He looked down, toward the silver tray that glimmered in the firelight. Upon it was a dagger, its handle encrusted with jewels, its blade dark and sooty, tarnished almost black. He recognized it immediately.
It was the dagger that had killed Morgan, the Petra from another dimension, wielded in the hand of Judith as part of her chaotic plan.
How had Petra gotten it? More importantly, why?
Fear and horrible suspicion suddenly welled in James, and yet he crept forward still. It’s just a dream, he told himself. I’m only dreaming… none of this is real…
Petra finally came into sight as she leaned forward, reaching for the dagger, collecting it into her thin hands. She cradled it in the firelight, her eyes wide, bright as she looked down at it. She drew a deep breath and shuddered as she let it out. Without raising her gaze from the dagger, she began to speak to it. As she did, James’ eyes widened in horror. The fire responded to her words, first growing restless in the hearth, and then flaring with bursts of hungry green, almost seeming to breathe. As Petra reached the end of her recitation, wind entered the room, coming from nowhere and everywhere, lifting the limp curtains, carrying dust and grit into the dank air, moaning throughout the dim, empty rooms of the decrepit mansion.
James could scarcely believe the words that came from his beloved’s lips, spoken with slow, undeniable emphasis:
“Extinguished soul’s essence risen,
“Final breath from murdered host,
“Enter now, this, your prison,
“Slave to my fragmented ghost.”
Petra held the dagger higher, her voice rising even as the rushing air combined with the flames of the hearth, carrying them around the room and illuminating it with green fire. She ignored this, her voice becoming a low boom through the growing tempest.
“If I should die before I take,
“The course of my intent design,
“Then from this prison reawake,
“Immortal now… my dread Bloodline!”
Petra’s voice became thunder, not shouting, but amplified over the sudden cyclone of wind and fire that burst throughout the room, lighting it, tearing at the ancient wallpaper, whipping the curtains, condensing into a whirling maelstrom around the slight girl, now standing with the upraised dagger in her hands.
“Petra!” James called out, breaking his paralysis and finally finding his voice. She couldn’t hear him, of course. This was just a dream, despite how terribly, frighteningly real it felt.
And yet, from the midst of that swirling, horrible cloud, even as it caught her hair, whipped it about her face and flashed in her stern, glowing eyes, Petra glanced aside at James. She saw him, blinked in a sort of waking flutter, and her face changed. Fear, and shame, and heartbreak suddenly filled her features, clouded her eyes.
The man in the other chair stood then, blocking James’ view.
He turned toward James, his own face full of surprise and wariness and more than a little fear.
It was, bafflingly, Donofrio Odin-Vann. He recognized James, opened his mouth to call out to him, but no sound could be heard over the roaring vortex of Petra’s spell.
The whirl of fire and green light sucked all light into itself and contracted, taking both Petra and Odin-Vann and even the sprawling, dead mansion with it. Everything condensed into one brilliant, terrible point, and the point was shaped like a dagger, as blinding and merciless as the deaths it had caused.
And then, with a shock that was both icy and deafening, the point exploded.
James shocked awake at the sensation of it, as if thrown the many miles and leagues back into his bed by pure force, nearly crashing through it to the floor at the strength of it.
He flung himself up instead, and gasped as if he hadn’t drawn a breath in minutes. His eyes blinked blearily around the dim silence of Gryffindor tower. His fellow Gryffindors were still asleep, sprawled variously across their beds, completely immune to the horrendous vision that James had just returned from.
But was it a vision? Had it truly only been a dream? Helplessly, he remembered the look on Petra’s face as she had seen him, recognized him in the midst of the spell she had conjured.
He looked down at his hands in the darkness. Something was smudged on the tips of his fingers, dark and greasy by the moonlight.
He touched his hands together and felt the filth of the mansion’s walls on them. The smell was still in his night-clothes, the reek of ancient rot and mold and death.
Somehow, he had not only dreamed of Petra. He had gone to her. He had physically stood in the same room with her, touched its grimy walls, taken its air with him upon his return.
What he’d seen had not been a dream or a vision at all.
Somehow, James had seen Petra and the inexplicable figure of Professor Odin-Vann perform some terrible spell, make some momentous decision that James sensed was irreversible, terrible, and portentous.
He tried not to know what that spell had been, but his deepest heart told him what his brain resisted. Petra had gone to the abandoned mansion that had once been the home of her cursed soul’s-twin, Tom Riddle, the Dark Lord Voldemort. She was no longer resisting his poison influence, but channeling it, using it, bending it to her own will.
And with it, she had repeated that villain’s most awful, damning spell. James flopped back onto his bed again, still breathing hard, his eyes wide and unseeing in the darkness. He could barely believe it. It was too awful to consider. And yet there was no question in his mind, even now, fully awake and in the comfort of his own bed in Gryffindor Tower.
Petra, the young woman that he loved, the girl who had once doodled happy fairies in the corners of her textbooks and sucked on the tips of her black hair during examinations, had done the unthinkable.
Amazingly, dismayingly, she had fulfilled the black promise began by the death of her stepmother years earlier, a death that Petra herself had caused in a fit of blind, righteous rage.
Petra… had created a Horcrux.
5. – Junior Aurors in training
At breakfast the next morning, James considered telling Rose and Ralph—or even Albus or Scorpius—what he’d learned via his previous night’s dream. It wasn’t a matter of whether they would believe the part about how he’d actually been transported to a different place, travelling the mysterious thread between himself and Petra like a sort of high-speed conduit. It was the simple, damning reality of what she had done. He was afraid of the looks that would appear on their faces, the shocked disappointment, the suspicion that perhaps the rest of the magical world was right in opposing Petra, that James and his friends may have been on the wrong side all along.