The Vault of Destinies (James Potter #3) (18 page)

"Come back, Izzy," I plead silently, speaking directly to that diminishing spark of her life. "Please come back."

There is no response. Izzy's eyes do not so much as flutter. I begin to panic. "Don't go Iz, I need you. You're all I have left. It shouldn't end this way. It can't end this way. Good will win out in the end. It has to…" I hold my sister in my arms and rock back and forth, searching for that spark. "No… No Iz… Don't be gone. Don't leave me alone…"

I open my eyes and look down at my sister's face…

Here, Petra's story stopped for a space of several lines. James looked at the blank space, but it wasn't entirely blank. Petra had begun to continue the story three more times, and then scribbled out the results, violently and completely, obliterating the shapes of her neat handwriting. The quill had leaked, leaving ragged black blots on the parchment. Finally, much more roughly, Petra's story continued.

Izzy lays in the darkness of the gazebo, cold and still, unmoving. The guttering spark of her life is gone. Izzy is dead. As dead as the gazebo. As dead as her dolls back in the bedroom of the farmhouse. Izzy is dead, and I am the one who has killed her.

"No," I insist. It can't end this way! I made the right choice! I fought the darkest desires of my soul, and overcame them, all by myself, with no outside intervention. I chose
good.
Good
owes
me!

"No…," I say again, raising my voice, "this isn't how it's supposed to turn out. You're supposed to be alive! This isn't how the story ends!" My voice is rising, both in pitch and volume. I stare down at the pathetic figure below me, refusing to believe what I see. Izzy's body lays in the center of the gazebo floor, soaked and limp, filthy on the rotten planks.

"No!" I scream now, scooping the small body into my arms. "NO!"

"
Yes!"
the voice in the backroom of my mind commands coldly. "
You cannot fight your destiny. You tried to in the chamber of the pool, and you tried to tonight, and yet… fate prevails! You and I are one! Give in to your powers. Embrace the paths you have opened. It is too late to turn back now. All that is left is power, but that is not a bad thing. In time, you will come to accept what happened here tonight. In time, you will be glad of it, for it makes you who you are, who you were meant to be from the very beginning. Fight it no more. You are tired of fighting, aren't you? Now, at the end, you see that fighting was always futile. Fighting your destiny only destroys you, and all that you love. Embrace it now. Embrace it, and perhaps destiny will repay you. After all, the path of power has many, many benefits…"

I listen to the voice. I am helpless not to. For the first time, I listen, and I do not argue with it. The voice is right. There is no fighting my destiny. What had been meant to happen in the Chamber of Secrets had not been prevented, only postponed. I gained nothing by choosing good, succeeded only in raising the price that I must inevitably pay. Now, Izzy is dead, and good is annihilated. The voice is right. All that is left is the path of power.

I stand slowly, lifting the light body of my murdered sister. I will bury her, in the woods, beneath the cairn that represents her. And then I will leave. I don't know where I will go or what I will do, but I have a strong feeling that those decisions will mysteriously take care of themselves. Suddenly, it is almost as if I am merely a passenger in my own mind. My body seems to move of its own accord, carrying me back along the dock, my sister's cold body dripping lake water in my arms. I am glad to give in. It is too hard to fight, too hard to think. Destiny has claimed me, and I am happy now to relinquish control to it. What is left now to fight for anyway?

In the darkness overlooking the lake, the great old tree stands in Grandfather Warren's field, its leaves whispering like a thousand voices.

Sometimes, I can still hear those voices. Even when I am awake.

James dropped the last page onto the small sheaf of parchments. He was shaking and his forehead was beaded with sweat in the dark confines of the upper bunk. His mind raced as he considered the remarkable, inexplicable implications of the story.

If any of it was true at all, then how had Petra performed the magic? In the story, she admitted that she had broken her own wand, for reasons James couldn't begin to guess. So how had she performed a feat as amazing as levitating a long-sunken gazebo out of a lake? Obviously, that part simply couldn't have actually happened. But then, James remembered the events of that very morning, remembered how Petra had simply closed her eyes, as if in deep thought, and then, a moment later, how Henrietta's harness chain had magically reattached to the ship, allowing them to escape the pirates' trap.

James tried to remember if Petra had had her wand in her hand at the time and realized he couldn't. Frankly, he couldn't remember seeing Petra's wand even once since her arrival at the Potter home, months earlier. But that was simply crazy, wasn't it? No witch or wizard could do magic without their wand, at least not anything specific or meaningful. There had to be a reasonable explanation for it, and James had a strong feeling that it all revolved around the question of which parts of Petra's dream story were true and which parts were just that: a dream.

I think she asks me to come because she needs me here to prove that the dreams aren't true,
Izzy had said the night before, while Petra had still been writing.
She needs me here to prove that I'm still alive
.

In James' memory, Izzy's words mingled with those of Professor Trelawney, the horrible prophecy she had made on the morning that he had left Hogwarts:
The fates have aligned… night
will fall, and from it, there will be no dawn, no dawn, save the dawn of forever fire…

Strangely, powerfully, James felt a deep sense of fear and doom. It hovered over him like a shroud, almost like the pall of a Dementor. He shook himself, and then, almost desperately, tapped the parchments again with his wand, closing them once again into the seamless, featureless packet, hiding Petra's words, shutting off the voice of Professor Trelawney in his memory.

He jammed the packet of parchment under his pillow and leapt down to the floor, hungry for light, for the sane babble of the voices of his friends and family. He very nearly slammed the door to his stateroom as he entered the narrow corridor, heading for the galley. Ralph and Lucy would be there, as would Albus and Lily, his parents, Neville Longbottom, and the rest. What James wanted most was to tell someone what he had read, but of course he couldn't. He had promised Petra that he would keep her secret.

Perhaps she would be in the galley, though, as well. Maybe he could tell her, and ask her about what was in the dream story, find out how much of it was real, and how much (hopefully most of it!) was just a dream. Suddenly, he wanted that more than anything.

But Petra wasn't in the galley. A cursory look around the decks and the narrow corridors revealed no sign of either her or Izzy. Apparently they were in bed already.

Later, however, James would wonder otherwise.

The next morning dawned hazy and bright, still as a tomb. The ocean was nearly flat, with barely a breath of breeze to disturb it, so that the wake of the
Gwyndemere
lay like a highway behind her, spreading into the shimmering distance. Henrietta plowed on, her great scaly head occasionally breaking the surface and flinging fans of water all around.

"The doldrums," Barstow explained to James, Ralph, and Lucy after breakfast. The four stood on the bow, watching another mate operate the steering pole on its brass chair. "Technically, it's where a bunch of huge Atlantic currents all meet and cancel each other out, making a sort of dead space in the middle of the ocean. But it's more'n that if you ask an old sailor like me. It's a cursed place. If Davey Jones really does have a locker, it's right below our feet, fathoms down, in the still darkness of the deepest deeps."

"Cheerful stuff, that," Ralph commented, shaking his head.

"It
is
pretty queer, when you think about it," Lucy said, leaning on the railing and looking down toward the shadow of the ship on the rushing, leaden water. "It's almost like we're floating on a cloud, high up over some alien, hidden landscape. Who knows what wild creatures live down there, not even knowing there
is
a surface, much less magical ships that can scoot along the top of it, sitting on the mysterious boundary between the air above and the secret world below. Puts things into perspective, in a way, don't you think?"

Merlin had approached along with Harry, Neville Longbottom, and Percy Weasley. The Headmaster smiled faintly at Lucy but didn't say anything.

"So," James asked, looking between the three men, "where were
you
lot yesterday morning when we were getting squeezed between three pirate ships like a walnut in a giant nutcracker?"

"We were below-decks, as per instructions," Merlin said mildly, still smiling that strange, small smile. "You must understand: we are at sea. Here, the word of the captain is law. As adults,
we
are in the habit of abiding by the law."

James shook his head. "Fat lot of help you'd have been if we hadn't gotten Henrietta's harness fixed at the last second. We'd have been caught by pirates, and then who knows what would have happened?"

"Worse fates have befallen people on the high seas, James," Neville replied, patting the boy on the shoulder. "I suspect everything would have turned out all right, no matter what. After all, we're hardly carrying a shipment of Galleons for the World Wizarding Bank in New Amsterdam, are we?" He blinked and turned aside to Harry. "Are we?"

Percy shook his head. "I assure you, James, and the rest of you, everything was entirely under control at all times."

James leaned against the railing next to Lucy. "Sure didn't seem like it when we were flying over that last pirate ship, smashing its masts like tenpins," he muttered. "But whatever you say."

"So what do you think those pirates
were
after us for?" Lucy asked quietly as the adults meandered away, talking in low voices.

"Well, it wasn't to ask us all to come over for crumpets and tea, that's for sure," James said darkly. "Barstow himself seemed pretty surprised by it. Seemed to say that it was pretty unusual for so many pirates to work together at once. I bet you a Galleon that my dad, Merlin, Professor Longbottom, and the rest of the grownups know a lot more about this than they're letting on."

"Well, that's their job, I guess," Ralph sighed. "And they're welcome to it." In a different voice, he added, "I hear we'll be landing in America by teatime tomorrow! I can hardly wait, can't you?"

Lucy nodded. "I'm ready to get land under my feet again even if it isn't home."

"You'll love the States," Ralph said confidently. "It's totally cool there. Way different, especially in the cities. You can get food from all over the world on nearly every corner. And there's Bigfeet, and old Native American magic, and loads of amazing wizarding places. There's even a crystal mountain that you can't even see until you just about bump into it. Even the Muggles told stories about that one, up until the American Magical Administration made it unplottable, a hundred years ago or so."

"Bah," Albus said grumpily, stumping up and plopping down onto a bench built into the railing. "None of it will be as cool as Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade. Who needs a stupid old crystal mountain? Or Bigfeet for that matter?"

"I think they prefer the term 'Sasquatches'," Lucy said carefully. "Or Bigfoots, even though it sounds a little odd, grammatically."

"Stupid apes can't even talk," Albus groused. "They can start telling me what to call them when they can say it in plain English."

"That's rather speciesist," Lucy commented, but without much conviction. "What's got you in such a foul mood?"

Albus rolled his eyes. "Mum just yelled at me for making a racket in the hallway. Me and Lily and Molly. We were just playing Winkles and Augers. I don't see what the big deal is."

"You were playing Winkles and Augers with Lily and Molly?" Ralph said, frowning. "But they aren't even in school yet. Do they even have wands?"

James smiled ruefully. "Albus' attitude toward the rules is pretty loose. He got both girls some cheap toy wands from Gorleone's Novelties last time we were in Diagon Alley and he taught them some basic levitation, just so he has
somebody
to play Winkles with that he can actually
beat
."

"I beat
you
last time we played," Albus countered, raising his eyebrows challengingly. "Don't pretend I didn't."

"That's because
you
kept on playing after Mum called us for lunch and I went downstairs!" James cried, tossing his hands into the air.

"S'not against the rules, is it?" Albus replied evenly. "I mean, I could have just claimed you'd forfeited. I gave you the benefit of the doubt." To Ralph, he grinned and added, "I won, two hundred and seventy-eight to five."

"You can't play Winkles properly in a hallway as narrow as the corridors below-decks anyway," Lucy said, leaning back on the railing. "But besides that, why would your mum care? It's not like anyone's asleep or anything."