James Potter And The Morrigan Web (7 page)

“My friend,” the Collector hissed as Park stumbled to his knees in front of the dais. “You have been a disobedient boy, haven’t you?”

Park cowered, chin to his chest, shivering. He nodded.

“You broke a window,” the Collector went on in a velvety voice. “You stole food. You collected for yourself, and not for the benefit of the community. You were selfish, weren’t you, Mr. Park?”

Park nodded again, violently, and Lissa could hear his breathing, short and harsh.

The Collector raised his voice and said, “What, my people, is rule number one?”

The entire kneeling crowd responded at once, in perfect unison: “We must collect only what is unguarded. We must collect only for the community. We must not steal for our own selfish gain.” Lissa was dismayed to hear her own voice among the crowd, repeating the well-known mantra.

The Collector nodded, relishing the sound of the voices. “Yes. And do you know why this is such a very important rule, Mr. Park?”

Park nodded again, but the Collector ignored him. He stepped down the dais as he said, “Because if we break the rule, just as you broke the window of that shop, Mr. Park, then we attract the attention of the oppressors. They will come in their rumbling trucks and flying propeller machines, and they will seek us out. They will find us here. They will imprison you and your friends for thieves. Do you not see, Mr. Park? My rules are here to protect you, to keep you safe. Do I not feed you each night? Do I not provide you beds to sleep in? Do I not give you the benefit of a mission? Why do you threaten all of your friends, and spit in the face of my charity, for a meal of half-spoiled meat and stale bread?”

“I was hungry,” Park sobbed. “I’m bigger than a lot of the others. I need to eat more. I was really, really hungry. Forgive me! I won’t do it again. Promise!”

“I am sorry, Mr. Park,” the Collector breathed, and his voice hissed throughout the entire assembly, magically amplified and echoing in the hall’s dark ceilings. “But I cannot grant you forgiveness. There can be no infraction without punishment. For your sake, as well as those who watch. Put out your hands, Mr. Park.”

The monstrous wizard was enjoying it. Lissa heard it in the very timber of his voice. He was a sadist, preying on the weakest of them all. Lissa knew she should say something. Park had begged her to protect him. It had only been an old pastrami sandwich in a deli case, still wrapped in white paper. Lissa had considered breaking into the market for it herself. After all, the Collector barely fed them enough to keep them alive. All of them lived in a state of constant hunger, made dependent upon the wizard’s meager provision. Instead, she had left Park by the market, climbing the fire escape to search the wizarding apartments above, and Park had done what she should have known he would do. He’d broken the window with a smashed parking meter and eaten most of the sandwich by the time she had gotten back. The look of abject guilt on his face would have been funny under any other circumstance.

Kneeling in front of the dais, Park shook his head briskly, making his curly hair flop about his head.

“Do not add disobedience to disobedience, Mr. Park,” the Collector admonished luxuriously, approaching the man, raising his wand, point down. “Put out your hands.”

Lissa stirred. She pressed her lips together and raised her head. She knew she had to say something. Self-preservation was a hard instinct to overcome for someone who had lived so long on the street, but she couldn’t bear to see her companion tortured. She stared furiously at the scene as it unfolded in the dimness of the dais. Park was shivering visibly, cowering on his knees, refusing to put out his hands.
Just do it, Park!
Lissa wanted to call out,
all he’s going to do is brand you with his wand! It’ll hurt, yeah, but you’ll live! Can’t you see that he
wants
you to disobey him? He wants to hurt you even more! He
likes
it!

“
Now
, Mr. Park,” the Collector ordered, still speaking smoothly, silkily.

Park whimpered, refusing to obey. Lissa opened her mouth to call out. She didn’t even know quite what she was going to say. Before she could speak, however, Park raised his own head. He looked the Collector straight in the eye and said, so loudly and firmly that the room echoed with his voice, “No, you!”

There was a collective gasp throughout the entire hall. A few heads looked up. Park drew a deep, quick breath and pointed at the Collector. “I
won’t
obey you! You—you’re just a big bully! And you’re
mean
! Before you came to us, yeah, we had to find stuff to eat on the street, and beg for money and stuff, and maybe that wasn’t so great, but we were way better off then than we are with
you
around! You’re no friend! You’re a bad guy! You treat us like slaves and pretend that you’re all nice, but you aren’t! I wish I was back on the street again! At least then I was free!”

Park finished this uncharacteristically long speech and the room fell eerily quiet. Even the piano in the front lobby had stopped playing. There was a long, awful silence. The Collector merely stared down at Park, his face grave and strangely sad. Finally, slowly, he drew a deep breath and lowered his wand.

“You wish to be back out on the street, Mr. Park? At the mercy of destiny, with no one to care for you? Is that what you truly desire?”

Park’s face was contorted into a mask of stern terror. He nodded once, quickly.

The Collector sighed sadly. “Well, my friend. There is the door.” He nodded toward the end of the hall.

Thick silence filled the room, so perfect that Lissa, at the back of the hall, could hear the rustle of Park’s clothing as he scrambled to his feet. He turned. Nearly every head in the room was raised now, watching, wide eyed with disbelief.

Park began to walk toward the open double doors.

“Park!” Lissa called out suddenly, “No!”

But it was too late. The Collector had raised his wand the moment Park had turned his back.

There was an awful scream, eerily screeching and birdlike. It was the mingling noise of Park and the Collector, both crying out, one in anguish, the other in delight. Park collapsed to his knees as a jet of red light engulfed him, crackling and twining over his entire body. The Collector approached him from behind, wand out, casting the horrible tentacle of light. For the first time, Lissa saw his full face, lit by the light of his spell. His mouth was wide open, as were his eyes, which were wild with relish, showing the whites all the way around his pupils. Park’s and the Collector’s screams mingled, ululating throughout the hall, a chorus of horror and black glee.

Most of those gathered looked away, dropping their eyes, dipping their chins to their chests, but Lissa watched. She couldn’t move. He own mouth was still open, her breath stuck in her chest.

Park fell forward flat onto his face, his arms limp. And still the Collector approached him, tormenting the fallen man with the evil red spell. Park was dead. Lissa knew it. The Collector did, too. She could see it in the delight of his open, toothy grin, his wild, bulging eyes.

And then, finally, the red light vanished. The room fell silent again. Lissa’s retinas were burnt with the after-image of the spell, so that the figure of the Collector was merely a black shape in the dimness.

“There,” the awful, velvety voice breathed, spent and panting. “Now Mr. Park has been collected forever. Does anyone else… wish to join him?”

It had been a very strange and unpleasant few months for the President of the United States.

Hal Drummond was a career politician, and he knew it, even if he was loath to admit it out loud. There was simply no way to become president anymore without fully immersing one’s self into the occasionally grimy world of politics, utterly and without abandon. Drummond had put in his years, first as a state representative, then as a governor, and finally as a senator, all the while keeping his eye on the ultimate prize of the highest office in the land. Even more difficult had been the management of public perception. He had to maintain the illusion that his marriage (unhappy) was perfect, that his children (rebellious and sullen) were ideal, and that his record (sullied with all the seemingly necessary bribes, kickbacks and backroom deals) was spotless. It took a special kind of person to wade through the Washington swamp and still come out smelling clean on the other side, but Drummond (so he regularly told himself) was just that sort of person. He had won the presidency on a wide margin, boosted by the public’s extreme dislike of his predecessor. All had gone relatively well. The congress and the senate were stymied by partisan gridlock, which allowed Drummond to occupy the moral high ground while not accomplishing much of anything. All was more or less well with the world.

Until Memorial Day, three months earlier.

Drummond had been in a late meeting at the time. Three members of his cabinet had been with him in the White House conference room, and they had just requested that dinner be brought to them there. They had been discussing the upcoming election. It was still over a year away, but election season started very early in the age of the twenty-four hour news cycle. Drummond was determined to stay in office for a second term, despite an intimidating new flock of political rivals. One of them, fortunately, had already been eliminated—Chuck Filmore, the very popular senator from New York, had gone missing in some sort of botched magic stunt orchestrated by that pompous illusionist, Michael Byrne—but several other politicians were already making campaign noises, showing up on the Sunday morning talk shows, deriding Drummond and his “do-nothing agenda”.

Drummond’s chief of staff, Linus Fallon, had just hung up his call to the kitchen when there was a sharp rap at the conference room’s double doors. To everyone’s surprise, it was the president’s secretary, an older woman named Greta with tiny spectacles and very short grey hair.

“You should turn on the television, sir,” she said breathlessly, her eyes wide behind her glasses. “Right now, sir.”

Drummond merely blinked at her, but Fallon arose briskly from his seat. “What network?” he demanded.

Greta shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t matter.”

A wall of televisions blipped to life, each showing essentially the same scene, but from many different angles. In one shot, the camera was being buffeted by a running crowd. Over their heads, streams of flying objects streaked, some as small as individual people, others the size of buses. Another screen showed the Statue of Liberty, but not as Drummond had ever seen it before. It no longer stood, but hunkered down next to its base, its right hand lowered, its torch plunged into the black water that surrounded Ellis Island. Yet another screen panned wildly across what were unmistakably the skyscrapers of New York City. Clustered around and atop the familiar buildings, however, were odd, colorful structures. Brightly lit bridges connected them at dizzying heights. Strangely quaint storefronts and marquees blinked against the night sky. More of the flying objects zoomed through the scene, mingling like insects, avoiding crashes by the narrowest of margins.

“What…” Drummond began, but his voice trailed off. He had read the running news ticker at the bottom of CNNs screen: NY SENATOR CHARLES FILMORE FOUND DEAD/UNEXPLAINED MASS PHENOMENA OVERWHELMS NYC.

From that point on, things had happened very quickly, and very haphazardly.

Drummond had known about the magical world, if only barely. On his second day of office, he had received a visit from the very shocking figure of Benjamin Franklyn, the supposedly long dead icon of America’s founding. Franklyn had explained that he was a wizard (thus his magically augmented age), and that an entire magical community existed not only in the United States, but indeed the entire world. They were hidden, Franklyn explained, but quite real and very active, with their own cultures, economies, and governments. Fortunately, it seemed, an alliance had been reached some centuries ago that conjoined the governments of magical and “Muggle” America. This alliance was best represented by a tiny branch of the Secret Service known as the Magical Integration Bureau. Franklyn had introduced the new president to the head of this agency, a rather severe fireplug of a man named Lynch, who had assured Drummond that he need never think of the magical world again.

“My agents and I are fully capable of handling all the necessary interactions with the magical community,” Lynch informed him in a low, gravelly voice. “We’re well trained, fully equipped, and legally invisible. You will likely never hear from us again.”

Drummond was secretly glad of that, although he had harbored a degree of curiosity. In the days that followed, he had come up with several questions for Lynch—did the magical folk have cures for cancer or other diseases? Could their magic be harnessed for military use? What other historical figures might still be hidden away, alive and well in the wizarding community?—but he quickly discovered that there was simply no way to contact Mr. Lynch and his agency. No one else in Drummond’s cabinet knew anything about the Magical Integration Bureau, much less the wizarding world it represented. He’d be seen as insane even to ask about it.