Chapter Two
Conversations With Dead People
I.
While Leo pulled his second leg through the portal, he took advantage and utilized the power he had as an Elder to turn himself invisible. Better use it while you can, buddy, the little voice in the back of his head told him. He had come to completely disregard that voice since finding out Chris was his son. That voice had spent so much time making him believe Chris was an enemy that it had caused him to miss out on over a year's worth of time to make things up to his boy. That voice had led him far enough astray that it would be a long, long time before he trusted it again. Still, this time it was right. The other Elders hadn't decided his fate as of yet, but if things went the way he thought they would, he wouldn't be orbing for much longer, let alone any of the other tricks he had picked up since becoming an angel. Hearing that thought run through his head, the little voice snickered in the background. See? Sometimes I know what I'm talking about.
The small internal battle kept Leo from noticing he was feeling slightly headsick as time bent to the will of the potioned portal. The sudden twisting of pain behind his eyes was gone as soon as it started, though, leaving Leo exactly Where (and hopefully When) he wanted to be.
The attic wall was now behind him instead of in front as it had been only seconds before. The portal triquetra quickly settled back into a chalk outline, the blue light extinguished. The sudden lack of light in it served only to tick off that damned voice in the back of his head again, which sounded an awful lot like a demonic Jiminy Crickett.
Man, your wife is gonna kill you, and if she doesn't, her sisters will. You're lucky you're already dead.
Ignoring the voice once again, Leo reminded himself to focus. He was in enough trouble with his family already. No, he needed to just take a look around, find out if everything was all right with his family, and go back before anyone back home would know he'd been gone. How he was going to know, he wasn't entirely certain, but there had to be hints around the house somewhere.
So far, things in the attic appeared to be in order. The furniture of the future attic had been replaced with a few sofas and chairs that he didn't recognize. Considering all of the furniture abuse he had witnessed in his years in the Halliwell household, he wasn't all that surprised. He could only have continued to mend frequently blown up cushions for so long. The new stuff actually looked rather comfortable. If it got anywhere near the use that it did in his time, it would have to be. The rugs, on the other hand, weren't looking so good. Scorched holes dotted the entire floor, and the fringe along the edges of the rugs were black twisted coils of burnt fibers. Shelving units, tables, and wooden chairs all appeared to have been built and rebuilt many times over, but they were still intact.
Leo wandered over to the podium where The Book of Shadows still rested. The Book was even thicker than in his time, which was a stark reminder that the sisters' battle was still far from over. It was open to a spell that Leo didn't recognize, but then, that wouldn't take much. Unlike his charges, it wasn't his duty to memorize every single spell in The Book. Still, he didn't like the sound of this one. Everything about it screamed 'Time Travel', and it was one he would rather not think would be used by anyone in the family any time soon. In fact, just to be sure that it couldn't be, Leo ripped the page out of The Book and stuffed it as deep down into his back pocket as it would go.
Feeling somewhat relieved, he flipped the pages absently, looking for the pages that he and Piper had talked about just a little while ago. There were so many demons in The Book that he didn't recognize at all as he moved closer toward the front. Then, anxiously, he closed The Book, knowing the answer to at least one of his questions was an easy enough get.
The answer was not the one he wanted at all.
The points of the triquetra were separated from the circle and one another, the triquetra broken. The symbol of the Charmed Ones was broken. That meant that the Power of Three was broken, too.
As far as Leo was concerned, the likelihood that the girls had had an argument so destructive that their birthright had been stripped from them was This Side of Crazy. Even when they almost lost Phoebe to Evil with her marriage to Cole when he was the Source, the Power of Three had still hung on through it. The sisters loved each other far too much to lose each other that way. The only explanation remaining then was that they were lost in another, irreparable way. One, if not all, of the sisters in this future point in time were dead.
Realization sucked the air out of his lungs, and when he tried to find more he only found that there wasn't any air anywhere to be breathed. One of them was dead. If he had arrived in the time he wanted, at some point in the next twenty-five years he was going to have lost at least one of the sisters. His heart had no idea which one, and he wasn't all that sure that he wanted to know. It didn't matter. One of his girls was dead.
Leo didn't have a family, not in his own time, not really. Anyone (or most anyone) who he'd loved in his mortal life was long out of reach. His parents were long passed; his wife remarried with children and even great-grandchildren. The point was he didn't have them. The sisters, though, they had taken him into their lives. He hadn't only gained a wife in Piper. He had gained three fabulous sisters in Prue, Phoebe, and Paige. His heart ached to know at least one of them was no longer with him. He didn't know When or Who or How, but one of them was obviously gone. He had always known it would happen eventually. After all, he was immortal and they weren't. He would outlive them. He'd always known that. Knowing and accepting, however, were two very different things. Seeing the triquetra torn apart on The Book's cover brought it all back to him. Immortality —
" — really sucks, you know!"
A grumping male voice floated up from what sounded like the bottom of the stairwell, finishing Leo's thought for him. He'd been so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he missed the clomping of shoes on the stairs. He had to stifle a wry chuckle, in spite of this unwelcomed reality check that The Book had just given him. Whatever it was that sucked for the man at the bottom of the stairs, Leo couldn't agree with him more. Thanks for finishing my thought for me. I'm right there with you, man, the Elder thought.
What sounded like an order to the clomping shoes came floating up the stairs to him, still annoyed but not actually as annoyed as it was trying to sound. "You two get back down here, right now! Do not leave me down here without you!"
"They can deal without us for a few minutes," a slightly irritated female voice that sounded like it was aiming down the stairs came around the doorway, much closer and announcing at least one new arrival to the attic. "Just keep them entertained for us for a little while, would you please? Let them feel your stomach for a while."
A different but very familiar male voice, closer and obviously addressing only the person next to him, said with just as much sarcasm, "Are you sure that's an offer you want to make to him when Tina the Home-Wrecking Wonder Slut is downstairs? You might not get Charlie back if you leave them alone together."
"Oh, please." She rounded the corner and came through the doorway into the room, smoothing long, blonde hair out of her eyes. With her vision cleared, she braced her hand on the doorjamb and kicked a pair of clunky heeled shoes off across the attic room, nearly hitting Leo in the head and betraying the perception of elegance that her long, flowing black dress suggested. She shook out the dark red bundle in her other arm to reveal a sweater that she snuggled comfortably around her stomach, which was slightly giving way to what Leo guessed was five or six months of pregnancy. As she pulled her hair out from in between her back and the sweater, she grumbled over her shoulder, "I swear, Christopher, I can't take another four months of this. I'm ready to start freezing the room every time anyone even looks like they're reaching for me. How do generations of normal women do this year after year? I don't get it."
Then, mercifully, Leo got another of the answers he was looking for. This one seemed to be much more positive as his fully grown and very much alive son followed the woman into the attic. Even though he'd heard Chris's voice, he hadn't dared to hope until now. Dear God, he looked so good. He could use a shave, but that didn't really bother Leo much. It just looked inappropriate for the nicely tailored black suit Chris wore; so were the badly scuffed black sandals he sported. Without realizing the implications, Leo wondered where Piper would be that she would let him out so unsuitably dressed.
Still, none of that mattered. If the potion had brought Leo to when he wanted, that meant he was now past Chris's twenty-fifth birthday. With any luck, Wyatt was still alive, too, leaving them both safe and sound. At the moment, though, all Leo wanted to do was look at his son for a little while longer. Chris was alive. He was walking and talking and dressing badly and making faces at the woman's back. His boy was okay.
"And you can have the dreams and the cravings and the sick and everything else. Just call me when the fun part gets here," the woman mumbled, bringing Leo out of his happy mind-wandering. "That plan work for everybody? Good. Great. FANtastic!"
"Well, that's what you get for going off and having The Sex," Chris told her in that patronizing voice Leo had come to know so well.
She seemed to know that tone well, too, and was in no way going to take it from him. "You make it sound like my baby is some potion I whipped up in the kitchen or something. It's not like I did this one all by myself. I seem to remember Charlie being there to help."
"Didn't want to know that," Chris moaned at her. "What you two do in your own time is your business."
"That's not what you said when you slugged him," she retorted.
Chris offered her one of his patented looks. He shrugged his shoulders out of his suit coat, loosened his tie from around his neck, and rolled the sleeves of his white dress shirt up around his elbows. As he did, he continued to defend himself against the woman's accusation, the yanking and tugging of clothing serving to punctuate his words. "You're right, it's not. If you don't count Wyatt, I am the oldest, and just because it was only you, me, and Sam left that night doesn't mean I'm not still the oldest. That makes me responsible for all of you. So when you show up in my bedroom in the middle of the night, crying, and tell me that, not only are you twenty and pregnant, but our Whitelighter is the father and you don't know what to do, I'm not exactly going to be calm. Put yourself in my shoes and tell me if you wouldn't have done the exact same thing. Hmm?"
None of that sounded too promising to Leo. He hoped he was hearing the words If you don't count Wyatt wrong. They could mean anything, right? Instead, Leo reined himself in on the fact that, without knowing it, Chris had given him every indication that the woman he was talking to was family. If she was a sister or a cousin (not that it would probably matter in this household if they were all still living under the same roof), Leo couldn't be certain, but she definitely belonged to one of the three sisters. Of course she did. If he really looked at her, he would have known she was a Halliwell in an instant. She was family, family and pregnant. Suddenly the our Whitelighter and twenty and pregnant parts didn't sound so good to him either. At the same time, Leo took it as a good sign that he and Chris actually agreed on something. That was a start.
After another pointed rise of his eyebrows and a huffy toss of his jacket onto the back of a chair, Chris went on. "You can't blame me for being upset that night. You know damned well that if you were me, the first thing you would have done is call his orbing ass down here and punch his lights out, too. I like the guy, but at that particular moment, he was lucky I'm the one you came to and not Wyatt."
"(A), I'd never call Wyatt for anything. And (B), if you got pregnant by our Whitelighter, I wouldn't be calling him. I'd be calling a priest and a doctor, hoping at least one of them would have an explanation for that little miracle of science." When Chris just stared at her with a Gimme a Break sort of look and didn't say anything in return, she softened. "You're right, okay? I get it. It wasn't the smartest thing in the world for me to do. I never should have let myself involved with Charlie, especially after I found out he wasn't just a conveniently placed neighbor like we always thought. But I did and I'm in the situation I'm in, and there isn't anything we can do about it now but deal. Okay? Please? Don't be mad at me for too long. Things are hard enough."
"I'm not mad at you," said Chris, apparently surprised she thought he was angry with her. "Do I think Charlie should have known better than to get involved romantically with one of his charges? Sure. Do I think you could have learned a little lesson from this family's history of witches and their Whitelighters? Definitely. But I also know he was there for you in a way I can't, and you needed him. Given family history, I guess it was bound to happen with at least one of us kids, although why it had to be you is beyond me. It was just a big surprise. That's all. I was never mad at you."
The woman — No, actually, girl. She's family and twenty, which makes her a girl, Leo thought — looked like she didn't really believe him but didn't want to talk about it any longer. She shrugged like what she was saying didn't really mean much, but the tone of her words said anything but. "Well, whatever you're thinking about it, don't feel that way for too long, okay? I can't do this without you."
"I. Am. Not. Mad. At. You." Tiredly, Chris flopped down on the end of the sofa and glared. "And you're not doing this alone. Would I ever let you go through something like this alone?" When she didn't answer him, he went on, snapping, "I'll take that as a 'No', and, damn it, I'm not mad so quit looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you think I'm mad at you and I just killed your puppy."
"I'm not. Besides, we don't have a puppy. We have a cat," she pouted. This time it was Chris's turn to look at her like he didn't believe her, to which she quickly defended herself. "I'm not giving you a look, you bum. This is just my face. I've got it. You're not mad at me."
"Then what?"
She looked down at him, sadly and not without a great deal of anxiety. "Do you think Grandpa was mad?"
Chris rolled his eyes and stretched a hand up to her, which she took and used to help her sit down next to him on the couch. When she was sitting in what was going to be comfortable for her for at least a few minutes, he looked at her, hard and sincere. "Grandpa was not mad. He was not disappointed or any of the other things you seem to have running around in that paranoid little head of yours today. He was thrilled for you. You're going to be a mom. He was going to be a great-grandfather. Are you kidding? He was tickled. He was just worried. This isn't exactly like the time you came home with a tattoo, you know. That's normal kid stuff. A baby is big time scary life stuff, and he has every right to worry about things like that. You're his granddaughter. He'd be worried about you no matter how old you were when this happened. That was his job. It's what grandpas do. He loved you, and he would have loved this baby. I'm going to love this baby. Sam would have loved this baby. The sisters would have loved the baby. The whole family would have loved this baby. It would be a gigantic hippy love fest. We were all excited. There is going to be a new baby in the house, the first of the new Halliwell generation. So knock it off and stop worrying about it. Okay?"
"Yeah."
"You don't look so sure."
"I don't know," she said, looking down at her hands, which were protectively draped over her stomach. "I guess I just wish a lot of this could be different, you know?"
Sadly, Chris agreed in a low whisper, "I know."
"Do you think he's okay?" she asked, prompting Chris to turn himself into the corner of the sofa for a better look at her. Leo looked at her, too, seeing her fighting tears that she was quite obviously willing not to fall. She swallowed them back and straightened her quavering voice to ask, "I mean, do you think he's alone there?"
Chris's smile was gentle, hopeful as he told her, "Nah. The sisters are with him. Everybody else, too. Everyone got over the him-leaving-the-sisters-when-they-were-kids thing a long time ago. There is no way they would let him cross over alone. I bet even Grams and Grandma are there. They probably have a poker game started already."
The sisters? As in all of them? Leo didn't like the sound of that. Everybody else? None of that sounded very promising to him at all. Were they all gone? Were Chris and this girl the only ones left? That couldn't be.
The kids on the couch didn't seem to be as devastated saying that as he was in hearing it. Then again, if what he was guessing was true, they had probably had plenty of time to get used to saying it. Still, it bothered Leo that Chris could refer to the sisters so casually. How long had his son been referring to his mother and aunts that way? They were 'The Sisters', not 'Mom' or 'Aunt Phoebe' or 'Paige'; and who was 'Everyone'? Were there other children who had already had their lives cut short like this Sam apparently had? Were Phoebe and Paige married, so that there were husbands to grieve for as well? Leo wasn't sure he wanted an answer to that one. So far, none of the answers that he'd come looking for, save that Chris was very much alive, were the ones he had wanted at all.
References to the Dearly Departed of the Halliwell line didn't faze the girl either. A twinkle of sarcasm returned to her eyes, erasing the only sign of defeated fear and sadness that Leo had seen in her. "Well, he better be having a better time than we are right now, or else we are never throwing him another party like this again."
"We're getting pretty good at throwing funerals in this house, aren't we?"
"At least I know that after all of this is over and I actually live through it, I have a future in party planning." The girl looked at Chris with a half-pursed smile, threatening him as well as joking. "But I'm telling you right now, you better not even think about going before me. I am all funeraled out these days. You die before me, Christopher, and you will be getting nothing more than a bonfire and a keg in the backyard. You hear me?"
Chris saluted her with a quick flare of his wrist. "Yes, Ma'am."
Feigning offense at the salute, she raised her eyebrows and snapped, "Just for that . . . "
The girl put her feet up across Chris's lap and wiggled her toes at him, amusing Leo to no end. Piper had used that little signal on him many, many times when she was pregnant with Wyatt. The signal had seen even more use during her pregnancy with Baby Chris, but it had been directed at her sisters. Chris seemed to understand the signal just fine, though. Leo wondered briefly if Piper had used it on their adult Chris, but was pulled back into the moment as he watched Chris's hands reach for the girl's feet. A quick playful grin on his face suggested he might be tempted to tickle her feet, but he instead put his fingers to work while the girl laid her head back against the arm of the sofa.
Neither one of the two kids said anything for quite a while. Chris laid his head against the back of the sofa, closing his eyes in apparent exhaustion even though his fingers kept working hard on the girl's right foot. She responded by flinging one of her arms over her stomach and the other over her eyes, sheltering them both from the light. They both seemed lost in their own little worlds that were somehow the same. It even looked as if Chris almost had her asleep when she opened her eyes and looked hard at him.
Without any other warning, the room grew very cold. The kids felt it, too. The silence between them choked everything in the room. Leo couldn't imagine what could possibly be going on between them at the moment, but whatever it was, they were struggling with it. He watched them, both looking terribly nervous, and could practically feel the wrenching in their stomachs. Something was going on, something big. From the looks on their faces, they both understood that it was something big.
"You felt that?" she whispered urgently.
"Yeah." Chris's narrowed eyes toured around the room. As soon as he said it, the cold feeling left the room. Warily, he told her, "I think it's gone."
The girl blew out a breath of relief, only to replace it with one filled with apprehension. "I'm not ready to do this."
"I know."
"We just buried Victor two hours ago, Christopher. We still have people in the house, for God's sakes."
Chris was visibly pained but torn about doing whatever this 'this' was, although he certainly put on a good face about it. "Listen to me. That's why we need to do it now. He'd never expect us to try to do something while we still had people in the house. Just because he has no problem risking the exposure of magic doesn't mean we don't, and he knows it. Besides, this is the last thing he's going to expect. He would have stationed more of them around the house today if he was expecting anything, don't you think?"
"What do I think? I think this is crazy, and our lives are crazy, and I want it to end. I want to be normal. Can't we just sit here and pretend for a few more minutes that we're still going to be here in the morning?"
He grinned a lopsided smile at her, joking and hopeful at the same time. "You were never normal, and we will be back in the morning."
"You know what I mean," she snapped, unwilling to let go of her fear and anxiety. "Why can't we be normal grandkids grieving for their grandfather? Can't we even do a funeral like normal people? Is that really too much to ask?"
"I don't know, but on the bright side, if things go the way we want them to, you won't ever have to ask that question again. Neither of us will."
"You really think we can do this?"
"You're not giving up on me already, are you? You know me better than that."
"I know," she said, and from the light in her eyes when she looked at him, Leo saw she had every faith in the world in Chris. He was maybe the only person she had any faith in anymore, from the looks of it. "I need this to work, Christopher; I want things to be right."
"They will be." Chris stood up in front of the girl, reaching both hands down to help her pregnant body up out of the cushions. "C'mon. The sooner we do this, the sooner the world becomes what it was supposed to be. I am not going to let your baby come into this world any other way."
When the girl was standing, she wrapped her arms around Chris's neck. Leo could see tears in her eyes as she hugged him hard. "My baby is really luck to have you, Christopher. We both are."
"I'm going to fix this, for all of us," he returned, sounding just as sad. "I promise."
"I know you will." They held on for a just a moment longer until she pulled away. She wiped tears from her eyes, straightened herself up, and exhaled a long, relaxing breath. She nodded to herself and began talking quickly, like if she slowed down she wouldn't be able to get the words out any further. "Okay, one last time — "
"It's my plan," Chris started in protest.
"Humor me," she urged.
Chris rolled his eyes, but he was definitely grinning at her. "Well, didn't we wake up on the hormonal side of the bed this morning?"
A playful slap on the shoulder was his reward. "Watch it, buster. Now . . . " The girl started pacing in a small pattern in front of Chris, ticking things off on her fingers as she went along. "I'll freeze the room once or twice — " As she ticked that first thing off, she looked to Chris and asked, "That should be enough to set off the alarms, right? Just freezing the room a couple of times? I'm not going to need to do anything else, right?" Chris nodded at her, leaving Leo wondering what alarms she was talking about. "Okay, so the alarm goes off, one of his goons shimmers in. You think he'll send Biltok again?"
"Just because we've got the funeral today doesn't mean he'll change a whole lot," Chris offered. "He'll think we're just trying to summon Grandpa, being the insolent little troublemakers we are. So unless he's expecting an attack today, which isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility, it's going to be Biltok. He always sends Biltok first."
She nodded solemnly, ticking that one off on one of her fingers. She glanced over to one of the potions tables and nodded to herself, then ticked something off on her finger that Leo couldn't quite figure. She went on, obviously oblivious to anyone but Chris watching her. "Screw being a pacifist; I've been waiting to blow up that smarmy little slug forever. Anyway, you reset the alarms after two minutes. That gives us a total of ten minutes to summon Grams, get Charlie up here, and to explain everything to them both before he gets antsy enough to send someone else along. That one we send back to him."
"He'll get suspicious once that one gets back. I give us only another minute or two to get the spell off and get out of here."
"If he shows up before then?"
"We promised the sisters we wouldn't do anything to hurt him, and we won't."
Leo had that look plenty of times, the one where he doesn't think about anything else but Wyatt and how to save him. While Leo appreciated the gesture, he wasn't so sure he liked that Chris wore that expression again. Worse, from what Chris was saying, they were going back to save Wyatt. That was what that damned spell in his back pocket was all about. Chris, however, seemed to be a lot more hopeful about the scenario than Leo's heart was.
"But he has to be stopped. You know that. Look at what he's done to this family. Look at what he's done to the world. No one else can stop him, not like we can. Unless you see something I don't, this is the only way."
The girl looked like she was trying really hard to be brave as she asked, "While we're there, can we hint to the sisters and Leo that they need to add a few more bedrooms? Or maybe buy the house next? Six adults, eight kids, random demons, a ghost, and all of the children's toys do not fit into six bedrooms. 'Cause if you ask me, that's what turned him to Evil in the first place — sharing a bedroom with you, Jack, and Sam his whole life."
"Very funny." Chris took in a deep breath and exhaled hard enough to blow the hair out of the girl's eyes. To her, he nodded and ordered, "Once we take care of Biltok, you stay close to me, you hear? You stay close to me. If for some reason I can't get to the portal, you go without me. I'll find another way if I have to. Not that I have to worry about it because you're going to stay right next to me."
"Close to you, check. Close to the portal, check. All right. Let's get this little commotion started, shall we?"
She raised her hands to prepare to freeze the room, making Leo panic. If she was about to set things in motion for Chris to come back from the future again, there was no way he could let that happen. Not again. He couldn't let his son go through all of the things he did, only to die cold and helpless in his arms. Forgetting that the kids had no idea he had been there at all, Leo stepped forward to try to talk Chris out of doing this. This time, he and the sisters could take care of Wyatt on their own. They knew now what could happen and were fully prepared to deal with it. There was no sense in Chris risking himself again. Not again.
Just when he was about to take another step, the reality of everything came back to him. He couldn't stop Chris from going back. If he made himself visible to the kids and tried to talk them out of helping Wyatt, they wouldn't believe him anyway. They would just wait to go through with their plan until after Leo was gone. That was the way Chris had always done things. Besides, seeing Leo suddenly come into view would probably be a shock of enough proportion that the kids would automatically try to vanquish him before realizing who he was. That certainly wasn't a chance he could afford to take. No, the best thing he could do was let them go through with their plan, and then when they all got back he could track them down before they did anything. He could send them back before anything bad could happen to either of them.
Remedial plan decided, Leo relaxed and made to walk out of the way of these goons he kept hearing about until the kids were ready to do whatever they were going to do. Unfortunately, he relaxed right onto that floorboard. He watched Chris's face for reaction, but his attention seemed to be intently locked on the girl with him. She didn't appear to have moved at all. Perceiving the danger to be passed, Leo carefully raised his toes, one by one in his shoe, hoping to pry his foot off the board without any further sounds.
"Hey, guys? We have a problem."
A new voice called from the top of the stairs, startling the already nervous kids and distracting Leo enough to take his attention away from remaining undetected. In his haste, he not only caused the board in the floor to rise and fall again with a rather loud squeak, but he also jumped back from the noise to trip over his own feet until he caught himself on the edge of one of the potion tables. He was able to keep the table from tipping over, but bottles and bowls on top of it rattled and clanked, giving away the presence of at least someone or something in the attic.
Immediately, Chris whirled around, searching the room with his eyes narrowed. "Freeze the room."
"He won't freeze."
"Just do it."
Her hands flew up in a manner reminiscent of Piper, but with a flare entirely her own. The next thing Leo knew, his son, both born and murdered only nine days ago, stood directly in front of him, arms crossed over his chest. Next to him, the much smaller woman stood, looking equally unhappy. Her hands were still mid-air, having just unfrozen the room. They obviously could see him, probably because they had cast some spell to make the intruder visible to them. They didn't seem too threatened by his appearance, but they both looked slightly unnerved. Chris moved just slightly to his right, partially shielding her from Leo's view as the very much alive young man raised his eyebrows in question, expectantly blinking his eyes as if to say, "Well?"
Anyone who had known Leo would have recognized his nervous gesture as his hands immediately reached for the back pockets of his jeans. He hooked his thumbs into the pockets, nervously twittering his fingers behind him. His mind worked furiously, trying to think of how he could explain his presence. The more nervous he got, he started rocking on the balls of his feet. Then, finally, he managed to say something, which was far from what he needed to be able to say.
With a crooked, half smile, he greeted them. "Hi, Kids."
II.
When the two older Halliwell sisters returned to the manor, Phoebe immediately set off in search of a nap, prompting Piper to want to check on her (hopefully) still-sleeping children. Before she made the long trek up the stairs — it was a damned long, post-surgery trek — she made a detour to the kitchen to grab both of the boys bottles from the refrigerator. She reached into the cold to pull out the bottles and grabbed a water bottle for herself along the way. She couldn't explain it, but she had been incredibly dehydrated since coming home. The doctor said that it would pass, but he didn't really have an explanation for it either. Still, the man had saved her baby. She wasn't going to give him too much grief after that. She was far too grateful.
She shut the refrigerator door and leaned back against the island counter for a moment. With the water bottle pressed against her cheek, she closed her eyes and tried to find a way to calm herself down a bit. It had been an emotional afternoon, and she really wanted a moment to not have to think about anything at all. This was actually one of the things that made Piper miss being pregnant. Even though the boys had both given her plenty of the usual pains of pregnancy — constant morning sickness, constant cravings, constant everything biological — they had also given her a kind of peace she had never had at any other time in her life. She supposed it was the Whitelighter (or Elder) in them, the pacifist leanings. Maybe they were trying to make up for the icky parts, but they had made their mommy feel very safe and loved, too. It had given her a sweet calm that she just couldn't explain any other way.
Out of nowhere, the voice of her adult son came back to her, plain as day. "Sorry about, you know, me."
That's okay, Kiddo, Piper thought. It wasn't your fault. Okay, it was, but you didn't mean it. Besides, you made up for it. You more than made up for it.
Suddenly, Piper wanted more than anything to see her son. There was no real reason why he wouldn't be, but she needed to know for sure that Christopher was okay. She made the trudge up the stairs as quickly as she could, like if she didn't get there as soon as possible, he might disappear forever. In this house, anything was possible. Ever since Leo told her about how Chris had disappeared from his arms, her dreams at night were tortured by visions of Baby Christopher vanishing from her sight while his big brother looked on with a smile. The chill she got every time she thought of it ran through her, prompting her to take the stairs even faster. By the time she reached her bedroom door, Piper was in the throes of a full-on baby panic. She flew into her room without even the pretense of quiet, whether they were asleep or not. She needed to see her baby.
Paige started awake when the door knocked back against the wall. Her eyes hadn't even opened before she sat up and threw her body protectively around the two boys. She pulled them to her and warned Wyatt of danger before she even had a clue what had burst into her sister's bedroom. As Wyatt's protective bubble formed and deflated around himself, his brother, and his aunt, his highly traumatized aunt snapped at his mother. "Damn it, Piper! You know you can't do that in this house!"
"Sorry," Piper winced, suddenly feeling very foolish. "And hey! Language!"
"Sorry." Paige tiredly swiped at her eyes so she could glare at Piper with clarity. "So what's the hubbub, bub?"
Piper sat down on the edge of her bed with a grumble. "I said I'm sorry I just . . . "
"You just what?"
"I don't know," Piper admitted, still feeling a little silly for panicking the way she had. "I had this awful feeling I had to see them, like they were going to disappear if I didn't get here in time. Silly, right?"
"Christopher isn't going to disappear," Paige said reassuringly. No, he already did that, she thought to herself, but she knew she couldn't say that one out loud to her sister. Piper was already messed up as it was, and she hadn't even had to see it happen. A brief chant echoed in her head — New baby, baby Christopher, celebrate — until Paige instead tried to utilize her best sister skills that she had acquired in the last few years and grinned. "Neither will Wyatt. They're both okay. They have me and Phoebe, and they have you for a mom. They know they're okay. But if you want to panic about it, they're going to understand. They'll just wait for you to show up every time you do."
"Thanks."
"You're welcome," said Paige in that same celebratory voice she'd been using for the last nine days. A fussy whimper from Wyatt in her lap took her attention temporarily away from her sister until she saw the bluish orbs float from Piper's lap to his hand. As her nephew stuck the spout of the baby sports bottle that they had been using to transition him from bottle to tippy cup in his mouth, Paige looked back at Piper, all smiles. "See? Wyatt has you covered."
"I guess he does." Piper grinned at him with her Amazed Mommy smile. She reached over and swept one of his lengthening curls around the back of his ear before she reached to take Baby Christopher to her, her smile turning sadly to him. "What do you think, Christopher? Does your big brother have us covered?" The sisters smiled at one another then down at the children in their arms. Before she even realized that she was saying it out loud, Piper muttered, "I hope he does."
"You okay?" asked Paige.
"Just tired. It doesn't matter."
"Why don't you take a nap or something? The three of us are fine. Aren't we guys?"
"I would, I think, but I . . . " She smiled down at the two boys lovingly. She was tired, but she couldn't bring herself to shut her eyes long enough to sleep. She was too aware, too afraid, and far too fascinated to let them close. Eventually it would catch up with her, but until it did, she didn't want to take her eyes off her sons for anything. With a slow shake of her head, she sighed. "No. No, I'm fine. I'll sleep later on tonight once they're both out. You look like you could use a few hours, though."
"Well, thank you very much," said Paige, feigning offense. She grinned, though, soon afterward and waved her big sister off. "Nah. I'm good."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," Paige said, shaking her head and bouncing Wyatt on her knee. "I need some kid time. Something has the magical world going bonkers, and someone at the temp agency got tired of taking cryptic messages for me. The dirtbag started giving my cell number to whatever and whoever calls, which means that any and all magical creatures have a direct hotline to me now instead of that cushy in-between. I had to turn the ringer off four days ago and haven't gotten around to going through all of the messages yet. So believe me, I want time with my nephews when I can get it. Look at these little faces. How am I supposed to tear myself away from these faces?"
Piper dramatically flipped her hair, brushed her nails on her chest, and mugged with a huge, toothy smile. "Yeah, we make pretty cute babies in this house, don't we?"
"I don't want to test that theory until I've been married for at least five years," groaned Paige. "But I'll consider these two angels as proof positive until then."
They each looked down at the boys in their arms and squeezed them a little bit harder. When their eyes found each other, without a word they knew they were thinking the same thing: they were lucky to even be holding two boys at all. They had come far too close to losing them both. But they were there. Home, loved, and safe. If they were going to sit there, marveling over the two boys, they should be taking in the wonderful things, not things that were in no way wanted memories. Fears could be fretted over some other night.
As they watched, sparkling blue orbs swirled around them to flutter in front of Piper's face. Wyatt pointed at them and giggled while they swirled over Christopher. Piper and Paige exchanged quick glances, but were almost as mesmerized by the orbs as Wyatt was. Then, as Piper was dividing her gaze between her sons, she suddenly realized something.
"Paige," she whispered, "Look at his finger."
While the little finger that Wyatt extended pointed and swirled around in the air in front of him, the orbs over the baby's head dipped and dived and rose and jumped in the same direction at the same time. The orbs weren't taking any real shapes, but they were moving around in whatever direction Wyatt orchestrated. The two sisters watched with utter astonishment as their little man giggled some more and entertained his new brother.
"Wow," Paige breathed.
"Yeah. Pretty amazing, huh? And here I was worried."
"Worried about what?"
"I don't know. I just . . . Some of the things that Chris said about what it was like for him in the future and what Wyatt was going to grow up to be? I wonder sometimes if I shouldn't let Wyatt be too close to the baby. I mean, I know that isn't how things will turn out. They're going to be the best of friends, like all of us are. Sure, they'll fight and probably beat up on each other now and then because that's what boys do, but for the most part, they're going to be brothers. But at the same time, there's this little voice in my head that sounds just like Chris telling me how Wyatt would do unspeakable things because he knew he could get away with it. Chris never told me anything that happened between them, but it was there, you know?"
"Piper — "
"I know it's silly, I do. For God's sakes, they're still babies. And like I said, I know we did it — we saved Wyatt from turning evil in the future. We had to. Wyatt will grow up protecting his little brother the way that big brothers are supposed to do. He's going to love Christopher. But there is still this part of me, Paige, that's terrified. You saw what he did to Leo in the spider demon's cave. There couldn't have been anything good about growing up for him if he could do that to his own father. I keep telling myself that this time is going to be different. Until I figure out how to do that, though, part of me wants to just keep him as far away from everything evil as I possibly can, including his brother if I have to."
"This world is going to be a better place for both of them, I promise. We won't let it be any other way."
Piper reached her free hand over to Paige and squeezed her Wyatt-free knee. She turned her smile down on her newborn with all the reassurance she could muster in her exhausted state. "You hear that? We're going to make this a better world for you, Christopher. We promise. You are never going to have to be afraid. Your brother is going to love you. Your parents love you. Your auntie Paige and Aunt Phoebe love you, too. The future you came from isn't going to exist. You're going to be happy and loved. I promise you, honey. You will never feel that way, ever again."
Paige hugged Wyatt close again, although her heart shared the hug with her other nephew as well. "You guys got that?"
Her answer was for the swirl of orbs to sway away from the baby up to circle around in front of her face for a moment before swinging back to Christopher.
"I think Wyatt likes that plan," Piper mused, grinning at her first-born with amazement. She waved at him, spurning him to giggle louder and happier. "How about you, Christopher? Do you like that plan?"
Piper smiled down at Christopher while his wondering eyes followed the bright balls of light in front of him, amazed at the tiny person in her arms. In all the time that the grownup Chris had been around and she had known his true identity, she had tried to imagine what he was going to look like as a baby. She already knew what he was going to grow up to look like, but he was a fully formed person by the time he came to her. She had wondered what he was going to be like when he was small, unable to take care of himself and actually needing her. It turned out that he was a lot more like his big brother than she could have imagined.
Still, Baby Christopher was something of an enigma to her, too. She couldn't quite figure out what it was, but she knew it was something. The funny thing was, from the look in her son's eyes, he was thinking the exact same thing about her.
"Um, Piper?" Paige asked sheepishly. She looked like she felt badly for interrupting her sister's thoughts. "Speaking of Christopher not feeling unwanted? We were so busy worrying about Wyatt and protecting Wyatt and all things Wyatt — which isn't a bad thing, but you know what I mean . . . " She waited for Piper to nod her acknowledgment before she continued. "Well, we never did a lot of things for the new baby that we should have done. So I was thinking, I would like to give him a shower. It's a little late, I know, but I want him to have had one."
Guilt overtook Piper's expression, which she knew was exactly not what Paige had been going for. Still, Paige was right. They hadn't done anything near the same astronomic welcome to the world for Christopher as they had for Wyatt. Sure, they had been busy trying to protect Wyatt, but that wasn't really an excuse. She had two sons, not just one. It was no wonder Chris had so many issues with thinking he was second best. Well, that was going to change. She had to change it. Her baby deserved better than second anything.
"I think that's an excellent idea. Thank you." Piper grinned gratefully. To the infant in her arms, she said, "See? Paige is on the ball. She loves you. We all love you, honey."
"I've got you covered, Little Man," Paige nodded sharply at the baby. When Piper didn't say anything else in response to that, Paige asked, "What's wrong?"
"I wonder why Chris never said anything about it. I know he was worried about Wyatt and wanting to be sure that Wyatt was taken care of, but . . . He never complained. He never pointed out that we were, if you think about it, ignoring that he was going to be born at all. Other than that one time that the spider demon attacked us, he never complained about the attention Little Christopher wasn't getting. He never talked about himself, not even after we found out who he was, but he talked about Wyatt all the time. He never talked about what kind of relationship they had or anything, like he wasn't even there or like he didn't matter in any of it. Chris never talked about himself like he mattered. It was only about Wyatt. He put everything about Wyatt before himself. I guess I don't understand why he wouldn't complain. He didn't say anything about us forgetting about him at all. What did we do to him to make him think that he didn't matter?"
Paige immediately jumped to banish that thought from Piper's head. "No! God, no! It wasn't like that. It couldn't be. If it was, he would have hated all of us, not only Leo. Like you said, his brother was his focus. There were plenty of times that we were really awful to him, but he never complained about that either. He just kept on trying to take care of his family. We scared him. We hurt him. We said terrible things to him. You should have seen what Leo did to him when he got back from Valhalla, but Chris took it because he wanted to save his family. That was exactly how he put it to me when I found out who he was. All he said was 'I'm Piper and Leo's son. They're my parents. I came back to save my family.' That was it. No I love yous or Can we start over nows or anything like that. When the four of us were talking after we told you who he was, he wouldn't let us apologize to him about how we had been treating him since he got here either. He had his mission that he had given himself, and that was it. Look at how hard he fought Leo and the rest of us about changing any of our relationships with him. I don't think that throwing himself a baby shower was really a part of that agenda. He wanted to save his brother, not himself."
"But at what expense?" Piper asked. "How do we explain to him that we, including his future self, were so wrapped up in saving Wyatt that we didn't have time for him? What if he thinks we didn't care? Kids do that. They notice these things. Second children notice that there aren't nearly as many cute-naked-baby-in-the-bathtub pictures. And we didn't take any pictures of me pregnant with him, not like we took pictures of every single inch when I was pregnant with Wyatt. It isn't like there aren't all kinds of Daddy-putting-the-nursery-together pictures for Wyatt. I don't even have an ultra-sound for Christopher because he conveniently hid it from me after you and I embarrassed him in the elevator that day. Paige, how could we not think about those things? He's going to think we didn't care about him."
"We are not going to let that happen," said Paige reassuringly.
"How do you know?"
Paige smiled and tiredly wiped her eyes again. "Because, for one thing, I stayed up all night last night addressing envelopes and writing his birth announcements."
A pleasantly surprised smile flooded Piper's face. "You did?"
"Yep, and I called a caterer so you don't have to do any of the work for the shower. I booked it for next weekend while your dad is still here, if that's okay with you. I talked to the lady we bought all the decorations from for Wyatt's parties, and I got her to order me some special stuff for Christopher. I'm picking up the invitations tomorrow. All I need you to do is find the stamps. I can't seem to find them anywhere. I was also going to see if Phoebe could get somebody to put an announcement in the paper about the party, too, since it's going to be on such short notice. I can make calls, too, if you want. Everything is in order, if you want to do it."
"Are you kidding? Of course I do. I can't believe you did all this. I don't know what to say."
"Well, you guys all have a lot on your plates right now. I can wait to miss him until you guys are ready."
"You're allowed to miss him, too, you know." Piper was suddenly struck by something she had never really noticed until they were talking, something she couldn't believe she had missed. "Now I know where Chris got his little selfless streak from."
"Huh?"
"From you." Piper reached over and swept some hair away from Paige's face, thinking about just how right she was and wondering why it had never occurred to her before now where this had come from. "Don't think we don't notice how, ever since you came into this family, you put your own feelings behind ours sometimes. You are my sister. Just because you weren't with us for twenty-four years doesn't mean you are any less important to us either. Your feelings count, too. You can stop stepping back any time now."
"I don't step back," Paige argued weakly. Then, trying to steer the subject back to her missing-but-present nephew, she said, "Besides, he's my nephew, and I wanted to do something nice for him. That's all."
Apparently bored with his orbs and wanting some new kind of attention, Wyatt stopped directing the bluish sparks and let them lazily twinkle in front of his brother's eyes. He, however, ignored them and tugged on Paige's hand, begging for an answer to his new favorite question. "'Hat's 'at? 'Hat's 'at?"
"What's what?" Piper asked. He had only been asking the question for a week, so it hadn't quite tired them out yet. She looked around the room to find whatever it was he was looking at, but couldn't quite find it. "Honey, what do you see?"
"'Hat's 'at" was quickly followed by a thrown bottle onto the floor.
The answer apparently wasn't nearly as important as the question itself, though, because Wyatt didn't say anything else. He kept staring at something that neither Piper nor Paige could see. The girls both shrugged after awhile and went back to talking about the boys and how much fun they were to have in the house until some internal warning went off in Piper's head, reminding her of the thing she had been planning for the evening. "Listen, I was wondering, would you mind watching the boys for a little while yet? I have a date with a ghost that I've been putting off for far too long."
"Grams?"
Piper winced playfully. "Yeah. She's going to go completely thermal when I tell her everything."
"How do you think she's going to react to you having another boy?"
"I'm hoping that will be the least of her issues with the entire thing, but if not? She has plenty of time to get over it." Her entire body exuded dread as she lazily pushed herself up closer to the head of the bed. She handed Baby Christopher back down in to the crick of his aunt's waiting arm and giggled down at him reassuringly. "I'll be back soon, honey. I promise. Then you can meet your great-grandmother, who I promise you, by the time I'm done with her, is going to be much nicer for you to meet than she was for your brother." To Paige she added in a much more adult voice, "Dad is supposed to arrive some time in the next hour or two. Would you mind keeping him company until I'm done with Grams?"
Paige made a face at the two littlest Halliwells in her lap and asked, "What do you think, guys? Can we keep your grandpa busy for a bit while Mommy fights with Grams?" She looked up at Piper with a wink and confidently goofy grin. "I think we can handle your dad. He'll be putty in our hands."
"Right," Piper snickered. Considering what she knew about her younger son's relationship with her father, she guessed that to probably be very true. "Really? Paige? Thank you for trying so hard to make Baby Christopher welcome in this world. He's lucky to have such a thoughtful aunt."
Paige waved her sister off. "It's no big deal. He's earned it." She grinned up at her sister, almost too cheerfully. "And I'm the lucky one. Now go. Grams is already going to have a snit that you haven't called her yet. Ten more minutes and she might just come across without being summoned at all."
A big grin between the sisters and few agonizingly long minutes later, a circle of white candles lined the circumference of one of the attic rugs. They, along with random candles in varying heights, were the only sources of light in the room since the sun had gone down. Low though the light was, it made up for it with warmth and welcoming, exactly the ambience Piper was going for. Grams had never complained, but she couldn't imagine that it could be very warm on the Ghostly Plane. At least, she didn't remember it being very warm at all. Some day, she'd have to remember to ask one of their Dearly Departed ancestors about it (for future reference, of course).
"Some day is not today, though," Piper said softly, not even realizing she had been talking out loud to herself. "Tonight you have a much more important question to ask."
Having lit the last candle, Piper smoothed the folds of her skirt over her hips. She gathered her sweater closer around her, closed her eyes, and took in a deep breath. She hadn't figured out yet what she was going to say, but at least she knew how it always started.
"Hear these words,
Hear my cry,
Spirit from the other side.
Come to me, I summon thee,
Cross now the Great Divide."
The familiar burst of white lights appeared in the middle of the carpet, swirling around until they settled to form the ghostly body of a brightly smiling Penny Halliwell. The lady extended her arms in welcome toward her oldest (living) granddaughter as she stepped off the rug to become corporeal once again. Lovingly, she took Piper into her embrace. "My darling, it's good to see you. How are you?"
"Grams, thank you for coming."
"You call, I answer," Penny replied. She stood back and cupped Piper's face in both of her surprisingly warm hands. "My beautiful girl, you grow more striking every time I see you, although it wouldn't hurt you to do something about those circles under your eyes. Now, tell me, what can I do for you?"
Piper wrapped her hands around her grandmother's. She held them there for a moment, enjoying the comfort that Grams didn't know she provided so perfectly. She closed her eyes again to steel herself to face the question she had summoned Penny from the Afterlife to ask. When she opened her eyes, Grams was still waiting, but already she appeared to be growing impatient. Her eyebrows started twitching up and down, asking a question Penny didn't know how or what to ask. Piper had always hated it when her grandmother did that, but this wasn't about what Grams needed. Grams was dead. She could handle it. Right now, Piper needed patience. She wasn't ready to ask her question, and burning a few more seconds wasn't going to hurt. Brightly, Piper went straight for a diversion and asked, "So, Grams . . . how's life — er — death?"
"I'm just fine, Darling, but the way you are dawdling now tells me that you are not so fine. What is it?"
Piper exhaled her inhibitions out with a huff that blew her hair out of her face. "Okay," she breathed, finally ready. "Grams? How much attention have you been paying to what's been going on around here for the last few months?"
Grams winced with guilt. "Not as much as I would have liked, I admit, although, you girls are grown and perfectly capable of taking care of yourselves. You don't need an old ghost like me hanging around full time. You have two Whitelighters at your call for that. Besides, Gideon has kept Patty, Prue, and myself a little busy lately, so there hasn't been as much time to peek in on you. Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I don't have a life. Why do you ask?"
"Whoa!" Piper pulled back, gritting her teeth. She had heard that correctly, hadn't she? As much as she wanted to tell herself she was merely being paranoid and was overtired, in her head, she knew she had heard right. Still, she asked with more than a little fury running the pitch of her voice just a touch too high, "Gideon? Gideon? As in Gideon-the-Elder-Who-Watches-Over-The-Magic-School Gideon?"
"Well, of course I mean Gideon the Elder. You know another Gideon?" Out of the corner of her mouth, Penny muttered, "What were his parents thinking?"
Sickness overtook Piper. Gideon was keeping her family busy? Just as he had been doing here on this plane, he had manipulated her Grams and Mom and Prue, too? She took a few more steps back away from her grandmother until the backs of her incredibly shaky knees hit the edge of the sofa. Gideon? Sonofabitch! His betrayal had even gone beyond the living family to the Afterlife? How could he? It wasn't bad enough that he was afraid of her son, but he had to snake around the entire family? Piper gulped the sickness back down and gnashed her jaws so hard she thought she heard a tooth or two crack. Through her trapped jaws, she moaned, "This just gets worse and worse."
"What is this all about?" urged Penny. Piper grabbed her grandmother's hand and yanked the ghostly lady down incredibly hard so that Penny almost left her head behind in the quick snap. Penny's feet fell out from under her so that she plopped hard onto the couch. Her eyes bulged out of her head as she regained her composure with a nervous laugh. "Uh, Piper?"
"You'll want to sit for this. Long story, Grams."
"I have all the time in the world, but you don't — at least, not right now. So start talking."
One of her grandmother's patented Looks prompted Piper to finally get on with the business at hand. Part of that business had just become a lot clearer, but she would get to that in a little while. First, there was a lot to explain, a lot that even she didn't understand quite yet. She let herself relax back into the cushions of the sofa and hugged a spare pillow to her chest. One last deep breath and she began. "A lot's been going on, Grams, and that's why I need your help. If what you said just now is true, I think Gideon was trying to keep the three of you out of the way, out of his way."
"Why on Earth would an Elder, of all people, want to keep me away from my girls?"
"Well, Gideon wasn't exactly . . . Let's just say that being an Elder doesn't really have a whole lot to do with it," said Piper bitterly. "But I'll get to that in a minute. I think there's somewhere else we should start first, except, Grams, I really don't know where that is. We're still trying to figure a lot of it out ourselves."
"Darling, stop dawdling. It's unbecoming, especially from you."
"I am. Look, Grams, I love you with all my heart — you know that — but I have to tell you, your impatience has always been one of those things that I just hate about you. What I have to tell you is going to take awhile, and I really need you to be here with me on this one instead of speeding ten miles ahead. Can you do that, please?"
Penny gestured for Piper to go on, but not without a little roll of her eyes first for extra measure.
"Thank you," Piper said, still snippy but obviously getting over it. "Why don't we start with me asking you what you're doing a month from today before you clear your calendar anyway?" Penny looked like she was about to come up with some sort of sarcastic remark about Death and scheduling the Afterlife, prompting Piper to narrow her eyes disapprovingly. "Shush! You'll make the long story longer, and you promised." Another permissive gesture set Piper back to explaining, nervously stuttering through the explanation, faster and faster until she tumbled over the words she'd tried figure out for the last few days how to say. "Now, Grams, I need you and the other matriarchs next month because . . . well, because . . . we — that is, Leo and I — well . . . we have a new baby in the house. Baby Christopher. I had a baby. His name is Christopher. Perfect baby. Ten fingers, ten toes, no protective force field, but I think that's his choice and has nothing to do with his powers just yet. He's downstairs in my room with Paige if you want to see him when we're done. He and Wyatt are taking a —"
Penny's face lit up, literally. In her maternal excitement, Grams actually had a glow. She interrupted her granddaughter's nervous rambling with a maternal (but dignified) squeal of baby excitement. "A new baby? Piper, you were pregnant? I had no idea. That's wonderful!" Suddenly, reality seemed to kick in for the ghostly lady. Her expression changed from elation to confusion in quite a hurry. "I haven't been able to look in on you for that long?"
"So it seems."
"Well, Gideon certainly has kept us busy," Penny said dismissively. Her excitement quickly returned to her as she grabbed her granddaughter by the hands. She squeezed them so tightly that Piper's fingers turned white. Whether she was too excited or too dead, Penny didn't seem to notice, though. There was a new baby to bless. "When do I get to meet the little darling? Christopher, is it?"
"Yes, it's Christopher," Piper smiled, choosing to ignore the fact that Grams had referenced her son's murderer again with such casualty. Then she winced again, bracing for the strangeness of conversation she knew would be coming as soon as she said what she had to say. "And you've already met him."
"Don't be silly. How could I have met him if you are only now telling me about him? He's how old? Four days? Five? Don't tell me you waited an entire week to tell me I have a new great-grandson."
"Nine days, actually," Piper said sheepishly. She brightened up quickly, hoping to distract her grandmother from that number nine she could tell her grandmother was going to fixate on. She and a tendency to do that. "But he was twenty-two when you met him a year ago."
Exactly as predicted, Penny completely missed the hint Piper had dropped for her and exploded on the much smaller detail. "Nine days? You waited nine days to call me?"
"I have a really good reason, Grams. It's complicated."
"So you keep telling me." Penny glared with none-too-happy expectation. Everything about her expression said that reason had better involve an entire nest of demons and at least one impending apocalypse. Nothing, on any plane, was more important to Penny Halliwell than her granddaughters and their families. Nothing. Penny crossed her arms over her chest and eyed Piper a little harder. "Well? Out with it already."
"You really did just miss everything I just said, didn't you?" snapped Piper, marveling at her grandmother's One Track mind.
"Don't you get snippy with me, young lady. I may be dead, but I am still your grandmother, and I — "
Interrupting, Piper exploded in frustration. "Yes, you are! You're my grandmother and I need you, and you're making it really damned difficult to talk to you right now. I don't have anybody here to tell me how to do this so I called you, but you're sitting here with that — "
Penny reached over and gripped her granddaughter by the shoulders, hard. "Calm down. You're going to blow something up if you don't, and I would prefer that it wouldn't be me." Penny gestured around in a circle from her chest, smiling. "Now, take a deep breath, relax." Piper did, but not in the gentle way she was being told. Penny rolled her eyes at the gesture, but kept up a chipper sound to her voice. "Good. Now, let's start over. Blessed be, my darling. How are you?"
Piper hoped her grandmother was sincere in her gesture to start over. She needed to start over, too. She took another deep breath in, doing it the right way this time, and let herself relax. She needed to talk to her Grams, the way they used to talk when she was a kid and Grams had all the answers. Hopefully, Grams still had all the answers because, in this situation, there really weren't a whole lot of people around here who could help her with this one.
"Grams," Piper started asking slowly. Admitting it too quickly was going to hurt her too much. Time. She needed to take her time with this. "When Mom died, how did you deal with it?"
"What made you — "
"Just answer the question."
"I didn't," Penny said plainly. "Patty was the light of my life, her and you girls. It hurt so much I didn't think I would ever be able to breathe again, but I had you girls to protect. A trio of warlocks attacked at your mother's funeral. I suppose they thought you girls would be your most vulnerable and I would be too distraught to protect all of you. They reminded me very quickly that I didn't have time to grieve, not with the Charmed Ones under my roof. So instead I helped the three of you along. You three kept me together."
"Did it ever stop hurting?"
"Of course not. The hurt never goes away, not when it's your own child. One day, you learn to not think about it so much, though. What's this about? Has something happened to Wyatt?"
"Wyatt is fine — as far as we can tell, anyway. That's another thing that I'll explain, I promise, but I — "
Impatience finally exploding in her face, Penny snapped, "Then what? You keep saying you'll explain later, but you have yet to explain anything at all. Now what in the world is going on?"
"If you had been listening to me before, you would know," Piper started but decided that it would be a great deal easier to get help from her grandmother if she wasn't quite so snippy about it. Recomposing herself, the witch smoothed her hair out of her eyes and started over in a nicer tone of voice. "Okay. Here it is: the last time we saw you, when we called you because Paige put on your boots? Do you remember meeting our Whitelighter, Chris?"
Penny smiled reminiscently. "You mean the pubescent child the Elders were crazy enough to assign you to? He was a nice enough kid, and he certainly came through in that instance, but he is far too green to look out for you girls. Please tell me he's at least had to start shaving."
The comment should have been funny to Piper (considering that she had had that same thought once or twice about her son), but she wasn't finding the humor there at all. Not anymore. If Chris were still alive, maybe, but he wasn't, and she wasn't really inclined to joke about him yet. Instead of even trying to explain to her grandmother why the comment wasn't funny, she snapped and blurted everything out as quickly as she could.
"No, actually, he doesn't need to shave anymore because he's dead. Gideon murdered him. That's why I called you, because I need you to tell me how I'm supposed to deal with the fact that an Elder murdered my son for trying to protect his big brother from becoming the ruler of all Evil in the future." Realization caught in Piper's throat as it dawned on her that that was the first time she had actually managed to put all of that into words instead of skirting around the reality the way she had been. Then, finally, that was when it all hit her. She looked at her grandmother and knew that her eyes had never welled up with tears so fast in her entire life. Her lips trembled as she boiled it all down to the simplest form. "My son is dead, and I need you to tell me how to deal with it because no one here can tell me how I'm supposed to deal with the fact that my child is dead."
"I don't understand. You said that Wyatt is fine."
"Not Wyatt, Grams. My son, Chris, the baby we had last week. He's going to cast a spell a little over twenty years from now in the future to bring him back to this time so he could stop an evil entity from turning his brother evil. The problem there is we were tricked by the sonofabitch, who turned out not to be some demon like we thought, but Gideon. Instead of Chris stopping him, he stopped Chris. While I was in labor and Paige and Phoebe were under a spell, Gideon murdered Chris and kidnapped Wyatt. Leo was able to save Wyatt but not Chris, so now I need you to tell me how I'm supposed to deal with the fact that my son was murdered by people we were supposed to be able to trust. Chris is dead, Grams, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do now."
Still trying to digest everything that Piper spit out at her, Penny slowly put her shock into at least a few words that really didn't sound all that profound to her once she said them. "You mean to tell me that that spunky little Whitelighter was my great-grandson?"
"From twenty-two years in the future, yeah."
"I knew there was something funny about the way he looked at me." Still confused, Penny asked, "But then, how did he manage to become your Whitelighter? If you and Leo are his parents, wouldn't that make him half witch and only half Whitelighter? How did he heal you girls if you needed help? How did he do any of the — "
"Don't you think you're sort of missing the point here?"
Slowly and with more than a little shock, Penny marveled, "That boy, the Whitelighter — he was my great-grandson and . . . and . . . "
"And he's dead," Piper said, barely containing her tears. "We were actually trying to send him back to his future that day. We were so sure we had found the thing responsible for turning Wyatt in his future that we were trying to send him home. Gideon, he tricked us all into believing that it had worked out. He sent them through a portal to buy himself the time to try to take Wyatt from us. When they got back, Chris stayed with Wyatt while Leo tried to find Gideon. He mur-murdered my son, Grams. Gideon murdered my son. We promised him that he was going to be okay, but we lost him."
With that, Piper finally broke down weeping for the first time since she had been told about her son's death. Sure, she'd had tears. She'd had blazing panics. She'd had nightmares in the few minutes she'd made herself sleep. She hadn't really cried, though. Now, as her grandmother took her into her arms and held her so tight and so close, Piper wondered if she would be able to stop crying ever again.
Softly into her grandmother's shoulder, she rambled, "What am I supposed to do now? Paige is doing all of the happy stuff for all of us, going all out with a party and spending every waking moment she has with the boys. Leo is freaking out. He's going out every night hunting down Barbas. He thinks I don't know, but I can't sleep at night because all I want to do is watch the baby sleep and make sure that he is still here, so I hear Leo sneaking out and in of the house. Leo's cracking up, and I can't help him. Phoebe, she won't talk about it at all. She's been locking herself in her office, and when she does come home, she locks herself in her room. My family is falling apart, and I don't know how to put it back together. It's all I can do to keep myself together. My son is dead, and I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do now. Grams, what do I do?"
Penny slowly started to rock back and forth, stroking Piper's hair. She tried to disguise the tears in her own voice as she advised, "You talk to me. You cry, you let yourself hurt, and you talk to me. You tell me everything you don't know how to tell everyone else. Then you hurt and cry some more."
"Does that come in any specific order?"
Instead of answering, Penny pulled her darling girl to her and held her even tighter. She continued to rock them back and forth while she looked up through the ceiling and into the heavens. Angrily she thought at whoever was listening to her, Haven't you put my girls through enough yet?
III.
"Oh, man, we so don't have time for this." Christopher could see that wasn't the reaction Leo would have hoped for, but he couldn't care, not right now. He'd spent so many nights wishing his father would somehow magically appear to be with him, but if there was a single day that that was not on the top of his list of Things To Happen, this was the day. Any elation he should've felt was completely shadowed by the fact that Leo had shown up a little too late to the party. "I don't know exactly how you got here or what you want, but you need to go back to Whenever you came from, fast, or you're going to get us both killed."
Before Leo could respond at all, the girl cut him off. She grabbed Christopher by the elbow and turned him around. "You, focus. Incoming." Over her shoulder, she ordered Leo, "And you, however you were invisible before, do it, and don't make yourself seen again until I want you to."
While Leo obediently cloaked himself, Chris reached over to one of the potions tables and picked up four brightly colored vials he immediately recognized as one of Paige's specially concocted vanquishing potions. Chris kept two for himself and handed two over to the girl. The two kids exchanged apprehensive glances, obviously making sure they were both equally prepared. For what, Leo didn't know, and that was absolutely not acceptable to him.
"Whatever you two are up to, let me help."
"Shut up," the kids hissed in unison.
Again Leo did as told, although he wasn't entirely happy about it. The kids either didn't notice or didn't care what he did, so he went ahead and grabbed another vial of the vanquishing potion from the table for himself. He waited then, watching them while they fanned out over the distance of the attic. As they separated to their opposite corners (him to the windowseat, her to the attic door) her hands went up a few more times, freezing and unfreezing the room, from what Leo could tell. He couldn't be sure since he was freezing along with everything else. There were various hand signals and wiggled eyebrows, but so far as Leo could tell, nothing happened.
"Nothing," Christopher muttered after a moment of anticipatory silence. That didn't seem right to him. It never failed. The stupid alarms all over the house never failed to go off when he orbed something from two feet away, let alone repeated magical events. They should have gone off, and he should have sent someone by now. This wasn't right at all. In a heavy whisper he suggested, "Maybe the spell wasn't powerful enough to make him think it was an attack instead of only us messing around?"
"It was. Besides, I've frozen the room three times, blew up the squishy chair, and cast a spell. They had to have gone off. Give him a — "
Before she could finish her thought, a demon shimmered into the attic, arms crossed over its chest and looking rather annoyed at having been ordered to babysit the boss's family. It glanced briefly at the girl, who smiled innocently. It turned to Chris and growled, "He wishes to know why the magic alarms for this house are going off. Have you been attacked, or are you just causing trouble again?"
"Causing trouble," she replied eagerly, innocent as could be.
"But nothing you're going to be able to tell him about," Chris informed the demon casually. "NOW!"
Her hands flew up, leaving Leo temporarily frozen once again. He didn't realize what had happened until he looked over in her direction. As he was coming back out of it, the demon was writhing in fiery agony until it finally convulsed and exploded into Oblivion, four broken bottles at its feet.
"That's one," she breathed at Chris, who nodded solemnly. She then turned back to Leo, clearly unhappy. She stomped across the room and snatched the vial out of his hand before it even occurred to him that she could see him again. She waved the small bottle in front of his eyes angrily. "We told you we could handle this. Do us a favor? Don't help."
Confused, Leo asked, "You can see me?"
"Of course we can see you," she snapped. She set about the business of placing white candles around the circumference of one of the rugs as she explained to him, "While you were frozen, the spell I cast to make the other demon visible brought you back into sight, too."
"Other demon?" asked Leo, glancing between the two of them. "I only saw the one."
Equally unhappy, Christopher explained, "This time there was only the one. When he sends his demons to check on us, he usually sends two. One of them is always invisible to us. He thinks we don't know about them." Not that I have the time to explain all of this to you, he added to himself. Why did Leo have to pick today of all days to show up? Christopher had so many things he wanted to talk to his father about, but it was too late. He had a responsibility here. As much as he wanted to make their time stop so he could sit and talk to his father, he couldn't. He forced himself to look away from Leo to where his real responsibility was still doing her job, which he needed to be doing as well. He tried to act as if his father was no longer in the room. Softly, he asked, "Why would he only send the one this time?"
The girl's face screwed up quizzically, looking not at all unlike Paige when she was thinking out loud. Her hand gesture and shrugged shoulders only furthered the comparison in Leo's mind while she mused, "Because of the funeral, maybe?"
"You'd think he would send extras because of that," Christopher wondered out loud. "We're more likely to be attacked today than any other. We're going to be perceived to be our most vulnerable. Don't you think? But then he would have posted them around the house today if he was worried. It's like we said before, — "
"You know what?" she asked with a hint of irritation. "It doesn't matter. We've got," she glanced at the watch on her wrist, "ten minutes, tops, before he sends someone else. Ninety seconds before you have to reset the alarm or he's going to know Biltok didn't do it." She reached down onto the table again and grabbed two more candles. "We need to get Grams here before that damned thing clues him in. Hurry. Lighter."
Christopher dug into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small lighter, which he tossed over to her. With some difficulty, she tried to crouch down low enough to light the candles, but she was quickly caught in some sort of pain. She overbalanced and fell hard to the floor. Surprised, she hollered, "OW!"
Immediately, Christopher whipped around to her and held her shoulders to steady her. "What's wrong?"
"He can tell I'm upset, that's all," she said, placing a soothing hand on her stomach. "He's worried about us a little more than usual, I think."
"Which you two should be, too, from the sounds of it," Leo grumbled at the both of them, although they were far too easily distracted. Wanting desperately to help these kids get through this thing they had started without either of them getting hurt, Leo held his hand out to her. "Give it to me," he said, indicating the lighter. "You take care of her."
"We can take care of this. Just go. If he finds you here, it's only going to make it worse for all of us. Go."
"And leave you two to deal with this scheme you've got going, with her in her condition and you alone? I don't think so. Now you can either accept my help and let me get your great-grandmother here for you, or you can wait to see what happens when you aren't able to get things done in the time you've set for yourselves."
Softly, the girl told Chris, "I'm fine. Help him. You know he isn't going to leave, and he can't call Grams by himself."
"Are you sure?" Christopher asked her.
"Light 'em," she told Leo, who caught the tossed lighter with a lopsided grin. She squeezed Christopher's hand a little harder and ordered, "Help me up. I'll go get Charlie while you guys summon Grams." When Christopher had her standing on her own two feet with as little wobble as possible, she shoved him in the direction of The Book. She walked backwards toward the attic door, commanding along the way, "Make it fast."
Leo nodded and immediately set about the business of lighting the candles that circled the rug. He had to flick the lighter several times before the spark caught on. As he lit the first one, he looked up at Chris whipping furiously through The Book for a spell that Leo sneakingly felt was in his back pocket. As if Chris could feel his father looking at him, he glanced up to glare at Leo. "I'm only trying to help, Chris."
Christopher didn't linger, much as he wanted to. He couldn't. If he did, he would get lost again, and he couldn't do that. Things were in motion now. As soon as this was over, they would have to send Leo back anyway. The Book. The Spell. He had to concentrate on getting Grams. They needed Grams. Annoyed at the heartbreakingly terrible timing of this father-son reunion, Christopher ripped through a few more pages for distracted emphasis as he snapped, "What are you even doing here?"
"It's a long story." One I hope I won't have to explain, Leo added silently. "But the short version of it is that I — something happened recently to our family, and I needed to make sure you and your brother were okay."
Christopher snorted angrily. Things always happened to the family. There wasn't a day that went by that something didn't happen to the family. "Well, as you can see, something is happening to the family again. It may only be the three of us, but we're still a family, and we're kind of having a rough day around here, if you can't tell. But if this goes the way it's supposed to, we're going to remedy that in a hurry. So if you wouldn't mind working on getting those candles lit a little faster and then getting yourself back to Whenever it was you came from, it would be greatly appreciated. I'm not going to let your curiosity endanger either one of us or that baby any more than it's already done."
"Whenever? That's the second time you've said that. Why?"
"Seeing as how you don't exactly exist in this time, you had to have come forward from some point past. It's not like you can just orb in from nowhere."
"In your future, I'm dead?"
Christopher stopped flipping pages in The Book long enough to look his father in the eye. Leo didn't like that look at all. It confirmed the answer to Leo's question before Chris even got the chance to say anything in response. It told Leo he had missed a lot in Chris's life for a reason even darker than the one he'd criticized him for before. Leo could see it: Chris had been without a father for a very, very long time. Sadly, he verbally got that answer as well when Chris said, "Look, Leo, Dad, you've been dead for nineteen years. You died the day after my sixth birthday."
"I really died?"
Christopher concentrated on The Book, unable to meet his father's disbelieving gaze. He was not having this conversation. He had been through the whole 'Future Consequences' lecture so many times he could practically recite it word for word. Secretly he wondered if, maybe, he would be making things better if he told his father everything. Besides, he wasn't in the past yet. Leo had come to what, for him, was the future. Grams never gave them any rules about that. Maybe he wouldn't have spent most of his life without a father if he accidentally told Leo what happened. He had to try, right? "Yeah. You were alone at the house with all of us kids when Darklighters attacked looking for Wyatt. Wyatt wasn't quite eight yet. It was bedtime, so the five of us were all running around in separate rooms when they came in. One of Phoebe's girls was hit by an arrow. You were able to heal her right away, but while you were, the Darklighters ganged up on you. You took three arrows to the back. Wyatt and I tried together to heal you, but there were too many arrows coming at us from everywhere. In the end, we were too small and weren't strong enough yet, not for that much poison."
Devastated, not by the future knowledge of his death, but by the thought that Chris had once again been without a father, Leo breathed, "I left you alone. Again. Chris, I'm so sorry."
"I'm not alone," Christopher argued, his unfallen tears dried, and with them the brief moment of connection with his father was gone. He wasn't alone. He didn't have a father, but that didn't mean he was alone. Damn it. He knew he shouldn't have tried to talk to Leo. This was doing nothing but distracting him. He needed to concentrate. He had responsibilities, and he'd made promises. And miles to go before I sleep, he reminded himself. He gestured out the door where she'd disappeared. He wasn't alone. "I have her."
"You're right. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. It's just, from the talks you and I have had in the last . . . Nevermind. It doesn't matter. Your future is obviously different from the one that you told me about." Finishing with the last candle, Leo stood up. He tapped the lighter inside the palm of his hand, nervous. Chris apparently hadn't been listening because he didn't say anything at all. Instead he flipped more pages, leaving Leo standing there with nothing else to do. Looking for something, anything to say, he randomly picked the first thing that came to mind. Tentatively, he hooked a thumb over his shoulder and asked, "So you two seem pretty close. Sister or cousin?"
"You don't know?" Chris rested both hands on the pages of The Book. "When exactly did you come from?"
"You're nine days old."
Chris looked at Leo like he was completely off his block. "That far back? Then I'm not going to tell you anything. No offense, but I like her too much to let you screw that up for us. You should know better than that. It could change the future if you know too much."
"Don't do that. You've been giving me that same song and dance for the last twenty months. Obviously, keeping things like that from us wasn't enough to change the future in either direction."
Christopher only gaped at his father in confusion. "Huh?"
"We never told you, did we? Well, I suppose we didn't. You asked us not to. Look, I can't explain it all right now, but suffice it to say that I know a lot more about your life than you think I do."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
Leo couldn't help but laugh at himself as he juicily teased, "Can't tell you. Past information. It could screw up the future."
"Nice, Leo. Really nice."
"It's 'Dad', and it sucks when you aren't the one saying it, doesn't it?" A small personal victory won, Leo tried one last time to use the feeling against his son. "Will you at least tell me her name?"
"I can't. Future information," Chris snipped. "You already know far too much."
Leo threw his arms up in total frustration. "You have got to be kidding me."
"Deal with it." Chris slammed the cover of The Book shut with a cocked eyebrow. Moving to the fringe of the circle, he smoothed his hair down and tugged on his tie to straighten it back into a nice knot. He glanced sideways at Leo, told him to be quiet, and folded his hands neatly in front of himself.
"Hear these words,
Hear my cry,
Spirit from the other side.
Come to me, I summon thee,
Cross now the Great Divide."
A brilliant swirl of lights centered above the carpet until Penny appeared. Before she even finished settling into her form, she reached forward to embrace her great-grandson. "Christopher, my darling boy, I thought I would be hearing from you today."
"Hi, Grams," Christopher said, hugging his great-grandmother a little too tightly. He pulled back then, anxious. "I wish I had more time to talk, really I do, but we need your help, and we don't have a lot of time to do it."
"Anything for my great-grandchildren. You know that."
"Thanks." Christopher grinned with genuine gratitude. "This one is pretty big."
Penny stared at him with deep concern, seeming to know what the Big Thing was. "You're still planning to do it, aren't you? Even though your grandparents and I have both asked you not to?"
"Grams, I have to. If you three won't give me a good reason why I shouldn't want to save my brother, I don't see where the problem is. He wasn't meant to be like this — you know he wasn't — and I can't stand by doing nothing when he's got the world crumbling around our ears. So please, help me. You don't have to agree with me. Just help me."
While Chris waited for an answer, Leo's heart sank down through to his toes, chilling his spine along the way. What Chris had done the first time hadn't been enough. His son had died in vain. Leo's darkest imaginings were more than true, and now, here he was, caught up in the middle of them.
"Your mother would be very proud of you. Terrified, but very, very proud," Penny said by way of agreement, breaking into Leo's thoughts again. She breathed hard, and with her mind clearly made up that all she could do was help, she asked, "Have you picked a day yet?"
"There was a day a little less than ten months before I was born. They were attacked by a Darklighter the day of Wyatt's first birthday party. I think — "
As Leo began to panic at the thought that his son could quite possibly mess with his entire existence — again — he was thankfully given more time to figure out how to talk Chris out of going back to that day when the girl he was obviously so fond of came back into the room, trailed by a tall, dark haired man who looked to be not all that much older than the two kids he was (Leo guessed) guiding. Then again, Leo also knew he couldn't judge by that. He didn't exactly look his eighty-seven years either.
"Hi, Grams," the girl sang as she swept across the attic. Her arms extended excitedly as she skipped a little faster toward the now-corporealized ghost. "Thanks for coming."
A brief hug later, Penny pulled away with a rather unhappy look on her face. "Is there something you want to tell me, young lady?"
"Sorry?" The girl looked at her great-grandmother, confused. Penny gestured at the girl's stomach with an annoyed, pointed wave of her hand. The girl started and laughed. "Oh, right, sorry. Grams, you're going to be a great-great-grandmother. Uh, surprise?"
"You're only now telling me? The first of the new Halliwell generation is on the way, and I'm not the very first person you told?"
The girl gestured with an exasperated wave. "Hey, Christopher isn't done being mad yet. I can only handle one of you being cranky at me at a time."
"I'm not mad at you," Christopher seethed through his teeth. "Thanks a lot, Grams. I finally had her off that kick."
"Shush! You just go and reset the alarm before he gets suspicious," she playfully ordered. Turning her attention back to Penny, the girl picked up on Christopher's words and proudly announced, "He started kicking last week."
Penny didn't cover her wrinkle of distaste fast enough when the girl called her baby 'He'. Her smile was certainly less excited as she asked, "Another boy?"
The girl giggled. "That's what he told me. Why?"
"Because Penny still hasn't forgiven Wyatt or Chris for being boys yet," Leo answered with an affectionate chuckle before anyone got the chance to say otherwise.
Finally noticing that the two kids weren't the only people in the room with her, Penny sputtered at her grandson-in-law's appearance. Clearly confused, she asked, "Uh, Leo? How did you . . . Oh, no."
"What?" He looked at Penny, who didn't seem to know what to do with him. Leo was quite positive that was the first time in his entire life he had actually seen Penny Halliwell speechless. "Is this because I'm supposedly dead by now?"
"Not just 'supposedly', and how do you know that?" Penny asked with immediacy, her eyes narrowing on her granddaughter's husband. "Leo?"
Christopher turned around from where he was quietly whispering some incantation to a corner of the wall and sheepishly raised a hand to surrender to his great-grandmother's wrath. "That was me. Sorry, Grams."
"Christopher, you know better. You should have sent him back to his own time the instant you saw him. Trust me when I tell you that your mother has been through enough chaos when it comes to time-travelling men in their lives. What if something happens to him before we're able to send him back?" Penny looked at the girl at the witch's side pointedly. "Things could be messed up more than they already are." She turned wickedly on Leo. "Let me guess. You're here from 2004, right after the baby was born?"
"How did you know?" Leo asked, surprised.
"Because if I remember correctly, while you're taking this little jaunt, Piper is summoning me to tell me about Chris." With a darker look, she emphasized, "The Other Chris." She must have felt the chill from Leo's blood freezing. Everyone else in the room seemed to, because all eyes fell on Leo. Penny softened at the deadened look in Leo's eyes. "This isn't him. Nothing you do is going to bring him back. The best thing you can do is go back and be there for the baby and Piper. You can't fix anything from here."
"I needed to make sure he was okay," said Leo, unable to look at Chris. This man was not him, not the one who had died only nine days ago. The timeline had changed too much for it to be otherwise. Part of him had known that before he had even come through the portal. Talking to Chris had certainly suggested so much, but Penny was doing him a favor now by driving it home. The son Leo was looking for was dead and would not be coming back.
"You can't help Chris, Leo. You have to go home and help Piper. She's hurting just as you are."
"I know."
"Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?" The man who had come upstairs with the girl, who Leo guessed was probably this Charlie character he'd been hearing about, stepped into the middle of the group of Halliwells. He gestured at Leo suspiciously. "Who is this guy?"
Feeling Penny's glare, Leo looked down at his shoes. He knew better, even in this time, than to tick off Penny Halliwell. She may be dead, but she was a force to be reckoned with anyway. To the man he figured was Charlie, he said, "It doesn't matter. Penny's right. I need to get back to my own time, and these kids are going to need all of our help to do what they need to do." He looked hopefully at Chris, who looked back at him, waiting. "That is, if you'll let me help. I don't like this, but if you're going to do it, let me help."
Christopher looked back at his great-grandmother for approval. "He is already here. It wouldn't hurt for us to have an extra hand around."
"This is your show, Christopher. You do what you think you need to do."
Thinking as he spoke, Christopher asked, "Leo? You came from 2004? And I was just born?"
"You're nine days old," Leo answered, accepting that this was the closest he was going to get to a request for help.
"Nine days? So, if I remember my family history correctly, you still have your powers, your Elder powers? The other Elders haven't stripped them yet?"
Leo nodded, unwilling to give away too much. And I'll gladly use them if it keeps you safe, Leo added to himself.
"Good. We may need them." With a crooked smile on his lips, Christopher extended his hand toward his father. "I'm also going to need the spell you ripped out of The Book when you got here."
"How did you know?" Leo blushed while he guiltily dug it out of his back pocket, even though everything in his heart told him not to admit to a single thing. If Chris didn't have the spell, he couldn't go back. If he couldn't go back, he couldn't end up dead like his future counterpart had. He just had to keep Chris here in the future. He had to. At the very least, he had to keep his son talking until he could figure out how to talk him out of his plan.
Christopher shrugged. "The Book still protects itself against evil, even without the Power of Three, so it wasn't like anything demonic could have ripped it out. The portal that brought you here didn't open while we were up here, which means you arrived sometime between when we left for the funeral and when we got back. So you had to be the one to take it."
That small issue resolved, Penny turned the topic back to where she had been originally cut off. "Christopher, you've picked out a date for the spell to work?"
"Oh, right." Christopher took the paper from Leo, letting it sit between their hands for a little bit longer than he might have if he had actually seen his father in the last nineteen years. As scared as he had been at first, he was seeing his father again. He couldn't be that mad, even if Leo was causing so much unwanted distraction at a really bad time. He kept his eyes on his dad for an extra beat before he looked back at his great-grandmother. "There was a day, Wyatt's first birthday party. They," he gestured at his father with a strange half-smile, "were attacked by a Darklighter. It was the next day that Dad went Up There and didn't come back for six months. I figure, if he hadn't been gone, they might have found out that the Elder from Magic School was trying to kill Wyatt sooner, and we'd be able to stop all of this." He glanced quickly at his father again, this time actually looking for help. "I need to know how to stop you from going Up There, and I need an idea of how to get rid of their Whitelighter. The sisters are more likely to trust me if I can be closer to them and Wyatt, and that means becoming their Whitelighter. If I can get in, I know I can pull it off."
"Don't you dare," Leo cut his son off dangerously, startling both Christopher and the girl with him. "You leave him alone. You can't take that time with him away from your mother and Phoebe and Paige — or from me. It wasn't his fault we didn't find Gideon. If anything, it was all of the work he did that finally led us to him. It wasn't my being gone that caused us not to find Gideon either. Don't you dare mess with that day. You're screwing with more than just Wyatt's future."
"Huh?"
With the outward flapping hand gesture that Paige had long ago nicknamed Leo's Expository Jazz Hands, he tried to explain as quickly as possible, "You'll be messing with your own future, Chris. It was because of that Darklighter that you were even born."
"Again: huh?"
"Your mom and I were trapped in the Spirit Realm shortly after your brother's party. We were being tracked by a Darklighter who was trying to get me out of the way, which, if you think about it, he did. It was because of that attack that I decided I was risking my family's safety too much and tried to be a full-time Elder like They wanted. I'm still trying to find out if it was Gideon who set that one up, too. All of the gory details aside, your mom and I — we thought I was going to die and so we . . . made up — for a lot of things . . . that night. If we hadn't, you wouldn't be here."
"Crisis sex? I was born because you and Mom had a bout of crisis sex?"
"It wasn't like that." Leo added to himself, You didn't seem to mind before. But then, that was a different Chris and a different time now. That Chris had simply been happy exist again. This Chris, he never knew any of that. He didn't need to either. "The point is you can't mess with that day or any other day until the day you were born because I can't let you take that time with him away from us."
"Time with who?"
"It doesn't matter. Look, I know I haven't been around for you and that you don't need me to tell you what to do, but I'm asking you anyway. Stop this now. Don't go back at all. You didn't know about that, and you probably don't know anything about a lot of things that happened in the year and a half before you were born. You don't understand what could happen if you change things."
"Don't," Penny warned. "You could make things even worse."
My son has just been murdered by the man I trusted the most with my family. It doesn't get any worse than that, Leo thought angrily, but controlled himself from actually it saying out loud. Instead, the Elder (not for much longer, but he was still one at the moment, by God) completely ignored the dead woman's pleas. He focused everything he had on his son, willing him to truly hear him this once. "If you go, you might not — "
Christopher stepped back from his father, angry and confused. "What is this? What happened to whatever you two are up to, let me help? Grandpa tried to get me to promise I wouldn't go back, too. She's been begging us not to do this since we first brought it up. Same with Grandma. Why? What are you guys not telling us?"
"Leo," Grams warned him again.
Leo's eyes flared at her, desperate. "I won't let him go back just to have him die again. I can't do it."
"What do you mean, again? I'm not going to die," said Chris firmly, although he was clearly thrown by the talk going on around him. He looked quickly at his girl, who was looking very unsure of his reassurances. To her specifically he said, "I'm not." To his dearly deceased relatives he said strongly, "You can both stop talking about me like I'm not here and just deal. My family needs me. I promised that little baby over there that he wasn't coming into this world the way it is, and I intend to keep that promise. You can either help us, or you can both get out of my way."
"The hell with the rules, huh?" Grams mused. She punched Leo in the arm, hard but affectionately. "He really is your son, isn't he?" She didn't wait for an answer from her grandson-in-law, but instead turned to his son. "What do you need, Christopher?"
"How much time do we have?"
The girl nodded at her watch. "Two minutes, tops."
Switching back into mission mode, Christopher started doling out the assignments in quick succession, needing to cover all of the ground they had wasted in arguing with his father and great-grandmother. "Okay, Charlie, I want you by the potions table. If he shows up once the next sentry comes to check on us and leaves to report to him, he's coming with at least three demons to take his hits for him. Throw whatever you can at them as fast as you can. Blow them up, give them hives, set them on fire. Do whatever you have to do to keep them busy and unable to get at us."
Charlie looked down at the girl at his side, the mother of his child, with a worried smile. Leo saw him reach for her hand and squeeze it hard as he said, "Nothing's getting by me."
An almost brotherly threat accompanied Chris's handshake with his Whitelighter. "I'm gonna hold you to that, Charlie. I mean it."
The look that passed between the three of them was not lost on either Leo or Penny. She, however, wasn't going to stay as quiet about it as Leo was. Somewhere in the middle of her ever-reliable, anti-male handbag of insults, Penny found it in her to sputter, "You? You're the one responsible for my great-granddaughter's condition? I swear, I thought you knew better than to get involved with a Whitelighter, — "
"No names, Grams," Chris jumped in before she could get any further with her attack. With a pointed look at Leo, he added, "He doesn't know who she is or which sister she belongs to, so it's probably better if we keep it that way. The first time the sisters went to the future, Piper saw a future with her and Leo divorced with a little girl named Melinda, and we all know how that one worked out."
"They spent Wyatt's entire pregnancy thinking he was going to be a girl because of it." The girl snapped her fingers with the realization of a mock-epiphany. "That must have been what turned him evil! He was traumatized by being called Melinda for nine months."
"And, no offense, Ms. Halliwell, but we've been lectured more than enough," Charlie chimed in with a pointed look at Chris before he turned to the entire group. "So let's keep this boy safe, shall we? What else do you need, Christopher?"
Leo decided that, despite the obvious reasons why he shouldn't like the guy, he still liked his son's Whitelighter. He knew how to handle a Halliwell. Penny, too, looked on the angel with admiration and approval. The two of them stood anxiously awaiting their orders. Penny was obviously pleased her instructions would be saved for last and most important as Chris turned on his father next.
"Leo — Dad — since you're here, we're going to need the extra fire power, but we need you to be invisible. If you could just take out whatever demons you can and keep them distracted, away from where we open the portal, that would be great. As long as you're invisible, they won't be able to see you to fire back. Once we're gone, it should be clear for you to get back to your own time, too. Wyatt hates this house. He won't stay in it if he doesn't have to."
The two of them looked at each other as Leo silently agreed to the plan without actually agreeing to the plan. While they were busy having a father-son moment, the girl looked at her watch again, and with a dreading immediacy announced that they had thirty seconds to kill, if they were lucky. Leo saw the reluctance in his son's eyes as he turned them away and handed the piece of paper from inside The Book of Shadows over to his great-grandmother.
"We're going to need you to open the portal, Grams. If he shows up in the middle of this, you're the only one he can't accidentally kill. If you stay within the confines of the candles and, you know, see-through, you'll be safe from everything that comes through here."
"Twenty seconds," the girl announced.
With that, Penny pulled the two kids to her in a big but all too brief hug. "Be careful, my darlings. I love you both."
"We love you, too, Grams," said Christopher into her shoulder.
"Thank you, Grams, for everything," the girl said into the other shoulder.
As they separated, the girl went to hug their Whitelighter and Chris came to his father. Awkwardly he said, "I don't know why you're here, but it was really nice to see you again. I've really missed you, Dad."
"I love you, too," Leo said, afraid to actually say anything more or less than that. Any other words failed him.
Chris must have seen something in his father's eyes that he didn't want to know because the boy quickly turned away from Leo, walked over to the girl, and pulled her close to him. He whispered down into her ear something completely inaudible to anyone but the two of them. Together their heads looked up and at the people with them. They smiled gratefully at everyone as they backed a little further away, turning off everything but some battle mode they had together.
She whispered her count off of the five second mark as Chris watched his father with regret while Leo cloaked himself from all eyes again. Leo felt the sad sigh in Chris's heart in his own. This was not how this trip to the future was supposed to go. Nothing about the future was the way it was supposed to be.
"Stay close to me," Chris ordered her again, breaking into Leo's worries.
"Wait for it," she said, her eyes widening in search of the thing that would be coming for her and Chris next.
Then, as if right on the predicted cue, a beautiful young woman in body-hugging leather shimmered into the room. She held some sort of knife out in preparation to attack something that her dark eyes flashed around the room searching for. After a moment, she relaxed her grip on the weapon and grinned in greeting at the two kids as if they were old friends. Leo didn't like the look of her, but Chris apparently did — maybe it was the leather; Leo had never understood the attraction to leather — because he crossed over to her and met her lips in an incredibly friendly kiss. There was something darkly familiar about her, but unable to figure them out, Leo looked in time to see the girl roll her eyes sky high with distaste.
"I hate to interrupt, but what do you want, Bianca?" she snapped in a stage whisper over Chris's shoulder. Even though the kids had expected this new visitor, she clearly wasn't happy with the visitor being this woman. "We're kind of having a family thing today and would rather not have to deal with outsiders, if you know what I mean."
Bianca? That woman was Bianca? No wonder Leo didn't like her. She was the one responsible for Chris nearly dying from that chest wound a year ago. Even if she had been Chris's fiancée at one time or another, Leo was not in the least bit happy to know she was still clawing her way into his son's life. It was a good thing she couldn't see the look on his face because it would have burned her soul to a crisp.
The phoenix backed away from Chris, annoyed at being interrupted. She huffily slapped a hand on her leather-clad hip and glared. "He wants to know why Biltok hasn't returned from his visit to you," Bianca cooed, the perfectly manicured index finger of her other hand tracing down the length of Chris's arm as she spoke. "He thinks the two of you are up to something. Are you?"
Chris gently but definitively pulled the woman's hand away from his body. "He came. He reactivated the alarm. He left. Anything that happened between here and there is entirely out of our hands."
"That's all?" asked Bianca, clearly not believing Chris, no matter what kind of eyes he made at her.
Together, the two kids chimed, "That's all."
"Then what's she doing here," Bianca asked suspiciously, gesturing at Grams in her candled sanctuary, who scoffed in offense at the woman's attitude toward her great-grandchildren.
"Not that it's any of your business," the girl snapped in return, holding a hand back to steady her dearly deceased Grams from advancing out of the candle circle. "But we called Grams because we wanted to make sure Grandpa was okay. We haven't told her about the baby yet either, so we thought she should know. I froze the room a few times because I just couldn't deal with the condolences any more. My grandfather is dead, and I needed some air. That's all — not that I need your permission. I don't need your permission to do anything."
Shaking her long dark head, Bianca barked, "Fine. I'll tell him that, but I don't think he'll believe me any more than I believe you. So whatever you two are up to, you better come up with something better than this."
"We aren't up to anything, I swear." Chris added rather flirtatiously, "Would I lie to you?"
She didn't answer him, but her demeanor definitely relaxed a little at the gesture. "I'm sorry about your grandfather. I've heard he was a pretty good guy. He's going to be by later to pay his respects."
"Why?" the girl snapped. "He couldn't care less."
"You better go," Chris said to Bianca, getting in between the two women. "You'll upset her, which means you'll upset the baby. Not today, okay? We both have enough to deal with today. Besides, he'll freak out if you don't get back to him right away."
Bianca sidled up just a little closer to Chris and wrapped her hands around his neck. She pulled his head down to plant a deep, passionate kiss on him that made everyone, seen and unseen, turn away. When she released him, he cleared his throat with surprise. She winked at him and turned to glare at the girl. Her comment was directed at Chris, though, as she cooed, "I'll see you later."
"'Bye," Chris told her.
"Yeah, 'bye. Oh, and Bianca?" Before she could respond to the girl, a vial of vanquishing potion exploded at her feet. Unlike the other demon from earlier, the woman's body collapsed into a field of sputtering pieces, not entirely unlike black orbs, and circled around out the window. As the pieces fluttered away, the girl called out to them, "Don't get lost on your way back to your kennel, bitch!"
Chris looked amused but definitely annoyed. "Why do you have to blow her up every single time you see her? It only makes the both of them mad."
"That is between me and the sisters," she replied, looking and sounding quite satisfied with herself. She glanced over at where she had last seen Leo, who snickered. She hooked a thumb in the general direction of the sound and said, "And him, too, apparently. Frankly, I don't care if I make her mad. She deserves it. If he doesn't like it, that's just too bad, too. If she's that important to him — "
"Don't finish that thought," Chris warned her. He quickly looked back at Charlie, who he apparently knew without even asking had orbed the vial into her hand behind her back. "Why do you encourage her? Aren't you supposed to be a pacifist like the rest of us?"
"Because he loves me more than he loves you," the girl beamed at Chris. "All I'm saying is I don't get what you see in her. You deserve better." She then glanced at her watch and turned darkly on everyone in the room. "Okay, let's do this, people. We have a portal to catch, and it's leaving the station in less than ninety seconds."
Christopher put a hand on her back and steered her around the sofa toward the chalk drawing on the attic wall that had served as the family's portal wall for more years than any of them cared to think about. On the way, Christopher grabbed his suit jacket and shrugged it back on while she grabbed a backpack in each hand from the floor. When they reached the wall, Christopher took one of the packs from her before they turned around to face everyone in the room one last time. Hand in hand, they beamed lovingly at all of their partners in crime, tears in both their eyes.
"Thank you," said Chris while she nodded in agreement next to him. He took in a deep breath and gestured to the ghostly family matriarch. "Grams?"
"Of course, my darling," she agreed. The two kids turned toward the wall as Penny began to recite the spell.
"Hear these words, hear my rhy- — "
"WAIT!" Leo hollered and ran forward, grabbing both kids around the biceps. When they were facing him, he was quite visible to them again, hoping they would see the desperation in his eyes. "Don't do this! Please?"
A spark of that defiant hate that Leo had been so familiar with from his son flared in the boy's eyes. His movements were cold, almost completely opposite from the gentle, loving way he had been with the woman at his side. Christopher looked Leo up and down, hard, and said, "No offense or anything, but you haven't exactly been a factor for us for a long, long time. We've made plenty decisions without you, just as big as this one, and we're going to spend the rest of our lives making decisions without you. If you wanted to have so much input on things, then maybe you shouldn't have gotten yourself killed when we needed you the most. You're my dad and I love you, but I had to figure out how to live my life without a dad a long time ago. That doesn't change because you pop on in with a portal for an afternoon."
"Chris, listen to me," Leo pleaded.
"Leo, I'm warning you. Don't do this," Penny snappishly advised. "You've already said more than you should."
"Back off, Penny," he snarled and turned back to his son. He scrambled for the words, speaking as fast as he could before he could be cut off again. "Screw the rules. Listen to me, Chris. We aren't dealing with Time Travel rules. We're talking about family rules, and it's apparently time that this rule was broken. You need to understand: you've already come back. You asked us not to tell you as you were growing up. You already came back and tried to save Wyatt."
Penny started forward, only to be held back by a hand gesture from her great-grandson. She relented her charge, only because she knew it was Chris asking her. She could see that Chris was listening to his father, though, which was the last thing they needed to happen at the moment. "Leo, stop! It's too late. He's going."
Leo, however, wasn't listening to anyone or anything but that damned Jiminy Crickett in his head telling him that he was doing the right thing by saving his son from repeating his own past mistakes. He couldn't risk his son's entire existence just because the kid was as stubborn as he was. They'd find a way to fix everything else later. "That Whitelighter that you were talking about getting out of your way just a few minutes ago? That's you! You had already moved me out of the way so you could become their Whitelighter. None of us knew who you were for almost ten months, but you were there trying to save your brother."
"Leo! Think about what you're doing. You can't — "
"But you obviously didn't save your brother if you're planning to do this now. More importantly, you couldn't save yourself."
"LEO, DAMN IT! THINK!" Penny huffed in exasperation, arms thrown up in the air. "He asked you not to tell him. He asked you not to tell him about Wyatt or coming back from the future. No one told him, Leo, yet he still came to the same conclusion anyway. So get out of the way. Maybe he can do it right this time."
Firmly, Christopher backed away and stood closer to the wall where the triquetra drawing waited. He took the girl's hand again, his stance defiant, his mind more than made up. "He's my brother, my responsibility. If I learned anything from growing up in this family, it's that there is nothing more important than helping family. No matter what he's done, we're going through that portal. You don't have a say in this, Dad."
"Chris, don't. Please."
Defiantly, Christopher ordered, "Go ahead, Grams."
While they were busy yelling at one another, they were all too busy to notice the flak of black smoke in the corner of the room that materialized into a Darklighter. They were so busy, in fact, that none of them saw the black arrow speed through the room from the windowseat to tear into the girl's shoulder and pin her into the attic wall.
Both of the kids screamed in agony, her from the pain in her shoulder and Chris in fear. Without even thinking about it, Charlie darted across the distance between himself and his charges. When he reached them, both his hand and Chris's went up to grasp for the arrow to try to pull it out of her but was cut short when Leo jumped in and caught their hands.
"You can't touch it," Leo instructed, even though he was sure that they both knew that anyway. "Charlie, get back into position. Hurry."
"So I'm just supposed to leave her skewered into the wall?" Chris sputtered incredulously as Charlie walked backwards until he ran into the potions table, shaking his head angrily at Leo. The two of them shared a look as together they echoed, "Are you insane?"
"I'll get it," Penny volunteered, stomping out of the protective shield of the candles unnoticed. Under her breath, she mumbled, "This is what happens when you try things with only Whitelighter blood in the house."
Before the ghost could get to her great-granddaughter, the girl stopped them all with a breathy hiss. "Behind you."
Chris and Leo both whirled around, Chris very carefully placing himself between her body and anything else that moved. Leo felt his son tense even further when a new body orbed into the attic in front of them. He could see Charlie tense as well, his hands reaching for multiple brightly colored vanquishing potions. At the sight of the dark blue orbs, the Darklighter seemed to shrink. Leo quickly cloaked himself again, not wanting to tip off the new threat until he knew for certain that he could be more helpful to his son (and niece?) by being seen. While the orbs took the solid form of a young blond man in his probably mid-twenties, the Darklighter convulsed a few times before internally combusting without being touched at all. Its entire being hiccuped three or four times before exploding outward in a burst of flames.
Seemingly satisfied with himself, the blond man turned toward the group that surrounded the girl pinned to the wall. He centered his attention on Chris, crossed his arms over his chest, and demanded an answer. "Christopher? Care to explain what the hell is going on here?"
"Wyatt." Chris took one step back, obscuring the girl and their frantically working great-grandmother from a clear view of the new arrival. With the most ugly tone Leo had ever heard from Chris, the boy snarled angrily, "You sent a Darklighter after us? Today?"
Glancing back at the spot where the Darklighter had appeared, tried to reload, and been vanquished, the blond man said quite calmly, "He wasn't one of mine. I didn't send him."
As the two of them faced off, a second puff of blackness appeared in the dark of the corner behind the door. Before anyone saw it coming, a black Darklighter arrow slammed with a sickening thud into Charlie's chest and knocked him to the ground.
"That one was mine," the blond man said plainly.
Another Darklighter and a robed demon appeared in the room, carefully placing themselves between the man and the small band of rebels. Immediately, Chris focused his attention on the potions table that Charlie was no longer able to reach and located several vanquishing potions. He concentrated on them, willing them to zip across the room and make contact with the threats, but he didn't get to them quite fast enough. As he watched helplessly, every single bottle, vial, bowl, and jar exploded on the tabletop, sending Charlie into a blissful unconsciousness away from the pain of the Darklighter arrow in his chest. Chris's heart sank as their only weapons disappeared right before his eyes.
Leo's heart sank, too. That was Wyatt? The cold, nearly inhuman person in front of him was exactly what he had imagined and oh so much more. How, when he had such an amazing mother and all of the love his family could give him, could he end up standing here like this, viciously trapping his brother in a corner?
Christopher, however, wasn't anywhere near as concerned about Wyatt as he was with everyone else. With Charlie down and the one person he truly needed in all of this pegged into the wall, they were down four to three. But still, at least they had the element of surprise in Leo. Even Wyatt couldn't possibly know Leo was in the room, not really.
As if knowing his son was thinking of and counting on him, Leo sprang into action. While the distraction of the exploded potions still burned and the brothers glared at one another, Leo took careful aim. He hadn't exactly learned to control this power of his. He had only used it the day Chris had died and during a few random moments of frustration during his nightly hunts for Barbas. But then, he figured those moments alone had focused him enough. With angry precision, Leo let burst energy bolts from his hands, sending them into first the two Darklighters and then the demon. The three of them were all dust before anyone knew what was coming at them.
What was coming at Leo was a flash of anger from his firstborn, who waved a hand in the direction of the bolts. The next thing Leo knew, he was flying off the floor, high up into the rafters. The jolt to his head threw his balance of concentration off so that when he landed down on the ground again, hard, he was no longer a mystery to his eldest son. Wyatt, in fact, didn't seem surprised at all to see his father lying there on the floor.
"Hi, Dad," Wyatt called chipperly, reminding Leo of a creepy Christopher Walken movie he'd seen once.
"Wyatt," Leo muttered in disbelief, shaking his head to get the ringing out of his ears.
"Bet you didn't think I'd know you were the one behind the energy bolts, did you?" The man walked over to stand over his father and telekinetically helped him to stand up so they could meet eye to eye. "I figured you were going to show up here in the future at some point. After all, since Gideon took me, I'm sure you had to know for sure what happened to me in the future, make sure I wasn't evil or anything, right?" When Leo only glared at his son in angered confusion, Wyatt told him condescendingly, "You know, you really should listen to Phoebe when she tells you she can't keep a secret. She warned everyone, yet you always told her anyway. I have to give her credit, though. I never would have remembered Gideon at all if it hadn't been for dear Aunt Phoebe."
"She told you about that?"
"Well, she kind of had to, but the details of why don't really matter. What matters is that Christopher isn't going back, not this time. I'm perfectly happy being me, and I am not about to let him ruin that for me."
Angrily, Wyatt turned his focus away from his father and over to his little brother, who was quietly standing against the wall with their great-grandmother while she tried frantically to free the girl from the wall. Penny was quietly whispering the incantation that would allow the portal they needed to escape to the past to open.
Seeing them, Wyatt growled in fury. He raised his hand and snapped, "Sorry, Penny. Your services are no longer needed." With a sharp wave of his hand, the corporeal lady was smacked hard across the room into her circle of candles. The force of it sent the small realm of light into a burst. The family matriarch and the entire circle exploded into a bright white light.
"GRAMS!" Chris yelled.
"Oh, she's fine," Wyatt snapped. "But you, you get your ass away from that wall, Christopher, and tell me what the hell you think you're accomplishing here because at the moment, I'm thinking you are about to betray me."
"I'm not betraying you, Wyatt," Chris said defensively. He held on to the girl with him, trying to hold her up against the pressure of the arrow that still held her into the wall. "We aren't. I don't know what you guys are talking about. We're just trying to get Dad back to his own time. The spell that brought him here isn't in The Book anymore, so we called Grams to help us. We can't get him — "
"If you really expect me to believe that, Christopher, I — "
Wyatt's threat remained unfinished. He was too busy looking for Christopher to actually say anything. While Wyatt had been busy sending his great-grandmother back to the Spirit Realm, Leo had used the distraction to cloak himself once again. He had tiptoed across the room, carefully avoiding that loose floorboard, and reached Chris. As soon as he got close enough, he reached his arm over to his son and cloaked him as well. He didn't have to say anything by way of warning because Chris felt nothing more than an odd, tingly sensation from head to toe as his body disappeared from sight. What he did feel was a strong yank on his arm, pulling him away from the wall and across the room in the opposite direction of where Wyatt was charging the wall.
Father and Son ducked behind the sofa with Leo bobbing up and down occasionally to lob energy bolts in random directions to distract Wyatt from his location. During one of his times of shelter, Leo dug into his pocket and brought out the bottle of potion for the time portal he'd used to bring himself here. He felt for Chris's arm and placed it hard into his son's hand, knowing he couldn't just let the boy stay here in the future, not when his homicidal brother knew they'd had been plotting against him. That would be suicide.
To Chris, Leo instructed in a low whisper, "It's the reversal of the potion I used to get here. Get as close to the wall as you can before you toss this at it, then go through as fast as you can. I'll keep him distracted until you can get through." Leo popped up and sent another bolt of energy across the room, exploding an entire rack of potions that really should not have been mixed together. When he came back down, he continued. "When you get out on the other end, it's going to take you to the attic. As soon as you get there, orb to the top of the Golden Gate bridge and wait for me there. Don't go anywhere else. You won't have your powers, so you'll be unprotected until I can get there. You'll be safe on the bridge. Until then, if you should run into any of them, do not talk to your mother or your aunts, especially Paige. I can't explain why to you right now, and I'm sure you've probably guessed some of it by now, but when I get back, I will tell you everything."
"How will you get back?" Christopher asked, his eyes darting between the vial in his hands and where he thought his father's head was.
"The spell you were going to use should get me back just fine."
"But you're not a witch, Dad. You can't."
"No, but I'm guessing she can, once I heal her, anyway," Leo said, indicating the girl, forgetting that Chris couldn't see him do so. "Don't worry. Whatever happens, Wyatt knows he has to let me go back. Too much of this precious future of his will be changed if he doesn't. He doesn't want to risk anything changing at all. I just have to get you back before I make myself seen to him again."
"What about her?" Chris nodded in the direction of the girl who was still helplessly pinned into the attic wall, him too forgetting that his father couldn't see his movement anyway. "Dad, I'm not going without her, not now. If I leave her here, Wyatt will — "
"We'll catch up with you as soon as we get Wyatt out of the way. Don't worry. It will be okay, but I need you to do this, for all of you."
"Fine, but be careful. He won't kill her, but he will have no problem making her suffer — or you, if he finds you."
Again Leo popped up and sent another energy bolt, which missed and went through the stained glass window of the windowseat. When he came back down, he reassured his son. "We're going to be fine. Just go. Meet me at the bridge."
"Dad, I — "
"Go, Chris. We'll be right behind you. Go."
Needing no other encouragement, Chris took off running, seeing one of Wyatt's dark blue energy balls fly just a little too close to his head. It was enough to make Wyatt look in the opposite direction of where he was running. The closer he got to the wall, the harder he had to concentrate on not looking away from the triquetra drawing. It was all he could do to keep his sights there and not at the wounded around him. He had to get through. His father was giving him the chance he needed, and he needed to take advantage of it while he could. When he was barely a foot away, he chucked the vial hard and fast into the wall, opening the portal to a feral scream from his brother. Chris was grateful he couldn't see anything going on behind him as he leapt into the portal to dodge an energy ball from his brother's hand.
And just like that, Chris was gone.
Wyatt fumed as the triquetra portal slacked back into a simple chalk outline on the wall. With one hand he lobbed energy ball after useless energy ball into the wall, futilely chasing them after a brother who was no longer there to attack. He finally gave up on Christopher with a redirected anger, which he turned on the girl. As his one hand tightened on nothing but air to cut off the oxygen supply to the now conscious and gasping Whitelighter Charlie, the other gripped hard on the girl's hair until she couldn't hold her yelp in any longer. When he heard her, he quickly whipped his head around to face her, eye to eye. Growling in fury, he demanded, "What did you two do?"
"Nothing."
"Don't lie to me. You weren't just trying to get Leo back."
Tears brimmed in her eyes, which were noticeably dulling over from the arrow that was still trapping her to the attic wall. Still, even though it was obviously taking a lot of energy for her to argue with the man, she visibly steeled herself and instead ordered, "Let me down, Wyatt."
"Not until you tell me what's going on." With Charlie again an unconscious heap on the floor, Wyatt reached his free hand over until it was parallel with the arrow, and with a little telekinetic burst snapped the arrow in the girl's shoulder right at the point where flesh and wood met. The shaft splintered, leaving pieces of black wood in her skin as it snapped upward, cutting even further into her. The girl bit back her scream, though, which only served to make Wyatt even more furious. "What did you do?"
She only glared at him until she was unable to hold her own head up any longer. Her eyes slowly started to close as she tried to nod her head back into position a few times. Helpless against the pain, her entire body started to give in. The pressure on the stub of an arrow grew as she slowly collapsed against it. Even the pain of it wasn't enough to bring her back to full consciousness. The sight of it made Leo sick.
What made Leo even sicker was knowing that the man standing there patiently watching as this happened was his son, his Wyatt. Chris hadn't even begun to tell them all just how awful his brother had grown up to be. It was the first time Leo realized he was actually grateful for one of Chris's factual omissions. This evil sonofabitch in front of him barely resembled something human in feeling. There was nothing there, nothing compassionate at all. Still, if Chris believed his brother could be saved, maybe what he needed was for his father to get through to him. He had to try.
"Wyatt, she's dying. Get her down."
The man turned around to look at where he guessed his father to be standing, a crooked grin on his face. "Then she can tell me what she and Christopher were up to. She can come down as soon as she tells me."
"She isn't going to be able to tell you anything like that," Leo protested, gesturing at the quickly fading girl. Without even realizing he was doing it, Leo offered the man a tradeoff. "Look at her, Wyatt. She can't even keep her own head up. Just get her down and let me heal her. She'll tell you then. Keeping their plan a secret isn't worth losing her baby. I know it. Just let me talk to her."
"You? Talk to her?" Wyatt actually laughed, and it wasn't a laugh that Leo ever wanted to hear again. It was so terribly cold. The laugh continued up through his cold blue eyes as Wyatt went on. "Dad, she doesn't even know you! You certainly don't know her. What makes you think you can talk to her at all?"
"She isn't you," Leo retorted, sensing that what Wyatt was saying was really about what he felt, not about what she may or may not feel. Leo knew; he had seen the way the other two kids looked at him. They were annoyed with his presence, but that was because they were in the middle of executing something that could get them both killed. Leo understood that now. There had been something else in their eyes, though, both of them. They had been happy to see him. He knew it. He could get through to her. He could save her. He could save something from the future, anyway. "You don't know what she wants."
Again Wyatt laughed, but this time it was confused. "And you think you do? I bet you don't even know her name!"
Stung by the reality of his son's statement, but certainly not about to let it steer him away from helping the poor girl, Leo growled angrily, "Get her down, Wyatt. Now."
"Show yourself."
"What?"
"I'm not doing a thing until I can see where you are. It's not an advantage that I'm willing to give you right now," said Wyatt plainly. "Now show yourself, or I kill her."
Even though Chris had told him Wyatt wouldn't kill her, Leo didn't want to take any chances. If he was going to be negotiating with his son at all, he would have to give Wyatt something. As he revealed his position, he didn't like the sneer that crawled over his adult son's face.
Wyatt laughed at his father's weakness. "It's no wonder this family is extinct except for the three of us — well, two of us. She's not going to last much longer."
Leo's sickness turned into strength, an uncontrollable urge to fight for an innocent. In the last few months, he had forgotten what it was like to think about anyone other than his sons or his wife and her sisters. This girl was family, certainly, but Wyatt was right. He didn't know her, but she needed him. It felt good to want to do something right again. He felt himself straighten as he took very cautious steps toward the man that he didn't want to think was his son. "Don't. Please, I know this isn't you. It can't be you. I know your mother and I would not raise you to be this way."
"What is it with everyone in this family thinking that I'm not me? I am perfectly capable of making decisions for myself. Newsflash, Leo: Gideon didn't do anything to me. No demon or warlock or any other magical creature you want to come up with did anything to me. I'm not Evil. I haven't been turned to the Dark Side. I'm not psychotic or any of these things that you all seem so afraid I am. I'm just me, Dad. I'm powerful, more powerful than anyone ever imagined I would be. That doesn't make me evil. You all need to get with that. Power doesn't mean evil because there is no Good or Evil. Why is that so hard for you to comprehend?"
"Fine. All right? You're not evil. We have all missed the point, and we don't know you at all. That's great. Will you let her down now please?"
Surprisingly, Wyatt actually orbed what was left of the Darklighter arrow out of the girl's shoulder and let her slip to the ground. She hit her head hard on the wall behind her, jolting her back to awareness. Before Leo could make the move over to her to help her away from Wyatt, the younger man reached down and yanked her up by the same arm where the arrow had been. She whimpered in pain, causing Wyatt to roll his eyes. "Suck it up," he told her.
"Let me heal her. We can talk all you want, and we'll figure this out. Just let me — "
"No, Dad, I don't think I will." Wyatt didn't say anything for another beat before he sucked in a breath and completed his thought. "I think you are going to go back to your time. I think you're going to get Christopher, and you're going to bring the little Benedict Arnold back here to me. When my brother is back home safely, then you can heal her, and we can have that little father-son talk until we're both blue in the face."
"She can't wait that long, and you know it," Leo argued, disgusted.
"So you should probably get going, then, huh?"
Leo didn't move. He couldn't leave her there like that, no way. Though he knew for certain that Wyatt still had been turned, he also couldn't ignore the opportunity that Chris's return would bring him. They had another chance to save Wyatt. He couldn't waste it, not yet. Not again. "I can't leave until I know you aren't going to hurt her."
"We'll be fine, Leo. You don't need to worry about anything but getting Christopher back here. Do that, and she'll be fine. In fact, I can guarantee you she won't be out of my sight." Wyatt glared down at the girl, who stood her ground and didn't back away. "I won't have you in this house where I can't keep an eye on you anymore. You're coming back with me."
Bravely, the girl replied, "Not in this lifetime."
"You don't have a choice." Wyatt reached down and grabbed the girl's other wrist hard enough for her to moan against her teeth in pain. He pulled her close so that she was partially shielding his body from Leo. Both of her arms now crossed her chest, preventing her from moving away from Wyatt at all. Even as she struggled, Wyatt ignored her. "I mean it, Leo. Stop Christopher and send him back here before he changes anything, or I will kill her. Believe me when I tell you that if you don't tell him and he finds out, Christopher will never forgive you if anything happens to her."
"Wyatt — "
The son ignored his father's pleas without any further care. He pulled hard on the girl's hair once again, snapping her ear back to meet his mouth. Casually but with undeniable menace, he ordered her, "Get him out of here."
With one last look of terror in her eyes, the girl bowed her head, unable to look at Leo any longer. She closed her eyes, thinking, until she tearfully whispered in rhyme.
"Send him back through Space and Time.
He found the answers he came to find.
Do not delay — send him fast
To the very same day in his past."
"Get out of here, Leo, before I change my mind," Wyatt ordered as the portal opened.
Leo slowly backed away from his son and his shield, never taking his eyes off her as he neared the portal. She tried to smile at him but only succeeded in letting the tears fall from her reddening eyes. He grinned back, and as he set his first foot through the portal, he whispered to her, "I will be back for you. Just hold on. We will be back for you."
With that, Leo turned and put his second foot through the portal and waited for the headsickness that would carry him back home.
(End Part Two)
