They had set a dragon loose in Muggle London.
The very thought seemed preposterous. Laughable, even. And yet he could all too easily recall the crash of colliding cars and the screams of witnesses as Norberta clawed to the top of Tower Bridge, coiling atop its famed silhouette like a living gargoyle.
Hundreds of people had to have seen it, despite the hour. And even now, the fully-grown Norwegian Ridgeback was surely rampaging through the city, doing untold damage and spreading a wake of Muggle terror in every direction.
Zane had been right. As they’d departed the hobbled Gertrude upon finally returning to the Moonpool, he had pulled James, Rose, and Ralph aside and gravely said, “This is worse than the Night of the Unveiling. You know that, right?”
Hagrid had been utterly silent throughout the return journey, even as they all bid their solemn goodnights. He was in a sort of shock, James knew, caught between worrying about his poor, lost dragon, the knowledge that he had caused possibly the greatest breach of the Vow of Secrecy in a thousand years, and the reality that, by the following morning, he may well be carted off to Azkaban to await trial for crimes too numerous to easily count.
And yet James simply couldn’t comprehend the terrible scope of it all. Whenever he tried to imagine what was to come, or what he should do about it, his mind fetched up once again on that harrowing image of the dragon atop Tower Bridge, her tail whipping her flanks, her wings spread for balance, roaring a stream of liquid fire into the clouds.
He fell asleep without realizing it and woke up mere minutes later, or so it felt. The daylight outside the window betrayed the truth, however. It was the middle of Saturday afternoon.
James groaned and rolled over, clutching a hand over his eyes.
“Late night, sleepyhead?” A voice greeted him cheerfully. It was Graham. “You’ll be in no shape for Quidditch tomorrow if you keep that up. As your team captain, I feel it’s my duty to say I’m disappointed in you.”
James groaned again, unable to formulate any meaningful response. As he swung his feet to the floor, realizing that he was fully clothed in grimy jeans, sweatshirt, and clammy socks, the memory of the previous night fell back onto him like a millstone.
“Oh, bloody hell,” he muttered urgently to himself. “Graham, have you seen a newspaper today?”
Graham had not. “Why? Did you have another interview with Rita Skeeter?”
Breathlessly, James leapt out of bed, not even thinking to change out of his grimy day-old clothes, and ran down the spiral stairs.
No one in the common room had seen that morning’s Daily Prophet either. James pushed through the portrait hole and ran toward the staircase, his feet clad only in socks, now loose and flopping damply from his toes.
He passed Peeves in the hall, and the poltergeist hurried to follow, sensing potential trouble and eager to exploit it however he could.
“Get away!” James called back over his shoulder, panting. “This is none of your business!”
“Things that aren’t my business are the best things of all!” the fat little figure trilled, bouncing happily from the walls.
Rose was just coming out of the Great Hall as James blundered to the bottom of the stairs with Peeves tittering close behind.
“Have you seen it? What’s the news?” James gasped, but Rose hurried to him, already shushing him with a finger to her lips.
“Ooo!” Peeves squeaked with high anticipation. “This is going to be good! I can just smell the beautiful stink of conspiracy about you both!”
“Away with you, Peeves!” Rose hissed, snapping her glare onto the poltergeist. “This doesn’t concern you!”
“All the better!” Peeves squealed, turning loops in the air.
“Trouble, trouble for Peeves to double!”
Rose narrowed her eyes. When she spoke again, it was in a musing, sing-song voice. “Did you hear what they’re making for dessert tonight, James?”
Peeves halted in mid-air, his face suddenly suspicious.
“Sleeping Toad Tarts,” Rose whispered tantalizingly.
“Mmmm… miniature enchanted sugar toads twitching in Turkish Delight gelatin drops. Very tricky to prepare. Requires complete silence in the kitchen, lest the trays of sugar toads be woken before they’re properly embedded in the gelatin. Can you just imagine? Hundreds of candy toads leaping pell-mell about the kitchen with all the elves scrambling to catch them?”
James glanced up at Peeves and was surprised to see the poltergeist wringing his hands frantically, his piggish face screwed up with strain, like Ralph trying not to belch in class after chugging a licorice soda.
“It would be simply disastrous,” Rose went on, speaking in an awed voice, “if anyone, say, invaded the kitchen and started banging pots and pans while singing the Hogwarts Salute at the top of their lungs. It’s a good thing I don’t know anyone who likes to do such things.”
“MmmmMMH!” Peeves groaned shrilly, nearly popping with torment. He hovered a moment longer, his eyes going cross-eyed and his cheeks bulging with concentration, and then let out a bawl of helpless glee and swooped away, careening in the unmistakable direction of the kitchens, already breaking into the first verse of the Hogwarts Tribute.
“Come with me,” Rose said, grabbing James by the elbow and steering him away toward a side corridor. “The library. And not a word before we get there.”
James allowed Rose to drag him onward, once again marveling at her ability to manipulate lesser minds by giving them exactly what they most want.
Five minutes later, at a table in the farthest back corner of the library, with their backs to the wall and no one else in sight, James bent over Rose’s edition of that morning’s Daily Prophet.
The news story was surprisingly small, halfway down the second page. Not buried, exactly, but clearly not the screaming headline that they had expected.
MUGGLE DRAGON SIGHTINGS IN CENTRAL
LONDON CAUSE FOR INVESTIGATION
Ministry of Magic officials responded early this morning to persistent reports that a dragon had been sighted atop London’s Tower Bridge and in nearby environs. Initially dismissed as mass hysteria induced by the numerous unrelated breaches of magical unplottability in Muggle spaces, eyewitness testimonies led Ministry investigators to believe that some incursion of a magical beast may indeed have occurred.