A New Life in San Francisco
Chapter 3; Alcatraz's secret
James spent most of Friday and Saturday staying at home. Sam had stuck around since then to alleviate James' nightmares that were sure to follow an event like the one that had occurred at P3 on Thursday night. Jackie, though she had crashed on the couch Thursday night had gone home early on Friday morning to pick up her cousin from the airport. She had been given the onerous task of keeping the young thirteen year old girl busy for the weekend before she flew back to England after her two month tour of America.
It was late Sunday when everything went wrong. James and Sam were sitting down for dinner on James' sofa. They had been planning to go into the city centre and do a little late night shopping but that plan was quickly forgotten when a hysterical Jackie called.
"Calm down, Jackie!" James told her sternly. "Where are you? I can barely hear you."
There was a brief struggle before the background noise that had first covered Jackie's hysterical words died away.
"We're down by the water edge." Jackie yelled into the phone over the wind.
"You sound like you're in a hurricane!" James told her, rather loudly so that she could hear him. "I thought you were supposed to be visiting Alcatraz?" James asked referring to her weekend planning that she had spent the last week completing.
"We were! Oh god James! I don't know what it was, but it was horrible!" She sounded really scared. "And now there's this huge storm breaking out of nowhere over the city!"
James glanced out of the window where indeed he saw that the storm that they had noticed build up over the last few hours was coming from the north. "Wait there, Jackie. Me and Sam will come and pick you up." He told her.
"Thanks, James. Were near Pier 41." Jackie told him before the background noise returned and the line went dead.
"Jackie and Lucy are stuck in the storm. Did you want to come with me to pick them up?" James asked Sam.
"I'm not letting you drive into that storm on your own!" Sam cried getting to his feet. They both grabbed raincoats on their way out of James' flat and were soon getting into James' second hand Honda Civic and driving North with the sky getting steadily darker and darker.
"So, what was she so hysterical about? I mean, we've had storms as bad as this before and it never phased her." Sam asked as they neared the place where James had been told to meet them.
"I don't know, I think something happened on Alcatraz island. I could hear a lot of noise on the other end of the line. Maybe they evacuated everyone because of the storm?" James suggested.
"That doesn't make sense, surely if a storm hit you'd stay and take shelter on the island rather than crossing the bay." Sam stated logical before continuing. "Besides, that wouldn't be enough to make Jackie that scared.
James shrugged without taking his eyes off the road as rain poured down over the windshield. Two minutes later they were pulling up near a small car park by the water edge. It almost looked like dusk here but James saw a group of people huddled under a bus shelter, though they were still getting drenched. Flashing lights drew his attention to five ambulances along the side of the car park where most of the people were.
"Stay in here." James told Sam before jumping out of the car and before Sam could protest the door had closed behind him. He made his way across the road into the car park. Two people to the side of the group in the bus stop caught his attention, he couldn't see their faces from this angle but the taller one's height matched Jackie's five foot ten frame and the figure beside her was about the right height for someone of Lucy's age. "Jackie?" He yelled through the wind when he was only a few metres behind them.
"James!" Jackie shouted back pulling Lucy with her as she moved out of the small cover that the shelter gave them and towards James who took off his own rain jacket as he noticed that neither had one. He handed it to Lucy when they met.
"Quick, let's back to the car. We'll talk in there." James told them before grabbing Jackie's hand and tugging her and Lucy across the road and back into the car.
By the time they reached it James' clothing was soaked through to match Jackie and Lucy. He held the door open for them to clamber in the back before moving to the driver's door and getting in himself. Sam was already taking off his own jacket to give to Jackie and he was the only dry one among them.
"Are you two ok?" Sam asked, looking at their pale faces and cold hands. He received short nods from the pair and James didn't waste any more time in starting the short journey back to his flat.
The group didn't speak much on the way. James wanted to know what had happened but had to concentrate too much on keeping the rain and wind from spinning the car out of control. Sam didn't want to distract James from his driving and the girls seemed to just be in shock.
James parked the car right across the door to his building regardless of the no parking zone and they piled out of it and ran for the shelter of the building. James unlocked his flat and three soaked people and one damp one flooded in.
"Sam, go and grab some of your clothes and go to my room, I'll go change quickly in there too. Jackie, can you pop the kettle on and then I think your bag of spare clothes are in Sam's room. Lucy can use those and I'll grab you some of my own to wear." James told them all and straight away Sam disappeared into his old room which he had been staying in for the last couple of days. James went into his own room, stripping off his soaked tee-shirt as he went. He walked through his bedroom and into his bathroom grabbing a towel.
He stripped off the rest of his clothes leaving them in the bath for the time being before tying a towel around his waist. He grabbed two others from a clean pile and headed back into his bedroom. Neither Sam nor he fluttered an eyelash at their state of undress since in their first year they had shared a double room and other the course of the year had seen each other countless times in less clothing than a towel.
They quickly changed into dry clothes before heading back into the living room. "Sam could you make some hot chocolate for us all. I think there is some chocolate in the fridge too. Could you grab that?" He asked and received a quick nod. James always knew the best way to cheer people up, even down to what food to give them. Sam had just finished a degree in History and Jackie was now Chemistry graduate.
James knocked on the door to Sam's old room and received a yelled permission to enter. He opened the door automatically averting his eyes in case Lucy was changing.
"It's ok, James, it's just me in here." Jackie told him. James sighed and looked up. Jackie was never shy around James, though she wasn't shy around a lot of people, but with James being gay she knew she wouldn't get any dirty comments. "I sent Lucy in to warm up in the shower."
"You best go give her this then." James passed her the towel and moved over to the bed to strip the sheets as she disappeared into the bathroom. By the time he had finished putting knew linen on the bed so that the girls would have somewhere to stay that night she had returned and changed into James' clothing that he had lent her. "There'll be hot chocolate out there once she's out. I think you both need a chance to warm up."
Five minutes later the two girls joined James and Sam in the living room. James gave up his place on the sofa so that the two girls could sit down next to Sam. Jackie still looked pale as Sam handed her a hot drink. Lucy looked if anything worse, in fact whereas Jackie only looked pale but no longer worried, Lucy took scared and confused as well as pale.
"Both of you should eat some chocolate." James told them both, he gave Jackie a piece and then turned to meet Lucy's eyes for the first time as he passed her the chocolate. Alarms started ringing in his head as he recognised something in her but he couldn't put his finger on what. He knew he didn't know her or anyone who resembled her.
"So what happened?" Sam broke the silence that fell as Jackie and Lucy savoured their chocolate both looking far better with the sugary treat in their systems.
"We were on one of the tours of the prison and had just got to the office section when there was this huge crash from somewhere. One of the tour guides said that it had come from the closest cell block, but before any of us could move all the lights went dark and the room got really cold." She explained. James tensed, more alarms going off at the reminder of the summer before his fifth year. "I don't know. . ." she stumbled over the sentence for a few seconds as if trying to find the right words. "I don't know how to describe the feeling, it was like I couldn't think of anything happy. I couldn't focus on anything but the night when I was eight and my brother died in that car crash."
"Oh god," Sam pulled her into his side. Lucy looked to be thinking of what she had remembered though it didn't seem to be as bad as Jackie's memories. Jackie continued eventually.
"One of the guides must have pulled out a torch or something because a light shone down the tunnel but there was nothing there." She paused as she looked at Lucy. "It was then that Lucy started screaming like she'd seen something."
'Oh Merlin.' James thought, 'That effect could only point to a Dementor, and Jackie couldn't see it because she didn't have any magic. But Lucy had seen something, enough of something to make her scream.' It was then that all the warnings clicked in his mind. But he wanted to be sure.
He passed Jackie another piece of chocolate to eat, as well as giving a piece to Sam as he was eyeing it. He then turned to Lucy and gave her a larger chunk as he knelt in front of her. He made sure to cup Lucy's hand in his own two as he placed the chocolate in them. He felt it, that spark through his system that told him that Lucy was the very thing that he feared the most.
A English Witch in San Francisco. He bolted backwards and barked his shin against the coffee table as he went drawing odd looks from Jackie and Sam. Lucy didn't seem to notice and there had been plenty of chance during the last hour for her to have recognised him as James Potter but she didn't seem to have.
He decided to play the role of the Child Psychologist that he was. He sat on the edge of the coffee table and re-filled the mug of hot chocolate. "Lucy?" The girl looked up. "How do you feel now?"
"Better, thank you Mr. . .?" She stumbled when she hit the name.
"James Evans." He introduced himself. "But you can call me James, none of that Mr. Evans stuff." He grinned at her.
She returned the smile opening up to James' honest person.
"Jackie tell us you live in England." James asked and received a shy nod in response.
"James' from England, aren't you James." Sam told her cheerfully trying to help James cheer her up. James winced as his best friend gave the young witch a clue as to his real identity.
The girl's head snapped up to look at James looking at him in bewilderment as if trying to recall something but James sought to distract her. "Where do you go to school?" He asked wanting to put her on the defensive. Making people hide their own secrets was a good way to avoid people being suspicious of you.
"I…I go to a boarding school in Scotland." She told him.
"Do you like it there?" James asked, honestly curious. "Which is your favourite member of staff?"
"It's a good school, I really like Headmistress McGonagal." For a fleeting second James actually thought she was testing him, but he pushed the idea away, she probably didn't figure there was anything that a Muggle could gleam from the name, but to James it proved his theory that she was a Hogwarts student.
Now to find out is she was raised a Witch. If she was Muggle-born then there was a chance she hadn't heard of him, or hadn't been brought up with tales of the boy-who-lived. "Did your parents go to the same school?" He asked with a curious tone, though he made sure that she knew he was only making conversation.
"No," she told him, making him relax slightly. "They went to the local school."
"Now," James turned serious. "Can you tell me what happened today on the Island? Jackie told us that you screamed when the Guide switched on his light. Did you see something?"
She was obviously torn between telling them and maintaining the secret of magic. "I…I thought I saw something in the corridor. A person maybe, but it must have been a shadow from the Guide's torch." She told him, feeling more confident as she went.
James turned to Jackie, "But you didn't see anything?" He asked to make sure.
Jackie shook her head and that decided it for James. There was Dementors in Alcatraz and for some reason they had been released. The storm pointed to there being hundreds of them. The question was whether they had left Alcatraz Island yet.
Harry eventually turned the conversation away from what had happened that day and onto nicer topics until suddenly the power cut off. Harry made his way to the kitchen in the dark as the others waited. He pulled a lantern out of one of the cupboards and turned it on, flooding the room with a dull light.
"Maybe we should all head to bed?" James suggested as he walked around the counter top and into the living room proper.
He received three nods through the darkness, he walked Jackie and Lucy into their room for the night and waited in the door as they got into bed before leaving the room and making his way to his own room with Sam.
"Night, James." Sam said as they stripped down to their boxers and settled under their covers. James left the curtains open giving the room some illumination though not much. "You're going to make a great Social Worker, you know that?" James chuckled along with Sam but said thank you all the same.
As they settled down James started concentrating on his magic willing it to help Sam to enter a long and deep sleep. He felt it working and thanked Merlin that Lucy was too young and ill-trained to sense the use of advanced magic. As soon as Sam's breathing slowed and became shallower he slipped back out of the warmth of his bed and threw on his clothing. He made sure to add a few layers before slipping into a black leather waterproof jacket that Sam and Jackie had brought him after their graduation. He pulled the matching gloves on and snuck out of the room, being careful not to make a sound as he slipped out of the room. He left a note on the counter top as he left, saying good morning and that he had popped into town to get a paper and some groceries. Hopefully it would be enough that if he was later back then he planned, Sam and Jackie wouldn't worry that much.
He slipped out of the building and into the rain and with the covering sound of the rain on the rooftops he apparated away with a soft pop.
Alcatraz Island (Immediately afterwards)
James reappeared and almost straight away his form morphed into Shadow, black velvet fur blending perfectly with the night with only two bright green eyes glowing with an eerie intelligence.
Silently James padded forwards, huge paws making no sound as he crept across the courtyard of the disused prison. He expanded his panther senses, seeking out the smells of anything living. He smelled old traces of humans but the water pouring through the air and over his fur dampened the smells further away. He made his way to the cell block's entrance and slipped into the shelter, as soon as he was out of the rain his senses picked up hundreds of smells. He vaguely accounted for Jackie's scent which Shadow's memories remembered and many others that he didn't recognise and then a horrible smell that made him flinch violently loosing the predator's grace that came naturally to his panther form.
The smell left in the wake of the Dementors. A smell that in itself depressed James more than anything else. He regained his control and followed the putrid scent further into the prison to were all of the trails seemed to originate. A small stairwell down into a room. A sign on the wall marked it as the incinerator room. He followed the stairs down and instead of an incinerator in the room there was a large arch bricked into the wall. A carved name above it told James that this was the entrance to and old Wizarding section of the infamous Muggle prison above. Obviously when they shut down the prison they sealed all of the Dementors away and now they had escaped. Had they sensed Lucy's presence in the prison and broken out or was it just a coincidence?
A plan formed in his mind even as his panther instincts screamed at him that it was insanity. It was either this or risk the Dementors getting loose in San Francisco surrounded by millions of people who couldn't see them let alone defend themselves.
He padded silently further and further into the underground complex, disused cells with crippled bars flashed constantly passed to both sides. He went straight ignoring the side passageways as he went. After a few minutes he decided that he had gone far enough and bracing himself he pushed himself upright and morphed back into a human.
Without a pause the cold wave of depression slammed into him. Goosebumps sprung up all over his body and shiver went up his spine. He could feel the effect getting worse with every passing minute that he waited as all of the Dementors on the Island were drawn to the fresh blood. The only prey within two miles.
He waited for as long as he could take the screams of his mother, the accusations of his ex-friends. Every bad memory he had ever accumulated flashed through his mind. By the time he chose to move on in his plan he was on his knees with tears flooding down his cheeks.
He slipped into his panther form just as the closest Dementor stopped in front of him and immediately the effect lessened though with this many Dementors near him and his already severe reaction to the creatures even his Panther mind couldn't completely protect him.
He slipped around an endless line of Dementors as he ran back up the corridor, back into the incinerator room and up the stairs to the normal prison. As soon as he broke through the door he was spinning around and morphing back into a human. He pulled up as much magic as he could to form a ball of pure energy in between his cupped hands and then with a mental and physical gesture thrust the bright blue and white ball up into the ceiling.
A loud explosion rocked the Island as a whole section of the cell block imploded into itself blocking the recently opened tunnel with thousands of tons of concrete and metal. James escaped the building as Shadow just as a cloud of dust burst through the door behind him. He loped across the courtyard before turning back into human form taking a quick look at the rising sun as he did so.
A last rumble of thunder announced that the storm was breaking up just as he prepared to apparate off the Island. Before he could however a massive wave of cold struck him followed swiftly by a return of his horrid memories. He span around to face the scaly face of a Dementor. Obviously one that hadn't been trapped under the rubble. It's hood was already down in preparation of the Dementors kiss.
James twisted away from the monsters skeleton like hands and morphed back into the sheltering form of Shadow but at this range the Dementor wasn't fooled; it knew it's prey. James tried to leap away but the creature grabbed at his pelt forcing James to twist. James swiped his claws at the monster and managed to wrench himself from the grip landing roughly. He slammed into the wall and roared at the creature with all his strength, the sound echoing for a few seconds between the buildings.
The beast swiped at him hitting him violently in the side throwing James into a pile of rubble. His body screamed in pain as a shard of glass sunk deeply into his side. A horrid scream bubbled up in his throat and he shrieked in pain. He rolled off of the shard slowly, falling to the ground as the movement caused more pain to lance up his side.
He pushed up from the ground, slowly regaining his feet as the creature closed the gap between them slowly. James tried to come up with an escape route but couldn't come up with one in the enclosed space with his injury. The creature's rattling breath sucked in air for a second before it's head spun to look behind it. It turned around and started gliding in the other direction for a few seconds. James braced himself to take the opportunity to escape.
The creature exploded into a black mist.
Two minutes earlier
Three bunches of orbs appeared in a small courtyard on Alcatraz Island. Paige, Piper and Phoebe emerged from one as Chris and Wyatt appeared in the other two.
"Is this the place?" Piper was already asking.
"Yeah, this is it. I saw the cloaked creatures here." Phoebe told them even as they all saw the two struggling figures.
"What is that?" Paige asked.
"It's one of the creatures I saw!" Phoebe gasped. Even as she said it she shivered realising the coldness of the air.
"That's a Panther!" Chris said in awe.
Wyatt gave him a confused look before they all realised that he was talking about the animal that was fighting to escape it. As they watched, it wrenched free of the monster's grip. They were forced to cover their ears as the Panther let loose a deafening roar before it slashed at the monster then lunged away only to be smacked aside by a skeletal hand.
The yelp from the Panther made Chris and Phoebe step forward automatically. The monster turned to look at them and they all fell to their knees as memories surfaced that they had all hoped never to remember again.
Piper snapped her hands up, her highly emotional state powering her magic as she blew the creature up into a fine black mist that lingered for a second being sinking into the ground and disappearing.
The group pulled themselves up, forcing down the memories the creature had induced and moved their way towards the Panther as it struggled to stand up. They could see the blood flowing slowly from a wound in it's side.
James looked at the five figures silhouetted by the rising sun and decided he didn't want to risk it. They were magic users and were obviously well trained to be able to kill a Dementor and as such would probably have no trouble recognising an Animagus. He growled menacingly at the group before slipping into the shadows. Pain lanced up his side as he moved away from the group.
He morphed into himself as soon as he was out of sight and with a small pop disapparated.
James' flat
James' apparition had gone awry. The stab wound in his side causing enough pain along with the reminder of his time with the Dementors of Azkaban to throw off the crucial concentration required for the magical form of transportation.
He landed a fast ten minute walk away but by the time he, with his injury, had covered the distance it was already eight o'clock. He eventually got back to his flat to find Sam laid out on the sofa watching Sunday morning cartoons like any self respecting twenty-one year old.
"Where's Jackie and Lucy?" James asked as he noticed Sam's bedroom door was open and the room beyond empty of life. He moved straight away into the kitchenette area and began looking through draws for his first aid kit.
"Jackie took Lucy to the airport, she had to get an early flight." Sam explained without looking at James, probably assuming that he was emptying shopping bags into the cupboards. "She's going straight home afterwards though, she said she'd call you after you finish work tomorrow to see how things went."
James cursed as he knocked the kettle off the counter in his rush to find what he was looking for. Sam looked over his shoulder and was on his feet a split second later.
"Jesus James! What the hell happened to you?" Sam cried as he crossed the room. "You're as pale as a ghost."
"I'm fine!" James lied but Sam wasn't fooled for a minute.
"Was wrong with your side?" Sam asked making James look down at where his right hand was clinging to his side even if he hadn't realised it. He looked at his hand as if it wasn't supposed to be there and slowly pulled it away from his side wincing at the pain and staring wide eyed at the blood covering his hand. His shirt, though dark was obviously stained with blood.
"Oh my god James! Is that blood?" James didn't answer only stared in mute shock at the blood on his hand. He tipped slightly and then looked up at Sam in confusion.
"Why are you here?" James' mouth spoke without his conscious control.
Sam ignored the question. "What happened to you?" He asked for the second time.
James frowned at him before realising that he was talking about the blood. "Oh that? I got stabbed." James told him before falling forwards and straight into his best friends waiting arms.
He blacked out just as his friend laid him on the carpet.
