JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

       William, still limping, had been surprised to see Helen and her pistol, but only a little. Kneeling over the body of Magnussen, he had retrieved the man's evil magical cane. With a swift, decisive movement, he broke the cane over his knee. The long end he tossed into the gutter, but the handle he peered at in his hand, studying the glint of moonlight on the leering metal face. He shuddered.

       'Your stolen goods might not be the sort of thing that would fit in a velvet bag, would they?' he asked dourly, looking down at the body.

       James nodded. 'Could be,' he answered, stepping gingerly forward. As he approached Magnussen's prone figure, he saw a drawstring sack lying next to the corpse, still hooked over the left wrist. Feeling a wave of revulsion, James tugged the loop of string from around the dead man's wrist. The hand thumped back to the street with a faint smack.

      'You three…,' William said faintly, looking at the boys. 'You're like him, ain't you?'

       James swallowed thickly and shook his head, but Ralph, surprisingly, was the one to speak up. 'We're sorry for what happened to Fredericka,' he said solemnly. 'This man may have been a part of our world… but we aren't like him.'

       William stared at Ralph, his eyes wide and shining in the darkness. Slowly, he nodded. Helen moved next to him and put an arm around his shoulders, still staring down at Magnussen's body, as if mesmerized by it. Her face was very pale and James had a suspicion that the girl had been sick only moments earlier, probably behind the same broken crates where he, Zane, and Ralph had hidden.

      'I don't know what's in that velvet bag,' William said, shuddering, 'and I'm sure I don't want to. This is over. You go your way. And me and Helen, we'll try to go ours. Fair enough?'

       James nodded. He could feel the cold weight of the horseshoe through the velvet of the sack. Slowly, he backed away from the body of Magnussen. Zane and Ralph followed and a moment later, all three boys turned and ran out of the alley. They ran almost the entire way back to the Alma Aleron gate, where Flintlock was only just beginning to come out of the trance Magnussen had cast over him. The rock troll remembered them in that hazy reverse-time way that Zane had predicted and allowed them to approach the Warping Willow. Zane recited the incantation that would return them to the school and the Tree began to shiver all around them. The moon and stars started to roll forward again, taking them back to the school and their own time.

       Throughout the journey home, James held the velvet bag, fingering the distinctive shape inside it. Neither he, Zane, nor Ralph said a word.

      They didn't have to.

19. UNHELPFUL REVELATIONS

      'They killed him?' Rose asked the following day, speaking through the Shard on the back of the dormitory room door. 'Shot him dead, right there in the street?'

       'It was like something from a movie,' Ralph nodded soberly. 'Only in real life, it doesn't feel so exciting. It was just sad and shocking and… sort of final. It didn't fix anything that'd been done. It just stopped more bad things from happening.'

       'The poor girl,' Rose said sadly, shaking her head. 'Maybe Magnussen deserved what he got, but she'll have to live with what she did for the rest of her life. That's what courts of law are for.'

       'Boohoo,' Scorpius scoffed, sitting on the other end of the sofa in the Gryffindor common room. 'You think some Muggle court would be able to capture and convict someone like Magnussen? Don't kid yourself. I'm more interested in the horseshoe anyway. Let us see it, why don't you?'

       James swallowed hard and turned toward his bunk. A moment later, he retrieved the black velvet bag from beneath his mattress.

       'We haven't found a decent hiding place for it yet,' he said, loosening the drawstring and sliding the cold metal shape into his right hand. 'If it was too magical for Magnussen to keep on campus, then the same is probably true for us. Someone's bound to sense its power and come sniffing around to see what it is.'

       He crossed to the Shard and held the horseshoe up before it, cradling the silvery weight gingerly in his palm. The metal was dulled and clouded with myriad scratches, but its shape was unmistakable. Purplish light glinted along its curved edges.

       'It's bigger than I would have expected,' Rose said, having approached the mirror on the Hogwarts side of the Shard. 'It looks… heavy, somehow.'

       'It is,' James admitted. 'Almost like it comes from a place where gravity is less important. And it glows a little too. You can't see it unless all the lights are turned off and it's totally dark, but it's there, sort of faint purple, like the last bit of sunset.'

       'I can almost sense the magic from here,' Rose said quietly. 'You're right, you definitely need to hide it somewhere safe.'

       'At least until we can find a way to use it to get into the World Between the Worlds,' Ralph nodded.

       'But that's our main problem now,' James said, turning back around and carrying the horseshoe to his bed.

       On the other side of the Shard, Scorpius sighed. 'Ah yes. Up until now, everyone believed that your Professor Magnussen had escaped into the Nexus with the help of his dimensional key. Now that you know that the man was, in fact, killed by a Muggle bullet, you have no way of knowing where the Nexus Curtain actually is.'

'That was supposed to be the easy part,' Ralph acknowledged, flopping back onto his bed. 'We thought we'd just have to follow Magnussen to the Curtain. Getting the horseshoe from him was supposed to be the difficult bit.'

       James finished stuffing the horseshoe under his mattress again and stood up. 'We're not completely stumped,' he said stubbornly. 'We still have Magnussen's other riddle. The one about the Nexus Curtain lying in the eyes of Roebitz. Zane's back working on that one again, although it's looking pretty bleak. There aren't a whole lot of Roebitzes in the world.'

       'I'll look it up on my side,' Rose said briskly. 'Maybe it isn't a person at all. You never know.'

      James sighed. 'Thanks, Rose. We appreciate your help. Petra too.'

       'I'm doing this to help you and Uncle Harry find out the truth, James,' Rose said, meeting his gaze through the glass of the Shard. 'If it helps Petra, then that's all for the best. I'm not quite as confident about her as you are, though. Sorry.'

       James sighed again and nodded. From behind Rose, Scorpius watched James, his own eyes sharp, narrowed. Scorpius was more than unconvinced of Petra's innocence, James knew. Scorpius was outright suspicious of her.

      Deep down, despite his own feelings to the contrary, James couldn't blame him.

       As spring settled firmly over the school, tulips, daffodils, and snapdragons began to crowd the flowerbeds that lined the mall. The snapdragons, being of a magical variety, occasionally leaned lazily and nipped at the fat bumblebees that patrolled the flowerbeds. The days grew longer and warmer, and James finally packed away his winter cloak, happy to relegate it to the top of his closet along with his dress robes and the backup pair of spectacles that his mother had insisted he pack, which were, in reality, hand-me-downs from his father.