The Witch and The Assassin

[scifi]

The days following Victor’s funeral and Bianca’s departure passed in variations of monotony for Chris. They all seemed to blend together into an endless cycle of sleeping, being put on hold when he called Social Security or the insurance company, doing the paperwork they sent, driving across town to get said paperwork notarized, playing phone tag with the bank to find out what he’d need to send them to have Victor’s accounts switched over to his name, barely eating, then sleeping some more, taking out a notice to creditors in the newspaper, arranging to meet with a realtor to list the house since Wyatt had summoned him and wondered when he’d come to the Underworld to stay, waiting for the death certificate and its duplicates to arrive in the mail, being told they’d take a couple of more weeks, paying the gas bill with a credit card since he’d finally learned that the bank required one of those slow death certificates before they‘d give him access to the check account, and downing aspirins like candy. And to top everything off, Ekera had returned with a vengeance in her non-stop surveillance, perhaps because Wyatt had always had a sense about him when something big was going to happen.

So when his twentieth birthday came upon him, Chris could do nothing more than work in silence around the house. It wasn’t like he would have been in the mood to celebrate the day -- and who was there to celebrate it with him -- but he thought constantly about Leo’s coordinated chaos of last minute preparations both for battle and for transferring the camp at the sanctuary to the portal site. But with Ekera there to watch, Chris couldn’t begin to be of any use to his family and friends. Instead, he spent the morning ripping up the baseboards in the dining room, taking care not to split any of them, then repainting the rose-colored walls in eggshell white, since the realtor had said people preferred more neutral tones when buying a house. And now that the second coat of paint was dry, he was nailing the baseboards back in place. It had looked a lot easier on the home repair show he’d watched earlier in the week. His hand-eye coordination ought to have been better than it was, given the nature of his power, but he nevertheless missed more nails than he hit, leaving small dents in the wood. He cursed at each and every reminder that, unlike his father, he was no handyman. On the last nail, the hammer hit his thumb instead of wood, and he stood abruptly, threw the tool down, and stuck the injured appendage in his mouth.

“Aren’t you a little old to be sucking your thumb?”<br>
He turned around and smiled at the sound of her voice, the throbbing pain forgotten. “Bianca.”<br>
Without another word, she crossed the room and met his lips with a passion he’d not felt from her before -- almost like she expected this to be their last kiss.

“I missed you, too,” he grinned, but then he saw a hint of sadness in her eyes. “What is it?”<br>
She simply studied his face for a moment, then turned away to sit at the table. He joined her there.

“Bianca?”<br>
She sighed, and then conjured a contract on the table before him. He glance briefly from it to her, then began reading what he already knew.

“Tess broke through the cloak this morning,” Bianca said after he’d had enough time to read it through. “She’s waiting for nightfall.”<br>
Chris kept his head bowed over the contract, but from the corner of his eye, he saw Ekera’s outline move into Bianca’s shadow. “How are you going to do it?” he asked as though this was his first knowledge of the plan.

Bianca motioned to the end of the table farthest from him, and a crossbow and quiver full of arrows appeared.

Chris nodded at the sight, then brought his eyes back to the contract. “You and Tess, huh?”<br>
Bianca hesitated. “I’m not going with her.” She met his eyes when he looked up at her. “I can’t.”<br>
He felt like taking Bianca in his arms and giving her a swing around the room, but he restrained himself. Tess probably wouldn’t take too kindly to a refusal, he thought, and then he imagined how that displeasure would likely play out, especially with the Matriarch’s disposition. “She’ll kill you if you don’t go,” he said. “Won’t she?”<br>
Bianca wet her lips. “That’s where I’ve been, Chris. I’ve been trying to find a way around that. And,” here she grew a bit more anxiously excited, “I think I did.” She stared at the wood grain of the table. “I found an apothecary, and I had her make a cloaking potion, one that Tess can’t counteract. Nobody’ll be able to sense me.” She paused and looked up at him. “I had her make two.”<br>
Chris swallowed and watched her eyes allow hope to supercede the sadness. “A perfect world, Chris. Nobody can ever call on us. It’ll be just you and me.”<br>
He stood again and paced around the table, pausing to examine the arrows, and desperately trying not to let his eyes stray to Ekera. He had to think of some way to make Bianca stop talking like this before the demon told Wyatt of her aspirations.

“What about Wyatt?” he finally asked. “I can’t just leave him.”<br>
He could tell that this was the last response Bianca had expected. “What?”<br>
“I can’t take myself off his radar. What if he needs me?” He hoped Ekera would report every word he said.

Bianca stood up with the contract. “No, Chris. You . . .” She was almost at a loss for words. “You’re not like him. I know you’re not.”<br>
Chris shrugged. “He’s my brother.” He knew Bianca had no idea what to say to that. “But Leo? I barely know him. And what I do know -- well, he’s not exactly my favorite person.”<br>
“Chris --”<br>
“In fact,” he began as the scaffolding of a reckless plan to get Ekera off his back for good rapidly took form in his mind. “Why wait until nightfall?” He picked up the crossbow and the strap of the quiver, careful not to graze the arrows even in his bravado, and tossed them to Bianca, who caught them neatly in either hand despite her utter confusion. He strode back to her quickly and took her arm to orb before he lost his nerve. “What Wyatt wants, Wyatt gets.”<br>
*** *** ***

[scifi]

“No, no, no,” Leo said a little impatiently to an old gypsy he saw pass by dragging a huge trunk behind her. “Take only what you can carry -- essentials.”<br>
The gypsy harrumphed, but opened the trunk anyway to take out only what she needed. Leo turned back to Lydia and Cole.

“Bridget keeps going on about how the children are going to love it, even if it has been raining non-stop for two days,” the witch said. “The place is crawling with fairies -- all those Brothers Grimm tales must have had a grain of truth. They’ve even enlisted their help,” she boasted for her friend.

“How’d they manage that?” Leo asked.

“Max’s kids did it actually, since they were the only ones who could see them. They negotiated to have the fairies set up a second cloak, since the Phoenix keep working to get through ours. You know Murphy’s Law -- they’re bound to break through at just the worst time. It’ll be good to have that second layer of protection until the portal opens.”<br>
“Anything on the antidote front?” Cole asked.

Lydia’s smugness faded into frustration. “She’s got nothing.” She pursed her lips as though the antidote was purposely eluding them.

“It doesn’t matter now, anyway. Just make sure that when the portal opens, you get them in there in the order we discussed,” Leo said.

“Wait a minute. Where will you be?” Cole asked suspiciously.

Leo didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

“That’s the best you can come up with to distract Wyatt?” Cole continued. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”<br>
“I’m the one he wants the most,” Leo explained. “Coming after me will keep him away from the portal.”<br>
Cole shook his head. “You never change -- still mistaking stupidity for bravery. You’re not going. I am.”<br>
“Come on, Cole. Now’s not the time for heroics. You’ve already proven whose side you’re on. And besides, Wyatt could take you with the magic in his little finger.”<br>
“Give me some credit, Leo -- in his whole hand, at least.”<br>
“I’m serious.”<br>
“So am I. You’re an Elder, not a fighter. You won’t last a minute with him.”<br>
“I’ll last quite a bit longer than you think,” Leo said. “It’s not open for discussion. You’re not going anywhere near Wyatt.”<br>
“Well, you see, Leo, you keep forgetting that I’m a demon, and I’ve never had to take orders from an Elder.” Cole started to walk away, but Leo caught his arm.

“Phoebe’s dead, Cole. Let her go.” The stare Cole brought to bear on Leo turned the Elder’s blood cold, but he continued anyway. “A memory’s not worth dying for.”<br>
Cole was silent for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice was low. “No. It’s not.” But then he glanced in the direction of children’s laughter, and Leo followed his gaze to the next generation of Halliwell girls. “But they are,” Cole said.

*** *** ***

Bianca watched from her position inside a tent as Leo grabbed the demon’s arm and said something. The crossbow somehow seemed heavier than it ever had before, and the quiver she’d flung on her back felt like a boulder was strapped there. She turned to Chris when she thought she heard him mutter something under his breath, but she only saw him watching the same scene.

“Chris, please. Don’t do this.”<br>
He ignored her. “You ready?”<br>
“No. Wait --”<br>
He orbed them into the midst of the Elder, witch, and demon, and sent Cole flying with the same hand that he then used on the back-swing to do the same to Lydia. He grabbed Leo by the collar and swept his feet out from under him, so that the two of them fell to the ground with Chris on top and in control. He brought his face close to his father’s. “Get them out of here now!” he whispered frantically, then connected his fist with Leo’s jaw with as much force as he could muster.

Leo pushed Chris away, then raised his arms heavenward. The camp was suddenly awash with blue light as he orbed every soul out of harm’s way and attempted to orb himself. But Chris orbed simultaneously, and the two patterns collided in midair, sending both men reeling to the ground. Chris recovered first and threw Leo into a tree trunk several feet distant. Leo tried to orb a second time, but Chris gestured to once again bring the pattern crashing to the ground. Leo stood then and used his own power to throw Chris on his back. But even as Chris landed, he motioned for an arrow to fly out of Bianca’s quiver and straight at his father. Leo never even had a chance to try orbing again, and the arrow passed through his shoulder and lodged itself in a tree.

Chris stood up as Leo went to his knees, and watched as the red glowing outline disappeared from Bianca’s shadow. Apparently, Ekera had gone to tell Wyatt that Chris was no traitor, after all.

It took less than ten seconds for Leo to move from convulsions to completely stillness, and at the end of that time, a third whitelighter appeared at his side. Helen stared from the limp body to Chris, her confusion giving way to horror, and she immediately knelt down to touch Leo’s chest and orb him away.

Chris turned from the spot where his father had lain to see Bianca shaking where she stood, tears flowing unchecked down her face.

“Bianca --”<br>
She couldn’t look at him, but shimmered instead. She thought maybe he would know where she would go, and found that she was right when he orbed into the arboretum a couple of seconds behind her.

“Bianca --”<br>
“Go away,” she said hoarsely.

“I --”<br>
“You.” She could barely speak and seemed to search the life surrounding them for comfort. But even the flowers had turned against her, their summer blooms long decayed. She stared at Chris, but could see only the impassivity with which he had watched . . . She couldn’t even bear to think of it. She had been wrong all this time: he couldn‘t save her. He would hard pressed to save himself. “I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want you to come near me.”<br>
“Let me --”<br>
“He was your father! And you just . . . You didn’t feel . . . anything!” She was crying in earnest now, and the words stuck in her throat. “I did that to you!”<br>
Chris swallowed and had to physically take a step back. “You’ve done nothing to me Bianca,” he said softly after a moment. “Nothing bad, anyway.”<br>
She closed her eyes. “Just go,” she whispered.

Chris shut his eyes as well, and thinking better of continuing to upset her, turned away and orbed out with a sigh.

[scifi]

It was a good thing Chris had been to the portal site once before, situated on a mountainside in the Black Forest region, because for some reason he lost Helen’s orb trail somewhere around Munich. Surely the refugees hadn’t devised a cloak against him in only a couple of minutes and before he could explain anything to them. In any case, it wouldn’t do them much good, and they must certainly have realized that: he knew too much already.

When he arrived, the new camp was almost pitch black, except for the dim torchlight coming from the bunkers, and most of the refugees were still milling around in their confusion and near-panic at having been transported so abruptly and amid circumstances that bred the worst kind of rumors. Chris barely paid attention to the fragments of coherent mutterings that came through the din -- “Is Leo dead?” “Chris was there,” “I think he did it” -- so intent was he on searching through the darkness and torrent of sleet for any sign of where Helen had taken his father.

Suddenly, he was tackled from behind and landed face down in a mud puddle, the jagged edges of the fragile layer of ice stinging his skin. When he turned over, he saw no one there, but felt a foot connect with his side. His instinct was to curl up in pain, but Bianca had always warned him about such reactions, that his opponent would expect them. Instead he rolled further away from his invisible assailant and came to his feet. With no one in sight for him to focus on, he became painfully aware of the crowd that had begun to circle him, yelling obscenities, screaming for whoever was attacking him to go for the kill, but to make it last.

“The whole time!” he heard a woman say before he felt one fist split his lip and another follow up with a hit to the chest. He stumbled back, unable to breathe, and fell into the crowd. Blows came from all around for a moment, before someone pushed him back into the ring. With the noise they were making, Chris couldn’t begin to hear the footsteps of the invisible witch as she came up and caught him in a choke-hold.

“Was it fun playing us all along just so you could kill him?” she said. Even as Chris tried to get his voice to squeeze through her hold, his mind picked up on the Japanese accent -- Hatsuo. Until this point, he’d been trying not to hurt his adversary, but now he was starting to see stars. Screw it; she’d never liked him anyway.

Orbing out of the hold and reappearing inches from where he had just been, he imagined where Hatsuo must still have been standing, and then raised a hand to send the invisible figure hurtling. He knew he’d succeeded when the impact of her body with the crowd knocked several people to their backs.

“Anybody else want to try it?” he taunted, his fury getting the better of his common sense.

Yes, actually, they did, and someone grabbed one of his arms. He twisted around to throw the man off, but just as he broke his grasp, another hand was at his neck. God help him, he’d just tried to save these people’s lives, and they were rewarding him with mob violence.

He orbed again, this time several feet away from the ring. “Will you people just listen to me!”<br>
“Listen to this,” Hatsuo’s voice said at his ear, startling him that she’d been able to recover so quickly and run silently to his position. Strangely enough, he really did hear the knife enter his lower back before he felt it, the tear of flesh and sinew resounding through his entire body.

“Stop!” a voice of authority carried through the area, silencing the mob, only a fraction of a second before blue orbs became a solid figure that turned to face Chris.

“I’m having a really bad day,” Chris mumbled, and then collapsed into Leo’s arms.

[scifi]

When he regained consciousness, Chris knew that only a little time had passed, as he could see from his position on the ground that the crowd of people had simply transferred their ring to this new spot. He felt Leo take his hands away from the wound and heard him speak to someone.

“Get these people into some shelter.”<br>
Chris closed his eyes at the pain in his head that Leo had not yet healed, and heard Bridget’s voice from somewhere behind him.

“All right, people. Show’s over. Move along.”<br>
Chris slowly began to sit up, his clothes already so soaked that he didn’t notice that he was sitting in the mud. He looked up at the people who remained close to the scene: Cole, Lydia, his cousins, and farther away, a now visible Hatsuo, standing horror-stricken with the knife in her hand.

“Easy, not too fast,” Leo cautioned as he gently tried to wipe the sleet-and-mud-plastered hair out of Chris’s face.

Chris smiled weakly at the sound of his father’s voice, proof positive that his plan had worked, and then stood up.

“You want to tell us what exactly is going on here?” Cole asked, then pointed to Leo. “And how exactly he’s still alive?”<br>
“Long story,” Chris sighed, and hugged himself against the cold. “The short of it is, I was being followed, and they were coming for you, and I had to beat them to the punch,” he told Leo. “Now that they think you’re dead, they won’t be looking for you. But they will be looking for the witches,” he added as an afterthought. “We have to come up with another cloak.”<br>
“Already taken care of,” Bridget said as she rejoined them.

“And how is it that I’m not dead?” Leo got back on subject.

Chris’s teeth were chattering now, but he answered anyway. “I cast a Phoenix spell before I attacked. It gives the illusion of death. Believe me, I know it well.”<br>
“Now that was brilliant,” Cole said.

“Doesn’t make it hurt any less,” Leo pouted as he rubbed his still aching shoulder.

Chris grimaced, now knowing how Bianca must have felt all those times. “Sorry.”<br>
“You know what would be really brilliant?” Lydia said. “Getting us in out of the pouring rain and that poor boy into some dry clothes.” She pushed passed Leo and Cole in annoyance at their thoughtlessness and took Chris’s arm to lead him to shelter. But before they had gone far, Hatsuo spoke.

“Chris.”<br>
He turned to her, and she walked over with her eyes on the ground, presenting him with a very different picture than she had ever done before.

“I have misjudged you, and I beg your forgiveness.” She bowed low in formal abjection.

Chris studied her for a moment, anger at her overzealous fit taking center stage in his mind. But then he realized how very important it was to a Japanese witch not to lose face, and remembered with what grace Leo had only just accepted his role in duping Ekera. And if Leo could be so understanding, then so could he.

“You keep defending Leo like that, and you’ve got it,” he said finally, and returned her bow before following Lydia.


Several hours and a change of clothes later, Chris stood at the opening of one of the old concrete bunkers built into the side of the mountain and looked out on the beginnings of the change from dark to dawn. Below him he saw the scattered outcroppings of other bunkers left over from the Nazi’s defense of the region so many decades before. When Bridget and Max’s team had first arrived here, they’d found the remnants of the swastika, some rusty ammunition, even a few rations. Chris wondered how Leo must have felt about using Nazi fortifications to hide from the latest attempt at genocide in the world. But then again, perhaps he didn’t think of the irony -- he’d fought in the Pacific.

A gust of wind whipped the tail of the long coat someone had given him around his legs, and he held himself tighter. It was warm deeper inside the bunker, with fires built on the floor and a spell to keep them smokeless. But the bunker was full of children, his cousins among them, pressed together to hasten their move into position once the portal opened. He’d sat back there for a couple of hours, until Helen had fallen asleep against his chest and he’d lain her on a bench alongside Cassie. But it had made him feel a little claustrophobic, with all those kids gathered beside him and at his feet, so he’d headed for open air, no matter how cold he knew he’d become.

He turned his head as Leo materialized beside him, fresh from his check-up on the other people in camp.

“Looks like it’s all snow now,” Chris commented absently at the flakes that blew in with the wind and landed at his feet in momentary crystals before melting.

“Yeah, the temperature was dropping all night. The ground’s covered,” Leo returned. A shiver went through his son, and Leo motioned to a pile of blankets further back in the bunker to orb one to himself. He unfolded it, draped it across Chris’s shoulders, and rubbed both his arms to get the circulation going. “You should go back inside; you’re not used to the cold.”<br>
“Yeah, well, growing up on the West Coast will do that to you.” Chris pulled the blanket closer and stared back to the light blue cast of the snow covered trees.

“What are you thinking about?” Leo asked at his distracted manner.

Chris sighed. “I hurt her so bad, Dad.”<br>
Leo started slightly at the appellation, but apparently, Chris didn’t even realize that he’d let it slip.

“She thinks it’s her fault, that being with her turned me into a monster or something,” Chris continued.

“How do you know that?”<br>
“Because I know her. That’s how she thinks.”<br>
Leo’s smile was tinged with sadness; he’d often been able to read his own soulmate that way, but for Chris to have such a connection with a Phoenix witch made him worry for his son for several reasons, especially now that the portal was about to open.

“Things usually work out the way they’re supposed to, Chris. For good or bad.”<br>
“Oh, really. Like they did with Wyatt?”<br>
Leo stared out at the same trees. “I said usually,” he answered quietly after a long moment.

“I could have told her. Nobody else was around. I could have just stayed there and explained everything. And she might even have come with me. She was that serious about us getting away. But I didn’t.” Chris tugged the edge of the blanket up to cover his neck. “She loves me. I know she does. But all she’s ever seen is the play version of me, you know, the one who’s on stage saying the lines and hitting the marks. If she knew the real me . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t even know who the real me is anymore.” He glanced up at the now distinct shapes the clouds took. “Why are people so stupid?” he asked in frustration. “Why don’t we just say what we mean?”<br>
Leo was a long time in answering. “Maybe sometimes we aren’t sure ourselves what we mean. Or maybe we know, but we don’t know how to say it.”<br>
They stood together in silence, contemplating those words, until Leo spoke again. “I’m sorry I missed your birthday. Again.”<br>
Chris grinned, and then looked at his watch. “Technically, in San Francisco, it’s still my birthday.”<br>
“That’s the trouble with time. It’s always changing,” Leo chuckled, then pulled something from his pocket. “In that case, Happy Birthday.”<br>
Chris took the gift and turned it over in his hands. It took a moment’s examination for him to realize what it was: the first component of an ARI kit. “They stopped making these years ago.” He glanced up at Leo. “Where did you get it?”<br>
“I have my ways.”<br>
He brought his gaze back to the module that once had meant the world to an eight-year-old. And it meant the world to him again. He placed in his coat pocket and replaced the blanket at his neck before finally meeting Leo’s eyes. “Thanks.”<br>
As soon as the word was out of his mouth, Chris gasped at the sensation of a tug at his chest, almost as though a string was attached there pulling him toward some unknown destination. “Do you feel that?”<br>
Leo nodded and turned to the waking children. “It’s time.”

[scifi]

Some of the smaller children began to cry at the shared sensation that tugged at their chests, but Leo hardened himself to their fear and orbed with them to the portal that had appeared further up the mountain, with Chris following half a second behind. The two men had no time, really, to marvel at what they saw there, but neither could help staring slack-jawed at Brigadoon. Rather than appearing as any portal they’d ever witnessed, with definite boundaries between dimensions, what they saw in front of them was seamless, almost as if the two worlds had melded for this brief span of time and become one. Instead of continuing upward in a steady slope as it had done only moments before, their mountain had become the edge of a precipice opposite a completely new range of mountains, snow-capped and gleaming like polished glass in the sunlight. And rising from within a valley was the city itself, the bases of its crystalline spires obscured by the foothills of the range, so that they seemed suspended in air by the gossamer threads of the clouds they reached. Cole had been grossly understating when he’d described the city as ancient: it felt palpably, unfathomably old, but at the same time, it exuded a sense of eternal newness. And Chris had actually thought he felt small in the universe when he stood by the ocean -- he felt positively microbial in the presence of this place.

Chris tore his gaze from the wonder of it all and fixed it on the impediment that lay between them and the city. The precipice overlooked a dizzying descent: the river that flowed through the bottom of the canyon seemed little more than a pale blue ribbon. There was a bridge across this expanse, but it looked like a tease rather than a viable way over. It was supported by what seemed to be unraveling hemp ropes staked to the precipices at either end and sagged down in the middle like it was straining under the weight of the air. Chris glanced through a six-inch gap between the edge of the ground and the first plank of the bridge, then drew back quickly at the nausea the sight of the drop caused.

“Can’t you just orb them across?” he asked Leo.

“What do you think I was trying to do?” Leo retorted out of frustration. “It must be part of the rules that they have to cross over on their own.”<br>
Chris hazarded another look at the bridge. “Are you kidding me?”<br>
Leo cut a glance at the children who surrounded them, their eyes wide at the suggestion as well. “That kind of attitude isn’t helping anything,” he warned. “Start getting them over. I have to get the . . .” His sentence stalled when the rest of the refugees orbed to the spot en masse. “. . .others.”<br>
“You didn’t mean to do that,” Chris stated the obvious.

Leo shook his head. “It must be the power boost. I just --”<br>
Chris interrupted him with a sudden “No!” and flung his hand out toward a group of demons who had just shimmered in and lunged at the children. The five demons flew back, all right -- along with a couple of pine trees that were demolished by the shock wave from his gesture. Chris stared at his palm. “Okay.”<br>
Several more demons appeared then, but Chris was able to focus on his assigned task since the other witches now decided to get a taste of what their own enhanced powers could do. Lydia found that she no longer needed to speak to cast spells; she willed them into effect. Hatsuo’s invisibility became physical instead of simply perceptual, so that fireballs passed through her unheeded. And Bridget was picking up on so many demon and witch powers, she barely knew where to begin.

Chris glanced between the children in his care and the bridge he had to convince them to cross. “Why did he leave me with the kids?” he muttered. “I’m no good with kids.”<br>
He finally spoke directly to them. “Okay, guys. Hustle.” He motioned toward the bridge as though extending an invitation. They stared at him like he’d lost his mind.

“Seriously. Go!”<br>
The children looked to the dilapidated bridge and then to the skirmishes the grown-ups were fighting with demons, and Chris could tell they were calculating the differences in their chances between the two dangers. He finally stepped tentatively on the first plank of the bridge. It creaked beneath his weight, but he forced himself to ignore the sound and turned around to face the children.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he lied. “See? It’s perfectly safe.” And to prove the point that he didn’t even believe, he jumped up and down on the slat, fully expecting to have to orb out of a fall through the wood. He was just as surprised as the children when it held.

A little boy stepped up to lead by example. “Just keep running,” Chris told him. “Don’t stop. Don’t look back. And don’t look down.”<br>
He turned away as the boy was the first to start sprinting over the bridge, and spotted a winged demon swooping in for one of the smaller girls. He motioned to throw the demon off her, but the shock wave fizzled out almost as soon as it started, forcing Chris to reassess the nature of the portal. While there was no discernable line where one world ended and the other began, there most certainly was some kind of barrier there at the edge of the bridge, one that wouldn’t allow their magic to originate in one realm and pass into the other. Somehow, he understood this instinctively, the same way that he knew that this very understanding was related to an advancement in his whitelighter side, so the discovery struck him in less time than it took him to charge off the bridge and at the demon, tackling it away from the girl. To his complete confusion, Chris created a full-fledged energy ball in his hand and thrust it at the demon, which burst into flames beneath him. He stared at his hands once more; he’d been able to fire off harmless orbs since he was a kid, and had liked the ability mostly because it made a cool light show, but this was getting ridiculous. “Will you stop with the surprises already?” he fumed at himself.



Near the outskirts of the formation of children, Kit searched the faces of her allies in combat. “Where’s Cole?” she asked, and turned to her sister. “Did you see him orb here?”<br>
Cassie didn’t answer, but held a vacant expression on her face. Kit bent slightly to look into her eyes. “Cassie?”<br>
The younger girl simply blinked in response, and Kit got the sudden impression that she should move out her line of sight. When she did, she turned to see a demon direct its own fireball at itself. It disintegrated, and Kit stared in disbelief at the ten-year-old before shaking herself out of the incredulity that Cassie’s power should advance to mind-control, and who knew what else, when she had yet to feel any effect of the portal. “Cassie, where’s Cole?” When Kit reached to shake an answer out of her, she was on the receiving end of a vision Cassie projected, and gasped at what she saw. She let go of her sister and jostled among the small children around her to grab Helen’s hand. “We have to go to Cole,” she explained urgently, and Helen orbed them away without a second’s hesitation.

[scifi]

Chris picked himself up from the ground in time to see Helen and Kit orb out, but had no time to think of where they could be going, or what he should do to get them back, because an eerie calm came over the field of battle. He looked around at his fellow witches, saw his father standing several yards off, and they were all staring down the mountain. He brought his gaze to their target, and emulated the expression of horror and hopelessness that was on everyone else’s face.

“God in Heaven,” someone near him said, and he silently echoed the sentiment. The demons they had been fighting up to this point had simply been an advance guard, he realized, and now he stood looking down on the army -- legions of demons, columns upon columns, more than he even knew existed, stared back up at them with the confidence of a predestined massacre. And at their head was Ekera.

[scifi]

Bianca had shimmered into her apartment a moment after Chris left her at the arboretum, not knowing of any other place to go. Here, as she had done at her spot, she searched for something, anything, to help her shift her focus away from the intense pain, the intense self-loathing, that watching her protégé kill his own father had brought to the surface. But, again, there was nothing. How could she have expected anything to help, when everything was a reminder of the life that had given her these possessions, that had paid for the things she wore, the things she ate, the things she drank. Things upon things upon things -- the trappings of an assassin's profession. Innocent people's lives for things. How many had there been? She couldn't remember -- nearly ten years she'd been at this. Ten years. Her mind wanted to shut down at the very thought. But at the same time, something inside her wouldn't let it shut down; she had to think about it. She had to see those people, remember the details of their faces, hear the voices of the few who'd had time to speak. She had to think of the ones left behind -- of those children she'd left motherless only a few months before. She had to sense again the life slipping from her victims in their instants of death like a symphony’s dying notes that linger and then fade into an ever-expanding distance, so slowly that the moment between hearing and not hearing passes before it’s grasped.

There had to be something, someone, somewhere to help her.

Chris.

Chris would take her in his arms and tell her that everything would be fine, that she was not evil, that he loved her with all her sins on her head, that she had the rest of her life to find redemption, that he would lead her to it. Chris could make the pain go away. Chris could heal her. But no, he couldn't, she had to remind herself. He killed his father and felt nothing. Bianca had reformed him in her own image. She had damned him as she had damned herself, and now neither could escape her hell.

She had buckled down onto the sofa then, her hair cascading down as she held her face in her hands and sobbed openly as she had scarcely ever allowed herself. She cried for herself, for what she had done with her life, and for Chris. She cried for a world that would never be, that had never had a chance to be.

Out of habit, she had tried to force a calm, and opening her eyes, had seen a spot on the carpet that she’d never noticed before, a small dot of brown just at the edge of her coffee table -- weeks old sauce that had splattered there when Chris had once been clumsy with his chopsticks. The calm left her, and her hand went to her throat where she could feel her cries under her skin. She had an urge to tear at the carpet with her fingers, to obliterate the stain, but images of Lady Macbeth’s sleepless, guilty insanity stopped her from dropping to her knees. “Out, out damned spot” indeed. She remembered her mother then, of all times for her face to come to mind, and the day she’d asked her about a passage in the play she’d found among the opulent leather-bound Shakespeare collection displayed so prominently, as if to remind all comers of the prestige of the family. Her mother had read the passage, and several others, then closed the book. “I don’t want you to read this, Bianca,” she had said, and Bianca had never seen the volume again. She had been fourteen then, and had of course gone out to buy her own paperback copy of the forbidden play, hidden it in the space between her mattress and box-springs, and read it incessantly until the spine fell apart and she could feel the words in her soul, when she still had a soul.

No, she could not think of her mother; she could not think of those words. She could not think of Macbeth or his hallucinations or of his wife’s obsession with washing the blood from her hands, those tiny hands which all the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten, those hands so like her own that fit so perfectly into Chris’s as though they were made for no other purpose.

No. She wouldn’t think anymore. She had grown tired of thinking, tired of knowing. She had pushed herself up from her seat and crossed the room to her liquor cabinet, another thing blood had bought her, and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels that had been there for as long as she could remember, since it had only been placed there for display. The first swallow burned inside her throat and chest, but also left a numbness, almost like an antiseptic that ate away at infection and left the flesh raw and without feeling. She pulled another gulp from the bottle and went into her bathroom to draw a hot bath. A couple of more mouthfuls, and the tub was ready for her. She’d held the bottle against her bare skin and stepped in, feeling the warmth of the water speed her blood flow, so that the alcohol could infuse every recess of her body and mind and bring her nothingness. But with each drink, she recalled those antiquated words with more clarity, the inversions, the obsolete phrases, until finally she sang them as if they were some ditty from a comedy rather than solemn musings from a tragedy.

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.”<br>
The words stopped making much sense, even though she could see them as though on a page, but she did get a mental image when she lay her hands atop the water in the tub of it turning red and swirling around her, and she wondered if when she unplugged the drain it would flood out into the Bay, and then to the Pacific, and around the great capes, and into the Atlantic, and the Indian, and whatever other oceans there were. There would be a whole world of red. Two thirds of the earth’s surface is blood, she’d thought, and then the bottle had fallen from her hand to the floor, tipping over and spilling only a few drops, since there wasn’t much left to spill. She had slept in the water until it cooled to the point that she felt the chill even in her stupor, and she had crawled out and lain naked against the cold tiles of the floor.

Now, as a sudden light burst through her eyelids and rough hands slapped at her face, Bianca was vaguely aware of a pull inside her chest, almost a feeling of longing to go to some wondrous place. But her attention was drawn away from the sensation when a glass-full of water splashed in her face, and she opened her eyes to see a blurry image of her aunt.

“Wake up!” Tess yelled and threw some clothes at her. “The portal is open and the witches are exposed. We have to strike now!”<br>
Bianca simply lay there a moment, regretting that most of her drunkenness had worn off in the hours since she’d passed out, but Tess grabbed her by the wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Remember the contract!” Tess insisted.

Bianca stared at the Matriarch for a moment, and then nodded and began to dress. The action seemed to satisfy Tess that she would follow soon after, for she shimmered abruptly in anticipation of the kill. As soon as she was gone, however, Bianca’s fingers fell away from the last button of her tunic and she left the bathroom to sit on her bed. She wasn’t going, although she knew Tess would certainly kill her, and would certainly make her suffer first. But at least the suffering would eventually end. And who knew? Perhaps her absence from the fight would throw Tess’s strategy off kilter, maybe give just one witch a fraction of a chance to escape. She scoffed at the idea that she could make such a difference, but nevertheless wished them luck, lay back on her pillow, and waited in the darkness.

*** *** ***

[scifi]

Wyatt felt the pressure in his chest a couple of seconds before the portal actually opened, and he wondered if it meant he was destined to be there as he had been fated for so many other things. Destiny would have to wait a few moments, however, if that was in fact what was playing out on this day, and he summoned the demons he had spent the past months gathering from Hell to stand before him by the score in his pure white hall. A few of them grumbled at the surroundings, and Wyatt casually waved a hand to replace the illusion with a lair more fitting to their idea Underworld.

“It’s time,” he said. “Take your positions and wait for the word. When you get it . . .” he cocked his head in a way that might have been taken as arrogant if he’d had a smile to accompany his orders. “Have fun.”<br>
The demons shimmered to their assignments just as Wyatt turned toward the place where he sensed a new presence. He did not turn quickly enough, though, and an energy ball hit him square in the chest, knocking him backward into a rock wall.

“Miss me?” Cole asked, and started focusing all his power on the energy balls he threw in rapid succession toward his enemy.

But Wyatt recovered with more speed than Cole anticipated and held up a hand to deflect the projectiles. One flew back toward Cole, and he had to shimmer out of its way. He reappeared next to Wyatt to pick him up from the ground and throw him, but Wyatt grabbed Cole’s coat flaps instead and tossed him onto a pile of stones.

“I don’t have time for this,” Wyatt said and started to orb to the portal. But with a wave of his hand, Cole brought the pattern back down, and forced it to stay until Wyatt solidified.

“Make time,” he replied.

Wyatt fired an energy ball of his own, but Cole rolled and shimmered to dodge it. He rematerialized on the ground near Wyatt to sweep the man’s feet out from under him. Wyatt hit the dirt hard, but remained unfazed. He motioned to hurl Cole away from him again, and as Cole was flying, he sent another energy ball in his direction. This one hit its mark, and Cole fell with a chunk of flesh burned out of his side. He lay semi-conscious as Wyatt strode toward him with a sphere of glowing blue energy held ready for the vanquish.

“Energy ball!”

Cole heard it, but he didn’t believe it until he opened his eyes to see Helen directing the stolen bit of power back at her oldest cousin in a configuration of tight blue orbs. Wyatt would have been able to avoid it if Kit hadn’t levitated and kicked him in the jaw, sending him back into the path of Helen’s attack. Cole tried to sit up to stop the two foolish children before they got themselves killed, but before he could make any attempt to draw Wyatt’s attention back to himself, Helen grabbed Kit’s hand and orbed to his side, where she placed a hand on his arm and orbed the three of them to a distant corner of the lair, out of Wyatt’s sight.

“Get out of here!” Cole raged at them under his breath.

“Not without you,” Kit told him firmly.

Helen peeked around the side of the rock that hid them from Wyatt’s view and saw him recover from being double-teamed. “He’s mad,” she whispered.

Cole leaned his head back against the rock in annoyed fear for the girls. They were exactly like their mothers -- stupidly impulsive and recklessly brave. “Get out of here before I get mad.”<br>
“No,” Kit said again.

Helen shrugged sheepishly. “We can’t. I don’t know how to orb out of the Underworld.”<br>
Cole swallowed and held his injured side. He could shimmer the girls to the portal, but then Wyatt would go there also, and they’d all be dead. But he couldn’t let them die here with him. He was running out of options, and as Wyatt advanced toward their hiding place, there was little that Cole could do except wait for inspiration.

[scifi]

“Ah, Phoebe. I could really use your help about now,” Cole breathed, then gathered enough strength to bring Belthazor to life and prepared for a last stand.

“Cool,” Helen whispered beside him. Belthazor glanced down at the girl and saw that his appearance was far from eliciting fear. He shook his head and came up into a crouching position, ready to pounce on Wyatt when he stepped into view. Suddenly, instead of seeing Wyatt where he expected him, Belthazor saw him orb behind them -- but how could he see that without eyes in the back of his head? He blinked then and turned around to see nothing. Somehow, he knew what it was he had just experienced, and hurled an energy ball into the empty air just in time for it to collide with Wyatt’s solidifying orb pattern. Wyatt fell back, and Belthazor looked briefly to the heavens. “Thanks.”<br>
Another premonition came to him, and he threw the girls out of the way of Wyatt’s return fire almost before he’d formed the energy ball. Belthazor shimmered as Wyatt orbed, and, foreseeing where the man would rematerialize, shimmered into the spot right in front of him to ram the heel of his palm at his chest, feeling a couple of ribs crack on contact. Wyatt staggered, and Cole got the very real feeling that things weren’t as hopeless as he’d thought.

*** *** ***

Chris looked away from the demon army only when he got the sense that he was being watched himself. He turned to his father, whose eyes held him for a fraction of a second in a gaze filled with determination that he would not lose his son, the last thing left to him in the world.

“Stay with them!” Leo yelled, pointing to the children who had now begun storming the bridge, and then called for the best defense available to them -- an offense. “Potions!”<br>
The vials that had been stockpiled during their preparation for this moment appeared in a massive flurry of orbs, only to be cast simultaneously toward the waiting horde, hitting only those demons on whom potions would work, so as not to waste a single drop. Even as Chris ran back to the children, he marveled that his father had just taken out close to three hundred demons at a swipe.

But at best, it was merely a dent in the war machine, and the demons used the attack as a signal to launch their own. They shimmered in among the scattered witches, isolating and surrounding them like dogs with quarry. Bridget found herself facing ten of them by herself -- but she simply smiled at the stupidity that brought them in a gang against an empath whose specialty was borrowing powers. She caught a fireball in one hand and sent another back toward its owner telekinetically before unleashing her own ammunition against them. They dodged the attack, however, with more speed than she had counted on, and Bridget had the brief insight that this was one of the portal’s effects on them before they appeared again, ready to experiment with the powers that Wyatt’s spell had allowed them to access. So much the better, she thought, for as long as they wanted to play the “I’ve got a new power” game, she was more than ready. After all, she got their powers, too.


Chris could barely hear himself think over the screams and whimpers of the hundreds of children now pushing their way through the crowd to get to the bridge. The smallest of them fell to the wayside, and he saw that if the main group strayed only marginally, they would be trampled to death. With a wave of his hands, he lifted the swarm from the ground, a struggling collection of little hands and feet flailing in mid-air. The screams grew louder at the realization of their suspension, and Chris thought maybe he hadn‘t dealt with the situation as well as he should have.

“Calm down!” he yelled frantically even though they couldn’t possibly have heard him over their own screams and those of their parents and friends falling in the battle before them. Then he closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself, and, curiously, as he did so, the noise from the children died down. When he opened his eyes, he saw a faint glow coming off his hands -- almost like the glow his father emitted when he healed. The children stared at him in silence, their fears assuaged, and he lowered them to the ground where they awaited his instructions. With this portal around, he was shaping up to be quite the whitelighter.

“Little kids, run single-file to the bridge. Big kids, circle up around them. If you see a demon, kill it.”<br>
The children obeyed with little more than a murmur, having become a regular little disciplined unit in a matter of seconds. Chris took a position among the perimeter guarding the portal’s entrance, a defensive line he would never have expected to have been formed of teens and preteens. The good news was they didn’t need to worry about anything coming from behind, since they were backed against the demon-proof barrier, but the bad news was they had some of the worst of the demons vying to take up a position that would deny entrance to any more of the witches.

Chris dodged one of the energy balls chucked in his direction, but looked on in horror as a kid of no more than twelve fell beside him, a plasma burn covering the majority of his chest. Chris kneeled to the boy’s side while the teenagers flanking him chanted one of the spells Lydia and Hatsuo had been teaching them, and a few of the more pressing demons exploded. He desperately held his hands over the wound in the way his father always had, hoping against hope that the glowing he’d just seen in his hands meant he, too, now had power to heal physical wounds in addition to emotional upheaval. The boy continued to wheeze, however, while Chris kept one hand over his chest and tossed an energy ball toward a demon with the other, all the time trying to bring to mind images of love to trigger the power -- his mother, Bianca, even Leo, but nothing worked.

He ran his fingers back through his hair to knock it out of his face, and saw to his complete surprise that the wound started to close without any assistance from him. He watched as the burn vanished, leaving healthy skin behind, and glanced up to the only possible source of the miracle.

Leo tossed out lightning strikes in a steady stream to keep his adversaries at bay, occasionally putting enough voltage behind them to effect a vanquish. But more importantly, a deep golden aura surrounded him like a halo. Chris watched as a nearby witch fell with an athame through the stomach, but as soon as the demon retrieved the blade and turned to a new target, the woman stood without any sign of having been harmed. Leo was healing these people, all of them, without thinking about it, without so much as looking at them.

“Need a hand?” he heard a man’s voice say from above him. Chris raised his eyes to the speaker and saw that the voice belonged to a member of the Resistance who had not yet been exposed as a witch, one who was fortunate enough not to have been counted among the refugees -- so what was he doing here?

The man interpreted the bemused expression on Chris’s face correctly, and explained as he conjured one athame after another to throw in the direction of the demons. “We got word a good while back that you guys would need some help.” He gave Chris a wink. “You didn’t really think Victor slept all through his last few days?”<br>
Chris surveyed the battlefield and saw the various materialization patterns of witches’ teleportation spells -- several hundred closeted witches, at least, and enough to tell him that his grandpa had been busy.

Just as he was about to grin at Victor’s forethought, an odd sense of dread prompted him to check once more on his father, and his breath caught in his throat. The Phoenix Matriarch had just shimmered in, and Chris looked on in paralyzed fear as she recognized Leo, taking only a moment to process the reality of his presence, and then conjured her darklighter bow and arrows to take aim.

“Dad!” he screamed, and the paralysis left him. He ran in Leo’s direction, not even thinking to orb, only focusing on keeping the Matriarch in his sight, as though he could will her not to shoot. But before he had taken many strides, a hand caught him by the collar and thrust him down into the snow. He gazed up at the demon who had stopped him, and he could see on her face that he was the last person she had expected to be here. Ekera backed away, then started to shimmer -- to Wyatt, Chris was certain. He raised a fist and willed her smoky essence to slow its fading, and spoke the words that came rushing into his head.

“Confine her to this field of white
‘Til one shall die and end our fight.”<br>
Wyatt’s lieutenant became solid once more, and her eyeless gaze fixed itself on his prone figure. Chris rolled away from her and came to his feet, for all the good it would do him, for he had no idea how to vanquish her.

[scifi]

Lydia stared down her band of demons with all the defiance that her great-great-great grandmother had once given the Yankee garrison in New Orleans. Anyone who might have questioned her identification with an incident a hundred-and-sixty-odd years in the past didn’t know the two-fold importance of heritage to a Southerner and a witch. What could she say? She was a sucker for lost causes.

Elemental spells had served her well in these past months, so Lydia willed one to take effect around a group of three low-level demons who would now require no further attention. The snow that had been falling steadily this side of the portal became thicker in the seven-foot radius surrounding them -- blindingly dense and moving with ever-increasing speed, the ice crystals ripping minute tears in the demons’ flesh, until the friction of its momentum melted the snow and created a column of water that flooded into their bodies.

But Lydia didn’t watch any of this, nor did she see when the three literally dissolved in the water, because she was busy with other silent vanquishing spells that set several demons aflame. The heat of their demise burned away the snow on the ground and left a layer of mud about two inches thick. The demons who had not yet expired advanced through the mire, but Lydia raised her hands and collected the soupy mixture into a sheet to cover them. The mud hardened in an instant, shrinking around its molds, but retaining its integrity without a single crack, so that the demons inside were crushed. The explosions that ensued at their vanquish sent shards of rock flying out in all directions to pierce the bodies of a few other unsuspecting enemies in the distance.

“Ha,” Lydia said at her handiwork, then turned toward the next batch who were understandably a bit more wary in their approach.



Chris orbed out of the way of Ekera’s first volley of fireballs and appeared behind her, thankful that she no longer had the advantage of shimmering. He sent a shock wave into her back at point blank range, but all it did was send her sprawling several yards away. She stood then, and Chris used his power to break off a tree limb and drive it repeatedly through her torso like a needle darning a sock. Her body simply faded into shadow at the entry points, however, and she charged him unscathed.

He was so intent on watching her for any sign of an opening that he didn’t see a second demon run at him from the side until it had already tackled him to the ground, where it rammed its talons into his left shoulder and snapped his clavicle. All Chris’s strength went toward keeping himself conscious, so he couldn’t even scream at the pain.

“Back off!” Ekera yelled and vanquished one of her own kind so he would be hers and hers alone. Immediately, the wound began to close, but only to a point. The bone had come back together, but blood still soaked through his shirt and onto his coat. Something must have happened to Leo for the healing to have stopped, but Chris couldn’t spare a glance in his father’s direction, for the Shadow was upon him.

He orbed to a standing position and used his good hand to create an energy ball. It passed through her morphing form just as the branch had. Physical attacks were getting him nowhere, and he knew he needed the potion and spell from the Book of Shadows.

Shadows -- that was it. Wyatt had once said there was a way to dispel shadows without the Book. So what would shadows fear? Light. The quakes of 2013 and 2017 and the Woogyman battles that followed had taught him that.

He deflected a fireball and concentrated on halting Ekera’s advance long enough for him to think of a variation on the Woogyman spell. His right hand shook with the effort, but he succeeded in holding her still for a few seconds.

“Summon light
Summon enemy of night
Bring that in which she can not dwell
By order of this Halliwell.
Out of mind and out of sight
Take her now and serve what’s right.”<br>
Chris turned away and shut his eyes against the brightness of the burst of light that enveloped the demon, but he could still see red beneath his eyelids. Once the light diminished, he blew out a relieved breath and finally took a moment to wince at the ache in his shoulder. But when he turned around to look on Ekera’s remains, he realized that was not the only pain he’d be feeling in the next few seconds.

“Oh, crap,” he muttered as he saw seven incarnations of the shade demon, one for each of the wavelengths of visible light. It was the story of his life -- one backfire after another. “Crap, crap, CRAP!”

[scifi]

Leo never saw the arrow coming. But he didn’t have to see it, because even as the Matriarch let it fly, a force field similar to the one his older son had used as a baby surrounded him. Leo turned to face his newest opponent through the blue haze, but she didn’t allow this setback to deter her for long. With unbelievable speed, she shimmered to his side with an athame, apparently to test exactly what this defense was effective against -- all attacks, or simply projectiles. She brought the blade down to pierce the shield, and the shock from the deflection knocked her to the ground. Leo tossed a bolt of energy in her direction before she could rise, but she shimmered instead to stand before him, her hand outstretched a mere inches from the shield, and suddenly the Elder was unable to move. It was as if the life were being sucked out of him and into the swirl of white light playing between her hand and his force field. His power started slipping away, and he clenched his fists in a futile attempt to hold on to it. The golden aura of his healing gift left him, and the blue sphere of energy became more transparent with every passing second. He’d felt what it was like to die from this new poison only the day before, and he did not look forward to repeating the process. But it seemed there was nothing he could do to prevent it.



Lydia had not been doing too bad for herself. Twenty-two demons, and all she had to show for it was a gash on her forearm from where one had tossed a knife toward her in the throes of its vanquish. She rushed toward the twenty-third demon with said knife to see if it could tear through demon skin as well, but this one simply sneered and motioned toward the blood trickling from her wound. Too late, Lydia realized what it was doing, and the blade fell from her hand as she glanced down in horror. The blood was seeping back into her body through her pores, and with it went the pestilence the demon had placed there. She watched as her arm turned black and gangrenous and the necrosis spread into her hand and up under her sleeve; she had only enough time to whisper “No” before it reached her brain and stopped all thought.



If Bridget had been close enough to hear the whisper, she would have known that her own scream of denial coincided with her friend’s dying breath. As it was, she simply charged blindly to Lydia’s side as the younger woman collapsed. She tapped into the demon’s power to send its own plague back into itself. But she couldn’t take satisfaction in the vanquish, for no sooner had it exploded than she felt a tightness in her back and chest, a pain that told her she was as good as dead even before the dagger was pulled out. She fell on her side, but mustered enough strength to force herself to face the sky in hopes of looking on her killer’s face. No one was there, only the gray clouds rolling by like smoke. But then they weren’t quite so gray, or quite so far away, and as she blinked at the snowflakes falling into her eyes, she thought she saw her husband standing over her, giving her the oddly undisturbing feeling that he had preceded her on this field of battle. And even though she had not the will to move, she felt as though she were nodding her head as he reached for her and promised as the world faded that he would take her to see her sister.



Chris’s spell should have worked. It was a good spell, even if it was on the fly. “Shadows retreat from the light.” That was what was written in the Book to introduce the Woogyman spell, the exact words his Aunt Phoebe had shown him and said came from her big sister Prue’s mouth. Well, Prue Almighty, why hadn’t it worked?

He dodged two fireballs at the same time, forcing him down to the ground on his injured shoulder. He swore through a grunt and orbed out of the way of three more, but one of Ekera’s forms had latched onto his shadow, so that when he reappeared she was right there to kick him in the back. He flew forward and landed without bracing his fall with his hands, then breathlessly rolled over to toss an energy ball in her direction. It missed by a long shot, and the seven shadows surrounded him. He tried orbing again, but one of them was quick enough to drag him out of it and force him back down into the snow. More than a little ticked now, he waved his good arm in a wide circular motion over his head, and the shockwave went out on all sides to blast them away.

He stood panting then, still trying to figure out what had gone awry. “Shadows retreat from the light” . . . unless he was thinking about this all wrong. Time seemed to slow down for a moment, and he heard the blood rushing in his ears in a steady pattern. With every beat, he realized the importance of that regularity, of its naturalness, of its reflection of a cosmic order. Shadow could not exist in the absence of light.

The words came so easily now, partly because these thoughts of the natural order brought to mind Bianca, whose face led him to an image of the page in the grimiore she had used to open him up to a new perspective on his abilities. Her very presence in his soul taught him all he needed of light and shadow -- one had no meaning without the other.

“Blacker than black,
Devoid of light,
Substance they’ll lack
In perpetual night.”<br>
The Ekeras were caught mid-stride in their return to finish him as wells of darkness rose up from the earth, at first as smoky as their own essence. The swirling ethereal mass solidified as it folded over the demons, becoming completely opaque, save for the seven red outlines inside, and Chris watched as the pulsations that only he could see closed in on themselves with the appearance that they had been swallowed whole within the masses of absolute darkness. It was a bit anticlimactic, really, but in no way did Chris care.

“Dad,” he breathed, and spun to see if he was still alive. Leo was on his knees, and a thin veil of blue that had separated him from Tess vanished before Chris’s eyes. Tess backed away, and reconjured her crossbow to take aim.

She fired just as Chris orbed, and he could sense exactly what happened in that split second. Hatsuo made good on the condition of her forgiveness and came out of her invisibility, and her invincibility, to dive in front of Leo’s bent frame and take the arrow for him. Chris cried his fury out of his orb cloud, and before he was even solid, waved an orb-composed hand to send Tess crashing into the portal’s barrier. Leo, his powers slowly recouping, threw what bit of strength he could gather into an energy ball that accompanied the one Chris thrust in her direction. Both hit dead on, but the Matriarch reformed out of her explosion. She stared at Chris in gloating satisfaction that she’d found him out for what he was, then shimmered away from the battle before he could attempt anything else.

“Oh, God,” he whispered.

[scifi]

Something unimaginable was happening in the Underworld: Wyatt was losing to a demon.

He’d actually adapted quite well after it became evident that Belthazor was anticipating his every attack -- as well as could be expected, anyway, which meant he took an essentially defensive stance. But as soon as he could orb to avoid an energy ball, the demon would send another one flying in the direction of his rematerialization. If Wyatt hadn’t learned so quickly to dodge them and orb again, he might not have lasted so long against an enemy who could pound away at him with impunity.

Belthazor watched this struggle to survive with an amusement he hadn’t felt in quite some time. It was the rush of knowing that he was in control, that Wyatt’s life was in his hands and he could crush it whenever he pleased. It was the thrill of finally doling out punishment after waiting for so long.

Wyatt orbed in front of him and took a swing, but Belthazor easily ducked it and returned a blow to the stomach. Wyatt anticipated the return the old-fashioned way, however, and tightened his abdomen to absorb the punch. He brought his other fist to the side of Belthazor’s head. At these close quarters, Wyatt was able to attack faster than the premonitions could alert the demon, and the fact that his punch actually made contact told both of them that he’d finally found a weakness. He head-butted Belthazor then, and followed up by backhanding him to the ground. Belthazor shimmered to regain his distance and foresaw that regardless of where he would reappear, Wyatt would send an energy ball toward him. So when he did rematerialize, he flew to the ground to avoid the blast and fired his own toward the cavern ceiling, sending down a rain of rubble. Even Wyatt couldn’t stand against a rock to the back of the head, and when the dust cleared, he lay motionless on the ground.

Belthazor approached cautiously, but he had no foreknowledge of Wyatt rising from the pile of debris. Rather, he saw a vision of himself vanquishing the witch once and for all. He smiled and rallied his power to create one last energy ball between his hands -- larger by far than the one he’d once tried to hurl at the Source.

“Cole, stop.”<br>
He hesitated with the blue sphere poised over his head and searched for the speaker. He saw only Kit with her lips held together tightly in reluctant acceptance that she was about to witness her cousin’s death, and Helen with her face buried in Kit’s shirt.

“Don’t do this,” the voice came from inside his mind.

“Cassie?” he whispered.

“I don’t want you to kill him,” she answered. “You can’t.”<br>
“It was you,” he realized. She had been projecting her own premonitions to him across the distance between the portal and the Underworld. He shook his head. Phoebe had never been here with him. And it was because of Wyatt.

“He has to be stopped,” Belthazor growled. “Kit understands that. Why can’t you? After everything he’s done to the world, everything he has yet to do --”<br>
“That’s not why you want to kill him,” Cassie’s thoughts intruded again into his own.

He clenched his jaw in fresh anger. “If you know that, you know what he did.”<br>
“I know what you think he did. I don’t believe it, but even if I did, you can’t kill him. You can’t --” Her thoughts became less coherent, a result of a ten-year-old’s inability to wrap her mind around a concept she couldn’t yet articulate, though she felt it instinctively. “You’re good,” she finally thought simply, and Belthazor saw the vision of the past that her subconscious drew on to get her point across.

Cole was in the Underworld, standing before his old mentor, Raynor, and feeling the emptiness of losing the only person who could have kept him human.

“How’d you get me to do it?” he spat. “A spell?”<br>
Raynor’s smooth voice held unpardonable satisfaction. “Does it really matter? But you enjoyed it, didn’t you? Killing the witch?”<br>
Belthazor could feel again the hate, the rage, and the blind ecstasy of revenge build inside him to the climax just before release. “Not as much as I’m going to enjoy this.” Cole thrust the dagger into Raynor, and Belthazor relived the quickening in his blood. “You killed Phoebe’s love for me. Now I’m going to watch you die.”<br>
He remembered what had happened next, how Raynor smiled through his pain as he met Cole’s eyes. “I feel your heart; it’s racing even as mine slows.”<br>
Belthazor wanted to break away from the vision; he couldn’t bear to feel again what Cole was about to discover. But he couldn’t look away; he couldn’t shield his mind.

“You’re enjoying this,” Raynor gloated. “I can feel it.” Cole pressed the blade deeper. “This is what I hoped for, your inner-demonic nature finally showing itself for all its glory.”<br>
Cole shoved his mentor away in denial of the truth he knew.

“You’re truly evil now, Belthazor. Welcome home.”<br>
Cole had fallen to his knees at those words, hopelessness washing over him just as the flames had washed over Raynor. And now, as he came out of the vision, Belthazor felt he might go to his knees again.

“You’re good now,” Cassie insisted.

He shut his eyes in a final fight with his demonic self -- but that was just a euphemism, an excuse. There was never such a thing as a demonic self and a human self. They were both simply part of a whole, part of a single person. And it was his choice what that person would be.

Cole pushed out a long breath and let the energy ball dissipate into air. He stood over Wyatt half a second longer, then walked over to the two girls. They stared up into his black and red face, the fear that had grown in them at the ferocity of his fight with their cousin melting away at his mercy -- or his stupidity, he couldn’t decide -- and they took his offered hands.

“Let’s get you out of here.”<br>
*** *** ***

[scifi]

Bianca stood from the bed and swallowed when she sensed her aunt shimmer into the room. Her breaths came quickly, and she trembled at what she would undoubtedly meet after death. But she would go to Hell on her feet.

Tess strode across the room, no doubt wanting a hands-on experience in killing her. But she didn’t raise a finger.

“Leo’s alive.”

What she said was so far from what Bianca expected that it took a moment for her to find her voice. “What?”<br>
“I saw him helping the witches. And I saw Chris helping him.”<br>
Bianca simply stared at the Matriarch, not daring to believe.

“He’s played us all for fools, Bianca. Wyatt, too. Imagine what he’ll pay to have a traitor’s head brought to him on a silver tray.”<br>
Bianca lowered her head, trying to make sense of the past months as the images and feelings rushed through her mind -- he stood at her doorstep, rainwater dripping from the tips of his hair; he watched her run a cloth over his blood-stained face; he cried in her arms; he kissed her again and again.

“Everything . . . everything was a lie,” Tess’s voice shot through her consciousness as she conjured a bow and quiver of arrows and held them out to her niece.

He’d lied, and now, finally, Bianca knew who he was. She took the weapon and locked eyes with Tess for a moment before loading an arrow, and only one word escaped her lips, her every intention bound up in its syllable.

“Chris.”<br>
*** *** ***

“Get back to the kids,” Leo ordered Chris as his son tried to help him stand.

“The last of them just stepped onto the bridge,” Chris told him and threw a handful of demons back into a wall of fire one of the witches had just created.

“Everybody else, then --”<br>
“They know, Dad.” He nodded toward several of the refugees fighting as they fell back to the portal. “They can take care of themselves. I gotta get you out of here.”<br>
“No,” Leo said as Chris deflected a fireball away from him. “I have to get closer to the portal. Maybe my powers will come back quicker. They need me.”<br>
Chris almost continued arguing but saw that Leo was already in a staggering run toward his destination. He caught his father’s arm and orbed the few yards to the barrier, though he didn’t know how Leo would be any help when he could barely keep his head up.

That was when Chris saw Cassie off to his left, standing in the midst of a half-circle of demons who were attacking and vanquishing each other rather than paying attention to the little witch, and when he saw Cole shimmer in beside her with his two other cousins and drop his guise as Belthazor. The demon seemed to be a magnet for the opposing army, perhaps because he was a traitor to his own kind. Whatever the reason, the four of them looked to be on the verge of being overrun with more demons than Cassie could control. Chris started to run to their aid, but an energy ball flying past his ear told him he couldn’t leave Leo defenseless. As he returned fire, he hoped Cole could somehow keep the girls from harm.



Kit didn’t notice the demons surrounding them, or Cole sending some of them back with a wave of his hand and summoning flames from down below to consume several others. She didn’t notice Helen orbing them away from her in twos and threes. Nor did she think about Cassie’s unblinking calm as the more weak-minded continued vanquishing themselves. She was oblivious to all of it because she had finally felt a change in her powers.

She was in the past, or at least part of her was, and it was like no vision she had ever before experienced. Her mother and Aunt Paige struggled to carry their sister between them as the entered the attic of the real Halliwell Manor in a state of panic.

“Hurry, he’s coming!” Paige’s voice carried as though in a cave, and the echoes reverberated inside Kit’s head.

“Come on, honey, we need you, Piper, it's time.” Her mother tried desperately to bring the eldest to consciousness. “Come on, you can do it.” Kit reached out a hand to touch her mom’s face, but felt nothing except air.

“Kit!”<br>
She came out of the vision at the sound of Cole’s voice and tried to blink away her disorientation.

“What happened to you?” he demanded as he vanquished two more demons with their own fireballs. “You were phasing.”<br>
“I was what?” She levitated out of the way of a demon who’d dove for her, and Helen orbed him against a tree.

“You went transparent!”<br>
“I was really there,” she muttered in disbelief. She looked to Cassie, wondering if perhaps that intuition of hers would help explain everything. “They were about to vanquish the Source.”<br>
Cassie nodded, and channeled a demon’s power of deflection to throw up a force field around the four of them. She finally faced her sister. “Can you get back there?”<br>
Kit caught her breath at the idea that occurred to her at the same time that it came full-fledged to Cassie’s mind. “I think so.”<br>
Cassie swallowed. “Cole, go to Leo. He’ll protect you.”<br>
“I’m not leaving --”<br>
“Now!” the sisters yelled at the same time, and their demeanor reminded him so much of the Charmed Ones’ when they were about to do some serious vanquishing that he obeyed them as though they were not little girls, but grown women more powerful than he could ever hope to become.

“Why did you leave them?” Chris shouted when he saw Cole shimmer to Leo’s side.

“They’re up to something.” He turned to Leo. “And you’d better be shaping up real quick, because they said you’re supposed to save my sorry --”<br>
Chris stopped listening to Cole and turned his attention to the girls, wanting badly to hear what they were saying to each other.

“Helen, come here,” Kit ordered. “Don’t be afraid.”<br>
The three girls joined hands then, and rose into the air with Kit’s levitation. She once again bridged the gap to the past, taking the others with her, and the spell she thought of went through Cassie and into Helen’s mind, so that the three of them could chant together.

“Power of the Witches rise
Course unseen across the skies
To help us in our hour of need
We call upon the Power of Three.”<br>
Chris heard them then, and not with his ears. This had to be Cassie’s doing.

“The Power of Three will set us free.
The Power of Three will set us free.
The Power of Three will set us free.”<br>
The girls continued the first spell the Charmed Ones had ever learned, but Chris couldn’t understand why. They didn’t have that kind of power.

And then, for the first time in over five years, he heard his mother’s voice -- faintly at first, as though in a memory of a dream, and then more clearly, weaving itself with her sisters’ voices, and with the voices of their daughters.

“Prudence, Patricia, Penelope, Melinda, Astrid,
Helena, Laura, and Grace
Halliwell witches stand strong beside us,
Vanquish this evil from time and space.”<br>
“Piper,” Leo whispered beside him, but Chris could find no words to speak.

A column of iridescence formed at the girls’ feet, whirling in a kaleidoscopic frenzy that seemed to build as they repeated the Power of Three spell with more intensity and the Charmed Ones again called on the Halliwell line as though they were looped on a recording. The children were channeling the power of a spell twenty years in the past, bringing it into the presence of the portal, where it redoubled itself. The demons had even stopped attacking in awe of an event so inconceivable.

Suddenly the spells stopped, and the girls solidified to open their eyes and stare out on the battlefield. The circumference of the column expanded as quickly as it had been created, and even as Leo’s shield came up to protect Cole, Chris closed his eyes against the light and felt the energy pass through his body. Everything that Piper had been was included in that energy -- a sister, a wife, a mother. He couldn’t breath, yet he could smell her hair; he couldn’t move, yet he could feel her wipe his tears.

When he finally looked on the column’s effects, he had to blink a few times to take it all in. The mountainside was utterly devoid of demons, excepting, of course, Cole. Only piles upon piles of ash lay strewn among the refugees and witches of the Resistance, who stood as stupefied as he did. He forced his breathing back to a more normal rate, then turned to his father.

“Is everybody better than me?” he complained through a grin, but he knew the joke had fallen on deaf ears when he saw the terror in Leo’s and Cole’s expressions. He glanced back in the direction his father was facing -- toward the girls. They lay in a lifeless heap on the ground.

He ran with the two other men and reached for Cassie as Leo held Helen and Cole went for Kit. The other witches started gathering around their saviors, already in an attitude of mourning. These girls weren’t meant for the Power of Three, and it had been more than they could endure.

Chris had never before seen Leo vent his rage as he did at these people who were assuming the girls were already dead. “Get through the portal, all of you!” his father screamed and then looked down to stroke Helen’s cheek.

Chris stared at him as the people obeyed his command. “Can you?”<br>
Leo shook all over. “I can try. Give me your hand.”<br>
Chris joined his palm to his father’s, and they each held their hands over the girls’ bodies. And though he knew his concentration needed to be focused on this task, all he could think of was how he would personally vanquish Tess if it didn’t work.

[scifi]

Nothing was happening, and the anger and desperation built inside Chris to the point that he shifted on his knees in nervous agitation.

“Clear your mind, Chris,” Leo advised, having already calmed himself into a determined stare at Helen’s face. It occurred to Chris that he was the one keeping Leo from healing the girls, but even that thought, and his kicking himself for his hindrance, had to go. He followed his father’s example and picked a flower on Cassie’s shirt as an innocuous focal point, and started counted his own breaths.

He reached twenty-two before he felt anything -- a warmth like he’d felt all the times he’d been healed, but with more to it now that his father’s power filled him and flowed out through both their hands. He felt Leo’s trigger and brought his eyes away from the golden glow coming from his fingertips and to his dad’s face, blurred by tears that were the only possible reaction to the overwhelming love stored in that man. Nothing Chris had ever felt for anyone was like this love. It was the love of a man for his wife, a father for his family, but it was even more than these. Leo’s love for those he protected, for those he guided, was where his strength came from. They could anger him, they could hurt him, but he loved his charges anyway, down into the depths of his soul. Chris felt a glimmer of all this and knew then that he would never develop the power to heal; he didn’t have that kind of capacity. Then he remembered that Wyatt could work this kind of miracle, and he was awestruck at the depth of feeling his brother must have had for him all these years.

He heard Cole let out a breath that he had been holding for what seemed an eternity. “It’s working.”

Chris looked to where Kit stirred in Cole’s arms, and then down to where Cassie sighed beneath his hand. Helen wriggled her nose at a snowflake that had fallen to tickle it, and Chris let out a laugh and grinned broadly at what his father had done. Leo simply smiled weakly as the girls sat up and looked around at the remains of the demon horde; a gust of wind twirled a bit of the ash into the air and sent it down the mountain.

Cassie turned to her sister, blinked for a moment, then brought one corner of her mouth up in a smug curve. “We are good.”<br>
Chris pulled the little girl into a hug with his good arm, then released her a bit to look at her while he spoke. “You are insane!” he said through the smile that wouldn’t leave his face, and he hugged her again.

“It runs in the family,” Kit said as Cole helped her to her feet, and he nodded his agreement with that assessment of the Halliwells. But Cole’s smile faded when he glanced toward the portal.

“Leo.”<br>
They all looked to where he pointed. Where once the portal had allowed Brigadoon to coexist seamlessly with their own world, it now had a distinctly fuzzy perimeter marked by the superimposed image of the canyon edge over the trees and rock of the mountain, almost like a doubly exposed photograph. And with each passing moment the edges of the portal pulled closer in on the bridge, where the last of the hundred or so surviving adult refugees were already reaching the midway point.

“Girls, quickly.” Leo picked up Helen and ran with the others the few feet to the barrier. There he set her down and waited for her to step onto the bridge. Instead, almost instinctively, she turned to her cousins, who had already stopped short of crossing over when they realized Cole would go no further.

“You’re coming with us,” Kit told him.

He grinned half-heartedly and eyed the portal warily. “This thing and I have met before. It doesn’t like me very much.”<br>
“But . . . I want you to come,” Cassie begged as though he had a choice in the matter. “Wyatt --”<br>
“Don’t worry about Wyatt.”<br>
“He’ll kill you!” Kit insisted.

“How many times have I been vanquished? You know I never stay that way.”<br>
The tears in Cassie’s eyes told him she couldn’t be nearly so optimistic, and he kneeled down to her. “I promise. I’ll be here when you get back.”<br>
The tears fell down her cheeks as she hugged one side of his neck and Kit held him from the other side. Helen ran to jump on his back to embrace what part of him remained. He fought back tears of his own as he let them stay like this for a second longer, then peeled them off. “Go.”<br>
Leo ushered the girls onto the bridge, then gave Cole the hearty handshake he reserved for friends. “Be careful.”<br>

[scifi]

Chris watched the exchange, but it was only when Leo took a step for the bridge that he fully understood what was going on. “Dad?”<br>
He consciously tried to stand taller as Leo turned to him, to look like his realization didn’t faze him. “You’re going.”<br>
Leo narrowed his eyes in his confusion that his son could miss something so obvious. “So are you.”<br>
Chris simply shook his head. “No.”<br>
“You wait until now to discuss this?” Cole said incredulously, but neither of them paid attention. Leo stepped closer to Chris, trying desperately not to lose control, not to hyperventilate. This could not be happening.

Cassie heard their words and turned around to watch her uncle -- he had to convince Chris to come. He just had to. Suddenly, she gasped at a premonition, the pain of which made her double over with her hands holding her side. She fell down on the bridge, her face screwed up at the burning in her abdomen, and forced out a single word before she could break the connection. “Dad!”<br>
She felt Kit shaking her, heard her call her name, and then opened her eyes to see the plank under her face. Immediately, she checked her hands -- no blood. But the pain was still there, and the events of the premonition took on a clearer shape. She couldn’t say a word, but simply scrambled to her feet and ran the length back to the edge of the bridge. She had to get to Chris.

Cole saw her go down, though he couldn’t dare try to get through the barrier, and then watched her barreling blindly toward him. He caught her up in his arms just as she stepped off the bridge, but she kicked wildly, twisting and flailing against him.

“Let me go!” she sobbed, but those were the only coherent words he could get from her. She was shockingly strong in this state, and it was all Cole could do to hold onto her. He stepped backward and tripped on the uneven first plank of the bridge, landing on his back with Cassie pinned to his chest. It took him a moment to realize that the portal had not repelled him; he was fully inside this other world, one he would never have hoped to be allowed entrance to. But from this side, he saw the portal closing rapidly, and knew he couldn’t marvel at his acceptance right now, but must simply struggle to hold Cassie until she had no choice but to stay.

Leo turned away from his niece’s hysteria for the moment. He would have time to help her, but now he had to make sure everyone was safe -- everyone who he’d not already lost. “Chris, please.” He paused, knowing why Chris was hesitating. “There’s nothing more we can do for him. He’s not coming back.”<br>
Chris bit his lip. “I don’t believe that. And even if it’s true, what about the rest of the world?”<br>
“Wyatt already has the world,” Leo said faintly. “Without even trying. You know that.”<br>
Chris watched the tears flow freely down his father’s face, and realized his own was just as wet. He closed his eyes. “So, what, you’re just . . .” It was becoming harder and harder to speak. “You’re just going to give up?”<br>
“Chris, these witches are the only hope for the future of good magic. Wyatt . . . Wyatt can‘t live forever.” Leo bowed his head. Oh, God, he was talking about his own son, the one who had brought so much joy on the day he brought magic back into the world, the one whose presence had given him a sense of completion he’d never thought could be paralleled until he held his second child in his arms. He couldn’t lose both of them. “These people are going to come back into the world someday, and they’re going to need guidance. You have to help me. If we stay, we can’t guarantee we’ll be around to give it. Now, please, come on.”

Chris blinked another tear from his eye and looked away.

“I’m an Elder, Chris!” Leo sobbed. “It’s my job to protect good magic!”<br>
That was it. That was always it. Chris swallowed and took a deep breath. “And I’m a witch,” he said calmly and met his father’s eyes. “It’s my job to protect Innocents.”<br>
With those words, Leo saw that Chris was already lost to him, as surely as Wyatt, as surely as Piper, as surely as everything he had ever loved. And he didn’t know if he had the strength to ever move again.

“Whoever’s coming, come on!” Cole yelled as the portal shrank further so that not much more than the bridge and a few feet of the precipice remained.

“Let me go!” Cassie continued to wail.

Leo simply stared at his son, taking in his features, memorizing them. He longed to touch his face, to wipe away those tears, to tell him everything would be all right just as he had done when he was a boy. He couldn’t leave him. Not again.

“Leo, you don’t have time!” Cole called.

Leo took a staggering breath. Cole was reminding him that his decision had already been made for him. He had charges waiting on the other side, people who had come to rely on him implicitly. He knew that there was no other choice.

“I love you, son -- ” His voice broke, and he could barely finish his sentence. “More than anything.”<br>
Chris inhaled shakily and nodded to acknowledge that Leo had said those words -- what he wouldn’t have given to be able to believe them. He sniffed and tried to regain some composure so that Leo would not take with him with the memory of seeing him broken.

Leo stepped inside the portal then, walking over the wood like an old man who needed to watch his feet to direct them where to go. He looked up only when he heard Cole yell his name, and he saw that Cassie had wrenched herself from his hold and was again trying to get off the bridge. There was no getting around Leo, though, and he picked her up in his arms, where she struggled as vehemently as she had done with Cole.

“Let me go!” she choked out in a scream. “Let me go! He’s going to die!”<br>
The last Chris saw of his father was a horrified expression on his face when he turned to him with Cassie held against his shoulder. He would never know if Leo would have taken a step back out to him then, because just as quickly as Leo spun around, the portal closed, and all that was before Chris’s eyes was and expanse of ground and forest.

His legs no longer felt like they could hold his weight, and he had to catch himself against a tree. Something told him this was because of the crash from losing the power high of the portal. But he knew there was more to it than that.

After about a minute of trying to get his breath, Chris felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up, and it was the same young man who had announced the arrival of the Resistance’s reinforcements. For the first time in several minutes, Chris realized he wasn‘t the only witch who’d never had any intention of leaving the world. “You all right, man?”<br>
The man looked as drained as Chris felt, and as he glanced around the mountain side at the other witches, he realized they were waiting for something, for some kind of indication of what they were supposed to do now. They were waiting for him. He returned the man’s gaze.

“I’m good,” he said, then drew himself up to speak to the others. “Go home,” he told them, unconsciously imitating the way his father had always projected his voice from his diaphragm when he had addressed assemblies. “Get some rest. We still have work tomorrow.”<br>
If they were expecting a speech, that was as good as they were going to get. They looked around at each other, then followed their new de facto leader’s instructions by muttering their various spells. The man stayed by Chris’s side a moment longer. “You sure you’re okay.”<br>
Chris nodded, then saw the man extend his hand. “Matthew Pike, by the way. I’m in San Francisco, too. So if you need anything, look me up.”<br>
Chris stared at the hand for a moment, then took it. He studied Matthew’s face. He was maybe a year or two younger than Chris, but he’d held his own against the demons. He would be useful. Then Chris released him, a bitter taste coming into his mouth at the thought that he was already strategizing, planning where he would put this young man like he was a pawn in a chess game, thinking of him not as a person, but as a tool. But he supposed that was his new role.

Matthew said his transportation spell, and Chris was left alone on the mountain side. But not alone, he realized, as he surveyed the bodies of fallen witches and mortals that lay scattered among the ashes of fallen demons. There were hundreds of them, some friends, some strangers, all gone the way that, apparently, he was soon to go. Cassie had seen and felt it; she had tried to stop it. The idea occurred to him that Leo would have done everything in his power to stop it, too, if he’d known in time. But the fact remained that he hadn’t known, that he had left him to this fate, whatever it was. Chris would die alone and in pain, calling on a father who would not be there to answer.

[scifi]

A gust of wind blew past him and in among the branches above his head, producing a cold, lonely howl. The wind chilled his hands, or rather, brought his attention to how numb they felt, and he drove them into the relative warmth of his coat pockets. But they did not stay there long, for his fist had closed around a piece of hard plastic. He brought it out and examined it in his palm; it was the ARI module Leo had given him -- how long ago? Not even an hour, though it felt like another lifetime. It was a useless piece of a toy, its only meaning a sentiment, but now the fact that it served no practical purpose was driven home by the crack that ran down its center where he’d fallen on it one too many times. He wanted his brother, he wanted his mother, he wanted his father -- he wanted his family. Leo had led him on, made him think he could have one of them, at least. He made him believe that maybe this time, he could be good enough to keep his dad with him. But for the third time, Leo had proven him wrong.

Chris tightened his grip around the module, then threw it as hard as he could at the trunk of a tree. “I hate you!” he screamed as the toy shattered, and his scream echoed throughout the mountainside. The force he’d put into the throw caused his foot to slip in the snow, and he came down hard on one knee. He sat to nurse it, and closed his eyes as the last of his echoes turned his words back onto him. “So much,” he breathed, and wished what he’d said were true. His life would have been a lot easier that way.

He sat for a couple of more minutes to let the throbbing in his knee abate, all the while thinking how wonderful it would be if the falling snow could bury him; but then again, Wyatt would probably take care of that when he came for him, as he undoubtedly would once the Matriarch had told him everything. But perhaps his brother would wait long enough for Chris to regain his strength -- at least enough to orb -- and he’d be able to find a way to cloak himself. Perhaps he could find the apothecary Bianca had mentioned. However unlikely these possibilities seemed, Chris still managed to pick himself up and test how much weight the knee would support. Satisfied that he could walk down to one of the bunkers to rest, he glanced up from his knee -- and saw her.

“Bianca,” he said, and then let his eyes fall to the crossbow she held at the ready. She knew the truth.

“Don’t try to orb,” she said. “You know I’m faster.”<br>
“Bianca, please, don’t do this.”<br>
She started walking toward him, slowing only briefly enough to glance at Bridget’s body on the ground. Chris swallowed at his recognition of his friend, but also at this proof of his lies.

“You were going to stop,” he pleaded. “You were --”<br>
“How many times do I have to tell you?” She came to a halt a few paces from him. “Don’t trust me to do what it looks like I’m going to do.”<br>
He started to beg again, if only for her own sake, but there was something in the way she said it -- but not even that, since her voice was just as cold as it had been their first day of training. It was simply a feeling he got from her -- a vibe.

“Now,” she said, and the word sounded like the beginning of a new sentence. But Chris took it as a signal and twisted his shoulder out of the way even as she pulled the trigger, so that the perfectly timed arrow swept narrowly past him. He watched its trajectory take it into the woman standing behind him, and saw Tess’s athame fall from her hand as she clutched at the arrow in her chest. She would have stabbed him while he was preoccupied with Bianca -- that must have been what Cassie had seen. But if the premonition had just been played out with a different ending, why did he consciously have to shake off his uneasiness?

“Good shot,” he told Bianca as she dropped her quiver and bow and ran up to him to look on her handiwork.

“Just be glad I’m only a little drunk.” Before Chris could ask what she meant by that, she reflexively conjured an athame. “She’s not dead.”<br>
Chris beat her this time, and turned with his fist clenched even before he noticed the movement that had alerted Bianca that her aunt was alive. He felt her heart in his hand, felt it constrict, felt the vessels around it strain, and thought of all the lives the Phoenix had taken -- and had led Bianca to take -- as her heart finally burst. He kept the fist tight for a few seconds longer than necessary, then realized that his fingernails had dug into his palm. He released his grip and looked at the half moon indentations, a couple of which were actually oozing blood into the cup of his hand, reddening it as though he had literally held the Matriarch’s heart. He wet his lips and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. He became intensely aware of how killing was not nearly as difficult for him as it had once been, and the thought scared him more than anything he’d seen that day. But he couldn’t afford to think about it right now.

“You have to get out of here,” he told Bianca. “If Wyatt finds you with me --”<br>
“She didn’t tell him, Chris,” Bianca said softly and hazarded a glimpse of her aunt’s body after he’d finished with it. “She came straight to me.”<br>
Chris stared at her, not daring to believe that it could be true.

“That doesn’t mean he won’t come here,” Bianca continued. “I don’t know why he hasn’t already.” She glanced to Tess’s body again. “You know what he’ll want to see -- what he’ll have to see.”<br>
Chris took a second to catch her drift, but then nodded. Bianca strode over to Bridget’s body and lay a hand on it. “I’ll get rid of the evidence, and you do your thing,” she said. “I’ll be back.” She shimmered with the witch that he’d supposedly already killed months ago, and he was once again alone with the dead.

He blew out a breath and kneeled beside Tess’s body, mentally rewording the glamouring spell he’d used on himself so long ago to take on her appearance. The irony didn’t escape him.

“In look, in face, in word, in deed,
Become another to fill a need.
That Wyatt may his desire see,
Our father you will henceforth be.”<br>
He rose then and watched her body morph into a replica of Leo, with the arrow stuck in his chest, and the signs of a final struggle to maintain life erased by the slackening of his facial muscles. It was too realistic, and Chris had to turn away. He started to run his hand through his snow-wet hair to push it away from his face, but thought better of using the hand that was bleeding. So he simply stood there waiting for Bianca to return and screwed up his eyelids against the occasional gust of wind-blown snow.

[scifi]

But Bianca did not come back before Wyatt did.

“What happened to you?” Chris asked when he saw the cuts and bruises that covered his brother -- a sight so rare, the question was not simply a cover.

“I’m fine,” Wyatt answered. “What are you doing here?”<br>
“When the portal opened, I could sense Leo, and I knew they must have healed him somehow. So . . .” He shrugged.

Wyatt checked the rest of the battlefield. “Where are my demons?”<br>
“They vanquished them. All of them.”<br>
“Leo did this?”<br>
“No. The girls.”<br>
Wyatt folded his arms and tried to hide a wince at the pain in his ribs. He still hadn’t seen Leo’s face on the ground behind Chris. “How many got away?”<br>
Chris shook his head -- he hadn’t really bothered to count. “Around 600, I guess.”

“It’s all right,” Wyatt said as though Chris was apologizing. “This was all just a distraction anyway. And Leo?”<br>
Chris moved out of the way and watched Wyatt. For an infinitesimal moment, he thought he saw him frown at the sight of their father. But when he blinked, the expression had left his brother’s face.

“The Matriarch --”<br>
“Is dead.” Chris interrupted.

Wyatt stared into Chris’s eyes. “Then who --”<br>
Chris waved a hand and brought the quiver of arrows that Bianca had left on the ground to lay before Wyatt’s feet. “You might want to check that he’s really dead,” he said dully. “I don’t feel like doing this a third time.”<br>
Wyatt looked from the quiver to Leo, and then to Chris. “Chris, I’m --” He swallowed and gazed at the body before finally sighing. “It had to be done.” He met Chris’s eyes again. “You know that.”<br>
Chris nodded, but he couldn’t maintain eye contact. Wyatt came closer to study his face, then let his attention go to the hole in Chris’s coat at the shoulder.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Chris imitated his brother’s lie.

Wyatt half-grinned. “Here.” He placed a hand over the still-open wound. But as the seconds passed and nothing happened, the grin dropped from his face. He looked at his hands.

“That’s weird,” he laughed unconvincingly. “Must be some kind of residual portal crap screwing with my powers.”<br>
“Yeah,” Chris concurred outwardly while praying inwardly that he wouldn’t fall to his knees in despair while Wyatt was still around.

Wyatt stared at his hands again, then resumed his mask. “I have some stuff to do. But first . . .” He gestured toward the bodies all around them and caused every one of them to disintegrate in a brief burst of flame as though to prove that just because his healing power was messed up, the rest of his abilities were not. “We’ll talk later?” he offered, almost gently, after perusing Chris’s face one more time.

“Sure.”<br>
He closed his eyes as Wyatt orbed, wishing to God that Bianca would come to him soon. And almost as if she’d heard the wish, she shimmered in beside him.

“Has he come yet?” she asked, then saw that the bodies had been replaced with yet another layer of ash. “Oh.”<br>
“He couldn’t heal me,” Chris mumbled and stared at the ground. Bianca turned to him.

“What does that mean?”<br>
He shook his head. “Nothing.” Only that his hope had just died. But he’d done without hope before. He took a deep breath to force that sorrow down to a more manageable level.

“So,” he started a new point to take the attention off himself. “Where do you go from here?”<br>
Bianca pulled the coat away from his shoulder to have a look at the wound. “First of all, I’m getting you to a healer that actually works.”<br>
To his credit, Chris attempted a smile at her levity. But the pain behind it made the smile the saddest thing Bianca had ever seen. She became serious then, reaching up to pass her hands over his face and back through his hair, and she changed her answer.

“With you.”<br>
He bowed forward until his forehead rested against hers as though she were the only thing keeping them both standing. She allowed him to lean on her only briefly before she wrapped her arms around him beneath his coat; they would have to sustain each other. He held her head there against his chest, breathing in her scent rather than the ashes of demons, witches, and mortals that the wind carried up into the air so that it was nearly indistinguishable from the snow, and looked to the skies where the gray clouds rolled over and around themselves vying for a piece of blue sky to cover from his view. He closed his eyes against their contest and buried his face in her hair.

As they stood there atop the remains of this day’s battle, they could not know that tomorrow would bring a new one. They could not know that Wyatt was at the very moment giving the word to the demons he’d spent the last months resurrecting, and that the word was destruction. They could not know that for the next month, he would allow them to run rampant in the mortal world, exposing magic in its worst form, obliterating everything and everyone in their paths, until finally, at the end of that month, Wyatt would step in to vanquish them spectacularly on live holo-casts. They could not know that this was how he would become the world’s savior, a witch descended from unimaginable power whose sole purpose was to bring order to chaos. Certainly, there would be resistance, mostly from religious leaders who would see the danger in taking Wyatt’s motives at face value, or from governments that would be loathe to give up their control. But such people and institutions would not stand long in the face of mass adoration. Halliwell History would become a bestseller, mainly because of its extensive section on Wyatt’s benevolence. School children would memorize whole passages; adults would tour his childhood home. And witches, the last group left to fight the glorious future that was Wyatt’s rule, would be hunted to the brink of extinction.

Chris and Bianca could never have imagined what the years ahead would hold, nor would they have believed how short the time they had left together would seem. The years would bring them suffering and darkness, separation and heartache, betrayal and forgiveness. And it would bring them death.

But in each other’s arms, they didn’t think of anything tomorrow would bring. For this one fleeting moment in time, they were alone -- the only two people in the world.

The End

[mcharmed21]

Thanks so much for reposting the story! It was 1/2 done we I joined the old Cafe..this is truely a master piece

[CanadianHalliwell]

I enjoyed rereading this story so much that I am wondering if you were going to write a sequel

[scifi]

Thanks!

While they aren't direct sequels, "The Ties That Bind" and my newest story, "So Far Down," both assume that the events of "The Witch and the Assassin" took place.