G. Lippert - JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

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 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.