Part Five

"Live and learn." Dean turned and arched his eyebrows at Wyatt. "Want to give me a hand, little man?" Much like the nickname he had chosen, he spoke to Wyatt much more as he would an alarmingly short adult than a child. 'Not yet, he's not,' Piper thought. At the same time, she could see that Dean's refusal to talk down to Wyatt was winning the boy over in spite of any reservations that he might have had at first.

Wyatt even took a small step in Dean's direction before he remembered that he was supposed to ask for permission and glanced back at Piper. She nodded that he could, but first crooked her finger for him to come over to her. When he did, she knelt in front of him and whispered, "I know, I think that he's a good person, too. But if anything-anything-happens that makes you nervous, whether Dean does it or not, you orb straight back to me, okay?" Wyatt nodded his acceptance, and Piper kissed him on the cheek before she turned him loose. He immediately ran back over to Dean, who knelt down in front of Henry's front door while Wyatt leaned over his shoulder and watched intently. It looked to Piper as if they were doing nothing more complicated than opening a canister of salt, but she also knew of several potions that wouldn't look like anything more than exotic soup to the uneducated. If it kept that thing, be it Billie or something else entirely, out long enough for them to consider their next move then Piper would be satisfied.

There was always going to be a next move, Piper was coming to realize, whether she was wandering around in a fugue state or not. The least that she could do, for herself and for her boys, was to ready herself for it. Easier said than done, she thought, and felt her mouth quirk into a small and not entirely happy smile.

Piper shifted Chris into a more comfortable position on her hip as she straightened and turned to face Henry again. Chris was giving Henry a goggle-eyed stare from his position with his head draped across Piper's shoulder, when ordinarily Henry was one of his favorite people in the world. Piper dreaded the howls that would ensue when she finally did have to set him down again. "Guess I owe you some explanations," she said, struggling to smile and not entirely sure that her effort was a success.

"One or two." Henry glanced towards Dean again before he seemed to realize for the first time that he had answered his front door dressed in a pair of pants and nothing else. A faint flush crawled up his neck as he grabbed a spare shirt from the back of a chair and gestured Piper ahead of him into the kitchen. Piper took a seat at his table, looking around the room that she had cooked in almost as much as she had her own-as the apartment's, Piper amended crisply-over the course of the past year. The same efficiency and organization that Henry employed while he was at work carried over into his living spaces. Everything was neat and clean, everything had its place, even if maybe sometimes the colors did not quite match. A few pots of herbs that Piper ordinarily would have used in simple, basic potions were growing above his sink. Like most of the rest of her magic since her sisters had died, they were not doing so well. Piper glared at them for a moment while Henry crossed over to the other side of the table.

He was still adjusting the lower edges of his shirt as he took a seat across from Piper, and the flush that had crawled up the sides of his face did not look as if it was going to dissipate soon. If he was thinking of the poorly thought-out kiss that he had given Piper back at the house, well, that made two of them. Piper looked down, remembering the faintly and inescapably male scent that she had not even realized that she had missed and that troubled her so much now that she was craving it again, and busied herself by teasing the largest of the tangles out of Chris's hair with her fingers.

"Is it a demon?" Henry might still be embarrassed, but he was shoving it to the side in order to deal with the more important matters at the moment. His eyes as he leaned across the table were clear and concerned.

'Of course not,' Piper almost said, before she realized that he was talking about the attack that had brought her here, not the man in the living room now. She blew out the air in her lungs on a sigh. "Maybe. Or Billie. I don't know." Henry wrinkled his brow at her. He wasn't used to seeing her so unraveled. Well, Piper was still getting used to feeling so unraveled, so they made a matched pair. "It's complicated, but it might be possible that Billie's possessed." Which would then make it bad if Piper vanquished her so hard that there was nothing left to her but her constituent atoms. Really bad. Something to remember, no matter how much she might still crave her revenge. A sour taste rose in the back of her throat, while Chris had begun to squirm in her lap. She noticed that Henry was looking at her blouse and said quickly, "It's nothing. Just a scratch." And it would have been a lot more than that if she had not gotten her wits back together and started firing with the big guns, but Henry did not need to know that.

Henry had gone rigid at the sound of Billie's name, and his eyes glittered in the same way that Piper was sure her must also be doing. Billie had taken Piper's sisters from her; she had taken Henry's wife from him. "Sure it's a demon?" he asked. Piper had an idea that he wanted it to be Billie working alone as much as she did. "What kind?"

Piper shook her head. "Ordinarily I would just check the Book of Shadows, but-" She found herself toying with Chris's hair again. "I don't smell like smoke because some incense got out of hand. There was a fire. Pretty…pretty much everything in the bedrooms was destroyed."

"No Book of Shadows," Henry finished for her in a low, shocked voice. To his credit, he shook it off quickly, or perhaps the entire notion of magic was still so new to him that he did not know how seriously a blow the loss of the Book had actually dealt them. He jerked his head towards the living room, where Dean and Wyatt were presumably still casting salt over all of the doors and windows. When he looked back at Piper, his eyes were dark and grave. She knew what Henry was going to ask before he even opened his mouth.

"Piper, how well do you know that guy?" Henry asked, hunching his shoulders so that he could lean further across the table. "Because right now…" He trailed off as if he was trying to figure out a way forward that would not offend her.

"Because I've been walking around in a fog for the past year?" Piper asked. "Because I can't make any magic that I have to think about actually work, and I don't know why? Because I'm leaving my child alone in a room with a man that I've only known for a few hours and that I met in the middle of a demon attack?" Her tone was as bright and gleaming as broken glass.

Henry leaned back in his chair and stared at her for a long moment before he finally answered. "Yeah. All of that."

"Dean's not a demon," Piper said crisply. She forced her hand back down to the table before she rendered her son bald. "For one thing, after eight years, I know from demons." Unless they were possibly Billie. "They're all horrible actors. And for another, I cast three different spells on him while the fire was being put out." They were clumsy things, the best that she could make up on the fly without a Book of Shadows and with dubious control over her own powers, but Dean had been so fixated upon keeping the cops from getting a clear look at his face that he had not noticed.

Henry relaxed, marginally. He was still giving Piper an uncertain, speculative look, as if he was being forced to question her judgment for the first time in a long time and did not enjoy the sensation in the slightest. "Demons are not the only evil things in the world," he pointed out gently.

Resting on the tabletop and wrapped protectively around her son's middle, both of Piper's hands clenched themselves into fists at once. "I know that," she said tightly. Once more, she saw blood spread out across the pavement in front of her and smeared across her hands as she tried desperately to do CPR, once more she saw Phoebe's lifeless body sprawled out across the scorched cement. Sending the abrupt change in atmosphere, Chris craned his neck so that he could look upwards and into her face.

"Then let me run a background check on him," Henry pushed forward in a gentle voice. "Just to see if any red flags pop up. The guy's carrying more than one gun in that bag of his, you owe it to your kids to find out if he has a history of using them."

Bringing Chris and Wyatt into it was a low blow. Piper thought that she would be much more irritated with him if she also didn't have the sneaking suspicion that he was right. She trusted Dean based upon little more than a five minute heart to heart on the side of the road and gut instinct, when all of her previous experiences should have had her vanquishing him first and then asking questions later. She had frozen the mail lady so many times over the past month that she was afraid that she was going to give the poor woman some obscure kind of brain cancer.

"His first name is Dean," Piper began. Oh, this story was definitely going to be the one that convinced Henry that stress and grief had not driven her straight out of her mind, she could already tell. "I don't know his last name. Even if I did, running a background check on him would be pointless, because he's already told me that he didn't do what the police want him for."

Spoken out loud, it sounded even worse than it did in her head. Henry stared at her. He had been doing a lot of that since she had showed up again. "What, he has an evil twin problem?"

"Actually, it was a shapeshifter." Henry continued to stare at her. Piper made a huffing noise and felt a bit more like herself. "Look, I've actually been possessed before, okay? Paige came within ten minutes of being permanently turned into a vampire, we're going to be here all day if you want the full story of everything that Phoebe was ever turned into, and Leo died for the first time in World War II."

Henry flinched away very slightly when Piper mentioned Paige's name; she came within a hair's breadth of flinching herself when she was forced to bring up Leo. On some kind of cosmic calculus that Piper did not have the energy to work out right at the moment, she was pretty sure that that made them even. Henry leaned back in his chair and held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Okay, okay." He paused to consider for a moment and then said, "Shapeshifters? Really?" Every time that Henry learned something new about the aspect of the world that lurked beyond the sight of normal people, he adopted the tone of a kid realizing that he really could bring Tinker Bell back to life by clapping hard enough.

Piper made an impatient gesture with her free hand. "The point is, I've learned not to dismiss a story out of hand just because it sounds a little crazy. You're going to have to trust me here, Henry. There are a lot of things that I'm willing to do now that I never would have thought of when I first learned about my powers and about magic, but letting either one of my boys walk into danger is not one of them." She paused when she was finished, her breathing coming slightly faster than normal. Trust did not come easily to her any longer; she was not certain why it was coming so easily to her now, and hoped that it was not a by-product of a slick smile and nice set of shoulders. It couldn't be. And yet, after the incident with Henry in the bathroom, she could not be sure. Piper was almost glad that she did not have Leo's photograph with her, so that she did not have to look at it and face this strange blend of confusion and guilt at the same time.

Henry did not look convinced. Piper did not know what aspect of her story it was, exactly, that was leaving him so unsatisfied, and was not sure that she even wanted to. Neither did he have the time to protest, though, as Dean and Wyatt came into the kitchen, announcing their arrival with a loud stomping of boots across the linoleum. Piper had an idea that Dean was deliberately making a lot of noise so that they would have time to change the topic of their conversation gracefully. He had moved as silently as the smoke itself while they were fleeing from the apartment earlier.

Sure enough, Dean asked jovially, "Do I pass?"

"Probationary status," Piper answered, watching as Dean walked over to the window above the sink and began to pull down her plants. Wyatt followed him as obediently as if he was a puppy and Dean held the other end of his string in his hand.

"I've got this one," Dean said. He took the canister from Wyatt and, seeming to miss the way that the boy followed his every move with his eyes, shook the last of the salt out in a line across Henry's windowsill. That done, Dean pulled a small bottle of what Piper presumed to be olive oil from his jacket pocket and dabbed a bit of it on each corner of the window's frame. Her guess was confirmed when Henry's kitchen began to smell just slightly like an Italian restaurant.

Dean stepped back and surveyed his work as he slide the bottle back into his pocket. "It's not perfect, but it'll hold," he said. Dean reached out and ruffled Wyatt's hair. "Couldn't have done it without you." Wyatt, who rarely even allowed Henry to touch him and only accepted real affection from Piper these days, stood stock-still and blinked at Dean solemnly as he drew his hand back and turned back towards the table. Piper did not know what to say.

Dean threw himself down into one of the remaining chairs. Wyatt hovered for a moment between the table and the kitchen door, saw that Piper's lap was already occupied, and wound up pulling himself into the final unoccupied chair. He sat ramrod straight like the miniature soldier that he was far too young to be modeling his behavior after and eyed them all with an expressionless face. Piper stared across the table at Henry, who gazed back at her with eyes every bit as wide as she knew her own must be. There had been a few seconds when she would not have been surprised to see Wyatt climb up into Dean's lap.

Dean did not seem to notice any of the unspoken communication that was going on around him. For perhaps only the second or third time since Piper had met him, there was no charming smile just waiting for the right opportunity to flash across his face. "If we're done with the secret tribunal, then we might as well figure out where we stand," he said to her. "The protections that I've put around the doors and windows will keep out just about anything that decides to come at you while you stay here." Pain flickered across Dean's face before he banished it again. Piper could not hope to figure out what it meant before every trace of it was gone. "But unless you want to spend the rest of your life hiding in your friend's house, then the only way that you're ever going to be free of his son of a bitch is if we kill it." Wyatt perked up in his chair and began swinging his feet rapidly back and forth. Piper could not be sure if this was due to Dean's words, or the note of savagery that had entered his voice as he said them.

Rather than rebuking Dean for swearing in front of little pitchers with very big ears, Piper thought very hard for a moment before she said, "Piper."

Dean looked startled. "I'm sorry?"

"Piper," she repeated. "It's my first name." She steadfastly ignored the look that Henry was flashing her from the other side of the table. "You can't be more than five or six years younger than me. It makes me feel old and doddering, and that's the last thing that I need to be right now."

"Piper." Dean repeated her name as if Piper was giving him a gift by trusting him with it. Given the nastier aspects of a few demons that Piper could name, he might be right. "Okay, like I was saying, the only way that we're going to stop this thing-"

"Who are you?" Henry interrupted. As Dean broke off and stared at him, he continued, "You show up at the same time that this thing does, saying that you want to help, and somehow Piper trusts you immediately. No offense, Piper, but that's not like you enough to make me suspicious." Piper shrugged, as it was so close to the path that her own thoughts had been taking only a few moments before that she could not really argue. "And you've managed to work your way into the house and put up a bunch of sigils that I've never seen before." The corners of Henry's mouth pulled down briefly before he went on. "That might not have meant much a year ago, but I've gotten a bit of a crash course in all things magical over the past year or so."

Dean went rigid and alert in his chair from the moment that Piper had begun to speak. So much so, in fact, that professed trust or not, Piper unwrapped her hand from around Chris's midsection and laid it down on the table so that it was plainly visible. Rather than fussing as had been his tendency over the past several hours, Chris sat quietly and instead watched Wyatt for clues as to what he should do. Wyatt watched Dean.

"So how does it work, Dean?" Henry went on. "Do you want us to believe that it was just a coincidence that you were there when Piper needed help? And will it be a coincidence if you're there the next time that Billie attacks, too?"

Dean flashed Henry the kind of tight, glittering smile that was never more than an excuse to bare the teeth. He had folded his arms over his chest in a defensive gesture. Piper did not think that he even realized he was doing it. "Wasn't a coincidence," he said. "Hate to push the pin into your conspiracy theory, Hank, but I never claimed coincidence here. I've been hunting this demon for a very long time. I was tipped off by a friend of mine that it would be settling down in the West Coast. Piper's family seems to be one-stop shopping for every unexplained phenomenon that rolls through California and doesn't stop in Los Angeles first, and that's just everything that makes it into the papers." Dean paused for a moment so that he could shrug. He was still wearing the 'fuck you' smile, and if anything had even turned it up a notch. "You keeping up with our story so far?" He didn't wait for anyone at the table to answer before he pushed on. "Good. I got a phone call while I was at the old house site-"

"You were the creepy guy?" Henry interrupted him again. He swiveled his head around to look at Piper as if he doubted her sanity more and more with every second that passed. Piper almost expected him to reach over and pluck Chris from her arms for his own well-being in the next few seconds. Henry might be family at this point, but Piper was still pretty sure that she would have to smack him one if he tried that. "You never said that he was the creepy guy."

"You called me creepy?" Dean almost looked hurt.

Piper sighed and pinched at the bridge of her nose, as the epicenter of what promised to be one hell of a headache was already settling in directly behind her eyes. She was amazed that it had taken that long. "You're still the creepy guy, Dean, you're just our creepy guy now." There was something subtly wrong about that phrasing. Piper frowned for a moment before she decided to let it go. "Whatever. Go on."

"I ran into a pair of ghosts, one less than friendly, one more than friendly enough to make up for her friend-"

Pair. Plural. "Wait a minute," Piper said suddenly, waving her hands at Dean to halt him, just in case the urgency in her voice was not enough to clue him in. He sighed and did so, looking none the happier at being interrupted yet again. She glanced over the table to see that Henry was matching her stare for wide-eyed stare. "You said that there were two ghosts?"

"Ye-es." Dean nearly sing-songed the word, and now it was his turn to arch his eyebrows at Piper as if she had taken her brain out of her head and set it down on the table for all to behold. "Newspaper said that three died in the explosion. Anyway, one of them, at least, has got to be exorcised. Bitch nearly cut my head off."

"Language," Piper said automatically before she shook her head and pinched at the bridge of her nose again. "No, back up. The second ghost, the less than evil one, what did she do?"

Dean's ears turned faintly pink before he put his rakish grin back into place again. "Pretty sure that she was hitting on me." Heaven help them all, he actually sounded proud. "Which is a first even for me, hard as that may be to believe."

Henry had perked up in his chair at the first mention of a second ghost, only to deflate back into his chair upon hearing that she had turned amorous attentions onto Dean. "Phoebe," Piper breathed in a voice so low that she doubted anyone else was even able to hear her. It had to be. But…and Piper felt a line drawing itself down between her eyes. She had been to the manor site dozens of times since her sisters had died, perhaps even more than one hundred, and she had never felt even a whisper of Phoebe's or Piper's presences. Christy, sure, had no problem, making herself known, but the ones that Piper had repeatedly tried to feel…and for Phoebe to go and show herself to a stranger…

"You're sure that felt a second ghost there?" Piper demanded.

Dean leveled her a look suggesting that he had come to expect better of her in the short time that he had known her and was disappointed that she was failing him now. When he had faced down everything that she had, then he could question her skepticism. Piper arched her eyebrows, tried to calm her thundering heart, and waited until Dean replied, "I think I know when a pretty woman is hitting on me." He held up his hand. "In my mind, she's pretty. Don't correct me if I'm wrong."

"She is," Piper said softly. She cleared her throat. "She was." At the same time, Henry demanded, "Did you feel a third ghost there?" while Piper pressed, "It still could have been Christy playing with you, you don't know."

Rather than looking irritated by the fact that they were continuing to second-guess him, Dean's expression was tired and sad. "No, man, I'm sorry," he said to Henry. Given the tone that Henry had been using to question him just moments before, Piper did not expect that the apology would sound sincere, but it did. "And, look, Piper, I'm not some John Edwards wannabe running around the country chasing after spooky stories in the newspapers, okay? I do actually know what to do when I find them, and I know how to tell one ghost from the other. Whatever your beef is that your sisters have been feeling so shy until now, that's your problem with them." Dean looked at them each in turn. "Can we get back to the demon now?"

If he had noticed the way that Piper had sucked in her breath sharply between her teeth and had gone rigid at his casual dismissal of Phoebe, then he was wise enough not to mention it. More likely, Piper thought in a sour, uncharitable moment, he just did not care. There was a part of her that, when properly agitated, could instantly become small and mean, and knew how to deliver acid with a smile. "There's no demon," she told Dean sweetly, a part of her even enjoying the way that his eyes went flat. Good. He probably had no siblings and no concept of what he had done by suggesting that Phoebe's ghost couldn't show herself to Piper purely because she could not be bothered. "I'm sorry, but your vision quest must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. This is just a witch with a grudge. Don't think that I'm not grateful for your help, but I'm pretty sure that from here on out I can deal with her myself." Never mind the problems that she had been having. In that small, mean space, Piper was certain that they would all fall away as soon as she felt the pulse stop beating in Billie's neck.

Dean's eyes were flatter still by the time that she had finished. They were made for flirtation and happiness, and it was strange to see them so cold now. "You're wrong," he said, snapping his teeth shut around each word as if he was making weapons for later use.

"I think that I know a little something about demons by now," Piper said. "You still haven't given me any good reason not to believe that it's Billie." Because Billie was a lot of things, Piper's brain wouldn't allow her to ignore, but she had not become violent until she was prodded there by Christy, and she had faded out of sight as soon as Christy was dead. It was beyond out of character that she would attack Piper or, more importantly, Piper's boys now, it was enough to beggar belief. 'But I need it to be real.'

"I've been fighting them since I was four. I think that I know a little something, too." Dean was still speaking in that strange, clipped-off way, as if it was all that he could do to keep himself under control. "This demon has attacked people before, and it always attacks in exactly the same way-exactly the way that it came after you. We've managed to save the mother a grand total of once now, including you." 'We.' The bitchy part of Piper woke up even further and began to stretch. "This witch that you saw in your son's room was possessed-"

"Billie was not possessed," Piper snarled. "Just because you say so-" 'Because she can't be, that bimbo does not get to make any more excuses for what she's done, she has to be held responsible for what she's taken from me-'

"Why can't she be?" Dean threw back at her. "Because you say so?" He was still powerfully angry, but he looked as if he was beginning to calm down. Damn, that was going to make what Piper was about to do next a shame. "No offense, Piper, but this about a little more than your revenge."

"Is it so different for you?" Piper asked waspishly instead. Her hands on the table were clenched into fists. Chris on her lap had swiveled his head around so that he could look at her with wide eyes. "I don't see any 'we' here unless you have an invisible buddy that you're not telling us about. Don't lecture me about revenge, Dean. Not while you have it written all over you."

She might as well have just reached over the table and casually punched him, for she would have gotten the same reaction. "You," Dean began, and actually started to rise from his chair.

"Enough." Henry could make gang members on the verge of throwing away their second chances sit down, shut up, and listen to him with nothing more than the sound of his voice. Dean and Piper both were rendered into silence by the way that he cracked it across the table now. Piper looked over at him and realized that, while Dean had only begun to lunge up to his feet, Henry had gotten there. She had been so caught up in the person on the other side of the table that she had not even noticed the one beside her. Henry stared at each one of them in turn before he spoke. "There are two small boys in this room. If the fact that they're learning from you is not enough, then think about how they've already come damned close to losing their mother once today." Piper pulled back in her chair, shocked. While she had known Henry to swear on occasion when the two of them were alone, he also knew how she was about language in front of the boys and had not slipped once that she knew of. Rather than glaring at Dean as she had expected him to, Henry instead turned the laser stare onto Piper. "So maybe you ought to listen before this thing gets it right."

Piper leaned back further in her seat. Dean, she noted, appeared every bit as shocked by Henry's choice of attack as she felt. He turned his head quickly and coughed into his hand to cover it. Piper could still see a bright flush of emotion crawling up the sides of Dean's neck. For her part, Piper took several long, deep breaths until the roaring in her ears had subsided and said, "Billie's possessed. Okay." There, that was not so bad. Or it was, but she would learn to cope with it. "What else do you know about the demon that's supposed to be in her?"

For every breath that Piper took to calm herself down again, Dean did the same, until he finally said, "It does possess people. I've seen it at work. Probably it went after your witch in the first place because she knows you and because it wanted to add her powers to its own." 'She's not mine,' Piper wanted to say, and barely managed to restrain herself. Dean was staring down at his hands where he had them splayed over the tabletop, his eyebrows drawn together until they created a harsh slash running between his eyes. "The demon is after kids. Near as we can tell, he's only interested in kids with abilities that make them just a tiny bit different from the normal soccer and juice box set. Psychics, telekinetics, people like that."

Dean took in both Chris and Wyatt at a glance, and Piper knew what he must be thinking even if he did not know the full story behind the boys' parentage. That was all right; a few more details on this demon, and Piper would be more than happy to fill in those blanks for him. After whetting its appetite on Seers and telekinetics, the sons of a Charmed One and a Whitelighter must be making the demon salivate. Piper drew Chris closer to her chest without realizing what she was doing.

"It goes into the kid's room," Dean went on. "It drags the mother up to the ceiling and guts her so that her blood can fall down onto the baby." Piper put her hand against her stomach as she realized just how close she had come to dying hours earlier. Dean broke off long enough to flash her a grim smile. "Yeah. It's not about puppies and roses." Piper did not think that he would have shared this much detail with anyone else. She had pissed him off, and now he was trying to scare her a little. She arched one of her eyebrows and waited for him to continue. "Then it lights the room on fire, the mother dies, and the kid keeps growing until it can take its place as a member of the Addams Family." Dean snapped his fingers twice sarcastically before he made a face. "Actually, we-I-don't know what happens after that. Whatever the demon has been planning for these kids, it hasn't had a chance to put it into motion yet. Given that it's an all around nasty son of a bitch, though, I don't think that it's going to be giving them college scholarships."

Piper had watched Dean's face closely while he spoke. "So what's wrong?" she asked.

Dean finally stopped staring at his own hands as if he could pull all of the secrets of the universe in the lines in his knuckles by glaring at them long enough. "Did you think that I was telling you a fairytale just then?" he asked her. "This monster is going to kill you and probably brainwash one of your kids into a starring role in the apocalypse, that's what's wrong."

Piper made a dismissive gesture with her hand. "Besides that," she said, and smiled thinly. "Enough people try to kill you, eventually stop running around in circles every time that a new one pops up. You looked confused when you were talking about my kids. Why?"

The change in expression that Piper had seen was swift and quickly masked. Dean looked surprised and even a little impressed that Piper had caught it at all. He nodded once and pursed his lips for a moment before he flashed her a rueful grin. It only lasted a moment before he became solemn again. "They're too old," he said. "Every other kid was attacked when it was exactly six months old. I can't figure out why yours weren't." Dean looked frustrated. Piper did not imagine that he ran into problems that he could not barrel over through force or charm all that often.

'The Charmed Ones were alive when both of the boys reached their six-month birthday,' Piper thought. The remaining third must not be nearly so threatening, and she did not think that there were going to be any more long lost half-sisters dropping from the sky to help her this time around. Piper sucked her lower lip into her mouth and worked at it with her teeth as she thought. She was still a powerful witch, or should be, whether she had her sisters or even a complete Book of Shadows at her side or not. She would beat this demon down by the pure force of her will if that was what it ultimately came down to, because nothing, nothing was going to touch the family that she had left. Piper might still have her magic, but magic had not helped her protect her sisters, or protect Leo. She would do it running on nothing else than mother-love.

If only.

"We'll need a spell," Piper said slowly, half to herself, rather than answering Dean's question. It had been a long time since she had written one, even before she took into account her recent issues. She could only hope that it would be more like riding a bike than it was like calculus.

"We'll need a bullet," Dean answered her immediately, and then winced. "That I don't have, damnit. There's a gun that can kill the demon, but it was taken from me when I had my unfortunate run-in with the boys in blue."

"Don't swear around my kids," Piper responded automatically, glad that her blood pressure had at least come down far enough for her to notice, at the same time that Henry asked, "Where is it, then?"

Dean stared at him until Henry said, "Piper's already told me about your problems with the law. I might still be able to help." Dean rattled off a precinct as if he had been thinking about it for months. If the gun was as important as his brief description made it sound, then he probably had. Henry's lips moved as he memorized it before stood and reached to take Chris from Piper's arms. Chris held out his hands eagerly to be picked up; it was Piper who had trouble letting go. She dropped a kiss onto the top of his head first, inhaling the soft baby smell that he had still not entirely lost. Piper loved that smell, and had mourned when Wyatt had finally grown out of it. She would always associate it with youth and innocence.

There was something out there that wanted to take that and…do what with it? Twist it in some way, pervert it, of that much she was certain. Make another Christy, maybe even another Cole. And use her blood to do it.

Reluctantly, Piper allowed Chris to be pulled from her arms. Henry shifted the boy onto his hip and then held out his other hand to Wyatt. Wyatt looked first at Piper, then at Dean, almost as if he was searching for approval, before he took Henry's hand and allowed himself to pulled from his seat. "Come on, guys, I have a DVD for the two of you to watch," Henry said. "The adults have a lot left to do."

"Thank you," Piper said to him before she crooked up the corner of her mouth into a half-hearted smile. "So much for your day off."

"You're family," Henry replied before he led Chris and Wyatt from the kitchen. "That settles it."

The kitchen rang with silence after Henry left. Piper stared down at her interlaced hands on the table before she looked back up at Dean, feeling shy in a way that she had not for a very long time. Apologizing to a near stranger was different from apologizing to one of her sisters. With Paige or Phoebe, even if she said the wrong thing at first, she knew that they would all stumble their way to the end eventually.

"I'm sorry," Piper said finally, deciding ultimately to rip off the bandage quickly and not play around with it. Dean came back from whatever far-off place that he had been wandering around in his own head and blinked at her. "You're reasons for hunting this thing are your own. I have no right to pry."

Dean barked out a short laugh that almost, but not quite, sounded real. "Yeah, well, I'm told that sometimes I need a kick in the ass like that." For a second, the distant look was back, and Piper could not help but notice all over again that he was alone. Whoever it was who had done his ass-kicking for him beforehand, they were long gone now. That probably explained a good chunk of his zeal to hunt this monster down and into the ground. "Look, I know this is none of my business, so don't answer if you don't want to, but this Billie person? Is she the one who killed your husband?"

Piper was regretting now that she had not pushed him harder about his connection to the demon, since he seemed to have no problem turning the tables on her. "No," Piper said, knowing that her face was not friendly. "Billie is only responsible for my sisters, as I'm sure that your copious amounts of research has told you."

Dean was beginning to look embarrassed and as if he was regretting opening up the line of conversation at all. "I never was the bookworm type," he muttered.

"Leo was hit by a car," Piper continued. She did not need to see herself in the mirror to know that there was a bitter twist to her mouth. She could feel it, making her face ache. "A hit and run. Drunk driver, probably. We were…things were promised, and not delivered. I'm not the biggest fan of my own magic these days." Since it had been a full year and she had not even tried to start rebuilding the manor yet, that could be a bit of an understatement.

Dean tilted his head back and watched her as she pushed herself back from the table and went over to Henry's kitchen sink so that she could turn on the tap. Her skin still felt gritty with soot, and her hair smelled worse than it had on any of the most packed nights within the club. She guessed that she could shower, if she didn't mind changing right back into the same smoky clothing, but it was everything that she could do to let the boys so much as leave the room without her at their sides. The thought of being unable to hear them over the running water if they needed her was almost enough to send her into a cold sweat. Piper splashed water across her face instead and felt a few drops slide down the back of her neck, sticking her hair to the skin, before she began searching Henry's kitchen drawers for a rubber band.

"I've never been a fan of it at all," Dean said from behind Piper before he realized that this was perhaps not the best thing to say to a witch. "No offense."

"None taken," Piper said dryly as she finally found a rubbed band and turned back around. She toyed with the damp strands of her hair for a moment before she swept it quickly up into a ponytail, and ended her hesitation by putting her hand down on Dean's shoulder and squeezing for a moment. If Dean seemed shocked by the gesture, then he was not the only one. Piper could hardly believe in what she was doing herself as she squeezed at Dean's shoulder again and said, "It probably didn't come through very well, what with all the yelling, but I am grateful for what you've done for us."

"I'm not a stranger to the yelling, trust me," Dean said, his voice strangely gruff. "Like water from a duck's back." He hesitated for nearly as long as Piper had before he finally brought his hand up to cover Piper's own. Dean's skin was warm, and Piper could feel every callus in his palm pressing into the back of her hand. "And don't worry about thanking me, either. It's part of the family business."

End Part Five