“Someone came back for a scarf!” Odin-Vann breathed, rushing to meet them, the horseshoe in his hand. “Somebody named Perkins! I told him he couldn’t go in yet because of the poison snails. He argued with me! Said that if that crazy zombie Zane Walker could handle them, so could he! I had to let him in! I put the key back in place as soon as I could!”
Wordlessly, James held up the rubber Duck in his hand, showing Odin-Vann the word scrawled across it in Rose’s hasty capitals.
The professor’s face went slack and ashy with shock. After a second, his eyes darted from the Duck, to James, to Petra.
“Did you get it?” he asked, his voice a breathy husk.
Zane nodded wearily, still tittering with nervous laughter. “We succeeded. It was close, but we succeeded.”
James looked up at where Petra still stood on the steps. The knees of her jeans hung in frayed strips, stained with her blood. Her hair was wild and matted with dust, clinging to her sweaty cheeks and hiding her eyes. She raised a hand and showed her open palm. In it, looking like nothing more than a ball of red lint, was the crimson thread.
“We got the thread,” she said, her voice a low, hollow monotone. “But we didn’t succeed.”
And suddenly James understood what she meant.
Petra may have told everyone, even Odin-Vann, that their mission was to retrieve the crimson thread. But Petra herself had gone to the World Between the Worlds for her own reason, a reason she may have cared about even more.
She had gone to replace her father’s lost brooch.
And in that task, sadly, she had failed miserably.
9. – Peeves plays his part
James slept long and late the following morning, awaking well past Saturday breakfast to an empty dormitory and feeling little inclined to get up. The leaden grey sky outside his window concurred with his lethargic mood. He stared at it from the rumpled mess of his bed, replaying the night’s events. The grit of the destroyed black castle was still in his hair. Its dirt was grimed into the palms of his hands and beneath his fingernails. He was still wearing the jeans and tee shirt he had worn to greet Zane at Alma Aleron, only now they were sweaty and grass-stained.
He longed to spend an hour or three soaking in the fifth floor prefects’ bathtub, and considered asking Ralph for the password. This, of course, would likely necessitate an explanation for why he was so grimy after a night’s sleep, and while he did intend to tell Ralph everything that had happened, he didn’t feel up to it just this morning.
Thus, instead, he merely lay in bed blinking at the autumn clouds as they rolled dully past his window, grumbling with distant threats of rain.
He’d assumed that his dream-journey would end once he, Petra, and Zane returned from the World Between the Worlds, but in fact he had spent another hour or more there with them, in the basement game room of Apollo mansion, explaining their adventure to Donofrio Odin-Vann and discussing what still remained to accomplish.
Petra was morose and quiet throughout, seated next to James on a low, sprung couch with her feet splayed in front of her, her shoes kicked off. Izzy seemed to sense Petra’s mood, and joined her, lying her own smaller body on the arm of the sofa beside her sister, crossing her arms over her chest, mimicking Petra’s pose perfectly.
Odin-Vann was ashen-faced at the idea that Merlin had somehow discovered the plan, and had somehow been summoned to confront the three of them.
“Not us,” Zane shook his head. “Petra. She said it herself. The only person who can touch the thread is the person who it represents. I expect that means even old Merlin Magic-pants.” He tried to give the nickname his usual familiar irreverence, but even he was still shaken by the memory of Merlin’s terrible pursuit. “Maybe he has his own way of getting into the Double-you Bee Double-you.”
Odin-Vann shook his head doubtfully. “I would say that absolutely no one can access the World Between the Worlds without the dimensional key,” he said. “But this is the great Merlinus we are talking about, he who spent centuries suspended in the Transitis Nihilo, who traveled beyond death for a year only to return at his own strange bidding. Even if he couldn’t cross the Nexus on his own, he may well have been capable of establishing a sort of beacon to summon him should Petra ever touch the thread.” He shivered at the very thought.
“But if that’s the case,” James realized, sitting up in alarm, “then that means we trapped him in the World Between the Worlds when we left without him!”
This time it was Zane who shook his head. “The black castle was full of portals,” he said, standing and heaving open a nearby refrigerator. Bottles rattled in the door and he plucked one out, popping its top with a brief hiss. “Remember? They were escape routes for anyone who found themselves stuck there, taking them back to their own dimension. The castle may have ended up a ruin at the bottom of that dead ocean, but the portals are still there, and I bet they work just fine. Merlin will find his way back, somewhere and somehow, but drummels to donuts he’ll be as wet as a drowned Glumbumble when he does.”
“And as angry as a fire-demon,” James sighed.
“He didn’t see you,” Petra said dully. “All of his attention was focused on me. I made sure of that. He will be in a rage, but that rage will belong to me alone.”
James glanced at her. There was rage in her voice as well, albeit cold, banked to a deep-freeze of deceptive calm. She had run from Merlin, escaped from him, but only barely. How could that be?
Shouldn’t the two of them have been very nearly matched there in the World Between the Worlds, each separated from their elemental powers?
Was her strength divided, somehow? Had she spent a portion of it hiding Zane and James from Merlin, protecting them? Or was there something more to her seemingly reduced power?
He thought of the weakness he’d felt when she had summoned her powers in force. He thought, I’m her battery.
“Right,” Odin-Vann nodded curtly. “The point is, we’ve succeeded in collecting the crimson thread. All that remains now is to replace it in the Loom of the Vault of Destinies. This shall be my challenge, as it may well require some spell or enchantment to power it back up again, sending it back to its native dimension and returning us our original destiny.”
Zane shrugged. “Or maybe just getting the thread back in the same place as the Loom will cause it to magically snap back into place, like a stretched rubber band being let go, or two magnets getting close enough to get caught in their own attraction, snapping together.
Professor Jackson said something like that, back when the thread was first stolen. The destinies want to realign, he said.”