I’m torn between what I know I have to do, and what my heart most desperately wants. I need the conviction that that part of me offers. It’s like a dark magnetism. It helps me stay on the path I need to go down.”
James simply stared at Petra, unable to formulate any response to her words. They were wrong on so many levels that he couldn’t simply choose one. He flailed desperately in his thoughts, found nothing to cling to, and then simply said the first thing that came to his mind.
“But that voice is hate, Petra. Hate is never right. There has to be another voice. A voice that’s truly yours.”
Petra didn’t move. She stood silhouetted against the petrified bronze sunset, the forbidden book under one arm, the dagger Horcrux dangling in her other hand. After a long moment, she shrugged slowly and shook her head, as if reaching a hopeless conclusion that she had reached a thousand times before.
“There is no other voice, James,” she said with horrible banality.
“That voice died with the other Petra.”
James reached for her arm, took the heavy book from beneath it, and dropped it to the empty bench without looking. He turned her toward him, but she didn’t raise her eyes to him, didn’t look at him at all. She held the dagger Horcrux behind her back, as if she thought he might try to take that from her as well. Or as if she meant to stab him with it.
“I don’t believe that,” James said, taking Petra by the shoulders, looking down at her. “You’re good. Good isn’t a myth, as long as you believe in it.”
Petra leaned toward James, pressed her forehead weakly to his throat, allowed him to collect her into his arms. She did not hug him back, but absorbed his embrace deeply, unwilling to ask for it, but desperate for it nonetheless. They stood like that for some time, warming in the eternal sunset glow, listening to the lap of the waves beneath the gazebo, and the softer, slower tide of Izzy’s breathing behind them. It might have been a minute, or an hour. James had no way of knowing, and was content to stand there holding Petra forever, until she stirred against him. She twined her arms around his waist slowly, keeping him close, and then pushed herself up onto her toes before him.
He dipped his head as she opened her mouth to whisper to him.
Instead, she kissed him.
Her lips were shocking in their normalcy, their perfect warmth, and softness, and subtle expressiveness. There was no fantastic exchange of power between them, no spark of blinding enchantment.
And yet…
And yet it was the most purely, pristinely magical moment that James had ever experienced. He forgot who he was. His heart expanded and took up his whole body, crowding out every rational, waking thought.
And then, only a second and a lifetime later, Petra withdrew, keeping her face near his, looking up gravely into his eyes.
“We just had our first and last lover’s quarrel, James,” she said somberly. “Did you know that?”
James stared down at her, speechless, wanting nothing more than to kiss her again, or for the world to end at that exact moment so that her kiss would be his final memory. “No,” he answered. “Was that…us making up?”
She smiled secretively and then shook her head. “No. That was because you were jealous of Don. He’s just a friend. That’s all he ever was, and all he ever could be. He’s not like you. But your jealousy…it’s sweet. And adorable.”
James felt his face flush. He knew that she could see it, but he wasn’t ashamed.
“Don’t go, Petra,” he said. The words came out before he could stop them. There was nothing more to say. That’s all he wanted in the whole world. No matter the cost. No matter the consequence.
She closed her eyes. There was pain on her face, as if she was experiencing a brief but titanic inner struggle. And then she went rigid in his arms. When she opened her eyes again, they were different.
James shivered violently and recoiled, but Petra was still holding onto him. She stared up at him still, only now her eyes glowed with a ruddy inner light. Her pupils were thin, black snake-slits.
“I don’t want to go, James,” she said with low emphasis. Her voice was a cold furnace of conviction. “But don’t make this harder than it is. I’ve warned you before. Don’t try to stop me. No one can be allowed to stop me.”
“Petra,” James rasped, but his own voice was barely audible.
Horror and dismay constricted his throat. And still she held onto him.
James couldn’t tell if she was embracing him or strangling him.
“I love you, James,” she said. Her breath was an arctic breeze on his face, and yet it was the hopelessness in her tone that chilled him worst of all. These weren’t the words of young love.
This was an epitaph, a final inscription—a single kiss, first and final, the one to stand for all.
Darkness swept across the sky. It blotted the lake, snuffed the sun, and threw he and Petra into seamless black. He felt her holding onto him even as he fell away, dropped into the abyss of dreamless sleep, hearing her last words clang over and over in a senseless echo, like the tolling of a bell, as dead and cold as a January frost.
16. – Hagrid makes a plan
“It was a dream, James. Had to be.” Rose was distracted and agitated as they walked along the snow-mushy path to the greenhouses.
Cold water squelched into their shoes as they hurried, blinking against the stunning winter sunlight. The snow was a damp blanket over the grounds, pitted and heavy, as if exhausted after the long winter, ready to melt away at the first breath of spring.
“It wasn’t a dream,” James insisted, keeping his voice hushed despite the constant pummel of the wind. “You know I can travel to Petra in my sleep. I’ve told you the whole thing, about how, on the night I saved Petra on the back of the Gwyndemere, a connection happened between us, and it’s been there ever since. You’ve seen it with your own eyes! I tell you, I visited with Petra last night. She was just as real as you and me right now. I could smell her. I could… um, touch her.”
“Just because you can travel to her in your sleep sometimes doesn’t mean you do it every time. You said yourself that you visited her in her grandparents’ gazebo. Harriers and Aurors have been staked out all around that farm ever since the Night of the Unveiling, guarding it and watching for her. She can’t put her big toe anywhere near there without being instantly surrounded.”
“And I told you,” James said, exasperated, “That it wasn’t the gazebo and the lake as it is now. It was caught in a loop of time from decades ago, before any of us were even born.”
“Right,” Rose nodded. “Definitely not something that would happen in a dream.”
“Rose, she’s been in contact with Al! And she’s tapping into the power of the Bloodline for strength and support! Whatever is left of Voldemort, she’s talking to it. She’s listening to it. And she’s using its power.”