James Potter And The Morrigan Web (101 page)

On the floor, Ralph moaned.

“Do it, Ms. Hendricks,” Rechtor Grudje instructed. “He comes around. Let us waste no more time with pointless talk and brute confrontation.”

Nastasia nodded. She levelled her wand at Rose and took a step closer, breathing hard through her nose.

“Avada…”

James pushed himself in front of Rose again, but she only shoved him back once more. “Stop it, you git!” she rasped angrily, hopelessly. “You think I want to watch you die in front of me?” She grabbed his hands, refusing to look at Nastasia. Instead, she squeezed her eyes tight shut.

James waited breathlessly. Five seconds passed. There was no flash of deadly green.

He looked aside, still grasping his cousin’s hands.

Nastasia stood exactly as before, wand extended, panting hard through her nose. “
Avada
…!” she said again, more loudly.

“Do it!” Grudje commanded.

Nastasia opened her mouth to finish the killing curse. What came out, however, was her own name: “Nastasia!” she shouted.

James blinked at her in confusion.
Avada Nastasia?
Rose opened her eyes, glancing aside at the pink-haired girl. Nastasia’s wand trembled in her hand.

“Nastasia!” she called again, apparently involuntarily. Her eyes seemed to lose focus, to drift, almost to look in two different directions. “Nasti-ashya!” she shouted. Then, more emphatically, “Nasti!
Ashya
!” James had the eerie, haunting sense that Nastasia was arguing with herself.

“Nasti!” she cried, the wand gradually lowering in her hand. “Ashya!”

“NASTI!”

“ASHYA!”

Grudje strode forward impatiently. He reached to wrench Nastasia’s wand out of her hand, to do the horrible deed himself, but she flicked her wand, barely even pointing it at him and without so much as a sidelong glance. The old man was thrown backwards amidst another flash of red light. He tumbled over Ralph and collapsed to the floor between the fallen cabinets. With a sudden, spasmodic movement, Nastasia gripped her wand in both fists, twisted it, and snapped it in half.

“What’s she doing?” Rose begged in a shrill voice, unable to take her eyes from the chanting, shouting girl in front of her.

“She’s losing control of herself,” James said weakly.

As if to emphasize his words, Nastasia’s face began to transform. It happened with surprising, horrible speed. Her pink hair shrank away while her pupils grew, expanding to fill her eyes completely, turning them into inky black orbs. Her cheeks and nose flattened while her mouth grew wide, spreading all the way to her quickly vanishing ears. And still the mouth spoke, chanting her dual names, turning raspy and hoarse. Her tongue flicked out, long and red. Nastasia’s entire body grew thinner. Her arms sucked up into her sleeves. Her legs snapped together beneath her skirt, melding into one, sinewy appendage.

It was horrible to watch, but James was not entirely surprised. He knew this was what happened to Nastasia when she went to war with herself.

And that was why what happened next was so completely and utterly shocking.

“Nasty!” the snake’s mouth hissed. “ASHYA!” And with a wet crackle of bone and a horrible, violent jerk, the head split in half.

Rose screamed, shrinking against James, still holding his hands in a death grip. James could not tear his eyes from the sight. As Nastasia’s body continued to narrow, to slither hypnotically inside her clothes,
two
snake heads split from her collar, each one hissing its name, fighting for dominance over the other. Two tails coiled on the stone floor, thrashing and curling.

James jumped back as the Nastasia-thing fell forward, losing its ability to stand upright. Out of her limp clothing slithered two snakes, each the size of a giant python, one black and oily, the other bright pink with glinting, sharp scales. Both snakes hissed at each other viciously, circling, rising atop their coils and baring horrible, glistening fangs. Then, in an explosion of lithe violence, they fell to battle. The snakes curled and thrashed around each other, forming a blur of whipping coils and snapping jaws, each still hissing its name in a battle for dominance.

Ralph stumbled around the melee, his forehead bleeding from his collision with the Durmstrang cabinet. “What the ruddy hell!?” he cried breathlessly, grabbing James’ arm.

“We have to get out of here!” James declared, pulling Ralph and Rose back from the battling snakes. “To the Great Hall while we still have a chance!”

“Oh, I think not!” a rough voice cried madly. A hand gripped James’ shoulder, clutching like iron. Another fell on Ralph, fisting in his robes and yanking him off balance. Stumbling, fighting against the iron-like hands, James was dragged around the thrashing snakes, away from the classroom door.

“You really are simply a
constant
source of trouble,” the Collector growled through gritted teeth, hefting James and Ralph toward the Beauxbatons cabinet. Rose followed, beating uselessly at him with her fists. “Fortunately,” he went on, seething through a sick grin, “I pride myself in my
resourcefulness!
”

He shoved James into the vanishing cabinet, bashing him against its rear wall. Ralph was thrown in after him, followed by Rose, who fought and thrashed furiously against the Collector’s unnatural strength.

“I will grant you this,” the Collector gasped, his eyes dancing with mad rage, “You are intrepid, and you are far luckier than any mere rabble-rousers should ever expect to be!” Behind him, the black and pink snakes wrestled on, thumping wildly, their ten foot bodies twined in vicious struggle. “But I daresay none of that will help you cover a thousand miles in the next thirty minutes!
Au Revoir
, my troublesome young friends!” He cackled shrilly.

James struggled to jump out of the cabinet, along with Ralph and Rose, but the door slammed upon them, closing them in seamless darkness.

“No!” James shouted, but it was no use. A flash of light filled the compartment, accompanied by a sickening lurch, like a lift suddenly dropping in its shaft. A moment later, gravity reasserted itself, propelling the three students out of the cabinet, tumbling them onto a cold, marble floor.

James clambered around, aware that he was in an entirely new space, echoing and flooded with golden light. People were milling around, chattering, but James barely registered them. He looked up at the cabinet he had just fallen out of. Its doors creaked slowly shut as he watched, revealing a woodcut of the Hogwarts crest, split so that half adorned each door.

He jumped up, threw himself into the cabinet again, and without waiting for Ralph and Rose, jerked the doors shut.

There was no flash, no sickening jolt. The doors merely creaked open again slightly, letting in the curious gaze of a collection of blue-robed girls. Ralph and Rose clambered to their feet in front of them. Rose opened the doors fully, her face tense and pale.

“Broken,” James announced helplessly. “Or destroyed on the other side. He shut it down somehow. Closed off our only way back.”

Rose’s mouth opened soundlessly, dumb with shock. Next to her, Ralph’s face was a mask of frustrated anger. Blood still trickled freely down his forehead and cheek. French voices babbled all around and James finally recognized where they were: Beauxbatons, of course, in the gilded and richly vaulted atrium at the centre of the school. Broad white staircases leapt up in twin curves on either side, lined with brass-framed windows.

“What are
you
lot doing here?” a voice-- thankfully not speaking French-- called out.

Ralph and Rose turned, looking back as a figure approached. James did not think it was possible, but his spirits dropped even further at the sight. Morton Comstock strode toward them, his head cocked and a sardonic smile cinching the corner of his mouth. “Don’t tell me you actually came to help get Professor Moreau safely back home after all this time. If so, you only missed it by about three hours. His welcome home party was quite an event. Nobody celebrates like the French, eh?”

James shook his head, unwilling even to formulate a response to Comstock’s irritating prattle. Wearily, helplessly, he stepped out of the useless cabinet.

“We have to get back,” he said. “If we don’t…”

“Everyone dies,” Ralph nodded darkly. “But how? Like that madman said, it’s impossible! A thousand miles in thirty minutes!”

“Wait a minute…” Rose suddenly said, her eyes sharpening. She glanced back at Comstock. “Where, exactly, did this professor Moreau just get back from?”

Comstock scoffed and adjusted his glasses. “You mean where
didn’t
he just get back from,” he chortled. “You lot just don’t
get
Advanced Arithmatics at all, do you?”

Dismissing Comstock, Rose turned back to James and Ralph, her eyes bright with intent. “I think,” she said, raising a hand to point at the Muggle boy, “we just might be able to travel that thousand miles after all…”

23. COLLECTIVE CONSTANT

“It isn’t like a cab, you know,” Comstock said, straightening his glasses as Rose hurried him along. “You can’t just hop across countries neat as you please. It’s complicated!”

“That’s why
you’re
along,” James said, turning left at a tall, marble archway and hurrying between a pair of impeccable suits of armour. Sky-blue vaulted ceilings, decorated with winking golden stars, spread away for what seemed miles. Beneath them, dressed in normal clothes with only a few robes in sight, were a scattering of Beauxbatons students, some levitating trunks, others lounging in alcoves on collections of baroque chairs and sofas, all looking up curiously as James, Rose, Ralph and Comstock sped past.

“Who are these, Morton?” a tall girl in jeans and a Rig Mortis tee shirt called curiously.

“Hi Adela,” Comstock called back as Rose hurried him on. “Friends, er, I guess.”

“
Moorr-
ton!” a trio of younger girls walking in the opposite direction sang, giggling. The ginger-haired one in the middle waved. “Pas si tôt! Change your mind about the dancing lessons?”

Morton gave a forced laugh. “Some other time, Mirielle. I’m busy, apparently.”

“Wait a minute,” Ralph frowned, wheeling Comstock around another corner. “You’re
popular
here?”

“It’s a little something called
personality
,” Comstock declared with a sniff. “You lot could learn a thing or two. Which reminds me,” he added, turning to Rose. “Your cousin Dominique says she still wants that hairbrush back you borrowed Christmas before last.”

“If we survive tonight,” Rose rolled her eyes, “It’ll be first thing on my to-do list.”

James spied the Advanced Arithmancy classroom ahead, beyond a pair of high, bevelled doors. “Can you do it, Comstock?” he asked, dragging the boy forward at a trot. “Can you send us back to Hogwarts using those giant abacuses?”

“Abaci,” both Rose and Comstock corrected simultaneously. They glanced at each with mutual irritation. “Short answer,” Comstock went on, “No. You don’t understand a thing about how it works. It would be daft to even try.”

“I thought you were a genius at this?” James demanded irritably. “Don’t start telling me now that it won’t work.”

Comstock jerked his elbow away from James’ fist. “I can’t
send
you there because the support arithmaticians don’t do the sending!” he exclaimed irritably. “That’s just not how it works! What’s the big rush, anyway? Why are you lot even here?”

Rose, who’d been pacing briskly ahead of the three boys, came to an abrupt stop in the corridor. She gathered herself for a brief moment, hands raised slightly in front of her in a calming gesture, and then spun around to face Comstock.

“You were there in the forest the night we found the dead warlock. Yes?”

Comstock blinked at her, obviously reluctant to revisit the memory. “Erm… yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it was me what found him.”

Rose nodded curtly. “He was a very bad wizard, and he was working with an even worse wizard. Together they created a sort of super weapon that’s going to kill a whole load of people in, oh, about twenty-five minutes. Our parents are among them.” She glared at Comstock, letting the full weight of her gaze bore into him like a drill. “If we get back immediately, we may be able to stop it. If not, well, the whole world is likely about to drop straight off into global war and chaos. So. Morton. Can you help us get back to Hogwarts? Or can’t you?”