Skip Schumaker Allows Home Run To Aaron Miles, Causes Priori Incantatem

(What follows is an excerpt from Skip Schumaker and the Outfielder’s Stone Glove, my upcoming novel about the bravest Grytffindor of them all. In this scene he’s just won the Slap-hitter’s Tournament, only to be teleported by dark magic to the pitcher’s mound, where the Dark Lord Dave Kingman is attempting to create for himself a new swing with even more holes in it.)

Chapter 34: Priori Incantatem

“You have been taught to duel, Mr. Schumaker?” said Aaron Miles softly, his goatee glinting through the darkness.

“Traitor—” said Skip, “You—you betrayed my father, Tony, and you k-killed Corey Patterson, and—” Skip was not going to die ducking behind the pitcher’s mound—he’d die upright, like Fernando Salas. He threw a pitch, but Miles was ready. As Skip threw his fastball, Miles took a wild swing.

And suddenly Skip’s arm was vibrating as though an electric charge were surging through it. The golden thread connecting them splintered; though the arm and the bat remained connected, a thousand more beams arced high over Skip and Miles, crisscrossing around them, until they were enclosed in a golden, dome-shaped web.

A great grayish something began to blossom from the tip of Miles’s bat… it was a head… now a chest and arms… the torso of Bo Hart. 

“Hold on, Skip,” he said. 

More screams of pain from the bat… and then something else emerged from its tip… the dense shadow of a second hand, quickly followed by its pitching arm… Fernando Salas was now pushing himself out of the end of the bat just as Hart had done and surveyed the both of them with mild surprise. “He was a real hitter, then?” Salas said, his eyes on Miles. “Killed me, that one did… You fight him, Skip…” 

Now another head was emerging from the tip of Miles’s bat, and Skip knew when he saw it who it would be… knew, because the man was the one he’d thought of more than any other tonight. The smoky shadow of a man with dark sunglasses fell to the ground, straightened up, and looked at him… and Skip, his arm shaking madly now, looked back into the ghostly face of Tony La Russa. 

“When the connection is broken, we will linger for only moments… but we will give you time… you must get to the portkey, it will return you to the outfield… do you understand, Skip?”

“Yes,” Skip gasped.

“Skip…” whispered the figure of Bo Hart. “Take this box of unsold sherseys back, will you? Take it back to my parents.”