The television show "Charmed," including the characters of Piper Halliwell, Phoebe Halliwell, Paige Matthews, Leo Wyatt, and Cole Turner, is copyrighted by Spelling Television, Inc., a subsidiary of Spelling Entertainment Group, Inc. The character of Dr. Charles Eppes is copyrighted by someone who owns the television show "Numb3rs," which I would know if the networks didn't mutilate the closing credits of television shows.

Piper nodded, once, and turned back into the kitchen.

Paige and Charlie were sitting at the little breakfast table with cups of tea, and even from the door Piper could tell that Charlie's cup was still full. Paige had a questioning look on her face, and Charlie looked like he hadn't heard the question.

"Paige?"

Paige crossed the room and Piper said quietly, "Cole's going to take Dr. Eppes and Leo to a bar, then we're going to summon the Seer and send her back."

"Sounds good."

"Would you – Phoebe already looked at the dimensional transport spell while we were gone, but if you could take a look, just see if there's something I might have – "

Paige patted her arm. "Honey, I'm sure it's great, but I'll take a look at it if it makes you feel better. Charlie, I'll see you later."

"It's up in my room. Thanks, Paige."

As Paige left, Piper walked over to Charlie and touched his teacup. As she had thought, stone cold. She emptied and refilled it, saying, as she put it in front of him, "You really should try to drink that. It's very calming. Not a potion," she added hastily. "Just chamomile tea."

He took a sip. "I'm just – I'm trying to figure out if this is the nullification of everything I know to be true. Or only part of it."

"Does it have to be one or the other? Can't it be – a supplement?" She smiled. "An additional dimension?"

He smiled back and took another sip. The remains of the soup she'd made for dinner were crusting the pot, and dishes and spoons were stacked on the counter. "I promise, the kitchen doesn't always look like this. I was going to clean up the dishes after I read my older son his bedtime story."

"Dishes?"

"Um. Things you put food on."

"Yes." Eppes almost laughed. "I mean, can't you just – " He waved his hands in the air.

Piper smiled, pouring herself the last of the coffee. "We don't use magic for personal gain. It has bad consequences."

"I have a hard time believing – Well, any of this – but especially I have a hard time believing that magic makes a moral judgment on how it's used."

"Why?" Piper asked, sitting at the table with him.

"Electricity doesn't. Gravitation doesn't. Solar radiation doesn't. If this – magic – makes any sense at all, it's only as a form of energy previously unsuspected except by believers in fairy tales."

"Oh, I think magic is more than just energy."

"Everything is energy. Even matter is energy."

"There's a spiritual aspect to magic too. Doesn't work without it."

Eppes gulped his tea and turned to her with animation; it was like having something to argue about was bringing him back to life. "Apparently this Seer is perfectly able to use magic with no moral compass at all."

"Oh, she's immoral, but don't think there's no spiritual aspect to what she does. Every time she casts a spell, every time she has a vision, she's drawing from a source of power greater than her own. She knows that, and she bows before it. In her own way."

"And you bow before the opposite? No magic would happen if it weren't for God vs. the Devil?"

"Well, my personal feeling is, not much of anything would happen if it weren't for God," Piper said. "And if there's a force that lives to corrupt or, or, usurp God's power, is that so hard to believe?"

"For the rational mind, yes. We know that the concepts of both a well-meaning divine omnipotence and an evil omnipotence spring from the need of people to put human reasoning behind events that are explainable as straightforward natural phenomena. The terror and the superstition both become unnecessary when you realize that it can all be reduced to mathematics."

"Hmm." Piper rested her chin on her hand. "I've heard that argument before – that anything people believe without seeing and hearing it is just the result of fear – and it always makes me wonder, who is it that's really afraid?"

"Seeing and hearing aren't necessary. Just some form of scientific proof. You can obtain scientific evidence of the existence of radio waves. You cannot obtain such evidence of the existence of God."

"Not yet; maybe never. But radio waves existed long before people could prove they did, and maybe God is the same – soaking though the universe, through all the universes, through matter and energy and whatever else there is, making it possible for us to do what we do. Well – and for that matter, for you to do what you do." Piper smiled. "And that, Professor, is a phenomenon I'm afraid you'll never be able to reduce to mathematics."

He seemed inclined to let her have the last word, tilting his head and taking a sip of his tea; then he glanced up at her with a grin and a glint in his eye. "Wanna bet?"

Coming back downstairs, wearing his jacket, Leo took a swing by the living room on his way to the kitchen. He had the feeling that he was going to have to break a major lip-lock between Phoebe and Cole, and on the one hand he was sorry to do it to her; on the other hand, Cole had to go back, and the more deeply Phoebe got involved, the more she'd be hurt. Besides, he himself wanted this to be over with before it got later and everyone got even more tired.

Prepared to say something gently interruptive, he stopped in the doorway, and was surprised. They weren't even on the couch together. Phoebe was standing, her body angled toward the door, but her gaze turned over her shoulder at Cole. He sat on the sofa, his arm extended; he had caught the tips of her fingers with one hand, and apparently that fragmentary clasp had stopped her dead in her tracks. They were both half-lit by the one lamp in the room; a change of clothes, Leo thought, and they'd have been an old Dutch painting.

Then Phoebe realized he was there and gently pulled her hand away from Cole. "We're coming."

Leo continued to the kitchen and looked in on Piper, sitting at the breakfast table with Eppes. "Piper? I think everyone's ready."

She nodded and said to Eppes, "You and Leo are going to hang out at a sports bar while we get rid of the Seer. After that, you'll be safe."

"A sports bar?" Charlie looked as if he'd been served a big slice of lemon with his tea.

Leo laughed. "It's not my usual milieu either. But it'll probably be good for both of us. Get us away from the academic stuff for awhile."

"If, um, Paige wanted to go someplace, I'd be willing to go there with her," Charlie volunteered.

Piper smiled. "We need all three of us to cast the spells we'll be casting. But if you're still in town tomorrow, I can encourage you to give Paige a call."

"All right." Charlie stood. "Mind if I use your bathroom again first?"

"Not at all. You know where it is."

Charlie left. Leo walked over to Piper and she stood for a long mutual embrace.

Leo looked her in the eye. "Hey."

"I know."

"When I became mortal, I gave up the ability to be in on the really dangerous stuff. I know that. But you know I'll be here with you."

"Yes, I do. Leo, we'll have the Power of Three here. You know what that means."

Leo held up one hand, his thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart. "It means I worry that much less."

Charlie looked over Leo's and Piper's sink and counter for the soap. It was no easy task; every square inch of surface space was covered with Piper's cosmetics, Leo's shaving stuff, toothbrushes, children's shampoo, baby supplies. But he spotted the small dish to the left of the faucet and washed his hands, looking into the mirror. For a moment, after rinsing them, he leaned on the sink and stared.

"This is not the face of a credulous fantasist," he whispered.

The Seer's face in the mirror said, "No, Dr. Eppes, of course not."

Charlie started, banging his hand into a rack of Piper's eye makeup so hard that it bounced off the wall and fell into the sink. The Seer wasn't alone; she was kneeling behind a little girl in pink pajamas. And holding the point of a knife to her throat.

"I regret having to bring mortals into this," the Seer said, "but you know no one will ever believe what this child says. They'll tell her she had a bad dream. Or they'll search for a psychopathic killer. One way or the other."

Charlie opened the child-proofed mirrored medicine cabinet door and searched. Nothing in there but medicines and more baby stuff. He closed it; the Seer's image was still there. He looked around to see where an image might be projected from. He stopped and looked in the mirror again when he heard the little girl cry out.

The Seer had grabbed the back of her hair and pulled her head back, and now the edge of the blade was across the child's throat. "Don't try my patience, Professor, and don't call out. Do exactly what I say or I'll kill this mortal."

"Well, I uno dos tres quatro," Charlie said. "One four nine sixteen twenty-five. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and -- "

"Tests? Must we? Very well. Cinco. Thirty-six. And I have no idea what those rather Greek-sounding words were, but your face tells me I have convinced you that I'm not a prerecorded message."

Charlie nodded.

"Don't say anything loudly. If you try anything clever you may help yourself, but you will kill her. Go to the window and drop out of it. It should take you no more than three seconds to cross the bathroom and five seconds to open the window and climb out."

"And then what?" Charlie was darn near whispering, but she seemed to understand him easily. "What if you kill her anyway and then cut my head off to get at my brain? Two deaths instead of just one? It makes no sense."

"Don't be ridiculous. The dimensional portal in your brain wouldn't work if your brain were non-functional. We're simply going to go conduct a small ritual which will take me back to my reality."

"Where? I'm not going to some – sulfur pit in Hell and be stranded there when you leave."

"Quite the opposite, Professor." The Seer smiled almost demurely. "We're going to church."

Charlie leaned both hands on the sink, shaking his head. He looked woozy. "This just isn't happening."

"Tell yourself that. It will make it easier to follow my instructions if you're sure none of it is real anyway."

"I have to think," he said, leaning his left hand and his head on the mirror, "I have to think."

"You've run out of time, Professor. When I reach ten, the child dies. One. Two. Three."

He moved back sharply from the mirror. "I'm coming."

The child-proofed window caught, giving him a moment's anxiety, but then he managed to get it open and clamber out, hanging from the sill. It was so dark that he couldn't see the ground just a story below, but he steeled himself and dropped anyway.

And felt again that sensation of blur and bodiless movement and blur again.

He blinked his eyes, looking up. He was sitting on the grass, outdoors somewhere. He couldn't see anything else.

Then five yellow streaks of light leaped from points all around him and met over his head. By that light he could see the Seer standing on the other side of the yellow streaks, still holding the child by the arm.

Charlie stood. "All right, I'm here. Let her go."

The Seer looked down as if she'd forgotten the little girl's existence. The child smiled up at her, and began growing. She changed shape as she grew, assuming the form of an adult man in dark clothes.

"Bravo," the Seer said, giving him gold coins. "A heart-touching performance."

The man grinned at her, looked over at Charlie and snickered, and vanished in the blink of an eye.

"You're new to this, Professor," the Seer said, "so there's no reason why you should have ever heard of a shape-shifting warlock. You don't need to feel stupid."

She turned to pick up something propped against a tree. Charlie tried to put an arm between the streaks of light and realized the reach of the cage's force field. The Seer turned back and stepped easily into the cage, carrying a long, heavy broadsword.