Part Three

"My ass," Piper repeated as she slid the key into the apartment door, as she had been doing steadily and with great and greater amounts of conviction ever since she had driven away from the manor's site. She had known from the moment that she had first seen that Jack, or Al, or Ramone, that he was going to be trouble.

"Hard to know what to call him when he has an ID for every occasion," Piper muttered to herself. She gave the door a quick pound with the flat of her hand when it stuck in the same old spot that it always did and smothered her brief pang when she realized that the sticking spot was now familiar to her. There had been plans to rebuild; Piper told herself that there were still plans to rebuild. Everything that had happened since then had just forced them to be shoved to the wayside for a little longer than she had expected, was all.

"I am so sorry," Piper said to the figure sleeping in the chair in front of the television as she hurriedly shut the door behind her. He stirred and rubbed at his eyes. "I didn't think that it would be anything more than a quick visit, but things got…complicated."

"They seem to have a way of doing that," Henry agreed as he rose from his chair. Even a year later, he still looked exhausted. Piper wondered if, looking in the mirror, she would see a similar face staring back at her.

Henry's eyes widened when he caught sight of Piper's face. "You're bleeding."

Piper lifted her hand to her cheek so that she could finger the three deep scratches that were running across her jaw and down into her neck. They had closed on their own earlier; she must have done something on the way home to crack them open again. "Christy," she said, feeling something that wanted to be a smile and could not quite manage touching the corners of her mouth. "Spunky as ever." Piper headed for the bathroom and the first aid kit. She could hear Henry's footsteps behind her. "Did the boys get to sleep all right?"

Henry made a noncommittal noise. "Wyatt's old enough to know that there's something about today that's making everyone upset. Chris knows that his brother's upset, so he's upset."

"I'm sorry," Piper said as she pulled down the bottle of rubbing alcohol and began dabbing at her cuts, wincing from the sting.

"Here, let me." Henry took the bottle from her and began cleaning the scratches. He put his hand beneath her chin and tilted her face up so that he could see what he was doing. "Some of my parolees are bad seeds, but a lot of them are kids in over their heads, getting into fights, being abused." Henry's chuckle had nothing to do with mirth. "I've patched up worse, believe me."

Piper knew that her smile was not much happier. Quite a pair that they were making. "Unfortunately, having Leo and Paige around for these kinds of things spoiled me."

Piper could feel Henry's fingers pause for a moment at the mention of his late wife before he resumed cleaning up her face. "Wyatt was asking questions earlier about why you were gone," Henry said. "I wasn't sure how much you wanted me to tell him."

"That every ugly thing that flies, walks, or slithers will want to come see the place where the Charmed Ones died and Mommy has to go and make sure that nothing crawls out of hell that could hurt somebody?" Piper asked in a faux-bright voice. "That's a little much for a four year-old to handle, but Wyatt's never been a normal boy. He knows that Paige and Phoebe are dead, even though that might not mean much to him when Great Grandma still pops in whenever she wants. I still want to shield him from as much as I can, though. I'll have to figure something out." Granted, she had always thought that Wyatt would be surrounded by a full magical family to help him as he grew into his abilities. Funny how life wound up twisting on you.

Henry finished cleaning up Christy's little love taps and smoothed a couple of Chris's Ninja Turtle bandages over the scratches. Piper smiled in spite of herself, picturing what the reaction would be at the club when she showed up later to do the books with her snazzy new accessories. "You should probably think about explaining more to him," Henry told her gently as he stepped away and put the alcohol and the bandages back into the medicine cabinet. "He was asking about Leo, too."

"Damn it." Piper rubbed at her eyes as the weight of the entire night decided to come settling down over her shoulders at once. "He probably still thinks that Leo can come back, since he was able to come back the last time. Damn it," she repeated, and looked back up at Henry. "I'm sorry." She thought that she had apologized to him at least once every time that she had seen him since Paige died. "You probably have other things that you wanted to do tonight instead of watching the boys while I went out and waited for demons that didn't even show."

"It's all right." No, it wasn't. Piper could hear from Henry's voice that it wasn't, but she also knew that it had nothing to do with her. "I went by the grave earlier and, you know, talked to her a little bit." The two of them must have made a hell of a sight, Piper realized, standing in the bathroom at dawn and mourning over the same pair of women. She knew that Henry waited for months to see if being half Whitelighter would be enough to bring Paige back, as it had brought Leo back the first time that he had died. She had waited for the same thing.

Almost as if he had the same thoughts running through his head, Henry shivered and said in an attempt at a normal tone, "Did you vanquish anything interesting?"

"No." Piper shook her head. "First anniversary of the Charmed Ones' death, and not a thing. I don't know whether I should be incredibly gratified or incredibly insulted. The only one who showed up was a mortal." She felt Henry stiffen beside her and went on before he could speak. "No one dangerous, I don't think, just an amateur ghost hunter. He had a gun, but it was only loaded with rock salt, and it was the only thing that kept Christy from cutting his throat for him. I smashed all of his other toys."

"You sure that's not something that you should be worried about?" Henry asked her. "If he has experience with dealing with the magical world…"

Piper's snort was rueful. For a moment, she almost sounded like herself again. "Henry, the list of people who know about us could fill the telephone book at this point. I'm more worried about what he can prove. And what he can prove amounts to a big, fat nothing." That still hadn't stopped her from worrying about memory alteration spells for the rest of the night, but that was Piper's problem. Henry didn't need to carry anything else. He had barely known her before Paige had died and had already shown a willingness to go out on a limb for her numerous times over the past several months.

Piper might be having problems with her magic at the moment, but they were completely her own to deal with. She touched at the scratches on her face and said instead, "You do good work."

"Told you. Experience." It was clear from Henry's eyes that Piper's attempts at a normal tone were not convincing him. "So, Christy doesn't seem all that interested in crossing over to the other side."

"She's probably worried about what's waiting for her there," Piper muttered, but she already knew where Henry was going, and he had a point.

"So she's going to hang around, and sooner or later it's going to be some neighborhood kid that climbs over that fence."

"And she's attacking other people now, not just me," Piper finished. "She was a powerful witch. Exorcising her is going to take time." And she was minus two-thirds of the Charmed Ones, had a Book of Shadows that made her hands shake just to open it, and, while she could make her inherent powers work just fine, was having trouble casting spells that required anything more complicated than lighting a candle. She was a hell of a candidate for the job. Even so, even if she was trying to raise her boys, hold down a job, and stand all by herself on the vanquishing front, it was time to get it in gear. Piper added up all of the math in her head and decided that a year's passage had not changed a thing: she would still wring Christy's neck without remorse if the witch had a neck for Piper to wrap her hands around, and would still happily use Billie as a stand-in if the girl ever got up the nerve to show her face again.

Henry squeezed at Piper's shoulder once in comfort, and she leaned into the touch. After her night, she desperately needed it. Henry kneaded at Piper's shoulder for a moment, rubbing out the tension, until Piper sighed in pleasure and tilted her head back. His mouth came down softly on hers.

It was a good kiss, sweet and slow. Piper parted her lips and even thought about letting it continue for one crazy moment. It was not broken until she felt Henry's hand come up to cup the side of her face. His wedding band felt cool against her cheek. She had not taken hers off yet, either.

The two rings might as well be communicating with each other to send an electric charge passing from one to the other. She put her hand against Henry's chest and pushed him away before quickly bringing her other up to cover her mouth. Henry stumbled back against the sink; Piper all but leapt sideways into the shower. "Oh," she said. "Okay, well, that's just a bad plan."

Henry looked almost as shocked by his own actions as Piper was. He started to rub at his mouth and then dropped his hand abruptly back down to his side, as if he was afraid that he would hurt Piper's feelings if it looked as if he was scrubbing her taste away. "Yeah," he agreed with her. "It's been a weird night."

"I'm sorr-" Piper shut her mouth around the word. She really needed to get out of the habit of doing that. Piper reached out and rubbed at Henry's arm instead. "Are you working today?"

"Off." Henry made a face as he said it. Piper was pretty sure that it wasn't one of his normal days off, but instead had been suggested to him by his sergeant. She was pretty sure that it had been a liberal definition of "suggest", too.

"Go home and get some sleep before you wind up walking into a wall or driving into a telephone pole or something," Piper told him. "Come over for dinner sometime this week, if you want." She paused for a moment and took stock of how tense the air between them still was. "Maybe next week."

"Next week sounds like a better idea," Henry agreed quickly. He hesitated for a moment before he pulled her into an awkward hug and kissed her on the forehead. "I'm here if you need me."

"You just watched my kids for twelve hours straight," Piper said. "How much more there for me can you possibly be?" Without taking a U-turn into the scary and awkward territory that they had just flirted with, that was.

Henry's lips twitched upwards. That was about as close to a smile as he came. "You know what I mean." He shrugged and looked embarrassed. "My credibility might be shot right now, but I'm here."

"I know." Piper reached and gave Henry's hand a squeeze. "Next week?"

"Next week." Henry let himself out of the apartment. Piper listened to the sound of the apartment door shutting behind him before she let out a long sigh and, brushing her hair back from her face, let the bathroom. The boys' room was dark. That still didn't stop Piper from halting in the doorway and listening to the two of them breathing for a moment before she continued to her own room. It ought to be strange, she figured, that it was the anniversary of her sisters' deaths and she had not cried once. After all of the tears that she had shed over the past year, she would think that the past few days would have rendered her into a barely-functioning wreck. Instead, she was allowing her sister's widower to kiss her. Piper was letting him kissing her, and there had been moments in there when she had given serious consideration to kissing him back.

Piper groaned and dropped her head into her hands as she reached her room and took a seat on the edge of her bed. "It hasn't even been eight months yet," she whispered to herself, and heard horror in her voice. Looking up, the first thing that she saw was a picture of the entire family back when they had still been a family. That hardly made things better. Piper reached out and was on the verge of turning the picture around so that she would not have to look Leo in the face before she changed her mind and pulled the Book of Shadows from the dresser and into her lap instead. Right on cue, her hands began to tremble. Taking a deep breath and ordering herself to knock this crap off right now, Piper opened the book and began flipping briskly through it for something that would help her exorcise a powerful witch with a nasty grudge. Christy had taken months longer than most ghosts to manifest herself, but that didn't mean that Piper wasn't still being remiss in her duties by letting her stay this long.

"I know," Piper said as she raised her head again and looked Leo in the eye. "I know, I know. It's going to stop. It has to stop." Her voice shook more than she liked, and she there was finally the burn of tears in her eyes. If only her hands didn't tremble as she held the Book of Shadows in her lap, and if only the thought of writing a spell didn't make her queasy. It had been powerful magic as much as it had been Billie and Christy that had killed her sisters, and the absence of it was the reason that her husband was not with her now. It seemed as if every which way that she turned, her gifts were finding ways to trip her up.

"Mommy?"

Piper ordered the tears fiercely to stop before they had a chance to really get started, raising her hand so that she could dash at the few rebel drops that had dared to run down her face. She finished dabbing beneath each eye before she turned to face her son. "Hey, Wyatt. It's kind of early for you to be up, isn't it?"

"Chris is snoring." Chris had not snored a day in his life. Piper should know, having spent enough time standing over his crib and watching him in the weeks after he had been born, and in the paranoid months after his aunts had died. At the rate that things were going, both of the boys would be lucky if she let them go to kindergarten.

"Is he?" Piper stood from the bed and held out one of her arms so that Wyatt could burrow himself against her side. "Well, since you're awake now, how about we make some breakfast. Do you want pancakes?"

Wyatt squirmed further against Piper's side and turned his face into her hip without answering for a long moment. "When is Daddy coming home?" He didn't lift his face away from her jeans, so that Piper had to strain in order to make out what he was saying.

Her heart twisted and for a moment did not know whether it wanted to remain whole or shatter altogether. It was a feeling that she was well familiar with by this point. She put her hand on the top of her son's head and stroked at the golden hair that was so like his father's. "Daddy's not coming home, kiddo," she told him in a soft voice, measuring each word carefully. "Daddy died."

"He came back last time." Even though Wyatt was still speaking into the side of her leg, he sounded as if he was near tears. Her son was not a talker by nature; he must have been saving this up for days.

"Oh, Wyatt." Piper gently untangled Wyatt from her side so that she could kneel in front of him. "Daddy didn't die last year. He just had to go away for a little while, and then he could come back again."

"Grandma still gets to come back sometimes."

Piper had been dreading the day when he finally made that leap. "Ghosts are funny," she said. "Some people are able to come back, and some people can't. It depends on whether or not they die suddenly-" Leo had. "And whether they think that they have unfinished business-" With a wife and two children left behind, there was a part of Piper that could not help but think that Leo should feel this way and find a way to come back to her, even though she tried to squash it whenever she arose. "It also depends a lot on whether or not that person was a witch." Bingo. "Your daddy didn't have any powers, Wyatt. That doesn't meant that he doesn't love us, and that doesn't mean that he would not come back if he could. He just can't."

Wyatt stood in front of Piper and studied her face without fidgeting, almost without blinking. Piper was not sure where he had gotten this strange streak of stoicism. Certainly not from her, or from Leo. "I want him to come back."

"So do I." Piper pulled Wyatt into a hug before she released him and rose back to her feet. She had been lukewarm on the thought of breakfast before, but her appetite was definitely gone now. Wyatt's face said the same. "Let's go check on Chris."

The apartment only had two bedrooms, so Chris and Wyatt shared a room while Piper stayed down the hall. P3 was doing well enough that, between that income and the insurance money that she still had not spent, she could more than afford something larger. At the moment, she did not see the need. Losing first their aunts, then their father in such quick succession had caused Wyatt and Chris to cling to one another like lifelines. Chris was even prone to crying whenever Wyatt was in a different room from him for too long. Piper remembered how she and Prue had hugged one another after their own mother had died. It had dissolved back into sibling squabbling soon enough; Piper would let Wyatt and Chris remain friends for as long as they could.

Chris was sleeping peacefully in the crib that he was almost too large for now, his arms sprawled out over his head in a posture so comical that it was all that Piper could do to hide her smile. She stood over the crib and watched her youngest son sleep for several long minutes, counting each breath that he drew as if it might be the last one that she ever heard. Wyatt was as firm and implacable as a half-sized soldier beside her. Having said his piece in her room, he now seemed content to save up his words until he needed them for his next lengthy outburst. The way that they were going, that would be in about six months or so. Piper had not thought of him as exactly being a chatterbox even before Leo had died, but now it seemed as if he could go hours without saying a word.

Piper reached out and ruffled Wyatt's hair. "Think that we should wake Chris up for pancakes, or just let him sleep?"

Wyatt cocked his head to one side and studied Chris through the bars of his crib for a long moment. "He'll want cereal when he wakes up," he announced. He had been doing that with increasing frequency over the past several months. Piper was not sure if it was some new gift showing itself, akin to Phoebe's premonitions, if was symptomatic of the closeness that he and Chris had developed, or if Wyatt was just going through a bit of a bossy phase that Chris was allowing.

"More pancakes for us," Piper announced with false cheer, even though the thought of eating was only slightly less stomach churning than it had been a few moments before. She took Wyatt's hand and began to lead him from the room. "You can stir the batter."

Piper had scarcely reached the door when she paused, feeling a strange prickle of unease run up her spine, the cause of which she could not hope to name. The room felt unaccountably hot and crowded from one moment to the next. It was not even June yet, though, and Henry liked to set the thermostat down to glacial levels whenever he was watching the boys. Piper always joked that she was going to come home one of these nights and find a layer of frost covering all three of them.

She glanced down at Wyatt, saw that he was looking up at her, and his small face was screwed up in worry. "Yeah, kiddo, I felt it, too," Piper told him. "So how about we just grab Chris, stay calm, and-"

Piper felt a lurching in her belly, as if a fishhook had been placed into her navel and then violently jerked forward. For a moment, her vision was so filled with blue light that she could see nothing else at all. By the time that Piper had blinked twice, her vision had cleared and she was on the other side of the room, standing beside Chris's crib again. Wyatt was still clutching her hand tightly within his own. Though his face was calm, Piper could feel him shaking all the way into her elbow. After blinking several more times, Piper realized that there was nothing wrong with her sight, even though the world was still being shown to her through a haze of blue. Wyatt had cast a shield around all three of them in addition to orbing himself and Piper back across the room.

Chris began to kick and mutter in his sleep. Piper reached into the crib and picked up her baby before he could fully wake, needing to hold him close to her. A drop of sweat that was equal parts fear and the sudden, sharp increase in heat ran down the back of her neck. She reached out with her free hands so that she could push at the barrier that Wyatt had constructed around them. It was like pushing against the skin of a balloon, only allowing her to stretch it so far before it snapped back. It made the pads of Piper's fingers tingle.

"Well, it's certainly different being on the other side of this," Piper said, pushing again. Chris woke up fully at last and stared around the room with big owl eyes. He rubbed at them and then screwed up his face as if he was contemplating a good cry. The room was hotter than ever. "Wyatt, honey, you want to let Mommy go, so that we can leave?" No sisters. Just herself and two small children that she would lay down her life for.

Wyatt tilted his face up and gave her a look suggesting that, vast difference in experience between them or not, there were moments when he severely doubted her sanity. "Wyatt," Piper began in a warning tone at the same moment that someone began to pound on the apartment door. Of course they did. "Now."

Wyatt dropped the shield, and Piper clutched Chris more tightly to her chest than ever as she hurried for the door. One quick stop for the book, and then they would be gone. Chris was not crying, not yet. What he was doing was fisting his hands through her hair and tugging so hard that Piper could not help but pull her lips back from her teeth at the pain, something that he had not done since he was less than a year old. Piper held him to her that much closer as she put her hand into the small of Wyatt's back and ushered him quickly towards the hallway.

There was an enormous whooshing noise behind her, and Piper was jerked backwards so hard that she nearly dropped Chris down to the carpet. She shoved him quickly into his older brother's arms before he could begin to scream. "Take Chris and go outside!" she yelled. Piper could only hope that the pounding at her door was a neighbor. In all of her colorful years of experience, she had never known a demon that knocked and then politely waited to be granted entrance.

Wyatt twitched when his mother yelled at him, and Chris finally screwed up his face and let loose the wail that he had been building up to ever since Piper had wrenched him from his crib. Chris was a toddler now, too old for Wyatt to carry by himself. He put his arm around his younger brother's shoulders before he pulled him close against his side. They both began stumbling towards the door.

Piper had spent eight years hunting and being hunted by the nastiest creatures that stalked both the earth and the underworld. She knew what eyes against the back of her neck felt like. Before another powerful telekinetic blast could jerk her backwards and nearly pull her off of her feet, she spun around to face her attacker. Her jaw dropped.

"You bitch," Piper breathed, and raised her hands.

Before she could get off of a blast, Piper was lifted entirely off of her feet and slammed back against the wall, hard enough to make the plaster flake off and rain down into her hair. The discomfort that she had felt when Chris orbed her was mild compared to the hook that she felt entering her spine, hurling her back against the wall hard whenever she tired to move hard enough to make tears of pain spring forth into her eyes. Flames erupted from the ceiling directly above Chris's crib at the same time that Piper felt as if claws were being dragged across her stomach. The fire threw out angry fingers that ran swiftly across the ceiling and then reached for the walls. The heat was immense.

The hook moved, no longer content to hold Piper against the wall but now also dragging her upwards along it. The speed and the pain were so great that Piper could not even make a sound; all that she could do was wheeze as her feet left the floor.

"Mommy!" Wyatt screamed. He forgot all about Piper's order for him to leave and lunged forward, leaving Chris standing along in the doorway. Chris balled his hands into fists by his sides, raised his face towards the ceiling, and simply screamed.

Grunting with the effort, Piper lifted her arms away from the wall. It was not easy; she felt as if someone was trying to staple her to the plaster. Drawing her lips back from her teeth again, Piper let loose with what she already knew was going to be her most powerful burst of energy to date. She might be struggling with the magic in the book, but the power at its most primal was still hers to command. It made the skin on Piper's arms rise up into hard knots of gooseflesh and tingle as it passed, made the tips of her fingers ache. It was almost strong enough to knock down a wall, and it was certainly strong enough knock the blonde bitch backwards and against Chris's crib hard enough to send the both of them clattering down to the carpet. The flames enveloped her within seconds. Piper did not care to watch what happened afterwards.

The hook rusted, then snapped, all within a span of time that surely lasted no more than five seconds. Piper fell heavily back down to the floor. She pushed herself back up to her knees as Wyatt rushed to her, flinging his arms around her and babbling so quickly that Piper could only understand one word out of every three. With all of the extra words that he was spilling today, Piper would be lucky if he spoke again before he was eight.

Piper dragged Wyatt against her chest and rained kisses down on his face, forgetting for the moment that he had chosen the worst of all possible times to disobey her. She took his hand in her own and raced for the door. The only pause that Piper made was to lean down and scoop Chris, one-handed, into a carry that made a mockery of the klutz that she had been as a teenager. Chris continued to shriek without bothering to form words. Every smoke detector in the house was wailing in tandem, and by listening hard Piper could hear the alarms in the units next to hers going off as well. The collective cacophony was making her head throb in a perfect rhythm to every beat of her heart.

There was a part of Piper, a significant part, that wanted nothing more than to rush back into the boys' room and finish the vengeance that Phoebe and Paige could no longer take for themselves. If the smoke had not become so thick, if she could not hear Chris's panicked wheezing in her ear and feel Wyatt gripping her hand hard enough to turn the knuckles black and blue when he finally let her go, she might have spun around and done just that. As it was, Piper ducked her head to avoid the worst of the smoke, coughed hard, and pushed on.

Even if the person at the front door had been silly enough to keep knocking when sounds of battle and the smell of smoke began to roll out into the hallway, Piper would not have been able to pick it out among all of the other noises. The person in the hallway was as a result very nearly the victim of a zap every bit as hard as the one that she had hurled in the boys' room when she let go of Wyatt's hand long enough to reach for the door, only to have it bounce inward before she could touch it. Piper grabbed for Wyatt and pressed him back against her thigh as she spun all of them around so that she could protect her boys with her own body. Whirling back, Piper hoped desperately that it would be Henry, coming back to reclaim something that he had forgotten or on nothing more than a hunch.

No such luck.

"Oh, my ass," Piper said again.

Jack of the many names barely glanced at her before he stared down the hallway, where the flames had turned the hallway into a billowing hell. His face was hard, intent, a hunter's expression. Piper didn't think that this was his first time seeing a situation like this. The only thing that kept her from freezing where he stood was the realization that she had, terribly, forgotten the one thing that she had left from her old life.

"The Book!" Piper exclaimed, forgetting Jack momentarily so that she could whirl back towards her room. She didn't have to go more than a step before she knew that it would be a lost cause. Flames whipped and danced in her room, turning the doorway into a carpet to ceiling inferno. Her mouth fell open.

"Come on!" Jack bellowed at her, grabbing for her elbow when she seemed more inclined to stare than to rush after him towards safety. He reached for Wyatt's free hand so that he could jerk the boy into the hallway, but Wyatt only shrank further back against Piper and glared with all of his four year-old's hostility. He had not spoken since they had left the bedroom, and he was carrying himself like a miniature soldier again.

"Come on," Jack repeated in a softer tone of voice, glancing once again over Piper's shoulder and at the happily raging fire. "The fire department is already on their way. There's nothing for you here." The look that he threw towards the bedroom again was hungry. Piper wondered if she had been wearing a similar one moments before.

Piper took a deep breath and squeezed once at Wyatt's hand in warning when he began to cast a shield around himself and his family again. Jack's eyes widened for a moment, but that was his only visible reaction. Piper was certain that this was not the first strange thing that he had seen in his life. She meant to ask him a few questions about that very soon.

"Let's go," she said shortly as she shouldered past him and into the hallway. Her neighbors were all peeking their heads out of their doors and then rushing down the hallway as they saw the thick black smoke that was billowing from Piper's apartment. When Jack touched lightly at her arm, she jumped hard and came very close to vanquishing him then and there.

"Are you hurt?" Jack asked her.

Piper glanced down and saw for the first time the thin line of red that was stretching out across the stomach of her blouse. In all of the chaos of the bedroom, she had hardly even felt the pain.

End Part Three