The Witch and The Assassin

[scifi]

Day 17

Bianca sat in the pre-dawn light of her bedroom window with her thumb marking a page in her grimiore. She must have been deep in thought, because Chris stood in her doorway watching her for the longest time without so much as a nod from her direction. He knew she was aware of his presence -- she always was -- but it was strange that she gave no indication of it.

“Are we starting anytime soon?” he asked.

“Are you so eager?”<br>
“No, but I don’t you sneaking up on me. No repeats of yesterday, thank you.” She had ostensibly given him the previous afternoon off to get a feel for the terrain of the fields and woods surrounding the house since she’d soon be extending the illusion spell so they could work on stalking techniques -- only to jump him the moment he returned to the house.

He expected her to come back with some obvious bit of instruction along the lines of “Don’t lower your guard,” spoken like he was six. But instead she simply nodded and reopened the book. “I’ve been thinking about the Tess fiasco from the other day.”<br>
“Oh, you thought of some more ways I’m stupid?”<br>
“I never said you were stupid; just your strategy. But those are your mistakes to dwell on. I have enough of my own.” Bianca stood and stared out the window. “No, I was thinking that you had to use a spell to disguise yourself -- you couldn’t do it simply by virtue of being a whitelighter.”<br>
“So?”<br>
“So, I think it’s unfair that you should get all of their weaknesses but so few of their strengths. Unfair . . . and unlikely.” She turned to face him. “You have a sense of other people -- I mean, you can respond to Wyatt’s call -- how general is that?”<br>
“What do you mean?”<br>
“I know how it works for us, but with you -- how does the sense manifest itself?”<br>
“I don’t know; when I orb, I know generally what’s going on at my destination -- but that’s just, sort of like a sense of direction. Like when you’re walking, you know what’s in front of you. And when Wyatt or somebody else calls me, I just . . . hear them.”<br>
Physically? From halfway across the world, and all they have to do is say your name?”<br>
“Well, no, I guess not -- I never really thought about it. I guess I know their intention to summon me. But I really do just hear their voice.”<br>
“Or the thought that’s given form through the voice,” Bianca mused. “Then why is my every move such a surprise?” she asked herself.

“Huh?”<br>
“Whitelighters were all supposed to have this intuition about peoples’ intentions -- get some sense of when someone was a threat --”<br>
“Distinguish good from evil.”<br>
“Exactly. Now, I suppose it could be muddied by prejudices, preconceptions, or whatever, but at their core, they could get these, I don’t know, these --”<br>
“Vibes?” Chris remembered how Paige used to describe it.

“Yes. But you don’t seem to get them.”<br>
“So, you’re saying I should, like, read your mind?”<br>
“No, just my intent. Like yesterday, when I met you at the front door, you assumed I was being nice to you for giving you that time alone outside, when all along my intentions were to lower your guard and then strike. But aside from the logical doubt that it was too good to be true, there should have been something more instinctual --”<br>
“I thought you frowned on instincts.”<br>
“Only the ones that don’t serve you.” Bianca came to her point. “What I want to know is, do you not sense my intent because you really can’t, or just because of the interference?”<br>
“From?”<br>
“Your physical senses. Your intuition ought to tell you the truth even if your senses tell you different.”<br>
“Truth, like?”<br>
She hesitated. “Like you can’t always trust me to do what it looks like I’m going to do.”<br>
Chris nodded, and then shrugged. “Well, we can’t exactly pluck out my eyes -- or you could, but it wouldn’t be real.”<br>
Bianca sighed at his lousy attempt at humor.

“What do you propose?” he asked.

“A spell -- several, actually.” She crossed the room and passed him the open book.

“‘To Strip the Senses’?” He read through the five short spells. “Handy.”<br>
“Extremely. But you’re only supposed to use one at a time. One’s enough to scare anybody.”<br>
Chris glanced up from the page, taking her meaning. “You’d have to use all five.”<br>
“To cancel out the interference, yes.”<br>
“All that just to see if one of Leo’s ‘gifts’ got lost in the mail?”<br>
“It’s not in any way an orthodox part of the training, so I’m not going to force it on you. But . . . if something is there . . . it could save your life someday.”<br>
Chris stared at her, trying to determine whether or not her earnest expression was real. “What I wouldn’t give for some of those vibes right now,” he said. “Whatever. It can’t be any worse than anything else you’ve done to me.”<br>
“Yeah, it can.”<br>
“Just . . . just do it. Where do you want me?”<br>
“Here’s fine,” she motioned to her bed, which Chris now noticed hadn’t been slept in. She really had been thinking about this for a while. He lay across it and waited.

Bianca looked supremely uncomfortable for someone who wasn’t the guinea pig. “I’ll start with your most used sense -- sight.”<br>
“It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of the dark.”<br>
“Chris, be serious. It’s like nothing you’ve ever known. Even on the darkest night, there is still enough remnant of light to allow you to differentiate some outlines. But you won’t have even that -- no light, no shadow, nothing . . . Are you sure?”<br>
“Hey, you brought it up.”<br>
“I don’t think this will help much, but just so you know, here’s the order -- sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. I’ll bring you out in reverse. Got it?”<br>
“Yeah,” he said and took a breath.

“Whatever happens,” Bianca began. “Know that I’m right here, and that I will bring you out. In the meantime, focus on sensing me.” She breathed out and started the first spell.

“Blacker than black,
Devoid of light,
Aid my attack
And take his sight.”<br>
Chris tensed at the total darkness that enveloped the room. He could feel his eyeballs roving frantically for some glimmer of vision. Then he closed his eyes, thinking the feeling of his eyelids coming together might make the darkness seem more natural.

Bianca waited for his breathing to slow down to a normal rate. “Are you ready?”<br>
A leap of faith implied that the reason for leaping was worth the effort -- he must have been out of his mind to agree to this. Nevertheless, he nodded.

“Music, laughter, take it hence.
Nothing left except silence.”<br>
He hadn’t expected to lose the rhythm of his own heart beating or the sound of the air passing in and out of his lungs. Nor did he expect his other senses to suddenly register so intensely -- the mint of the toothpaste he’d used only a few minutes ago now nauseated him for a moment before his tongue became nothing more than a useless weight in his mouth. The talc and lavender of Bianca’s bedding burned his nostrils, but then smell, too, was gone. Beads of sweat on his forehead ran down into his hair and ears like knives carving trenches. The knives faded, and he entered the void.

There was nothing except his thoughts, and with no sensation to latch on to, these were chaotic. His memory supplied what his body could not, but the rapid-fire impressions were so fleeting, so compressed, he could understand no meaning behind them. He saw his mother in her bedroom braiding her hair, an image mixed with the smell of lighter fluid and the sound of an ace of spades flapping in a bicycle wheel. A few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth merged into a car horn blaring, which became a punch in the back that transformed into the taste of spaghetti vomit which converted to Leo’s eyes which turned into a baby blanket against his skin which changed to Bianca sitting on the bed next to him . . .

The image remained long enough to surprise him before it was replaced with the disordered thoughts. He tried to ignore the rampant memories and bring Bianca back to mind. His awareness of her presence was the only thing that made sense. She was going to bring him out of this madness, he told himself, and he believed her promise. She was determined -- she had been all along -- she had to save him, even if it meant creating a hatred for her as strong as the one she bore for Tess.

The first of his physical senses returned just as he made this realization, and the rush of tactile feeling drove the chaos away in favor of pain -- his throat burned, though he didn’t know why, and the fabric against his cheek was not that of a bedspread, but rather the ridges of Bianca’s denim pants. His head was now resting on her lap, and she held his hand over his heart so he could feel it through his shirt. The mint was now back in his mouth, and this close to Bianca’s body, he suddenly smelled her soap. Now his voice sounded in his ears -- his throat burned because he had been screaming this whole time.

“Light from dark
Dawn from night.
My words mark
And restore his sight.”<br>
He opened his eyes to see in the mirror a reflection of Bianca tossing away the grimiore. She took his hand away from his heart and held it to her own.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she repeated and brought his hand to her lips.

He was too drained to move from her lap or make any acknowledgement of her apology, and instead simply closed his eyes and slept.

[scifi]

Day 18

Chris had come to cherish the hours between six and eight in the evening because he could have that time to grab a quick bite in solitude. Bianca had always left the kitchen to him after microwaving her dinner and taking it to another room; she must have assumed that since his mother was a chef, he must like to cook as well. Actually, his eating habits were closer to Bianca’s. He often settled for a sandwich and chips, and then an hour-long nap before the last two hours of fighting for the day.

Tonight, however, Bianca had told him to meet her in the dining room at seven. The furniture and accessories in the room had been restored to their original elegance after having been abused as weapons and spots for crash landings for all these past days. Candles were lit in the middle of the table when he arrived, and Bianca had just finished pouring wine into his glass.

“Another departure from accepted training practices?” he asked.

“Actually, no. This one’s legit.” She indicated that he should sit. “There may be times when you have to get socially close to the target so you can get them to trust you enough to leave an opening. Tonight, I‘m your target.”<br>
“I don’t need etiquette lessons.”<br>
“Maybe not, but you sure could use some help with conversation.”<br>
Chris unfolded his napkin across his lap and looked at the contents of the dish Bianca set before him -- Spaghettios. He gave his first genuine smile since . . . Had it really only been a little over two weeks?

“Bianca, the gourmet,” he said.

She performed a mock bow before seating herself. “Hey, I’ve got a tight schedule.”

Chris picked up his sthingy. “And for dessert, what? Ice cream sandwiches?”<br>
“Or snack cakes.”<br>
There was an awkward silence, as if they both were thinking back to the first day they’d met and wondering if the forced easiness they were displaying here would have come naturally if she had never found out his name and had actually gone with him to lunch.

Bianca watched him eat for a moment, kept her eyes on him over the rim of her wine glass, and finally spoke again. “You never said if it worked yesterday. I mean, you slept the whole day, and then today was catch-up.” She made a hollow in the middle of her food. “So… did you sense anything?”<br>
Chris stopped eating. “I did.” He took a sip from his water glass.

“What was it?”<br>
He wasn’t quite sure what to tell her. “At first, it was like I’ve always been able to do, just not with you. I can sense where my Grandpa is, where my friends are, even where Wyatt is after a few tries, if he’s not blocking me -- but I couldn’t just think of you and know before now. But then there was something else. I can’t put my finger on it; it was like I knew I could trust you to do what you said -- that you would bring me out.”<br>
“I don’t know how well it was working, then, because you shouldn’t trust me.”<br>
“Yeah, you’ve told me lots of times.” He said it like he knew something about her that she’d never admit, which made her fidget a little.

“Was that all?” she asked.

“Yes,” he lied. “I don’t know how useful it’ll be,” he resumed. “I don’t think it’s something I can call up at will.”<br>
“Maybe with practice --”<br>
Chris laughed. “No. I don’t want to become a vegetable anymore.”<br>
“I don’t mean go under the spells again. What I mean is, now that you know it’s there, maybe you can work out how to use it.”<br>
“If full whitelighters couldn’t always rely on it, I don’t see how I can.”<br>
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve been able to do quite a few things you never thought you could.”<br>
There was that awkward silence again.

“Did you ever . . .”<br>
“Go under?” she finished for him. “No. I don’t think Tess would have thought to use those spells together. She’s very much a traditionalist.”<br>
“She raised you then?”<br>
Bianca paused. “Not exactly.”<br>
“But . . . I thought your mother . . .”<br>
“When I was sixteen.” Bianca stared at her plate. “It was just after . . . After my initiation. I wasn’t, um, ‘coping’ very well. She had lied to me, told me you don’t feel anything. I went a little nuts. Tried to dig it out.” She motioned to her birthmark. Chris seemed confused, so she elaborated. “Blew my arm off. But it reformed -- I knew it would. I got Mom’s attention, though. She started talking about getting out; we could take the money and run. She always had those kinds of pipe dreams, but I think she was serious this time. This next kill was going to be her last. She swore. So she went after a demon lord with Tess and never made it back. She certainly didn’t lie about it being her last. The very next day, Tess brought me here to train for two years. And she didn’t . . . Tess was never one to hold with my ‘quick and painless’ policy.”<br>
Bianca looked up to where Chris sat with his elbows on the table and his hands folded at his chin. He hadn’t touched the rest of his food. She forced a smile. “And I’m supposed to be teaching you dinner conversation.”<br>
“I had a fight with my mother the day she died,” Chris said softly. It was almost like a competition, now, to see who had the better sob story. But neither of them thought of it like that. “I was off sulking somewhere when it happened; I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for any of them.” There was nothing more for him to say about it -- I wasn't there summed it up for him.

“You loved her.”<br>
He seemed to search for sufficient words for an answer, but had to settle for an inadequate description. “So much.”<br>
“And it was just you three -- you, Wyatt, and Piper?”<br>
“After the sisters had families of their own, pretty much.”<br>
Bianca wet her lips and started to speak a couple of times before she actually decided how to phrase her question. “So, it’s not just now -- you were never close to your father?”<br>
Chris took a breath. “My dad was too busy being Leo Wyatt for me to get close to him.”<br>
Bianca nodded, and he continued almost as though talking to himself. “She never got over him. She tried for a while, but . . . She eventually started referring to herself as a widow, because it was easier, somehow. Of course, she couldn’t keep up the illusion for herself when he’d send letters every so often. And she kept them all, too, in a little shoebox under her bed. Sometimes I’d pass her bedroom and hear her crying, and I knew she was reading them. I remember being blown away by it every time. I’d think, how could she possibly still love him?”<br>
“So you don’t. You don’t love him?”<br>
Chris took a long time to answer, and when he did, there was a catch in his voice that hadn’t been there even for the memory of his mother’s grief. “Leo and I have always had this weird pattern going on. Weird, but consistent. See, for the first three, almost four years, he was the greatest dad ever. And then one day he was gone. I didn’t see him again until the day Mom died. And for a few weeks there, he was almost human. But then he was gone again. He ran so fast. He couldn’t take it -- left the ‘taking it’ to me and Grandpa. So now . . .” Chris stopped, still with enough presence of mind to edit out some of the truth of his current relationship with his father, but also to leave in enough to finish his thought. “Now, I am . . . wholeheartedly with Wyatt when he says ‘Screw him.’”

He glanced up at Bianca, and then quickly looked away before sniffing and putting his wine glass to his mouth.

“No, wait,” Bianca tried to warn, but he had already taken a swallow. He looked from her disappointed appearance to the contents of his glass.

“Poison?” he guessed.

She nodded unenthusiastically and gave the obligatory explanation. “Don’t take anything from your targets; they may have already found you out.” She started clearing their dishes from the table as his vision began to blur. “I’ll see you when you wake up,” she said.

[scifi]

Day 26

Chris crouched among the branches of an ancient live oak, watching for signs of movement in the field a few hundred feet away. Even in the moonlight, he couldn’t see Bianca from this far away, dressed as she was in dark, unreflecting material. But he didn’t need to see her; he could sense her presence as well as she could sense his. This whole night had been an exercise in futility, for how could either of them sneak up on the other?

As Bianca drew nearer to the tree, he could begin to make out her form striding confidently -- she knew exactly where he was. And with the no-orb/no-shimmer rule that was in place for the night, he couldn’t move from this spot fast enough.

But then, a wicked smile spread across his face, and he muttered under his breath.

“Spoken to my sometimes foe:
Never see, never sense, never know.”<br>
Bianca stopped in her tracks for a moment, then resumed her course. Chris’s smile vanished. Either he wasn’t strong enough to cast the spell on his own, or she was a more powerful demon . . . witch . . . whatever she was . . . than even he knew.

He’d been killed four times out here already -- that seemed like his running average for each night they’d been training outside. And every time he’d engaged her directly and on her terms. His whole body ached, not from the illusory injuries, but from the exertion of their increasingly drawn-out fights. And the constant strain of hiding and stalking between bouts didn’t help any. He just wanted a bed, and he could have it if he could only win. Now was the time to think outside the box -- to think like a demon -- to cheat.

He licked his lips, gave a quick glance at Bianca’s position, and then reached out a hand toward the ground for a fallen branch to come up to him. He found a good hand-hold on the branch and watched her silhouette move until she was just where he wanted her. He’d have only one shot at this.

He orbed behind her and swung, but not quickly enough to prevent her turning slightly so that the branch didn’t hit the base of her neck, as he’d intended, but rather caught the side of her head. The blow did cause her to tumble into a tree trunk, where she kept herself standing by leaning against it. Until her head cleared, she sent energy balls flying out in random directions to keep him away, but he had already orbed to a new position several yards off. When the ringing in her ears began to fade, Bianca threw out the rules, as well, and shimmered to where Chris was hiding. He deflected the first two energy balls she sent toward him, causing her to shimmer out of their way both times, and just as she reappeared, he brought the twigs, leaves, and pine needles of the underbrush up from the ground and into the air around her to attack her bare arms and face. The distraction worked, because he was able to aim one of the larger sticks through her shoulder before she could get out of its way. She gave the stifled Bianca-version of a scream to acknowledge the pain, but even this didn’t stop him. He orbed a few feet behind her, grasped with his mind the piece of wood in her shoulder, and jerked it out through her back. As soon as it was in his hand, he struck out again, and this time connected with the other side of her head. She went to the ground and lay flat aback briefly before sitting up and throwing an energy ball. It passed through Chris’s departing orbs and caused a tree to burst into flames. He came back in the same spot, his fist clenched. Bianca had created another energy ball, but this one extinguished when she brought her hands up to her closed-off throat. She stared at him as she felt the same sensation Miranda had felt, and in the light of the fire, she saw that this time, there was no hesitation in his eyes. She forced herself to block out the pain that led to thoughts of her head popping off at any moment, and concentrated on conjuring an athame. She threw it in his direction, not aiming for anything specific, but it was enough to force him to orb out of its way and to break his hold on her. She stood up unsteadily and focused first on forming an energy ball and second on staying conscious long enough to use it. She all but fell back against a tree and waited for him to return. He stayed gone for several seconds before she saw the beginnings of his rematerializing pattern out of the corner of her eye, and she threw the energy ball toward him, timing the movement precisely so that it hit him the moment he was solid. He lay still on the ground, and Bianca used the opportunity of his death to slide down the tree trunk and rest her head on it.

When Chris came around, the woods were quiet and dark again, the fire having been put out and the trees restored so that it seemed nothing had ever happened. Bianca stood above him, offering her hand to help him up.

“You were so close! Come on, again.”<br>
He didn’t take her hand, opting instead to shake his head. “I’m done,” he said, and orbed back to the house.

When Bianca arrived after him, he was near the top of the stairs.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked incredulously. “We still have an hour left.”<br>
“No. You can have an hour left. I’m going to take a shower and go to bed.”<br>
“Chris, you don’t have a choice --”<br>
“Yes, I do! Now, you can come up and pull the Psycho shower scene if you want, but I’ll just wake up, finish my shower, and get in bed. There’s always a choice, Bianca -- I just . . . wish to God you could see that!”<br>
He took the remaining steps two at a time, and Bianca let him go.

An hour passed before she looked in on him. He was not asleep. He had cleaned the grime from his body and sat in his pajama bottoms at the head of the bed, staring at his hands.

“What did you mean?” she asked from the doorway.

“Nothing.”<br>
She moved further into the room. “I suppose you meant, why can’t I be like mother and find a way out? You think I have that choice.”<br>
“It’s just that . . . You are the smartest woman I’ve ever met -- you can think of a thousand different ways to kill me. But you can’t think of one way to stop?”<br>
“It’s not that simple. There aren’t always choices.”<br>
“There aren’t always easy choices, no. Sometimes the choice is between two crappy alternatives. But it’s always there. You always have some say. I chose to be here. I could have run the very first day. I could have run and hidden and never had to see you again. But I chose to stay, because I knew you were right. And I will choose to go with you when this is over, because it’s what Wyatt wants. And I will always choose to help Wyatt, to protect him, because maybe once or twice a year, he’ll do something to make me think he’s worth the trouble, worth doing things that are so . . . far beyond anything I believed growing up. I choose because I am just crazy enough to hope there’s some way we can both be redeemed, and I’m crazy enough to think you can be, too!” He stopped there and realized that he had said way too much.

Bianca had backed away from him as his speech intensified, and now she stood grasping the door handle as though it could support her. “Good night, Chris,” she said simply, and shut the door.

That night, Chris didn’t get the sleep he so desperately desired, because he was wondering if she would suspect him now and thinking that it might not be such a bad thing. But her mind wasn’t in strategic mode. For the first time since her mother died, Bianca cried herself to sleep.


Day 30

“Show me what you can do,” the Matriarch ordered as Chris and Bianca stood before her in the den. “Attack her.”<br>
“He does better with a defensive attitude --” Bianca started to explain.

“Offensive is all I care about -- can he get the job done? Attack her.”<br>
Bianca started to make an apologetic expression to Chris, but he immediately gestured for the curio to fall over on her. She shimmered, and they played magical cat-and-mouse for a minute before she finally led him to the kitchen, where some potions they had prepared the night before lay on the table waiting for them. Bianca gathered a couple and shimmered back to the den, followed a hair’s breadth of a second later by Chris’s orbs. He deflected the potions back to her, causing her to explode. But because they were not vanquishing potions, the action didn’t count as a kill. She reformed behind him, athame in hand, but as she put the blade to his throat, he caught her hand and flipped her forward over his back. He orbed as she hit the ground, then reappeared with a kitchen knife of his own. He threw her back into the wall with one hand and orbed to within inches of her in the split second it took for her to fall to the ground. She was not as winded as he’d anticipated, so she pulled him to the floor by his waist and attempted to pin him. But he was able to wrap one of his legs over hers and reverse their positions. With his knife hand beneath her, he forced her body down onto the blade.

As she gasped at the sensation of a knife through the heart, Chris felt a bit light-headed himself. He thought of the recurring dream that he’d finally allowed to run its course for the past couple of nights. And as her skin lost its honey-tint in favor of a deathly pallor, he pitied the fact that real life was very, very different.

“You’re dead,” he whispered.

Bianca tried to swallow and nod. “Well done,” she forced out. “But, uh,” she looked down to where she had plunged her athame into his heart at the same moment, the recognition of which caused him to finally register the pain. “So are you.”<br>

[scifi]

“You don’t waste a second,” Chris said as the three other members of the Phoenix on Bianca’s team shimmered into the house, which had just been emptied once again with a short spell. Tess had sent them after seeing his performance, although she had criticized that he’d taken a minute longer than she would have needed to catch the prey.

“Quiet,” Bianca snapped at him and paced around the assembled members. “Technically, this witch has no active powers, but she might as well -- she’s a phenomenal spell-caster,” she began the briefing.

“Then why do you need all of us?” one of her distant cousins asked. “Sounds like an easy shot. She won’t have time to rattle off a spell.”<br>
“Don’t underestimate her. The woman is a genius -- she doesn’t have to come up with rhymes or specific phrasing -- single words sub for every spell she’s created over the years, and she’s got them all stored up here.” Bianca tapped her temple.

Chris nodded. Bianca was describing the most taciturn member of the Resistance, Lydia Barnes, whose quiet nature was often mistaken for timidity. Chris knew better -- she spoke only rarely, but when she did, her words carried the force of authority. There were only five members in this party -- Chris thought that, despite her warning, perhaps Bianca was herself underestimating this witch.

Bianca turned to him. “Stay close to me. If she kills you, there’s no getting back up anymore.”<br>
Lydia lived in Bayou Country, her home situated at the edge of a series of lakes and marshes that had been in her family since before the state was divided into parishes. The grounds were bathed in moonlight when they arrived, and Chris could see his friend on the shore of the lake nearest her house -- standing almost like she was waiting for them.

“Lights!” he heard Lydia call before he was momentarily blinded by the sudden brightness of every phosphorescent gas in the swamp emitting fifty times its normal illumination. His vision adjusted in time to see Lydia throw a potion at the first Phoenix in her view, who spun out of the vial’s way before it hit.

“Slow!” Lydia yelled, and Chris saw the Phoenix move as though their limbs were weighed down by the gravity of a denser planet than Earth. Even his own eyelids felt the heaviness so that blinking them took a full three seconds. Compared to him and the Phoenix, Lydia seemed to be moving so quickly, it was as if the spell had effected the opposite result on her. The next potion she threw easily hit its nearly immobilized target, and even the flames of the vanquish were slow to consume the demon flesh. Chris couldn’t take his eyes off it fast enough, though he tried.

If he were Bianca, he would have been panicking, but he watched as she unperturbedly attempted to shimmer out of the spell’s hold. He could begin to see through her body to Lydia beyond. The witch was out of potions, and if Bianca was successful in breaking the spell, she would be an easy target.

But Lydia apparently had already thought of this possibility, because she stole a sorrowful glance first at the lake and then at him before constructing a brand new spell that could be condensed to a single word at a later date.

“Waters that on this shore do break,
Bind them, leave them no escape.
Yet mercy to Mercy show its face;
Provide therein a saving grace.”<br>
Chris’s capacity for movement returned for all the good it did him, for as soon as Bianca’s shimmer was halted, he followed the Phoenix pell-mell into the lake as though his own power had been used against him. He landed hard in the shallows and sat stunned for a moment before he felt the water stir around him. Something told him that now would be a good time to get out of the lake, but when he tried to orb, nothing happened.

He stood, and suddenly, the water pulled away from his feet, leaving him mired in silt. Then he saw that the Phoenix who had landed further out were now standing in the mud of the lake floor. Instinct told him to look up, and when he did, four vertical walls of water came crashing down on all of them so fast, he barely had time to gasp a breath.

His feet left the floor, and he tumbled through the chaotic undercurrents until there was no way to get his bearings. He tried to catch some hint of moonlight to show him which way was up, but the sediment that had been churned into the water made his eyes doubly useless by creating dark clouds of murky obscurity and by burning his eyes worse than the overdone chemicals in any pool he’d ever been in.

His chest was aching now, and he felt the pressure in his throat of air on the verge of involuntary escape. He picked a direction and started swimming, though he knew how unlikely it was that he had chosen the right one to take him out of darkness.

But then the water became clear and brightened by the radiance of day. He saw that he was swimming toward the bottom and turned himself around. He could see the ever-changing light of the sun viewed through ripples, and there was someone beckoning him there at the surface. A part of him figured this must be a hallucination brought on by oxygen deprivation, but the other part knew that he’d rather die chasing an illusory hope than die treading water in the dark.

As he approached the probably non-existent surface, the features of the person waiting there became more clearly defined -- plainer, really, than they ought to have been through the wavering veil that separated air from water. Bianca. She stood on the shore, bending over the water with her hand outstretched and her smile confident in his ability to break through. He reached for her, and she plunged her hand down to meet his and pulled him the rest of the way.

But no one was there when Chris threw his head back and took his first breath in what seemed like hours. He splashed in confusion for a few moments and let the comparative coolness of air on his wet skin confirm that he was alive before making his way to the empty shore. He hauled himself up onto the solid ground and lay on his side, coughing and choking on the air he was taking in, but gulping at it nonetheless.

Several feet distant, a figure crawled toward him, and in the moonlight, she looked as bedraggled as he felt. Bianca threw herself down beside him and joined in his air-feast. As soon as she was able to talk, she turned her face toward him and voiced her own bewilderment. “I saw --”<br>
“You,” he finished for her.

She simply breathed for a few more moments, then sat up and pushed away the strands of hair stuck to her face. Chris raised himself up on one hand and stared where Bianca was staring. The water was completely calm, with no wind even to disturb the stillness that fit the lake’s new role as a grave for the other assassins.

Bianca finally spoke the question Chris had been wondering himself. “How did she know we were coming?”

[scifi]

Wyatt was taking the news of Bianca’s failure better than Tess had expected. She had thought perhaps she would be dodging energy balls right about now, but he just sat there nodding and saying that of course, he realized the Phoenix would never stop until the witch was found. So Tess moved past the apologetic stage and moved straight into the fuming stage.

“She ambushed them -- they never even got near her -- how could she know? And how could she get a vanquishing potion?” she vented.

“And why did she leave a loophole in her spell for my brother and Bianca to escape?” Wyatt said more calmly.

“That’s the only easy question of the lot. According to your own report, she takes a great deal of pleasure in her cleverness. She probably threw in the Mercy bit as her idea of a joke, since she’d assume her attackers were incapable of mercy.” Tess allowed herself a humorless smile. “Bianca’s weakness was finally good for something, and you know Chris is still so soft. But the other questions --”<br>
“Matriarch, has it ever occurred to you that you are dealing with some very smart, very tightly-knit witches? After the first one died, the others would naturally be on their guard. And as for the vanquishing potion, I’d imagine they have enough resources among them to come up with one that works. You’re not exactly the most powerful demons out there.”<br>
Tess didn’t buy his explanation, but he’d said it in such condescending tones, she didn’t bother to contradict it.

“Where is Chris now?” he asked.

“I sent him with Bianca to the next target. The witches won’t expect two attacks within two hours.”<br>
“You didn’t assemble a new group so quickly?”<br>
“No. Bridget grows more powerful as the number of her opponents increases. I would normally have sent Bianca alone, but with the contract --”<br>
“Yes, yes. I know. That’ll be all.”<br>
As soon as Tess left his presence, he spoke to the air. “Ekera, show yourself.”<br>
Wyatt’s shadow rose from the floor and began to take a solid shape as the shade demon obeyed his command.

“You recall the assignment I mentioned -- the possibility that we discussed?” he asked.

“It would appear that Chris has made that possibility a reality,” she answered. Her eyeless gaze saw Wyatt’s jaw muscles tighten despite his attempt to show no reaction.

“Go to London. Watch him,” Wyatt ordered, and Ekera shimmered.

Wyatt was finally alone in his chambers, finally able to rise from his chair and pace the room as he had wanted to do since Tess described the failed attempt. After a couple of times around, he orbed to his bedroom and stood before the Book of Shadows, where the triquetra blurred slightly in his vision.

“I’ll kill him!” he sobbed as he reached suddenly for the Book and swept it off its pedestal. But as abruptly as the cry escaped him, he closed his eyes and took a few calming breaths -- Wyatt didn’t have outbursts.

[scifi]

The newest addition to the British Museum looked deceptively like the main building from the outside, with massive Ionic columns giving it a similarly Grecian feel. But the inside was entirely modern, housing holographic projections of artifacts deemed too fragile or priceless for actual display. During museum hours, those projections varied from close-up views of the texture of a mummy’s wrappings, to line by line translations of parchments lying somewhere off-premises in a climate-controlled vault, to full interactive opportunities for the public to restore various famous relics to their original states. But at five-thirty in the morning, the animations were still, and the patterns of illumination sent off by half-formed nudes and barely framed mock-ups seemed to flicker only because of the appearance of the orbs that coalesced in an alcove opposite the one Bianca had shimmered into. She hand-signaled the locations of the security sensors in the main gallery to Chris, who waved a hand to turn the sensors’ beams out of their path to the stairs leading to the museum offices and labs a floor below.

In the brief time they’d had since Tess had ordered them to the next target, Bianca had explained to him why they had to get to the witch by acting like a couple of cat burglars rather than simply orbing and shimmering in on her. She’d used his Aunt Phoebe as a rough example of what they had to look forward to with Bridget. He only half-listened to Bianca’s description of her powers, since he already knew them well enough. For lack of a better word, Bridget was a sort of empath, though she couldn’t pick up on emotions the way Phoebe did. Her receptivity focused more on channeling magical powers, making her control of those powers more intuitive and skillful than Phoebe’s had ever been. Thanks to the fact that the woman was second only to Lydia at writing spells, and second to none at making potions, her abilities had kept her alive longer than most witches in the UK. Still, she had to be relatively close to borrow her opponents’ magic, and it was possible to approach her undetected if they could make do without using their active powers until the last possible moment.

So when Chris started to force the lock on the door to the labs, Bianca grabbed his hand and shook her head. Moving down a floor and through the hallway may have put them within power-sensing range. She whispered a short unlocking spell, and the keypad lit up green to grant them entrance to what seemed a sterilized version of a stockroom. The pieces that were scattered around in their own protective glass cases were not among the items they’d seen projected in the main gallery -- these were probably new acquisitions waiting to be copied, digitized, and transferred to a more secure location. That was how Bridget made her living, after all, down here among the reliquaries.

Across the room, they could see the middle-aged witch sitting before one of the cases with her back turned to the door. Her hands were in the gloves built into the case so that she could handle the piece without leaving damaging oils from her skin to eat away at the fragile surface. She seemed to be working with a wooden chalice that from where they stood, didn’t look so valuable. Nevertheless, she took extreme care when she set it down to bring one of her hands out of the case and set the controls on the device that came down out of the top of the glass to scan the artifact and create a sample hologram in the air above it.

Chris and Bianca moved silently among the relics, careful to keep out of her sight, but also to keep her in theirs, until they were close enough to hear her speak into the headset she was wearing.

“I know, darling, but I told you the museum wants the McDonwall collection finished straight away. With everything that‘s happened, I’ve had no time until now, and the wing opens in a week.” She paused to listen to the person on the other end. “I promise you a fortnight in Bath when this is over. No all-nighters there -- unless, of course…” she laughed at what the other person said, and Chris smiled faintly at the knowledge that she had to be talking to her husband. It was nice to know that some people could stay together as long as those two had. His smile faded, though, when he glanced over to Bianca’s intense examination of the area surrounding Bridget for an opportunity to get closer for the strike.

“Let me finish with this piece, and I’ll be home directly.” She listened again. “I‘m always careful. See you in a bit,” Bridget told her husband, and turned her attention back to the bowl. She switched a setting on the headpiece and assumed a more scholarly demeanor when she spoke. “The markings on the outside of the chalice would appear to indicate its ceremonial uses in blood rites dating back to the second century, B.C.E. You will notice here the portrayal of animal sacrifice, the high priest presiding over the ritual, aloof in his representation as their god, and finally, the people bowing to the restored animal whose new life they hoped to emulate. However, the inside of the chalice tells a very different story, lined as it is with inscriptions written in a style consistent with a much earlier society. Take particular notice of the words engraved at the rim of the chalice, which read --” She stopped and examined the words. “I don’t believe I will read those.” She adjusted the scanner and her headset to take the imaging and recording back several seconds so that there was no close-up of the words, and then switched both devices off for a moment.

“Demon curse within these lines,
I banish thee now with sands of time.”<br>
A wind developed inside the glass, whipping away miniscule pieces of grit and wood until it appeared a sandstorm might demolish the object. When it died down, Bridget turned her scanning and recording devices back on, and started again. However, this time, when the scanner zoomed in on the inscriptions inside the chalice, the words at the rim were indecipherable. “Unfortunately, the ravages of time have left us with little idea for what purpose the chalice was originally intended.” She finished the fudged description and placed her headset aside, then spoke triumphantly to the chalice. “No possessing witches for you, dearest.”<br>
Bridget rose from her chair, and Bianca quickly hid herself better behind a statue. Chris did a double-take because it seemed her dim shadow on the floor moved a fraction of a second too slow, but it must have been fatigue making him see things. Still, he couldn’t help but have a bad feeling.

Bridget got a bad feeling of her own at the same moment. She looked in their direction. “There are two of you over there with the ability to sense me. Therefore, I sense you. Therefore, come on out.”<br>
Chris looked to take his cue from Bianca, but she simply shook her head and held up a finger for him to wait. She stood like that long enough for Bridget to grow impatient, then shimmered behind her. Drawing on whitelighter power, Bridget orbed across the room to stand a few feet from Chris. He saw that Bianca had formed an energy ball, and, hoping the action would look like he was trying to capture the witch, he dove for Bridget as she threw it. She orbed out of his grasp and out of the way of the energy ball, which passed inches above his head as he fell to the floor. It didn’t explode into any of the artifacts, however, because several feet away from both of them, Bridget had reappeared and stopped the energy ball with Chris’s telekinesis.

“I just catalogued those,” she admonished. She brought the sphere of crackling power through the air toward herself and held it in her hand, proving that she had now mastered Bianca’s powers as well. “Let’s take this somewhere not quite so expensive,” she said before closing her fist to extinguish the energy ball and then shimmering out.

“She’s good,” Bianca breathed as she ran to Chris to grab his arm and bring him along in her shimmer. “Come on.”<br>
She tracked the stolen signature of her own shimmer to Bridget’s flat, where the witch had materialized long enough to pick up her husband, but then inexplicably lost the trail. Bianca stood in the living room for a few moments trying to pick it up again, but then Bridget returned alone, an energy ball in her hand ready to fly. Chris and Bianca ducked, only to find a fireball coming at them right behind it. They jumped behind the couch to dodge it.

“Since when do you do fireballs?” he asked in exasperation.

“I don’t!” Bianca answered in equal bafflement. She formed an energy ball in her hand, but just as she rose to throw it, a more powerful one hit her in the shoulder from behind. She flew into the wall and slumped down, unconscious.

Chris looked in the direction of this attack and saw that a new demon had arrived. He looked familiar, but Chris couldn’t place him, didn’t even think to try to place him, because he had thrown another energy ball to finish off the Phoenix.

“No!” Chris’s arm flew up and deflected the attack from Bianca. For a second, the demon looked genuinely surprised that he’d done it, but then he shimmered to Bridget and took her arm. Both disappeared from the room. Chris glanced briefly at Bianca‘s inert form, wondering who this new demon was that Wyatt had sent, then orbed after them.

He found Bridget unharmed in an abandoned warehouse, though the demon was still standing beside her. When he solidified out of the orbs, the demon held up a hand. “Wait a minute --”<br>
But Chris threw him a few feet from Bridget before he could finish the sentence, then grabbed her and began to orb. The demon rolled his eyes and leaped just in time to include himself in the disappearing lights.

[scifi]

The three of them arrived to the campfires of Leo’s sanctuary, and Chris shrugged the demon off his back and motioned to place an invisible hold on him.

“Chris, wait,” Bridget begged and tried to bring his hand down. “You don’t understand.”<br>
“Who are you?” Chris demanded of the demon.

“Put him down!” Bridget continued as other witches gathered around the scene. “Will you bloody well listen to me?”<br>
“This is ridiculous,” the demon muttered and formed a quarter-sized energy ball in his palm and with a flick of the wrist tossed it toward Chris’s hand. The shock was minor, but it forced him to release his hold. As he seized his injured hand, Chris happened to see one of his cousins in the crowd.

“Helen, cage him!”<br>
The child obeyed unhesitantly, though she was sleepy-eyed and unsure of what was happening. “Crystals!” she called for the objects back at her treehouse. “Circle!”<br>
The demon folded his arms and gave an annoyed sigh inside the crystal cage, knowing he’d have to wait for Bridget to explain everything to this hot-headed kid.

“What’s going on here?” Leo said as he ran up to the gathering. He stopped abruptly and stared in disbelief at the demon inside the cage. “Cole?”<br>
“Leo,” Cole acknowledged with a nod.

Chris gawped between his father and the demon. “Wait, the Cole?”<br>
Cole grinned and gave a sort of half-bow. “Nice to know I’m remembered."

[scifi]

Leo started healing the minor burn on Chris’s hand, and while he and his son watched the process, both spoke at the same time.

“I am seriously out of the loop here.” They glanced up at each other, both surprised, and in Chris’s case, annoyed, that they had thought alike.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Bridget explained. “He’s on our side. Cole came to us a couple of days after you went with the Phoenix, Chris. He told Victor --”<br>
“Victor would never trust him,” Chris interrupted.

“He didn’t at first,” Cole began, but again, the whitelighters spoke in unison.

“Shut up!”<br>
“Cole let Lydia cast a truth spell.”<br>
“You don’t know him, Bridget,” Leo said. “He wears a very good mask.”<br>
“Not this time,” Cole defended himself.

Leo stood before the crystal cage and glared at the demon who had once so rapidly gone from threat to brother-in-law to bitterest enemy. “Why should I believe you?”<br>
Cole hesitated before speaking. “Because the only thing I have left is proving her wrong about me.”<br>
Leo stood immobilized by those words until a small voice behind him said, “I believe him.”<br>
Leo saw the stricken look on Cole’s face and turned to his niece. While her sister Kit had taken after their father, Cassie was Phoebe in miniature, right down to her voice. The little girl stared up at Cole curiously, but then suddenly began to cry. Kit pushed her way through the crowd to come to her little sister’s side, then she hugged her and tried to shield her from Cole’s view. She shot a venomous glare at the demon as she led Cassie back into the fold of people, where Helen joined in her own childish way to comfort the empath.

Leo tore his stare from the trio and faced Cole again, but the demon’s eyes were still watching Cassie. Leo finally saw in those eyes what clenched his decision -- the same longing for her mother that Leo himself felt for Piper every time he looked at Chris. He kneeled down and removed one of the crystals to break the circle, then followed Cole’s gaze to the girls. “Stay away from them,” he warned, and Cole recollected himself and nodded in understanding.

“Have you lost your mind?” Chris yelled.

Leo ignored the outburst. “Come with me,” he said to Cole as he started walking toward a more private area for council.

Chris followed and tried to continue his protest, but Bridget touched his arm and said the only thing that could make him swallow his words. “If you won’t trust Leo’s judgment, at least trust Victor’s.”<br>
“Leo,” Cole said. “I have to get the fourth witch. Now. When that Phoenix wakes --” He turned to Chris. “Speaking of her, why did you stop me?”<br>
“It’s complicated.”<br>
“You have no idea how complicated. You had a shadow back there.”<br>
The four of them stopped walking. “What?” Chris breathed.

“That fireball Bridget threw wasn’t mine.”<br>
Bridget nodded. “There were five of us in that room, Chris.”<br>
“You’re just lucky it wasn’t attached to you when you orbed, or it would have found its way here, same as me,” Cole added.

Chris remembered what he had seen at the museum, what he had stupidly taken as a hallucination. “But how --” he started to ask, but then came upon the answer himself. “Your vanquishing potion,” he said to Bridget. “He saw me with the Book of Shadows and assumed --” He closed his eyes at the irony. “The one time it wasn’t me, and he catches on.”<br>
“Chris --” Leo started.

“I have to go back.”<br>
“You have to stay here,” Leo explained the obvious. “He knows.”<br>
“No. I’m not dead yet, which means he’s not certain.” Chris nodded to himself. “I can fix this.”<br>
Before Leo could get past the disbelief that his son was actually talking like this, Chris pointed to Bridget’s necklace. “I need that.”<br>
Bridget held the pendant at her neck protectively. “It was my sister’s -- I swore never to part --”<br>
“I know. And as thorough as the Phoenix are, they’ll know it, too.”<br>
“Now who’s lost his mind!” Leo exclaimed, but Bridget began to catch on to Chris’s plan and took off the necklace.

“It’s an awful chance,” she said as she handed it over.

“It’ll work.” He glanced grudgingly in Cole’s direction. “You should go with Cole for the fourth witch so he can find his way back through the cloak. After that, you have to stay here if we’re going to convince them you’re dead.”<br>
Bridget nodded. “Be careful.”<br>
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”<br>
“You are not going anywhere,” Leo commanded, but Chris had already finished orbing.

Cole took Bridget by the arm and gave Leo a sympathetic look. “I see those Halliwells take your advice as well as ever,” he said, and then shimmered out.

[scifi]

“Bianca.”<br>
The far-away voice called to her through the nightmare that always came in one form or another when she was in pain. She was sixteen again, lying nearly catatonic in her bed, a dead witch’s cries sounding in her ears.

“Bianca.”<br>
She tried to listen to the voice, but suddenly Tess shimmered into her bedroom and threw back the sheets. “You want out?” the Matriarch shrieked and pulled her roughly out of the bed.

Bianca found herself on a deserted street in a freezing rain, the ice pellets stinging her face as they fell. The puddle she stood in drew the feeling out of her toes after only a few seconds, but she ceased to notice that when Tess dragged a figure over the pavement and deposited it at her feet. It was Bianca’s mother. The rain washed blood down her body in little more than rivulets, though her torso was an oozing mass of red: the energy that had burned her through to the bone in some places had also cauterized most of the blood vessels.

Bianca kneeled down, searching for a place on her mother that wasn’t blistered, but finding none, touched her arm anyway. The skin sloughed off under her fingers, and Bianca fell back onto her palms.

Her mother made no reaction to the sensation -- couldn’t feel it, really, since the nerve endings had been destroyed -- but she managed to turn her head toward her daughter’s frantic motion.

“Bianca,” the voice said in sync with her soundless mouthing.

“You want out?” Tess repeated in an even tone, then plunged an athame through the dying woman’s larynx. “That is how you get out.”<br>
She left Bianca sitting there in the wet and cold, batting her eyes against the ice and staring at her mother’s vacant expression, too numb even to scream.

“Bianca.”<br>
The memory faded to black, and she felt someone lift her from the floor and lean her on her side against the wall. A sharp pain at her shoulder told her the person was probing her wound, though her mind was fuzzy about just how she’d been wounded, even about where she was. There was a hint of movement near her chest -- the clasps on her tunic were being unfastened -- but still she couldn’t bring herself fully to consciousness. She instinctively shrank away from the pain when the fabric of the tunic rubbed against the patch of burned skin as the garment was removed, and she thought she heard a small cry escape her throat when she felt some kind of fluid irrigating the wound, putting her back in mind of the icy rain of her dream. The pain diminished slightly after a dressing was pressed onto her back, and her arms were placed into the sleeves of a light, breathable blouse that seemed to hang a few sizes too big. Her head started lolling back as she was moved away from the wall, but it found support in the crook of the person’s arm.

“Bianca, I need you to wake up. I need you to drink this.”<br>
Through the haze in her mind, she mustered enough initiative to sip at the water that was placed at her lips and to swallow a little of it. Then she turned her head away from the cup and nestled her face into the warmth of the person’s chest. The pained tension in her body slackened a bit, and she breathed deeply -- stagnant water, and sweat, and a bit of her own blood, but also something else, something unique -- something that made her feel safe for once in her life.

She forced her eyes open long enough to glimpse who was holding her, though she already knew, then let them fall shut again and smiled contentedly as she lapsed momentarily into unconsciousness again -- they were lazing about in the open air of a Sunday afternoon. But reality finally pushed its way into her mind, and she propelled herself up out of Chris’s arms.

“The witch!” she exclaimed before realizing how dizzy the sudden movement had made her.

“Easy.“ Chris reached out to steady her. “ She’s gone.”<br>
Bianca waited until the room stopped spinning before she stood, then winced and put a hand at her shoulder as though it could trap and remove the pain. She crossed over to a mirror, unfastened a couple of buttons on Bridget’s blouse, and pulled the collar back until she could get a good view of the burn.

“I put a temp-skin on it, but you really need a hospital,” Chris said as he also got up from the floor.

She ran a finger along the outer edge of the over-the-counter synthetic skin he must have found in the medicine cabinet. He hadn’t done a bad job. “I’ll live,” she said as she rebuttoned the blouse. “We have to find her.”<br>
Chris swallowed and sat down on the couch, his eyes fixed on an object on the coffee table. “I told you. She’s gone.”<br>
Bianca saw the necklace then, and the walk over to pick it up seemed to take ages. She stared at it in her hand, then took it with her to a window overlooking the city street hemmed in by gray sidewalks, gray buildings, and a gray sky that dropped down cold sheets of rain on the people passing by.

“Where’s the body?” she finally asked.

“There isn’t one,” he answered. “That other guy didn’t stick around after he got her out of here. I guess he didn’t think I could follow her. She kept copying my powers, so I had to use a spell. The necklace was all that was left.”<br>
Bianca closed her eyes in a vain attempt to recapture the moment before she learned she wasn’t the only murderer in the room. Somehow she had always secretly hoped that she would be the one to take the witches, that he wouldn’t have to dirty his hands. It was a supreme example of her own stupidity that she felt sorry that he had done exactly what she had trained him to do.

“Are you all right?” she asked, still not facing him.

“No broken bones.”<br>
She turned around and gave him the look that said he knew that wasn’t what she meant.

He nodded. “I’ll live.”<br>
Bianca sighed and pocketed the necklace. “Tess will want to know, and then probably Wyatt.” She held out her hand to him so she could take him to her aunt. “Looks like your brother got what he wanted.”

[scifi]

Bianca was right that Tess would take them both to Wyatt when she learned the news. While the assassins and his older brother discussed the day’s events, Chris took the opportunity of his interview being left for last to distance himself from them with the guise of examining one of the demons in the statuary. He hoped the shade demon wasn’t close enough to him to hear as he breathed a spell he had been working out in his head since before Bianca woke.

“My eyes which seek where shadows dwell
Become unblinded with this spell,
With lustrous beacon and brightest sheen
See what means to be unseen.”<br>
Chris blinked, not noticing any difference in how his eyes felt, but then he turned to face the three people across the room and saw the shadow Bianca seemed to cast was pulsating with a bright red outline. The suppression of his satisfied smile was made easier by Wyatt’s call for him to join them.

“You two take care of the fourth witch,” Wyatt told the Phoenix. “I want to celebrate with Chris.”<br>
Bianca and Tess shimmered, but the shade demon stayed behind, changing its shape to fit Wyatt’s shadow. Chris surmised that it had to be Ekera.

“Congratulations are in order,” Wyatt said as he tossed the necklace Bianca had given him back to Chris. “I didn’t think you had it in you, honestly. I thought it might toughen you up, but . . .”<br>
Chris didn’t think that kind of compliment called for thanks and just stood silently.

“Funny, though, that you, of all people, could fall back on a spell. You never used to be much good at coming up with them on the spur of the moment -- you usually have to write them down and agonize over them, get the wording perfect. But now, you spout them just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “In the heat of battle, no less.”<br>
“I’ve been practicing,” Chris said flatly.

“Apparently. I think I’ll give Bianca a nice bonus. I just wish I could have seen it.” Wyatt stopped as though a new idea had struck him. “You’ve never added anything to the Book, have you?”<br>
Chris shook his head in confirmation, and Wyatt held out his hand to orb the Book of Shadows to them.

“I can’t think of a better spell for you to add than the one you used on that witch.” Wyatt flipped to a blank page, conjured a pen, and placed both on a table before Chris. “It’ll only take a second.”<br>
Chris’s mind went as blank as the page. He stared at it in what he hoped seemed like a pause of awe at making a contribution to the Halliwell Book of Shadows, but he knew that every second he stalled added to Wyatt’s suspicion that there was no spell to write. Finally, a few words came into his head, and he scribbled them out.

Wyatt looked at his handiwork when he lay the pen back on the table. “That’s it?”<br>
“I just modified a spell the witch had cast earlier,” Chris said. “Lame, I know, but it worked.”<br>
“Turning her own words on her. Ironic.” Wyatt read over the spell again. “I’d love to see what this does.” He orbed a demon guard into the room. “Substitute ‘demon’ for ‘witch,’” he said to himself before reading the spell aloud.

“Demon that Wyatt deems out of line
I vanquish thee now with sands of time.”<br>
The demon was caught up in a dusty whirlwind, the particles tearing at its skin, muscle, and bone even as its body desiccated, so that after a few seconds, the demon was simply a pile of sand.

“I thought you said there wasn’t anything left.” Wyatt put the Book down.

“There wasn’t. We were outside, and it started raining -- washed it all away.”<br>
“Considerate of London to clean up your mess for you.”<br>
Bianca and Tess shimmered back into the room. “The fourth witch is missing,” Bianca said.

“We can’t sense her anywhere,” Tess added.

Wyatt turned to his brother with a deadly serious look. “Are you holding out on us, Chris?”<br>
Chris faltered for a moment with nothing to say, but then Wyatt continued in a lighter tone. “Did you kill all of them by yourself?”<br>
Chris regained his speaking faculties and mocked Wyatt’s smile to show how unfunny he thought the joke was. “Obviously, she’s cloaked. Probably with the spell-caster.”<br>
Wyatt nodded. “Which means both are probably with Leo.” He faced the assassins. “You know what to do, then.”<br>
Both nodded and shimmered away again, but not before Bianca looked to Chris with almost an apology -- for what, he couldn’t know.

“What are they going to do?” he asked Wyatt.

Wyatt clapped him on the back. “They are going to find the witches through a more indirect route. You, on the other hand, get some time off until you’re called. As much as you’ve been up to, you could use a little R&R.”<br>
When Chris orbed home, he blew out the breath he felt he’d been holding for an hour. Wyatt had been playing with him -- he had been naive to think a mere necklace could convince him of his loyalty. He wouldn’t be satisfied until Chris brought a body to lay before him. But, at the very least, his explanation had been just credible enough to buy him some time -- time to do what, he didn’t know, but he would think of something. In the meantime, he looked around for the first sight of his grandfather in a month. The house was curiously empty, however, the air inside almost stale, but he didn’t have the luxury to wait around wondering when Victor would be home. With a final glance to make sure Ekera’s glowing outline wasn’t there to follow him, he orbed back to the sanctuary.

[scifi]

The camp was quiet when Chris arrived -- he had to remember that in this time zone, it was only a little after two in the morning. The only two people he saw stirring in this area were a watch keeper in his trance and a night patrolman, Mike, making his rounds to maintain order within the sanctuary.

“Hey, Chris,” Mike said. “Leo thought you might be back before sun-up. Said he’d talk to you in the morning.”<br>
“Now’s fine --”<br>
“He figured you’d say that, too. Said to tell you, and I quote,” Mike’s voice changed from its heavy Bronx accent to a perfect imitation of Leo’s. “‘You’re exhausted. Get some rest like everybody else, and don’t argue.’”

“Oh, sure, let’s all wait on Leo’s convenience,” Chris said as he turned to walk away.

It was true that Chris felt like keeling over on the nearest tuft of grass and sleeping for a thousand years, but at the same time, he knew his exhaustion was the kind that had a paradoxical effect -- as soon as his eyes closed, his thoughts would keep him from sleep. He was so tired, he was wired. He rolled his eyes -- so now he could rhyme with no effort.

He hadn’t really chosen to walk in the direction of his cousins’ tree house; it was more from force of habit than anything else, since he usually tried to make a point of checking up on them whenever he visited. But now when he approached their campfire, he guessed his coming this way was one of those weird moments of serendipity his mom used to talk about. Kit was lying on the ground, propped up on an elbow, sketching with a stub of a pencil in one of the notebooks he’d brought her a few months ago. He’d have to remember to bring her some more soon.

“What are you doing up?” he asked as he kneeled down beside her to see the picture she was working on.

“Cassie woke me.” She waved over to where her little sister lay asleep at the base of the tree. “She kept having bad dreams. She came down here so she wouldn’t wake Helen, too. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I thought I’d draw my latest vision.”<br>
“Let’s see.”

She handed the notebook over to him. “You know, it makes me mad that Cassie gets to see any time she wants, but I get stuck with only seeing the past. And I don’t even get the whole story -- what’s the point?”<br>
“There’s always a point, even if you can’t find it.”<br>
“Nice platitude. But really, I’m the oldest. What’s up with Cassie getting all the cool powers?”<br>
“I wouldn’t want Cassie’s powers. Dealing with your own baggage is hard enough, let alone everybody else’s.” Chris glanced up at her and saw that his answer wasn’t good enough. He didn’t have a better one. “I don’t know. Everything got screwed up with our generation, changed from what it’s always been. The old rules don’t apply, I guess.” He tried to change the subject, knowing from experience how useless it was to dwell on being shortchanged in the power department, and gestured to the picture of the Charmed Ones battling a demon. “I remember this fight.”<br>
“I thought you would. You’re standing right there.” Kit pointed to the boy standing on the Manor’s stairs, watching as the demon was vanquished.

“My hair was never that long.”<br>
Kit gave him a once over. “It’s getting there now.”

“Is that a subtle ‘get a haircut’ hint?”<br>
“You’re so smart.”<br>
Chris faked his sweetest smile, but then turned to where Cassie had started crying out beneath the tree.

“No! Stop!” she screamed, and Chris rushed to shake her awake. She blinked up at him for a moment, then threw her arms around his neck. Chris glanced to where Kit had risen from the ground, her pencil wrapped up in her clenched fist.

“She’s been like this ever since she got that empathic hit off Cole. I wish he’d never come here.”<br>
Cassie let go of Chris and looked to her sister. “He’s a really sad man. He couldn’t help it.”<br>
“He’s not a man, Cassie. He’s a demon,” Kit snapped. “Remember that.”<br>
“Were you dreaming about Cole?” Chris asked in a quieter tone.

Cassie shook her head. He could guess what she‘d been seeing from the way she guiltily averted her eyes away from him. “Miranda?”

After a second, she nodded. Chris got off his knees and sat back against the tree. Cassie crawled into his lap and rested her head on his chest. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“You're sorry?” He kissed her hair and sighed.

“Try not to think about it,” she advised. “I don’t want to handle more than one heartache tonight.”<br>
“Here.” Kit handed him her notebook. “Tell us the story that goes with the picture. That way, I can write it up and add it to my history.”<br>
“There’s not much to it, really.” Chris said, though he was grateful to her for giving him something to help take his mind, and Cassie’s, off Miranda’s death. “I guess I was about twelve or thirteen -- you’re age, Kit.”<br>
“Hey!” Helen called from the “Manor” up above them. She orbed down and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “You guys always leave me out.”<br>
Chris repositioned Cassie and opened his arms to make room for Helen. “Anyway, this new teacher at school had been giving me a hard time -- detention for getting on the internet without asking permission, stupid stuff like that. But I’d never tell Mom about it, because I didn’t mind having detention with her -- I‘d actually try to get in trouble. I mean, she was, like, whoa.” The girls giggled, exactly the reaction he’d been going for. “Of course, Mom found out; she always did. And she marched me down there for a parent-teacher conference. That’s when we found out she was a demon trying to get to a Charmed One through me.”<br>
“That’s the oldest trick in the book,” Kit scoffed. “Why didn’t you see it coming?”<br>
“I was thirteen, and she was hot. ‘Nough said.”<br>
“And he wouldn’t be a Halliwell if he never liked a demon,” Cassie joked.

“Prue never did,” Kit said.

“We can’t all be as wonderful as your hero, ‘Saint Prue,’” Cassie shot back.

“Anyway,” Chris broke them up. “After that it was a basic ‘check the Book, call the sisters, say a spell’ kind of vanquish.”<br>
“Moral of the story, don’t let hormonal teenage boys go to school,” Kit finished.

“I never would have thought you could be hormonal, Chris,” Cassie said in all seriousness.

He looked down at her in amusement. “What are you, ten?”<br>
“I’m very knowledgeable. I bet you weren’t knowledgeable when you were ten.”<br>
“No.”<br>
Cassie nodded. “That’s because girls mature faster than boys.”<br>
Kit joined in the teasing. “Plus, you seem more like a watcher than a doer when it comes to girls. Let me guess -- first kiss at, oh, say, seventeen.”<br>
“Come on,” he laughed.

“I’m going to kiss lots of boys before I’m seventeen,” Cassie said, and then planted one on Chris’s cheek. “That’s one.” Her eyes sparkled with merriment, her dream at least momentarily forgotten, but then they closed in the sudden manner of a premonition. When she opened them again, she grinned. “Who’s the lady? The one with the red bird?”<br>
Chris started to answer, but then stopped in curiosity -- surely Cassie had seen Bianca before, if nowhere else, then in her vision of Miranda’s death. “You don’t know?”<br>
“Do you think she's hot?”<br>
“I don’t like her, if that’s what you mean.”<br>
“Oh, so she’s not kissable.”<br>
Chris smirked. “I have no intention of ever kissing her.”<br>
“Now, Chris. With an attitude like that, how are you ever going to find a nice girl to settle down with and marry?” Kit mocked.

“I think that’s enough girl-talk for one night. Go to bed.” Chris made to get up, but his cousins kept him down.

“Come on, Chris. We have to get up in a little while anyway to say the spell for the shift change. We won’t tease anymore,” Kit said, but then added with a sneaking glance at her sister. “We know how sensitive you can be.”<br>
“That’s it.” He tried to get up again.

“No, no. We mean it.” Cassie said. “Tell us another story.”<br>
Helen patted him on the chest, trying to draw his attention so she could join the discussion that had gone almost entirely over head. “I’d marry you, Chris.”<br>
Kit and Cassie looked at each other, laughed, and said, “Ewwwwww!” to Helen’s confusion. Chris just nodded to acknowledge the five-year-old’s contribution. “Thank you, Helen.”

[scifi]

His father had already assembled the other people who were to sit in on this meeting by the time Chris entered the library with Kit, who, as the oldest of the Halliwell girls, had been allowed to attend. Max, a witch Prue and Leo had helped when he was a boy, sat on an outcropping of rocks beside a shaman whose name Chris didn’t know, and on the ground sat a gypsy and Bridget. Standing behind his wife was Bridget’s mortal husband, Jack, and Cole leaned against a dilapidated bookcase with his arms crossed in front of him. Leo sat on a rock on the other side of the bookcase, almost central to the other people in the cave, looking for all the world like a king in his court until Kit sat beside him and rested her head on his shoulder to shatter the illusion. Chris smiled at a new face in the sanctuary, a Japanese witch named Hatsuo, but she didn’t return his expression. Instead she moved away from where he stood at the entrance and made room for herself beside Max. Chris nodded his acceptance of her behavior -- she was only the first member of the Resistance to have given him the cold shoulder, but he knew there would be plenty more to take the same view of his part in Miranda’s death. He folded his arms in his habitual defensive posture and leaned back against the wall of the entrance, standing apart from the semi-circle of people, and suddenly feeling very much like a man on trial.

Every other person in the room noticed the tension, but surprisingly, Cole was the first to say anything. “Four witches targeted, three saved. Against the Phoenix, that’s a pretty good record.”<br>
Hatsuo wouldn’t take a hint. “That’s your record, Cole. He had nothing to do with saving us. He was off for a month learning how he could help them kill us --”<br>
“And if he hadn’t kept them busy for that month, Cole wouldn’t have had time to find out what he did,” Bridget replied angrily.

“Miranda was a big price to pay for Cole to do Chris’s job.” Hatsuo finally glared at Chris. “You couldn’t find another way? She was the only one of us four with kids…”

Chris stared at the ground, rehashing the thoughts he’d had every day for the past month, and all of them ran along the same lines as what Hatsuo was saying. He swallowed, knowing when he wasn’t wanted, and started to leave.

“Chris,” Leo’s voice stopped him. He faced his father, who in turn, faced Hatsuo. “Sacrificing Miranda was too a great price,” he told her. “But not one of us knows that better than Chris.”<br>
“You’re speaking as his father,” Hatsuo said dismissively.

“No. I’m speaking as an Elder. And as an Elder, I’m telling you that this infighting will get us nowhere. Now, I can’t make you forgive him, but I can say either drop it, or go outside and wait for your turn as a watch keeper.”<br>
Both Chris and Hatsuo stared at Leo, but for very different reasons. Finally, Hatsuo shrugged. “I was there when Cole first brought us the information. I don’t need to hear it again.” She strode out of the cave, careful to avoid any gaze Chris might give her, though he kept his eyes on the ground while she passed. When she was gone, he glanced again at Leo with a mixture of gratitude and confusion.

“Three witches saved,” Cole continued as though the disagreement had never arisen. “But that’s short-lived at best. The Phoenix won’t stop until they find them.”<br>
“As long as they’re inside the cloak, they should be fine,” Leo said.

“That’s the problem. The Phoenix are working on getting through as we speak. Wyatt didn’t just want the witches. He put out a second contract.” Cole told him. “On you.”<br>
“That’s a lie!” Kit said. “Even Wyatt wouldn’t --”<br>
Cole stopped her with a look that said he wouldn’t tolerate yet another outburst by a spiteful witch in so short a time, especially when this one didn‘t have a clue what she was talking about. “Wyatt is capable of a lot more than you know,” he said, not caring whether or not she understood the personal implications of that statement.

Leo took a breath, calm as ever. “How long have you known?”<br>
“A few weeks now,” Bridget answered. “We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d try to leave the sanctuary to draw the Phoenix away. After what nearly happened last month when you saw Victor --”<br>
“What nearly happened?” Chris interjected, more than a little shaken by Cole’s news.

“Nothing,” Leo brushed off his concern to continue talking to Bridget. “You should have told me before. The Phoenix may have found a way through the cloak by now.”<br>
“No.” Cole said.

“He’s right,” Chris added with more self-control. “If they knew how to find you, they’d have done it already.”<br>
“Still, I have to leave.” Leo said. “I put the whole camp in danger.”<br>
Lydia finally joined the discussion in her slow, quietly decisive drawl. “Leo, the witches you serve may generate their own cloak, but they couldn’t maintain it without you to help them focus. If you leave them, the cloak will fail, and they’ll be lambs to the slaughter. If you stay with them, they’ll have a chance.”<br>
“But it’s just a matter of time. The cloak can’t hold them off forever,” Leo said as he stood up and started pacing, a sure indication that his calm was gone. “If we had some way of getting everyone to a place where they didn’t have to maintain it . . .”<br>
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Cole said. “Germelshausen.”<br>
“What?” Chris shook his head at the jumble of syllables.

Leo just looked at Cole. “Brigadoon.”<br>
“The musical?”

Leo broke his gaze with the demon to explain. “Germelshausen, Brigadoon -- they’re just different names for the same story. But that’s all it is, a story. I’ve never seen anything in any of the magical texts --”<br>
“Are you looking in the right books?” Cole interrupted. “Leo, I’ve seen it.”<br>
Leo stopped pacing to hear Cole out.

“1924. I was after a witch in some godforsaken German forest, when all of a sudden we saw this city on the other side of a bridge. It was old, ancient, really, and very . . . un-German. But that wasn’t what surprised me. As soon as we came near it, the witch got this burst of power -- she knocked Belthazor to the ground without breaking a sweat. Then she crossed the bridge, and when I tried to follow, I couldn’t. There was some barrier that kept me from setting foot on that bridge. No matter how much I fired on it, the barrier never came down. She just stood there laughing at me, until the town and bridge disappeared, taking her with them. Now, I’m not sure exactly what day it was, or exactly where in Germany the portal showed up, but I do remember there was snow on the ground. If the stories are right, and it appears every hundred years, we’re looking at this winter as our only shot.” Cole paused. “Leo, you get them to Brigadoon, and he’ll never find them.”<br>
The room was so quiet, Chris didn’t dare move to disturb the silence, even if his back was starting to hurt from leaning against the wall for so long.

“Even if it’s true, that’s a big timeframe to work with, Cole,” Leo said. “We’d have to find some way to fill in the gaps in what you know -- time, place, duration. And like I said, we don’t have any resources that can tell us those things.” He motioned to the shelves and piles of books surrounding them and extending back into the cave.

“Wyatt might,” Chris mused. He glanced around at the people in the room, and then back to Leo. “The books you have here are only the ones you could orb from Magic School. But what about the ones that were bound to the school -- the ones that couldn’t leave the grounds? They’re still there -- under lock and key, but there. I’m willing to bet they’d have something. I’ll try to get in and see --”<br>
“No, I will,” Cole said. “You’re not exactly in a position to risk ticking Wyatt off. Me, on the other hand, I think he’d enjoy seeing again.”<br>
“Lydia should go with you,” Bridget said. “You could use some good spells to go with your firepower.”<br>
“You two work on a way to get in and out of Magic School undetected, then let us know when you’re ready,” Leo agreed. “Chris --”<br>
“Should not stay here,” Bridget interrupted. “He should keep an eye on the Phoenix, see how close they’re getting. Or at the very least, try to distract them from their goal.”<br>
Leo couldn’t argue with her logic, but reluctantly nodded, effectively ending the meeting.

[scifi]

Chris was the first one out of the cave, eager as he was to get far away from the others and be by himself to take in everything he had heard. He hoped they hadn’t noticed how very near panic his concern for Leo had been before he’d forced himself to calm down -- he wasn’t keen on acknowledging it himself. But now as he paced back and forth among the trees on the outskirts of camp, he saw that Bridget, at least, had detected it, because she was now approaching him. What Chris didn’t see, however, was an invisible Leo, who had also perceived how upset he had been and now orbed nearby to listen to his son say to Bridget what he wouldn’t say to his own father.

“What is it, Chris?” Bridget asked.

He just kept pacing, not knowing exactly how to explain to her the complexity of his problems. “She was trying to tell me,” he muttered. “She probably would have come out and said it if I hadn’t been an idiot and died.”<br>
This was a bit too oblique for Bridget to follow. “What? Who?”<br>
“Bianca,” Chris finally spoke directly to her. “The witch I was training with. We were talking one night and we somehow got on the topic of Leo. She was asking me how I felt about him, if I loved him and stuff. I didn’t know it then, but it was like my answer would help her decide something --” He paused, then continued quietly at his realization. “Whether or not to go through with it.”<br>
“And?”<br>
Chris ran his hand though his hair in frustration. “And I practically gave her permission -- said ‘Have at it, and enjoy.’”

He turned abruptly to scan the woods for the source of what sounded like a defeated sigh that came when he finished speaking, but seeing no one there, he started pacing again.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, mentally adding, about either of them. “I have to talk to Grandpa. He’ll know something.”<br>
“Chris,” Bridget began, but then had to look at her hands to think of what to say. “I’m sorry I haven’t mentioned anything before . . . It’s just that everything was so up-in-the-air and I didn’t get a chance.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then told him straight out. “Victor’s been in hospital for the past week.”<br>

[scifi]

The smells of bleached sheets and antiseptic floors were the first impressions Chris received when he orbed into Victor’s hospital room. The second was the sound of Maria singing her verse of “Somewhere” from West Side Story. He glanced briefly at the hologram of Tony and Maria holding each other, then focused on his grandfather asleep in the bed, which was propped up as far as it would go. Chris surveyed the monitors beside the bed with the practiced eye of someone who cared for a chronically ill relative, and saw that Victor’s blood pressure, pulse, and respiration rate were all high -- but that was typical for him. The lovers in the movie continued singing over the steady rhythm of the machines.

“Somewhere
We’ll find a new way of living
We’ll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere.

There’s a place for us,
A time and place for us.
Hold my hand and we’re halfway there.
Hold my hand and I’ll take you there
Somehow,
Someday,
Somewhere!”

It seemed this was just a musical-themed day. “Off,” Chris ordered the TV. As soon as the sound stopped, Victor woke.

“I was watching that,” he said.

“Your eyes were closed.”<br>
“I could hear it, though. I was thinking about you on stage -- best Tony I ever saw.”<br>
“I was understudy to the understudy -- and that’s because Ms. Adair felt sorry for me. I went on only because the other guys had the bad fish at lunch. Dogs howled, Grandpa.”<br>
“Ah, but the acting! There wasn’t a dry eye in the place when you thought Maria was dead. You were so real.” Victor pondered the memory for a moment. “Probably because you knew what loss feels like better than the other kids.”<br>
Chris adjusted the oxygen tube so it wasn’t tangled up with the IV. “How‘d you get in here?”<br>
“Oh, it’s just a cold that got out of hand.”<br>
“A cold.”<br>
“It doesn’t take much, nowadays. They’re supposed to let me go home this afternoon.”<br>
“So you’re better?” Chris asked as his eye caught a form posted beside a vitals chart on the wall above the monitors.

“Better than when they brought me in,” Victor said, but Chris had stopped listening when he read the first few lines of the form.

I, Victor Bennett, hereby direct that none of the following resuscitative measures be initiated or continued in the event that my heart stops beating or I stop breathing:

He glanced down and noticed for the first time a color-coded bracelet above the one that identified his grandfather. He clenched his teeth and started breathing a bit faster. “Since when do you post a DNR for a cold?”<br>
The door opened before Victor could respond, and a doctor came in smiling with the false cheer that some doctors exuded. “Mr. Bennett, how are you this morning?” The man stopped at the sight of Chris, and looked to Victor to cure his confusion.

“Doc Stone, this is Chris.”<br>
“The grandson. I’ve heard so much about you. You’re all he talks about.” The doctor extended his hand, but Chris didn’t shake it.

“What’s wrong with him?” he said without prelude.

Dr. Stone glanced at Victor for some indication of how detailed his answer should be, and the patient nodded for him to go ahead. Stone instantly switched to somber mode. “Well, uh, your grandfather came in with a severe case of bronchitis -- it’s to be expected with the emphysema --”<br>
“The big picture,” Chris interrupted. “That form’s dated three months ago.”<br>
“As you probably know, Mr. Bennett’s been having some mild abdominal pain and bowel trouble. He thought it was just old-age, but when we checked it out, uh, there was a mass, uh, at the head of the pancreas. It was malignant.” Stone pulled a pencil out of his coat pocket and began twirling it between his fingers. “Uh, the nature of pancreatic cancer is such that it goes untreated for a long time because people assume the symptoms are from something less serious. It gives the cancer time to grow and spread.”<br>
“What are you doing for him?”<br>
Stone looked like he hadn’t quite made the point he had been trying to get at. “Well, we’ve arranged for Mr. Bennett to remain at home with nurses to come out every day and assist his regular nurse in keeping him as comfortable as possible.”<br>
“I mean --” Chris had to take a breath for his voice to come out normally. “I mean surgically, what have you done?”<br>
“Surgery at this point would be of negligible help. And even if it could give him a few months, I wouldn’t risk it. At his age and in his condition, he could die on the table.”

“There’s other things you can try --”<br>
“No chemo, no radiation,” Victor insisted. “I’m not going out like that.”<br>
“And it probably wouldn’t do much, in any case,” Stone added.

Chris set his jaw. “Can you give us a minute?”<br>
“Sure,” The doctor turned to leave. “Take all the time you need.”<br>
“This is insane,” Chris said when he had gone. He started to remove the tape that held Victor’s IV needle in the back of his hand.

“What are you doing?”<br>
“I’m going to --” he broke off and swept the room with his eyes, furious that he had to remember to check for Ekera’s presence at a time like this. Finding no tell-tale glowing outline, he continued. “I’m taking you to Leo.”<br>
“No, Chris,” Victor said softly and stopped his hands. “No. I’m dying. It’s a natural, human thing to do. I’m not afraid.”<br>
“Good for you, but God knows I am.”<br>
“Chris, I’m an old man, and there comes a time when we have to accept that some things are meant to be.”<br>
“This isn’t one of those times.”<br>
“I think it is.” Victor paused. “My girls were always talking about their destiny, and how things happen for a reason. Maybe my destiny was just to make sure you turned out all right.”<br>
“Then you’re not finished . . .”<br>
“Oh, I think you turned out just fine.”<br>
Tears were starting to come to Chris’s eyes, and Victor smiled. “It’s all right to cry.”<br>
Chris shook his head. “No, because you’re not going to die. If you won’t go to Leo, then I’ll bring him here.” He orbed from the room and reformed only a couple of feet away from where Leo was slowly pacing in the woods where Chris had done the same only a few minutes before.

“I need your help. Grandpa’s dying.”<br>
Leo stopped and looked up at him. “I know.”<br>
“And you still haven’t --” Chris started to yell, but then lowered his voice. “I need you to come heal him. We’ll take some guards with us --”<br>
“I can’t.”<br>
“Or you won’t!” He didn’t worry about keeping it down now. “What is it, some stupid rule again?”<br>
“Don’t you think I want to save him?” Leo yelled back. “He’s the closest thing to a father you ever had.”<br>
Hearing this admission from his real father shocked him out of his anger long enough for Leo to explain. “I tried already, last month, when I went to see him about you. I sensed his pain, and I tried, but he wouldn’t let me.”<br>
Chris thought about what Bridget had said earlier about what had almost happened to Leo when he visited Victor. “ And then Wyatt sensed you were out.”<br>
Leo reluctantly nodded. “After I left Victor, a demon intercepted me, but I made it back fine. There’s one less demon, anyway,” he attempted a self-effacing smile to minimize the seriousness of the encounter.

Chris closed his eyes and listened to the wind in the trees. “I’m not giving up on him.”<br>
“If you can change his mind, I’ll heal him in a heartbeat.”<br>
Chris might have thanked Leo if he hadn’t heard the doubt in his voice, and he knew how well-founded that doubt was. He looked away into the recesses of the forest as though he could find some path there that could lead him away from everything that was wrong in the world. All he saw was a tangle of undergrowth.

[scifi]

Cole and Lydia were sitting at the entrance of her tent, where they had been studying the blueprints Leo had drawn up from his best recollection of his old mentor’s school. An incredibly meandering design coupled with security measures from both the time of the Elders and, most likely, the time of Wyatt, would not make for a simple entry.

“If I were Wyatt,” Cole said, “I’d have two, maybe three guards posted here, just before you get to the force field.” He tapped the blueprints. “Not particularly powerful demons, though, but not stupid, either. That way, you’d have a believably hard time vanquishing them, but not impossible. It would boost your confidence in you abilities, but not be so simple as to hint at a trap. Then you’d go forward on your merry way and get zapped by the force field.”<br>
“I’ll buy that.” Lydia nodded. “You take the guards, and I’ll keep us from getting zapped.” She wrote the force field down on her list of things to devise spells for.

“Of course, that still leaves us with three floors and a couple of wide open corridors to pass through -- no cover there at all.”<br>
Lydia grinned. “Oh, I can give us cover. Don’t worry about that.” She stood up. “I’m going to grab some lunch -- you hungry?”<br>
Cole shook his head and flipped the blueprints over to survey the next floor they would have to tackle. He was alone with his work for no more than thirty seconds, however, before he heard children’s whispered voices from the other side of the canvas.

“Talk to him.”<br>
“No, he’s busy. He might get mad.”<br>
“Maybe he wants to be friends. Nobody else’ll talk to him.”<br>
“That’s because he likes it that way. Wait a minute -- he’s getting annoyed.”<br>
“What do you want?” Cole called out to them.

The two girls peeked around the fold of the tent, then brought themselves into full view.

“Um, we just wanted to say hi.” The girl had Phoebe’s habit of smiling when she was nervous.

“Hi,” Cole said flatly.

“We never introduced ourselves --” she tried again.

“I know who you are.”<br>
Her smile started to wane at his interruption. “It’s polite,” she explained in one last effort.

Cole relented with a nod, and her effervescence returned. “I’m Cassie, and this is my cousin Helen.”<br>
The younger girl held out her hand in an attempt to be grown-up about meeting him. Cole only stared at the hand, wondering vaguely if its owner would grow up to be like Paige, and if so, whether there could be any satisfaction in visiting the sins of the mother on the daughter.

“I’m sorry about the crystal cage,” Helen said. “I thought you were one of the bad guys.” She smiled then, showing the gaps where she had lost three of her front teeth, and Cole remembered how he’d always considered second-generation retribution to be an asinine concept. He shook her hand.

“Don’t worry about it -- runs in the family.”<br>
“Huh?”<br>
Nothing,” he said. “Look, you’d better not let Leo catch you talking to me.”<br>
Cassie laughed. “Oh, he won’t do anything.”<br>
“What makes you so sure?”<br>
“He’s Leo.”<br>
Cole grinned at her confidence in having her uncle wrapped around her little finger.

“There was actually something we wanted to ask you,” Cassie said. “Don’t get mad.”<br>
“Why ask me if you think I’ll get mad?”<br>
The girls looked at each other, unsure of whether or not they’d be allowed to ask.

“What is it?” Cole said.

“Well,” Cassie began. “You were vanquished when you had the powers of Belthazor, right?”<br>
“Right.”<br>
“So does that mean now you’re --”<br>
“Still Belthazor,” he answered.

The girls glanced at each other again. “Can we see him?”<br>
“What?”<br>
“Well, see, Kit -- that’s my sister -- she’s writing this book. It’s about our family’s history. And you’re in it.” Cassie explained. “She drew a picture of Belthazor from one of her visions. She’s a really good artist, but Helen doesn’t believe that’s what he looks like, even though I told her I saw the same thing. I just thought you could prove it to her.”<br>
Cole marveled at the tact, or lack thereof, to be found in children. “No. I’d scare her.”<br>
“I’m not a baby,” Helen protested.

“I’ve scared much older witches than you, trust me.”<br>
“Like my mom?” Cassie asked hesitantly.

Cole glanced down at the blueprints but didn’t really see them. “For one.”<br>
There was a silence, and then Cassie asked the million-dollar question. “Why -- why wouldn’t you leave her alone?”<br>
Cole didn’t have an answer, but simply stared into her face.

“Did that one make you mad?” Helen asked.

He tried to start an explanation a couple of times before he had to settle on one that sounded too trite for his liking. “When you love someone as much as I love Phoebe . . .” He searched for a way to continue. “It’s just really hard to let go.”<br>
Cassie’s response proved how incomplete answers never could satisfy these children. “My dad loved her, too. But if she said she didn’t want him, I don’t think he’d ever -- ever --”<br>
“’Stalk her’ is what you’re looking for,” Cole finished for her. He sighed. “Your dad must have been a good man.”<br>
Cassie mistook his generalized compliment for an additional reason. “Was it because you were evil?”<br>
Cole thought she couldn’t have made a more apt mistake. “Partly.”<br>
“What’s it like? To be evil, I mean.”<br>
“Do you ever run out of questions?”<br>
“Not usually,” she answered frankly.

How to put into ten-year-old terms an answer to a question philosophers had debated for millennia? “You know when you’re in line with the other kids for lunch and they’re serving something you both really like? Well, pretend you’re the next in line, Cassie, and you see there’s only one piece left. And they’re waiting to put out something you really don’t like. Helen’s in line behind you, and she’s going to get stuck with the mystery meat. If you wanted to be nice, what would you do?”<br>
“I’d let her cut in line.”<br>
“But what would you rather do?”<br>
“I’d rather take the last piece of the good stuff.”<br>
“That’s it. That’s what it feels like, except on a much bigger scale. And you don’t stop to think about what would be the nice thing to do. You push everybody else out of the way and take what you want. But when you get it, it’s not enough. So you fight to get more, and more, until you don’t even know what it is you want. Pretty soon, you’re just pushing people to be pushing them. You’re not fighting for anything; you’re fighting because that’s what you’ve always done and you don’t know anything else to do. It becomes who you are, and it takes a big jolt to get you out of the rut -- and that’s only if somewhere inside you actually want out of the rut to begin with. Your typical demons don’t want out. They think that getting power and spreading death and destruction will get them what they want, that being evil can make them happy. But in reality, they’re incapable of being happy, because it’s just the same routine, and they know it. And that realization keeps them miserable.”<br>
“You make me feel sorry for them,” Cassie said.

“Don’t,” Cole corrected. “It’s their choice to be evil, just like it was mine. And if you come across the rare exceptions who realize they can choose to be good, it’s not something you can persuade them to see. You can be the reason, like Phoebe was for me, but they have to pull themselves up out of the rut.”<br>
“But you went back to being evil -- that was because of Mom, too.”<br>
“I fell back in because I thought of evil in win or lose terms. I thought I could win if I fought hard enough. But when I lost her, I felt like I’d lost the battle, and after feeling that, there was no reason to fight anymore. That was my mistake, that I thought there could ever come a point where I could say, ‘I beat it. I’m good and nothing can ever change that.’ I didn’t realize that I would never be able to stop fighting, even though there was nothing to win.”<br>
He saw that Cassie was thoroughly confused now -- he was starting to confuse himself -- and Helen was looking like she needed an afternoon nap, so he grossly simplified it. “Evil is choosing to be the opposite of Good, which is fighting for something other than yourself.”<br>
“What are you fighting for?”<br>
He paused, and then smiled sorrowfully. “A memory.”<br>
“Pretty flimsy thing to fight for, don’t you think?” The three of them looked up to see Kit standing with her hands on her hips.

“Not if it’s strong enough,” Cole replied.

Kit ignored him and glared at the other girls. “What part of “Don’t talk to him” did Leo not make clear?”<br>
“We’re not hurting anything,” Cassie said.

“Go home,” Kit ordered.

“Make us.”<br>
She turned her anger on Cole. “Got some little recruits for the ‘Feel Sorry for Cole Club,’ huh? Using the same ‘I can suppress my demonic half’ crap that you used on my mother.”<br>
“Leave him alone!”<br>
“Did you tell them how much you hated Paige, how if you saw her now you’d probably grab the nearest sharp tool and gut her?”<br>
“Stop it!” Cassie held her temples and Helen gave frightened looks at both sisters.

“Did you tell them how you turned Mom against her own sisters because you had to have her all to yourself?”

“You’re hurting me!” Cassie yelled at her.

“How many times did she dump you, anyway? You couldn’t take a hint the first time could you? She knew from the start what you were, no matter how much you said ‘I’m not evil anymore.’ I’ve got it all written down, committed to memory.” She mimicked Phoebe’s rejection as though reading from a play. “’Maybe not on the surface and maybe not even in your heart. But somewhere inside of you, you'll always be. And you can't ever change that. Goodbye.’ Was it just not clear enough for you?”<br>
“Take me home,” Cassie said weakly as she held onto Helen’s hand so the youngest could orb her away from there.

[scifi]

“You gave my mother nothing but grief,” Kit finished.

“She gave as good as she got,” Cole finally shot back now that Cassie was gone.

“No, I’ve seen you two together, and she didn’t do anything to deserve what you did.”<br>
“Really? Did you see how many times I saved her life, only to be thrown out the next second? Did you see how she left me in the Wastelands even when she knew I had been purged of the Source -- when there was nothing left except the husband she had promised to always love only a couple of months before? You have no idea what that kind of grief is.”<br>
Kit only narrowed her eyes. “Why are you helping us then? Do you get some kick out of pretending to be good for a little while, and then turning back, right when we start to trust you?”<br>
“That would make hating me easier, wouldn’t it? You could carry on with your mother’s righteous indignation with no problem at all. You’d rather I worked for Wyatt.”<br>
“I’d rather you’d stayed vanquished.”<br>
“You write what you see, I get that,” Cole continued. “But I think you’re only seeing what you want to see -- a perfect mother, and perfect aunts, and their perfect crusade. You’ll never be a good writer if that’s all you see, if that’s all you tell people. You’ll be worth your salt only if you tell the truth.”<br>
“And what’s that, Cole?”<br>
“That they were good witches, and good women, who were more than capable of evil when it suited them.”<br>
“When they were under a spell, or possessed, or --”<br>
“Nope. They could be evil all on their own. They weren‘t saints -- martyrs, I‘ll grant you, but not saints.”<br>
“Oh, so everybody’s evil, is that it?”<br>
“No, everybody has the capacity for both good and evil -- it’s a matter of which you choose more consistently. Like just now, when you kept sharpening your claws in me even though it was your sister who felt the scratches. That was an evil you chose, however minor it may be.”<br>
“I don’t need a demon to lecture me on evil.”<br>
“And I don’t need a kid to lecture me on the validity of my existence,” Cole said. “So are we done?”<br>
“More than done.”<br>

[scifi]

Let my plea not be in vain.
This man whose life is on the wane,
Force him to let us heal his pain --

“I swear this isn’t personal gain?” Chris said to himself, a lame ending to a lame spell. He drew a huge X over the words he’d written, re-crossed it several times with a ferocity that forced the pen tip through the paper so that it marked on the next page in the notepad, then ripped out and crumpled both pages so he could throw them into the trash can across the room. It was so full of other failed attempts that the pages rolled off the wrinkled mountain and landed in the floor, taking a few of the more precariously perched wads down with them in a paper-slide.

He stood from where he had been sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up to serve as a writing surface and tossed the pad and pen onto his desk before hitting the light switch in his room. The rest of the house was dark except for the dim light shining from beneath his grandfather’s door. Chris walked softly down the familiar hallway and opened the door wide enough for him to slip inside, but not past the point where the hinges always creaked. Victor was asleep, having never touched the stack of books on his nightstand beneath the lamp. He was bound and determined to get all those classics read before he died. Chris nodded at an idea that occurred to him and returned to his own room, where in the back of the closet was a box full of paperbacks he’d had to buy for high school English classes -- the advanced ones his Grandpa had made him sign up for because he said a witch needed a good vocabulary. He was right, of course, and all the Cliff’s Notes Chris had read in lieu of the assignments had, indeed, helped him. He dug through the Dickens, and the three Brontes, and the Shakespeare -- hey, he actually did have Macbeth -- and came to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

“Now that’s a big book,” he said, and took it back into Victor’s room.

You just try getting through that, Victor Bennett, he thought. All 783 pages of punctuationless jabber.

He lifted some of the other books in the stack to place the tree-killer among them so his Grandpa wouldn’t suspect that he’d added it -- and hopefully wouldn’t remember that it wasn’t one of his original choices. When the books were straight again, Chris pick up the one on top out of curiosity and saw the cover picture of a young man and woman sitting on a river bank and gazing steadfastly at each other. The picture didn’t quite fit the title -- Crime and Punishment -- so he read the synopsis on the back cover. It was about a murderer finding redemption. He opened to the last page to read if this was one of those old-fashioned books with convoluted sentences; he hoped it was, really, so Victor would have to take his time accomplishing his goal.

He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.

“You couldn’t pick a happy book to read before you go?” Chris muttered, then realized that he was actually admitting that his Grandpa wasn’t going to stay with him, no matter how many books he tried to add to the list or how many spells he wrote. He turned off the lamp and stood in the darkness listening to the staccato intakes of breath -- and that wasn’t even what was killing him. Chris couldn’t stand being in this room, in this house. He had to go somewhere, anywhere -- it didn’t matter, so long as he didn’t have to hear Victor gasp or wonder where in his body the cancer was attacking at this very moment. He orbed with no real sense of direction and ended up at one of the last places he ordinarily would have thought to go.

Bianca’s apartment was brightly lit, a huge contrast to what he’d just left. He saw that Tess was at her dinette table scrying over a world map, and several other members of the Phoenix were scattered around her living room searching battered old texts for something. Bianca was seated apart from the rest, not looking in her book, but rather staring at her reflection in the window. They all stiffened and glanced up at his appearance, but only she rose to meet him.

“Chris, what are you doing here?” Concern rather than the annoyance the rest of them exuded came through in her voice. “You look terrible.”<br>
“Can I talk to you?” he said, his own voice barely above a whisper.

“Sure.” She looked to the other people in the room. “Can you --”<br>
“We’re not going anywhere. We’re busy,” Tess told her and continued to scry.

Bianca glared at them all, at their callous attention to nothing except their appointed tasks, and at the fact that she was not even in control in her own home.

“Fine,” she said, and touching Chris’s arm, shimmered with him to the arboretum.

The dew on the flowers there reflected moonlight so that the place sparkled with tiny blue-white lights that might have reminded them both of a whitelighter orbing if either of them had bothered to notice the beauty that surrounded them.

“Chris, what is it?” Bianca asked. “How can I help?”<br>
He sat down on the marble bench, uncertain what to say now that they were here. “I don’t know . . . I don’t even know why I came to you . . . I can’t explain it…”

Bianca nodded and sat beside him. “It’s from spending a month alone with me. That’s what the isolation is for, to make you rely on the teacher implicitly. It’ll pass in time,” she added with a hint of what might have been regret. “But for now, you can tell me.”<br>
“Since I was a little kid, I’ve always been afraid that I’d be the last one left,” Chris said almost to himself, unmindful of the tears that started falling down his face at the confession. “Afraid that I’d have to watch them all leave me, and I’d have nobody. And that’s exactly what’s happening.”<br>
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Who’s --”<br>
“Just one after another. Leo, and Mom, and Phoebe and Paige -- and Leo again,” he added with a bitter laugh. He took a shallow breath to try and calm himself. “My grandfather’s dying. . . and there’s not a thing I can do about it.”<br>
Bianca knew better than to say she was sorry. Conventional platitudes seemed inappropriate, somehow. So when his attempt at calm failed with his last few words and he finally wept in earnest, all she could do was hold him.

“I’m not supposed to be alone,” he choked out. “This isn’t supposed to happen.”<br>
“Shhh.” She stroked his hair like a child’s. “I’m here. I’ve got you.” She kissed his forehead a couple of times before instinctively moving to stifle the cries coming from his mouth. She pulled away after a second, surprised at what she had done.

Chris stared at her for a moment, her face only inches from his own. He was still struggling to breathe through his sobs, but to his own confusion, he drew her back into the kiss anyway. There was no thinking, no analyzing, only feeling. He brought his body in closer to hers, and his hand moved from her arm to the nape of her neck as if by doing so he could hold her in this moment indefinitely. Bianca withdrew briefly to inhale, then began nibbling at his lower lip. The sensation took him by surprise, and he opened his eyes. At the same moment that she bit his lip a little too hard, he saw a glowing red outline looming directly behind her. He broke away abruptly.

“I’m sorry,” Bianca said breathlessly, taking his sudden movement as her fault, and mortified that she had let herself do too much, too fast, at a time when such a mistake could only be taken as insensitive.

Chris forced himself not to look in the direction of the shadow that had been watching them for no telling how long. Instead he stared at her lips and brushed a thumb over them. “Don’t be,” he said, and kissed her a last brief time before standing up and putting a little distance between them.

“I should probably get back,” she said after an awkward silence. He nodded, and after she shimmered, he sat back down on the bench, still careful to avoid noticing the shadow. He lay back on the cold marble with his hands beneath his head and watched the moon climb higher in the sky, determined to bore Ekera with his idling. It gave him time to think, in any case, and he ran his tongue over the small swelling on his lip where Bianca had bit him. Her kiss had been ravenous, love-starved, and so intense that there must have been quite a lot of mental buildup during the time they’d known each other. It occurred to him that he should have been bothered by kissing the woman who was supposed to track down and murder his father, or by feeling what he was feeling right now, but something told him that he needn’t be. Somehow, he was sure that she wouldn’t kill him.

So sure and so focused on the memory of their moment was he, that he didn’t notice when Ekera left him. She reported immediately to Wyatt, who was in the midst of an experiment to resurrect three demons at once. She waited for him to succeed and send the demons away before speaking.

“You were right,” she said at the end of her report. “He’s drawn to her like a moth to a flame.”<br>
“Keep watching them together,” Wyatt replied. “If he’s going to slip up, it’ll be with her.”<br>

[scifi]

Cole had just woken up from the first dreamless sleep he’d had since he’d been back when he saw the silhouette of the youngest Halliwell cousin lurking around the entrance of his tent. He opened the flap and looked down at her so unexpectedly that she stumbled backward and fell. She didn’t move to pick herself up, but instead returned his stare with a mixture of fear and determination to say what she’d come to say.

“Would you really kill my mom if you saw her now?” she asked exactly as Paige would have done -- straight to the point.

It took him a second to answer, not because he was unsure, but because he was contemplating what would have happened if he had been successful all those years ago. Helen, and Cassie and Kit, in all probability, would never have been in the world.

“No. I wouldn’t,” he finally said.

Then Helen did something that set her apart from her mother -- she took him at his word. Her gap-toothed grin returned, and she stood to take his hand. “I want to show you something.”<br>
Before he could agree, she had orbed them to the children’s Manor, where he had to duck his head to avoid hitting it on a beam. Three pallets of blankets, made up neatly as though they were real beds, filled most of the tiny room, but in one corner there was enough space for a dilapidated trunk to hold their few belongings.

Helen put her finger to her lips in a shushing motion. “Don’t tell,” she said, and then reached out her hand toward the trunk. “The Charmed Ones,” she called.

A thick green spiral-bound notebook appeared in her hand, and Cole saw that under the title was a triquetra drawn in permanent marker.

“Kit would kill me if she knew I sneak this out when she’s not here,” Helen whispered even though they were alone. “She’s got lots of them -- Melinda Warren, Cassandra Wentworth -- that’s who Cassie’s named for, since she had prems too. But this is the only one I like to look at.” She sat down, opened the notebook, and spread it wide on the floor. The first page was filled edge to edge, top to bottom, even where there were no lines, with tiny script, doubtlessly written thus to conserve paper. But Helen wasn’t pointing there. She was pointing to the inside cover where the four sister witches were drawn in an impossible portraiture, obviously taken from Kit’s imagination rather than any real vision. They were in the attic at the Manor, Prue and Piper sitting on the sofa, and Phoebe and Paige standing behind them, each choosing a sister to lean in next to and wrap her arms around.

“Is that what she really looked like?” Helen asked, indicating Paige hanging around Piper’s neck.

Cole got the feeling that she had received an answer to that question many times before, since she probably asked it of everyone who’d known Paige, hoping to get a smidgeon of information about the mother who had died when Helen was no more than a couple of months old.

“Pretty much,” he answered. “A little off on the eyes. Her eyes were more like yours.”<br>
Helen colored up with pride, as he knew she would, and began flipping through the notebook to show him other pictures.

“Why’d she name you Helen?” he asked to make her feel like she was worth a real conversation. “It doesn’t start with a P.”<br>
“Duh, none of our names starts with a P,” she said. “She named me for her other Grams. So I’m Helen Halliwell-Matthews. Chris told me she said I was hyphenated, so my name might as well be, too. He didn’t tell me what hyphenated means, though. It must mean long, because it takes forever to write my name.” She kept turning the pages to find other images of her mother.

“Hang on. Go back,” Cole said when he caught sight of one of the demons Kit had written about. “I know him.” He read the entry. “That spineless little twerp got away? Still, it’s good for us -- he could be useful.” He tapped his chin in thought, then glanced mischievously at Helen. “You want to learn how to make a vanquishing potion?”<br>
*** *** ***

Kit kicked at the dirt underfoot as she walked aimlessly through camp, lost in thought. She didn’t even notice Cassie eating her meager breakfast in front of a friends tent, where she had chosen to spend the night rather than sleep in the same room with Her Obnoxious Majesty. But Cassie noticed her and felt the frustration radiate from her like heat off of pavement. She set her meal on the ground and fell into step with her sister.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked grudgingly.

“Stupid demon -- it’s all his fault!” she mumbled. “I had a vision last night of Prue kissing a warlock. Prue!”<br>
Cassie tried to remember some of the things she’d seen herself. “You mean the one she married? That was a trick --”<br>
“No. This one she meant to kiss. He was going to be a priest.”<br>
“Prue kissed a priest?”<br>
“Going to be,” Kit emphasized. “That’s not the point. She knew he was a warlock, and she liked him anyway. Do you know what this means?”<br>
“Um . . . No.”<br>
“It means being attracted to evil is in our blood, all the way back to Melinda Warren. Prue was my one exception, and now that’s shot all to pieces. It’s a family legacy, which means we’re doomed to follow them. Chris was first with that 8th grade hoochy-demon-teacher he had. How long before one of us falls, too?”<br>
“Well, the only demon we’ve ever really been around is Cole, so I don’t know. Liking your mom’s ex? Sounds pretty gross to me.”<br>
“Cassie!” Kit yelled. “Why’d you put that picture in my head? As if Prue wasn’t bad enough! Ew, ew, ewwww!” she flailed and stomped at the very notion.

*** *** ***

[scifi]

Chris couldn’t get away from home until mid-afternoon. He’d only just had time to tell Victor to mind what he talked about since Ekera could show up at any moment, before she actually did appear in the room in the form of a chair’s shadow. What she saw for the next several hours might have been typical in any non-magical family, with Victor getting up to fix his own breakfast, and staving off the hospice nurse who tried to give him a sponge bath, and sneaking outside for a smoke because he wouldn’t give up that pleasure this late in the game, and with Chris scolding the whole time that he ought to be resting. She finally left them when Victor took that advice to shut up his grandson’s nagging and settled down for a nap. Chris thought when he finally had a chance to orb that if her glowing outline followed him around much longer, he was going to start hating the color red.

He found Bridget and Lydia sitting in the shade of the forest, deep in conversation. “Hey,” he greeted them. “Where’s Leo?”<br>
“What do you need him for?” Bridget asked.

“Nothing. I was just . . .”<br>
“Checking up on him?” Lydia put in.

“No,” he answered defensively. The women did a tolerable job of suppressing their smiles.

“Cole thinks he has a lead on finding what the assassins are up to. Leo went with him to check it out,” Bridget explained.

“What!”<br>
“I know, I know. But once he has something in his head, there’s no talking him out of it.”<br>
“That man is completely and totally insane,” the women heard Chris say as he orbed out again.

“Do you want to tell him, or should I?” Lydia asked.

“That they’re just alike?” Bridget said. “I’m not telling him.”<br>
Chris had no trouble sensing Leo once he knew his father wasn’t at the sanctuary, a fact that infuriated him all the more. He was in the lair of some lower-level demon to watch Cole’s interrogation, something he apparently wasn’t stomaching too well.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Chris demanded, for the moment oblivious to Cole’s tactics. “Right in the middle of the Underworld -- are you trying to be found?”<br>
“You may not know this, Chris, but I can take care of myself. We’re cloaked well enough for now.”<br>
“I found you.”<br>
“I never block you.”<br>
Chris finally looked to where Leo was watching when he saw him wince at something Cole had done.

“It’s a simple question, Auric.” Cole had thrown the demon on the ground and pressed his knee into his chest. Directly over Auric’s face, he held a vial of vanquishing potion.

“I swear I don’t know!”<br>
“You’re telling me a courier demon, whose sole purpose in life is to keep his ear to the ground for any and all rumors, doesn’t know how the Phoenix plan to kill the very last Elder in existence? You’re lying.” Cole tipped the potion vial so that its contents were just on the verge of spilling out onto Auric.

“They’ve got a darklighter arrow!” he said quickly. “They’re making the rounds with the apothecaries to find someone to duplicate the poison -- make it better, even.”<br>
Cole didn’t remove the threat of the potion even after Auric’s change of heart. The slightest movement of his hand could break the surface tension between the liquid and the rim of the vial.

“Have they succeeded -- who’d they get to do it?”<br>
“I don’t know! Really! But whoever it is, Wyatt wants him dead when he’s finished making it. Everybody knows that, so the Phoenix had a hard time getting someone to actually try to make the stuff.”<br>
“What have you heard about his plans for the mortals?”<br>
Auric tried to break away from Cole, but only succeeded in making a drop spill from the vial and land just beside his head. He screamed in terrified fury.

“Cole, that’s enough. This isn’t the way to go about it,” Leo reasoned.

Cole ignored him. “You know something, you little maggot. Tell me.”<br>
“He wants to take over --”<br>
“I know that; you’re stalling.”<br>
“And he’s got more than enough demons to do it, but he keeps bringing back more and more -- the smart ones, who you’d think wouldn’t want to serve anybody.”<br>
“What kind of timeframe are we talking about?”<br>
“I don’t know.”<br>
Cole threatened with the vial again.

“I don’t know! I don’t know!”<br>
“Stop it, Cole,” Leo ordered, and then stepped forward to intervene. The movement distracted Cole enough for Auric to think he had a chance to get away, but in his haste, he jostled Cole’s arm, causing the potion to pour down onto the courier’s face. Cole rolled away from the vanquish, then glared at Leo.

“I knew I shouldn’t have let you come,” he said as he stood and brushed himself off. “I was handling it.”<br>
“That wasn’t handling; that was going overboard! That was in no way how we operate! That was --”<br>
“That was brilliant,” Chris interrupted, then continued at Leo’s disbelieving stare. “Well, come on, Leo, really. I know it’s not pretty, but you can’t expect a demon to tell you world domination plans over milk and cookies.”<br>
“You should see them when they’re dangling over Hell,” Cole told him. “Now there is motivation that works.”<br>
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Chris said as though the two of them habitually talked shop like this.

“Okay, you know what?” Leo said and pointed at Chris. “You, no more lessons from demons. And you,” he turned to Cole, “‘Don’t talk to the kids’ applies to him, too.”<br>
Both Cole and Chris glanced at him for half a second with their respective looks of incredulity that Leo would actually think they took his word as law, then let loose a simultaneous “Whatever.”<br>
*** *** ***

For the second night in a row, Tess and several other members of the Phoenix were at Bianca’s apartment trying to find in their books a way to get through the cloak surrounding Leo and the witches. And for the second night in a row, Bianca’s mind was not on what she was doing.

She could still taste him, feel his hands on her, hear his gentle voice tell her not to be sorry. Again she marveled that he had returned her kiss, something she would never have thought could happen. From the moment she’d left him, so many other things had passed through her mind that suddenly no longer seemed impossible. She didn’t know how those things could be accomplished, but at least now they were worth thinking about rather than dismissing out of hand.

She turned a few more pages in her book, then stopped with momentary alarm. De-cloaking a Witch. She read through the ritual and spell, and they would be easily adaptable for an Elder’s cloaking ability, if Leo was, in fact, the one whose cloak was shielding the witches.

She glanced up at Tess to see if the Matriarch had noticed that she’d found something, but her aunt was too engrossed in searching her own book. Bianca turned the page, watched for a reaction from Tess, then continued flipping away from the relevant spell with as much nonchalance as she could muster, her face growing hotter every moment. Finally, she tossed the book into the discard pile and picked up a new one. Nobody said anything about it -- no admonitions about foolish emotions, no accusations of betrayal. She knew someone in her family would eventually find a similar spell, perhaps even the same one when they double-checked the discarded books. But any delay could improve the chances that Leo and the witches could find some way to save themselves, that she wouldn’t have to add to Chris’s sorrows. It was an unlikely hope, she realized, but nothing was impossible anymore.

*** *** ***

[scifi]

Wyatt stood atop the Golden Gate Bridge, looking down on the city that had once been his home. But that wasn’t really true. He’d never been at home anywhere. His father had taught him to come here to think, and as much as he would rather have learned the lesson from anyone else, he had to admit, it was a good spot.

He vaguely remembered the last time he’d come here with Leo. It had been after a fight at school. His kindergarten teacher had called the house, terrified at the explanation the class bully had given for his sprained wrist. Wyatt had met the kid behind the school building, orbed him into a tree, and then thrown him out of it again, just because he could. Of course, she attributed the story to childish imagination, but the fact remained that Wyatt wouldn’t admit ever laying a hand on the boy, and he’d be suspended until he did. Leo had been forced to work his own magic, yet again, and memory-dusted everyone from the kid and his parents to the doctor who had treated the wrist. Leo and Piper had fought that afternoon about the wisdom of keeping Wyatt in a normal school, but, as usual, Leo caved to Piper’s wishes. He had insisted on lecturing his older son, however, and brought him to the bridge to do it. Some of the words he’d used stuck in Wyatt’s mind, for they justified everything he’d since fought for.

“Wyatt, you have to remember, you’re not like everybody else,” Leo had said. “You’re special. You have gifts that other people can’t even imagine. And you have to use those gifts to make the world better. That’s the destiny you were born to fulfill. So you need to understand that you can’t beat other kids up, even if they steal your lunch money, or give you a dirty look, or whatever it is that makes you mad. You’re meant for bigger things -- so much bigger than any of those kids.”<br>
Wyatt thought of those words as he stood here now and sensed the people of San Francisco, who were no different than any other people in the world. He was above all of them, literally, and figuratively. He was above their football games, their movies, and their television. He was above their malls, their schools, and their halls of government. He was above their constant race to spend money faster than they could earn it. He was above their desperation to keep food on the table. He was above the crime, above the charity, above everything that was human. These people were contemptible in their weakness, but it was his destiny to make their world better, even if those he loved stood in his way.

There were times when he envied Chris, if he had thought to give such a name to the feeling. His brother bore none of the burdens of greatness, none of the responsibility for molding the world into something tolerable. And he was not so wholly cut off from that world that he had no choice but to look at it as one might look at an ant farm. Chris could see a woman and feel passion, for example, but Wyatt would always be cursed to feel the detachment that came with total superiority. Yes, Wyatt knew his brother, and though he had seen him with Bianca only a couple of times, he knew how Chris felt about her before Chris did. But if he knew him so well, why hadn’t he seen his betrayal coming? Chris’s sense of morality was essentially no different from Leo’s or the Charmed Ones’, limited to a world-view that Good and Evil were dichotomous concepts. But none of them were able to break out of that foolishness, and had thus become stumbling blocks that had to be removed. Yet Wyatt had thought perhaps Chris would, in time, be able to see the reality that the only thing that mattered was what would be most beneficial to the largest number of people -- that Wyatt’s imposed order would be that beneficial thing. Perhaps his sense of family obligation could have been a stepping stone out of the darkness of his mother’s teachings. It could still save him from the archaic notion that Good and Evil existed in such childishly simplistic terms -- after all, Wyatt hadn’t received definitive proof that Chris really had betrayed him. He could still hope he was wrong. Nevertheless, suspicion was always there to strangle out hope, and Wyatt knew that short of watching with his own eyes as Chris killed Leo, nothing could make him trust his little brother again.