The Vault of Destinies (James Potter #3) (51 page)

James leaned forward and stripped off his Clutch boots, letting the conversation roll on without him. Secretly, he wasn't all that upset about the prospect of teaching what he'd learned to a few other players, so long as it wasn't the entire team. He might still earn the ire of Professor Wood, but for the moment, James' aversion to getting into trouble was slightly outweighed by his desire to win at least one Clutch match this season. By the time he and his teammates left the cellar and struck off into the twilight of Pepperpock Down, he was already planning what he'd teach them first.

"Sorry guys," James said to Ralph and Zane as they caught up to him. "No Butterbeers in the Kite and Key tonight. I've been commandeered."

"We figured," Zane nodded, sighing. "You gonna teach your team the old magical twentythree skidoo?"

"Shh!" James hissed, looking around. "Not the whole team. Just a couple of my mates. Keep it a secret, all right?"

"All right," Zane agreed, throwing up his hands as Mukthatch loomed menacingly over him. "Cool your jets, Chewbacca. Your secret's safe with me. But keep in mind, next week, you lot are up against Zombie House. Magic is their middle name."

"Yeah?" Wentworth countered, pushing himself up to his full height. "Well, Team Bigfoot's middle name is… er…"

"Big?" Jazmine suggested hopefully.

"Big magic," Gobbins nodded. "Thanks to James here. Our new magic coach."

The rest of the Bigfoots agreed heartily, cheering and clapping James on the back.

Zane shook his head and rolled his eyes, smiling ruefully. "My hero," he said, nudging James with his elbow.

James grinned sheepishly.

T
he semester unrolled like a carpet.

James spent a few nights each week teaching Clutch magic to his new friends under the canted ceiling of the attic common room. Bump, the house poltergeist, was quite different than what James had expected. Unlike Peeves, whose gleeful mischief and imp-like appearance were Hogwarts legend, Bump was barely a wisp of human-shaped smoke and a vague scent of mold. His primary method of communication was a variety of sneezes, wheezes, annoyed moans, and the occasional hacking cough.

"Sounds like the ghost of someone who died of the sniffles," Ralph had commented, a little put off by the roaming, cranky specter.

"It's a good theory," Wentworth agreed. "We thought the same thing, so we had him tested. Some teensy old lady from the Medical College came over and took an ecto-sample. According to her, Bump's a poltergeist, through and through."

"She sure
was
teensy, wasn't she?" Jazmine concurred. "Her glasses were bigger than her head. I think she had some dwarf somewhere in her family tree."

Gobbins poked his wand toward Bump, who moaned irritably and snaked off toward the bookshelf. "She said that there wasn't much point in checking, really," he added. "She said that there hasn't been a real, bonafide ghost at the Aleron for decades."

"Really?" James asked, curious. "Hogwarts is full of them. One of them used to be our History teacher. Why aren't there any here?"

Wentworth shrugged where he sat by the door in an old high-backed easy chair. "Nobody knows. Maybe because of the Timelock. Maybe ghosts just can't keep up with the way the campus roams all over the centuries every day."

"But there
used
to be ghosts," Gobbins countered. "A long time ago. I've heard stories about them. Percival Pepperpock was one of 'em even. And that old janitor, Freddie something or other. He was always trying to scare people, but he insisted on wearing this old stripey sweater and fedora hat, which is pretty hard to pull off even if you
aren't
trying to be all spooky."

"So what happened to all the ghosts then?" Ralph asked.

Jazmine shook her head. "Like Went said, nobody knows for sure. Maybe they just don't make ghosts like they used to, eh?"

Mukthatch grunted and barked, anxious to get on with the lesson.

Things went well enough and James' initial concerns began to wear off. The third time the group met, however, Norrick appeared in the attic common room, having heard about the Clutch magic practices that were secretly taking place there. Grudgingly, James allowed him to stay, so long as he kept the lessons a secret. By the next week, however, two more members of the team had appeared on the long couch beneath the room's single window, grinning eagerly, their wands in hands.

"I didn't tell anyone!" Norrick said defensively as James glared at him. "It's all over the house now. You can't keep secrets very long around here. I even heard Heckle and Jeckle arguing about it downstairs. Heckle thinks we should be learning some tandem spells, by the way, just to mix it up a little."

James sighed. The truth was that he didn't really mind. Team Bigfoot's Clutch magic was coming along slowly but surely, even if it was fairly standard stuff. James sensed that Professor Wood was still somewhat uncomfortable with it, but he had not yet said anything about it. Perhaps this was because the team had not yet won a match, even though the final scores were growing increasingly close. The last match, in fact, had ended in a tie. James had been disappointed to learn that, according to the rules of Clutchcudgel, a tie game translated to a win for whatever team had had the best record coming into the match, thus giving Team Pixie a technical victory. It had been a moral win for the Bigfoots, nonetheless, and there had been raucous celebration in the locker cellar following the match.

As the team carried their good cheer with them back to Apollo Mansion, James recalled his dad's stories about Quidditch at Hogwarts and felt, for the first time, a deep sense of pride that he was living up to his father's image. In fact, according to the old stories, Oliver Wood himself had been quite the formidable player and had been madly passionate about winning. Perhaps Wood's reluctance to use offensive and defensive magic—whether or not it was rooted in his insecurities about his deceased parents and their disapproval of his participation in the Battle of Hogwarts—was held in check by his much older love of sporting victory. James hoped so. He still had more things he wanted to try.

"All right, you lot," he said, now speaking to slightly more than half of the entire Bigfoot Clutch team, crammed uncomfortably into the attic common room. "That's everything I know. Time for us to get a little creative. Your homework over the weekend is to research something new, something that the other teams will never expect us to know, and come back Monday ready to teach it to the rest of us. Got it?"

There was a rumble of eager excitement throughout the cramped space. Bump lurked by the bookcase with a large encyclopedia in his wispy hand, as if he couldn't choose who to throw it at.

Across the campus, the leaves had all finally drifted from the trees, carpeting the lawns with orange and yellow. The trees scratched their bare branches at the sky as winter settled slowly over the campus, bringing gusty winds and an increasing chill. James broke out his heavy cloak and began wearing it to classes, buttoned dutifully beneath his chin, its stiff collar sticking up around his ears.

"Very dashing," Lucy had said on one grey day, smiling crookedly at her cousin as they made their way toward Administration Hall for lunch. "You'd fit right in at Vampire House. Cloaks are all the rage this year."

"Along with plastic fangs and black hair dye," Albus grumped next to her, walking with his hands stuffed into his blazer pockets.

Lucy clucked her tongue. "You're just mad because you lost the Quidditch tournament to us."

"The tourney's not over yet," Albus countered stridently. "And
I'm
rooting for Zane and his Zombies to beat you all in the final!"

Lucy shrugged as if she didn't care. "May the best team win, of course."

Albus bristled but didn't pursue it any further. James knew that his brother's experiences in Werewolf House were mixed and this was contributing to his natural moodiness. Sometimes, Albus spoke very highly and proudly of life in Ares Mansion. Other times, he seemed sullen and dejected, slinking over to sit with James, Zane, and Ralph in the corner booth at the Kite and Key, rather than joining the long table near the fireplace where the rest of the Werewolves often gathered. Once or twice, James tried to question Albus about his new mates, but Albus always replied defensively, claiming that nothing was wrong, he loved his house, and couldn't a bloke come and sit by his brother every now and then without being grilled about his personal life? Eventually, James gave up asking about it.

Petra still appeared regularly in Professor Baruti's Potion-Making class and James was glad to see that she generally seemed to be in good spirits. Apparently, Izzy was settling in well at the small campus grade school, which was mostly attended by children of other teachers and administrators. The two of them lived in a small apartment on the top floor of one of the houses on Faculty Row. James saw them occasionally at dinner in the cafeteria and sat with them whenever he did.

Strangely, those were the times when he felt the most homesick for Hogwarts, even more so than when he talked to Rose, Scorpius, and the rest via the Shard. Sitting with Petra and Izzy, Ralph, and Zane, laughing and talking, reminded him almost painfully of his days in the Great Hall and the Gryffindor common room. Sometimes, on these occasions, he felt the strangest feeling of loss and worry, as if he might never again return to those halls, might never again see all those familiar people and places. It was silly, of course. He'd be returning soon enough. Still, the feeling lingered, and sometimes, especially late at night, he'd find himself thinking of his last conversation with Professor Trelawney. He'd recall her distant, haunted eyes, and her frightening words:
The fates
have aligned
.
Night will fall, and from it, there will be no dawn
…

Occasionally, James saw his mum and dad and sister Lily. They came to some of his Clutchcudgel matches, although not as many as they wanted to, according to his father. Harry Potter's work was becoming more and more hectic, he said, and James could see it in both of his parents' faces. There was a quiet tension there, and an unspoken worry. No outside newspapers made their way onto the campus of Alma Aleron, but James sensed that things were not at all well in the outside world.

"Don't you worry about it," Harry told him when James asked about it. He smiled at his son, but James could tell that it was a thin smile, put on mostly for his benefit. "You just keep at your schoolwork and your Clutchcudgel. Keep an eye on your brother too. Your mother and I are a little worried about him and those new friends of his in Werewolf House."

James shrugged and nodded. His dad was masking his larger worries with concerns about how Al might be fitting in with his fellow Werewolves. It was rather unsettling, but James determined not to make it his problem. He had done that enough over the last two years.

"I've heard of this Professor Magnussen bloke," James told Ralph and Zane the following weekend, walking along the cold flagstone footpath and kicking piles of dead leaves. "Back during our first year. Remember when I told you about sneaking out with the Invisibility Cloak and following my dad and Chancellor Franklyn around during their midnight meeting? Franklyn said something about Magnussen, made it sound like he was a real trouble maker. Compared him to that Umbridge witch that Dad told us about from back in his own day."

"That's pretty bad," Ralph considered, frowning slightly. "I remember those stories."

"But Magnussen's the key to the whole thing!" Zane insisted. "He's the one that found the key to the Nexus Curtain. We could look him up in the Archive, maybe figure out how he did it! If we did that, then maybe we could follow him through into the place between the worlds and find whoever it was that attacked the Vault of Destinies!" Zane's eyes boggled with excitement, but James sighed.

"You're a complete nutter," he said dourly. "We're done with that kind of thing, all right? Ralph and me, we got it all out of our system last year, chasing down that horrible Gatekeeper thing. Rose too. If she was here, she'd probably cuff you on the ear even for bringing it up."

"Hah," Zane replied, unperturbed. "I've spoken to Rose about it already through the Shard. She thinks it's worth checking out at least. So there."

Ralph spoke up uncertainly. "She says we should just tell James' dad about it and let him look into it. It's his job, after all."

"Mr. Potter's got his hands plenty full already," Zane answered breezily. "I've heard he's getting loads of flack from the local authorities, especially the Magical Integration Bureau. They're making things pretty tough for him, keeping him out of the loop."

"What?" James exclaimed angrily. "Where'd you hear that?"

"I eavesdropped on your dad and Chancellor Franklyn in the Kite and Key after Al's last Quidditch match
. Some
of us don't need any Invisibiliy Cloaks to pull that off."

James was rankled. "But why would the local authorities shut him out? He was sent here to
help
them, wasn't he?"