"I found him," breathed Chris.
On the other end of the line, Wyatt barely paused his motions and cast a glance over his shoulder. Across the kitchen, their sister, Melinda, and her friends, Eve and Patra, were busily skimming different grimoires and spellbooks and jotting down notes and references. Mel looked up and met Wyatt's eyes, offering nothing but the same weary support and speculations Wyatt himself was plagued by.
In the midst of the nearest thing that their family had come to a magical crisis in likely over a decade, Chris wasn't off consulting an oracle or a seer, or tapping any of his other myriad resources and contacts-magical or otherwise. No, their baby brother was enchanted by a man he had seen in a dream-a vision, he said. Never mind that not a single one of their mother's children had inherited even a touch of the premonition power their family was known for. Never mind that even Wyatt's powers marshaled with their approximations of the Power of Three spells left by their mothers couldn't penetrate the fog or cloaking that kept Chris from scrying for said young man or using any locator spells successfully.
Trying to sound only curious, really the best he could offer on short notice, Wyatt asked the question he doubted he wanted to know the answer to. "Where? Does he know anything?"
There were several beats of silence over the phone and once again Wyatt looked up and met his sister's eyes. Finally Chris came back with a reply at once intriguing and frustrating.
"I don't know. I only caught a glimpse-he was boarding one of the trolleys, leaving campus. I'm gonna try and catch up to him. I -"
"Chris," Melinda began cautiously, but before she could continue, the call was ended and the line went dead.
Patra reached over and gave Melinda a comforting squeeze on her shoulder and Eve offered the same with a look of understanding. They all knew that it was hopeless to try to dissuade or distract Chris from a mission once he had decided it was his to see through. He was like a dog with a bone like that-or a whitelighter with a charge. Except Chris was certain-and the Elders agreed-that he had not been assigned a new charge and no one Up There anticipated any unassigned charges crossing paths with their family.
Yet the recurring dream and Aunt Phoebe's gut feeling. Not a premonition or a vision to corroborate the absolute lack of information Chris was working with, but an instinctive nudge nonetheless and it was all the validation Chris might have needed. To be fair, he usually didn't need any kind of validation at all. If it wasn't because it came at such a terrible time and therefore had all the markings of a trap to distract and divide their attention, Chris probably wouldn't have reached out for even that much support.
With a sigh, Wyatt absentmindedly dropped the phone his powers had still been holding suspended in the air while it was on speaker phone and returned his full attention to the potion he would soon be leaving to simmer on the stove. He had vacated his own position at the table digging into the research barely twenty minutes ago to add the powdered root of asphodel and it would need to dissolve completely before he could add the infusion of wormwood, otherwise they would be dealing with a very different potion. Although...the thought of forcing their targets into an enchanted sleep, might not be so bad an idea.
Reflexively, he lifted a hand palm up in the air and summoned his own copy of the Book of Shadows into his grasp. It grew and expanded quickly from the pocket sized notebook it had looked like when it first appeared until he was forced to lower it onto the island while he flipped to a spare page and filled in quickly the applications they could ring out of the draught. Especially if we can manage to add an inflammatory agent and make it combustible...