Its voice was distant and echoing. Harry looked at Voldemort . . . his wide red eyes were still shocked . . . he had no more expected this than Harry had . . . and, very dimly, Harry heard the frightened yells of the Death Eaters, prowling around the edges of the golden dome . . .

More screams of pain from the wand . . . and then something else emerged from its tip . . . the dense shadow of a second head, quickly followed by arms and torso . . . an old man Harry had seen only in a dream was now pushing himself out of the end of the wand just as Cedric had done . . . and his ghost, or his shadow, or whatever it was, fell next to Cedric’s, and surveyed Harry and Voldemort, and the golden web, and the connected wands, with mild surprise, leaning on his walking stick . . .

“He was a real wizard, then?” the old man said, his eyes on Voldemort. “Killed me, that one did . . . You fight him, boy . . . ”

But already, yet another head was emerging . . . and this head, gray as a smoky statue, was a woman’s . . . Harry, both arms shaking now as he fought to keep his wand still, saw her drop to the ground and straighten up like the others, staring . . .

The shadow of Bertha Jorkins surveyed the battle before her with wide eyes.

“Don’t let go, now!” she cried, and her voice echoed like Cedric’s as though from very far away. “Don’t let him get you, Harry—don’t let go!”

She and the other two shadowy figures began to pace around the inner walls of the golden web, while the Death Eaters flitted around the outside of it . . . and Voldemort’s dead victims whispered as they circled the duelers, whispered words of encouragement to Harry, and hissed words Harry couldn’t hear to Voldemort.

And now another head was emerging from the tip of Voldemort’s wand . . . and Harry knew when he saw it who it would be . . . he knew, as though he had expected it from the moment when Cedric had appeared from the wand . . . knew, because the woman was the one he’d thought of more than any other tonight . . .

The smoky shadow of a young woman with long hair fell to the ground as Bertha had done, straightened up, and looked at him . . . and Harry, his arms shaking madly now, looked back into the ghostly face of his mother.

“Your father’s coming . . . ” she said quietly. “Hold on for your father . . . it will be all right . . . hold on . . . ”

And he came . . . first his head, then his body . . . tall and untidy-haired like Harry, the smoky, shadowy form of James Potter blossomed from the end of Voldemort’s wand, fell to the ground, and straightened like his wife. He walked close to Harry, looking down at him, and he spoke in the same distant, echoing voice as the others, but quietly, so that Voldemort, his face now livid with fear as his victims prowled around him, could not hear . . .