Petra glared at him, seemed to tower over him, her eyes glowing orbs of rage. And then, with a shaking exhale, the blinding glare fell away and she was just a young woman again, shaking and dirty and bleeding from a half dozen ragged scratches. Trembling, she asked, “There’s still one other way?”
“A terrible way,” Odin-Vann admitted reluctantly, palming blood from his face. “An unspeakable way. A path to ripping open dimensions that no one has ever attempted before because it is only one way, and the cost will be great. But if we leave this plane now, Petra…perhaps we can perform it.”
In a smaller, eerily girlish voice, she asked, “Can we capture back my father’s brooch before we do?”
Odin-Vann cringed as more of the edifice began to cave in behind him. “We will do what must,” he rasped urgently. “But we have to leave this very second. Your Horcrux may save you. But this place is about to kill me permanently.”
The Archive began to sink all around them. Every surface blurred and tilted, shattered and screeched out of true. The death throe of the subterranean edifice was a sustained roar, growing, shaking the very air.
Petra took Odin-Vann’s hand. Behind her, space tore open in a blinding fracture, forming a rough doorway into a calmer place, a sunny gazebo with the flicker of water behind it. She turned to the rift, knowing it would be there, and stepped through, taking the young man with her.
Far above, the Archive’s dome gave way. Its surrounding pillars tilted inward, falling ponderously into the massive pit below even as a volcano of dust and grit exploded up out of it, reaching to the boil of bruised clouds high above.
And with that, the deed that had begun four years earlier finally completed itself: the wheel of destiny finally, ultimately, ground to a complete and fatal halt.
In the Alma Aleron medical college, an old Cajun woman sat up in the chair next to her bed. For the first time in years, Madame Delacroix’s mind came back into malignant focus, as sharp and wicked as ever. She turned her blind gaze toward the tiny, barred window and the boil of clouds above, and a slow, helpless grin spread over her face, showing all of her crooked yellow teeth.
In the room directly above hers, Nastasia Hendricks—or what remained of her, still wasting away in the years since her lighter half was killed—bolted upright in her bed, her mad eyes blazing with alertness.
She unhinged her jaw and belted a scream of laughter, clawed at her face, even as her eyes filled with tears and rolled, both gleeful and horrified in equal measures.
As the destruction of the Archive subsided, Alma Aleron’s timelock tremored back into being and reasserted itself. The lot and its stone wall sprang back to its original tiny shape, sucking the city of Philadelphia in around it, shattering more windows, unbuckling the unruly streets, and leaving stunned Philadelphians dizzy, blinking, and dumbfounded.
The magical city of New Amsterdam vanished away again, swallowed back up by its reinforced new secrecy field. The old Pakistani cabbie stood inside the open door of his yellow taxi, looking around as stunned observers frowned, speechlessly asking each other if all those strange sights had really been there, or if they had been merely another mass delusion.
The cab rocked as a man dropped into the back seat, slamming the door behind him. The Pakistani cabbie leaned and glanced into the rear of his car. There, a thin man in a trench coat and an old fedora hat met his gaze, his face tense but composed.
“I’ll pay you a hundred simoleans to get us out of the city as fast as this boat can roll,” he said, holding up a thin sheaf of bills.
“Which direction?” the cabbie asked, a little breathlessly.
“Any direction,” Marshall Parris answered. “And if you’re smart, my friend, you won’t come back afterward.”
An ocean away, behind the Leaky Cauldron, the pile of broken bricks shuddered, vibrated, and with some difficulty, began to reassemble itself into a wall, once again, for the last time, closing off Diagon Alley from prying Muggle eyes.
Hogsmeade shimmered and vanished away into unplottability again, leaving the three hikers dazzled and confused, having only moments before been arguing loudly with Madame Rosemerta about the use of her apparently nonexistent telephone. Now, they stood cramped in a thicket so dense that it seemed to physically force them back, stumbling, scratched with nasty thorns and briers.
And in the Hogwarts greenhouses, the maddened plants began to settle, withdrawing slowly, retracting their vines in sheepish curls.
Dangling in James’ stunned hand, his wand suddenly and silently burst alight, shining with the Lumos spell he had called only moments before. Stunned and deeply worried, he raised his wand and looked at it.
Rose raised her eyes from the wand in his hands to his face.
“What… was that?” she asked in a bare whisper, nearly mouthing the words.
James weakly shook his head. He had no idea, although he would know the truth soon enough. For now, he simply had a deeply sinking sense that, whatever it was that had just happened, it was the beginning of the ultimate end.
And in that, of course, he was sadly correct.
22. – The end of the beginning
Professor Odin-Vann didn’t return that night, or at all on Saturday.
James, Rose, and Ralph finally grew impatient on Sunday afternoon and knocked on his door, but to no avail. The sound of sneezing had stopped from within—either the recording had worn out or the trained mimicking beast had finally grown bored and either given up or escaped.
“Maybe he’s asleep,” Ralph whispered, listening close to the door, but Rose shook her head.
“There’s nobody in there. You can tell by the silence of it. He’s not returned yet.”
As they wended their way disconsolately back through the weekend silent corridors, passing through sunbeams dense with floating motes of dust, James asked, “It couldn’t have worked. Whatever he and Petra tried, it must have failed. Right?”
Rose shrugged and sighed. Uncharacteristically, she had no hypothesis or comment whatsoever.
The Daily Prophet weekend edition called the earthquake a “temporary shift in magical polarities”, quoting a technomancy professor from the wizarding university in Warsaw. “These things happen with cosmic regularity, though in cycles of decades or centuries, thus few alive experience more than one such event. There is nothing to be concerned about now that the moment has passed.”
The rest of the newspaper had been filled with stories of the effects of the quake, most fairly minor, but a few with serious consequences. A few houses and buildings had collapsed, not from the tremor itself, but from the brief interruption of magical force, breaking the spells that had kept the ramshackle old structures intact and upright.