The Witch and The Assassin

[scifi]

“Grandpa, I know you’re awake,” Chris said as he sat in the chair beside Victor’s bed and set a plate of food on the nightstand.

Victor opened one eye to check for his nurse’s presence at the bedroom door. “Maddie gone home yet?” he asked.

“She left a couple of minutes ago,” Chris answered. “She said you wouldn’t eat anything for her all day.”<br>
“Aw, Chris, don’t you start in on me, too. I’ll eat when I feel like it.”<br>
“Come on, Grandpa. Just a few bites --”<br>
“I don’t have the appetite.”<br>
“A couple of days ago, you were scarfing down bacon and eggs. I don’t get it.”<br>
“It comes and goes, and right now it is most definitely gone.”<br>
“Look, Maddie’s going to ask me tomorrow if I got you to eat, and I’m going to catch it if you don’t. Here, we’ll half it.” Chris took a bite of the food to show his good faith and nearly choked on it. “That’s disgusting! No wonder you won’t eat it.”<br>
“She’s got me on a low-salt, low-fat, low-everything menu.”<br>
Chris surveyed the meal and wondered if the neighbor’s dog would eat it if he set it outside. “You want a burger?”<br>
Victor chuckled briefly, then grimaced -- the first sign of pain he’d let himself show in front of his grandson.

“Where does it hurt?” Chris asked softly.

“I’m fine.”<br>
Chris stood abruptly and headed for the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. There he found the untouched vial of morphine and emptied one of the pills into his hand.

“Here,” he pushed it toward Victor with a glass of water. “Dr. Stone prescribed them for a reason.”<br>
“I don’t want to become an addict --”<br>
“Like it matters now,” Chris let slip.

Victor closed his eyes, almost like he was relieved that Chris had finally said something along the lines of acceptance. He took the morphine tablet with no further protest, which indicated how much pain he truly felt.

“Grandpa, please,” Chris begged. “Let Leo --”<br>
Victor shook his head, and Chris sat back down in the chair to stare at his grandfather’s hands folded across his abdomen -- those wrinkled, liver-spotted hands that had wiped away innumerable tears, that had cut up his food when he broke his arm, that had given him the rose to place on his mother’s casket. He wished Victor wouldn’t let them lie like a mortician had placed them in that position. “You’ve helped me for all these years,” he said. “Why won’t you let me help you?”<br>
Victor smiled. “We helped each other.”<br>
Before Chris could move past staring at his own hands, Victor followed up with an odd question. “When’s the last time you talked to Leo?”<br>
“What -- day before yesterday. Why?”<br>
“I mean really talked?”<br>
Chris’s eyes were scolding. “You’re changing the subject.”<br>
“Yes, I am, to something more important. How are you two doing?”<br>
Chris grinned in disbelief that his grandfather could think this was a more important subject. “We’re good. He does his job, and I do mine.”<br>
“Chris,” Victor chided. “I don’t mean professionally.”<br>
Chris tried to press out the tension above his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “I don’t have anything to say to him.”<br>
“You sound just like my Prue --”<br>
“Don’t start that again.” Chris pushed himself up from the chair once more.

“Well, it’s true.” Victor watched him pace.

“I get that you want to defend him because you share this whole absentee father thing. I really do,” Chris said. “But there’s no need. I’m over it. And don’t shake your head like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”<br>
“I left the girls for twenty years without a word to even let them know that I was still living somewhere in the wide world. They never knew that I thought about them every day. At least Leo kept up some semblance of communication --”<br>
“A few letters around birthday-time? That hardly counts as an open line.”

Victor tried to respond, but Chris was on a roll. “And I wish he hadn’t sent those. Mom was right. It would have been a lot easier if we could all just pretend he was dead. Because if he was dead, there would have been a good reason for him not to be there -- it wouldn’t have been something he chose over us.”<br>
“I had just started to make some headway with Prue. Things were just starting to be good, and then I lost her. But as much as that hurt, I was so glad to have gotten that chance with her,” Victor said. “Now, from what you’ve told me about these assassins, there’s a very real possibility that your father won’t make it out of this alive. And I think you know that. Chris, don’t wait until it’s too late, and all you have left is regret.”<br>
“Why -- Why should I have to be the one to take the initiative? Why can’t he, for once, admit that he was wrong? Why can’t he come to me?”<br>
“Have you ever thought that maybe it’s not because he doesn’t want to? Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how.” Victor paused when Chris stopped pacing. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll take you up on that burger if you promise to try talking to him.”<br>
He looked at his grandfather skeptically. “Is that how you made your money -- unfair trades?” When Victor didn’t answer, but just kept that expectant expression on his face, Chris sighed. “What do you want on it?”<br>

[scifi]

“Are they there yet? Is he okay?” Helen asked.

“Will you be quiet? I’m trying to see,” Cassie answered and kept her eyes shut to focus on summoning a vision.

The three girls sat around their fire, Kit well distanced from where her sister was foolishly trying to watch her demon friend at work. Of course, Kit hoped Lydia would be fine, but Cole was another story. So she just fine-tuned her drawing of a vision of Chris’s past and tried to ignore Cassie and Helen. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but glance up from the picture when Cassie took a sharp breath and said, “I got it!”<br>
*** *** ***

Cole and Lydia shimmered into the endless Main Hall of Magic School where the perpetual lighting illuminated the scorched walls and other evidence of Good Magic’s last great stand. Littering the floor were scores of corpses of those witches who had not been vaporized on the spot. Lydia covered her mouth and nose to stifle a gag reflex; the place still smelled of death.

The two of them stepped around the clutter on the ground, picked their way through the bodies, and counted doors as they passed them. They had ignored two side passages and twenty-seven doors before finally rounding a corner, their first landmark in this maze, and started the count anew. The first floor of the library would be around yet another corner and at the end of that hall.

“Where are they already?” Lydia whispered over the hollow echo of their footsteps.

“They’re coming,” Cole assured her, and a fireball exploding into the wall about a foot from his head proved his point. He swung around to return fire at the four demons who had appeared behind them, but as soon as the energy ball left his hand, the four of them shimmered. Two reappeared behind Cole and pinned his arms at his side while the other two went for Lydia. She dropped to the floor to sweep one’s feet out from under him, then rolled out of the reach of the other one. Cole struggled to free himself, but his captors were too strong for him in his human form. Belthazor, however, had no trouble tossing them off and throwing a couple of energy balls in the same movement to keep Lydia’s demons at bay.

The guards regrouped, but before they could attack again, Lydia called out one of her condensed spells. “Smoke!”<br>
The corridor filled as though the school was on fire, obscuring her and Belthazor from the demons’ view. She pulled her partner into a classroom, hoping that they could find something useful there to aid in the fight. Unfortunately, it was the “Mommy and Me” class.

Belthazor surveyed the toys scattered around the room and the brightly colored finger painting projects still displayed on the walls after all this time, and then turned to Lydia.

“What’s your plan?” he asked in his deep, imposing voice. “Pelt them with blocks, or torture them with ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ until they vanquish themselves?”<br>
“We’ll go with the first one.” Lydia grinned as she thought of an idea. “Mess,” she said, her accent dividing the spell into two syllables. “Stand back and be ready to blast them.” She led Belthazor to stand against a wall as every toy chest, cubby hole, and book shelf emptied its contents into the middle of the floor, and the bulletin boards gave up their staples and thumbtacks to the cause.

The guards shimmered into the room in time to hear Lydia say, “Chaos.” The mess in the floor rose up to meet them -- sharp items first to go for the eyes, and the blunt items next to annoy and distract them. Fending off things like glue sticks, stuffed animals, and dull-tipped scissors kept the demons occupied long enough for Belthazor to pick them off like ducks in a shooting gallery.

*** *** ***

“Yes!” Cassie yelled to the crowd of witches that had gathered to hear her relate the action to her sister and cousin. “They got the guards.”<br>
A murmur went through the crowd, and Kit rolled her eyes at how easily entertained these people could be. She closed her notebook and crossed her arms in annoyance at their having invaded her space. Why did it always seem that their home, such as it was, had a sign on it that said, “Open 24/7 to the whole magical community”?

*** *** ***

Lydia cleared the hall of the smokescreen she had created and led the way down toward the library. She stopped at the entrance and barely glanced at the marker that told what they would find on this floor -- Prophecy, Temporal Mechanics, and Interdimensional Travel -- before reciting the spell that would first allow them to see the force field that protected the room and then allow them to enter.

“Bring this magic into view.
Pierce it so we may pass through.”<br>
The force field glowed orange for a moment, then a hole grew in the middle of it from the size of a pin prick to nearly as large as the archway itself. Lydia and Belthazor stepped through the cleared area, which closed behind them once they were in the library.

“Brigadoon to Leo,” Lydia intoned as they made their way to the stairs leading to the second floor. She never even slowed her pace, confident in the results that followed in her wake. The books that half-filled these shelves were bound to the grounds, but that didn’t mean individual pages were bound to the books. Even as Lydia placed her foot on the bottom step in her and Belthazor’s ascension to the Spells and Potions section, the pages with pertinent information ripped themselves from the books and vanished, only to arrive at Leo’s feet back at the sanctuary.

The second floor held several more books along with several more bodies, likely those of librarians and some of the older students. Lydia doubted this section would hold any useful information since it was unlikely that a simple spell or potion could conjure a portal to such a place as Brigadoon. But to be on the safe side, she called out the spell. “Brigadoon to Leo.”<br>
As expected, no pages came forth from the spell books, and the pair started toward the second set of stairs as they had done before. What was unexpected was the trap that was triggered by her use of magic. All around them, the tattered bodies of the dead came up from the floor in varying states of decay, their black robes hanging off them like shrouds. Behind them the demon who had reanimated the corpses made itself visible. The gleam from its flaming hair shone on its coal-black skin, and it stared at them ravenously through its vertical slits-for-eyes. Entirely naked, save for a wreath of human entrails slung around its neck and resting on a belly enormously swollen from its constant feeding on cadavers, it directed its minions to surround the intruders as it lithely advanced on them itself.

“Rakshasa,” Belthazor named it for Lydia before firing an energy ball toward it, and then a couple more toward some of the nearest corpses. It knocked the demon back, but this further use of magic summoned three more rakshasas, these almost identical to their predecessor, except for their respective blue, yellow, and green skins.

“Will you stop using magic!” Lydia yelled to Belthazor as she flung a chair at the closest zombie, breaking the head’s tenuous hold on the body. She couldn’t think now that it might have been an old friend she’d just decapitated, because the body kept moving toward her. The green rakshasa joined in reaching for her arm, but Belthazor pulled her out of the way and into the middle of the room, out of the circle that was hemming them in.

“Don’t let them touch you, and don’t touch them. You’ll die.”<br>
“How do you vanquish them without magic and without touching them?” Lydia began throwing some of the larger books piled on the table in front of them.

“I’m trying to remember,” Belthazor answered. “It’s the stupidest vanquish I ever heard of.” He threw an energy ball at the blue rakshasa, which had been almost successful in grabbing his leg, but another of its twins appeared to take its place just as he recalled what made the vanquish of such horrific beings laughably simple.

“Uncle!”<br>
The corpses dropped back to the floor and the five rakshasas exploded in shrieks of fury.

Lydia stared at her demon companion. “That’s it?” she said in disbelief. “You vanquish them by saying ‘Uncle’?”<br>
Belthazor shrugged. “I didn’t make up the rules.”<br>
They were considerably more careful about coming onto the third floor, because one look at the empty shelves told them that things could not be as they appeared. Eager to have the mission over, Lydia ran to leave the room and head for the Elders’ section at the end of the third floor corridor, but Belthazor stopped her.

“Say the spell.”<br>
“There’s nothing here, and I don’t want to set off any more traps,” she responded.

Belthazor assessed the shelves of the Biography and History section, unwilling to believe that Leo already had all the books that had ever been here. “Just say it.”<br>
She waited until she was nearly at the exit to comply. “Brigadoon to Leo.”<br>
Though she still saw no books, she heard the sound of innumerable pages tearing from their binding. As soon as a page was free, it appeared briefly to her eyes before disappearing again to go to the sanctuary. Several more seconds passed before all the hundreds of pages had been transported, and the room was silent and empty once more.

“We’re not the only ones who know how to use a cloak,” Belthazor explained and led the way out of the main library and down the final hallway.

[scifi]

The whole long way, they expected an attack at any time and grew more apprehensive as the seconds passed. The Biography and History section had been a cakewalk, and now they were meeting with no resistance in a passage that afforded no cover, no weapons, nothing to offer them any protection. It had to be a trap, but they made it to the end of the corridor without a scratch. Then they turned the corner that marked where the section should have been that required an Elder’s express permission to enter. Instead, they saw the entrance walled up, and standing before it as a warning to all comers was a statue much like the ones in Wyatt’s chambers, except this one was a witch frozen in the throes of a vanquish. His robes seemed to billow in the suction of the flames that surrounded him, and the tips of his brown hair had begun to singe. And though his face was blistered and contorted in pain, Lydia recognized him with a gasp and turned away.

“David,” she whispered, and then continued when Belthazor made no indication that he knew the name. “David Cabot. Helen’s father.” She collected herself and faced the statue. “We thought he was dead.”<br>
“He looks pretty dead to me,” Belthazor said.

“That’s just it. He’s frozen at the moment of death. Wyatt wouldn’t even let him move on.”<br>
Belthazor looked on the face of Paige’s husband and thought he could pick out traces of Helen there. “How long since the battle?”<br>
“Almost two years,” Lydia answered.

Belthazor nodded, then suddenly pitched an energy ball at the man to break the freeze and finish the vanquish.

*** *** ***

Cassie opened her eyes and tried unsuccessfully to wipe away the tears she was shedding for her uncle.

Helen shook her arm. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”<br>
Cassie stared at the smaller child and couldn’t say anything. Finally, Kit rose from her spot at the fire and kneeled beside her sister. “What is it?” she asked as she placed a hand on Cassie’s shoulder. Just as she finished the question, she was hit with a vision of the only seconds-old past that Cassie had just witnessed. When she came out of the vision, Kit didn’t know which shook her more, the sight of her uncle’s prolonged death, or the fact that a demon had shown mercy.

“Will somebody tell me what they saw?” Helen put her little fists on her hips.

Kit locked eyes with Cassie, and said what both of them knew had to be said. “Nothing,” she lied. “Everything’s fine.”<br>
*** *** ***

Belthazor didn’t allow Lydia time to thank him, but instead examined the wall. “Can you make a door?” he asked.

Lydia tried one of her simple spells, then tried a variation on the spell she’d used minutes before on the force field on the first floor. Neither worked.

“Stand back,” Belthazor said, then tried blasting through. The wall repelled the energy ball, though, and they both had to duck out of its reverse trajectory.

“We may have to leave with what we already have,” Lydia conceded when she picked herself off the floor.

Belthazor shook his head. “What we really need is on the other side of that wall. I can feel it.”<br>
“Got any ideas on how to get in?”<br>
“One, but it defeats the purpose. We will be caught.”<br>
“You want to shimmer in?” Lydia surmised. He was right, it would defeat the purpose. The only reason they hadn’t shimmered directly into the library and between floors was that they knew Wyatt would detect anyone other than his guards shimmering or orbing into the only part of Magic School still worth entering. But he was also right to say that it was the only way. She took a breath to calm herself. “Just be sure to make lots of fireworks. I want to go out with a bang.”<br>
The moment they appeared beyond the wall, Lydia shouted, “Brigadoon to Leo!” and then ducked the energy ball that appeared out of Wyatt’s orb pattern. Belthazor dove in the opposite direction, perhaps in an attempt to draw Wyatt’s fire away from her, but Wyatt was more than capable of handling them both at the same time. With one hand he picked up Lydia and pinned her by the throat, and in the other hand, he continued firing at Belthazor, who threw his own ammunition in between bouts of random shimmering. Finally, Wyatt grew tired of trying to hit a target that wouldn’t stay still, and pinned the demon beside Lydia, preventing him from shimmering anymore.

Lydia clutched at her throat, trying desperately to draw breath. Her thoughts had become foggy, but just before she blacked out, she had a moment of clarity. “Chaos,” she choked. Books flew from the shelves and surrounded Wyatt, striking his hands out of their position, and smacking him repeatedly in the back of the head and around his face. He had no choice but to release his hold, and as the last of the pages ripped itself from its book and disappeared, Belthazor reached for Lydia and shimmered -- but not before meeting Wyatt’s eyes and giving his broadest and cockiest smile.

He was laughing when they appeared at the sanctuary, and the crowd that moved away from the Halliwells’ campfire to come congratulate the pair on their escape couldn’t help but catch the merriment themselves.

“It’s not funny,” Lydia said over the tumult. “Getting in and out undetected was the goal. That didn’t happen.”<br>
“I know,” Belthazor said and transformed back into Cole. He tried to stop laughing and acknowledge the seriousness of Wyatt knowing they had been in his library, yet his exuberance at having managed to move up on Wyatt’s list of nuisances could not be contained. “But did you see his face?”<br>
Lydia reluctantly grinned at the image of Wyatt’s total astonishment that these two scraps of magical waste had actually survived a round with him. Cole clapped her slight frame on the back like she was one of the guys, sending her forward a bit before she caught herself, and the situation made the action seem funnier than it was.

But the crowd’s laughter died down as a still teary-eyed Cassie wriggled her way through to meet Cole. She gazed up at him for a moment, then threw her arms around his waist. “Thank you.”<br>
Cole stood with his hands held aloft for a second, unsure what he was supposed to do when little girls did things like that, then brought them down to pat her back. He glanced up then and saw a glimpse of Kit in the distance, who instead of moving to pry her sister away from him, just stared in utter confusion before turning away and levitating up into their tree house.

[scifi]

Chris orbed into Wyatt’s chamber expecting to see his brother standing with his hands clasped behind his back in the perfectly calm posture he often assumed, or perhaps sitting beneath one of the columns of his recreated Elders’ Hall with his arms folded in annoyance at having to wait more than a second for Chris to respond to his call. But instead of the usual white haze, the chamber had been altered to resemble the Elders’ section of the Magic School Library, and instead of exuding self-assurance with his every move, Wyatt was sitting at a table, wearily massaging his eyelids beneath his reading glasses -- he had inherited their mother’s far-sightedness. These moments when Wyatt let show that he was just a man, after all, were so few and far between that Chris didn’t say anything to announce his arrival, but rather took a few seconds to latch on to the image and store it away with the memories of his brother defending him from bullies, listening to him rehearse for his role as a turkey in his second grade Thanksgiving play, and freezing the first girl Chris ever kissed just long enough to slip him a breath mint. He had to have something to sustain his hope for Wyatt.

“You called?” he said finally.

“I want your opinion on something.” Wyatt took off his glasses and motioned for the scene of Belthazor and Lydia’s theft to replay itself, except this time, the demon and witch were not visible in the room. That was one aspect Wyatt didn’t need repeated. He allowed the books to fly out in a frenzy, and then slowed the scene down enough for him to isolate some of the pages that ripped from them. He waved for a few of the illusory pages to come to him and place themselves on the table. “Take a look.”<br>
Chris sat down and read over a piece of parchment that must have been from the 1700s, judging from the script in which F’s looked like S’s. It was a basic summary of Brigadoon and its properties, from the portal’s almost conscious ability to judge the intent of any person attempting to enter it, to the unknown origin of the city’s founders. Chris swallowed, knowing that the other pages must contain more detailed accounts. Still, he had to react as though he’d never given the place any serious thought. “What’s this for?”<br>
“The Resistance stole these pages from the library last night,” Wyatt answered. “What do you think they want with them?”<br>
“I don’t know. Do you think this place is real?”<br>
“Based on the amount that appears to have been written, I’d bet it’s real.” He stood up, erased the illusion of Magic School, and paced behind Chris’s chair. “A forgotten city that appears every hundred years, that can’t be summoned ahead of schedule, and that is highly selective about the people it lets in. What does that sound like to you?”<br>
Chris shrugged. “Sounds like a good hiding place.”<br>
“That’s what I think, too. They believe that I can’t get to them if they run to Brigadoon.”<br>
“Can you?”<br>
Wyatt smiled, rightly taking the question as a probe rather than as a product of random curiosity. So much the better. “If they disappear with the city, no. But, of course, that assumes the witches actually make it inside.” He conjured a slip of paper and tossed it on the table in front of his little brother. “I thought since you’ve gotten so good at casting spells, you could look over it and see if it needs tweaking.”<br>
Chris read the lines and tried not to reveal his anxiety. “It’s a good spell. Should work.”<br>
Wyatt nodded and picked it up. “Every magical creature in the world is going to feel it when that portal opens up, and they’ll know exactly where to find it. And once they’re there, even the demons can benefit from the power boost. That is definitely not a show I want to miss.”<br>
Chris sat motionless in his chair, though he was in a near panic to relate Wyatt’s words to Leo.

“And the best part is, I don’t have to be careful about them finding out my plans,” Wyatt continued speaking, then silently summoned Ekera to take her place in Chris’s shadow. “If they decide not to try Brigadoon and just rely on their cloak, then I’ll find them eventually, and if they make a run for it, then we can head them off and eliminate the threat even sooner. Either way, I win.”<br>
Chris finally turned around in his chair, determined not to give any further indication that the news disturbed him. In doing so, he caught sight of Ekera’s outline and felt his stomach plummet.

“Sounds like you’ve got it in the bag,” he said to cover his despair.

“Well,” Wyatt said as though the conversation was starting to bore him. “That’s all I wanted you for. You can go.”<br>
Chris orbed then, not to the sanctuary where both Wyatt and Ekera no doubt expected and hoped for him to go, but rather to Victor’s room, the only place that could justify his release of frustration and not look like it came from Wyatt’s plan. God knew Ekera had seen enough of Chris mourning his grandfather’s condition for a release here to seem normal. Still, to keep up the appearance that the only thing bothering him was the sight of Victor so helpless, he had to stand and stare at his sleeping figure for several minutes before sitting and putting his head down on the mattress.

For over seventy-two straight hours, Ekera never left his side. She was with him when he washed dishes, when he watched TV, when he took a leak. At night, he slept fitfully, waking up at almost regular intervals to see if she had yet given up on following him to Leo. But every time, he would see her outline hovering near him. By the fourth night, Chris’s exhaustion forced him to into a sleep from which nothing could wake him.

*** *** ***

[scifi]

Violin music soared from the speakers at the old drive-in, though even if they had wanted to, Chris and Bianca wouldn’t have been able to see Kill It Before It Dies through the fogged up windows. They were in the rear of a ‘52 Special, his letterman’s jacket tossed across the steering wheel, where he desperately wanted some of his date’s clothing to end up, as well.

“Gee,” he echoed a line from the movie in between kisses. “I think you’re swell.” He moved his hands beneath her sweater and fumbled with the hooks of her bra.

She returned his frantic kisses at the same time that she forced his hands away from the clasp. “I think” -- she kissed him -- “you’re swell” -- another kiss -- “too.”<br>
“This has got to be Phoebe’s fault.”<br>
Chris nearly threw himself off Bianca at the sound of a third person’s voice in the car and banged his head on the ceiling. One of his legs got tangled up in her poodle skirt, and his fight to extricate himself from the ruffles drowned out the violins. As soon as he was free, he looked up to see who had joined them.

“Leo!” he cried. “What -- How --” He nervously pushed his hair out of his face. “This is a nightmare!”<br>
Leo sat in the front seat trying to fix his eyes anywhere except on the pair of them. “A dream, yes. A nightmare?” He glanced at Chris out of the corner of his eye. “That’s not exactly what it looks like.”<br>
It took Chris a second to comprehend what he was saying. “I’m dreaming?”<br>
“Yeah.”<br>
“And you’re here watching me?”<br>
“I didn’t see anything . . . really.” Leo watched as Bianca tried to tie her mussed hair back with a pink ribbon, and then he stared at the birthmark on her wrist. “A Phoenix?” he said incredulously.

Chris ignored the remark and focused on his revulsion at his father’s voyeurism. “You are one sick, twisted --”<br>
“Hey, I’m not the one trying to score with a demon in the back seat of a Buick!”<br>
“Hello! Dream. A figment of my subconscious. I have no control over it.”<br>
“Well, now that you know you’re dreaming, you actually kinda do.” Leo motioned to Bianca. “Yet she’s still here.”<br>
Chris smiled a barely tolerant smile that indicated he was trying very hard to stay calm. He turned to Bianca and said, “Excuse me,” before getting out and slamming the door.

Leo followed him to the front of the car. “Do you have a lot of these dreams?”<br>
“That’s none of your business!”<br>
“Be careful, Chris. This kind of story never has a happy ending. Believe me, I’ve seen it before.”<br>
“Can we talk about something else? Like what you’re doing here?”<br>
Leo sighed. “I entered your dreams because I got the sense you needed to tell me something but couldn’t get to me.”<br>
This explanation struck a chord in Chris’s memory. “Yeah, I do,” he said slowly, still adjusting to the invasion of conscious thought in this subconscious world. Then it came to him. “Wyatt! He knows about Brigadoon.”<br>
Leo braced himself on the hood of the car. “How much?”<br>
“Everything. He read the pages Cole and Lydia got from the Elders’ section.”<br>
“Did he read anything from the other floors?”<br>
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he has to have actually been there to witness them, or at least to have been able to sense them.”<br>
Leo was only slightly relieved, but relieved nonetheless. “Then he doesn’t know everything, because plenty came from the other floors. We may still have a chance.”<br>
Chris shook his head. “Leo, he has a spell that’ll tell him when the portal opens and let him and his demons get the power boost, too. There’s no way we’re going to get a thousand witches into Brigadoon.”<br>
“He told you all this?”<br>
“Yeah,” Chris laughed humorlessly. “He wanted me to lead my shadow to you. She’s in my room now watching me sleep.”<br>
“We can’t give up yet, Chris. We’re still trying to piece together our information. Maybe there’s something there that will give us the advantage.” Leo crossed his arms. “All you can do now is keep waiting out the shadow. The minute she leaves you, get to the sanctuary. By that time, we should know more, and I’ll call a meeting to see where we go from there.”<br>
Chris nodded. His father started to leave the dream, but Chris couldn’t resist getting the last word on the argument that had started their conversation. “Leo,” he called. “If you ever feel the need to get inside my head again, could you, like, knock first?”

[scifi]

It was a relief for Bianca to have her apartment to herself again. Tess had finally decided to send the others to various parts of the Underworld to try to find what their books had failed to reveal -- the secret to uncovering Leo’s whereabouts. For Bianca she left a more tedious chore, but one that at least wasn’t directly tied to the mission. As heir to the position of Matriarch, Bianca had to hand copy Tess’s grimoire, the contents of which had been passed down from one Matriarch to the next in this same time-honored manner. Every spell or potion that any of the members of the Phoenix had ever written in their own grimoires had automatically found its way into the Matriarch’s book, so that after more than three centuries, it was so bloated with dark magic that Bianca figured she would need the better part of a year to transcribe everything.

The task might not have been so grueling if Bianca’d had a heritage she could be proud of. The first hundred pages read like any witch’s book of shadows -- after all, the first Matriarch, Elizabeth Perry, had once been good. But during the witch trials, everything changed.

My harte did ayke when they toke Goody Warren for to be examyned. Of all womyn in Salemtown, shee hath don least to desearve such a fate. Indeed, I did purpos to release her from the Prison, she & the divers Innocents ta’en in this maddness, yet Melinda will’d that I shold not, for to use our Powers so openly wold expose us as Wiches & give credence to the Children’s acusations against the Innocents. I sate in the Assembly & hard Justice Hathorne pronounce hur a lyar & a bryde of Satan to the grate vexation of my spirit, yet I sed no thing in her defence. For a tyme, I could rejoyce that hur good name mite save hur, for the Jurye did conclude hur innocence to the consternation of the Judges. But for Justice Stoughton, shee mite have ben returned unto the bosom of her dear Prudence. He wold recall now the honour of Matthew Tate & Melinda’s malisious chastisment of the whole of Salem. Justice Stoughton, ever a pernicious man, did Impose upon the Jurye to consider hur words against hur, and when they did wish to examyne her further, shee wold but sit as Ded, so full of grief was she that no words escap’d hur lips. To no man wold shee speek againe, for a sevennite after hur conviction, she did burn as a Wich. Yet I did see hur but hours before hur deth, & she did there bequeth me a Locket with which she had wreaked her vengeance on the warlock Matthew, & I have worn it about my neck these many years, for it brings to rememberance the revenge I have yet to exact.

Bianca had known from her childhood the story of what followed next, yet reading it for herself, in Elizabeth’s own words, sent chills through her body. In her own fall from grace, Elizabeth had taken her descendants with her, so that Bianca was destined to be born in a hell and to die there, too.

Not a fortnite had past ere I myself was ta’en to stand at the feet of the Counsell Justices & was told dispite my protestations of innocence not to begin my statement with contemptible Lyes. Were I indeed guilty of harm to those Children, I wold have confessed it with all my harte, but to the Prison cell was I sent to endure the dayly mercyless inquiry of the selfsame clergymen whose Fellowship I had heretofore enjoyed. I wold burn as Melinda Warren had burned, & Satan wold be bereft of another of his minyons to the satisfaction & gloryfication of God & His Angels. Presently, I grew weary of there prattle, for indeed had all mention of Heaven and Hell become bothersom to me. If I were to be consigned to Melinda’s fate, I wold have reason to warrant this Condemnation. In the dark of the midnite, I summoned the demon lord of the Savages, whose Pow’r &Wrath there wiches fear & seeke ever to apease. I did there offer him my help in plaguing the English & herding them from this land shold he consent to free me from the Flames that would consume me with the rising of the Sun. This he did, but with the warning that I must taste of deth ere I cold be reborn in his service. So it was that I was led by the arm to the stake amid the cryes of my onetyme friends & hard the Counsell pass jugement on my Sins against Heaven & Earth, & I knew full well that my bargaine with Hell was in earnest when I cared not that the torches ware set to the pire, & the Extreame Agony of the flames served only to sear my hatred of these people into my harte.

I lay among the remaynes of my bodye, aware but without form, until the Sun mite set & Darkness mite conceale me. As a Phoenix from the ashes, I arose anew with power I had ne’er known possible. Was I Wich or Demon? I knew not, nor do I wish my children to dwell upon the question. For with the Mark that defines us as having ben touched by Evil, I saye unto thee there is in the world no Goodness, no Loyalty, no Mercye, no Justice, & yea, no Love. Remember well, my children, there is only Vengeance.

“No, Elizabeth,” Bianca corrected with the mantra Tess had driven into her. “There is only survival.” She closed the book and stepped over to her window to look down on the steps where Chris had once stood in the rain. It seemed like ages ago that, for a moment, both of them had felt unburdened by the world, heeding only the giddy delight of a stranger’s attentions. Then she had felt the world fall back down upon her shoulders when he learned who she really was, and she saw every day the contempt in his eyes. True, the contempt had softened into disappointment toward the end of their time together, and that night at the arboretum when he poured out his soul to her . . . For a while there, she had thought perhaps it no longer mattered to him who she was. Perhaps he really was capable of infinite patience and forgiveness. But it had been over a week now since she kissed him and he kissed her back -- a week, and she’d heard nothing from him. Though, really, what should she have expected? Dinner and a movie, and then a romp in the sack? That just wasn’t Chris. Still, a week? There was only one reason she could think of for his distance. He was gentle and kind, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew as well as she did that the night in the arboretum had been a mistake. His conscience was so much more highly developed than hers, or else he had built fewer walls to keep it from intruding and hindering him from the unpleasant things in life that nevertheless must be done. He could kill -- he’d proven that -- but he wasn’t a killer. But she? A witch endowed with demonic powers, or a demon who relied on the vestiges of witchcraft -- Elizabeth was right; it didn’t matter. Either way, she was evil, and she had been naïve to think hiding one measly spell from her family could even begin to change that.

[scifi]

Bianca turned away from the window at the sensation of Tess shimmering into the room behind her.

“You’re supposed to be busy,” the Matriarch admonished.

“I was taking a break.”<br>
Tess simply pointed at the closed book as an indication for Bianca to get back to work. When Bianca obeyed, Tess told her news.

“I finally found an old fool to make the poison. He’s crazy, but he knows what he’s doing. He said it should be ready sometime in November. That gives us more than enough time to find a way through the cloak. I’ve ordered enough arrows for both of us. You and I will take out the Elder, and the rest of them will target the witches.”<br>
Bianca nodded. Of course killing Leo would be left to her. Why would fate have it any other way?

Tess departed then to relay the news to the other members of the assassination team, and Bianca tore her gaze from the Phoenix symbol at the end of Elizabeth’s entry and forced it down to the replica on her left wrist. That immortal bird was more than skin deep. It was in her life’s blood, and if she lived long enough to continue her family line, her children would carry it, and her children’s children. A laugh escaped her, but sounded more like a sob -- why should she think of children now? And why should Chris’s name come into her thoughts only a second behind?

She had to see him again, even if it was just for one last time. She shimmered into his back yard where the stucco walls on three sides hid her from the neighbors’ view, and then walked around to the front door and rang the bell. Chris was naturally the one to answer it.

“Bianca,” he said with a broad smile, though he seemed slightly distracted by something. “What are you doing here -- and since when do you use the doorbell?”<br>
“I didn’t think your grandfather would like me shimmering into his living room.”<br>
“Good point. Well, come in.”<br>
“No, I --” she started to say, but he simply left the door open in expectation of her entrance and began trying to tidy up the room by taking a few dishes off the coffee table.

“Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t called you,” he said from the kitchen, and then came back into the living room. “But it’s been kind of crazy lately. Let me tell Grandpa you’re here. I know he’ll want to meet you.” He started toward the hallway.

“Chris, stop. I didn’t come here to meet your grandfather or to ask you to explain why you’re avoiding me --”<br>
“I’m not avoiding you.”<br>
“Just listen.” She drew a breath. “I came here to tell you I’m really . . . sorry about the other night.”<br>
Chris seemed a little confused, but then he smiled and moved to take her hand. “I told you not to be.”<br>
“No.” She took her hand away. “I mean . . . I wish it never happened.”<br>
Chris stepped back from her. “Oh.”<br>
“I think it would be best for everyone if we didn’t --” See each other was what she meant to say, but as she met his eyes and saw the hurt there, she couldn’t make the words leave her mouth. Before she could muster the nerve to finish the sentence, Victor called from his bedroom.

“Chris, who’s here?”<br>
“Come on,” Chris said in a dejected tone. “You have to meet him now, just for a second. I’ll never hear the end of it if you don’t.”<br>
Victor was sitting in his chair reading one of the books from his pile, but when the two young people came into his room, he set the book aside.

“Grandpa, this is Bianca.”<br>
Victor removed his glasses and tried not to seem surprised that an assassin was standing in his house, and that Chris was introducing her like some girl who had just moved in down the street.

“Bianca. Chris has told me quite a bit about you.” He looked to his grandson, and then back to her. “He was right. You are pretty.”<br>
It seemed to make Victor’s day that he could make both of them turn red, and he motioned good-naturedly for them to sit on the bed across from him. The three of them were silent for a moment before Victor thought of something to start a conversation.

“So, romance novels.”<br>
“Excuse me?” Bianca said at the topic pulled out of the air.

“Chris told me you like to read romance novels.”<br>
Bianca grinned and looked over at Chris in embarrassment, but he was staring at the floor in anticipation of the grilling Victor had always given the girls he brought home. “Occasionally. I read other things, too. Like the classics.” She indicated the books on the nightstand.

“Really? Now that’s the strangest thing I’ve heard all day. I didn’t think people your age actually read books anymore. I thought they only used Cliff’s Notes and cheat sheets.” Victor gave his grandson a look that said he knew everything that had ever gone on in the young man’s high school career, and it was Chris’s turn to be embarrassed.

“Some of us still read,” Bianca responded.

Victor held up a finger as though a new idea had struck him. “I’ll tell you exactly what you need to read.” He grunted as he reached to the nightstand for one of the books, but held up a hand to keep Chris from getting up to help him. “A classic, but romantic, too, in a roundabout, depressing kind of way. Crime and Punishment.”<br>
“I’ve read it before,” Bianca said.

Victor seemed more impressed by the minute. “Did you like it?”<br>
“It was good.”<br>
“Favorite character?”<br>
“Sonya.”<br>
Victor made a face. “You didn’t think she was saccharine?”<br>
“Sure she was saccharine,” Bianca answered. “But . . .” She swallowed and glanced a Chris briefly, then continued hesitantly in her defense of the character. “No matter how messed up her own life was, she never lost faith in Rodya . . . She never stopped trying to save him from himself.”<br>
Victor nodded and glanced at Chris as well. His grandson was completely at a loss in this literary conversation, but knew something important had just passed between the two readers from the way Bianca was trying not to let a tear fall. Victor pretended not to notice it, and abruptly put himself into old codger mode. “You two kids go do something with yourselves now. The obligatory ‘visit the old man’ part is over.”<br>
Chris gave his Grandpa a look, then led Bianca out of the room.

“I should go,” she said when they were in the hall, but he took her arm so suddenly, that she turned back to him and stared.

“Will you come again?” he asked.

She looked away then, unable to meet his eyes, and happened upon a portrait of his family taken when he was a baby. Chris must have passed the picture a dozen times a day without noticing it, but it held her rapt attention. His mother was seated and holding Wyatt, and Leo was standing behind her with Chris in his arms. Even as a baby, Chris’s smile was infectious, though toothless and wide. She imagined a scene at the photographer’s moments before the picture was taken: Leo and Piper tried desperately to get Wyatt to sit still, to look at the camera, to actually smile, but, despairing of getting a response from him, ultimately told the photographer to just take the picture already. But then Chris smiled, and their dismay at the potential quality of the picture vanished. Leo looked so happy to be holding his son. God help her, she had to find a way out of this.

She finally looked back to Chris and nodded. “I’ll try,” she said, and ignoring the tears streaming down her face, she touched his cheek and kissed him briefly before shimmering out.

Chris stood in the hall for a minute after she left, wondering what had just happened here. At last he re-entered Victor’s bedroom.

“So,” he asked. “What did you think?”<br>
“She gave good answers,” Victor said, then glanced unobtrusively around the room. “But, uh, didn’t you notice there was this gloom hanging over her?”<br>
Chris understood the code, and nodded to indicate that Ekera was, indeed, still in the room, and that they were not at liberty to speak as freely as they might otherwise. “But other than that?”<br>
Victor hesitated. Yes, the answers had been extremely good, so good, in fact, that he was actually considering giving his approval to an assassin. It could be a colossal mistake for Chris to pursue this any further, but then again, Sonya was her favorite character. Based on that bit of hopeful information, Victor finally decided that even if it was a mistake, it was Chris‘s right to make it. “I think you should reinvest in some Cliff’s Notes and see for yourself what Sonya did for Rodya that made her love that character so much.”<br>
Chris grinned and shook his head at his Grandpa’s cryptic opinion. He started to come back with a complaint that Victor was always trying to con him into getting some culture, but then he noticed that the red outline wasn’t where he had seen it moments before. He scanned the room to see if the demon had merely shifted positions, but nothing was there. “She’s gone,” he said jubilantly, and immediately orbed to the sanctuary.

[scifi]

“Okay, so, let me get this straight,” Chris said from his customary position at the entrance of the sanctuary’s library. “This portal shows up all over the world?”<br>
“Yes,” Leo answered. He was pacing in the middle of the room once again with the eyes of the assembled witches, shamans, gypsies, mortals, and a half-demon watching him. “That’s why there are so many similar stories of a lost city -- Brigadoon in Scotland, Germelshausen in Germany, Shangri-La in Tibet . . . They’re all legends about the same place, just passed down in different cultures with different traditions.”<br>
“It actually opens every twenty-five years or so,” continued Bridget, who had completed most of the translations. “But the way it cycles through the locations, it would seem to the people who created the legends that it comes every hundred years.”<br>
“And this year is in Germany,” Cole added.

From where he was standing, Chris alone could see into the recesses of the cave where the light of someone orbing shone briefly on the walls. He tried to suppress a smile at the sense of Helen and Cassie he suddenly felt; he’d wondered when they would tire of Kit coming to meetings without them. He focused on Leo, who, whether or not he also sensed the girls, kept up the briefing.

“And thanks to this,” Leo held up a piece of parchment. “We know exactly where in Germany. The best part is, this came from the History section, where Wyatt didn’t get to read. That gives us a jump on him. At the very least, it allows up to make battle preparations at the site.”<br>
Hatsuo spoke up. “Do we know when it’s coming or how long it’ll stay open?”<br>
Bridget gave Leo a look to see if he’d caught the other witch’s doubtful tone. “Unfortunately, no. There’s no way to know the duration. It’s been known to last anywhere from a minute to a full day.”<br>
“So what do we do?” Hatsuo asked. “Move the sanctuary to Germany and just wait?”<br>
“No. The children wouldn’t be able to handle a winter there.” Leo answered.

“We’ll have to wait for Wyatt’s spell to take effect -- feel the portal open at the same time the demons do,” Chris guessed.

Leo nodded reluctantly. “It’s the only option we have. We’ll know the terrain, we’ll have the preparations in place --”<br>
“But we may not be the first on the field,” Chris said.

“No.”<br>
“Meaning they could block the portal before any of our people can get in.”<br>
Leo’s eyes held his answer, but before he could articulate it, a gasp reverberated off the walls. Leo glanced to the end of a nearby bookcase -- apparently, he known of the girls’ presence all along.

“Cassie, what did you see?” he asked.

Helen stepped sheepishly out of their hiding place, but when Cassie came into view, she was still trying to make sense of her premonition. “Happy Birthday,” she muttered to herself. Finally, she grinned and looked between Chris and his father. “I know when the portal’s coming -- the day after Chris’s birthday.”<br>
“I love that kid,” Cole told Lydia.

“Are you sure?” Leo asked his niece.

Her smile widened as she glanced between father and son. Something must have passed between them in the vision that she liked. “Totally.”<br>
“Then it looks like we have two things Wyatt doesn’t -- a map . . . and Cassie,” Leo said. “I think the kids can take a day or so of a German winter if it means we’ll get to the portal first.”<br>
“We’re still left with a problem. Wyatt’ll be coming with the demons,” Chris said. “The last thing we need is him on magical steroids.”<br>
“It’s a problem in more ways than you know,” Leo explained. “According to the legend of Shangri-La, there would be 32 rulers of the kingdom, one every hundred years, and during the reign of the 32nd king . . . a great Evil would rise to take the kingdom and be destroyed in the attempt. I don’t know what number king they’re on, but it seems like we’re set up for a battle of legendary proportions and --” Leo looked straight at Chris. “I don’t want Wyatt to be the Evil that’s destroyed.”<br>
Chris nodded in agreement, though he knew most of the people in the room wouldn’t mind seeing his brother dead if only it didn’t mean breaking Leo’s heart in the process. “To keep him away, you’re going to need one monster of a distraction.”<br>
“We’ll think of something.” Leo then addressed the assembly with an air of military authority he hadn’t used in eighty years. “Bridget, you and Max head a detail in Germany. Set up a cloak first, then work on potions, fortifications -- anything you think we’ll need. Lydia and Hatsuo, meet with the clans and covens and go through their books of shadows. Get them up to speed on their spell-casting and hand-to-hand combat. Cole --”<br>
“I’ll take out whatever apothecary the Phoenix are using to make the dark lighter poison and maybe delay their strike.”<br>
Leo approved. “Chris, keep doing what you’re doing. If you find out any new information, you, uh, you know how to get it to me.”<br>
Chris gave Leo a look, knowing that he was referring to his dreams. “Yeah.”<br>
“We have a little less than a month and a half until Chris’s birthday. Not much time, so make it count.” With those words, Leo dismissed them to their various assignments. Chris stayed behind, however, and watched as his father walked further into the cave and among the books.

[scifi]

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m going to keep looking for a way to save Wyatt, or at least keep him out of the battle. It’s a long shot, I know, but can you think of a better way for me to spend my time?”<br>
Chris hesitated. “No,” he finally said. “I can’t.”

He had hoped to hold up his end of the bargain with Victor in the time he had at the sanctuary, for who knew if he would have another chance to really talk with Leo, given the hassle he’d already had in getting rid of Ekera. But, of course, Wyatt had to come first, and as much as he’d have liked holding it against Leo, he actually couldn’t blame him for trying. Chris started to leave the cave.

“Chris,” Leo called as though he’d heard the disappointment in his voice. “You want to help for a little while?”<br>
Chris shrugged and joined Leo among the books. He pulled one randomly from the shelf, as that’s what it seemed Leo had done, and began flipping through it.

To Leo’s credit, he tried to start a conversation. “It’s probably pointless to look for an answer in here, but I have to keep my hands busy.”<br>
And to Chris’s credit, he tried to keep up the civility of the small talk. “You know what they say about idle hands.”<br>
Not so much to Leo’s credit, he couldn’t resist the opening his son had given him. “Your hands certainly weren’t idle the other night.”<br>
And not so much to Chris’s credit, he let the jab get to him. “Leo, come on,” he said exasperatedly. “It was a dream. And speaking of which, I hope you realize you may have materially damaged your chances of getting grandkids from me. Because, I mean, seriously, that was messed up.”<br>
Leo smiled at the comment, but then turned to more somber thoughts. “I meant it when I said be careful with her, Chris. She’s evil.”<br>
“Cole was evil. Now look at him.”<br>
“Chris, regardless of how she may act around you now, if she found out what you really do, she could kill you in a second.”<br>
Again, Chris felt like arguing a counterpoint, but couldn’t refute something that had occurred to him before now. “I know what you’re saying, Leo. Believe me, I know.”<br>
Leo nodded and turned a couple of more pages in his book. The two men were silent for several minutes before Chris spoke again.

“Can I ask you a personal question?”<br>
“You’re my son; of course you can.”<br>
His internal reaction to Leo’s words was one halfway between a cringe and a leap, but Chris didn’t show either. “How did you know --” he paused, trying to get the wording right. “How could you tell that you loved Mom?”<br>
“Well, I’d watched over her since she was a child, so --”<br>
“Not . . . that kind of love.”<br>
Leo took a breath. “We had been seeing each other off and on for a little while. It was before she knew what I was -- before Phoebe even found out.” Leo seemed to concentrate on making the memory so vivid that he could almost reach out and touch his wife. “One day, we were in the kitchen. I remember the refrigerator was leaking, and we had to take everything out of the freezer to find the problem.” Leo grinned. “She had some sea slugs in there freeze-drying and she tried to cover up the fact that they were a potion ingredient by saying they were for a new recipe she was experimenting with. I asked who would ever want to eat a slug, and the best she could come up with was that the great chefs of Europe were now grinding the things to put in spaghetti sauce. It was all I could do to keep from laughing. Well, she was so rattled by me having found them, and then by her spectacularly ridiculous lie, that she turned on the kitchen TV to try and calm herself down. It was the midday news, and they were running a story about a nine-year-old caught in the crossfire of a turf war, and how the little girl’s family didn’t even have the money to bury her. They flashed up the address of a bank that was taking donations for her funeral fund, and your mom sat down and wrote out a check right then and there. She was such a caring person. And that’s when I knew.”<br>
“That was it?”<br>
Leo chuckled. “That was it. Even though I knew that I couldn’t stay with her, that it would break all the rules, deep down I also knew that I couldn’t --” Leo’s voice started to break, and Chris forced himself not to look at the tears that came to his father’s eyes. “I couldn’t imagine being in the world and not being with her. And the weight of that realization was so . . . overwhelming, I couldn’t stand under it; I literally had to sit down.”<br>
As much as he knew it hurt Leo that his once unimaginable scenario was now a reality, Chris had to get an answer. “How could you leave her, then?” he asked in a small voice.

It took a while for Leo to speak. “I didn’t leave her completely. I could still see her, the same way I saw you that night.”<br>
“You came to her in her dreams.”<br>
“When I could. But even if I hadn’t been able to do that, your mother and I had the kind of love, Chris, that --” he sighed. “No matter how far apart we were, she was always here.” He pointed to his head and his heart. “And I was always there.”<br>
Chris didn’t respond for a long while, but simply stared at a page in the book he held. Leo studied him in the meantime, and then spoke. “You really like this woman, don’t you?”<br>
Chris’s gaze shot up at how their conversation had spiraled so that Leo had come to the essential point. After a moment, he nodded slowly. “Yeah. I do.”<br>
“Do you love her?”<br>
This answer was quite a bit longer in coming. “I don’t know,” Chris finally breathed. “I think about who she is, and what she does, and I say no. But when I’m with her, all of that goes away, and --” Chris swallowed and shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess --” He looked down at himself and shrugged. “Right now, I guess…I’m still standing.”

[scifi]

Cole strode along the banks of the stream on the outskirts of camp like a man burning with the same intensity as the sun that was setting beyond the trees. He didn’t even acknowledge Helen when she waved to him from where she was gathering the night’s supply of water with the other smaller children. He just kept walking until he reached the edge of the sanctuary, where one of the watch keepers stood oblivious to everything except maintaining the thin veil between them and annihilation.

Some things never changed -- as long as Wyatt could say he was a Halliwell, he had an infinite supply of second chances, no matter how much suffering he caused. For all his arrogant presumption that he could be allied with neither Good nor Evil, he had done more for the cause of Evil than Belthazor had ever done. Yet had Cole ever been shown the mercy that this spoiled brat was getting? Even when Phoebe had been able to forgive him, he’d had to fight and toil for every inch of the way back into her heart. But not Wyatt. He didn’t even have to try for forgiveness -- Leo was ready to welcome him back into the fold even now, when he knew that his son could and would commit another evil act at any given moment and that he didn’t want forgiveness or feel he’d even done anything to need it. And Chris was just as bad as Leo, putting his neck on the line to save what? A brother who had ripped away everything dear to all of them.

But surely they couldn’t know just how much he had been responsible for taking -- at the very least Chris couldn’t. Leo had always been reluctant to do harm, but even though Cole had noticed a lot of Leo in the young whitelighter, Chris was most definitely also Piper’s son. And if there was one thing he knew about his ex-sister-in-law, it was that she had a very real knack for retribution. No, Chris most likely didn’t know -- that, or he and his father were living proof of Cole’s long-time suspicion that there was something in the whitelighter genetic code that had Asinine written all over it.

“Whatcha doing?” Cassie said at his elbow. He hadn’t even noticed her step up beside him. He glanced over his shoulder and was surprised to see Kit a few paces off pretending to be studying the aquatic life in the stream rather than listening to him.

“Thinking,” he finally answered.

“About what?”<br>
“I’m trying to narrow down who would be crazy enough to make darklighter poison. I can’t exactly go after all the apothecaries. Word would get back to Wyatt.”<br>
“That doesn’t seem like something you’d get so mad about.”<br>
“I’m not mad.”<br>
“Somebody’s in denial,” Cassie repeated a phrase she’d often heard her mother say after reading letters for her column. “Is it Wyatt? Because I kind of noticed you got in a bad mood real quick when Leo said he wanted to protect him.”<br>
When Cole didn’t answer, but instead resumed his walk by retracing his steps, Cassie and Kit followed.

“Why do you hate him so much?” Cassie asked. “I know why those other people do, but you haven’t been around long enough for him to do anything to make you hate him.”<br>
Cole stopped again. “Don’t you hate him?” he asked, and then addressed Kit. “Don’t you? You’re good at holding a grudge.”<br>
Kit looked away, almost like she was ashamed, but Cassie answered for her own part. “My daddy said you should never hate anybody, even if they hurt you.”<br>
“He was a fool, then.”<br>
Cassie let his words sting for only an instant before she felt his regret at having been so harsh. “He said if you keep hating them, then you’re just letting them hurt you over and over and over again.”<br>
Surely Phoebe hadn’t married a saint when she married this -- what was his name -- Jonathan Laurier. “Did he really say that?” Cole asked Kit.

She nodded and spoke reluctantly. “Mom told me that’s why she married him. He made her realize she could never really, truly love again . . . Until she stopped hating you.”<br>
“The man must have written greeting cards for a living,” Cole made light of the sappiness of these sentiments, but Cassie picked up on the relief he felt that Phoebe hadn’t died hating him. She smiled.

“Actually, you’re a little bit like him,” she said.

“A very little bit,” Kit couldn’t resist putting in.

“How so?”<br>
“He was really tall, and he had dark hair --” Cassie began.

“And he told it like it was,” Kit said quietly.

Cole smiled in spite of himself. “Irritated her, huh?”<br>
“Oh, yeah.” Cassie laughed. “Like, even though she was a Charmed One, he never let her live it down that he could honest-to-goodness fly, and she could just levitate.”<br>
“Or like when he filled out Cassie’s birth certificate and switched the order of the names he and Mom picked out, even though she hated the one he wanted, so that Cassie’s first name is officially Zelda,” Kit teased.

“At least I’m not named after a cat,” Cassie threw back.

“A familiar. A witch’s guide. Very different thing.”<br>
“Well, they both say ‘Meow.’”

Cole listened as they inadvertently reminded him that they were children by tossing out jibes, and he watched in the distance where Helen had orbed a pail full of water over a playmate’s head. Despite his significantly improved mood, he allowed himself to waste one further thought on Wyatt before leading the girls back into the main camp. He may have taken Phoebe away from him, but he would not take anything else.

[scifi]

Bianca sat at her dinette table with the Matriarch’s grimiore spread before her, though she was no closer to having it copied than she had been four days ago. She had promised Chris that she would be back to see him as soon as possible, but she wanted to be able to know of a way out of killing his father before she made good on it. For the longest time, the grimiore had given her no options, but now she hit on a page entitled “Breach of Contract.”<br>
Should a witch deem an assigned task beyond her capabilities or otherwise unfeasible, she may request a replacement of the Matriarch without disgrace. However, should a witch voice any hesitation to fulfill the terms of a contract to which she, herself, has affixed her name, such hesitation is a dishonor to the Phoenix, and the Matriarch will hold said witch’s life forfeit.


Bianca slammed the book shut and cursed its uselessness. She transported it out of her sight and sat back in her chair with her arms folded. She’d just have to find a way outside the accepted channels; that was all there was to it.

No sooner had she finished the thought than she sensed Chris orb into the room behind her. She got up from the table quickly and a bit guiltily to face where he stood with his hands behind him.

“What are you doing here?”<br>
“I got tired of waiting for you,” he answered. “I’m not interrupting anything am I?”<br>
“Um, no, I uh . . .” She lost what she was going to say when she noticed him smiling at her appearance -- bare feet, sweats and a tank top, and her hair in a sloppy bun held up with a pencil. “Actually, I was just about to change,” she said.

“I think you look fine.”<br>
Bianca started to come back with something about false flattery, but the look on his face told her he meant it. She smiled back instead.

“Look, are you hungry?” she asked. “Sit down and I’ll see what I can find.”<br>
“I took care of dinner this time,” Chris said as he brought a sack of Chinese take-out and a couple of sodas from behind his back. “It’s safer that way.”<br>
She narrowed her eyes at his not so subtle reference to the time she poisoned him, and slapped playfully at his shoulder before taking two plates from her cabinet for him to fill.

“Bring your plate in here.” She motioned to the living room with her chopsticks. “I don’t eat at the table unless I have to.”<br>
“Why’s that?”<br>
She didn’t tell him that it was because the dinette table was a reminder of all the business meals she’d had with Tess. “It’s more comfortable in the living room,” she said as she sat in her favorite overstuffed chair and crossed her legs beneath her.

Chris shrugged and sat on the carpet at her feet so he could place his food on the coffee table. He tried to pick up a piece of General Tsao’s chicken with his chopsticks, but it fell out of his grip and splattered back onto the plate.

“I hate these things,” he said as he tried again without success.

Bianca laughed. “Let me get you a fork.”<br>
“No, no. I’m going to learn how to use them tonight if it kills me.”<br>
“You’ll stain my carpet, and there goes my security deposit.” She lay her plate beside his on the coffee table so she could rise to get the fork. When she came back, she didn’t bother to sit in the chair but rather joined him on the floor. He stabbed the prongs of his fork into his food and took a bite while watching her effortlessly use her chopsticks.

“Are you an expert in everything?” he asked.

“Not everything. Just in what’s useful.” She showed off her chopstick skills again.

“What can’t you do?”<br>
She had to think for a second. “I can’t sing.”<br>
“Doesn’t count. That’s a natural thing you either have or don’t have. I mean something that has to be learned.”<br>
“I have no idea how to play poker.”<br>
“Yes!” He threw his arms in the air. “I’ve got one up on you.”<br>
She smirked. “Can you sew, tell the difference between edible wildflowers and poisonous ones, forge a blade, or read Spanish, French, or Italian?”<br>
“No.”<br>
“Then I have at least six up on you.”<br>
“Oh, yeah?” He pulled her over into his lap and started tickling her sides. “I survived public high school.”<br>
She struggled against him and said through her laughter, “That must be why I’m up by six.”

She squirmed out of his hold and tried crawling away, but he caught her again and fell to the floor with his arms around her waist. She fought until she realized that he wasn’t tickling her again, and then became still under his arms. He reached up to pull the pencil from her hair. “That’ll put somebody’s eye out,” he said as he watched her hair fall from its bun. She blinked her eyes and waited.

After a minute, he released her and sat up uneasily, but he didn’t move away. Hesitantly, she reached for his arm and pulled him down on his side. “You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “Only stay.” She turned and nestled back into the bend of his body, and then smiled when he brought his arm over her and rested one hand on her stomach and began smoothing her hair away from her neck with the other. For how long they lay like this, neither knew, nor did they care. They only felt the contentment of proximity, of her back against his chest, of their breathing that started to approach uniformity. Finally, he felt her sigh out of sync with his breaths.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“A perfect world.” She played with the hairs on his forearm. “One with no worries -- no Wyatt, no Tess, nobody else in the world. Just us.”<br>
Chris grinned. “Only two people in the world? What if we got sick of each other? We’d be stuck for company then.”<br>
“We wouldn’t. Not if we stayed like this.”<br>
She looked back at him over her shoulder then and saw his smile fade into an expression of focus, as if he could will her perfect world into existence. Of course he couldn’t, so he did the next best thing, and she opened her lips to him.

Bianca shifted her position to relieve the strain the kiss put on her neck, and his hand followed her movement to her other side by sliding from her stomach to the small of her back. Once there, he used his hand to pull her even closer. He trapped one of her legs with his own, and her bare foot pushed against the material of his pants so that it could curve itself over the skin of his ankle, as though Bianca was determined to use every inch of herself to caress him.

He broke off their kiss as he rolled her gently onto her back and began tugging at her neck with his lips. She held his head there, directing him where to go by arching her throat this way or that.

“Chris,” she whispered shakily as his kisses lingered over the hollow where her neck and collar bone met and then moved back up beneath her jaw. She brought his head up to look him in the eyes and could see in them that he felt it too -- the ecstatically painful tightness in the chest that came from not knowing whether to laugh out loud or cry and that left them both trembling and breathless. “Save me.”<br>
He didn’t say anything in response to her plea, but instead moved in for another kiss, and she came up slightly from the floor to meet him. Suddenly he broke off again and turned his face away to blow out a frustrated breath. Someone was calling him.

“Wyatt?” Bianca asked resignedly.

Chris shook his head. “Grandpa.” He glanced back down at her. “I have to go.”<br>
She nodded, and his eyes darted over every detail of her face like he was memorizing it -- like she wasn’t already permanently etched into his mind. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he finally said.

She smiled and let him give her a last kiss, which, when it deepened after a moment, made her wonder if he’d decided to stay, after all. But at last, the pressure on her lips disappeared, and she opened her eyes to an empty room.

When Chris arrived home, he had to steady himself against a wall. He’d never before had the opportunity to orb out of a kiss, but now thought maybe he should do so more often. His last sensation of Bianca -- his mouth joined to hers, and the tip of his tongue passing lightly between her teeth -- had registered in every fiber of his being as he became an orb pattern, and then followed him through to his reformation in the hall. An involuntary shudder shot through his body, and he smiled. “Whoa.”<br>
“Chris, you home?” he heard his grandfather call from the kitchen -- apparently there was no emergency.

“Yeah, Grandpa. I’ll be there in a minute.” Chris shut himself in the bathroom and studied his reflection in the mirror. A flush covered his neck and face, and his lips were a bit swollen from the force of his kisses. It looked like he’d need more than a minute.

Victor knocked and spoke through the door. “I just called to tell you I ordered dinner from that new Chinese place, and yours is getting cold.”<br>
Chris shook his head and could only laugh at the irony of Victor’s lousy timing. “Thanks, Grandpa.”<br>
He heard Victor shuffle off down the hall to his room and then glanced at his reflection again. The humor of the situation died away as rationality superceded emotionality once more, and he thought that perhaps fate had made Victor call him away before he did something he would regret. But at the same time, he sensed his rational side was fighting a losing battle, because even as he contemplated the possibility of regret, he knew he couldn’t help but go back to Bianca tomorrow.

[scifi]

Cassie was pulling a shift as a watch keeper, Helen was with Leo sneaking a peek at Kit’s latest drawings, Kit was practicing levitating while casting a spell under Lydia’s tutelage, and as Chris finished this sensing exercise, his grandfather was in the next room dozing in his chair. Chris was getting better at this, shifting more quickly among the various people he was able to pick up; he could even catch hints of Bianca in the Underworld, where she had been for the past several days doing some kind of research. Perhaps she had been right to think all he needed was practice.

He stood up from his bed to keep his legs from falling asleep under him, paced the room and flailed his arms as though warming up for a race, then reassumed his lotus position in the middle of the bed and took a couple of measured breaths before shutting his eyes for the real test of his abilities -- sensing Wyatt. The wall his brother usually put up came immediately to his mind. If it had been something he could visualize, Chris might have described it as made of unflawed concrete and stretching infinitely up and out. But even the best concrete was porous, and if Chris could only find his way through, his job would get significantly easier. After several unsuccessful minutes of trying to drown out his physical senses to get through the barrier, however, he slapped the bed with the flat of his palms. “Forget this.” Whitelighter, indeed. He was a better witch any day.

As though to prove the importance of the distinction, Chris pulled a pen and paper from his desk drawer and started brainstorming rhymes for what he wanted to do, which was to be like a fly on Wyatt’s wall. He started going through the alphabet for the short rhymes first -- all, ball, call, doll, fall -- but then thought he might want to reword his desired effect, just in case a backfire of some kind literally turned him into a fly. A moment’s second sight sounded better, perhaps as a last line. Again he went through the alphabet, and then began eliminating nonsensical rhymes like kite. Next would have to come the meter, and if he ever thought in literary terms, Chris might have realized that he worked almost exclusively in variations of iambic or trochaic tetrameter -- fairly common, really, for witches. Of course, he didn’t think of such things, but instead inverted the word order here and there to fit with a rhythm he knew somewhere inside himself like the melody of a song heard in childhood that somehow stayed barely on the cusp of consciousness.

“Blood of my blood at power’s height,
Through these words I defy your might.
Unfold plans of death and blight
With a moment’s second sight.”<br>
He suddenly felt as if he were torn in two, one part with the physical sensations of sitting on a bed and clinching his teeth, and the other with the sensation of floating ever closer to watch where Wyatt stood in his Hall addressing several new demons. No sound came from his brother’s moving lips, but from the way Wyatt glanced at one of the more surly-looking demons an instant before it erupted in flames, Chris supposed he was simply giving them a glimpse of the kind of being who had brought them back into the world. As his consciousness came closer, he began hearing snippets of phrases, like he was listening through one of those old-fashioned cellular phones that consistently had a bad connection: “Mortals . . . maximum exposure . . . wait.”<br>
None of what Wyatt said was coherent enough for Chris to make sense of it, and just as the demons were dismissed to go about whatever business their new master had sent them on, he felt his two parts pull back together with a force that knocked him on his back. He lay still for a moment, contemplating the double insult of today’s bright idea -- he’d failed both as a whitelighter and as a witch. For all his trouble, he really knew no more now that when he’d begun.

An exercise that had initially stemmed from bored curiosity about how far he could push his powers had somewhere along the way turned into a humbling and infuriating eye-opener, and Chris cursed himself for ignoring all but the most instinctual aspects of his whitelighter side for so many years in favor of focusing solely on his mother’s craft. It was his own foolish pride that made him mediocre. But at the same time, it wasn’t like he had anyone around to teach him. There was that pride again. If only he could go to someone other than Leo -- someone whose advice he could bear to hear without getting the urge to contradict every word he said. Nevertheless, Chris knew what his options were, and chose the one that had him orbing to the sanctuary.

[scifi]

He found Leo still sitting with Helen at the foot of the girls’ tree. “Hey.”<br>
“Hey, Chris.” Leo seemed to be in a good mood as he stood up and showed him the notebook he and Helen had been examining. “Look what we found.” The cover held the title Christopher Halliwell.

“Kit must be running out of ideas,” Chris said humorlessly.

Leo ignored his tone and opened the biography to an early drawing. He handed it over to his son. “Do you remember that?”<br>
The picture was one of him as a small child, perhaps two or three years old. He was on his parents’ bed getting a good tickling from Leo, and on that baby face was an expression of unadulterated joy. Chris gave the picture only a cursory glance. “No.”<br>
Leo grinned. “We did that all the --”<br>
“I need your help,” Chris interrupted.

Leo’s smile faded as he comprehended Chris’s unwillingness to reminisce. “Helen, go see if Miss Lydia needs any more helpers.”<br>
She gave him a look that said “I’m not stupid,” but orbed out anyway.

“What do you need?”<br>
“I’ve been trying to sense Wyatt --”<br>
“Chris, I can’t even do that, and I’m an Elder.”<br>
“But he lets me sometimes. You’d think there’s got to be a crack somewhere, and if anybody can find it, it should be me. I want you to show me how.”<br>
Leo got the impression that Chris was grasping at straws. “I don’t have that kind of time.”<br>
Chris shoved the notebook back to him and turned away to fume to himself. “Even when I’m trying to do my job!”<br>
“It could take years for full whitelighters to really come into their powers,” Leo tried to explain. “You might never --”<br>
“You know what, Leo, just spare me the many ways I’m screwed, okay.”<br>
Wisely, Leo didn’t attempt to negate what Chris said, figuring the sound of his voice would only set him off further. What Leo didn’t realize was that the bulk of Chris’s anger had been directed inward since before he arrived, and that now the mere presence of his father gave him an opportunity to transfer some of it.

“I’m just . . . I’m so sick of it!” Chris didn’t say what it was, but as he stared at Leo, standing there mute and clutching the notebook to himself like it was a surrogate for the son of its title, he knew it was finally time to show him.

“You want to know what I remember?” Chris snatched the book away again and started turning the pages fiercely. “This is what I remember!” He held up a picture of that same three-year-old touching the tracks of his mother’s tears in wonderment because he’d never before seen her cry for herself. “And this!” It was a picture of him at twelve, fighting with a boy who’d called him a bastard, not because of the insult, but because he knew it might as well have been true. “And this! Look at it!” It was the moment Chris discovered he had been orphaned. “Do you see me? You see Paige, and you see Phoebe, and you see my mom!” He pushed the picture closer to Leo’s face when he tried to look away. “Look at it! Do you see me? I’m standing right there! Look at me! I couldn’t even move! Do you see me? Look at it!”<br>
Leo slapped the book away and pinned Chris to the tree with his forearm against his chest.

“Hit me!” Chris cried. “It’s my fault! Hit me!”<br>
Leo stood in complete shock. “Is that what you think?” he breathed after a moment. “That I blame you?” He release him and backed away. “You were fourteen years old. There was nothing you could have . . . How can you think I blame you?”<br>
Chris stared at the ground. “Why else would you leave me again?” he muttered.

“My God,” Leo sighed at the guilt he’d caused Chris to carry for so many years. In the silence that fell between them, Leo could hear the muffled sounds of the spectators the two of them had attracted, and for one of the few times in his life, he felt real bitterness toward the people with whose safety he was entrusted. Yet the bitterness wasn’t really so much at these people, but at the twists of fate that had led him to become what he was -- an Elder in the service of everyone except his own son. But service didn’t mean he had to lay bare their issues for public scrutiny. He touched Chris’s arm and orbed with him to the library, where whoever was in there reading found themselves suddenly being orbed outside.

But now that they were alone, Leo didn’t have any easier time of thinking how to set Chris’s misconceptions straight as he paced the floor. Finally, he settled on something he knew would be inadequate.

“Your mother told me once about this survey question she answered. It’s silly, but maybe it’ll make sense.” He stopped pacing and glanced at Chris. “You’re in a burning building and you have to choose between saving a sibling or saving five strangers. Who do you choose?”<br>
Chris considered it. “Is this sibling good?”<br>
“Yeah.”<br>
There was no further hesitation in his answer. “Then I would save Wyatt.”<br>
“But Chris, you see, the greater good would dictate that you don’t let family bonds determine your decision. The equation has to break down to five versus one.”<br>
Chris shook his head. “No. It doesn’t. If Wyatt were good, I’d be keeping him alive to save countless future innocents -- way more than the five I left behind.” He paused. “I can’t be like you, Leo. I can’t take family out of the equation, because life is not some theoretical math problem.”<br>
Leo didn’t have an answer to that, but simply sat down on an outcropping of rock at the opposite wall. Chris hunkered down where he was, and the space between them was like a limitless expanse. For several minutes, Leo watched him draw circles in the dirt and then rub them out, all the while not making any sound to bridge that vastness. But they were in a cave, and Leo could hope that the echoes could carry their words across the divide. “Talk to me, Chris.”<br>
Chris rose to pace much as Leo had been doing moments earlier. At last he stopped and gave his thoughts form. “I was just thinking about my eighth birthday. I remember it because that was the year I stopped believing in Santa Claus . . . and I stopped believing in you.” He said it with no trace of accusation this time, but merely as a matter of fact. “I, uh . . . In my letter, I had asked you for a --” Chris tried to recall the name. “For the first part of an ARI kit -- I told you it was this thing where you could build a robot to do stuff for you. I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it do anything other than bump into walls, but back then I thought I’d found a legitimate way to get out of chores, since with magic, personal gain always came back to bite me.” Chris grinned momentarily at an eight-year-old’s gullibility, but then continued with what really made the birthday memorable. “You sent me building blocks instead. An easy mistake, I guess, if you’re not paying attention. I told you I wanted to build stuff, so . . . But the thing that got me was that they weren’t even mildly cool like Legos. They were the big bulky kind people get so their kids can’t put them in their mouths and swallow them. You still had this image of me as the little kid you used to play with all the time. But I stopped being that kid the minute you left.”<br>
Chris walked over to sit on the rock with Leo and rested his head against the wall. “I think maybe it sticks out to me because it’s like a metaphor for my whole life. You never knew me, and I thought you didn’t care to.” He closed his eyes. “But then Mom died, and you came down for a while. And the longer you stayed, the more I’d find myself wondering if maybe it was possible, for once in your life, for you to stop thinking like an Elder . . . and just be my dad.” He shrugged. “I guess it was too much to hope for. You still have to read about me from a book.”<br>
Leo searched himself for any kind of response better than the one that came immediately to mind, but finding nothing to top the simplicity of a short, genuine reply, he sighed. “I’m sorry.”<br>
Chris pushed himself up then, giving an impression of being insulted that Leo thought an apology would fix anything. But that wasn’t really why he stood and crossed over to where daylight chased away the darkness on the cave’s floor. He stood because he knew that an apology was, indeed, a start.

“You make it so hard sometimes,” he said.

“To do what?”<br>
Chris stared out of the entrance and squinted his eyes at the brightness. “To stay mad.”

He knew what those words meant he was beginning to do, and he shook his head at himself for having said them. And even though he wouldn’t take them back now, he knew, in all likelihood, that he was once again leaving an opening for Leo to hurt him.

[scifi]

It actually wasn’t a bad thing to have to drive every once in a while, Chris decided as he exited the freeway on his way home from a successful shopping trip. At the last minute, Victor had said he was going all out for Halloween this year, insisting that he be able to sit on the front steps -- in full costume and with appropriately spooky décor in the yard -- and hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters. So Chris had been charged with scrounging in the party stores for a costume only a couple of days before the big night.

“Just don’t get an angel outfit -- what’s scary about them?” Victor had said. After searching three stores, Chris had finally found a devil suit and grinned wickedly at the idea of following those instructions so literally. Cheesy horns and a tail would serve his grandpa right for making him rummage through the leftovers. But in the end, he’d bought a simple black hood and cloak, which would serve double duty in presenting a sufficiently shadowy figure to the kids and in keeping Victor warm if the night turned out chilly. And as an added bonus, it allowed him a private joke on Ekera, who had been showing up periodically for the past week, no doubt figuring that any supernatural treason he might perpetrate would fall around the Witches’ Holiday.

Then he’d been off to yet another supply store to stock up on decorations since there were so few at the house. He and Victor hadn’t made Halloween night festive in a long time because it had seemed almost a sacrilege to celebrate it when so many witches had fallen in the years since the Charmed Ones’ deaths and Wyatt’s subsequent rise to power had left Good Magic substantially weakened. But Victor had him excited about the holiday again, maybe because the rushing around for frivolity’s sake instead of survival’s sake was almost the way things used to be, but mostly because it was a small act of defiance that said Wyatt hadn’t beaten them yet.

Now as he pulled Victor’s old convertible onto one of the side streets that was a short-cut home, Chris let the comfortably cool night air add to his contentment. He might have been in a car commercial if it hadn’t been for the poles for the artificial torches sticking up out of the back and the pile of sacks in the passenger seat beside him threatening to slide down into the floorboard if he took a turn too sharply. But even these didn’t bother him, because they were a reminder that he had finally drawn Bianca away from this research thing she was obsessing about by calling and begging her to help him decorate the inside of the house tonight. She’d been making herself sick over whatever it was she was looking for, though she wouldn’t let him lend any assistance when he’d asked, but instead became quiet and withdrawn until he changed the subject. She needed a worry-free night of hanging cobwebs and carving pumpkins as much as he did.

“Chris! Chris!”<br>
It took him a minute to recognize Madeline’s voice, as she so rarely called on him as a whitelighter, but when he did, he was filled with an almost precognizant dread that the night would hold events as far away from decorating as they could get. He parked the car haphazardly in an alley between two houses and orbed out of his seat.

Victor was lying unconscious on the floor halfway between his bed and his bathroom, with Madeline kneeling over him and checking his vitals.

“What happened?” Chris demanded as he joined them on the floor.

“I don’t know. I just came in to check on him and found him like this.” Maddie slung her stethoscope back around her neck. “He’s breathing, but his pressure’s elevated, even for him.”<br>
Chris motioned for her to back away. “I’m taking him to the hospital.”<br>
“Chris,” Maddie said as she stood and reached for the nightstand drawer. She held out the paper she pulled from it -- a copy of Victor’s DNR. “They’ll need this.”<br>
Chris stared at it for a second like it was some curious animal he’d never seen before, but then grabbed it and stuffed it deep into his pocket. “No, they won’t,” he said before orbing once again.

“Somebody help me!” he yelled into the emergency room, and a doctor and a couple of nurses ran with him to the empty bathroom where he had orbed in with Victor.

“He was taking a long time, and I came in to check, and I found him like that,” he lied quickly with a paraphrase of what Maddie had said moments before.

In less than a minute, Victor was transferred from the floor to a gurney, and Chris found himself standing outside a trauma room answering the terse questions put to him by one of the nurses. Through a small window in the doors, he watched the trauma team evaluate his grandfather.

“Sir, watching them’s not going to help. Answering me will,” the nurse said to draw his attention to the medical history. “Does he have a history of heart problems, high blood pressure --”<br>
“He has emphysema --”<br>
“Smoker?”<br>
“Yeah. And . . . He has cancer. Pancreatic.”<br>
“End stage?” she asked without preamble. Chris simply nodded and rammed his hands into his pockets, where he closed a fist around the paper he found there.

“Does he have an advanced directive, a living will?”<br>
“No.”<br>
It must have been Chris’s imagination that the nurse didn’t quite believe him, because she merely backed through the swinging doors of the trauma room to take the information to the doctors. After a few seconds of watching through the window, Chris pushed his way in and stood unobtrusively in a corner.

Victor was hooked up to every monitor imaginable, and Chris listened as the Attending ordered the standard diagnostics -- blood gas, CBC, tox screen -- before calling for a scan for brain trauma. A tech performed the brain scan in a matter of moments, and in a holographic array off to the side, a three-dimensional representation of Victor’s brain appeared in mid-air. The Attending examined the results for only a moment, seeing immediately what he’d already suspected. He ordered heparin to bring down Victor’s blood pressure and perhaps help break up the clot that had caused a stroke, then took another glance at the hologram. “And let’s intubate him as a precaution. If he seizes, we may not get another chance.”<br>
As one nurse started the heparin drip, another prepped the intubation kit. All Chris could think of was the typeface of the word “intubation” as it was printed on the DNR, but still he only tightened the hold he had on the paper, as though in doing so he could crush it out of existence. But then he saw the Attending take the tube out of the nurse’s hand and begin trying to open Victor’s airway so he could ram it down his throat. Chris felt the muscles in his own throat constrict, and then felt his mouth moving in some approximation of a word. No sound came from the first couple of tries, but finally, he got the word out. “Stop,” he called.

Without really even thinking about it, he had removed the paper from his pocket and was holding it out to the nearest nurse, who stood like the rest of the medical team in surprise at his presence. The nurse pried it from his hand and uncrumpled it before showing it to the Attending. He lay the intubation kit aside and stared at Chris for a long moment, perhaps trying to decide whether to lash out at him for very nearly putting the hospital in a very sticky legal situation, or to cross the room and wipe the tears out of the boy’s eyes. He turned to one of the nurses instead. “Let’s get him to the ICU. Continue heparin, and put him on a 90% oxygen mix. And, uh, when he’s settled, take him up.” He motioned to Chris before leaving the room to attend to other patients.

[scifi]

The nurse nodded and left. After a few minutes, she brought two blankets back -- one for Victor, and one for Chris.

“My name’s Jill. If you need anything, I’ll be right outside at the desk.”<br>
Only thirty minutes had to pass before Chris pressed the intercom to the nurses’ station.

“Yes?” an unfamiliar voice came back.

“Room 306. He . . . He needs his bed changed.”<br>
“Thank you.”<br>
What kind of response was “Thank you”? Thank you for making us get up from our crossword puzzles? Thank you for asking us to handle soiled sheets, for asking us to wipe some old man’s --

But Jill was again the nurse to come into the room, bearing clean sheets and a basin, and Chris somehow couldn’t silently berate her. She filled the basin at the room’s sink, and made to lift Victor’s gown. Yet even Jill would be an indignity.

“I’ll do it,” he said, and the nurse passed the water over to him and busied herself with unfolding the sheets and preparing a pad to place under Victor once everything was clean. When Chris finished, she expertly removed the bedding from underneath the inert patient and replaced it with the clean linens. She threw the soiled sheets into a red biological waste bag to be sent down to the incinerator, and before she left with them, she turned down the sound on the monitors.

“In case you want to get some sleep. The monitors at the desk will tell us if … if there are any changes.” Chris knew the change she was thinking of was his heart stopping. “You shouldn’t have to listen to that beeping all night. It’d drive me nuts.”<br>
About another half hour into the silence, Chris was tempted to whisper Leo’s name into the air. He knew his father would come if he did. But the name never passed his lips, just as it hadn’t when he first saw Victor’s prone body at home, and just as it hadn’t after he’d told the doctor to stop his procedure. No sooner had the thought once again passed through his mind than he sensed another presence in the room -- not Leo, not someone who could do anything about Victor’s condition, but someone who could at least give Chris some comfort.

He stood and turned toward the window, where Bianca was already moving toward him. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his head down to rest on her shoulder. She might have expected him to cry then, but he simply held onto her like she was some sort of buoy keeping him from drowning.

“I came as soon as I could,” she whispered, as though anything louder could wake the sleeping figure beside them. Finally she sat Chris down and pulled over a chair of her own to sit next to him. Only now did he notice that she was holding a brown paper bag, from which she brought out a half sandwich. “Eat.”<br>
He obeyed without a second thought, and realized when he swallowed the first bite how hungry he really was. She stroked his hair while he finished it, then brought out the other half for him to devour before washing it all down with a soda.

“I found your car,” she said in the same hushed tone. “I took it back to your house, and Madeline and I unloaded it.” She watched him take a drink of the soda. “She said you could call her if you needed anything. But I knew you wouldn’t.”<br>
He hunched over in his chair and dangled the drink can between his knees. “It’s just happening so fast.”<br>
She rubbed a hand over his back to try to take some of the tension out of it. “I know, Baby.”<br>
It was the first time she’d called him that, and he gave a weak smile in spite of himself. He leaned back in the chair, then took her hand and kissed it gently before resting it on the chair arm with his hand over it.

“You should sleep,” Bianca advised.

“I can’t.” He glanced over at Victor. “What if --”<br>
“Okay,” she answered, anticipating what he was going to say. She turned her palm over on the chair arm so she could intertwine her fingers with his, and held his hand there for the two hours it took him to finally start nodding off. As soon as he felt his head start to droop, however, he would jerk himself awake and stare more intently at his grandfather.

At last, Bianca withdrew her hand so she could cover him with his blanket.

“I can’t,” he mumbled as he felt the fabric fall over him. His head was reclining on the back of the chair, and his eyes were closed, but he was determined to maintain consciousness.

“I’ll wake you,” Bianca whispered at his ear and repositioned him so that he was resting more comfortably against her arm. She smoothed his bangs out of his face. “Sleep now.”<br>
He thought perhaps he could doze -- just rest for a minute -- but the dozing lasted several hours before he opened his eyes. Bianca was still there beside him and, as she had promised, still awake and watchful for any changes.

“What time is it?” he asked groggily as he sat up in the chair.

“Quarter to six.”<br>
He nodded and ran his hands over his face, then rose to fold up his blanket and toss it at the foot of Victor’s bed. He stood there for a moment, scratching the back of his head as if there were something else he needed to do but couldn’t remember, then sat back down again.

“Can I get you some coffee?” Bianca asked.

He didn’t answer right away, because he was still in the transition stage of wakefulness that left him wondering if all this was just a continuation of a dream. “Sure,” he said finally. She patted his arm and got up to go. “Black.”<br>
“I know.”<br>
For several seconds, he gazed at the open door through which she left the room for the cafeteria, but then turned his attention to the frail man in the bed. For the past month, Chris had noticed how much thinner Victor’s hair was becoming, how his face was starting to show signs of weight loss, how his movements were slower. But until now, he’d never consciously acknowledged any of it.

“Grandpa,” he breathed, then rested his elbows on the bed and folded his hands at his mouth. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.” Tears came back into his eyes. “It’s not fair. You know it’s not fair.” He watched Victor’s face through the blur. There was nothing there. “I can’t do this alone.” He buried his face in his hands.

“I wish I could hug you.”<br>
Chris’s face shot up at the sound of Victor’s voice. But the person in the bed wasn’t moving, and he realized the sound had come from behind. His breaths became shallow, and his limbs felt numb, and all he could allow himself to think of was how many people he would have to call now.

“Chris,” he heard the voice say. “I want you to look at me. Your grandma could only buy me so much time.”<br>
Chris reluctantly obeyed his grandfather’s request and saw that the spirit appeared twenty years younger than the body in the bed, and dressed in Armani.

Victor grinned. “Pretty snazzy, huh. It’s all up here.” The spirit pointed to his head, then became more serious. “I just wanted to stick around long enough to thank you. I’m not going to try to tell you not to cry, or that everything’s going to be okay because I’m going to be with my girls. I mean, it is okay for me . . . But not for you. And I hate that, but --” he shrugged. “It’s human. I’m just here to thank you.” He watched Chris for a moment longer, then continued. “And I want to tell you that I’d better not hear again of you thinking that you’re alone.” He glanced toward the heavens. “I have it on good authority that you’re not. You never have been, and you never will be. Just so you know.” He waited a few more moments while Chris tried to regain some semblance of control. “What is that phrase you witches use all the time?”<br>
Chris smiled through his tears. “Blessed be.”<br>
Victor nodded. “Yeah, that.” He winked then, and finally moved on.

The nurse who came on shift to relieve Jill entered the room a few seconds later to record a time of death and to lead Chris away to a small area the hospital allowed for grieving families. For several minutes, he was the only person in the room, but then Bianca found the place and set the coffees on a side table so she could hold him.

They sat together in silence until a respectful amount of time had passed, and yet another member of the hospital staff entered the room with several papers on a clipboard. She sat down near them and asked as gently as was possible if anyone had made prior arrangements for the body. Try as he might to remember what Victor had once discussed with him, Chris could only draw a blank. “I . . . I think he has it written down at home.”<br>
The woman nodded indulgently. “Okay. When you get home and find the information, I’d like you to call us so we can get in touch with the funeral director.” She held out her card to Chris, but Bianca took it instead when he didn’t reach for it. She stood up and indicated that she wanted the lady to stand with her, and then led her a little ways distant.

“You can just talk to me right now,” Bianca said to her.

The lady showed Bianca some of the papers on the clipboard, a complementary list of things Chris would need to have taken care of in the next few weeks -- insurance, bank accounts, Social Security, and the like. Chris listened and watched as Bianca nodded her understanding of the instructions, asked all the right questions, and generally took care of everything.

And he realized it was a good thing he was already sitting down.

“Do you want to see him before they move him?” Bianca came over to ask when the lady had gone.

“I just want to go home.”

[scifi]

They shimmered into the kitchen where they could barely see the table in the pre-dawn light. He sat down there while Bianca flipped on the florescent light above the sink and set the paperwork down on the counter. She didn’t say anything, but simply searched the cabinets for a skillet and, after finding one, brought a carton of eggs out of the refrigerator.

“How many can you eat?” she asked him.

“I love you.”<br>
She slowly set the egg she had been about to crack back in its container and stood still as death at the stove.

“I love you,” he repeated simply, as if she hadn’t heard him the first time.

At length, she turned to him and let a couple of tears fall before shaking her head as though the action would tell him all the reasons he couldn’t love her. Without a word of response, she shimmered out, leaving him alone.

[scifi]

Bianca conjured the Matriarch’s grimiore as soon as she shimmered into her kitchen, but she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She just stared at where it lay on the table, the crimson Phoenix emblazoned on its cover in an attitude of flight, of rising valiantly from the ashes, and she wondered if her coven had ever really believed in anything their emblem represented. She doubted it, if any of them were like her. She’d never risen from anything, and as she thought of the page in the grimiore that told her there was one way -- and only one way -- out of murdering Leo, she knew the only thing keeping her from taking that way was her own cowardice.

“Where have you been all night?” she heard from the living room behind her. Tess was sitting in her favorite overstuffed chair, her left hand stroking the fabric of the chair’s arm in the nonchalant way one might stroke a pet. Bianca got the sudden urge to burn that chair. She turned on a lamp in the living room instead.

“With Chris,” she answered, and crossed the room to another lamp so she wouldn’t have to see Tess raise her eyebrows suggestively. Bianca was in no mood to rebut innuendo.

“Anything to keep from studying the grimiore. But I suppose you have to play every so often, while you’re still young.” Tess said like a friend amused at knowing a dirty secret. “All the same, it was awfully inconsiderate of you to not leave a note. I’ve been sitting here for the longest time wondering whether or not to invite you.”<br>
“Invite me to what?” Bianca asked after she kicked off her shoes and sat across the room in an ornate high-backed wooden chair that was really meant only for decoration since it was so uncomfortable. But in front of this chair was where she had told Chris of her perfect world, where she had begged him to save her, and she kneaded the carpet fibers with the soles of her feet as if by doing so she could recapture that moment and the belief that she could be saved, that she was even worth saving.

“To go with me to see the apothecary. The poison is ready.”<br>
Bianca’s feet stopped their movement.

“The poison is useless if you can’t find him,” she responded for the express sake of argument.

“That won’t be a problem for very much longer,” Tess said. “Just because we can’t find a spell to break the cloak doesn’t mean I can’t write one. I’ve already been trying variations, and there are plenty more to go. One is bound to work.”<br>
Bianca rose again and stood in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.

Tess teased her after a moment. “So are you coming now or after breakfast? I’d imagine you’d be famished after --”<br>
“I’m not going.”<br>
“I want you to learn --”<br>
“I know how to deal with apothecaries. I know how to kill them, too. So there’s nothing to be learned by going with you.”<br>
“Overconfidence can get you killed. Look what it did to your mother.”<br>
“No, following you is what got her killed.”<br>
Tess sent an energy ball crashing into the wall beside her.

Bianca didn’t even flinch. “Never show your temper, Matriarch,” she admonished. “You see. I have been studying the grimiore. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get back to it.”<br>
She sat down at the table and opened the book to a random page, but before she could begin reading the entry on Chimeras, Tess was behind her with a fist full of hair to jerk her head back.

“That attitude is what got her killed,” Tess said evenly at Bianca’s ear. “The insolence, the arrogance of thinking she was a law unto herself, separate from all that we are and have known.” Tess tightened her grip and pulled again as though she had lost her attention. “I know where that attitude comes from. It comes from Chris. And if you don’t drop it, and soon, it’s going to get you both killed.”<br>
Bianca wondered if she would be quick enough to break out of her aunt’s grasp and stand against her. “Is that a threat?”<br>
“It’s a fact.” Tess released her hair and shimmered to the apothecary on her own, leaving Bianca to sit as though weighted to the chair for a long minute before she turned the grimiore to the entry she had been avoiding. She stared at it, memorized every pen stroke, and contemplated the meaning behind things like love, and betrayal, and flightless birds.

*** *** ***

Tess sensed the unfamiliar demon an instant before she shimmered into the apothecary’s lair and concentrated on keeping him from sensing her own presence as she hid in an alcove to assess the scene before making any kind of move.

He held the ancient demon in the air by the collar of his chemical stained coat and shook him. “You old fool, I know you remember me. Now give me an answer.”<br>
“Cole wants an answer. Answer to what? To keeping my witch, he says. Why you want a witch, I say. I don’t work love, I say. Useless, Cole says.”<br>
Tess listened to the senseless babble that told everyone who met him that the centuries of exposure to the potions and chemicals of dark magic had left the apothecary with little in the way of coherent thought, save his instinctive knowledge of how to mix those chemicals for the right effects.

“Cole says, ‘Answer about the Phoenix.’” Cole rattled him impatiently. “Where’s the poison?”<br>
“Hidden, hidden, hidden. Buyer’s eyes only.”<br>
“The arrows then?”<br>
“Forged and safe. Safe for me. Safe for you. Safe for my pretty, pretty Phoenix. Not so safe for an Elder. Liquid center for an Elder.”<br>
“Did you make an antidote?”<br>
Tess conjured an athame and held it ready, then shimmered behind Cole and thrust it deep into his back. She only had time enough to pull the blade out before he struck out to send her flying into the lair’s wall with one hand, and tossed the apothecary to shelter behind a table with the other. Cole could feel his right lung begin filling with blood, and his breaths came in gasps as he tried desperately to remain standing. He shook the blurriness out of his vision and saw that the apothecary was crawling out from behind the table and into Tess’s line of fire, which she immediately took advantage of. Cole stumbled and fell toward the demon, but Tess’s energy ball was too fast, and the apothecary vanished in flames.

Though he would never know if there was an antidote to the poison, Cole could take some small comfort in the sudden appearance of the things the apothecary’s now defunct magic had been cloaking from everyone except the buyer. In the middle of the room stood a vat of clear liquid that he, in all his madness, had made large enough to lace enough arrows for an entire army of darklighters, and beside it was a table that held two comparatively insignificant-looking quivers of arrows. Cole glanced over at the assassin and mustered enough power to shimmer at the same time that she did. Both reached the arrows simultaneously, their hands nearly touching in the rush to grab them. He backhanded her across the jaw with as much force as he could manage, and when she barely fell back, he tried to strike again. This time she caught his hand and flipped him into the vat of poison, splashing the loathsome stuff into the air. She swept up the quivers and shimmered out of the lair before Cole could even bring his head above the surface of the liquid.

Cole didn’t know how much longer he could remain conscious. He reached for the rim of the vat and tried to pull himself up, but his hand slipped at the first attempt. He tried again, and this time threw his arm over the side to thrust himself up and out. He landed on the floor with a dull wet thud, but he knew he couldn’t just stay there. With what little strength he had left, he stood and reached for the bottles left on the table, and not knowing anything about their contents, raked them into the vat to contaminate the poison so no one else would be able to use it. Then he shimmered even as the world became darkness, and his last thought was a hope that he would make it to his destination out of sheer luck.

*** *** ***

[scifi]

“Everything’s going to be done ahead of schedule, it looks like,” Bridget informed Leo of their progress at the portal site as she walked with him through the main thoroughfare of the camp. “It’s a good thing, too, because it’s getting chilly over there.”<br>
“Did you --” Leo started to ask, but his question was interrupted by screams several yards distant. Both of them ran in the direction of the sound, and saw where Cole’s lifeless form had materialized in front of a group of little girls. Bridget raced headlong to Cole’s side, but Leo halted short of him, having caught a strong, sickly-sweet whiff of a substance with which he was all too familiar. Even at this distance, merely the fumes made him lightheaded.

Suddenly, Helen orbed in beside him, and before Leo could reason that Cole was now among the people she could sense, she started running toward the fallen demon.

“Helen, stop!” Leo waved a hand, and the child disappeared in orbs, only to reappear a hundred yards behind him. “Stay there!” he called to her, then turned to a rope line where a family of witches had just put their laundry out to dry. He ripped a wet shirt from the line and tied it to cover his mouth and nose, then joined Bridget with Cole.

“Turn him over,” he ordered as he stood clear of any of the liquid that might drip off Cole as Bridget obeyed. Then he kneeled, and with one hand holding the wet cloth to his airway, he positioned his other hand only inches from the wound that might have meant Cole’s death and the poison-soaked fabric of his coat that might mean death for himself if he didn’t take great care.

After several moments, the wound closed completely, and Cole began to stir. Leo orbed to a safe distance and leaned against a tree to clear his head. That poison was stronger than any he’d encountered before. A single drop on his skin or in his bloodstream would mean instantaneous death.

With Bridget’s help, Cole stood up and stared at Leo. “Since when can you heal demons?” he asked.

“That’s what twenty years will do to a guy’s powers,” Leo quipped, though he still felt like he might vomit any minute. He called to Helen, “Go home now. Cole’s all right. Let him get out of those clothes, and then you can see him.”<br>
The little girl obeyed, and Cole shifted his weight from one foot to the other, testing how all right he actually was. “The Phoenix have the arrows now, Leo,” he said after a moment. “It’s only a matter of time.”<br>
“Just hold off a little while longer,” Leo said to himself, then nodded his acceptance of Cole’s information.

Bridget, however, narrowed her eyes as though an idea had suddenly entered her brain. “Take off your coat,” she told Cole.

“What?”<br>
“You’re wringing wet with the stuff. I’m going to use it to make an antidote.”<br>
“No one’s ever successfully made an antidote to darklighter poison before,” Leo called.

“No one except a darklighter’s ever successfully made the poison before, either,” she threw back. She motioned for Cole to hurry up and take off the dripping coat. “If that demon could do it, then I can make an antidote. I know for a fact I’m better than some bloody old apothecary.”<br>
And no one dared argue with her.

[scifi]

Chris sat in the front row of the chapel that had become so engrained in his family’s tradition. It had held the funerals of four Charmed Ones, after all, and was now where Victor had chosen to have his memorial service. Chris figured he would be laid to rest in this same place himself when his time came, most likely sooner than later. But for now, he just listened unenthusiastically to the worn-out phrases of the people who stood to eulogize his grandfather, employees and acquaintances who thought they knew the real Victor Bennett. Some of them had asked if he would get up and say something during the service, but he declined. He had already said all he wanted to say.

Two days earlier, he’d gone to the sanctuary in search of Leo, just an hour after he’d settled the arrangements with the funeral director. He had been standing at his grandfather’s closet, trying to decide which suit to bury him in, the blue or the black, when suddenly he felt like the whole thing was a sham, just like the fudged obituary information he’d given the director (how could he have honestly worded an entry like “survived by four grandchildren: Christopher Halliwell of San Francisco, Wyatt Halliwell of the Underworld, and Kit and Cassandra Halliwell of, sorry, I can’t tell you”). Nothing that would happen in a conventional service seemed like enough to convince anyone that Victor had been a real, flesh-and-blood man with faults, and annoying habits, and wisdom, and feelings, and loves, and losses. How could forty-five minutes of eulogies, how could a few pictures on a display, begin to approach all that his grandpa had been? There was that familiar unreality that he’d felt in so many times of sorrow, the sense that someone else was the dreamer, and he was the dream, and if he could convince that someone to wake up, then the heartache would disappear with him.

So he’d gone to Leo. It wasn’t like he thought Leo would be very good in the comforting department -- he’d half-expected his father to have him take a number and wait in line. Of course, he knew that expectation was simply him being angry with the world and taking it out on the one person who would let him. When he’d orbed into the middle of a meeting the Elder was having with Lydia and Hatsuo, Leo had abruptly cut his own sentence short and pulled his son into a hug. This had been too much for Chris, and he’d let out a single sob. But nothing more -- he’d come here with a purpose that blubbering wouldn’t serve. He hardened his jaw and willed the tears not to come, so that when he pulled himself from the awkward embrace, only his eyelashes were wet.

“Grandpa’s dead,” he’d said finally, feeling extremely redundant.

“I know.”<br>
Of course he knew. His father knew everything. Chris watched as Lydia and Hatsuo moved to a respectful distance. Why was it people kept treating him like grief was a contagion he carried?

“I, um.” He stared at the ground. “I was just wondering if we could, you know, do something for him here. You know, for the girls and everybody who can’t come to the funeral. I mean, I know it’s busy and everything, but --”<br>
“Absolutely,” Leo interrupted.

Chris had glanced up at his dad only briefly, then averted his eyes to a line of ants trudging in the dirt.

“We’ll assemble everyone tonight and go from there,” Leo said.

Chris nodded and almost grinned -- a makeshift funeral in the middle of nowhere, attended by people who could themselves be wiped out at any time -- his grandpa would be honored.

True to his word, Leo had gathered them all save the watch keepers to the stream on the outskirts of camp just as the first stars emerged from their veil of darkness. Granted, there was no body here for a procession of a thousand witches to pass by and wish farewell. But it was closer to what Victor would have wanted. These people sat on blankets or on the bare ground like this was a picnic in the park, only without the children running wild, and certainly without the abundance of food. Chris watched from his own spot on the ground as his cousins discussed something among themselves for a moment. Then Kit walked hesitantly over to where Cole stood against a tree, looking distinctly out of place until she said a few words to him and led him back to sit with them. He had once been family, too, after all, no matter how twisted the relationship had been. Chris turned away from them and listened for the occasional laughter from one group or another coming out of a story about something Victor had once said or done. Yes, this was exactly what Victor would have wanted.

Leo had called their attention then, and said the floor was open for anyone who wanted to speak. Eulogies, true, but not the kind Chris dreaded hearing in the chapel, not prepared speeches with pauses for effect artificially thrown in -- just honest memories. Bridget told the story of how she and her husband, Jack, had met Victor at a Sotheby’s auction where he’d outbid her museum on a Picasso, and how annoyed she’d been until she later learned that he resold the painting at a profit to help fund his fledgling resistance movement. Lydia told how he’d eaten crawfish like a Cajun when he’d first visited her home. Others spoke of money lent, of advice given. One little boy told of his only meeting with Victor and how he was impressed by how old the man was after hearing all the stories about him, and how he hoped he could do all that stuff when he got old. The innocence with which he’d said it elicited a few chuckles, and also a few prayers that the child really would live to see old age. Then Leo had stood again and looked out on the fire lit faces of his charges.

“Victor never liked me very much,” he began with a smile. “Father-in-law’s prerogative, I guess. I remember one of the first things he said to me when he found out I was marrying his daughter was how I should watch out for whitelighters, that they were sneaky little . . . Well, that they were sneaky. I was called away then and I had to orb out in front of him. The look on his face . . .” he laughed. “But he gave me Piper anyway, because if there was one thing he couldn’t bear to think of, it was denying his girls anything. He knew he hadn’t been the best father to them when they were children, but he was determined to make up for it. And he did. In spades.” Leo stared at Chris sitting among the jumble of faces. “He gave me the mother of my children. And he was there for her when I couldn’t be. And he took care of my son -- saw that he grew into a good man. For that, I thank him.”<br>

[scifi]

As Leo sat back down, Chris could feel the press of a thousand pairs of eyes on him, expecting him to say something, anything. But he only sat there, watching the reflection of the firelight move in the water. Finally, a couple of other people stood to break the silence, and the moment passed.

When everyone who wanted to speak had done so, they moved off gradually in collections of families. A few of Chris’s closest friends smiled encouragement as they left, but finally he found himself standing alone at the water’s edge after the fires had been extinguished -- well, not quite alone.

“How’re you doing?” he heard Cassie ask in the darkness.

He looked down at her and smiled weakly. “You tell me.”<br>
She took his hand and held on to his arm.

“I should have said something,” he admitted to the ten-year-old like she was some sort of counselor -- but empaths were good for that.

“Everybody knows what you would have said anyway,” she tried to reassure him.

“He came to me, you know. After he died.”<br>
“Yeah?”<br>
“He thanked me. He thanked me. How messed up is that?”<br>
“He must not have thought so.”<br>
Chris shook his head. “And then he told me I’m never alone. I don’t know if he meant you guys, or Leo, or what. I think maybe he meant our moms, you know, with the whole ancestors watching over us thing. It’s just . . . It’s just really hard to believe that sometimes.”<br>
Cassie didn’t respond, but simply leaned her head against his arm.

“I don’t know,” he said after a few moments. “I’m a little out of it, I guess.” He sighed. “I mean, this was good and all . . . I should thank Leo. But it just feels like something’s missing.”<br>
“Yeah.”<br>
And then it had hit him -- exactly what needed to be done. “You got any candles?”<br>
He’d orbed Cassie back to the girls’ tree house so she could rummage through their trunk in the corner for four candles while he rounded up Kit and Helen from elsewhere in camp. The four cousins sat in the middle of the room with a candle before each of them, and Kit lit a slow-match to begin a blessing.

“For our ancestors,” she said, and then lit her candle. “May they guide us into light.”<br>
She passed the match to Cassie. “For our mothers. May their love strengthen us in the dark.”<br>
It was Helen’s turn now. “For our dads. May we make them happy.”<br>
Finally, Chris took the match from the smallest girl. “For our Grandpa. May he find the welcome of family that he missed in life, and may he be there to welcome us in our turn.” He’d blown out the match then and smiled at his cousins, for that was all he’d needed to say.

So now, two days later, in the chapel where the smell of the woods was replaced by the smell of flower shops, Chris stood and moved to the foot of the casket to receive condolences, and to shake hands with people he didn’t know, and to hear himself called Mr. Halliwell since they all assumed he would inherit Victor’s money. He went through the motions of respectable mourning, saying how much he appreciated people coming, assuring them that he’d call if he needed anything, and all the while thinking how much he wanted to get out of there, to go home and learn to accept the silence of the house. But that wasn’t all he wanted, and respectability wasn’t all that kept him there until the last of the mourners left. He hoped Bianca would show. He hoped that he would look up from one of the hands he was shaking and see her standing there waiting to make up for the two nights he’d lain awake in bed, wishing for her to come and just hold him the way she had done at the hospital. He even stayed a couple of minutes after the chapel cleared, thinking maybe she’d shimmer in when there was no one to see her. But she didn’t.

Of all the things that Chris couldn’t understand, that fact was near the top of the list. He’d freaked her out when he told her he loved her -- he got that, at least. But Bianca never stayed freaked out about anything. The woman was unshakable: she could stare down a Brute demon if need be. Chris unbuttoned his suit coat and shoved his hands in his pockets. It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t like he’d said it out of the blue. Well, maybe at the time it had seemed that way, but surely she’d seen it coming. Surely she’d known that he’d mean it when he said it. Surely. On the whole drive home, he kept vacillating between justifying Bianca’s avoidance and questioning what could have been so hard about letting him know she hadn’t fallen off the face of the earth, so that by the time he walked into his living room to stand in its emptiness, he knew this wasn’t where he needed to be -- not just yet, anyway.

He orbed into her kitchen, and not finding her, he glanced down at the papers scattered on the dinette table. One set of them was the contract on the apartment with the section on getting out of her lease highlighted in yellow, and another was a notepad where she’d only gotten as far as Dear Chris.

Bianca came into the room, then, and stopped short at seeing him.

“Going somewhere?” he asked coldly.

She didn’t answer, but simply began gathering the papers.

“I should tell you, I’m not really big on letters,” he said.

“I have to go away for a while,” she finally responded. “I don’t know if . . . when I’m coming back.”<br>
“Why?”<br>
“I can’t tell you that. It’s complicated.”<br>
Chris knew a little something about complicated. “Try me.”<br>
“I just have some things I have to attend to, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take.”<br>
“What’s going on? Really.”<br>
Bianca just looked away from him. “Why won’t you let me help you?” he begged.

“Don’t follow me,” she picked up where she had left off, as if he hadn’t asked the question. Exasperated, Chris threw his arms in the air and turned to pace away from her.

“Chris,” she said in a softer voice, and he turned again to stare at her incredulously. “If you love me, don’t follow me.” With the papers in hand, she shimmered, leaving Chris to sit down at the table and shake his head as he tried unsuccessfully to figure her out. She infuriated him sometimes, but it didn’t change how he felt about her. He wasn’t sure if anything could change it now, and he marveled at how he could let himself fall so far, so fast.

He decided he had one more stop, then, before going home to stay, and orbed to the base of his cousins’ tree, where he stood and heard Leo’s voice coming from up above. He was telling a story to the girls, whom, apparently, he’d sent to bed at this time of day because they had watch keeping duty that night. From the cadence of his voice, Chris could tell he was reading, but when it came to dialogue, his inflections were perfect.

“’Oh, thank God,’ Piper said. ‘I tried so hard and I couldn’t make it work before. Why didn’t you tell me?’<br>
‘That love was the trigger? You had to find that out on your own. Why couldn’t you tell me?’<br>
Piper was crying harder now. ‘I don’t know. I was afraid. I was afraid if I admitted how I really felt, it would hurt more if I lost you. I’m so sorry. I should have said it before.’<br>
‘It’s better late than never,’ I laughed, and kissed her.”<br>
“That is my absolute favorite story,” Cassie said with a sigh. “Read it again.”<br>
“No,” Leo said. “That was the third one. You girls get some sleep now.”<br>
Leo descended the tree amid groans of protest to where he had sensed his son orb in, but Chris knew they would do what he told them.

“I must have heard Mom tell that story a thousand times,” he said when his father reached the ground. “But it’s kind of nice to hear you tell it.”<br>
“I was only reading what Kit wrote,” Leo said self-depreciatively.

“Just take a compliment.”<br>
Leo smiled. “Thanks.”<br>
They walked away from the tree in silence for a few moments before Chris abruptly changed the subject to what he’d come here to say. “I love her, Leo.”<br>
His father sighed, knowing exactly what he was talking about. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Chris. I can’t condone it.”<br>
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just letting you know.”<br>
Leo nodded. That was fair enough. Then he grinned half-heartedly. “What’s wrong with us? It must be genetic, falling for women we’re not supposed to be with.”<br>
“It worked out with you and Mom,” Chris said, and then shrugged. “Sort of.” They were silent for a few seconds more before Chris spoke again. “I bet you didn’t know then what you were starting.”<br>
Leo chuckled. “No idea.”<br>
Chris stared straight ahead and asked hesitantly, “Knowing what you know now, would you have done it all again?”<br>
Leo stopped walking. “Most of it.”<br>
Chris faced him, but was almost afraid to ask. “What would you have changed?”<br>
“I would have fought harder,” Leo sighed. “And I wouldn’t have left. If I had just not accepted the way things had always been done, broken just one more rule, things might have turned out . . . very differently.” Leo shrugged then at the dream. “But I guess it’s no use thinking about it now.” He gave Chris a resigned smile. “You can’t change what’s in the past.”