“Wait!” James called, alarmed, but it was too late. Vehicles swooped past and around the huge man at full speed, neither swerving nor sounding their horns. Neither did Merlin pay the vehicles any attention. He merely strode across the many lanes, his staff clacking the pavement at his side. Halfway across, he paused to look back at the people watching, dumbfounded, from the curb behind.
“A little trick I learned navigating herds of stampeding Erumpents during my travels in darkest Africa,” he called in his deep, resonating voice. “Follow close behind. We have a schedule to keep.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Ron muttered in a high voice. “He’s not serious, is he?”
Hermione said, “I think I’ll take the cross-walk, if you don’t mind.” She struck off at a trot toward the nearest traffic light some fifty yards away.
“I’m with her,” Ron nodded firmly. “We’ll catch up to ‘Mr. Red Cross-code Man’ on the other side, and schedule be damned.”
Hagrid wrung his huge hands in miserable indecision, glancing back and forth between the headmaster’s retreating back and the hurrying Weasleys. “I’ll jus’…” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, beginning to back away, “keep an eye on ‘em, then. Erm.” Turning, he hastened to join Ron and Hermione, his long coat flapping behind him.
“I’m going to try it,” Millie said, watching the headmaster with a twinkle in her eye.
“What!?” James began, “Millie, we can’t just—” but she had already stepped off the curb. Walking purposefully, without a glance back, she began to stride across the first lane. Headlamps painted her side with increasing luminance as vehicles bore down on her.
“Millie!” he called, and took one step down from the curb. A bus swept past her, buffeting her hair with the zooming blast of its passage. She didn’t even glance at it.
“Dad!” James exclaimed, turning aside to his father, but his father wasn’t there anymore, either. The elder Potter was also striding out onto the busy street, neither hurrying nor hesitating, keeping his gaze straight ahead as vehicles blurred past in both directions, whipping at his pant-legs and unruly hair.
James hovered a moment longer, completely stymied with uncertainty. And then, with a gulp and a steeling of his already frayed nerve, he stepped out onto the pavement of the thoroughfare himself.
The key, it appeared, was not to watch, not to pay the slightest attention to the rushing lanes of vehicles on either side. He kept his eyes firmly on his father’s back as he trod ahead of him, even as his father seemed to watch Millie ahead of him. Merlin had reached the other side now, having crossed no less than six lanes of busy nighttime traffic.
Without warning, a load of vehicles blared past in both directions, flickering between James and his father, momentarily obscuring his view. His eyes strained, reflexively trying to follow the flashing metal and glass of the vehicles, to look both ways to assure that his next step wouldn’t place him into the path of a speeding lorry. And yet, just barely, James resisted, keeping his gaze locked dead ahead. And each step, amazingly, carried him forward between roaring cars and taxis, buses and vans, threading through them in a sort of suicidal dance. The passing drivers, for their part, seemed completely oblivious to the line of magical pedestrians crossing between them. James could feel the hot blat of exhausts on his face, the sooty grit of road grime peppering his cheeks and hair. And yet, almost before he thought it possible, he found himself stepping up onto the curb of the other side of the boulevard, leaving the deafening drone of traffic behind him.
“That was brilliant!” Millie exclaimed, grabbing James’ hands and pulling him forward, into a narrow alley. “Wasn’t it a complete blast?”
“How could you do that?” James gasped, his heart still slamming in his throat. “Either of you?!”
Harry shrugged with one shoulder, glancing into the mouth of the alley, where Merlin was still striding away, a mere silhouette against the security lights beyond. “If Merlin said it was safe, I’ve come to trust him,” he said. “But don’t you dare ever try that on your own. Either of you.”
“No worries there!” James said, still struggling to catch his breath over the thunder of his heart. He glanced around the street outside the alley. “Where’s Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron?”
“They’ll catch up to us,” his father answered, “come on. It would seem that the Headmaster is in the teeth of the hunt.”
James found himself running along behind his father into the shadows and stink of the alley. Darkness choked the space, interrupted only by glaring security lights that didn’t seem to illuminate anything other than slushy puddles and hulking trash bins.
The alley ended in a narrow cobbled road bordered by a long chain-link fence. Beyond the fence was a dark open space, crowded with low weeds and bushes, that James vaguely recognized as a railway switchyard.
Merlin had stopped before the fence, the runes of his staff pulsing a pale blue. “In there,” he said, nodding his bearded chin. He stepped forward and the chain-link rattled and rang before him as if buffeted by a sudden, silent gale. The mesh of metal unfurled and unraveled, spiraling out from a centre point and forming a gaping opening just as the headmaster stepped through it, not even bowing his head. James and Millie clambered to follow him through, now with James’ father in the rear, his wand held at the ready, his eyes alert behind his spectacles.
“What about the others?” Millie said, her voice unconsciously hushed beneath the steady thrum of the city all around.
“Coming,” Hermione’s voice called, approaching from behind.
James turned to see his aunt run lightly out of the darkness, her bushy hair bouncing about her face. “I’m right here. And Ron is…” She turned to look back. “Well. On his way, it would seem.”
“Save yourselves!” a man’s voice wheezed from the vicinity of the chain-link fence. “I’ll just lie down here and die.”
“Come on, Ron,” Harry called back. “Think of it as exercise.”
Ron approached at a shamble, breathing hard. “You mean she’s not the only one what does this running thing just for fun? That’s a masochist streak, you ask me.”
Millie asked, “What about Hagrid?”
“I thought it might be a good idea to have him ask around at some of the wizarding establishments near Diagon Alley,” Hermione said. “There are loads of pubs and pawn shops and the like, secretly run by witches and wizards for Muggle patronage. Some of them might have seen or heard something about where Norberta has holed up.”
“He didn’t want to go,” Ron said, glancing aside at Harry. “But we thought… er… he might be more useful in that capacity.”
Harry nodded once, meaningfully. Tonight’s plan relied largely on subtlety and finesse, James knew, and neither of those things exactly sprang to mind when one thought of Hagrid.
The troupe began to move into the darkness of the switchyard again. Harry nodded toward Merlin and explained, “The old man seems to have caught a hint of a trail or something.”