JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

red thread. Not exactly the most obvious pan-dimensional artifact in the world. Magnussen's key could come in any shape or form. Were you perhaps planning on just walking up to him and saying, oi, Mr. Murderer sir, would you please be so kind as to give us this dimensional key thing, and never mind that we won't know the difference if you just hand us a chunk of lint that you might happen to have in your pocket'?' Scorpius smiled smugly at his wit.

       'Well,' James began, but couldn't immediately think of anything else to say. He glanced back at Ralph for help.

       'We have another clue,' Ralph said, perking up. 'Something about Erebus Castle. Magnussen said that the secret of the key walked around in the halls of Erebus Castle, or something like that. We just need to ask Lucy to take us on a tour. If we can figure out the riddle, then maybe we'll know what the key is.'

       'How hard can it be?' James nodded, grinning sheepishly.

       Scorpius looked meaningfully at Rose as he asked James, 'Why do you need Lucy's permission to get into Erebus Castle?'

       'That's the House of the Vampires,' Ralph replied. 'They're totally wiggy about who they let inside to bump around. You have to get a member of Vampire House to chaperone you around the whole time.'

       'Or you have to be a real-life vampire,' James added, rolling his eyes. 'The President of their house, Professor Remora, says that Erebus Castle is a 'sanctuary for any fellow wandering Children of the Night'. As if there are any of those in America.'

       Rose looked vaguely disgusted. 'Did she actually say that? Children of the Night?'

       'She says loads of stuff like that,' James nodded. 'She's completely batty.'

       'Hah hah!' Ralph added, nudging James with his elbow. James groaned.

       As the final days of the autumn semester unwound, James spent most of his time cramming (as Zane called it) for his semifinals. His fellow Bigfoots were a great help in that endeavor, forming spontaneous study groups in the game room of Apollo Mansion. There, Jazmine Jade, Gobbins, Wentworth, Norrick, Mukthatch, and anyone else who happened to be in the same classes would produce all of their notes and quiz one another for hours on end, all while consuming vast quantities of licorice soda and snacks from the Apollo kitchen.

       Occasionally, Yeats would drift through the room with a trash bag, collecting empty cans, cups, and candy wrappers, all the while muttering insincere apologies through his gritted teeth for interrupting the students' studies. Heckle and Jeckle hung near the cellar refrigerator and called out wrong answers to any quiz questions they overheard. James learned that Heckle, the deer head, answered wrongly on purpose, in the hopes of starting arguments with passersby. Jeckle, the moose head, however, got the answers wrong because he was, essentially, a moose head.

       It was thanks to these study sessions, which often lasted well into the night, that James finished his last week of school before the Christmas break with a somewhat giddy sense of confidence. His final test, a three-page practical in Precognitive Engineering, was possibly the hardest of all. For the two-hour examination period, James and the rest of the students were given three separate divining tools—a small crystal ball, a cup of tea leaves, and a random selection of octocards—and instructed to recount on parchment their predictions, being careful to assure that they were a) accurate, b) measurable, and c) essentially in agreement.

       This meant, James knew, that the second half of the test, which would occur sometime during the spring semester, would be a rigorous detailing of how the predictions did or did not come true. If this had been Professor Trelawney's class, James would have been less concerned about that second part—predictions for her class were always expected to be purposely vague and rather comically disastrous. The American Precog teacher, however, Professor Ham Thackery, was a fussy little man with a much different approach to the 'science of divination', as he called it. He frowned upon disastrous, major prophecies, preferring instead smaller, more measurable predictions regarding things like what colour bird might next fly past a specific window, or the number of candies in a box of Every Flavor Beans, or what dishes the cafeteria might choose to serve for dinner on any given evening.

       As a result, students had taken to spending inordinate amounts of energy attempting to steal advance copies of the menu from the head cook's desk in Administration Hall. James had joined Jazmine, Gobbins, and Wentworth on one such escapade and had succeeded in nicking a full menu plan for the entire month of December, right down to dessert options. Unfortunately, they had neglected to realize how far ahead the cook planned. It wasn't until after they had made their remarkably detailed class-time predictions that Wentworth had noticed that the menu plan was for December of the following year.

       'Easy enough,' Gobbins had proclaimed, flush with inspiration. 'We just tell Thackery that our predictions are super advanced and won't come true until next year at this time!'

       Against all probability, the plan had actually worked. Thackery had placed the students' predictions into a wall safe that he'd had installed for just such a purpose, explaining that he would grade the assignments in precisely one year, when the predictions could be measured.

       For now, however, James still had twenty minutes of examination time left. Feeling sleepy and vaguely hungry for lunch, he set the crystal ball aside and reached for the handful of octocards. It was very still in the Precog classroom, which was high and dusty, lit by a bank of tall windows that ranged along the left side of the room. The windows were nearly opaque with curls of frost, reducing them to bright blindness. The only noises in the room were the busy scritch of quills on parchment and the occasional frustrated sigh and clunk as students shuffled their divining objects about on their desks.

       James glanced around. Two desks to his right, Zane leaned over his parchment, writing furiously. The feather end of his quill shook wildly over his shoulder, as if he was systematically choking it by the nib. James sighed quietly and turned over the first octocard on his desk. He looked down at it.

the LADY of MYSTERY

       James blinked at the card. For a moment, the face of the dancing, smiling woman on the card had looked familiar. It had looked, in fact, like Petra Morganstern. James frowned and leaned over the card. It no longer looked like Petra, and yet it still looked familiar. Now, it looked like the strange woman that he had seen in the midnight halls of the Aquapolis and later aboard the Zephyr shooting hexes out of the windows without any visible wand. Who was she?

       James' hair suddenly prickled. It was her, he thought. She was the other woman that came out of the Hall of Archives right after it was attacked! How could I have forgotten? But who is she? He peered down at the card, concentrating furiously. The woman on the card didn't move, and yet she almost seemed to be smirking up at him. For the first time, James felt a deep sense of dismay about what he had seen that night. Was it possible that this woman and Petra had really done it? Was the woman somehow controlling Petra? Where had she come from, and what was the source of her power? Was it the same as the mysterious power that Petra herself seemed to demonstrate? In the warmth of the classroom, James shuddered.

       Slowly, he turned over another card.

the MAN of MIXED DESTINIES

James' eyes widened as he stared down at this card. He'd never seen it before—would have sworn, in fact, that there was no such card in a deck of octocards. Worse, however, he thought he recognized the face on this card as well: it was his own. The figure on the card was skinny, dressed in a quaint black suit with tails and an orange tie. Rather unsettlingly, however, the head had two faces, one looking right and smiling, the other looking left and frowning uncertainly. As James watched, the faces seemed to change places, to shift without moving. It made his eyes water and he blinked. With a shiver, he turned over another card, covering the first two.

the STAR of CONVERGENCE

       James had seen this one before, of course—the four-point golden star. He had drawn it once last year, in Professor Trelawney's class. Back then, it hadn't seemed particularly meaningful. Now the sight of it atop the other