A/N: Hi guys, so sorry for the delay! It was a mix of a bunch of life stuff coming at me at once, and also making some last minute changes to my story outline that tripped me up for awhile. I think I have it worked out, but I had to split up this chapter in two parts, so final chapter count could end up at 31 instead of 30! Either way, I'll try to get back to more regular posting, but I have been having to work weekends and lots of overtime, which sort of kills the muses.

"The Clan of the Phoenix," Phoebe echoed. "But…aren't they sort of…you know…evil?"

"We're neutral," Bianca snapped, before glancing away. "And I actually don't know what's happened to my clan since I left. If they struck a new deal with Wyatt, or…"

"Or what?" Paige asked.

"Or if just he killed them," Bianca admitted reluctantly.

"So…and I'm not trying to mean here," Phoebe started, "but either they're working for Wyatt, or they're dead? Because this isn't sounding like the best plan ever, just saying."

"No Phoenix has ever betrayed another," Bianca insisted sharply. "At the very least, they won't turn us in, even if they do turn us away. And if they help us, we have protections in place not even Wyatt knows about. It might be enough to hide us, and I really don't see that we have much choice."

"You're right, we don't, and we need to move quickly," Chris agreed, trying to push himself out of Bianca's hold and back to his feet. She quickly reached out to steady him. "As soon as Wyatt realizes his spell didn't work, he'll try something else."

"Okay, what the heck," Paige decided. "Henry, can you pass me the Shillelagh?"

"Twenty years of marriage," he muttered as he grabbed the staff up off the ground, "still hasn't stopped being weird."

Paige just rolled her eyes and grabbed it from him, before turning to Bianca. "Okay, this isn't like orbing, or shimmering," she explained. "Whoever casts the spell has to be thinking of the place they want to be, which means you'll have to do it."

Bianca eyed the staff with suspicion, and made no move to take it. "Phoenixes don't really mix well with other magic," she said. "We tend to cancel it out. Bad things happen."

Chris stepped up beside her and took the staff from his aunt. "Well, I may be powerless, but I can still cast a spell, and I know where to go," he told them with a shrug. He looked at Paige. "It's just Go n-eiri an bothar leat, right?"

In answer, a shimmering rainbow appeared in front of them, shaped rather like a tiny door. Chris glanced down to eye it carefully.

"Guess so," Paige agreed. "It's been awhile since I've done this myself."

"We just…walk in there?" Henry asked warily. Bianca seemed to agree with him, but Phoebe just bit her lip and walked straight through it. Paige grabbed Henry, while Chris took Bianca's hand, and they followed her in.

They spilled back out the other side, appearing right in the middle of an expansive, dying lawn. The brown grass looked like it had been that way for awhile, and it didn't really match the beautiful white mansion that sat right in the middle of it.

"This is the Clan of the Phoenix?" Paige asked. The mansion could use a little upkeep maybe, but it wasn't at all what she'd been expecting. "I thought it would be a cave or something. Like, animal skin rugs and—"

"My clan stopped living in caves about the same time as yours," Bianca told her coolly, before muttering, "probably before."

"I just meant, it's a nice place," Paige said, conciliatorily. "Very Richey Rich…meets Wuthering Heights."

"It was a present," Bianca said. "From Wyatt."

Chris tightened his grip on her hand. "Bianca," he said, nodding towards the house.

"Yes, I saw," she said.

"Saw?" Phoebe asked anxiously. "Saw what?"

"No one's been here for awhile," Bianca explained, pulling herself free from Chris's hand to head up the front steps. She examined the door for a moment. The vines that had been planted along the trellises had long since overgrown, spilling up around and through the door. It had been left open, she realized, and the vines had begun to crawl inside.

She knew exactly what that meant, but she could still feel her family's magic in the walls of this place, and it kept her from turning back around. She pushed open the door and carefully stepped into the white marble entryway, the Halliwells following close behind her.

"What happened here?" Paige asked quietly.

The mansion looked, for the most part, intact. Nothing was broken, or shattered, just a little dusty. There were spider webs wound around the corners of the room, but the floors were almost spotless. It looked untouched.

Bianca ignored her, turning to look at the double doors to her right. It led to the library, one of her uncle's favorite rooms. He had been the head of the family, and when she was young, she had looked up to him. He had always taken an interest in her, would buy her dresses and give her charms whenever she came to visit him.

Then, of course, he had sold her off to Wyatt.

She stepped away from Chris and towards the library doors, pulled there by a kind of sixth sense.

"Bianca," Chris called after her. She knew he would know what she was going to find. He would understand. But he could not help her with this.

She pushed the doors open, and there was her family. Her uncle was still at his desk, laid across its surface with his sunken eye sockets turned towards the door. They'd all been left where they died, as far as she could tell. Their blood painted the walls with strange, crescent patterns, that told the story of a massacre. If she had to make a guess, she'd guess they were caused by Excalibur.

The second thing she noticed was that all of the books were missing from the many shelves: taken, no doubt, for Wyatt's own collection.

Apparently the books were all that he saw worth taking, because he'd left everything else where it was. She saw a pair of her cousins lying against the back wall, holding hands. They would have only been thirteen or fourteen when they died, depending on how soon after her betrayal Wyatt had come after the rest of them.

"Oh my god," Paige whispered from behind her.

Her favorite aunt was upright against the doorway. She'd been pinned to the wall by an athame through the heart. Bianca guessed, by the rate of the decay, that they had been dead almost all three years.

So Wyatt hadn't given them another offer, then.

"Well, that explains why there weren't any guards," she said faintly.

"Why…why would he just leave them like this?" Phoebe whispered in horror.

"Wyatt wanted her to find them," Chris explained softly. "He wanted her to come here, to see them."

"He probably expected me to find them years ago," Bianca said, and then she pulled the doors shut. Her expression remained blank. "It's too bad about the books, though. They might have been of some use."

"Bianca," Chris started.

"Don't," she snapped. "I'm fine. I expected this. It doesn't change anything, this is still the best place for us to hide. Wyatt won't think to look for us here."

"Probably because it's a really bad idea," Paige said. "He's probably left enchantments—"

"No, my family's wards haven't been broken," she said stiffly. "I'm sure they invited Wyatt right in. He never had any reason to break them."

She could imagine it happening: her uncle had always been so solicitous of Wyatt Halliwell. Isn't he charming, Bianca, dear? he used to ask her. Play your cards right, and maybe you'll be more than just his best assassin.

They probably brought him into the library for tea, and then at a pause in the conversation, Wyatt might have set his teacup gently upon the desk, so he could kill them all. The world's best assassins, all in one room, and he had killed them before they could even fight back.

"I still don't see how this can be safe—" Phoebe started.

"Because we aren't staying here, exactly," Bianca explained impatiently. "My family brought a sort of…safe house with them, in case they ever needed to hide. Even Wyatt doesn't know about it, and with any luck, it'll be enough to protect us."

"Bianca's magic can't be detected, even by Wyatt," Chris added. "And if he had laid any enchantments of his own, their wards would have broken. This was never intended as a trap. It was meant to be a….lesson."

"He probably thought I'd come running back to him," Bianca said softly. "Beg for forgiveness. Beg to be taken back."

"Bianca—" Chris tried again.

"We're not all going to survive this," Bianca said, glancing over at Chris with burning eyes. "You know that, right?"

"We couldn't have known he would come after them," he said. "They were his best—I thought for sure he would have offered them a new deal."

Chris had been so certain Wyatt wouldn't sacrifice them all. He just kept on thinking his brother wouldn't do these things, and he just kept on getting surprised.

"You can't save everyone, Christopher, and the more you try, the more people we're gonna lose," Bianca snapped, and she hadn't called him that for years, not since they still lived with Wyatt. "Sooner or later, you're going to have to make a choice. Just like I made mine."

He reached out to gently try and grab her arm, but she sidestepped him, and wouldn't meet his eyes. "I need to reinforce the wards. Just…stay here."

Bianca quickly fled up the spiral staircase, though she could have accessed the wards just as easily from below. Chris watched her go before letting out a murmured curse, and dragging his hand through his hair.

"How can she be so…cold?" Paige asked, as she watched the Phoenix disappear up the stairs.

Chris turned to glare at her. "She risked her entire clan to save you," he said. "She was ordered to kill you and Phoebe, the day Prue died. She disobeyed him, and tried to save you instead. She did it even though she knew Wyatt might do this."

Paige's expression softened, and Chris relented, because none of this was her fault. "We never even tried to contact them. We thought Wyatt might have left them out of it, or offered them another deal. We couldn't be certain whether or not they were still working for him, so we couldn't risk warning them. I guess we should have."

"This isn't your fault," Phoebe told him. "I'm sure she knows that."

"Bianca wants Wyatt dead," Chris said simply. "And I'm…well, I'm the reason that he's not."

"Because you can't kill him," she realized.

Chris laughed, and looked away. "I can try my hardest to help people, and I do what I can, but I know it isn't enough. I know everything I've done has been for nothing," he said. "Because the only thing that will stop him is if I kill him. And that's the one thing I can't do."

"What if we just contained him?" Henry asked hopefully. He was still a believer in rehabilitation, Chris suspected, but he knew his brother better. Whatever had made Wyatt the way he was, it wasn't going to be that simple to fix. It would take a miracle to save his brother, and he had searched for one for years. He had even tracked down an Ancient cult of demons called The Order, intending to steal a wand they had that could reverse the morality of any being.

He only found dust in their temple—it turned out Wyatt had vanquished all of them years before he even became Lord Wyatt, and had destroyed whatever they had left behind.

"There isn't anything that can contain Wyatt," he finally answered. His brother had put him in an escape proof cell, and Chris had managed to get out by using just the tiny fragment of Wyatt's magic that had been placed in that truth bracelet.

Wyatt himself could have escaped that cell without any help at all.

"There's always something," Henry insisted. "Some magic urn, or some enchanted box. I've been around this stuff for awhile, and for every undefeatable power, there's something to defeat it. Usually that something looks like it came from Pottery Barn, but still."

Chris pressed his eyes shut. He had often suspected that he was the thing that could stop Wyatt: he was the counterweight, he was the opposite power. It wasn't that he was as strong, because no one was, it was just that he was the only one that could get beneath Wyatt's defenses.

Sometimes he worried he was only made to stop his brother: You will be the catalyst of the destruction, that prophetess had told him. He still wasn't really sure what it might mean.

"I don't think I could lock him up like that, either, you'd probably have to lock me up right there with him," Chris said. "I just can't…I can't do that to him. Bianca has never really understood that. I don't know that I completely understand it myself."

"He's your brother," Phoebe offered hesitantly. "Chris, we get it, we don't want him dead either."

"Yes we do," Paige said simply.

"Okay, yes, we do a little bit," Phoebe admitted with a wince. "But, honey, no one expects it of you."

"Who else is there?" he asked quietly.

"If it has to be done, I'll be the one to do it," Paige said firmly. "You're not in this alone."

He glanced over at his aunt, and he wasn't sure what to say to that. He appreciated her support, but his desire to keep his brother alive went further than just not wanting to be the one to kill him.

He didn't think he'd be able to stand by and let her do it, either. If he had to choose, and Bianca thought he would, he wasn't certain he would choose his aunts over Wyatt. He'd never hurt them, but he might try to stop them, and really, wasn't that the same thing?

And Bianca? he wondered. Would he choose her, or his brother?

He'd give his life for Bianca, there was no doubt about that, and he wanted so much to tell himself it wasn't even a choice, because of course he'd choose her.

But if it came down to it, if there was a moment he had to make a decision and Wyatt was in danger, his ingrained response had always been to save his brother.

Sometimes Chris was scared of himself, and he wondered, as much as he had become Perry, if there was just a little bit of Lord Christopher left over that he'd never quite be able to shake.

"Chris?" Phoebe said softly, and Chris cursed to himself.

He supposed he didn't need to say anything after all. He'd forgotten that he was in the room with the world's strongest empath.

"It's okay, you know," Phoebe said. "It's okay to love your brother."

"Even at the expense of everyone else?" he asked.

Not even Phoebe, the aunt with all the answers, had a response for that.

Chris turned away from his family, needing to get some distance from Henry and Paige's too sharp gazes and Phoebe's all-knowing glances. He wasn't used to having to deal with them, he'd been so long without them. He headed after Bianca instead, and started down the long, open hallway after reaching the top of the stairs.

He opened all the doors he passed by. He wasn't sure what he expected—more corpses and more blood, or demons laying in wait—but all he found were perfectly made up rooms, all of them almost entirely untouched.

He stopped at a large room at the end of the hall. The windows at the back had been left open, and the vines along the house had crawled inside. The sunlight washed over the faded, purple floral bedspread in strange patterns.

Bianca was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the floor.

"This used to be my room," Bianca said quietly. "I never lived here, they just felt guilty, so they said this one was mine."

He stepped towards her, ready to apologize, but she was already moving past him and back into the hall. "I reinforced wards," she said. "They're all working. They should block out even Wyatt's magic, assuming it's not directed specifically at us. He finds out where we are, and all bets are off."

"Well, we knew it would be too dangerous to stay here long," he said.

Bianca laughed, turning to look back at him, her mouth twisted up in a smirk. "And just how long do you really think we have?" She stepped closer. "We always knew we were going to lose. Admit it, Chris. You've known it all along. Because Wyatt always wins, right? That's what you think. You think you can't defeat him, so guess what: you won't."

"What is it that you really want from me?" he asked.

"I want you to fight!" she shouted. "That's what we said, do you even remember? No more running, that's what you said. And we've been running, ever since."

She clenched her hands to fists, and glanced up at him, her eyes reflecting both anger and sadness, all of it so completely mixed together that he couldn't tell the emotions apart. "It's not that you can't beat Wyatt, Chris. It's just that you won't."

Chris thought about Bianca's family downstairs. He had never really known them, because they were not on his brother's list of approved acquaintances for him, and they were never trustworthy enough to approach as Perry. He didn't know them, but they were Bianca's, and even if they weren't, even if he knew nothing about them at all, there were children in that room.

His brother had killed children: brutally, efficiently. He remembered Henry talking to him once, about a crime scene he'd been visiting. The killer had covered the faces of his victims, and Henry had told him it had been a sign of remorse.

Wyatt had slaughtered that family, and then left without looking back. No remorse.

"If I can't save him," Chris said promised softly, "then I will stop him."

Chris knew it would probably kill him too, but that wouldn't matter. He had thought for so long that Bianca didn't understand, that she didn't realize his connection to Wyatt—but he's the one that's been avoiding the truth. There might not be enough of Wyatt left to save.

And if Chris couldn't save his brother, then he would have to destroy them both.

"Chris," Bianca said, her voice sounding too broken, too unlike her, "you can't save him."

"There might still be a way," he insisted. "There's still hope, Bianca. I can't…I will do what I have to. I just need to wait until I'm sure there's nothing else I can do."

Bianca sighed. "Okay," she said. "I don't want fight, so…okay. We can leave it at that, for now." She looked up to meet his eyes. "And I'm sorry, about before. I don't blame for you this."

"You have nothing to apologize for," he told her quickly, closing the distance between them. "We both know you haven't said anything that isn't true."

"Still, you're not responsible for the things he's done, and I shouldn't take it out on you," she insisted. "I don't have anyone to blame for what happened to my family but me."

"Actually, I'm pretty sure this can all be traced back to me," Chris countered.

She gave a faint grin. "Really, you want to do this?" she asked. "Because the way I remember it, I'm the one that took you out of Wyatt's palace to try and save your aunts. If I'd just done what he wanted, and left you there, my family would be safe, you would be safe. I'd be safe."

"And my family would be dead," Chris finished.

"Yes," she agreed. "So, you see, it's really not so simple, is it?" She turned to look at Chris carefully. "How about we do something crazy, and start blaming the one actually responsible?"

"I told you, at the start, that I had to try everything I could to save him," he reminded her.

"We were children at the start, we were stupid," she said firmly. "This is all there is, this is what's left, and he's taking it from us. We might still make something of this world, together. We might have a chance, if we can stop him. But we're not even trying!"

He pulled her into a hug just as she was about to collapse, and she fell into him, silent as she held back all of her tears.

"You know I'd die for you, right?" he asked, as he held her close.

She nodded against him. "And I'd die for you, but I don't think it means as much as you think it does. Dying is easy, Chris, anyone can do it," she said, as she pulled away. "It's living that's hard."

Andrew tracked Sabine down to one of the lower levels, his invisibility wrapped around him like a cloak. He suspected that his singular talent was the very reason that Wyatt had kept him around—he made for a wonderful spy, and it often made up for areas where he'd fallen short.

But he knew better than to be too certain of himself, where Sabine was concerned.

Sabine was dangerous in some way he hadn't quite managed to pin down. The obvious answer was her ever-changing power, the way she could burn someone to dust with a look one week, and flay them alive with a flick of her hand the next. She was always unpredictable, and her talents made that unpredictability dangerous in an extreme.

If it had been up to Andrew, she would have been put down years ago—but Wyatt had never been scared of Sabine. She amused him. She kept things interesting, so he kept her around.

He was grateful that Wyatt's lenience for her was finally running out. She had finally fallen from grace, and Andrew had never seen Sabine looking so unlike herself.

Her hair was still stuck to her skull in dampened clumps, and her singed clothes were half falling off her. It was odd to see her looking like such a mess, but satisfying, he decided with a grin. She was coming well and truly undone.

As he watched her, she moved to lean against the wall, writing on the stone surface with the jerky, frantic movements of a small, silver pen.

Wyatt knows. Have information you need. Send help.

And there it was, he decided, all the proof he needed. It was sad, though, in a way, to see someone as clever as Sabine fall so far. Andrew let his invisibility slip away, as he stepped out into the light behind her.

"You're looking a bit less well put together than usual, Sabine," he told her wryly.

Sabine froze, spinning the pen in her hand, half-glancing back at him, though she did not turn fully around.

"You really think anyone is going to come for you?" he asked, sneering at her desperate message for help.

Sabine smiled slowly, finally turning around. "No," she admitted. "But then, the message wasn't really meant for them. It was for you. Had to give you something to draw you out, didn't I?"

Too late, Andrew remembered the power she currently held. The ice had already crept up from the ground and was on him, crawling half up his legs, trapping him in place. Sabine tilted her head, watching him carefully. He'd let her appearance deceive him, when he really should have known better.

"You're always so over-eager, Andrew," she tsked. "Always showing your hand before you should. I bet Wyatt asked you to watch me until you had something concrete, am I right? And you think you caught me, just because I wrote on the wall with some enchanted pen?"

She held up the little silver pen, and then tossed it to him. He reached out to snatch it from the air. "Go ahead and take it," she said. "You can run back to master with it just as soon as I'm done with you. But it won't do either of you a bit of good."

She stepped closer, tilting her eyes back towards the pen. "I've already spent years trying to trace its messages back to the source," she said. "It can't be done. It's useless."

"Just because you cannot do it, does not mean that Wyatt won't," he snarled.

"Because he is all-powerful?" she asked innocently. "Except, he's really, really not. If he were, Perry and his petty little resistance wouldn't exist. But the little wannabe Robin Hood has been running circles around Wyatt since the start."

"Is that why you joined him?" Andrew demanded.

She laughed. "Is that what you think? You should know me better."

"What is the purpose of this then, Sabine?" Andrew asked. "You know you can't escape from here. Maybe you can kill me, but he'll still kill you."

"Perhaps," she said. "But he'll do that anyway. The question is: just how much might I be able to accomplish, between then and now?"

"You're not going to accomplish anything," Andrew snapped. "Wyatt is King, do you remember? The world is his. You made yourself obsolete the moment you moved against him."

"Everyone's always so concerned with Wyatt," Sabine said, watching Andrew with her cold, green eyes. "But it's not him that worries me. It's the other one. The Halliwells are going to tear this world in two between them, and I'm the only one that sees it."

"So?" Andrew asked. "I don't really care what they do to the world. Since when do you?"

"Since it means I'm going to suffer," Sabine explained.

"Ah," Andrew said wryly. "So you fall out of favor with Wyatt, and now you're looking to join the other side? Is that it?"

"You think I'm scared of Wyatt?" she asked. "The worst he can do is kill me. Well, torture me horribly, and then kill me, but still. I can handle that. I'm a demon. We don't fear death—that's just job relocation."

"Then what is this about?" he demanded with a frown.

"Something worse than death is coming for us all," she said. "I've been trying for years to stop it, but it adapts to every change I make, and it keeps coming." She turned back around to glance at the message on the wall. "I was working with the Resistance to try and find the catalyst, that's all. I need to find him, and kill him, or he will destroy us all."

"The catalyst," Andrew said slowly. "Have you seen some prophecy? Is that what this is? Because Wyatt is the Twice-Blessed. Any prophecy you've seen, it'll be second to his."

"There are prophecies, yes," Sabine agreed. "I would not be so quick to dismiss them, because they will determine the fate of us all. There's only one move left for me to make, before we're all lost. The collapse of the barriers between the worlds, the return of Christopher Halliwell…these are the last omens before the end."

"You've completely lost your mind, haven't you?" he asked.

"It's entirely possible," Sabine agreed. "But we all go to great lengths for survival, and I am fighting for my very existence."

She stepped back towards Andrew, moving closer. "Now," she said. "You have something that I need."

She reached out and placed a hand against his heart, flashing him a parting smirk right before disappearing before his eyes.

Bianca led the way back down the stairs, Chris following sedately behind her. Paige, Henry and Phoebe were all waiting for them at the bottom, with Paige looking less than pleased.

"I feel like a sitting duck," she snapped when they reached her. "Wyatt could find us any minute. We need to—"

"Uh, Paige, honey," Phoebe said slowly, reaching out to grab Paige's arm and pull her a few feet away. "Something's, um…"

Words began to appear along the floor, written in large silver lettering. Paige stumbled back further as they started to stretch across the marble beneath her feet, falling back into Phoebe and Henry.

Chris and Bianca just watched as the message appeared on the ground before them.

Wyatt knows. Have information you need. Send help.

Bianca glanced over at Chris. "Do we do anything?" she asked, looking less than thrilled at the prospect.

Chris snorted as he read the message. "No."

"Uh, guys?" Phoebe started. "Why don't you seem too concerned that writing has just magically appeared on the floor?"

"It's how we communicate with our contact in Wyatt's regime," Chris explained. "We gave her an enchanted pen. She can write a message, and it will appear wherever we are. She can't trace it back to us, we can't trace it back to her, it just sends the message."

"Which was great, because we could never trust her not to sell us all out," Bianca explained.

"Neat idea," Paige said, leaning down to run her fingers over the silvered lettering.

Bianca glanced at her. "It was Chris's. He made the pens when he started the resistance. Used them to communicate for years while fooling us all."

Chris tossed Bianca a narrow-eyed look at the back-handed compliment.

"Won't Wyatt kill your contact if we don't help?" Phoebe asked.

"Probably," Chris said, unconcerned, as he leaned over to check on the message. The words on the floor had already started to fade, getting fainter until they disappeared. "I'm not exactly going to lose sleep over it."

"She's evil," Bianca explained. "She only helped us because she got a kick out of screwing over Wyatt. Trust me, she more than deserves anything she gets."

"She said she has information, though," Phoebe pointed out.

"It doesn't matter," Chris shrugged. "It's not like we could save her, even if we wanted to. She's smart enough she probably knows it, so I'm surprised she even bothered to contact us and give us the head's up."

"Are you sure Wyatt can't track this message?" Paige asked. "What if this is some kind of trap?"

"If it's a trap, he's wildly overestimating how much Sabine means to us," Chris said. "Even if Wyatt has caught her, she can't tell him anything he doesn't already know. We were very careful to keep any vital information well out of her hands."

"Anyway, let Wyatt come if he wants, because we won't be here," Bianca said, moving around to the other side of the staircase. She stopped in front of an elegantly framed vertical mirror. It was mounted on the wall beside the staircase, its frame touching the floor, its top halfway to the ceiling. "None of us ever trusted Wyatt, so when he forced us all to move here, we brought a little something with us."

"A mirror?" Phoebe asked bemusedly. "It's lovely….but what's it do?"

Bianca smirked. "Phoenix magic is mostly defensive. We're good at disappearing, it's why we make such good assassins. If there's one place in the world Wyatt won't be able to track us, it's through here."

"Through the mirror?" Paige asked warily, leaning past Bianca to look at it. She saw her reflection, and the wall behind them. It looked just exactly like a regular mirror. "What if Wyatt comes here, and just destroys the mirror?"

"There are other ways out, but this is the only way in," she said simply, before pushing back her sleeve to reveal her tattoo. She held up her hand, letting the mirror capture the reflection of the Phoenix on her wrist.

The reflection of the small bird stayed imprinted on the mirror, even after Bianca lowered her hand.

"Follow me," she said, and stepped through the reflection and disappeared.

Paige glanced over at Chris. "Are you sure about this?" she asked.

"I'm sure of Bianca," he said, and then stepped through after her.

Paige and Henry followed a moment later, Phoebe tumbling in after them. They immediately fell out the other side, and looked around themselves in disbelief. Behind them was a mirror on a wall, one that looked exactly like the one they had walked through, except this one had a silver frame, instead of gold.

Paige turned back around, and there was the mansion's entranceway, exactly the same as the one they came through, except that the marble covering this room was black and not white.

"Okay, this is weird," Paige said. "We're—where are we?"

"It's like everything's been inverted," Chris said, as he moved up the first few steps of the staircase, and glanced up to the hallways above.

"Sort of," Bianca agreed. "I'm not entirely sure how the magic works, but we're in the same place, we're just not on the same plane."

"And you don't think Wyatt can find us here?" Phoebe asked warily.

"I don't know, to be honest," Bianca said. "But we're not in the same world as he is, at the moment. The power to search other planes, to find someone across dimensions—well, if he can do that, then there's no where that would be safe, anyway."

Chris turned back to look at the front doors. "Can we leave through there?" he asked.

"Yes," Bianca said. "But it'll take us back to the regular world, and you'd appear on the real front lawn. We have to stay inside the house, or we'll be outside the bounds of the spell."

Chris nodded, before glancing at his family. They looked like they were trying to hide it, but he could tell how tired everyone was. "I think we should all get some sleep, while we can," he said. "Bianca, is there somewhere they can go?"

"There's bedrooms everywhere, thirty people lived here, once," Bianca shrugged, as she started towards the stairs. "They can sleep wherever they want."

She turned back and held her hand out to Chris in invitation. He reached out and grabbed it, but looked back again towards his family. "Will you guys be alright?" he asked.

"We're fine," Phoebe said, smiling sadly. "I think we'll all be feeling better in the morning."

Chris nodded and let Bianca lead him up the stairs to her bedroom. The deep purple bedspread that had been there before was now a light yellow, and the window shudders were closed to block out any sign of the sun.

"This is an amazing place," Chris said in awe. "Your clan was brilliant, Bianca."

"And I'm the last one," she said. "All that history, all that power, and all that's left is me."

"Bianca—" he started, but she just shook her head, letting go of his hand and stepping away.

"Do you ever just want to give in?" she asked him.

"All the time," Chris answered quietly.