Wizard Club

Chapter One

Voldemort gets me a job stocking shelves at Ollivander's, after that Voldemort's pushing a wand in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Voldemort and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Lord Voldemort.

Screwing my eyes around, I can see the thin writing inscribed into the side of the yew wand, and I can almost feel the pulsing energy of the phoenix feather embedded inside of it. Most of the noise a wand makes is magical energies being released on the audible part of the electromagical band. To silence a wand, you dip it in a potion made of skrewts' blood, gillyweed, and newt tongue. The potion has to be brewed at a precise temperature for three months, with other ingredients added in at exact times. The sound-dampening effect of the potion will last for several years of regular use, give or take a few weeks.

Brew the potion wrong and the wand will blow off your hand.

"This isn't really death," Voldemort says. "We'll be legend. We won't grow old."

I tongue the wand into my cheek and say, Voldemort, you're thinking of vampires.

The tower we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes. You take a 98-percent concetration of dried dragon's breath and add it to three times that amount of giant's blood. Do this in an ice bath. Then add manticore venom drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You have demon powder.

I know this because Voldemort knows this.

Mix the demon powder with sawdust, and you have a nice jelly explosive. A lot of people mix their demon powder with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. This works too. Some folks, they use beeswax mixed with demon powder. Beeswax has never, ever worked for me.

So Voldemort and I are on top of the Divination tower of Hogwarts with the wand stuck in my mouth, and we hear glass breaking. Look over the edge. It's a cloudy day, even this high up. This is the castle's tallest tower, and this high up, the wind is always cold. It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those house elves. You do the little job you're trained to do.

Bake some cookies.

Scrub some floors.

You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.

Thirty floors up, you look over the edge of the roof and the castle below is mottled with a shag carpet of people, standing, looking up. The breaking glass is a window right below us. A window blows out the side of the building, and then comes a bureau cabinet as big as a black coffin, right below us a six-foot boggart-holding wardrobe drops right out of the cliff face of the building, and drops turning slowly, and drops getting smaller, and drops disappearing into the packed crowd.

Somewhere in the thirty floors under us, the house elves in the Mischief Committee of Dumbledore's Army are running wild, destroying every scrap of history.

That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.

With a wand stuck in your mouth and between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.

We're down to our last ten minutes.

Another window blows out of the building, and glass sprays out, sparkling flock-of-pigeons style, and then a dark wooden desk pushed by the Mischief Committee emerges inch by inch from the side of the building until the desk tilts and slides and turns end-over-end into a magic flying thing lost in the crowd. McGonagall's desk always was tricky like that.

Hogwarts School won't be here in nine minutes. You take enough demon powder and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world. You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the dungeons around the column.

This how-to stuff isn't in any history book.

The three ways to make napalm: One, you can mix equal parts of lamp oil and frozen pumpkin juice concentrate. Two, you can mix equal parts of firefly juice and butterbeer. Three, you can dissolve crumbled cat litter in firefly juice until the mixture is thick.

Ask me how to make nerve gas. Oh, all those crazy broom bombs. Nine minutes.

The Divination Tower of Hogwarts School will go over, all thirty floors, slow as a tree falling in the forest. Timber. You can topple anything. It's weird to think the place where we're standing will only be a point in the sky. Voldemort and me at the edge of the roof, the wand in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this wand is.

We just totally forget about Voldemort's whole murder-suicide thing while we watch another wardrobe slip out the side of the building and the cabinets fly open midair, scrolls of parchment caught in the updraft and carried off on the wind.

Eight minutes.

Then the smoke, smoke starts out of the broken windows. The demolition team will hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. The primary charge will blow the base charge, the foundation columns will crumble, and the moving pictures of Hogwarts School will go into all the history books.

The magical moving picture show. First, the tower's standing. A second later, the tower will be at an eighty-degree angle. Then a seventy-degree angle. The tower's at a forty-five-degree angle when the skeleton starts to give and the tower gets a slight arch to it. Finally, tower and the school, all thirty floors of stone and brick and mortar, will slam down on the Beauxbatons carriage which is Voldemort's real target.

"This is our world, now, our world," Voldemort says, "and those ancient people are dead."

If I knew how this would all turn out, I'd be more than happy to be dead and in Heaven right now.

Seven minutes.

Up on top of the Divination Tower with Voldemort's wand in my mouth. While desks and cabinets and scrollwork meteor down on the crowd around the castle and smoke funnels up from the broken windows and three miles down the street, in Hogsmeade, the demolition team watches the clock, I know all of this: the wand, the anarchy, the explosion is really about Ginny Weasley.

Six minutes.

We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Voldemort. Voldemort wants Ginny. Ginny wants me.

I don't want Ginny and Voldemort doesn't want me around, not anymore. This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

Without Ginny, Voldemort would have nothing.

Five minutes.

Maybe we would become a legend, maybe not. No, I say, but wait. Where would Merlin be if no one had written the Sword in the Stone? Four minutes.

I tongue the wand into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Voldemort, man, I'll make you a legend. I've been here from the beginning.

I remember everything.

Three minutes.