AN: Hey!! Your guys' reviews are really wonderful, I can't thank you enough. But I gotta go, so I'll have to wrap this note short and let you to it. Thanks again!
Chapter 8
OoO He's Back! OoO
Leo slammed the door of his SUV closed, about to turn the engine on, when he realized that his legs would get him to the Halliwell manor faster.
Getting out, he started running down the street.
Within a minute he was climbing their steps of the front porch.
He let himself in, and headed towards the living room where the light appeared to be on.
In the living room, Leo spotted Rob talking to Paige who looked worried and quite frightened, and a few feet from them were Phoebe and Dr. Gravy, both standing above Piper who was in a chair, cuddled with a blanket.
He walked straight to her.
Her hair was still wet, and she had a fresh bruise across her forehead, making her seem miserable.
"What the hell happened?" Leo asked as soon as he approached her.
She looked up at him, and so did the other people in the room.
"Someone pushed her into the river! They were spying on us and she went looking and she didn't come back for ten minutes so we went to look and we couldn't fine her and..." Paige was talking fast and Leo only got the 'pushed into the river' part, which he already knew.
Instead, he looked back down at Piper.
"Are you ok?" He asked.
She nodded.
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"You look like hell." He stated, because she did.
"Is she ok?" He asked, this time directing it to Dr. Gravy.
"She'll be fine. Some rest will do the trick." Gravy said, putting a bandaged he had prepared on Piper's forehead.
"Now, what the hell happened? I thought I told you to stay away from the river, I wasn't kidding." Leo said, trying not to get angry.
"It's our fault, we asked her to go over and look who it was..." Phoebe started, looking down to her feet.
"Who it was?" Leo asked.
"Yeah, we saw someone across the river, and Piper went to check. She didn't come back for long and when we went looking and didn't find her we started asking the neighbors if they saw her. Soon the Adams who live a few houses away ran out and said they found her passed out by the river."
"So Phoebe called me and I got Dr. Gravy here." Rob finished.
Leo was looking back down at Piper again, who was making invisible circles with her finger on the texture of the blanket wrapped around her.
"Did you see who pushed you?" He asked her, his voice calmer then before.
She looked up and shook her head no.
"Damn it Piper, you shouldn't have gone anywhere near that thing. Five people were killed in the history of Lustville, all of them drowned in that river." Leo said, pointing towards their back yard, towards the Deadly Lustville River, as people came to call it in the last hundred years.
Again, she looked away, this time to the direction of the river.
"And you two should stop relying on your sister to do the dirty work for you." Leo said, getting confused looks from Phoebe and Paige who first looked at Leo, then at each other, then their older sister and finally back to the floor.
Rob sent Leo a look, and turned to Phoebe. He really did like that girl.
But Leo had other things on his mind.
Phoebe and Paige started arguing about whose fault it was, while Rob was trying to say something reasonable to the two, and Dr. Gravy was trying to give instructions on how to heal fast.
Piper who didn't seem to enjoy the situation any more then Leo did, just set and looked blankly at the floor.
Leo first put a hand on her shoulder, catching her attention, then put his other hand out to her, and after a few seconds she let him pull her up and they walked out to the back yard, sitting down on a bench.
"That thing you said about my sisters was really inappropriate Leo, it's hardly their fault." Piper said.
"Well, they should start realizing that you can't do everything for them." Leo insisted.
She didn't say anything about that, and he knew she'd actually like that too.
"There were two of them." She said after a few minutes.
"Two what?"
"I was heading back home, but then I heard someone and turned around to see if there was someone there, and I know there was, I swear I heard it behind me. But then someone pushed me from the other side, which means there must have been someone else there too." Piper said.
"That fucker." Leo said, out loud unlike he intended to.
"You know who it is?" Piper asked, surprised.
"It's Frank Tucker; he must have come there with one of his pool buddies." Leo hissed, wishing he'd had Frank's neck between his fingers.
"But... why would he want to spy on us? And then try and kill me?" Piper asked, but Leo didn't have a good enough answer.
"I don't know, I don't know... he's probably trying to get back at me... He wants that sheriff spot very badly. Like every other Tucker." Leo said.
Piper sighed in response.
When he next looked at her, Piper had her hand over her forehead, and looked somewhat dazed.
"Hey, you're ok, right?" He asked.
"You know, this thing really hurts." She said, and Leo started feeling completely selfish.
"I'm just thankful you're alive enough to feel the pain. When Rob told me you were pushed into the river, I didn't think there was a chance you were still alive." As he said it, her lips curled into a small smiled.
"Got you worried, sheriff?"
"Worried as hell, Vilma. Don't do it again." He said, seriously.
She nodded.
"You look beaten. Go get some sleep." He told her, and she nodded again.
He ushered her upstairs to her room, and made sure she was safe in bed before driving away to the station with Rob.
He couldn't help but worry, now after what happened. She didn't look half as strong and determined. She just curled under the sheets like a sick little puppy and didn't say a thing.
"You really think Frank is behind this?" Rob asked.
"I have no doubt on that one. No one in town hates Piper or the rest of the sisters enough to push them into the Lustville River, not unless they hate me, and that would defiantly be Frank." Leo said confidently.
"What if whoever it was just got scared that Piper went out to look for him; they overreacted and pushed her in out of shock?" Rob offered, but didn't sound like he believed that theory much.
"We'll take that idea into consideration, but I highly doubt it."
"You want to go pay a Frank a visit now, or should we leave it to the morning?" Rob asked.
"Nah, I don't want him to think we're on his tail. I want to see if he shows up at P3 tomorrow night, and we'll take it from there."
Rob nodded.
"How was Piper?" Rob asked after a few.
"Pretty shaken. Can't blame her." Leo said, remembering Piper's overly pale face.
"No, you can't. She's lucky though. The only one to survive the Deadly River..."
"Robert, we used to swim in that thing every day back in the school days."
"Not in this time of the year, and not in that part of the river." Rob said, and Leo knew he was right.
Somehow, the thought that Piper was so close to death literally scared him. He came to care for that woman in the past two weeks, and loosing her so suddenly seemed unfair.
He remembered the wired question she asked him earlier that night; 'What are we doing?'
He said they were having 'fun'. Now that he thought of it, it probably wasn't nearly the best answer to a question of that kind. He made himself a mental note to talk to Piper when the time will be right.
But for now, he had to start an investigation on Piper's attacker, hopefully without the whole town hearing about it.
The next morning, however, his hopes went down the drain when by ten am the whole town had already heard that Piper was attacked, assaulted, abused, raped, and even murdered. Everything but pushed into the river. The Lustville people were already digging in, and when Leo appeared in the town square that morning everyone wanted answers. Leo tried to explain and clear the rumors up, and found it harder then he'd expect.
No one was ever murdered or attacked, for that matter, in Lustville before. This was new, and everyone was talking about it.
Leo remembered about the council meeting that afternoon, and sighed. It was sure to be a long one.
---OoO---
It felt like the worst hangover.
Every muscle in her body was sore as hell, and her head was pounding. She needed some painkillers.
The clock showed it was already passed noon, but only at a little before one she was able to force herself to get out of bed.
"Hey, we were getting worried. How you feeling?" Paige asked when Piper walked into the kitchen.
"Like hell. Coffee will do the trick." Piper said, already making herself some.
"Want something to bite?" Paige asked.
"Maybe later."
"Listen... I'm really sorry about yesterday, Leo was right; we should have never sent you out there in the middle of the night. It's so like us to put you in these situations..." Paige was really taking the blame, and Piper didn't want her to.
"It's not your fault Paige; we couldn't have possibly known there was someone out there crazy enough to push me in." Piper said, shrugging at the memory.
Just thinking of that river gave her chills.
"Listen, Piper, I know you're not going to like this..."
Piper eyed her younger sister.
"What did you do?"
"Not me actually; it's Phoebe."
Piper took a slip from her coffee, feeling like she should be prepared for whatever Paige was about to tell her, because she knew very well it was more trouble.
"She said it just slipped, she didn't mean to tell him, but she was worried and a little hysteric..." Paige started explaining, but Piper wanted to hear it.
"What did she slip Paige? And to whom?"
"Ben."
"WHAT?"
Oh, not Ben... everyone but Ben...
"Sorry! We tried to call him again and tell him not to but..."
"Wait, wait wait wait wait wait... tell him not to... come here?" Please say no, please say no...
Paige put on a miserable face, and Piper wanted to cry.
"He's here, I'm so, SO sorry! He took his jet as soon as Phoebe... slipped to him about what happened."
"He's already on his way!?" Piper exclaimed, jumping from her seat.
Paige's eyes looked somewhere passed Piper, and Piper feared from the worst.
And there, when she turned around, stood the six foot something man, one which she had spent the last three years of her life with.
His big blue eyes were looking somewhere between loving and worried, and as soon as she saw him he walked to her and embraced her with a hug.
Her eyes widened as his arms came around her, and she felt like shooting herself.
"Ben... You shouldn't have come..." She tried.
Maybe it was just a dream.
"Shouldn't have come?! SHOULDN'T HAVE COME?! Piper, this place is killing you! LITERALLY!" He exclaimed, pulling back and grabbing her by the shoulders.
His eyes landed on her forehead, and he looked like he was going to explode.
"Piper, you need to get the hell out of this place. This is absurd!"
"No, Ben, listen, I'm not coming back to San Francisco. Lustville is our home now..."
"I can't believe you're still saying that after what happened." Ben said, furious.
It was going to be a VERY long day...