James nodded worriedly and climbed awkwardly over the bow railing. His foot skidded on the ice step below, and then found purchase. Carefully, nervously, he began to follow Odin-Vann down, moving from frozen step to frozen step. Once James and the professor reached the level of the water, the stairs sank away with a deep gurgle, replaced by a bridge of ice, as thin as paper and brittle as glass, yet somehow strong enough to support their weight as they walked slowly, approaching the rising swell before the dock.
As James watched, peering around Odin-Vann’s shoulder, he saw the spire of the old gazebo spear out of the gurgling boil. It was made of wood, but rotted and misshapen, barely sheathed in slimy white paint. It pushed upward, and a conical roof began to follow, its old shakes warped, as unruly as a hag’s teeth. Water began to pour down the roof as it widened, unleashing the weight of the depths.
“Only,” James whispered, more urgently now. “I had a meeting with the headmaster. He told me how he was keeping the brooch because he was hoping Petra would come to him. He had it with him, right there in his office. Did he… maybe… hide it here later?”
Odin-Vann didn’t answer. He inched closer to the rising gazebo.
“Ungh!” Rose grunted from behind. “This… is heavy!”
“Just a little more,” Odin-Vann called back, holding out one hand in a calming gesture. The ice bridge had narrowed as it stretched out, as if its power was weakening. Waves swamped serenely over it, wetting James’ shoes as he turned sideways, edging along in the professor’s wake.
Beware, foul Donovan, he thought. The words teased him, seemed to nag at him.
Surely you don’t need me to spell it out for you, Scorpius had said the night before.
“Almost there,” Odin-Vann said, almost to himself.
A long, creaking moan emanated from the gazebo as it rose further into the grey air, casting off its freight of water. It was crooked, turning as it rose, wallowing like a bloated corpse. Slick drapes of seaweed hung from its edges and coated its upright supports.
James stopped as an awful idea began to form in his mind. The cold of the ice bridge welled up over him.
Beware, foul…
The roar of water was too loud to speak over as the gazebo disgorged from the lake, finally bobbing fully to the surface. Its interior was obscured by curtains of limp, slimy seaweed. As it settled, it rocked and turned slightly, groaning against the old pilings.
“Donofrio Odin-Vann,” James whispered urgently, his eyes widening in horrible, stunned revelation. “Don… O… Vann! ”
The gazebo shuddered against the dock, and as it did so the seaweed tore loose from its roofline, falling away like a sodden veil.
Someone was standing inside the gazebo. The shape was barely a silhouette, wasted and skeletal, and yet still, somehow, recognizable by her long, sopping red hair.
“James,” she said in a chiding, rasping, ancient voice. “I warned you, did I not? On the lake just this past winter, I told you to abandon your Petra. And yet here you are. Predictable… to the last.”
Ahead of James, Odin-Vann’s arm jerked spasmodically, whipping his wand up and back. James flinched in terror as it seemed to point at him and fire a bolt of blinding blue. The spell sizzled over his shoulder, however, striking a mark further away, back on the boat.
Scorpius grunted in surprise. James turned in time to see the boy flung back against the wheelhouse, his wand falling from his hand.
A moment later, he collapsed heavily to the deck.
James drew breath to yell, but a sudden horrible pressure squeezed the air right out of him. The world spun upside down as he was lifted from the ice bridge and heaved away from the ship, pressed in the grip of a monstrous watery tentacle. A second later, he struck the cold, rotten floor of the gazebo, rolling hard enough to bash against the rear railing, smashing a leg through it.
“I would not!” Judith called toward the ship, her voice a hoarse shriek but still with the same imperious tone of command. “Drop this structure back into the depths and poor James goes down with it!”
James tried to struggle up, but his leg was tangled in the broken railing. Judith was standing directly before him. Her once glorious robes were now matted and sodden, rotted threadbare. Beneath them, her body seemed to be all angles, mere bones and tendon. She stank abominably.
Thirty yards away, Zane and Rose still leaned over the bow of the Gertrude, wands outstretched, straining, eyes wide with shock and fear.
Between them and the gazebo, Odin-Vann stood on the ice bridge with his wand still raised, pointing back at the boat, but his face looking forward, eyes locked upon Judith. His expression was misty with something very near adoration.
“Professor!” James called, half attempting to snap the man out of the trance that Judith had cast over him. Odin-Vann dipped his gaze for a moment, blinking at James, and his face hardened. James understood the terrible truth: Judith had not cast any entrancement over the man at all. He was doing this entirely of his own free will.
“It was you,” James exclaimed with sudden, sinking surety. “You sabotaged the Loom! But why?”
Judith answered, “The good professor and I have certain mutual interests, James.” As she spoke, she turned to look down at him. Her face, James now saw, was a shrivel of filmy white skin over bone. Her lips were gone, revealing the ivory grin of her teeth. Her eyes were like peeled grapes in the hollows of their sockets. But her hair was still long and red, draping her skull in wet ribbons. “As you can see, I need a new host. Petra has broken from me. Without her, my time in this sphere is nearly over. But Mr. Odin-Vann is more than willing to take her place.
He is eager.”
James recoiled from the horror of Judith’s dead stare.
Trembling, he tore his gaze away from her and focused again on the professor. “But what could you possibly get out of it?”
Odin-Vann frowned and shook his head, slowly but firmly, as if James had finally confirmed something that he had been suspecting all along.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he seemed to wonder aloud.
“Early on, I thought perhaps you would prove different. When you were attacked and humiliated by the little bullies, Edgecombe and his friends. I hoped you might grasp the truth. But now I see that you really are just like all the rest. Too arrogant in your own perceived superiority to understand what it’s like…” He edged toward James, his face contorting into a mask of furious, age-old misery, “to be mocked.
To be belittled at every turn. To be coddled like a child by those who believe they are good, and beaten down like a dog by those who know they are bad.” He moved forward more resolutely now, homing in on James, raising his chin and speaking with the fervor of long-suppressed rage. “Both of those acts arise from the same, pathetic delusion. That they are better than me. That they are more powerful than me. That I will always be what they believe me to be. A weak, slow, bookish, clumsy little embarrassment! But now the world will see. I used my brain to defeat them first. I made my WAND!”
He brandished it in his fist, which vibrated with manic tension.
His eyes blazed.