JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

rose into view. James saw a wand raised in a dark hand, pointing at Albus from behind.

       'Al!' James cried, scrambling to produce his own wand. 'Behind you!'

       Albus turned, but not before the figure struck.

       'Petrificus Totalus!' a female voice barked, and a bolt of magic seared from the upraised wand. It passed over Albus' shoulder and struck James squarely in the chest. He went immediately stiff, frozen in place, and began to totter backwards.

       The figure flicked her wand again and the Zombie flag at James' feet rose up like a cloth snake. It coiled around James' waist and knotted, leaving a long length behind it.

       'Grab that, pledge,' the female voice said briskly.

       Albus scrambled and snatched at the length of flag that trailed from James' waist. A second later, the cloth went taut, catching James as he fell backwards against the old railing, breaking it.

       'Ugh,' Albus grunted, shifting his stance and wrapping the length of flag around his fists. 'You're heavy. You know that, James? You need to lay off the Cockroach Clusters a bit.'

       'This is your brother?' the figure asked, and James now saw that it was the dark girl from Werewolf House, the one that had made Albus do pushups the day before.

       'Sir, yes sir!' Albus answered immediately.

       The girl smiled tightly at James. 'Lesson number twelve from the Werewolf handbook, pledge. Let me hear it.'

       ''He who strikes first strikes best'!' Albus announced, still struggling to hold onto the length of flag. James leaned back on his heels, frozen like a statue, but dreadfully aware of the precariousness of his position. Below him was only dark space, full of wind and the shush of the chestnut trees on the Hall lawn.

       'That's lesson number six,' the girl said. 'But still appropriate, so I'll let you off this time. Number twelve is 'all's fair in love and war…''

       ''And there's nothing other than love and war!'' Albus finished confidently.

       'Good work, pledge,' the girl nodded. 'Hold on while I raise the Werewolf flag.'

       James' heart pounded as he watched the girl produce the flag from a camouflaged backpack. The flag was folded into a neat triangle shape, which she unfurled with a tap of her wand. A moment later, she used her wand to operate the pulleys of the flagpole, which jutted from the roof's cone. With practiced economy, she switched the flags, folded Old Betsy reverently, and secured it in her backpack.

       'Operation Capture the Flag is complete, pledge,' she said, straightening. 'Which only leaves us to manage our prisoner of war. We have to assume he isn't alone, but Raphael has probably already secured any hostiles on the ground. Can't leave this one up here to replace the flags again once we decamp, which leaves us only one option. Lesson number three from the Werewolf handbook, pledge.'

       ''Neutralize any potential threat!'' Albus quoted immediately. Behind him, the girl knotted the long end of the Zombie flag around a length of copper drainpipe. She smiled grimly.

       'You do the honors, pledge,' she said. 'Prove your Werewolf worthiness.'

       Albus glanced over his shoulder at her, and then turned back to James, his face vaguely apologetic, but only vaguely. He smiled crookedly. 'Sorry, James,' he said. 'Lesson one in the Werewolf handbook: 'A Werewolf 's gotta do what a Werewolf 's gotta do.''

       James tried to shake his head, but the spell still had him perfectly frozen. Albus let go of the flag and James immediately dropped backwards, tipping over the edge of the rooftop walkway. He fell for one sickening second, and then jerked to a halt, caught by the flag that was knotted around his waist. An explosion of noise suddenly surrounded him as the shock of his fall startled the bats in the tower belfry. They squeaked and boiled into the air, their wings thrashing all around him. A moment later, the noise of the bats' departure died away and James swung gamely, turning dizzyingly on the end of his unusual tether. One of the bats perched on his head, squeaking amiably.

       Nearby, he heard the diminishing tramp of footsteps on the ladder as well as the infuriating sound of smug, stifled laughter.

       'You two,' Warrington said after a long fuming pause, 'seem to have some basic misunderstanding of how the whole flag switch dare is supposed to go down.'

       James slumped in the rickety chair in the attic office of Hermes House. Next to him, Ralph sighed and stared hard at the stained yellow carpet. Warrington leaned on the wobbly old desk, all four of whose legs seemed to have folded wads of paper under them.

       The Zombie House office was tiny and crammed with bookshelves despite its noticeable lack of books. The shelves were, instead, heavy with unusual odds and ends, brick-a-brack, piles of unopened post, tools, amusingly shaped papier-mache art projects, and the occasional skull, most wearing sunglasses and plastic noses. The wooden door was covered with a nearly life-sized poster photo of Theodore Hirshall Jackson caught in a stern pose, wagging a long finger at the viewer, his dark brow lowered. Construction paper letters were tacked above the poster's head, spelling out the words 'I WANT YOU to GIVE ME A HUG AND A COOKIE'.

       Warrington stood up straight and paced along a narrow path worn through the room's detritus, passing between the desk and the single round window. 'The point, you see,' he went on in a strained voice, stabbing his right finger at his left palm, 'is to not make Zombie House look like a bunch of bumbling nincompoops. Anything beyond that is, frankly, gravy. Gravy!'

       Warrington punched an inflatable doll made to resemble a rather ghastly clown. It bobbed on its weighted base and swung back, squeaking.

       'They were Werewolves,' Ralph moaned weakly. 'I barely saw them before they dropped on me like a piano. They were wearing camouflage! They had bits of bushes stuck to their hats! I thought I was being attacked by some kind of weird American dryad monsters!'

       'They were Werewolves!' Warrington hissed, rounding on the boys, his eyes wild. He struggled to compose himself and swiped a hand over his face, sighing vehemently. 'Look. You're new here, so I'll give you a helpful little lesson on the intricate societal politics that define life here in the hallowed halls of the Aleron. We hate the Werewolves. Here endeth the lesson. Got it?'

       'But they had actual members helping out the pledge, who just happened to be my brother,' James rallied. 'They attacked us before we had a chance to react!'

       'That's how Werewolves work!' Warrington cried, exasperated. 'They're Werewolves, for Zark's sake! To them, everything's a battlefield! Their one weakness is when people yank the battlefield out from under them! That's the Zombie way!'

Ralph raised both hands, palms up. 'But what could we have done?'

       'Gummy shoes!' Warrington rasped, deadpan. 'Stick them to the ground like flies on flypaper! Or the Jelly- Legs Jinx, or Tickling Hexes, or even spontaneous explosive intestinal gas. You can't just face down a Werewolf, you have to embarrass them. Their insufferable pride is their ultimate weakness. Any Zombie knows that!'

       'Sorry,' James said miserably, 'we're new to all of this. They got to us before we had a chance to respond. We'll do better next time. Give us one more chance!'

       Warrington boggled at James. He spluttered, 'They left you hanging by the Zombie flag from the belfry landing! The entire school saw you up there before Franklyn was able to get you down! You made us a laughingstock! Zombies do the laughing, pledge! Not the other way around!'

       'Now whose pride is at stake?' Ralph mumbled.

'And you,' Warrington said, turning to Ralph, his eyes blazing. 'I'm surprised you can talk at all, after being hung up on the Hermes House flagpole for the last three hours! If you could die of wedgies, we'd be arranging your funeral right about now!'