“Maybe we let Norberta take a swipe at them,” James suggested, aiming for Zane Walker style glibness. “If she gulps down one or two of them, the rest are bound to get the message and let us be.”
Ralph glared aside at him, obviously ill-amused. James wished Rose was along to rationalize away all of Ralph’s concerns, but she was busy with her own classes until dinnertime.
Fortunately, Alchemy and Divination occupied the rest of the afternoon, then, after a hurried dinner, Ralph announced his plan to return to the Slytherin dungeons for the evening, citing homework.
James had a feeling that homework was the least of Ralph’s concerns, it being Friday night, but was happy enough for a reprieve from the big boy’s constant litany of frets about the upcoming mission.
Leaving him at the bannister, James whispered, “We meet just outside your common room at midnight, right? Hagrid will come unlock the moonpool beneath the lake.”
“Don’t remind me,” Ralph groused, tossing up his hands and barely resisting the urge to clamp them over his ears. “Like, seriously, don’t remind me! I want to forget about this whole bleedin’ plan.”
“No backing out now, Ralph,” James prodded, leaning close to his friend. “Nobody knows when we’ll need you and that unbeatable wand of yours.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ralph rolled his eyes, reluctantly mollified. Then he added, “It sure didn’t help me against Odin-Vann the other day.”
James glanced at the boy where he stood on the first step down.
“I was going to ask you about that. You were like a force of nature.
What got into you?”
“Are you serious?” Ralph looked up, meeting James’ eyes with a piercing glare. “You saw the way he was dueling. Where’d that come from all of a sudden? That isn’t natural, and you know it. Something’s up with him, and his wand, and… and… everything about him. I checked up on him, you know.”
James had been about to comment on Odin-Vann’s mysterious new dueling ability when Ralph’s last statement caught him off guard.
“You—you did what?”
“I checked up on him.” Ralph repeated firmly. “Something we all should have done before traipsing off to the World Between the Worlds on his orders. I sent a note to Ted Lupin over in Hogsmeade.”
James blinked at Ralph, realizing that his instinct, if not his suspicion, was dead-on. Odin-Vann had indeed gone to school with Ted at one point, along with a few others they could have spoken to, such as Damien Damascus, Sabrina Hildegard, and the rest of the Gremlins. He felt foolish for not thinking of the idea himself, but then shook his head, as if clearing it.
“Petra trusts Odin-Vann, and I trust her,” he said. “But you haven’t liked him since you first clapped eyes on him, have you? So, what did Ted say?”
“Not much good,” Ralph said, and then sighed and glanced away. “Not much bad, either. Apparently Odin-Vann kept to himself most of the time. A real bookish type. Quiet, shy, the kind of bloke that hardly gets noticed by anyone other than the sort of bullies who sniff out people like that. He got pushed around a bit, according to Ted. He was never good with a wand, so much so that people teased him, telling him he was three-fifths squib, saying he could do better just to poke people with his wand for all the good it did him in a duel.”
James nodded reluctantly. “That sure hasn’t changed much, has it? He can barely get off a tickling jinx if the pressure’s on. And there’s no pressure like being bullied all the time in school.”
“I don’t know if he was bullied all the time,” Ralph hedged, “but apparently he felt like he was. That’s partly why Petra made friends with him. Ted says that Odin-Vann and Petra were close from the moment they met, but he never thought anything of it. It was never a romantic thing. She was just a kid then. For her own part, she just seemed to feel sorry for Odin-Vann, especially when the older years gave him grief.
They hung out in the library together mostly, since he could usually be found there surrounded by piles of books, almost like he was hiding behind them.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a thing,” James said with a shrug.
“That could have been you if Zane and I hadn’t met you that first day on the train and drug you kicking and screaming out of your shell.”
“He’s smart, though,” Ralph added, his face firm. “That’s what Ted remembers most. Scary smart when it came to potions and charms, any kind of magic he could do by himself, with no pressure. Ted says that Odin-Vann used to hang out in Flitwick’s classroom for hours some nights, just writing out charms and spells, studying them, trying to modify them to make them more powerful or invent new ways of casting them. Flitwick himself apparently said Odin-Vann was his sharpest student ever, but Ted thinks even he was a little wigged out by the kid.
He was too quiet and withdrawn to be that hyper-smart. Like, he’d be president of Igor house if he was an American, always secretly dreaming up crazy plans for how to take over the world.”
“Can’t hate a bloke for being smart,” James observed, “So what’s your problem with him?”
Ralph shook his head, eyes narrowed. “Well, for one thing, he sure isn’t bad with a wand anymore. What happened to him all of a sudden?”
James shrugged. The question had occurred to him as well. “I don’t know. Practice, maybe?”
“Maybe,” Ralph conceded doubtfully. “But there’s more to it than that. I can’t put my finger on it. But I don’t trust him. More, I think he knows it. And that’s what makes me the most suspicious.”
“Why, because he’s trying so hard to win you over?”
Ralph glanced up at James again, surprised. “No. Because he’s not trying to at all.”
A moment later, Ralph waved James goodbye and tromped down the stairs, clearly in a hurry. James watched him go, asking himself for the first time what Ralph might be up to at such an hour. It certainly wasn’t homework. Was it something related to his suspicions about Professor Odin-Vann? More, was Ralph right to be suspicious?
James shook his head, dismissing the question. It was only Ralph. He probably just had boring, tedious Head Boy responsibilities to attend to.
Without another thought, James turned and ran up the ascending staircase, jumping the trick step and taking the rest two and a time.
“This would be loads easier if we had the invisibility cloak,” Rose whispered as they skulked through the corridor at midnight, skirting the torches and ducking behind statues.
“I know,” James said tersely. “You can stop mentioning it.”
“I’m only saying,” Rose went on blithely, peering around the flank of a stone centaur, “A true gremlin would have found a way to nick the invisibility cloak without his father knowing, just for situations like this.”
“No other gremlin’s dad is head of the Department of Aurors,”
James grumbled. “Why are we stopping? The Slytherin common room door is just around the bend.”