Edgar Edgecombe wasn’t the only person Zane might have some half-decent advice about.
Considering it all throughout the day, James waited until dinnertime, and then dashed up to the Gryffindor dormitory, knowing that the common room would be deserted at this hour. Retrieving the Shard from his trunk, he tramped back down the stairs and flopped onto the sofa before the cold fireplace. It was several hours earlier in America, which meant that there was a good chance that Zane was either in class, at Quidditch practice, or just skiving around the campus of Alma Aleron with his friends. Still, James spoke the incantation that summoned the view into his friend’s dormitory room.
The silvery clouds of the Shard’s face cleared, as always, but the view that appeared was not the cluttered dormitory desk and perpetually unmade bed. It was, in fact, perfect blackness.
James shook the Shard in his hands. It was apparently malfunctioning somehow, although he wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible. The glass of the mirror remained perfectly blank.
And yet, James thought he could hear faint voices coming from it. He raised the Shard to his ear and listened intently. Sure enough, there was the faint murmur of a voice. Zane’s? Had he taken the Shard down from his closet door and stuffed it into his backpack?
“Zane!” James called, placing his face close to the Shard. “It’s me, James. Can you hear me?”
A faint scream came from the Shard. James withdrew suddenly, his eyes widening. It had been a girl’s voice.
A moment later, the blackness of the Shard fluttered, and then fell away. In its place was Zane and the sunny mess of his dormitory room. The boy was dressed in his Zombie house white shirt and yellow tie, but the tie was loosened and his blonde hair mussed. A black tee shirt draped from his right hand, having apparently been hung over his side of the Shard only moments before.
“James,” he rolled his eyes with a smile. “Don’t you ever knock?”
“Kind of hard to do,” James replied, “but I’m glad you’re there.
Isn’t it about lunch time there in the States?”
“It’s make-out o’clock, if you must know,” the blonde boy grinned. He turned aside. “It’s OK, Cheshire. It’s just James.”
James was slightly mortified to see the face of Cheshire Chatterly, Zane’s longtime girlfriend, appear in the Shard. She patted down her own blonde hair and smiled. “Hi James,” she called with a quick wave. “Good timing.”
James had a moment to think that suddenly everyone but him seemed to be leading an exciting and romantic dating life. “So I hear,” he shrank a little on the sofa. “Sorry.”
“We snuck past Yeats to come up and study for a Mageography quiz,” Zane bobbed his head and gestured toward a pile of books on the nearby desk. “But what can I say? My animal magnetism got the better of her.”
Cheshire poked Zane sharply in the ribs. “I should get down to the caff anyway,” she said, turning back to James. “I can’t face Professor Wimrinkle without at least one butterscotch brownie under my belt.”
“I’ll meet you at the dome in a few minutes,” Zane nodded.
“Bring me one of those brownies.”
The view of the room swept sideways for a moment as Cheshire opened the door, then swept back with a clunk.
“So what’s Petra up to?” Zane asked, pushing his tie back up and threading his fingers through his hair.
“What makes you think it’s about Petra?”
“Oh, did you interrupt me in the middle of the day to get my recipe for Salsa Grenado?” Zane raised his eyebrows. “You’re going to have a hard time finding Peruvian Plimpy-Peppers in the Hogwarts cupboard, and believe me, salsa without Plimpy-Peppers is basically just chunky ketchup.”
“All right, fine,” James sighed impatiently. “It’s about Petra.”
“And you don’t want to talk to anyone else about it because they already think she’s got one foot in old Voldy’s boots.”
“Zane,” James said, meeting the blonde boy’s eyes through the glass of the Shard. “She’s made a Horcrux.”
Zane took a step back from his own Shard, his eyes widening and his hand frozen in the act of finger-combing his hair. Slowly, he lowered his hand and stepped closer to the Shard than before.
“But,” he said, more seriously than James had heard his friend speak in a long time, “Horcruxes mean you have to kill someone.”
“She did kill someone,” James said in a hushed voice, sinking lower on the sofa. It wasn’t a topic they discussed much, but they all knew it. “Her stepmother, Phyllis. She was a perfectly horrid woman by every account. Hated her own daughter, Izzy. Drove Petra’s grandfather to suicide and may have been responsible for her first husband’s death, according to some. She and Izzy killed her together, somehow. They sent a tree after her.”
Zane was nodding, his eyes deep in thought. “But it was an impulsive thing. She didn’t do it in order to make a Horcrux. She did it because she was angry and brokenhearted about her grandfather. She lost control.”
James shook his head. “I don’t think that matters.”
Briefly, he explained to Zane how he had travelled along the silver and crimson thread between him and Petra, how he had found her in Tom Riddle’s family home, seen her raise the ugly dagger and pronounce the incantation that infused it with the fracture of her soul.
When he was done, Zane gave a low whistle. “You need to tell everyone,” he said after a moment. “Rose and Ralph, at least. It doesn’t look good for Petra, but there’s no getting around that now. You don’t do well trying to handle this sort of thing all by yourself.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” James allowed the Shard to fall flat onto his lap.
“That’s why you came to me,” Zane went on, now talking to the ceiling of the Gryffindor common room. “I tell you the hard, ugly truths that no one else will say. Like, it’s high time you got over your puppy love for Petra and started seeing her the way she really is.”
James startled and raised the Shard again, angrily. “Not you, too!” he exclaimed. “First, Scorpius, and then Albus, and now you?”
Zane shrugged in the Shard. “OK, so maybe I’m not the first one to speak that particular hard, ugly truth. But it’s true, and you know it.”
James slumped again. “If only it was that easy.”
“Just as long as you’re thinking about it,” his friend nodded.
“But in the meantime, there’s another person you need to talk to, as soon as you let Ralph and Rosie in on Petra’s latest excursion into the Dark Side.”
“And who is that?” James asked limply.
“This new professor of yours, Van Odin or whatever. The one you said appeared with Petra.”
“It’s Odin-Vann. And he couldn’t really have been there. My mind stuck him there because I’d been thinking about him, that’s all.
There’s no way he could’ve gotten all the way from Hogwarts to wherever Petra was last night.”