“You know,” Magnussen said magnanimously, “the young lady did speak of you, now that you mention it. Your name is William, isn’t it? Yes. She screamed your name, in fact, near the end of her life. I wouldn’t have thought that she’d been capable of something so strenuous at that point, but that just goes to show the difference between theory and reality. It was highly instructive, in fact. I’ll tell you what. As thanks, I will grant you your greatest wish. I will send you to join your dear departed Fredericka. Perhaps you will scream her name as well.”
The skinny man barely seemed to hear Magnussen. He lurched to his feet, limping pathetically, and began to lope toward the older man, his bare hands held before him, hooked into claws. In the darkness, Magnussen raised his cane, smiling malevolently.
“No!” James cried out, leaping out into the alley and brandishing his wand. His voice, however, was drowned out by a loud, echoing crack, nearly deafening in the confined space of the alley.
Too late! James thought hectically, still aiming his wand wildly at Magnussen’s back. He’s killed him! The skinny man, William, did not fall, however. James blinked into the darkness of the alley, waiting for Magnussen’s evil spell to take effect. Instead, Magnussen lowered his cane and then dropped it. It clattered to the alley. A moment later, Magnussen himself fell to his knees.
“How…,” he asked, looking up at William. Slowly, almost ponderously, Magnussen fell forward, flat on his face in the center of the alley, dead.
“For Fredericka,” a girl’s voice said faintly. James looked to the side. A young woman, barely older than James himself, stood nearby. She stared at Magnussen’s dead body, her face a mask of pale resignation. In her outstretched hand, smoking lazily, was a small pistol.
“For Fredericka,” she repeated faintly, “from her fiancé, William. And from me, her sister. Helen.”
The girl, Helen, had seen the three boys, but didn’t seem particularly interested in them. Zane, being wise enough to opt for the truth when it was most appropriate, simply told her that the dead man in the alley had stolen something from their school, thus he and his friends had followed him in the hopes of getting it back.
William, still limping, had been surprised to see Helen and her pistol, but only a little. Kneeling over the body of Magnussen, he had retrieved the man’s evil magical cane. With a swift, decisive movement, he broke the cane over his knee. The long end he tossed into the gutter, but the handle he peered at in his hand, studying the glint of moonlight on the leering metal face. He shuddered.
“Your stolen goods might not be the sort of thing that would fit in a velvet bag, would they?” he asked dourly, looking down at the body.
James nodded. “Could be,” he answered, stepping gingerly forward. As he approached Magnussen’s prone figure, he saw a drawstring sack lying next to the corpse, still hooked over the left wrist. Feeling a wave of revulsion, James tugged the loop of string from around the dead man’s wrist. The hand thumped back to the street with a faint smack.
“You three…,” William said faintly, looking at the boys. “You’re like him, ain’t you?”
James swallowed thickly and shook his head, but Ralph, surprisingly, was the one to speak up. “We’re sorry for what happened to Fredericka,” he said solemnly. “This man may have been a part of our world… but we aren’t like him.”
William stared at Ralph, his eyes wide and shining in the darkness. Slowly, he nodded. Helen moved next to him and put an arm around his shoulders, still staring down at Magnussen’s body, as if mesmerized by it. Her face was very pale and James had a suspicion that the girl had been sick only moments earlier, probably behind the same broken crates where he, Zane, and Ralph had hidden.
“I don’t know what’s in that velvet bag,” William said, shuddering, “and I’m sure I don’t want to. This is over. You go your way. And me and Helen, we’ll try to go ours. Fair enough?”
James nodded. He could feel the cold weight of the horseshoe through the velvet of the sack. Slowly, he backed away from the body of Magnussen. Zane and Ralph followed and a moment later, all three boys turned and ran out of the alley. They ran almost the entire way back to the Alma Aleron gate, where Flintlock was only just beginning to come out of the trance Magnussen had cast over him. The rock troll remembered them in that hazy reverse-time way that Zane had predicted and allowed them to approach the Warping Willow. Zane recited the incantation that would return them to the school and the Tree began to shiver all around them. The moon and stars started to roll forward again, taking them back to the school and their own time.
Throughout the journey home, James held the velvet bag, fingering the distinctive shape inside it. Neither he, Zane, nor Ralph said a word.
They didn’t have to.
19. UNHELPFUL REVELATIONS
“They killed him?” Rose asked the following day, speaking through the Shard on the back of the dormitory room door. “Shot him dead, right there in the street?”
“It was like something from a movie,” Ralph nodded soberly. “Only in real life, it doesn’t feel so exciting. It was just sad and shocking and… sort of final. It didn’t fix anything that’d been done. It just stopped more bad things from happening.”
“The poor girl,” Rose said sadly, shaking her head. “Maybe Magnussen deserved what he got, but she’ll have to live with what she did for the rest of her life. That’s what courts of law are for.”
“Boohoo,” Scorpius scoffed, sitting on the other end of the sofa in the Gryffindor common room. “You think some Muggle court would be able to capture and convict someone like Magnussen? Don’t kid yourself. I’m more interested in the horseshoe anyway. Let us see it, why don’t you?”
James swallowed hard and turned toward his bunk. A moment later, he retrieved the black velvet bag from beneath his mattress.
“We haven’t found a decent hiding place for it yet,” he said, loosening the drawstring and sliding the cold metal shape into his right hand. “If it was too magical for Magnussen to keep on campus, then the same is probably true for us. Someone’s bound to sense its power and come sniffing around to see what it is.”
He crossed to the Shard and held the horseshoe up before it, cradling the silvery weight gingerly in his palm. The metal was dulled and clouded with myriad scratches, but its shape was unmistakable. Purplish light glinted along its curved edges.
“It’s bigger than I would have expected,” Rose said, having approached the mirror on the Hogwarts side of the Shard. “It looks… heavy, somehow.”
“It is,” James admitted. “Almost like it comes from a place where gravity is less important. And it glows a little too. You can’t see it unless all the lights are turned off and it’s totally dark, but it’s there, sort of faint purple, like the last bit of sunset.”
“I can almost sense the magic from here,” Rose said quietly. “You’re right, you definitely need to hide it somewhere safe.”
“At least until we can find a way to use it to get into the World Between the Worlds,” Ralph nodded.
“But that’s our main problem now,” James said, turning back around and carrying the horseshoe to his bed.
On the other side of the Shard, Scorpius sighed. “Ah yes. Up until now, everyone believed that your Professor Magnussen had escaped into the Nexus with the help of his dimensional key. Now that you know that the man was, in fact, killed by a Muggle bullet, you have no way of knowing where the Nexus Curtain actually is.”
“That was supposed to be the easy part,” Ralph acknowledged, flopping back onto his bed. “We thought we’d just have to follow Magnussen to the Curtain. Getting the horseshoe from him was supposed to be the difficult bit.”
James finished stuffing the horseshoe under his mattress again and stood up. “We’re not completely stumped,” he said stubbornly. “We still have Magnussen’s other riddle. The one about the Nexus Curtain lying in the eyes of Roebitz. Zane’s back working on that one again, although it’s looking pretty bleak. There aren’t a wh
ole lot of Roebitzes in the world.”
“I’ll look it up on my side,” Rose said briskly. “Maybe it isn’t a person at all. You never know.”
James sighed. “Thanks, Rose. We appreciate your help. Petra too.”
“I’m doing this to help you and Uncle Harry find out the truth, James,” Rose said, meeting his gaze through the glass of the Shard. “If it helps Petra, then that’s all for the best. I’m not quite as confident about her as you are, though. Sorry.”
James sighed again and nodded. From behind Rose, Scorpius watched James, his own eyes sharp, narrowed. Scorpius was more than unconvinced of Petra’s innocence, James knew. Scorpius was outright suspicious of her.
Deep down, despite his own feelings to the contrary, James couldn’t blame him.
As spring settled firmly over the school, tulips, daffodils, and snapdragons began to crowd the flowerbeds that lined the mall. The snapdragons, being of a magical variety, occasionally leaned lazily and nipped at the fat bumblebees that patrolled the flowerbeds. The days grew longer and warmer, and James finally packed away his winter cloak, happy to relegate it to the top of his closet along with his dress robes and the backup pair of spectacles that his mother had insisted he pack, which were, in reality, hand-me-downs from his father.
Clutchcudgel matches went from grueling dark and icy affairs to exhilarating romps through the mild evenings, lit by the rose-gold light of the later sunsets. Team Bigfoot continued its dogged refusal to be knocked out of the final tournament playoffs, winning a few matches, tying even more. Fortunately, since their standings had gradually improved over the course of the season, tie games often meant technical victories for the orange and blue team. No one expected the Foots to actually get into the final tournament, but at least no one expected them to get knocked out easily. James was quietly very proud of the team and his own unique involvement with it. Even if they still ended up dead last in the overall season standings, it would be a close thing. More importantly, the other teams respected Team Bigfoot now. Or, at the very least, didn’t openly mock them.
Oliver Wood still showed a stubborn reluctance to encourage the use of anything other than the most basic magic during his team’s matches. He did, however, allow the continuation of the team’s game magic meetings and James began showing his fellow players some of the Artis Decerto tricks he’d learned during his last year’s Defense Against the Dark Arts classes with Professor Kendrick Debellows.
“It isn’t just about beating the other guy’s magic with your own magic,” he attempted to explain. “It’s about beating his magic with your mind, by knowing what he’s going to do even before he does it and being ready for it.”
“Mind reading,” Gobbins frowned skeptically. “I never understood that crazy voodoo stuff.”
“It’s voodoo,” Ralph said, shaking his head. “It’s just knowing how people usually act and guessing what they’re going to do before they do it. It’s easier than you think. People are a lot less unpredictable than you’d ever guess.”
James nodded enthusiastically. “Look at the Igors,” he said, standing up. “Say it’s the third quarter and they’re down by ten. You see three of their Clippers lining up around the second turn. What are they up to?”
Jazmine laughed and shook her head. “They’re stacking a piledrive maneuver. Their lead Clipper has the Clutch and if he loses it somehow, he’ll just toss it back to the guy behind him. That way, they’ve got two-man insurance that they’ll make it to the goal.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” James nodded, pointing at her. “We don’t have to wait to see what they’re going to do in that situation. We already know that’s their standard procedure, so we act first, sending some Bullies back to get in between them even before they line up. That’s Artis Decerto!”
“But that’s not all it is,” Wentworth said, tilting his head. “It’s also those crazy acrobatics you do out there on the skrim. You look like one of those guys from Cirque de Blasé.”
“My mom took me to that last year,” Norrick interjected.
Wentworth turned to him. “Did you like it?”
“Meh,” Norrick shrugged. “When I think circus, I think guys walking tightropes and taming tigers and making pyramids out of dozens of elephants and stuff. I don’t usually think of a bunch of dudes in tights swinging around on velvet ropes and doing yoga on flying carpets.”
“Sounds pretty interesting to me,” Jazmine admitted.
Norrick rolled his eyes. “That’s ‘cause you’re a girl.”
“Thanks for noticing,” Jazmine replied sourly. “At least when Ralph says it, it sounds like a good thing.” She smiled at Ralph across the room and his cheeks reddened. He coughed lightly and looked helplessly at James.
“Yeah,” James nodded, struggling to stay on topic. “Artis Decerto is also about acrobatic kinds of stuff too. It’s just a matter of using your whole body sort of like a tool or a weapon or a torpedo, whatever best suits the situation. You put both ideas together, and not only will you know what the other guy is about to do, you’ll already be getting yourself into position to defeat it.”
“Like when you got between that Zombie Clipper and Bully last match!” Wentworth exclaimed, sitting forward. “And you pretended to have a Clutch under your arm so the Bully would aim a gravity well at you, but then you spun around up over the other guy at just the right moment and the Bully shot his spell at his own Clipper and knocked him right out of the course and then ran into him because he was so surprised that he didn’t even see the other guy behind you until you went all topsy-turvy and they both crashed into the ring like a couple of blind Rafewringers!” His eyes bulged excitedly at the memory and then he sighed deeply, leaning back again. “That was beautiful.”
“Zane sure didn’t think it was funny,” Ralph muttered. “Although he did admit that it was a pretty good move.”
“Yeah,” James agreed, nodding at Wentworth. “Like that.”
“But how do we practice stuff like that?” another player, Luca Fiorello, asked from the corner near the window.
James nodded resolutely. “Good question,” he admitted. “And you won’t like the answer, but… well… me, Ralph, Zane, and Professor Cloverhoof have set up something in the backyard. It’s not anywhere near as good as the one back at Hogwarts and Zane and Professor Cloverhoof only helped us build it because we agreed to let Team Zombie use it as well, but trust us, it’s the best way to learn Artis Decerto. Come on over and take a look.”
James led the team out onto the third-floor landing, where they all crowded around the window that overlooked the mansion’s walled back garden. There was a moment of tense, puzzled silence. Finally, Jazmine spoke up.
“What is it?” she asked, frowning.
James sighed at the irony of it all. In the yard below was a haphazard clockwork monstrosity of wooden cogs, treadmills, pommels, swinging weights, and wand-studded barrels.
“It’s called the Gauntlet,” he admitted. “And it’s about to be your worst enemy.”
Classes at Alma Aleron, which had at first seemed exotic and strange, had by now grown routine and even boring.
James’ favorite classes were Clockwork Mechanics, Advanced Elemental Transmutation (which was the American equivalent of Transfiguration), Theoretical Gravity (which was still being taught by Oliver Wood), and Magi-American History with Professor Paul Bunyan. Having lived the long and amazing life of a giant in the country’s frontier days, the professor taught a lot of his classes by way of firsthand stories. Some of the stories, admittedly, were embroidered with obvious tall tales, such as the details surrounding the origin of the Rocky Mountains (allegedly piles of cast-off rocks cleaned out of the giant’s boot treads with a redwood trunk) and the creation of the Great Lakes (claimed to have been dug out by the giant’s footprints when he was wrestling Babe, the giant blue ox, for the last pancake of a particularly delicious breakfast). A Vampire boy had once deigned to challenge Professor Bunyan’s tall tales,
confronting him with the fact that while he was indeed quite large, he was nowhere near big enough to leave footprints the size of Lake Superior.
“Were you bigger back then, maybe?” the boy asked, a smile curling the corner of his mouth.
Professor Bunyan merely scoffed and waved a hand. “I was always the same size,” he said, his dark eyes twinkling. “But the world was a lot smaller back in those days. It’s a known fact. Just ask Professor Wimwrinkle.”
James had a suspicion that Bunyan knew that no one would actually do any such thing, being generally terrified of the Mageography professor, thus his allegations were, nominally, safe.
Mageography was, in fact, near the top of the list of James’ least loved classes. Only marginally worse, however, was Forbidden Practices and Cursology with the insufferable Persephone Remora. Remora had, it seemed, developed a bit of a fixation with James and his famous father. As a result, her attitude toward him seemed to swing between doting favoritism and spiteful jealousy. James never knew, on any given Thursday afternoon, whether the professor would gesture for him to sit close to her in the front row—where she would favor him with conspiratorial winks and infuriatingly condescending pats on the head—or glower at him darkly, annoyed and impatient at his apparent lack of awe for her accomplishments and her self-proclaimed ‘dark wiles’. James’ last essay had been returned to him with the incomprehensible grade of ‘INSIPID +’ scrawled across the top of it in red, followed by the handwritten comment, ‘You show mild promise IF you receive the proper tutelage. You know my office hours. See me.’
“She either has a crush on you or she wants to poison you,” Zane whispered, peering at the handwriting atop James’ essay. “And you never know. With her, it could be both.”
“No way I’m seeking her out for ‘proper tutelage’,” James hissed from behind his hand. “I’ll take ‘insipid plus’ for the rest of the year if I have to.”
From the front of the classroom, Remora narrowed her eyes at him, her red lips pressed into a tight frown.
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