JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

tournament,' he said with no preamble.

       James nodded and gulped. 'Er, yes,' he admitted. 'We checked the Bigfoot team charter and saw that there's no rule against it. We just thought the other teams might, er, want to see the Werewolves finally get beaten after all these years. Fair and square, of course. Nothing underhanded.'

       Harding's eyes narrowed. 'Well, that's a shame,' he scowled in disgust. 'But I should have known that Team Bigfoot wouldn't have the guts to do anything truly evil to put those infuriating dogs in their place. I was willing to share with you our most secret game curses. Would you be willing to accept a few mild Plague Hexes at least?'

       Ralph gave a smile that shocked James a little and then put an arm around Harding's shoulders. 'Did you know,' he said conspiratorially, 'that I come from a little place known as Slytherin House? Plague Hexes are a bit of a specialty for us. Talk to me.'

       Harding met Ralph's grin. For the next twenty minutes, the three talked in low voices, hovering near the glinting orb of the Octosphere. At the end of it, both Ralph and Harding laughed. After a moment, James joined in, a bit nervously.

       All the houses were backing them now. With their assistance, Team Bigfoot would be more formidable than they had ever been before and might never be again. James knew, however, that the real secret of their potential success was not in the technomancy-enhanced skrims or the expanded game magic or even the Vampires' dreadful game curses. The real secret was in the psychological boost that these things would give Team Bigfoot. The whole school was behind them, rooting for them, and offering them their best support. Apart from the members of Werewolf House, the entire school believed that the Bigfoots could win the tournament.

This, more than anything, was their secret weapon. Tentatively, James began to think that they might just pull it off.

20. ALBUS' STORY

       Albus didn't hate Alma Aleron despite his outward jibes and complaints. Nor did he necessarily dislike life in Ares Mansion with his fellow Werewolves. In many ways, they were comfortingly similar to his mates back in Slytherin House. There was a familiar ruthlessness to them, a mingled sense of pride and ambition that Albus wholeheartedly shared. He had friends among the Wolves and even a few outside his own society. Like Zane, Albus was a likeable fellow. People gravitated toward him and got caught in his orbit, drawn by his infectious (albeit pointed) wit and his cynical insightfulness. There were times when Albus felt perfectly at home with his new mates and even this strange new school, which was so very unlike Hogwarts.

       Furthermore, there was a refreshing candor to the Werewolves—a distinctly American straightforwardness that was somewhat shocking to his English sensibilities. Where the Slytherins (at least in his day and age) were rather political and subtle with their tactics, the Werewolves were fully overt about their aims. They were militant, power-hungry, arrogant, and merciless, and they were utterly unabashed about it. Albus appreciated the sheer bloody-minded bluntness of Clay Altaire, Olivia Jones, and the rest of the upperclassmen Wolves, even if their flinty-eyed zeal sometimes left him a little cold.

The one thing that ruined it all, of course, was the Werewolves' sense of nearly absurd patriotism. Albus understood patriotism—had expressed it himself in his irritation about coming to the States to begin with—but the brand of nationalism practiced by many of the older Werewolf students was off-putting at the very least. It had begun with the nickname 'Cornelius', apparently an American term for anyone with a British accent derived from some famous speeches given decades earlier by some Minister of Magic. Albus could live with that, he supposed. He himself had handed out more than a few derisive nicknames in his time, and knew that the best way to manage such a thing was to embrace the nickname rather than eschew it. Consequently, he answered to the nickname as if it was a source of pride. After all, he was British and this Cornelius fellow had been Minister of Magic. These were hardly things to be ashamed of.

       The Werewolves, however, seemed immune to the irony of Albus' willing acceptance of their sneering moniker. They viewed it as a weakness rather than a sort of backhanded boldness. The Werewolves, Albus learned, did not appreciate cunning or subtlety, at least outside of the battlefield. What they wished to see from their fellow Wolves was fierceness. They wanted Albus to bare his metaphorical teeth at them, to prove his toughness (and his adopted Americanness) by snarling at their jibes and even slashing back at them a little. By the time he realized this, however, it was too late to do anything about it. Like any wolf pack, the alpha dogs maintained their positions by stepping on the throats of the lesser animals. By playing it cool and subtle, Albus had allowed them to decide—erroneously—that he was not an alpha dog. The fact that he clung to his Britishness (and perhaps even more, his Slytherinness) only cemented their opinion that he was an interloper.

       As a result, Albus' initial rabid enthusiasm for his house and his mates had cooled to a brittle, grudging tolerance. He missed Slytherin House, where he was appreciated and (he had to admit it, at least to himself ) revered a little. After all, he was the son of Harry Potter and he had been sorted into the house of Harry Potter's mortal enemy. If that wasn't delicious irony, then nothing was. The Slytherins, politick as they might be, understood irony. They relished it.

       Thus, as each day passed, bringing Albus one step closer to going home to his mates, he became more and more discontent and restless.

       He talked to James about it a little, but James couldn't really understand. James had Ralph and that insufferable git Zane Walker to hang out with just like always. Besides, James was obviously obsessed with some project or other, as he always seemed to be. Albus didn't know anything about it—had merely noticed his brother and his small circle of mates buried in hushed conversations and lurking around the campus like a bunch of self- important little berks—but he guessed that whatever it was, it had something to do with Petra Morganstern.

       Albus supposed that he was slightly jealous of them. After all, Petra was his friend too, at least a little. She and her sister had lived in the Potter home for several weeks over the summer, and Petra and Albus had developed a sort of sharp-edged camaraderie. There was something decidedly un-Gryffindor about Petra, despite her house of origin. She could be surprisingly dark sometimes, both in her attitudes and her humor, and Albus had, to his own great surprise, truly liked her. He didn't feel the same way about the older girl that James did, of course. Everybody knew that James was completely sodden with puppy love for Petra. Albus, on the other hand, saw her as a younger, female version of his recently married Uncle George. To him, Petra was a sort of sister-in-arms, a cynical kindred spirit, even if she did tend to hide it all under a somewhat sugary nice girl exterior.

Albus didn't know if Petra really was guilty of cursing old Mr. Henredon or not. In his own way, he thought he knew her even better than James did, since James' opinion of her was rather hopelessly skewed by the rose- coloured glasses of infatuation. Albus understood that Petra may well have been the one to break into the Hall of Archives. He didn't know what all the ruckus was about it, really. So what if she had cursed some old Muggle curator and diddled around with some mysterious relic at the bottom of the Archive? Even if she had done it, Albus figured she'd had a good reason for it.

       He also understood—instinctively if nothing else—that if the American wizarding authorities tried to put Petra in prison, they might have a harder time holding onto her than they'd expect. Albus had some experience dealing with singularly unique, magical individuals. His father, after all, was the great Harry Potter. Albus knew that there was something unusual about Petra, something that was both quietly powerful and (perhaps even more