But it had never looked like this before. This was like a love letter to insanity. The scribbled words seemed to crawl over each other, pulsing with their own insectile life.
Without answering Ralph, James reached and scooped the parchments together again, shuffling them back into a stack and folding them over, quickly hiding their scribbled contents. The parchment crackled like dry leaves, suddenly icy cold. James could feel it on the pages themselves, turning the edges brittle and chilling his fingers.
“Potter,” Scorpius said, raising his chin.
“I don’t want to hear it,” James said quickly, folding the dream story again, roughly, so that the old pages crinkled and tore. “It’s nothing. There’s nothing to see. I thought… maybe…”
“Potter,” Scorpius said again, and then pointed to the floor where the dream story had rested moments earlier. “Is that also yours?”
James looked aside at Scorpius, blinking rapidly and hugging the sheaf of Petra’s old parchments to his chest, feeling the cold of them seeping through his shirt. For a moment he didn’t register what the boy had asked him, but then he followed the direction of Scorpius’ pointing finger.
On the floor before James’ knees, between an old puking pastille and a dried out inkpot, was another piece of parchment. This one was even older than the dream story, torn from a larger sheet, frayed and creased from its long sojourn in the bowels of James’ trunk. Three words were written on the parchment, scrawled in James’ own hand.
He didn’t remember the note at first. And then, in a blink of memory, it flooded back to him. It had been during his second year that he had had the dream—a nightmare, in fact. Shreds of it flickered before his mind’s eye: Albus with a young woman, standing in a graveyard, his grandparents’ graves leaning nearby; the Dark Mark exploding into the sky overhead, shot from Albus’ wand in the young woman’s hand, lighting the cemetery with its eerie green glow; James himself appearing out of thin air, apparating with alarm in his suddenly older voice, warning Albus and his companion that it didn’t have to be like this, that others were coming, and that they wouldn’t waste time with words…
Only now, thinking back on the dream five years later, James fully understood: the young woman in the graveyard was Petra. Of course she was. He just hadn’t known it then, because he hadn’t yet discovered that Petra was the Bloodline. Or the Crimson Thread.
He looked down at the old note.
When he had awoken from the dream, he had gotten up from his bed and, compelled by a sense of phantom, inexplicable resolve, penned those three words on a scrap of spare parchment. He didn’t know why, not then and not now. He had only known that the dream had demanded it somehow. He had only believed that someday, somehow, the words would mean something.
He looked up at Scorpius again. Scorpius wasn’t looking at the note, but at James, his eyes narrowed.
“I’ve always wondered,” the blond boy said, as if musing aloud.
“Were you sleepwalking when you wrote that? Or would you remember it again when you came across it?”
James felt suddenly exhausted, almost as if he had been hollowed out of all emotion. He merely shook his head at Scorpius, who had clearly observed him writing the note years earlier. “Both, maybe. I didn’t remember writing it until now. I don’t even know why I did. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a line from the play.”
Ralph leaned over the note and read it. “The play? You mean The Triumvirate?”
James shrugged. “We were putting it on that year. For Muggle Studies. I was playing Treus, remember? It’s just one of my lines.”
Ralph picked up the old note and examined it critically. On it, the ink had dried to a brackish brown, the color of congealed blood.
James looked at it in Ralph’s hand and then read the words again, this time aloud.
“Beware… foul Donovan.”
Ralph looked up at him, his brow knitted. He balled the note in his hands and shrugged impatiently. “It’s nothing. Just an old script cheat-sheet, right? What was that other thing?” He nodded meaningfully at the dream story where James still held it folded against his chest.
James shook himself, then reached and stuffed the scribbled parchments back into his trunk. “Also nothing,” he sighed harshly. “I thought it might give us some news, but it doesn’t. It’s useless, just like everything else.”
Ralph pushed himself up from his knees, clearly preparing to protest, but at that moment a sound of running feet echoed up the nearby stairwell. Graham Warton appeared there, leaning in through the door and looking slightly put-out.
“Rose Weasley says you lot need to come right now,” he announced. “She says he’s come back, and he needs your help.
Whatever the bloody hell that means.”
James jumped anxiously to his feet, slamming his trunk as he went, and joined Scorpius and Ralph as they clambered past Graham, leaving him staring after them in annoyed confusion.
“And you can tell Weasley that I’m not your bleedin’ secretary!” he called after them.
A moment later, shaking his head, Graham tromped back down after them.
Unseen in the now empty dormitory, a ribbon of white vapor snaked from beneath the lid of James’ trunk. Inside, the dream story steamed with cold, sizzling faintly as it chilled to absolute zero, freezing the socks and jeans all around it, cracking the glass in James’ spare spectacles. Then, with a final, brittle hiss, the pages disintegrated into films of icy ash and fell apart, sifting into bone-white dust.
And far, far away, under the darkness of a cloudy night sky, a cold wind at her back, buffeting her dark hair, Petra relaxed her fists and opened her eyes. She sighed in mingled resolve and worry.
“James,” she whispered. “Please, James… stay away. ”
Odin-Vann, Rose informed them as they hurried through the corridors, was in the subterranean moonpool, watching the door and waiting for them. He had somehow managed to send word to her via her Protean duck, even though he didn’t have a duck of his own. James, Scorpius, Rose, and Ralph slowed to a breathless stop as they joined the young professor, clambering through the door into the cool darkness of the underground lake. He closed the door immediately behind them, and then stood back and pointed at it with his wand. Without speaking a word, his wand spat an arc of electric pink at the lock, which clacked and latched firmly, presumably until he cast the unlocking charm.
James had a moment to muse once again about the professor’s sudden prodigious skill with his wand, after his earlier (and apparently infamous) magical impotence under stress. Now, he handled his wand with utmost confidence, and, perhaps even more impressively, with mostly nonverbal spells.