“Relashio!” he shouted, stabbing his wand up again and firing with lightning speed.
Odin-Vann’s arm jerked up from the shoulder, following the force of his wand, and a bolt of green flashed, snuffing James’ spell in mid-air. He was laughing again, moving steadily closer.
“Petrificus Totalis!” James cried, putting all of the force he could muster into the spell. “Levicorpus! Incarcerous! Convulsis!”
Each spell exploded and obliterated bare inches from his wand as Odin-Vann’s jerked in his upraised hand, firing the prescribed counter-jinxes of its own accord.
“You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” the young professor laughed delightedly. “There’s that arrogance that I’ve come to so loathe in people like you. The assurance that somehow, some way, you must win. That you are the good one. That you are right. It’s truly unbearable, you know. But it’s entertaining, at least.”
James strained forward with his wand, now only ten feet from the approaching professor. He drew breath to call his next spell, resolving to resort to unforgivable curses out of pure desperation, when a series of footsteps suddenly sounded from behind Odin-Vann, clambering down the spiral stairs of the headmaster’s office. They were heavy, and yet James instinctively knew by the sound that they were not Merlin’s.
“James!” the figure’s voice called in surprise, clambering to a stop at the base of the steps.
It was Ralph.
Odin-Vann’s left hand shot up and back, fisted on a second wand. “Stay, Mr. Dolohov,” he ordered, his eyes not flinching from James. “There is no need for you to share Mr. Potter’s fate.”
“That’s a laugh,” Ralph scoffed in a brittle voice. “Like any of us are going to survive this night! I’ve been waiting for the headmaster for almost an hour, but it doesn’t look like he’s coming back at all. Without him, we’re pretty much done for.”
As he spoke, Ralph raised his wand and fired a nonverbal spell at Odin-Vann. It was deep blue, arcing like electricity.
Odin-Vann’s left hand twitched, pulled his arm up, and fired the counter-spell, obliterating Ralph’s attack.
The professor smiled at James, one wand pointed back at Ralph, the other leveled at James’ chest. “Crucio,” he said, almost conversationally.
James flinched, but the spell wasn’t aimed at him. From Odin-Vann’s second wand, a belt of searing green struck Ralph and drove him back against the stairs, where he crashed heavily, half across the steps, jerking in agony. He gasped and tried to scream, but his chest locked and his teeth clenched, reducing his cry to a strained, desperate groan.
“I meant to thank you, Mr. Dolohov,” Odin-Vann said over the crackle of his spell. “You found the one potential flaw in my wand.
Nonverbal spells. Thanks to you, I have been able to calibrate and overcome even that.”
“Stop it!” James shouted, raising his own wand again. And then, before he could reconsider it, he repeated Odin-Vann’s spell: “Crucio!”
He had never attempted an unforgiveable curse, even on a practice dummy. The green bolt that fired from his wand was weak, frayed, without focus. Odin-Vann’s right arm flicked up with the force of his wand and the counter-spell fired, easily extinguishing James’ curse between them.
Ralph rolled and tumbled off the steps to the floor, still smothered in the grip of Odin-Vann’s Cruciatis spell. He gasped and groaned, and James thought he was trying to form words, even through the blinding haze of pain.
“NNNnn-nuh… nnnNIGHT!” He forced the word through helplessly gritted teeth.
Odin-Vann bared his own teeth at James and intensified his spell. It pulsed lime green and Ralph screamed.
“Stop!” James shouted, his own wand still pointed at Odin-Vann helplessly. It was no use. “You’ll kill him!”
“Everybody dies,” Odin-Vann said with sudden, grinning ferocity. “Let’s just hope that they lived while they had the chance! I admit, I have my doubts!”
Ralph writhed and arched his back on the floor. He gasped a whistling breath and strained again, struggling to speak.
“Nuh… nnnNIGHT… Quh-QUIDDITCH!”
James frowned in terrified confusion, his fist aching on his useless, outstretched wand. What could Ralph possibly mean? Was he going mad with pain? Why in the world would he spend his last, desperate words talking about something as inane and stupid as Night Quidditch?
The Cruciatus curse lanced into him, boiled over him, enveloped the big boy in unspeakable, maddening pain.
And then, somehow, James understood. His mouth dropped open as the realization washed over him. His mind raced, searched for exactly the right option, the one final gambit that would either turn the tables or doom them all. Resolved, he stabbed forward with his wand one last time.
“Osclauditis!” he shouted.
The spell was a lance of white. It struck Odin-Vann’s right shoulder, and his arm snapped rigid, the elbow locking straight.
His eyes shot wide with shock. Jerkily, he looked down at his right arm, and the wand in his hand, now pointed firmly and helplessly at the floor. It hadn’t fired the counter jinx.
There was no counter jinx. Not for game magic. The bonefuse hex could only be dodged, never countered.
The Cruciatus curse extinguished from Odin-Vann’s left-hand wand as the professor’s concentration broke.
“How—!?” he began, raising his eyes back to James, but James fired again.
“Novistenaci!”
The fingers of Odin-Vann’s left hand spasmed with the blast of the Knuckler hex. The secondary wand they had been holding clattered to the floor.
“How are you doing this!?” Odin-Vann demanded, his face turning furious.
“Game magic,” James answered, narrowing his eyes, “doesn’t appear in the Caster’s Lexicon.”
Odin-Vann roared with rage. He lowered his head and charged, aiming to ram James physically, to tackle him back onto the ruined wall behind him.
“Expeliarmus!”
This spell did not come from James, but from Ralph. James saw his friend still sprawled on the floor before the headmaster’s stairs, but with his head now raised, his wand outstretched and shaking weakly.
The wand in Odin-Vann’s right hand jerked up to deflect Ralph’s spell. The professor’s shoulder and elbow, however, were still locked rigid by the bonefuse hex. With a terrible, grating snap the bones broke, wrenched upwards by the force of the enchanted wand as it performed its duty.
The professor screamed and collapsed, even as his wand fired the counter jinx, snuffing Ralph’s disarming spell. His broken arm went limp again and he forced his fingers loose, dropping the wand before Ralph could coax it into action again. He cradled his broken arm against his body and faltered to the floor, moaning pathetically.
Ralph staggered to his feet and braced himself against the headmaster’s stairs.
James lunged forward and grabbed both of the professor’s dropped wands. With a decisive twist, he broke both wands at once and threw down the pieces. They clattered senselessly.