James had fumed about his team’s failure to prevent the maneuver, but he also knew that piledrive formation was a once-in-a-match tactic. Team Zombie had been nervous about losing the match even then and had begun to resort to desperation maneuvers. Five minutes into the second half, Team Bigfoot had already regained the lead. Wentworth had replaced Mukthatch on goal, leaving Mukthatch to shadow Warrington for the rest of the game, his ape-like reach and intimidating demeanor easily preventing any repeats of the fabled piledrive maneuver. In the end, using a confident mixture of game magic and Artis Decerto aerobatics, Team Bigfoot had soundly defeated the Zombies by a score of eighty-two to sixty.
“We’re going to the tournament!” Norrick cried out exuberantly, and the rest joined in, hooting and hollering, but James was less confident. Even as his fellow teammates cheered, he looked around and saw a table near the fireplace surrounded by the slate grey sweaters and scarves of Werewolf House. Clayton Altaire sat at the head of the table, staring at James with a small crooked smile. As James watched, the older boy raised a hand and pointed discreetly at James. He mimed shooting him and mouthed the word ‘pow’. The rest of the Werewolves saw the gesture. They turned and grinned wickedly back at James, their eyes glittering narrowly.
James sighed, the celebration leaking out of his heart. You may make it to the tournament, you little Squibs, the Werewolves’ grins seemed to say, but then you’ll have to face off against us, and we’re a whole different cauldron of newts. We eat Squibs like you for breakfast.
James looked away, not liking those secretive, confident grins. Instead, he looked toward the Zombies on the other side of the room, gathered truculently around their own tables. Zane sat among them, looking equally morose, and yet when he saw James, he winked and shrugged a little. Like the Werewolves’ grins, Zane’s gesture seemed to speak volumes. Congratulations, pal, the little wink seemed to say, now comes the fun part.
James rolled his eyes, bemused. Even Zane’s gestures managed to be sarcastic.
During the following days, James, Ralph, and Zane struggled to formulate a plan. Barring any unforeseen disasters, it seemed that the Bigfoots would—amazingly enough—play in the final tournament match. For most of the team, this accomplishment was success enough. James, of course, had a different goal in mind. It was essential that the Bigfoots not only meet Team Werewolf in the tournament, but that they defeat them. Only then would Apollo Mansion relocate onto Victory Hill, replacing Ares Mansion and thus completing the dimensional keyhole. But how could it be done?
It would have helped if the Werewolves’ record had been even slightly imperfect. Where Team Bigfoot (to no one’s greater surprise than their own) had managed to scrape together a record of four wins and three losses, barely clinging to a second-place standing, Team Werewolf was as yet undefeated. Worse yet, all but one of the Bigfoots’ victories had been breathtakingly close, including two technical wins by tie. The Werewolves, however, had easily dominated every match, usually leading by double digits at halftime and proceeding to send in their second-string players for the last quarter while the starters actually left the platform, descending to their locker cellar and changing out of their pads and jerseys. The sheer arrogance of it all added insult to injury and formed the final sting of the Werewolves’ game of psychological warfare—a game they alone played with nearly eerie ease.
“Every team has a weakness,” Zane insisted, pounding the arm of one of the sofas in the Bigfoot game room. “Even the Wolves.”
“Probably, but nobody’s found it yet,” Ralph said with a sigh. “They just seem to play a totally solid game. No chinks, no weak links.”
James shook his head as he looked down at the floor between the sofas. The disarmadillo waddled idly past a nearby coffee table, sniffing the carpet, two empty licorice soda bottles balanced amusingly on its plated back. Zane sat up and added his own empty bottle to the collection.
“That doesn’t mean they don’t have a weakness,” he said darkly. “It just means they’re hiding it behind all that stupid arrogance. Their best offense is psyching everyone out so much that they win even before the match starts.”
“Maybe,” James admitted. “But then again, maybe that’s their weakness. Maybe they really aren’t as good a team as everyone believes they are. Maybe Altaire and his goons have just succeeded in convincing everyone that the Werewolves are so good that the other teams just get nervous and throw the game. Has that ever occurred to you?”
Zane considered it. “It’s a theory, at least,” he acknowledged. “So you’re saying that if you can convince the Foots that Team Werewolf is more bark than bite, then maybe you’ll take the Wolves’ best weapon right out of their paws?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Ralph nodded. “Either way, right? I mean, psyching-out can work both ways. If it’s true that Team Werewolf can psyche other teams into playing worse, then it’s also true that we can psyche ourselves into playing even better. Stands to reason.”
Zane pressed his lips together thoughtfully. “But you’ll need more than words to convince your guys that the Werewolves are just a bunch of sheep in wolves’ clothing. You’ll need something concrete, something they can rally around. Some secret weapon or something, even if it’s just a symbol.”
“Like that stupid bronze statue that Team Werewolf rubs on their way to every match,” Ralph concurred, becoming excited. “But different. Something that will really make the team believe they have an ace up their sleeve.”
James was thoughtful, his eyes narrowed as the disarmadillo lumbered under his outstretched legs, knocking the bottles from its back. Zane and Ralph looked at him.
“What are you thinking?” Zane asked, raising his eyebrows.
James mused, “I’m thinking that maybe the Werewolves do have a weakness after all. I mean, besides their overconfidence.”
“What’s that?” Ralph asked.
James smiled slowly and a little wickedly. “Do you think that there is anyone on campus, apart from their own housemates, who want Team Werewolf to win the tournament?”
Zane blew a breath out through pursed lips. “After a decade of being undefeated? And after all the humiliations they’ve handed out for the last few seasons? Not likely. In fact, I’d bet that everyone in every other house would pay good money to see the Wolves get clobbered this year. Why?”
James was still smiling mischievously. “Do you think,” he asked quietly, “that they’d be willing to help make it happen?”
It was a simple enough plan, and James admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that he was just the person to pull it off.
Two years earlier, during his first term at Hogwarts, James had learned something about himself. He was not like his father. This was not a bad thing, really (although for some time he had sorely believed it was). It did mean, however, that James had to find other methods to get things done. His father, as a young man, had succeeded by rushing pell-mell straight into the arms of danger, usually flanked only by his mates, Ron and Hermione. This had worked for him because he was, simply put, the child of destiny. He was Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived.
James, on the other hand, was just a kid. His attempts to manage adventures entirely on his own had failed rather miserably. Like Team Bigfoot, James had only succeeded narrowly, often by the slightest of margins, and always with the help of the people around him. This had finally convinced him of the reality of the kind of person he was. Rather than attempting to manage things entirely on his own as his father had, James had learned (at least in a few instances) to ask for help.
He had first done this by asking the Gremlins to assist him, Ralph, and Zane in the great broomstick caper, when they had believed that Tabitha Corsica’s broom had been the legendary Merlin staff in disguise. The caper had failed (in the fundamental sense that the broomstick had not, in fact, been the Merlin staff ), but it had worked excellently in actual practice; James had succeeded in pilfering the broom, at least for a few minutes. Later, of course, James had asked Mer
lin himself to help them in ridding Hogwarts of the pesky (but dangerous) Muggle reporter, Martin Prescott. That, incredibly, had worked exceptionally well. Grudgingly, over the next year, James had learned that this was his fate. He was not a hero so much as he was a manager. He asked for help. Not always, of course, and probably not even as often as he should, but when he did, things seemed to work out much better.
Now, he was only slightly more comfortable with it. And yet, as he visited the first house on his list (it was Aphrodite Heights, up on the hill near the theater), he discovered that this task, unlike his previous experiences with asking for help, was going to be rather eerily easy.
“You bet,” Ophelia Wright, captain of Team Pixie, nodded resolutely, making her blonde pigtails flop. “Those Werewolf stump-heads had the gall to play Winkles and Augers on their platform during our last match. By the fourth quarter, Professor Jackson wasn’t even watching the game! He was watching his own players winkle an old Clutch around their platform! We’ll do more than share our best spells with you. We’ll show you how to use them! That’ll teach those tasteless old Wolves to embarrass the Pixies.”
Ten minutes later, James left Aphrodite Heights in a sort of stunned daze. Ralph walked next to him, his nose buried in a handwritten notebook, its pages crammed with hand-drawn illustrations and neat, back-slanting cursive, the ‘i’s all dotted with smiley faces and hearts.
“Wow,” Ralph breathed, not looking up from the pages. “Those Pixies are only cute on the outside. This stuff is ruthless.”
James nodded, but their work wasn’t done yet. They still had three more houses to visit, and yet he approached the task with a renewed sense of purpose. Ophelia Wright had responded almost as if the two Bigfoot players were doing them a favor, rather than the other way around.
“Put them in their place,” she’d said grimly as she walked them to the big gingerbready front door of Aphrodite Heights. “Knock them off their infuriatingly colourless grey skrims and tell them it’s from Team Pixie, at least in part.”
James had nodded, smiling crookedly. This was going far better than he’d expected.
By the end of the day, he and Ralph had procured the enthusiastic assistance of the team captains from every other house.
The Igors had agreed to give Team Bigfoot’s skrims a secret pre-game boost, using a battery of technomancic enhancements that they had formulated over the previous few seasons and which had, up until now, been a carefully guarded secret. These enhancements, the Igor captain promised with a slightly maniacal (if practiced) laugh, would make the Bigfoots’ skrims faster and more maneuverable than anything in the Werewolves’ arsenal.
Warrington, the captain of Team Zombie, was still smarting from his team’s loss to the Bigfoots, but with Zane’s encouragement, this was easily offset by the Zombies long-term hatred of the Werewolves. He agreed to share his team’s most effective offensive techniques with the Bigfoots, which was no small offering, considering that the Zombies had succeeded in scoring the most points against the Werewolves throughout the season.
James had been prepared to fetch Wentworth in order to guarantee an interview with the captain of Team Vampire, but it turned out that the captain was Anton Harding, the boy who had initially tried to prevent their entrance into Erebus Castle, and he had already heard about James and Ralph’s mission. He headed them off as they made their way across the afternoon warmth of the campus.
“I hear you’re looking for help from the other societies in beating Altaire and his Werewolves in the tournament,” he said with no preamble.
James nodded and gulped. “Er, yes,” he admitted. “We checked the Bigfoot team charter and saw that there’s no rule against it. We just thought the other teams might, er, want to see the Werewolves finally get beaten after all these years. Fair and square, of course. Nothing underhanded.”
Harding’s eyes narrowed. “Well, that’s a shame,” he scowled in disgust. “But I should have known that Team Bigfoot wouldn’t have the guts to do anything truly evil to put those infuriating dogs in their place. I was willing to share with you our most secret game curses. Would you be willing to accept a few mild Plague Hexes at least?”
Ralph gave a smile that shocked James a little and then put an arm around Harding’s shoulders. “Did you know,” he said conspiratorially, “that I come from a little place known as Slytherin House? Plague Hexes are a bit of a specialty for us. Talk to me.”
Harding met Ralph’s grin. For the next twenty minutes, the three talked in low voices, hovering near the glinting orb of the Octosphere. At the end of it, both Ralph and Harding laughed. After a moment, James joined in, a bit nervously.
All the houses were backing them now. With their assistance, Team Bigfoot would be more formidable than they had ever been before and might never be again. James knew, however, that the real secret of their potential success was not in the technomancy-enhanced skrims or the expanded game magic or even the Vampires’ dreadful game curses. The real secret was in the psychological boost that these things would give Team Bigfoot. The whole school was behind them, rooting for them, and offering them their best support. Apart from the members of Werewolf House, the entire school believed that the Bigfoots could win the tournament.
This, more than anything, was their secret weapon. Tentatively, James began to think that they might just pull it off.
20. ALBUS’ STORY
Albus didn’t hate Alma Aleron despite his outward jibes and complaints. Nor did he necessarily dislike life in Ares Mansion with his fellow Werewolves. In many ways, they were comfortingly similar to his mates back in Slytherin House. There was a familiar ruthlessness to them, a mingled sense of pride and ambition that Albus wholeheartedly shared. He had friends among the Wolves and even a few outside his own society. Like Zane, Albus was a likeable fellow. People gravitated toward him and got caught in his orbit, drawn by his infectious (albeit pointed) wit and his cynical insightfulness. There were times when Albus felt perfectly at home with his new mates and even this strange new school, which was so very unlike Hogwarts.
Furthermore, there was a refreshing candor to the Werewolves—a distinctly American straightforwardness that was somewhat shocking to his English sensibilities. Where the Slytherins (at least in his day and age) were rather political and subtle with their tactics, the Werewolves were fully overt about their aims. They were militant, power-hungry, arrogant, and merciless, and they were utterly unabashed about it. Albus appreciated the sheer bloody-minded bluntness of Clay Altaire, Olivia Jones, and the rest of the upperclassmen Wolves, even if their flinty-eyed zeal sometimes left him a little cold.
The one thing that ruined it all, of course, was the Werewolves’ sense of nearly absurd patriotism. Albus understood patriotism—had expressed it himself in his irritation about coming to the States to begin with—but the brand of nationalism practiced by many of the older Werewolf students was off-putting at the very least. It had begun with the nickname ‘Cornelius’, apparently an American term for anyone with a British accent derived from some famous speeches given decades earlier by some Minister of Magic. Albus could live with that, he supposed. He himself had handed out more than a few derisive nicknames in his time, and knew that the best way to manage such a thing was to embrace the nickname rather than eschew it. Consequently, he answered to the nickname as if it was a source of pride. After all, he was British and this Cornelius fellow had been Minister of Magic. These were hardly things to be ashamed of.
The Werewolves, however, seemed immune to the irony of Albus’ willing acceptance of their sneering moniker. They viewed it as a weakness rather than a sort of backhanded boldness. The Werewolves, Albus learned, did not appreciate cunning or subtlety, at least outside of the battlefield. What they wished to see from their fellow Wolves was fierceness. They wanted Albus to bare his metaphorical teeth at them, to prove his toughness (and his adopted Americanness) by snarling at their jibes and even slashing back at them a little. By the time he realized this, how
ever, it was too late to do anything about it. Like any wolf pack, the alpha dogs maintained their positions by stepping on the throats of the lesser animals. By playing it cool and subtle, Albus had allowed them to decide—erroneously—that he was not an alpha dog. The fact that he clung to his Britishness (and perhaps even more, his Slytherinness) only cemented their opinion that he was an interloper.
As a result, Albus’ initial rabid enthusiasm for his house and his mates had cooled to a brittle, grudging tolerance. He missed Slytherin House, where he was appreciated and (he had to admit it, at least to himself ) revered a little. After all, he was the son of Harry Potter and he had been sorted into the house of Harry Potter’s mortal enemy. If that wasn’t delicious irony, then nothing was. The Slytherins, politick as they might be, understood irony. They relished it.
Thus, as each day passed, bringing Albus one step closer to going home to his mates, he became more and more discontent and restless.
He talked to James about it a little, but James couldn’t really understand. James had Ralph and that insufferable git Zane Walker to hang out with just like always. Besides, James was obviously obsessed with some project or other, as he always seemed to be. Albus didn’t know anything about it—had merely noticed his brother and his small circle of mates buried in hushed conversations and lurking around the campus like a bunch of self-important little berks—but he guessed that whatever it was, it had something to do with Petra Morganstern.
Albus supposed that he was slightly jealous of them. After all, Petra was his friend too, at least a little. She and her sister had lived in the Potter home for several weeks over the summer, and Petra and Albus had developed a sort of sharp-edged camaraderie. There was something decidedly un-Gryffindor about Petra, despite her house of origin. She could be surprisingly dark sometimes, both in her attitudes and her humor, and Albus had, to his own great surprise, truly liked her. He didn’t feel the same way about the older girl that James did, of course. Everybody knew that James was completely sodden with puppy love for Petra. Albus, on the other hand, saw her as a younger, female version of his recently married Uncle George. To him, Petra was a sort of sister-in-arms, a cynical kindred spirit, even if she did tend to hide it all under a somewhat sugary nice girl exterior.
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