We’re much more alike than you know.”
James nodded derisively. “Albus says that, too. I just had no idea you agreed with him. Well, this is just fine then, isn’t it? My own brother is working with you to send you off to some other cursed dimension.”
“Not just him,” Petra said quietly, as if committed now to telling James the whole truth.
“Oh, that’s right,” James agreed sourly, throwing out his arms.
“There’s your old pal Don, who’s been your bestie since way back before I was ever in the picture.”
“Not just Don, either,” Petra countered, dropping her voice even lower, shame and defiance mingling in her tone.
“Who then?” James demanded, taking a step closer to her.
She raised her chin and turned to him fully now, her lips pressed into a tight line, meeting his gaze firmly. She didn’t answer, but allowed him to look into her face, to read the truth revealed there.
And another memory came, unbidden, into James’ mind. It was not his own memory, but Petra’s, deliberately broadcast to him on the frequency of their secret connection. In it, a wheedling voice, high and insistent droned viciously, speaking only to Petra herself: GIVE IN! All that matters is power… Embrace your destiny or die fighting it. You are not good. There is no… such… THING!
James’ shoulders wracked with a hard shiver. He had heard that loathsome, hateful voice once before, and recognized it immediately.
Back then it had come from a maimed painting, hissing with venom.
Now, it was the voice from the back room of Petra’s mind. It was the cursed voice of the Bloodline: the last, fractured shred of Lord Voldemort himself, long dead, but captured, like a spark of poison flame, in the lantern of Petra’s mind and heart.
And for the first time, James understood the fatal connection between Petra’s twin identities. She was the Bloodline. And she was the Crimson Thread. Beneath the titles, they were both exactly the same thing: a scarlet vector pointing to one terrible, inescapable destiny.
“You’ve been,” James said, his voice hushed now to a whisper, “you’ve been… listening to that?”
“I don’t listen to it,” she answered, still facing him with stubborn defiance. “But I tap into it. There is power there. And something else… something I desperately need right now.”
James wasn’t joking when he suggested: “Evil?”
Petra shook her head in negation, but took her eyes from him again, turning away. “Conviction. I’m divided, James, don’t you see?
I’m torn between what I know I have to do, and what my heart most desperately wants. I need the conviction that that part of me offers. It’s like a dark magnetism. It helps me stay on the path I need to go down.”
James simply stared at Petra, unable to formulate any response to her words. They were wrong on so many levels that he couldn’t simply choose one. He flailed desperately in his thoughts, found nothing to cling to, and then simply said the first thing that came to his mind.
“But that voice is hate, Petra. Hate is never right. There has to be another voice. A voice that’s truly yours.”
Petra didn’t move. She stood silhouetted against the petrified bronze sunset, the forbidden book under one arm, the dagger Horcrux dangling in her other hand. After a long moment, she shrugged slowly and shook her head, as if reaching a hopeless conclusion that she had reached a thousand times before.
“There is no other voice, James,” she said with horrible banality.
“That voice died with the other Petra.”
James reached for her arm, took the heavy book from beneath it, and dropped it to the empty bench without looking. He turned her toward him, but she didn’t raise her eyes to him, didn’t look at him at all. She held the dagger Horcrux behind her back, as if she thought he might try to take that from her as well. Or as if she meant to stab him with it.
“I don’t believe that,” James said, taking Petra by the shoulders, looking down at her. “You’re good. Good isn’t a myth, as long as you believe in it.”
Petra leaned toward James, pressed her forehead weakly to his throat, allowed him to collect her into his arms. She did not hug him back, but absorbed his embrace deeply, unwilling to ask for it, but desperate for it nonetheless. They stood like that for some time, warming in the eternal sunset glow, listening to the lap of the waves beneath the gazebo, and the softer, slower tide of Izzy’s breathing behind them. It might have been a minute, or an hour. James had no way of knowing, and was content to stand there holding Petra forever, until she stirred against him. She twined her arms around his waist slowly, keeping him close, and then pushed herself up onto her toes before him.
He dipped his head as she opened her mouth to whisper to him.
Instead, she kissed him.
Her lips were shocking in their normalcy, their perfect warmth, and softness, and subtle expressiveness. There was no fantastic exchange of power between them, no spark of blinding enchantment.
And yet…
And yet it was the most purely, pristinely magical moment that James had ever experienced. He forgot who he was. His heart expanded and took up his whole body, crowding out every rational, waking thought.
And then, only a second and a lifetime later, Petra withdrew, keeping her face near his, looking up gravely into his eyes.
“We just had our first and last lover’s quarrel, James,” she said somberly. “Did you know that?”
James stared down at her, speechless, wanting nothing more than to kiss her again, or for the world to end at that exact moment so that her kiss would be his final memory. “No,” he answered. “Was that…us making up?”
She smiled secretively and then shook her head. “No. That was because you were jealous of Don. He’s just a friend. That’s all he ever was, and all he ever could be. He’s not like you. But your jealousy…it’s sweet. And adorable.”
James felt his face flush. He knew that she could see it, but he wasn’t ashamed.
“Don’t go, Petra,” he said. The words came out before he could stop them. There was nothing more to say. That’s all he wanted in the whole world. No matter the cost. No matter the consequence.
She closed her eyes. There was pain on her face, as if she was experiencing a brief but titanic inner struggle. And then she went rigid in his arms. When she opened her eyes again, they were different.
James shivered violently and recoiled, but Petra was still holding onto him. She stared up at him still, only now her eyes glowed with a ruddy inner light. Her pupils were thin, black snake-slits.
“I don’t want to go, James,” she said with low emphasis. Her voice was a cold furnace of conviction. “But don’t make this harder than it is. I’ve warned you before. Don’t try to stop me. No one can be allowed to stop me.”
“Petra,” James rasped, but his own voice was barely audible.
Horror and dismay constricted his throat. And still she held onto him.
James couldn’t tell if she was embracing him or strangling him.
“I love you, James,” she said. Her breath was an arctic breeze on his face, and yet it was the hopelessness in her tone that chilled him worst of all. These weren’t the words of young love.
This was an epitaph, a final inscription—a single kiss, first and final, the one to stand for all.
Darkness swept across the sky. It blotted the lake, snuffed the sun, and threw he and Petra into seamless black. He felt her holding onto him even as he fell away, dropped into the abyss of dreamless sleep, hearing her last words clang over and over in a senseless echo, like the tolling of a bell, as dead and cold as a January frost.
16. – Hagrid makes a plan
“It was a dream, James. Had to be.” Rose was distracted and agitated as they walked along the snow-mushy path to the greenhouses.
Cold water squelched into their shoes as they hurried, blinking against the stunning winter sunlight. The snow was a damp blanket over the grounds, pitted and heavy, as if exha
usted after the long winter, ready to melt away at the first breath of spring.
“It wasn’t a dream,” James insisted, keeping his voice hushed despite the constant pummel of the wind. “You know I can travel to Petra in my sleep. I’ve told you the whole thing, about how, on the night I saved Petra on the back of the Gwyndemere, a connection happened between us, and it’s been there ever since. You’ve seen it with your own eyes! I tell you, I visited with Petra last night. She was just as real as you and me right now. I could smell her. I could… um, touch her.”
“Just because you can travel to her in your sleep sometimes doesn’t mean you do it every time. You said yourself that you visited her in her grandparents’ gazebo. Harriers and Aurors have been staked out all around that farm ever since the Night of the Unveiling, guarding it and watching for her. She can’t put her big toe anywhere near there without being instantly surrounded.”
“And I told you,” James said, exasperated, “That it wasn’t the gazebo and the lake as it is now. It was caught in a loop of time from decades ago, before any of us were even born.”
“Right,” Rose nodded. “Definitely not something that would happen in a dream.”
“Rose, she’s been in contact with Al! And she’s tapping into the power of the Bloodline for strength and support! Whatever is left of Voldemort, she’s talking to it. She’s listening to it. And she’s using its power.”
“Look, James,” Rose said curtly, tromping into the shadow of the greenhouse. Sunlight shot blinding arrows from the glass walls. “It’s marvelous that you and Petra have this cosmic connection. Really, it is.
And I’m just honest enough to admit that, quite frankly, I’m dead jealous of the both of you. It’s all so bloody, tragically romantic that I can barely stand it. Worse, the fact that it’s wasted on an emotionally constipated, immature clod like you—”
“Rose,” James interrupted, “I kissed her.”
Rose stopped in her tracks, sliding a little in the slush. She turned around, eyes wide. In a tight whisper, she said, “You didn’t!”
“Well, actually no. I didn’t. She kissed me.” He blew out a hard sigh and squinted in the reflected afternoon sunlight. “It was the last thing I expected. It was…” He shook his head, speechless at the memory.
“But you kissed her back,” Rose confirmed, her eyes still wide.
“Of course. And then, I just held her for awhile. Or… that might have come first. To be honest, the whole thing is almost too big to remember. It takes up too much space in my memory.” He glanced quickly up at her again. “But that doesn’t mean it was only a dream.”
“No,” Rose breathed wistfully, an almost pitying look melting her features, “that’s the first thing you’ve said that convinces me it was actually real.”
Slowly, they continued on, rounding the greenhouse toward the entry. Mollified but suspicious, James said, “And why is that?”
“It’s simple,” Rose said, her tone wistful but condescending.
“You’ve been completely besotted with Petra for years now. Have you ever dreamed of kissing her before?”
James shook his head firmly. “Never.”
“Of course not,” Rose said, dropping her voice as they pushed into the relative warmth of the greenhouse and the chatter of gathering students. “Dreams may toy with granting our wishes sometimes, but they don’t tease us with the things we want most of all. If they did, we’d be too heartbroken by reality to ever wake up.”
James nodded a little uncertainly. They made their way to a collection of wooden folding chairs arranged before the potting table.
Behind this, Hagrid was bustling and humming to himself loudly.
“But it does leave a lot of unanswered questions,” Rose whispered as they settled into the front row. “Like, what will happen to Izzy when Petra leaves this dimension forever? And why would the last shred of Voldemort in her blood want her to go at all? And maybe most importantly, what does Judith have to do with any of it?”
“I… “ James began, then paused and mentally kicked himself. “I didn’t even ask her about Judith.”
Rose did a subtle but pointed double-take at him. She rasped, “You didn’t tell her that Judith cornered you on the lake outside Millie’s home and warned you to stay away from her?” James had told Rose about the encounter, if no one else, since Rose most seemed to understand the mad power and ongoing threat of the Lady of the Lake.
Most others, if they knew of her at all, assumed that Judith had been destroyed during the debacle of the Morrigan Web, over two years earlier.
“I was a little distracted,” James whispered defensively, “being zapped away to the gazebo in the first place, and learning that Petra’s been in contact with Al for months. And then there was the kiss…”
“James,” Rose sagged helplessly, “Zane Walker is right. You really are as dull as dishwater. You had a chance to ask the most important question of all, and you completely flubbed it!”
James blinked and frowned again. “Zane said I was dull as dishwater?”
“Not in so many words, but come on. He was whatever passed for the brains of you three before I came along. Now think: the only reason Judith warned you away from Petra is because she knows you don’t want her to carry out her plan. That means Judith does want her to. And apparently so does the ghost of Voldemort’s soul that lives in Petra’s blood, otherwise she wouldn’t be tapping into it for guidance and strength. So, the big question is obvious, isn’t it? Why would the two most evil entities in the whole wide world want Petra to go through with her mission?”
James shook his head and slumped back in his wooden chair. “It can’t be that. Petra says that assuming the role of the Crimson Thread in that other version of reality is the only way to fix everything here in this one. There must be some other reason why Judith wants me to stay out of it.”
“And another reason why the demented shred of Voldemort in Petra’s head wants her to go through with it?” Rose shook her head firmly. “You’re making the same mistake you always do, James.”
He glared back at her, suddenly perturbed. “And what’s that, you’re so smart?”
Rose hissed, “Trusting people who don’t always deserve to be trusted!”
“Like Petra,” James nodded, as if confirming a suspicion. “Look, you don’t know her like I do. Nobody does.”
“Petra isn’t a bad person,” Rose acknowledged, the spark in her eyes unwavering. “But that doesn’t mean that she’s always right, James.
She can be wrong, just like you and me. Worse, she can be lied to.”
James had no response to that. Not because Rose’s suggestion made him angry, but because he had honestly never even considered it.
Hagrid’s voice boomed through the greenhouse, interrupting their hushed conversation, “Settle down, yeh lot, and find a seat. We’ve got loads t’ cover today, so be ready with yer quills and parchments.”
A ripple of surprise swept over the students, and then came the shuffle of knapsacks and bags as parchments, books, and quills were produced, balanced precariously on knees in the absence of desks.
“Professor Hagrid,” Trenton Bloch said, raising a peremptory hand. “We don’t usually take notes in this class. Does this mean today’s subject will be on a test later?”
“Wouldn’t yeh like to know,” Hagrid answered cagily, his beetle-black eyes narrowing. Then, with a start, he straightened. “Erm. I mean… o’ course yeh’d like to know. So, yes. Why, certainly there’ll be a test. This is a class, init?”
Apparently emboldened by Trenton’s question, Ashley Doone spoke up from the back row, “Only, we’ve never had a test in this class before, Professor. Just practical examinations. I’ve stopped even bringing an ink and quill to the barn with me when I go.”
“Yeah,” Nolan Beetlebrick added, glancing around for encouragement from the rest of the class. “And why this sudden move to the greenhouses for the rest of term? There’s no magical creatures here at
all. Just plants.”
Hagrid raised both of his huge hands as the class began to murmur. “Th’ barn menagerie is off-limits until further notice. Nothin’ t’ be done about it. The barn’s bein’… er… cleaned up. Again. With dangerous potions an’ elixirs this time. Highly potent stuff, straight from Perfessor Heretofore’s laboratory, don’cher know. So no one’s allowed in nor out until further notice, not unless yeh wanna grow yerself a third ear and a hinkypunk tail.”
James sensed Rose’s sidelong glance. He slid an eye toward her and shrugged.
“Yeah,” Hagrid went on, warming to the topic. “As yeh know, I’ve had to ship off most of the menagerie’s biggest an’ most dang’rous beasts, jus’ in case any other Muggles come a-wanderin’ onto the grounds. Ridiculous, o’ course, but orders is orders, an’ these ones come straight from th’ Minister o’ Magic ‘imself. So there’s no point in havin’ class in there anyways, least until further notice. Yeah, that’s about right.” He nodded to himself with obvious satisfaction. “An’ that’s why I’ve asked Perfessor Longbottom to let us use the north greenhouse for the rest o’ th’ term, and he was gracious enough t’ say yes. So. Today’s lesson will be on Ambermuggins, a species o’ mimicking penguin indigenous to only a single unplottable cavern in th’ South Pole. Unlike other mimicking birds, such as common parrots, th’ Ambermuggin mimics only swear words and embarrasin’ scatological euphemisms, thus their ban from p’lite society and even th’ mos’ dodgy o’ magical zoos…”
An hour later, with pages of disjointed notes and a list of the Ambermuggin’s favorite vulgarities crammed into their knapsacks, the class filed muttering back out of the greenhouse, heading toward the castle and lunch in the great hall. James and Rose remained just inside the entrance, however, watching Hagrid as he bustled at the potting table again, humming too loudly to himself as he gathered his things.
Finally, with a sweep of his huge coat, he rounded the table and tramped toward the door.
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 36