James Potter And The Morrigan Web (47 page)

“Is your pal Ted Lupin an animagus?” she asked suddenly, glancing back at him.

James narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about Ted?”

“I know what Zane told me. He said that Ted Lupin attacked Ralph once in the form of a wolf. But Ted’s not a werewolf. So is he an animagus?”

“Zane talks a lot, doesn’t he?” James sighed. “But no, I don’t think so. Petra said that Ted changes sometimes because of a weird combination of his werewolf dad and his metamorphmagus mum. It’s complicated. So are you telling me you’ve got a dad who’s a, what, a weresnake?”

Nastasia looked away again and drew a long, deep breath, shaking as she let it out. “Don’t be stupid.”

James waited, but Nastasia didn’t go on. “So tell,” he prodded, trying not to sound impatient, which he was. “You promised to tell me everything if I kept your secret.”

“It’s not that easy!” she whispered harshly, angrily. “I’ve only ever told one person before! It’s hard to break the seal on a secret like that! Give me a minute!”

“Fine,” James crossed his arms and slumped in his seat. “So were you there tonight, by the way? I didn’t see you.”

“I was there,” she replied sullenly.

James nodded. “Must make it easy to sneak around that way. Slithering through the grass unseen. Slithering up the enchanted dormitory stairs without tripping the alarm hex. Sliding around through pipes and drains…”

Nastasia was quiet.

James tried a different approach. “So how long have you been able to turn into a snake?”

“I don’t turn into
a
snake,” she hissed suddenly, turning back to him. “I…”

James shrugged. “You what?”

She sighed again, briskly, as if frustrated. “It’s not…” she began, gesturing vaguely with both hands. “I’m not… what most people would think of as… normal.” She dropped her hands onto her lap and glared at James, her face tense, as if she wanted to make a joke of it and was struggling desperately not to. Her hands scrabbled over each other restlessly, like wrestling spiders. Finally, she dropped her eyes.

“Right,” James said slowly. “I think I probably could have told you that.”

“Mother Newt helps me,” Nastasia went on quietly, staring down at her hands. “She’s the only person who knows about it, and she explained it all to me. The Muggles have something sort of like it. They call it
Dissociative identity disorder
. I memorized that. I like the sound of it. The witch version is really rare. It has a name I can barely pronounce.”

James shook his head slowly. “I’m… a bit lost here, Nastasia.”

She looked up at him again. “I have… a fractured personality.” She smiled weakly. “Two of them, actually. Two versions of me, both totally different, both living in the same mind. There’s Nasti, the mean one, and there’s Ashya, the nice one. That’s simplifying things quite a bit, actually, but you get the point. I can’t control which one appears at any time. That’s pretty crazy, I suppose, isn’t it?”

“Actually,” James replied seriously, “that sort of explains quite a lot.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” she said, dropping her eyes again.

“I’m not. Really. I just…” he shrugged. “It sort of doesn’t come as a great surprise. It… sort of helps.”

Nastasia sighed again, shuddering. “In the Muggle world, they have medicines for people with more than one personality. In the magical world, they have… other methods. Mother Newt, she taught me that what I have, it doesn’t have to be a curse. She said that it’s lots different for witches than it is for Muggles. I can train both halves of my personality to work together, like partners, if they have the same ends in mind. The trick, she said, is to have very clearly defined goals, to make sure both of my…
versions
… work toward the same things.”

James was morbidly fascinated. “How do you do that?”

“Ah,” Nastasia said with a smile, glancing up at him. “That’s between me and Mother Newt.” There was a flicker in Nastasia’s gaze, a mischievous glint, and James wondered if he was seeing a glimmer of her
other
personality: Nasti. It chilled him slightly.

“So the snake thing?”

The glint in Nastasia’s eyes became a hard glare, burning in the darkness. Then, with a seeming force of will, she blinked it away. “Mother Newt says there are words for that, too, if you ask the healers at the medical college. They call it a ‘transmorphic event’. Mother Newt calls it something else. She calls it a magical release valve.”

James cocked his head. “A way to relieve pressure?”

She nodded. “It started when I was three or four years old. Normally, it takes years to learn the art of the animagus, but under certain conditions, when a witch or wizard’s brain experiences extreme stress from within, it can happen spontaneously, as a sort of escape. When both sides of my personality, Nasti and Ashya, went to war against each other, my mind couldn’t handle the strain. So it… just changed me.”

“I see,” James said slowly. “As a snake, things are much simpler, I suppose. A bit more… er, single-minded. Right?”

Nastasia shrugged and looked away. “Something like that.”

“So when the Lady of the Lake attacked Lily,” James said, narrowing his eyes, “you saw what was happening and… you were at war with yourself?”

Nastasia still did not meet James’ eyes. “I’ve learned to control it,” she answered duly. “As the years went by, I began to understand the mental muscles that made the change happen. Now, I can do it whenever I want to. It’s a pretty useful skill. Sometimes, like you say, it’s handy to be able to turn into… something else.”

“So you fought the Lady of the Lake and saved Lily’s life.” James nodded. “I haven’t thanked you for that.”

She laughed darkly. “I’m not sure it
was
this ‘Lady of the Lake’ you’re always talking about. It doesn’t matter. But don’t thank me. Don’t ever thank me.”

“Why not?

She looked at him sharply, piercingly. Suddenly, she slid off her chair and knelt in front of James, leaning close over the arm of his chair.

“You can’t trust me, James,” she said in a hard whisper. “Don’t you see? The parts of me, they don’t always agree. I
try
to make Nasti and Ashya work together. I really do! But I can’t always make both sides of me want the same things. I don’t always know what it is that I’m up to. And I don’t… I
can’t
trust that it’s always good.” She stopped suddenly, her face pinched into a frown of concentration. “Did I… did I tell you I would come along with you to talk to Professor Avior at Durmstrang?”

James studied her face incredulously. “Well… yes. Of course you did. You don’t remember?”

Her eyes drifted away slowly, lost in thought. “Yes…” she said vaguely. “Yes, I guess I do. But…”

There was a long pause. Finally, Nastasia shook her head wearily. “Just, be careful when you are with me, James. I’ll try to control it. I have… ways.”

“The snake,” James nodded.

“Yes,” she said, almost dismissively, her eyes growing glassy again, distant. “But not just that. There’s something else. Something I have to concentrate on, something that keeps all of me working toward the same thing.”

James suddenly felt very sad for Nastasia. For the first time, he saw her not as a capricious, manipulative pixie, but as a tortured girl with a weighty secret, struggling to keep herself-- and everyone around her-- safe from her own nightmares. In some ways, she was very similar to Petra.

He touched her lightly on the shoulder. “It can’t be that bad,” he said. “What is it you concentrate on?”

Nastasia looked into his eyes again, gravely and intently. “The thing both parts of me have agreed on since the beginning of this school year,” she answered softly. And then she kissed him. It was quick, darting, and over before he even realized it was happening. His heart crammed up into his throat and his face heated, reddening his cheeks.

“Goodnight, James,” Nastasia said, her lips still only inches from his. “Close your eyes again. All right?”

“You’re mental,” he whispered faintly.

A smile twitched the corners of Nastasia’s mouth. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

James shook his head, his heart still pounding in his throat, his cheeks still burning. He closed his eyes.

Nastasia shrank away with a dull, complicated thump. He heard the soft rasp of her slithering as she moved away across the rugs of the common room floor, beneath the sofas and chairs. Seconds later, there was only silence.

He opened his eyes. His head was spinning, as were his emotions. He barely knew how he felt. He only knew one thing with certainty.

Nastasia’s visit certainly had not made things any simpler.

“Run, students! It’s called tag rugby, not tag standing-around-wheezing-like-old-women!” The iron voice of Tabitha Corsica, in her Yorke teacher guise, rang out over the muddy field with the assistance of an electric bullhorn.

“She’s enjoying this way too much,” Ralph panted, hands on his knees, mud staining his St. Brutus’ tee shirt all the way to the chest.

Graham nodded weakly. “It’s state-sanctioned torture, I tell you.”

James looked up to see a herd of students galloping toward them in pursuit of a terrified looking Kevin Murdoch, who held the football in front of him like a bomb. The mob bowled over James, Graham and Ralph, capturing them in a melee of bashing shoulders, muddy knees, and sharp elbows. James fell, tripped a particularly beefy Yorke student, and felt two more stampede across his back, their large, gratefully mud-caked cleats driving him into the mushy grass. A second later, the entire scrum collapsed onto Murdoch, burying him in a massive, grunting tackle.

“Remember, students,” Corsica called, the bullhorn turning her voice into an electric squawk. “This is
tag
rugby. But I do commend your enthusiasm. Carry on! We’ve twenty-five minutes before cool-down calisthenics!”

“You won’t believe what I just heard,” Graham moaned, limping back toward James and Ralph as the rugby scrum boiled away toward the far goal.

“Don’t tell me this is a double-period and she’s going to make us run laps after this,” Ralph begged, wide-eyed.

“Worse!” Graham spat. “Corsica’s going to be doing double teacher duty, filling in part-time at another school with an unexpected vacancy. Just heard the captain of the Yorke squad talking about it. Corsica told them about it this morning and they’re all broken up about it! They totally love her!”

“That’s impossible,” James shook his head.

“Who cares?” Ralph interjected, digging a dollop of mud out of his ear.

“They were laughing about the name of the teacher she’s filling in for,” Graham added pointedly. “A real gut-buster, they said! The teacher she’s replacing is some barmy duffer named… Longbottom!”

James startled so hard that he slipped on the mud and nearly toppled back onto the wet grass. “
Longbottom
? Are you sure?”

Graham rolled his eyes. “Pretty hard to get that name wrong, isn’t it? Corsica told them he taught at some yokel private school up north. Can you believe it?”

James shook his head slowly in wonder. “Grudje replaced Professor Longbottom already! He got the Ministry to reassign Corsica to his post!”

“He probably asked for her specifically,” Ralph said dourly. “She’d be just his sort.”

“No wonder she’s in such a good mood,” Graham sighed.

Ralph shook his head, flinging muddy water from his hair. “I wonder where Professor Longbottom is now?”

James frowned worriedly. “Probably cooling his heels in some Ministry detention centre along with Professor Revalvier. Maybe dad knows about it. If we have a chance, we’ll ask him tonight.”

A rumbling of the ground announced the return of the rugby scrum. James braced himself as the mob swept over him again, sweeping the three boys along like a sweaty, mud-spattered snowball.

From the sideline, Corsica grinned from her false, middle-aged face, her oversized glasses glinting white with the reflection of the cloudy sky.

James spent the rest of the day distracted by thoughts of the previous night, as well as hopes for the night to come. He hoped that his dad had gotten their message and would be able to get through via the Gryffindor common room floo. Further, he was worried that Filch would announce some draconian, late-night detention for all members of the Night Quidditch League, possibly interfering with the arranged midnight meeting with his father. As evening descended, however, no word came down about any punishment at all.