Chapter One
Chris and Wyatt stood outside the large oak doors to the Circulatory Office of the Magical School, each with one hand on each of the two doorknobs, hesitating… fearing. They looked at each other, then looked away for the fifteenth time since they had orbed here five minutes ago.
"What are you afraid of?" Wyatt asked Chris.
"Nothing," Chris replied somewhat dishonestly. After a moment of silence, he returned the question, "You?"
"Oh, you know. The usual."
"Think she's in there?" Chris asked hesitantly.
"No doubt about it," Wyatt was quick to reply.
Chris nodded for a while, tapping his doorknob with two fingers. "Wanna come back later… you know, when she's not here."
"Mrs. Tilwinkle is always here! She lives here to take care of the sick or injured."
Chris nodded again, wishing more than anything to just turn around and orb right back home. He was sure he saw his mom baking cookies yesterday… perhaps he could have some like the good old times, just sit down with a glass of cold milk and his mom's homemade cookies…
"So, should we go in there?"
"No," Chris replied.
"We kind of have to."
"Yes," Chris nodded, then groaned in frusteration. "On the count of three. One—"
"—Two—"
"Three!" The both opened the doors at the same time and found themselves facing a large, miraculously empty room. Nobody at the gigantic desk, nobody at the gleaming windows, just simply nobody…
"She's… not here?" Wyatt dared to utter the words, hope streaming through, unchecked in his voice.
"Shh… don't jinx it—"
"Oh, can it be? Oh, my goodness, it's the Halliwell boys!"
Chris turned to glare at his brother, sure that the only reason that the chirpy, almost eccentric voice was ringing through the room was because Wyatt dared to think it wouldn't… the classic moron-jinx!
Wyatt shrugged apologetically and they both turned to face the second set of doors in the room that led to the care-facility rooms. Mrs. Tilwinkle, a short, portly woman with a shock of white hair and large, diamond-studded glasses walked into the room, her usual, full-toothed beam in place. "Oh, you've grown so much since the last time I saw you!"
"You saw us four days ago, Mrs. T," Wyatt replied, frowning. "Remember, when Chris broke into Dad's class?"
Mrs. Tilwinkle looked at them with a distant look on her face, her beam frozen in thought. "Oh, yes, I suppose so…" She said reflectively. Immediately, she was back to her usual, chirpy self. "But you're still so handsome! Just look at you!" She took a hold of each of their cheeks and scrunched up her face as though she were talking to little babies. "Just such handsome-wandsome boys, aren't we?"
Chris grimaced as her long, fake nails dug into his skin. "Ow…"
"So," Mrs. Tilwinkle finally sighed, letting go of their cheeks. Wyatt and Chris both rubbed their respective cheeks which were already turning red. "What can I do for you boys today? You haven't broken into another class-room, have you, Chris? I know that you think it's cool, and that you got lots of encouragement from the excited children last time, but you need to find another way of being cool, son—"
"I didn't think it was cool!" Chris scoffed.
"We all need attention and some of us get our in different ways—"
"Actually," Wyatt jumped in, sure that if he had waited a second longer, Chris probably would have put his fist straight in the lady's mouth, "we came looking for the girl, the dark-lighter-demon lady—"
"Oh, you mean Daphne?" Mrs. Tilwinkle chirped, clapping her hands together. "That sweet little child the Elders wanted me to look after till this evening?"
"Yes, we've come to pick her up a little early," Wyatt replied, nodding. "So, if you could tell us where she is?"
"Oh, I don't know," Mrs. Tilwinkle replied, without the slightest hint of guilt. "I lost her."
People see and hear several surprising, even shocking, things in their lives but there are always those certain friends or family members that always manage to surprise them… again… and again. And not in a good way either. That's why it took Wyatt and Chris nearly a twenty seconds to get over Mrs. Tilwinkle's outrageous admission. And the woman's smile didn't even falter a little as she continued to look from one man's face to the other, in that ever-so-excited, slightly expecting look of hers that she was a master of.
"You lost her—wait—you lost her?" Chris cried out. "How can you lose somebody?"
"Well, I was having lunch," Mrs. Tilwinkle explained patiently. "I was sitting at that desk right over there, actually, and Carl had made me a special sandwich for today—it's our thirty-seventh anniversary, you know—and it just so happened that she… shimmered out." Mrs. Tilwinkle ended the speech with a small, awkward nod, then a shrug.
Chris found himself wanting to laugh with the sheer obsurdity of it. The Seer brings a satan-child to the Elders, hoping—praying, probably—that they'll keep her safe and away from danger, and yes, they were smart enough to appoint the kids of the Charmed Ones for her protection, but then they leave her with an absent-minded moron in the meanwhile so that she could go and lose her? Were they crazy or just immensely stupid? Then again, he was far more irritated—angry, even—to laugh at the moment. What the hell was wrong with them? He turned away, rubbing his fore-head because there was one hell of a headache pounding at his brain right now and Mrs. Tilwinkle's idiocy wasn't helping much.
Wyatt, always the patient one, took a deep breath and said, "Okay, let's see. You lost our Innocent?"
"Uh-huh," Mrs. Tilwinkle grinned.
"Um… when did you lose her?"
"Oh, about an hour ago," she replied.
"Oh, that's a little longer than I thought… or rather hoped," Wyatt muttered to himself, then turned back to Mrs. Tilwinkle. "And where did you lose her?"
"As I said, right here."
"And you have no idea where she is?"
"Well, I know that she's somewhere in the school, if that's what you mean," Mrs. Tilwinkle replied.
"How do you know that?" Chris asked her, turning back suddenly.
"Oh, we had her under a protection—she couldn't leave the school until we removed it, so she can only shimmer inside the school. There's no way she can leave."
Chris nodded, finally seeing a glimmer of hope to this impossible situation. "Did you try tracking her shimmer?"
"Oh, my boy, you forget that I'm not a whitelighter like you boys, though I've always wanted to be one! You just have such an amazing gift and you're always helpling people, you're just so special that i-it makes me want to cry!" Mrs. Tilwinkle's eyes moistened slightly and Chris froze.
"Don't cry," he said in an almost commanding voice. "We don't have time for crying! Did you tell any of the other professors?"
Mrs. Tilwinkle sniffled, then said, "Of course not, I wouldn't want to bother them!"
"Huh…" Chris turned to Wyatt. "We need to find this Daphne-chick."
"Oh, but she's not a chicken," Mrs. Tilwinkle replied in all honesty, looking slightly confused.
Chris smiled, knowing there was nothing he could do to get past how incredibly lacking in brains this woman was. He turned to Wyatt again, and laid a hand on his shoulder. "You wanna deal with her? I'm gonna look around the room and see if I can track her shimmer."
"Wait—I can do that, how about you talk to Mrs. T?"
Chris glared at him, turning his back to Mrs. Tilwinkle. "I swear I'm gonna kill her!" He mouthed to his brother.
"Oh, and you assume I won't?" Wyatt whispered back. He shoved his brother aside and gave his old school nurse a wide smile. "So… it's your anniversary?"
Chris rolled his eyes as Mrs. Tilwinkle burst forward with a rapid, thrilled speech that he was sure he wouldn't have been able to keep up with… if he had been bothering to listen. He walked around the room slowly, taking a deep breath to clear his mind… like that would help. Still, he lightly touched the surfaces of the room, hoping to find a residue of an shimmer, a sliver of magic to hint where his Innocent might have shimmered off to. It was a pretty lucky thing that they had come in time, he thought. If they'd come in the evening like they were supposed to, the power of the shimmer would have faded away until they'd be left with no other option than to search the entire school.
He strolled over to the windows through which the sun was streaming in from its mid-day height. He fingered the velvet curtains that had been drawn aside, then the window-sill. Nothing. He turned towards the second set of doors to the nursing-rooms. He opened the door, then walked into the dimly-lit rooms with their rows of white-sheeted beds and small oak bed-side tables—all of them identical in every way. Oh, how he had hated this room. He had been in here once for getting in trouble with a leprechaun who had somehow acquired the dark-lighter poison that was used to dip their arrows in, made especially to kill white-lighters. Unfortunately, Kaleb, as the leprachaun's name was, was quite willing to use it and somehow managed to direct the liquid straight into Chris's mouth—an entire vile straight into Chris's system. A little bit of poison itself is very dangerous when at the tip of a dark-lighter bow but this was… not overly good. It took seven Elders and four days for Chris to recover completely and that was only because Wyatt had walked into the room immediately after the incident and had orbed him into the nursing-rooms. Thankfully, Mrs. Tilwinkle was not the head nurse at that point. He had always wondered how she made it to the head-nurse position when she wasn't even a white-lighter, and thus lacked the natural healing powers. Wouldn't it just make sense to have a white-lighter as a nurse instead of a… whatever she was?
Chris felt a crazy desire to run from the place as he walked forward, recognizing the very bed he had laid in those eight years ago. He turned away and looked around the room. No wonder she had wanted to escape so badly… having only Mrs. Tilwinkle as company in this god-awful place… He took a turn around the room and, much to his frusteration, still found nothing.
He sighed and walked back to the door, then froze. There was that feeling again—a shudder almost, an intense feeling of… something unexplainable. He felt like he was somewhere he shouldn't be, somewhere he had to leave to be safe… because he wasn't safe here, he couldn't be—not with that dim-wit weirdo taking care of him.
"Whoa—" Chris whispered, stepping away from the door suddenly. A second later, it opened and Wyatt peaked in.
"Did you find anything?"
"Wyatt, walk forward a little," Chris told him, frowning. "Just take a big step forward and tell me what you feel."
Wyatt frowned back but did as he was told. Mrs. Tilwinkle followed behind him, looking confused. Within a second, Wyatt's expression suddenly changed to one of pure surprise mixed in with a little bit of anxiety. He stepped back immediately, looking up at him. "What was that?"
Chris nodded. "You felt it too?"
"Felt what?" Mrs. Tilwinkle asked him curiously.
"Yeah, it was almost like fear… but it wasn't fear. More like—"
"Determination? A need to get out?"
"What are you boys talking about?" Mrs. Tilwinkle asked again, louder this time.
Wyatt nodded. "But what—"
"I think we found our dark-lighter-demon girl's magic resedue."
Wyatt's mouth fell open slightly. "Wow! That's one powerful shimmer!"
"Tell me about it!"
"What's wrong?" Mrs. Tilwinkle asked, even louder this time.
"Usually, magical resedues are just glimmers of light or a slight tremor through the air, sometimes just a guttural feeling saying this was what the person was looking for but never such a strong emotion," Wyatt explained to her, carefully stepping around the spot where the residue lingered. "This one is very unique because it's like the person left a part of them behind when they shimmered, more particularly their emotions."
"Well, do you know where the girl went?" Mrs. Tilwinkle asked.
Chris nodded slowly. "She was trying to orb to the Underworld."
"What? But whyever would she want to do that?" Mrs. Tilwinkle wondered. "Doesn't she know she's wanted by the demons?"
"She probably does," Wyatt replied.
"Then why—"
"We'll have to find her and ask her that, won't we," Chris replied, looking up. "It seems that when her attempt to orb out failed, she decided to orb somewhere else."
"The gates."
(0)
Seconds later, Chris and Wyatt both orbed to the entrance gates of the Magical School, landing on the wet grass on either side of the pathway leading out of the schools. They looked around, searching for someone, anyone, but there was no one on the grounds. "Well, let's start searching."
They didn't have to go quite far before Wyatt suddenly froze. Chris turned to him. "Did you find something?"
Wyatt's eyes narrowed. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I did."
"Well?"
"You keep searching. I'll be right back."
"Wait, Wyatt—"
But his brother had orbed out before Chris could say another word. He growled with frustration and continued walking through the grounds. "Daphne… Daphne… where are you?"
He fingered the bars of the giant metal doors guarding the entrance to the Magical School. She couldn't have been far from here when she shimmered—aha. There it was again, but this time, it was another emotion, one that was quite familiar to him by now—pure frustration and nothing more. He grinned. At least he wasn't the only one having a bad day…
He sighed and orbed directly to the library.
When he appeared there, it was to find the room in complete chaos. Several books were strewn about on the floor, their ancient pages hanging out, reminding him of the way cartoons portrayed dead people with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. Desks were overturned, their legs broken, pages were floating down from the ceiling where their former binding had abandoned them and an entire shelf on one wall had been torn down and now lay like a wooden platform on the ground on top of several books.
And the cause of all this chaos turned out to be five children.
"Get away, demon! I swear I'm gonna sock ya so good it—"
"Whoa!" Chris jumped out of the way as a candelabrum came flying through the air, straight at his head. He turned to the little boy—barely more than ten years of age—who had managed to orb it in such a lethal way. He heard a good thump behind him, signaling that the heavy metal object had hit the wall and probably left a sizely dent. "What the hell is your problem—"
"Aaah!" The child wailed, sending an ink pen at him… no, not at him, past him and toward the wall behind him. Chris frowned and turned around just to catch a shimmer of black behind him. As soon as the pet struck the wall and fell to the floor, life-less once more, the shimmer reappeared and, with it, a young woman, probably in her early twenties, with raven-black hair and wide blue eyes.
"You better stop that, kid! I swear I'll blow you up—"
One of the other kids in the room, a seven-year-old girl who had one of the morning classes with his dad, cried out in fear and sent one of the strewn books towards the woman, missing her by a mile with her still undeveloped, clumsy magic.
"Ariel, don't! I've got it," the first young boy shouted heroically. "Die, demon!"
"Hold it!" Chris yelled, intercepting a flaming candle and sending it straight back to the table the boy had taken it from. He turned to stop another book from the terrified girl, Ariel, then one of the broken legs from a desk that another kid had decided to use as a weapon. "All right, that's it! Stop this, now!"
The room fell into complete silence the next second and a hovering book plopped to the floor in mid-orb. Chris looked from one kid to the next—the leader-boy, the girl named Ariel, a nine-year-old boy he did not recognize, and two young muses covering behind a fallen desk. No wonder the ten-year-old boy had been so pumped with energy and inspiration, Chris thought with a slight shake of his head, he was probably filled with the un-controlled magic of the muses in their fear.
"Chris," the boy whispered. "There's a demon behind you."
"She's not a demon, Charlie," Chris replied.
"Thank you!"
Chris turned to shoot an annoyed look at Daphne, then turned back to the boy. "Now, go get the Elders and tell them to come clean up this mess, okay?"
The boy nodded and, with his friends, walked out of the room, shooting anxious looks towards them. When they were finally out of the room, Chris turned on her. "What the hell were you doing?"
She had the nerve to scoff at him. "Oh, so now this is my fault?"
Chris crossed his arms and looked at her. "Isn't it?"
"No!" She replied. "I just came in here to look for a book and that crazy boy decides to attack me!"
"You scared him… and the rest of the kids, including the muses. That's why he was attacking you."
"What, hasn't he ever seen a woman before?" She replied, sarcastically.
"Woman, yes, dark-lighter-demon, no."
She froze, watching him with her anxious blue eyes. "How did you know that?"
Chris sighed, knowing he didn't have the time or the patience to deal with this right now. Besides, explanations were never his thing. "Wyatt?" He called out. Nothing. He groaned—where the hell was his brother when he needed him?
"Who's Wyatt?"
"He's my brother and he was supposed to be here! Wyatt!"
"What!" Wyatt appeared a few feet away from him, looking even more irritated that Chris currently felt. That didn't please him. He had no right to be irritated—he hadn't had to deal with a group of crazy kids!
Then, his brother looked around the room and his irritation fell away. "What happened here?"
"I'll explain later. First business—I found Daphne, so we need to go talk to the Elders about what to do next—"
"How do you know my name?" Daphne interrupted. "Who are you people?"
"We're white-lighters," Chris shot back off-handedly, immediately turning back to his brother. "First, we need to wait here and explain what happened to the library."
"Um… what did happen to the library?" Wyatt asked.
"Three kids scared shitless, two muses who were also scared shitless, and one dark-lighter-demon who lacked the brains to realize that her demon shimmer would probably scare whoever was in the library."
"Listen here, mister!" Daphne started, taking a step towards Chris.
"But that's not the point!" Chris talked over her, not bothering to look at her. "The point is, we need to talk to the Elders and get out of here so we can handle the next set of crazy demons before they destroy the mansion."
"Mom's there, isn't she?" Wyatt shrugged.
"No, she's probably at the restaurant—"
Suddenly, Daphne disappeared with a growl of frustration and a dark shimmer. Chris and Wyatt, both completely caught by surprise, took several moments to follow her, both quite outraged by her actions but Chris far more than Wyatt. They orbed out of the room, following the trace of Daphne's shimmer, and reappeared in the long hallway in front of a familiar office just as Daphne burst through the doors.
"I need to get out of here!" They heard her say inside the office.
"Daphne, what are you doing here?" Leo asked her, caught off guard.
"She's being an idiot, that's what," Chris replied bursting through the doors after her. "She still doesn't realize that shimmering as she pleases through the halls of a magic school where untrained children are running about is not a good idea!"
"You know what," Daphne scoffed turning to him. "I don't really know who the hell you are but I would love to just blow you up!" She opened her hand at her side, conjuring a fireball in her palm.
"Oh, don't even go there!" Chris replied, finally glad to get the chance to vent his anger on someone. Within a second, he had an energy ball conjured also, ready to fire.
"Daphne!" Leo shouted.
"Chris!" Wyatt complimented his father.
Suddenly, the energy ball and the fireball both disappeared and reappeared in either of Leo's hands where he easily extinguished them. "What the hell is wrong with you guys?"
"For the millionth time, I need to get out of here!" Daphne replied, turning around. She slammed her hands down on Leo's desk and glared at him.
"Well, good, 'cuz I don't think I'd mind if you just go back to Hell! I'm sure your dad will be very happy and so will a lot of other people!" Chris replied.
Wyatt jumped in front of him, pushing him away from Daphne. "Chris, shut up!"
"Chris, you know she can't do that," Leo said to him in his stern, fatherly voice. "There's no way we can let you go back to the Underworld, Daphne."
"Do you think I'm stupid?" Daphne scoffed. "I don't want to go to the Underworld, I just want to get out of this hell!"
"Yeah, well, this hell is saving your ass from your father's fellow demons," Chris muttered quite loudly.
"Who are you? And how do you know about my father?" Daphne demanded. She turned back to Leo and said, "I thought this was supposed to be a secret. Did you tell everyone on the planet about my lineage?"
"Daphne, I did not tell everyone, just your protectors," Leo replied.
"Then how does he know about my dad?"
"Because I am your protector!" Chris groaned. Was she really that dense?
"What!"
"Daphne—"
"He's a boy, Leo!"
"Who are you calling a boy?" Chris challenged, taking an intimidating step towards her. Immediately, Wyatt pushed him back again, wondering if he had to tie him up… it wasn't a bad idea…
"For God's sake, Daphne, don't be ridiculous!" Leo tried reasoning with her. "He's three years older than you."
"Well, I guess that's not saying much, huh? Looking at her maturity-level—" Chris began but was silenced by identical glares from his father and brother.
"He's far more powerful than you can imagine and he and his brother can protect you," Leo returned to Daphne. "They've been doing this for years."
"What, dealing with dark-lighter-demons?" Daphne sneered, crossing her arms.
"No, dealing with immature children," Chris replied. It was slightly true… growing up with all those cousins who were all younger than them.
"Oh, it's actually witty!" Daphne laughed sarcastically.
"Okay! Everybody, shut up!" Leo yelled very loudly, shocking everyone into silence. "Wyatt, Chris leaves the room right now! Daphne, sit down and stop looking at me like you're going to murder me because I can assure you that the moment I hear one more person yelling any sort of snide comment, I'll be the first to kill them!"
For twenty-five years, Leo had raised Chris. In fact, Chris had known Leo even longer than that since he went back in time to change the future and had met his father and mother then. Never in all this time had he seen his dad be so angry or authoritative. As he left the room with Wyatt behind him, he thought of how he'd probably never look at his father the same way again.
The door shut behind them and they were left in silence. Until Wyatt looked up at him with a look that very simply said, 'you idiot'.
"What?" Chris demanded. Then, not bothering to wait for a reply, he walked away from him, not knowing exactly where he was going, but knowing that wherever he went, the day was only going to get worse.
(0)
"Daphne, listen to me. You are far safer with Chris and Wyatt than you'll ever be by yourself," Leo said softly to the woman before him. "They are very powerful."
"It doesn't matter, Leo. No matter how powerful they are, it doesn't matter because I know they can't take on all the demons of the Underworld, they're not that powerful," Daphne replied earnestly. "Trust me, I've grown up around them."
"Well, trust me. I know how powerful they are. I've witnessed them go up against demons all their life. They're really good at what they do, Daphne. Let them protect you."
"I don't need protection," Daphne lied through her teeth.
Leo raised a single eyebrow at her. "I'll ignore that statement since we both know it's false."
"He's my father, Leo. I don't need to be protected from my father."
"But you do need to be protected from the Nemritzar Demon—"
"Who happens to be my father," Daphne pointed out.
"And also your mortal enemy."
"Aye, there's the rub," Daphne sighed.
Leo grinned. "Are you quoting Shakespeare?"
"Oh, yeah… you know. I saw him on one of my spying-trips through Heaven and he struck me as a witty fella'," she shrugged, then grinned. Leo laughed.
A silence followed during which Daphne took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Does it have to be someone who hates me?"
"What?"
"My protectors," Daphne replied.
"They don't hate you—"
Daphne scoffed.
"—You just got off on the wrong foot," Leo amended her delicately. "They've been having a rough week, what with all the demons attacking, trying to find you and stuff."
"Huh… they've been having a rough week?" She asked him, incredulous. "Try my week!"
"And you'll have a great competition going on," Leo agreed. "Still, they're not really used to protecting dark-lighters or demons, much less a combination of the two."
"Well, I'm not used to being protected by white-lighters either."
"Oh, and they're also part witches," Leo told her.
"And the surprises keep building up," Daphne reflected.
Leo smiled. "You will be safe with them, I can assure you."
Daphne rolled her eyes. "I know… just not very happy, huh?"
"If you start off thinking like that, then no, I suppose not."
"Well, like you said, we did start off on the wrong foot."
It was an hour later that Chris and Wyatt orbed into their father's office upon his call. His head far cooler, Chris took a seat in front of Leo as his brother did the same. "So, what's the verdict," he asked. "Are we still protecting her or did she decide to just wing it in the Underworld?"
"You're protecting her," Leo confirmed.
"And here I was… so hopeful," Chris muttered softly.
"What was that?"
"Nothing," Chris replied. "So you just want us to take her back to the mansion or something?" He asked, ready to get up and leave.
"Actually, I wanted you to take her by Aunt Phoebe's place first. There's a… surprise waiting for you three."
Chris frowned. "Dad, I don't like surprises."
"Yeah, and I don't think you'll like this one at all, but," Leo looked at both his sons with a large grin that told them he didn't want to ruin it for them, "it's for the greater good, remember that. I'm late for my next class."
With that, Leo had orbed out of the room. Chris and Wyatt looked at each other. "That's not good."
"No," Wyatt agreed.
The doors opened behind them and Daphne came in, dressed in a pair of baggy jeans and an even baggier sweatshirt. "Are we ready to leave, boys?"
Chris stared at her outfit. "Why are you dressed like that?"
"It's the only human-outfit I have," Daphne replied with a slight edge to her voice. "They're Leo's."
"He's right… we do need to get her to Aunt Phoebe's," Wyatt whispered.