thinking of the upcoming interview.

  “She’s changed, I expect,” his dad had said the day before, when the official request had come by owl from the offices of the Daily Prophet. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, James. The world has bigger cauldrons to boil these days. What possible harm could she do anymore?”

  Aunt Hermione had been far less magnanimous when she’d heard about it only moments before, on Platform Nine and Three Quarters. “You just remind her whose nephew you are,” she’d whispered into his ear, unsmiling. “I doubt she’s forgotten me, or a certain glass jar.”

  A sharp rap came from the window of the compartment door.

  James glanced back to see a man on the other side, peering through with a cane raised in his fist, prepared to knock again. He was a small man with large hands, clean-shaven beneath a bland bowler hat, wearing tiny wire-framed spectacles and a tweed vest. His eyes flicked over the occupants of the compartment and landed on James.

  “James Potter?” he called through the glass.

  James nodded, and the tension in his chest cinched a few notches tighter.

  “I’m Mr. Bullova from the Daily Prophet,” he said, still raising his voice to speak through the glass window. “We spoke yesterday via floo? We’re ready for you if you are.” He stepped back, not waiting for an answer.

  James heaved a sigh and moved reluctantly to the door. “That sure was fast.”

  “Don’t forget us little people when you’re all famous,” Albus clapped him on the shoulder as he went.

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Potter,” Bullova shook his hand briefly but vigorously as James joined him in the corridor. “We’re just a few carriages up. If you’ll follow me.” He gestured and led the way, moving with a sort of mousy economy, not looking back.

  James felt terribly selfconscious following the man through the carriages, knowing that he was being seen by loads of his friends and schoolmates, who by now had some idea of what was going on. Despite what he’d said to Albus, he suspected that none of them were being interviewed for the Daily Prophet about ‘the changing magical world and its impact on the younger generation’ (as Mr. Bullova had blithely put it in his invitation). But then again, as Uncle Ron had commented on the platform, none of them were the firstborn son of Harry Potter.

  They passed through three connectors, finally entering a much more sumptuous carriage near the front of the train. Red carpets and brass fixtures adorned the corridor and the smell of pipe tobacco seemed to have worked its way into the very grain of the polished wood paneling. Here, teachers rather than students occupied the compartments. As James passed by, he recognized Kendrick Debellows, the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, his crew-cut head nodding in conversation with Potions Mistress Lucia Heretofore. Across from them was a surprisingly young man with black hair and sharp features. The man glanced up as James passed the compartment, his expression merely idly curious. James had never seen him before and wondered fleetingly if he was some new teacher’s assistant. He was clearly too young to be a professor.

  “And here we are,” Bullova announced crisply, stopping at the last compartment and shuttling open the door. “Just have a seat, if you would.”

  Bullova stepped aside and gestured with the cane in his large left fist, ushering James inside. As James entered, Bullova shunted the door closed from the outside. James turned to look back through the compartment window, but the small man was already retreating down the corridor, a gold pocket watch open in his free hand.

  James turned back to the compartment, which was much different than any of the others he had ridden in. It was larger, with four red upholstered chairs instead of benches. Between them was a small but heavy table, polished to a mirror-like shine. A small notebook, bound in buff leather, sat on the table. Atop this lay a vividly green quill. James recognized the instrument from his father’s descriptions. It was a Quick-Quotes Quill, charmed to record whatever it heard, albeit with questionable embellishments.

  James decided to sit while he waited. He chose the chair nearest the outside window and plopped into it, thankful for the moment of quiet, but restless to get the interview over with.

  The outskirts of London streamed past the window, resplendent in the morning sun. James watched the city blur along for a moment, and then turned his attention back to the Quill.

  Experimentally, he cleared his throat.

  The Quick-Quotes Quill jumped to attention, flicking into the air as the notebook snapped open, riffling to a blank page. With a tiny pecking sound, the Quill tapped down on
to the page and vibrated bolt upright, as if waiting.

  Fascinated but a little leary, James leaned closer to the table.

  “My name,” he said slowly, experimentally, “is James Sirius Potter.”

  The Quill began to scratch busily across the page, stopping after only a few seconds.

  James leaned closer still, craning his head to read the upside-down writing.

  The young Potter introduces himself with a degree of palpable pride, clearly content with the pedigree of his famed lineage.

  “The pedigree of his…” James read, furrowing his brow. “I didn’t…! What do you mean ‘palpable pride’?”

  The Quill began to scribble again. James made to grab for it, but the Quill leapt and feinted easily around his reaching hand, pecking back to the notebook without the slightest pause and continuing mid-sentence.

  James jumped to his feet, meaning to grab the notebook away from the Quill, but a sudden buzzing noise startled him. Something small flitted around his head, and then droned toward the window, where it landed with a faint bump on the windowsill. James saw that it was a beetle. He almost dismissed it and resumed his mission to tear away the offending notebook page (upon which the Quill was still writing furiously) when a sudden suspicion—nearly a certainty—fell over him like a leaden wave. He looked closer at the beetle, which seemed to be regarding him from its perch on the sill. Its antenna waved faintly.

  James’ shoulders slumped. With a sigh, he sat back down in the chair. Before him, the Quill finally finished its paragraph and jerked upright again, waiting.

  The beetle unfurled its delicate wings, buzzed them, and lofted from the windowsill, casting its tiny shadow onto the table, where it landed near the notebook and Quill. It trundled toward the edge nearest James, glinting iridescent green in the flickering sunbeams, and then stopped, seeming to eye him again with its tiny, unblinking orbs.

  After only a moment, the beetle burst into a greenish rainbow of dense, swirling smoke, which condensed into the unmistakable shape of a woman. She was seated coquettishly on the edge of the table in a natty green jacket and skirt, peering at James through tortoiseshell spectacles, her red lips formed into a sardonic little smile.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me, Mr. Potter,” she offered, dropping her eyes slightly. “Old habits die hard. But I do find that what a subject does in the thoughtful moments before an interview can be highly illuminating. I’m Rita Skeeter.”

  She extended her hand, which was very thin and pale, palm down. Almost reflexively, James shook it, but briefly. Her fingers were cool but strong, despite the looseness of her grip. James guessed that she was in her late fifties, but had clearly invested much effort and money to appear much younger. Her probably falsely blonde hair was done in flouncy waves that framed her narrow, immaculate face.

  She brightened and turned toward the notebook. “I also apologize for this…” Without reading it, she tore the topmost page out and balled it in her hands, throwing James a conspiratorial little wink.

  “The Quill is still set to Tabloid mode. Embarrassing, but a necessary evil when one also freelances for publications like Witch Weekly and the Crafty Conjurer. Just one moment…”

  She withdrew a sleek wand from her sleeve and daintily tapped the Quill, which lofted briefly into the air, pirouetted, and then tapped back down onto a new blank page in the notebook, apparently reset to a less sensational recording mode, although James knew he couldn’t be sure.

  Returning her wand to her sleeve, Skeeter turned back to James, relaxed comfortably on her perch on the desk, and narrowed her eyes at him. For what felt like half a minute she merely studied him, her gaze ticking slightly over his face, as if reading his mind, or at least giving a very practiced suggestion of it. James blinked at her, and then around the room, growing exquisitely uncomfortable in the stuffy quiet. He could see the door over the woman’s left shoulder and heartily wished he was already on the other side of it.

  “You’ll have heard about me,” she finally stated, her voice quietly musing. “From your family.” She nodded, as if resigned and slightly penitent. “I understand, of course. But I want you to know that I am not the journalist I was then. I’m not the Rita Skeeter your Aunt and uncle and father met those many years ago, James. May I call you James?”

  James gave a small shrug and nodded.

  “I was young then, James,” she went on with a wistful sigh.

  “Young, and eager, and perhaps a bit too ambitious. But I’m different now. I need you to know that before we start. You can trust me.” She leaned even closer, waiting for him to make eye contact with her. Her gaze was huge and somber behind her stylish glasses. “I’m on your side, James.”

  Slightly nonplussed, James shrugged and bobbed his head again, not knowing if he actually believed her. The intensity of her stare was like being probed with purple-eye-shadowed spotlights.

  But then Skeeter relaxed again. She blew out a sigh and nodded to herself. “That’s a relief, James. Because for the sake of my readers, I need to know the real you. The unguarded you. Shall we begin?”

  James merely nodded a third time. He pushed himself back into the upholstery of the chair, trying to extract himself from Skeeter’s perfumed aura.

  “This is your seventh year at Hogwarts, then, yes?” She asked lightly. “And despite the turmoil elsewhere in the world, your last two years have been remarkably uneventful. Something that was never true for your famous father.” She smiled at him observantly, looking for a response. James couldn’t tell if there was congratulation or reproach in her gaze. When he offered no comment she went on briskly. “So, are you looking forward to graduation?”

  James drew a deep breath, relieved to finally confront a question he could answer. “I guess I am. I haven’t really decided what I’m going to do with myself afterward. I was thinking of becoming an Auror. Like my dad. But my grades are…” He shrugged and bobbed his head noncommittally.

  Behind Skeeter, the Quill commenced writing again, scratching busily over the notebook. It was minutely distracting.

  “Ah, yes. Harry Potter, the Auror,” Skeeter nodded lightly, and then turned serious. “But these are difficult times in which to be an Auror, are they not? Three years since the Night of the Unveiling. The Vow of Secrecy erodes more every day. It must be extremely frustrating, even hopeless work, trying to patch together the wall that divides the magical world from its Muggle counterpart, while still chasing down the occasional flying carpet smuggler and dabbler in dark magic. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  James did agree, having heard his father say virtually the exact same thing over the past few years, but he felt uncomfortable saying so.

  He merely shrugged.

  Beneath the steady shimmy and clatter of the train, the Quill scritched and capered.

  “You were there on the night that it happened, weren’t you?”

  Skeeter asked quietly, cocking her head. “The Night of the Unveiling?

  You were right there in the middle of it all, isn’t that correct, James?

  What do you remember of it?”

  James pressed his lips together, thinking furiously. What could he say? There was no way to answer the question easily, or even safely.

  The Lady of the Lake, the mastermind behind the whole nefarious affair, was virtually unknown, considered a myth by most of the people who had heard of her, and this despite her potentially disastrous appearance at the so-called Hogwarts “Quidditch Summit” two years earlier. Petra had battled and ultimately defeated her there, with some unlikely help from an Alma Aleron student named Nastasia Hendricks. And yet it was Petra who had borne the blame for the plot of the Morrigan Web, adding to the guilt already heaped upon her for the Night of the Unveiling, when she had indeed deliberately fractured the veil of secrecy between the Muggle and magical worlds.

  “I was there,” James foundered uneasily, “It was all kind of a blur. I don’t remember a lot.”

  “But you remember your friend, Petra
Morganstern?” Skeeter probed, raising her eyebrows. “She was your friend, yes?”

  James nodded faintly, thinking back to that night. He could still see Petra in his memory, walking down the centre of the broad New York avenue, hand in hand with her young sister Izzy, lofting parade floats into the air with the sheer power of her mind. He could still hear the toll of her voice as she called out to the Statue, the guardian of the magical city of New Amsterdam, caster of the greatest secrecy spell ever conjured, asking her to lower her torch, to break the spell.

  James nodded soberly. “Yes, Petra is my friend.”

  “You speak in the present tense, James,” Skeeter clarified, as if she thought she might have misheard him. “Surely you don’t mean to suggest that you are still friends with Ms. Morganstern. She is, after all, the most notorious witch in our lifetimes, perhaps in all lifetimes. The only female Undesirable Number One in history. The mastermind behind at least two murderous and chaotic plots to undermine the very foundation of our world. Of course, at the time, she had been living under the protection of your family, isn’t that right? And she had spent the previous summer in the Potter household, after the mysterious tragedy of her grandparents’ farm, where both of them ended up dead.”

  She paused, allowing her words to sink in, studying James’ face. “What do you say to the people who claim that this represents a serious lapse in judgment for a head Auror? Who claim that he should not only be dismissed from the position, but brought before the Wizengamot for negligence and conspiracy?”

  Skeeter was clearly trying to provoke James, and had been since the interview began. It was beginning to work. James glared at her, calm but heating with anger. “I’d say none of them were there when Petra showed up and told her story.”

  “Perhaps you can tell it to us yourself,” Skeeter suggested.