JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

       'Maybe,' James admitted. 'But then again, maybe that's their weakness. Maybe they really aren't as good a team as everyone believes they are. Maybe Altaire and his goons have just succeeded in convincing everyone that the Werewolves are so good that the other teams just get nervous and throw the game. Has that ever occurred to you?'

       Zane considered it. 'It's a theory, at least,' he acknowledged. 'So you're saying that if you can convince the Foots that Team Werewolf is more bark than bite, then maybe you'll take the Wolves' best weapon right out of their paws?'

       'Couldn't hurt,' Ralph nodded. 'Either way, right? I mean, psyching-out can work both ways. If it's true that Team Werewolf can psyche other teams into playing worse, then it's also true that we can psyche ourselves into playing even better. Stands to reason.'

       Zane pressed his lips together thoughtfully. 'But you'll need more than words to convince your guys that the Werewolves are just a bunch of sheep in wolves' clothing. You'll need something concrete, something they can rally around. Some secret weapon or something, even if it's just a symbol.'

       'Like that stupid bronze statue that Team Werewolf rubs on their way to every match,' Ralph concurred, becoming excited. 'But different. Something that will really make the team believe they have an ace up their sleeve.'

       James was thoughtful, his eyes narrowed as the disarmadillo lumbered under his outstretched legs, knocking the bottles from its back. Zane and Ralph looked at him.

       'What are you thinking?' Zane asked, raising his eyebrows.

       James mused, 'I'm thinking that maybe the Werewolves do have a weakness after all. I mean, besides their overconfidence.'

       'What's that?' Ralph asked.

       James smiled slowly and a little wickedly. 'Do you think that there is anyone on campus, apart from their own housemates, who want Team Werewolf to win the tournament?'

Zane blew a breath out through pursed lips. 'After a decade of being undefeated? And after all the humiliations they've handed out for the last few seasons? Not likely. In fact, I'd bet that everyone in every other house would pay good money to see the Wolves get clobbered this year. Why?'

       James was still smiling mischievously. 'Do you think,' he asked quietly, 'that they'd be willing to help make it happen?'

       It was a simple enough plan, and James admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that he was just the person to pull it off.

       Two years earlier, during his first term at Hogwarts, James had learned something about himself. He was not like his father. This was not a bad thing, really (although for some time he had sorely believed it was). It did mean, however, that James had to find other methods to get things done. His father, as a young man, had succeeded by rushing pell-mell straight into the arms of danger, usually flanked only by his mates, Ron and Hermione. This had worked for him because he was, simply put, the child of destiny. He was Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived.

       James, on the other hand, was just a kid. His attempts to manage adventures entirely on his own had failed rather miserably. Like Team Bigfoot, James had only succeeded narrowly, often by the slightest of margins, and always with the help of the people around him. This had finally convinced him of the reality of the kind of person he was. Rather than attempting to manage things entirely on his own as his father had, James had learned (at least in a few instances) to ask for help.

       He had first done this by asking the Gremlins to assist him, Ralph, and Zane in the great broomstick caper, when they had believed that Tabitha Corsica's broom had been the legendary Merlin staff in disguise. The caper had failed (in the fundamental sense that the broomstick had not, in fact, been the Merlin staff ), but it had worked excellently in actual practice; James had succeeded in pilfering the broom, at least for a few minutes. Later, of course, James had asked Merlin himself to help them in ridding Hogwarts of the pesky (but dangerous) Muggle reporter, Martin Prescott. That, incredibly, had worked exceptionally well. Grudgingly, over the next year, James had learned that this was his fate. He was not a hero so much as he was a manager. He asked for help. Not always, of course, and probably not even as often as he should, but when he did, things seemed to work out much better.

Now, he was only slightly more comfortable with it. And yet, as he visited the first house on his list (it was Aphrodite Heights, up on the hill near the theater), he discovered that this task, unlike his previous experiences with asking for help, was going to be rather eerily easy.

       'You bet,' Ophelia Wright, captain of Team Pixie, nodded resolutely, making her blonde pigtails flop. 'Those Werewolf stump-heads had the gall to play Winkles and Augers on their platform during our last match. By the fourth quarter, Professor Jackson wasn't even watching the game! He was watching his own players winkle an old Clutch around their platform! We'll do more than share our best spells with you. We'll show you how to use them! That'll teach those tasteless old Wolves to embarrass the Pixies.'

       Ten minutes later, James left Aphrodite Heights in a sort of stunned daze. Ralph walked next to him, his nose buried in a handwritten notebook, its pages crammed with hand-drawn illustrations and neat, back-slanting cursive, the 'i's all dotted with smiley faces and hearts.

       'Wow,' Ralph breathed, not looking up from the pages. 'Those Pixies are only cute on the outside. This stuff is ruthless.'

       James nodded, but their work wasn't done yet. They still had three more houses to visit, and yet he approached the task with a renewed sense of purpose. Ophelia Wright had responded almost as if the two Bigfoot players were doing them a favor, rather than the other way around.

       'Put them in their place,' she'd said grimly as she walked them to the big gingerbready front door of Aphrodite Heights. 'Knock them off their infuriatingly colourless grey skrims and tell them it's from Team Pixie, at least in part.'

       James had nodded, smiling crookedly. This was going far better than he'd expected.

       By the end of the day, he and Ralph had procured the enthusiastic assistance of the team captains from every other house.

       The Igors had agreed to give Team Bigfoot's skrims a secret pre-game boost, using a battery of technomancic enhancements that they had formulated over the previous few seasons and which had, up until now, been a carefully guarded secret. These enhancements, the Igor captain promised with a slightly maniacal (if practiced) laugh, would make the Bigfoots' skrims faster and more maneuverable than anything in the Werewolves' arsenal.

       Warrington, the captain of Team Zombie, was still smarting from his team's loss to the Bigfoots, but with Zane's encouragement, this was easily offset by the Zombies long-term hatred of the Werewolves. He agreed to share his team's most effective offensive techniques with the Bigfoots, which was no small offering, considering that the Zombies had succeeded in scoring the most points against the Werewolves throughout the season.

       James had been prepared to fetch Wentworth in order to guarantee an interview with the captain of Team Vampire, but it turned out that the captain was Anton Harding, the boy who had initially tried to prevent their entrance into Erebus Castle, and he had already heard about James and Ralph's mission. He headed them off as they made their way across the afternoon warmth of the campus.

       'I hear you're looking for help from the other societies in beating Altaire and his Werewolves in the