A figure appeared in the wall of flames, striding forward through them, untouched. James stumbled toward the shape, shielding his own face from the heat. When the figure resolved, stepping out onto the lawn and marching back toward the broken window, James saw that it was Merlin.
The headmaster was bleeding and disheveled, his robes smoking, but his face was stony with resolve.
“All able-bodied warriors,” he said as he walked, and his voice suddenly boomed, shaking the air and waking echoes all around. “Seal the students in their dormitories where they will be unharmed by those invading. Then, come to me in the entrance hall. The end of our world is upon us if we are not swift and committed to our duty. The villainess has escaped, but we shall track her. I shall summon those who can best assist us, Aurors and harriers alike. Come now and be ready to kill or be killed, for this is our final moment.”
He made to pass James, not even looking down at him.
“Headmaster,” James gasped, turning to catch up to him.
“Merlin!”
“She has captured the brooch,” Merlin said in a low, grave voice.
He stopped but did not turn back. “Nothing stands in her way now.
The Architect has done his work. And the Ransom shall soon do his.
You should have told me what you knew while it yet mattered.”
James had no answer for that. He looked up at the headmaster’s broad back, speechless, wounded, and afraid.
Merlin still did not look back at him. Instead, he tapped his staff to the ground and vanished in a crack of disapparation, leaving only stormy wind, lightning, and roaring fiendfyre in his wake.
A sense of deep, stunning loss filled James like lead. He stared at the space where Merlin had stood only moments before. His mind reeled, stymied with uncertainty.
Merlin would track Petra, he and any others prepared to accompany him. McGonagall would be among them, as would Debellows and Heretofore and any number of other teachers. Perhaps even his father and Viktor Krum and the rest of the Aurors and harriers, if they could be roused in time. James thought it very likely. They would leave the students locked and shielded in their dormitories, trusting that the centaurs would honour their word and not attack unless attacked first.
Merlin and those with him would abandon Hogwarts in pursuit of Petra, since she, they believed, was the cause and source of the chaos that had befallen the world. They would find her and go to war with her. She would kill them all, or they would succeed in cutting her down.
If Judith and Odin-Vann didn’t succeed in that endeavor first.
It was just like James’ dream, years earlier. They were coming to destroy Petra, and they wouldn’t waste time on words.
And with that, a sense of preternatural calm settled over James.
Because he knew exactly what he had to do. After all, he had already done it, in a manner of speaking. He had lived it once already, five years earlier, in that strange and prophetic vision.
He closed his eyes and imagined it, summoned every recollection of that long-ago dream. He remembered a freshly dug grave. He remembered Albus offering the young woman, Petra, his wand. It was necessary, James now understood. For Petra no longer had a wand of her own, having broken and abandoned hers years earlier. Sorceresses used their bare hands to perform magic. Unless, that was, they needed to cast a particularly unique spell that relied on a wand.
A spell like the Dark Mark.
Because Petra had stopped resisting the evil of the Bloodline.
She was channeling it, using it, tapping into the conviction and resolve that only the last shred of Voldemort could provide. And now, tonight, she would finally embrace it. She would fire the Dark Mark into the sky over the cemetery—was probably doing so at this very moment, announcing her final, damning choice.
Whatever terrible evil that such a choice entailed.
James squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He envisioned the cemetery; his grandparents’ leaning headstones; the freshly dug grave like a blot of ink under the stormy dark. He focused, firmed his grip on his wand, drew a deep breath, held it…
And flexed the mental muscle of disapparation.
With a hard crack, he vanished, just as Merlin had done moments before.
Neither would return to the same Hogwarts ever again.
24. – The blood of dearest love
Somehow, amazingly, James sensed the presence of the Dark Mark in the split-instant even before he reapparated. The spell was an emerald chill in the void, like the depths of a moss-choked well. He passed through it somehow as the world resolved around him, depositing him onto a wind-scoured hilltop, beneath the hulking sprawl of a dead tree. He faltered and fell, never yet having apparated such a distance, and unaccustomed to the strange inertia of it. Dry grass collected him, blew and whipped about his face, but he scrambled to his hands and knees immediately, disoriented yet breathless with panic. There was no time left. It was probably too late already. He looked around wildly, trying to make sense of his surroundings.
The moon still glowed here, pale yellow on the horizon, unobstructed by the imminent storm. Next to James, the dead tree reached out of the earth, gnarled and twisted, like a giant arthritic hand with a hundred fingers.
Beyond this, just visible in the pale moonlight, sprawled a very old cemetery. Its headstones leaned like rotten teeth, embraced within the confines of a weed-choked iron fence. A decorative arch marked the entrance. Above this, still rising against the approaching storm clouds, was the ghastly huge skull, phantasmic and terrible, of the Dark Mark.
Its jaw was unhinged, open in a silent scream. From the gaping mouth, a spectral snake poured out, uncoiling, opening its own fanged jaws in a vicious hiss.
“No!” James barked, but his voice came as barely a dry husk, lost in the buffet of the wind. Using the ancient dead tree for support, he blundered to his feet and pelted down the hill, under the crooked arch of the gate, and into the ranks and rows of old headstones.
He heard voices, indistinct on the wind. And then he saw them.
Albus and Petra stood on a low rise, in the corner of the marching fence, their shoulders and heads illuminated from above by the eerie green light of the Dark Mark. Near their feet was an open grave, next to a neat pile of fresh earth.
“Stop!” James shouted desperately, flinging out a hand to them, forgetting that his wand was still gripped in it. It would look like a pose of attack. “Both of you! I know what you think you have to do, but it doesn’t have to be this way! Albus, don’t let it end like this!”