Part Eight
Even as the smell of the oil that Dean dabbed against the windows was strange and alien to her, reminding her that it had been far too long since she had done any real cooking, Piper had to admit now that it was soothing. She sat at Henry's kitchen table and chewed at the end of the pen that she had found in one of his kitchen drawers, staring down at the page that stared back at her every bit as blankly. She had already covered one full page with the beginnings of spells that had then been scribbled out when they hadn't satisfied her, and with every failure the ache behind her eyes grew that much stronger. Piper bit at her lower lip and wondered how Dean would react if she asked him to throw more of the oil around as a crude kind of aromatherapy. She had certainly tried everything else over the course of the past year.
Piper snuck a quick glance over her shoulder and saw that Wyatt had abandoned the DVD that he and Chris had been watching and was grabbing the hem of Dean's jacket in his fist. Unbelievably, she felt a faint smile touch her face as she watched the two of them. Wyatt was seeming more like a child again than he had in months, and it had to happen around the person who most treated him like an adult.
Realizing that she was dawdling, Piper sighed and turned back to the page in front of her, laying her pen down and rubbing at her eyes for a moment. It was not as if she had not written spells before, or even as if she had never written spells while her own life, her children's lives, and the fate of the very world depended upon what she was able to come up with. She had had her sisters by her side then, though, and they had been the three most powerful witches in the world. She had had Leo. Now her sister's ghost was showing herself to a complete stranger but not Piper herself, Leo was gone, and there was something out there that did not just want to take one of her boys but wanted to…pervert him. Wanted to take him and change him and make him into something that Piper strongly doubted was going to be a Boy Scout. Piper's hand curled around the plastic pen hard enough to pull a creak of protest from it before she was able to force herself to relax again. She had always been better at fixing than she had been at brooding.
"So then do something," Piper whispered in a voice so low that it was scarcely audible even to herself. She set the pen down and flexed the ache out of her fingers before she picked it up again.
"By darkest night and this witch's might," she muttered to herself as her hand flew across the page, "I cast you away from my sight. Back to hell you shall be borne to trouble the living no more, and never again set foot on earth's sea or shore." She whispered the spell out loud as she wrote it for a reason, in spite of the fact that doing so was the kind of amateur mistake that had led to replacing the chandelier or sending the grandfather clock at the manor out for yet another repair more than once. There was something that Piper needed to know.
The air around her grew thick for a moment, thick and heavy, like the air outside could feel just before a storm unleashed the lightning and the rain. Piper held her breath and hoped, only to exhale again when all of that energy disappeared the very next second without even a burst of pyrotechnics. "Damn it," Piper whispered to herself. None of the kids were near enough to hear her, and it was either swear or cry. She set the pen quickly back down on the table before she wound up clenching it so hard that she would have sent ink shooting out again across her fingers and rubbed at her eyes instead.
"I liked it better when all that I had to do was throw potions at them and wave my hands around." It was not the spell that had failed, it was that she was one witch by herself, and while she might have done great things in the past, the woman that she was now did not seem to be the woman that she had been then. Unless Piper decided to dabble in necromancy, however, she was pretty much the only help that she was going to find for herself. Maybe she could go by the usual suspects when the sun had risen again and collect ingredients for one of the vanquishing spells that she still knew by heart, Book or not. Henry would not mind if they imposed on him just a little bit longer by using his kitchen, or if he did he would not say so. At the moment, they were close enough to something terrible happening that Piper did not particularly care. Even if she had been keeping a full stock of potions ingredients ever since her sisters and Leo had died, she wouldn't have a working kitchen to prepare them in. Had Piper still been holding the pen, she was sure that she would have broken it.
"Hey, Dean," Piper began, turning around in her chair. From the corner of her eye she saw a flash of blue, gone by the time that she was able to fully focus upon it. So were her son and the man who had pledged to keep him safe. Piper lunged up fro the chair fast enough to send it crashing back down to the kitchen floor behind her. "Dean? Wyatt?" It was far too easy for a note of panic to go crashing through her voice these days.
Taking several deep breaths and refusing to let that panic have the free rein that it desperately wanted, Piper righted her chair before she walked over to the place where Chris was still wrapped up in Spongebob. He looked up as Piper knelt down in front of him. Her youngest had been wandering in and out of hysterics all day; this was the calmest that Piper had seen him in hours. "Sweetie," Piper began in a voice kept calm so that she would not spook him, "do you know where your brother went?" What kind of detailed and useful answer she expected to get from a two year-old, she could not say. Chris only looked towards the place where Wyatt had been standing last and then shook his head mutely. Piper resisted the urge to knock over one of Henry's lamps and instead swooped Chris up and into her arms, straightening and calling for Henry. It had been blue that she had seen from the far reaches of her vision, Piper reminded herself, blue, not the crackle of a demon's flame. Wherever Dean and Wyatt had gone, Wyatt had been orbing and in full control of the destination. He could not have felt too threatened.
And children never climbed into waiting vans without feeling absolutely certain that that they were safe in doing so, either. Piper yelled for Henry again.
He emerged from the hallway that led to his bedroom, wearing a fresh shirt and looking as if he had just finished shaving. "Yeah?" Henry asked, rubbing his thumb along his jaw to pick up the few traces of shaving cream that he had missed. Whatever plans that he might have had for the day were long gone, and if he had actually slept then Piper had missed it.
"Dean and Wyatt are gone," Piper told him.
Henry snapped from exhaustion to full alertness in under a second. "How?" he demanded. Piper saw him glance towards the front door, where the deadbolt was still firmly engaged.
"I think that Wyatt orbed them both somewhere." Piper only reminded herself to loosen her grip on Chris when he began to squeak.
It was difficult to make brown eyes look cold, but all things considered, Piper thought that Henry did a fine job. "That son of a bitch," he snapped. Piper had no doubt that it was not her four year old son that he was swearing at, as she was calling Dean quite a few names within the recesses of her own mind. "We trusted him."
"No," Piper corrected softly, her entire body feeling as if it had been forced into a freezer against her will. "You didn't trust him. I did."
Some of the anger went out of Henry's eyes, though certainly not all. He began to look pitying beneath all of the panic. "Piper," Henry began, reaching out to take her by the arm and comfort her.
Piper pulled back before she could be touched. "No," she insisted again. "It's true." In her arms, Chris snuggled closer against her neck. "You were suspicious. You wanted him gone. I was the one who insisted that he stay. He has a murder warrant out on him, how much bigger of a red flag did I need?" Piper's voice was rising towards hysteria as she realized how blind that she had been, how stupid-worse, how willfully stupid. She had been so thrilled to know that there was someone else out there who both knew what lurked in the shadows and, unlike Henry and her father, had a hope in hell of doing something about it, that she had been able to overlook everything else. Small wonder that she had been living nearly as a mortal for the past year.
"You cast spells on him to make sure that he was not a demon," Henry said cautiously, seemingly forgetting that mere seconds before he had been at the head of the posse to bring back Dean Winchester's head. Piper had allowed herself exactly one week in which to go to pieces after Leo had died, one week longer than she had given herself after her sisters had done the same, before she ordered herself to pull everything back together and look to her boys. They boys had stayed with their grandfather, and Piper had pulled the phone out of the wall.
"And I'm doing such a great job with magic lately, aren't I?" Piper snapped back bitterly. "Even if he is human, sometimes humans are just awful." She tightened her grip on Chris until he whimpered before she was able to force herself to loosen it again. Piper nodded once, half to herself, before she said in a voice that she hardly recognized as her own, "I don't have anything with me that I can use for a locator spell." Dean or Dean's partner, if that was the way that it turned out to be, had been damned clever in that regard. Even though the fire at the apartment had not killed her as it was supposed to, it had still managed to destroy those few magical supplies that she had had left, regardless of whether or not she had been able to use them or not. "Unless Dean's taken Wyatt to a few different places in the underworld, I'll find him." Piper faced Henry, not batting at eyelash as she said, "You do realize that I'm not going to wait until the shops open up again tomorrow to get everything that I need."
Henry was already shrugging into a jacket. "If I thought that the police could deal with any of this, I would have told them. I'll look the other way. Just…" Henry made a face as if he was well aware of the ridiculousness of what he was about to say. "Get the generic eye of newt instead of the name brand, okay?"
"I'll pay for everything when this is over," Piper told him. "Anonymously." And she would probably wind up paying for quite a few windows in those shops, too, as she did not think that tonight, with all of the emotions that she was barely keeping under control, she was going to have a great deal of control over what Paige had once jokingly referred to as her fists of fury, either. Dean had better hope and pray that Wyatt was able to break away from him and come home on his own. Still stinging from her own negligence and unsure that she would even be able to perform the spell once she had the requisite ingredients together, Piper was not feeling inclined to be lenient.
She threw open the front door as Chris continued to hang from her neck like the world's largest and squirmiest necklace and marched out onto the porch. Henry said, "Piper, what is that?" from behind her, a bare second before Piper felt it herself, a thickening in the air that somehow reminded her of the moment of full-body rictus just before being sick. Magic being gathered rapidly together in one place, and ugly magic at that. For Henry it registered as nothing more than an odd current, the air just before an electrical storm; for Piper, it was all that she could do to remember her insistence that nobody swear in front of her kids. When Billie's vacant eyes and blonde hair popped up in front of her, she had to grind her teeth against one another hard so that she would not peel the paint right off of Henry's house.
Billie-or the thing in Billie-cocked her head to one side like a bird and regarded her with an alert intelligence that Piper had not been expecting. "I prefer blondes for my daughter, if I can find them," it said in an odd, gravelly voice, as if a much larger personality was struggling to make itself heard through a much smaller throat. "But you'll do." Just as the voice belonged to Billie and at the same time did not, the hand that gripped at Piper's wrist and began to drag her forward might have ended in well-groomed, perfectly manicured nails, but it still possessed a strength far beyond that which should have been found in one slender co-ed. Beyond anything that should have belonged to anything human.
Piper yelped when she felt her feet start to leave the ground, and she nearly dropped Chris. He squealed once before Piper was able to steady him. Henry yelled her name as Piper straightened so that she could get a good, long look at the woman who had taken her family from her. It did not matter that by rights Billie was only responsible for the deaths of Phoebe and of Paige and not of Leo, for so far as Piper was concerned Billie was the one who had started the spiral. Billie's mouth was twisted into a smile of malice that Piper had never seen before and that looked terribly unnatural there, not even in the seconds before the manner had exploded, and her eyes were gleaming with a faintly golden light. She looked so happy that Piper thought that Billie might even lean forward and give her a kiss.
The thought of this woman having any further contact with her after she had already done so much, or of even continuing to touch her at all, filled Piper with a black rage. Her ears were overtaken with a sound that was like the buzzing of bees, and she could feel blood surging up and into her face. She was no Phoebe, but the foot that she lifted up and put into Billie's stomach with all of her strength felt pretty damned good all the same. Billie grunted and reeled back. Piper was not a fool; she knew that it was only shock. Already the fingers were tightening around her wrist again by the time that Piper scrambled back, aided along the way by Henry twisting his hand through the back of her blouse and bodily yanking her backwards and against him. Billie's strength was tremendous, and something in Piper's wrist popped before she was able to wrench herself free. She staggered into Henry's chest and over the threshold, being careful at the last possible moment so that she would not put her feet down where they would not disturb the line of salt that Dean had laid out earlier.
'If that even did a thing outside of making a mess out of Henry's carpet,' Piper thought as she fell back into the living room and caught herself on Henry's armchair. She guessed that they would all have a chance to find out in the next second or two. In the meantime, the wrist had begun to throb in regular, agonizing waves that reminded Piper of the sea and made her breath catch in her throat. She could already see that it was beginning to swell.
Billie scowled in the doorway at Piper, looking less like the girl that Piper had known by the second. Nothing in her features actually changed; it was all in her eyes. If this was the demon glaring back at Piper now, then she could see why Dean had chosen to dedicate so much of his life to fighting it. She knew from evil when she saw it by now, and evil rolled off of the thing that rested in Billie in waves, evil made the air around her seem all the darker by virtue of its proximity. And if Piper's paranoia was justified, if it did turn out that Dean was working with this thing and was not as shocked by wherever Wyatt was taking him as Piper was to turn around and discover them gone, then Piper supposed that she could draw small comfort from the fact that he was clearly out of his mind.
She could, anyway. Piper still didn't actually see that happening.
The demon in Billie only glared at Piper for a moment longer before she (or perhaps it) extended its arm and with a terrible, leisurely slowness, as if it had nowhere else to be that night and could continue playing this game for as long as Piper was willing, began to push at the air around the threshold. It rippled, stretched and shone like cellophane wrap, and even made a high whining sound that reminded Piper of an animal in pain, but it held. For now. She realized that she was staring in a mixture of horror and fascination for nearly a full minute and had been doing so for nearly a fully minute while Billie continued to struggle and snarl. Piper took a quick step backwards and cast a wild look at Henry. If Paige had been present, or Leo before he lost his powers, then they could all be one thousand miles away within the blinking of an eye. Not for the first time and surely not for the last, Piper was caught wondering if she would have been better off with more magic in her life or less.
Apparently deciding that the barriers were just going to continue stretching but would not break, Billie drew her hand back and flashed Piper a sweet smile. It took longer to reach her mouth than it did her eyes, as if she was having to pause in order to flip through an instruction manual for a mouth that was not her own. Piper found herself actually feeling the embryonic stirrings of pity for what Billie must be experiencing, trapped within her body and watching all of this, but squashed it quickly before it could grow and hamstring her.
"Piper," Billie cooed, wrinkling her lips back in a smile that revealed more canine than was necessary. The resemblance to a dog did even more to bury the first reawakening of Piper's better nature than a boot to the face would have managed. Billie sing-songed her name again. "Where's the flash, Pi-per? I was expecting better of a former Charmed One." She put a delicate stress upon the word 'former' that made all of the hair on the back of Piper's neck stand up and convinced her even more that if Billie was still in there, then at the very least she was not acting without help. Even in her worst moments, Billie had wielded her malice like a hammer, not like a scalpel. "Why aren't you using your magic? Could it be that you were selfish all those years and drained it all away?" Billie leaned forward, pushing her face right up against the barrier that prevented her from crossing the threshold. It made her look like the world's biggest and most frightening child with her nose against a glass door. "Maybe if you and your sisters hadn't always been violating that nasty little 'no personal gain' clause, you all would have had enough juice left to save yourselves, and you would have been able to save Leo." Billie jerked her head abruptly to one side: from child to insect. She was going to run through the entire animal kingdom before she was finished talking. "I would have liked to kill the Charmed Ones."
Aching wrist or not, Piper flicked both of her hands out before she could stop herself.. With his arms wrapped around her neck and his legs around her waist, Chris hung from the front of her shirt as if he was in a papoose while Piper slammed the door shut with so much force that it nearly fell off of its hinges. The shriek that the Billie-thing let out as the door caught her full in the face was the sweetest sound that Piper had heard all night.
"I never liked that bitch," Piper said, turning back to Henry and trusting that he was too much a gentleman to mention the tears in her eyes or the way that her voice shook. She put her arms back around Chris for her own comfort as much as for his.
Henry stared at her, then nodded to his closed front door. A fine crack ran from the top all the way down to the floor. "Didn't know that you could do that."
"Neither did I," Piper said, staring herself. "I usually blow things up." With all of the force that she had hurled at the door, it could be argued that what she had done wasn't that far off, but the idea of being able to control the molecular manipulations to a large degree was still an intoxicating one. Piper promised herself that she would do a better job of entertaining it as soon as someone wasn't trying to kill her and realized that this could easily mean that she would be holding target practice when both of her boys were in high school. "Telekinesis was Prue's thing, not mine." When Henry looked confused, Piper flashed a tight-lipped smile even though she was shocked to realize that, after a year, she had not talked about Prue at all. She and Henry barely managed to talk about Paige, most days. "Charmed Ones don't live long lives."
A thump that would have shattered bone if it had hit either one of them rolled out from the door. Piper winced. "Hope you weren't too fond of your lawn mower," she said when the sound of rolling machine parts faded away. "I'm pretty sure that Billie just threw it against the door."
Henry shook his head as he picked up the phone. "It can be replaced," he said shortly. After punching a few buttons, he shook his head and set it back down. "Girl knows her horror movies." He tried the same thing with his cellular phone, and Piper watched as his expression grew dark. "Girl really knows her horror movies."
"Girl's not really a girl anymore," Piper replied. She watched as Henry slid another glance towards the front door, his eyes flinty and cold, and wondered if she had been wearing that same expression only moments before. "Much as I want it to be, that's not Billie at the controls. It's something different."
A muscle in Henry's jaw ticked as he asked, "Can Billie still feel in there, do you think?"
Piper stroked Chris's hair and made a shushing sound as he shivered. "I didn't say that we were going to be wearing kid gloves." She looked towards the front door, wondering what was going on when nothing else was thrown. Good things had rarely happened when Billie was quiet and out of sight, even before the possession. "Back door?" Piper asked Henry tightly. With a little luck, Billie would not be waiting to hop down on them from the roof.
Henry shook his head. "First thing's first. I have a gun in the bedroom."
Piper had been starting to follow him as he turned in that direction. She stopped in her tracks, jaw falling open, at the first mention of the weapon. "A gun?" she repeated after him, sure that some kind of wacky magical hijinks must be interfering with his hearing. "A gun? With the boys coming and going all the time?"
Henry barely glanced back at her. "It's unloaded and locked up," he said over his shoulder at her. "And I keep it in the top of the closet. The boys can't reach it."
"Maybe not normal boys," Piper insisted as she followed him. "But I don't have normal boys. Wyatt, in case you didn't notice, just teleported a grown man to God knows where, and he can orb just about anything else to him that he can think of, do you think that he couldn't get through a locked box?" Piper could hear a shrewish note entering her voice, but could not bring herself to stop or care.
"Piper." Henry stopped in the hallway and stopped so that he could face her. "Wyatt would have to know that the gun was there to begin with, and since you didn't even know that it was there, I wasn't really worried. Second, I deal with a lot of people in my job who screwed up once and need help getting a second chance. I also deal with a lot of people who are bad and have no intention of getting better. Coming after their parole officer has seemed like a good plan to more than a few."
Piper's jaw dropped even further. "I didn't know that," she said finally. Henry had been shot that one time at the bank when one of his parolees had flipped out, but he and Paige had always treated that as a fluke, and of course there had been the ever-present magical complications involved.
"Everyone's had a lot to deal with this year," Henry said as he led Piper into his bedroom and pulled two lockboxes down from his closet. The first box had the body of the gun, the second the clip. Piper pressed her lips together firmly to keep herself from protesting further and pulled Chris even closer against her. The snicking sound as Henry put the clip into place was one of the worst that she had ever heard.
"You're family, Piper," Henry said. He looked down at the gun for a moment, addressing it rather than her, before he finally met her eyes. "That's why I don't mind arguing with you every now and then. But I'm not one of your sisters. You don't get to have the same say in what I do that you had with Phoebe and Paige."
'Well, my sisters never kissed me, either,' Piper thought about saying, and bit it back in the nick of time. That would be too waspish, even for her worst moments. She watched as Henry finished assembling the weapon instead and said, "I threw Billie into a fire and she doesn't have so much as a mark on her. I don't think that shooting her is going to solve our problem."
Henry flashed her a tight smile. "It might distract her so that you and Chris can get away." When Piper continued to stare at him as if she did not quite understand, he added gently. "Family."
"Family," Piper repeated after him, nodding. "Okay." She still knew that that there was disgust marking her face as she eyed the gun in Henry's hands, and she vowed that when it came down to it, it would be her magic that would deal with Billie and the thing inside of her.
Henry put his hand against the small of Piper's back as he guided her from the room. Piper let it stay there, even though it was making her skin itch just to be touched. He was right about family, at least. Piper had no doubt that Paige, Phoebe, or Prue would have killed to protect her if it had come down to it, and Piper herself had come very close to killing Billie immediately after Phoebe and Paige had died. Likewise, she also knew that they would have done anything that it took to keep her from becoming a killer herself. Piper eyed the gun in Henry's hands and muttered the spell that she had been working on beneath her breath. The air around her thickened and stretched, making Piper think that she might pull it off, before it all went back to normal again. She was not strong enough.
Piper would have to do something about that.
The room was growing unaccountably warm as Henry stopped Piper by touching her lightly on her wrist. A line of sweat ran down his temple, and the beads that were collecting beneath his eyes only highlighted the dark circles there. Piper did not think that his sleep had been restive even before she had shown up with the kids and Dean. "Do you feel that?" Henry asked her.
She did, and her eyes widened in response. "Where's your fire extinguisher?" Piper asked Henry. She craned her head up to look at the ceiling, where the flames had started the last time. If the demon had its way, the night would end with her pinned among them.
Henry looked at her with the same mixture of shock and compassion that he would have shown to anyone who had carried such a heavy burden for such a long time before finally experiencing the snap that put them in the mental hospital. "What?" he asked her. "Piper, what are you talking about?"
"The fire extinguisher!" Piper repeated with considerably less patience than she had shown the first time around, so that Henry even flinched and took a small step backwards. She needed both of her hands free in order to freeze any flames that cropped up, but she was loathe to hand Chris over to Henry while he was still holding that gun. "This is how it began the last time," Piper elaborated as she continued to circle and look up at the ceiling.
The confusion dropped away from Henry's face between one second and the next, and left her looking at a completely different person. "Go," he said, putting his hand against the small of Piper's back so that he could usher her from the room again. Much as Piper's nerves were running high and she did not want to be touched at the moment, she let it stay.
Henry might have had angry parolees coming after him more often than he had previously let on, but Piper had heard the sound of shattering glass many times before and knew what it meant now. "Get down!" she shrieked, ducking without waiting to see if Henry was going to do the same and clutching Chris to her tightly. She shielded his head from shrapnel while he began to scream in terror all over again. It seemed as if he had been crying for most of the day, and Piper's heart broke. Mothers were supposed to be able to do something to keep their children from being this terrified. And making it even worse…
'So help me, God, Dean, you had better bring Wyatt home safely,' Piper thought to herself. 'Because if you don't…' She didn't allow herself to finish. Piper already knew what she was capable of doing, and when it came to avenging or protecting the people that she cared about, that amounted to a great deal. Even killing, she knew now, as her thoughts drifted to where Billie was likely stalking in circles around the house now.
Henry had been around magic long enough to know by now that when the witch dropped down to the floor it was probably a good idea for the normal person to follow suit, but he still dropped a second late. From the corner of her eye, Piper saw glittering shards as the window exploded inwards and the long lick of flame that followed. She shrieked as a hot wind flew all of her hair forward and into her eyes, causing Chris to yell that much louder at the obvious sound of his mother's distress, and smelled her own hair singing. Piper let go of Chris with one hand so that she could beat quickly at the embers before they managed to set her entire long, thick mane on fire. She heard Henry yell at the same time. Piper rolled over as soon as she felt that it was safe, still clutching Chris to her chest even though he had his arms wrapped around her neck so tightly that she could scarcely breathe and thought that it would be hours before she managed to pry him free again.
The fire had looked like a living thing as it had arced through the shattered window, like an arm that would grab at Piper and Chris and drag them both straight out onto the lawn, since Billie could not come inside. Piper did not know what Billie intended to do once she got her there. Pin her to the trees in Henry's yard, perhaps. It still looked alive as it now began to crawl over the ceiling, eating up the plaster far faster than any normal fire had a right to do, long orange fingers reaching out to lick at the far walls. There came a series of identical sounds from several other windows in Henry's house as they followed suit, whether from magical interference or the accumulation of heat Piper could not say. She felt as if she was standing in the center of a brick oven, and there was a river of sweat running down her spine. Piper stared up at the flaming ceiling, slack-jawed in awe, and could not look away until she heard Henry moan in pain.
Piper thought that if her jaw managed to fall open any further, it was going to unhinge altogether and leave her gaping like a snake, but somehow she kept finding a way. Henry was crouching on the carpet several feet away from Piper, struggling to protect his hair from the falling embers with one arm and hold himself up with the other, even though Piper could see his elbow trembling from the effort. A second later, he turned and Piper could see why. Henry had hurled himself to the ground a second after hearing Piper shout, which had likely saved his life when the fire had gone cracking through the room in a flash of smoke and heat. His hesitation, however, had allowed the fire to get in a kiss even if it had not been able to claim him with a full embrace, and it had left its mark. Henry had an ugly burn, easily third degree, crawling from his shoulder and up to his neck, and ending at a place just beneath his ear. The skin had already begun to turn the color of freshly cooked lobster in some places, blackened and cracked in others, and with fat, watery blisters the size of Piper's thumb in all of the places in between. The fire had taken him on his gun arm, and in his pain he had thrown the weapon away from himself and into the farthest corner of the room. Flames were already crawling down the walls towards it as if they could not wait to claim their shiny new toy. What was worse than anything else, though, was to look at Henry's leather jack and see the places where, rather than being burned away altogether, the edges had actually been melted into his skin.
Piper made sure that Chris had a good grip on her and would not fall before she scuttled quickly over to Henry's side. There was a hissing noise, almost a whine, rising over the crackling of the fire. After a second Piper realized that it was Henry, struggling to keep breathing between his tightly clenched teeth. He jumped when Piper put her hand onto his healthy shoulder.
"Oh, my God," Piper breathed when she saw the full extent of the damage that had been done. She brought her hand up to cover her mouth. When Henry opened his eyes, there were tears of pain standing out in them.
"Give Chris to me," Henry whispered at long last. His voice was raspy and ill used, as if the scream that clearly wanted out was resting just below his voice box and it was everything that he could do to keep it down even that far.
Piper shook her head, sure that Henry was in so much pain that he did not know what he was saying. "Come on," she said, sliding her shoulder beneath his, "we can climb out of the window."
"No, we can't," Henry said. He was looking out the bedroom window rather than at her. Craning her neck to follow his gaze, Piper thought that she saw a flash of gold hair, but among the flames she could not be sure. "And anyway-" Henry tried to move his burned arm, and went paler than the sheets on his own bed. Piper was sure that that scream was finally going to find its way free before he managed to force it back down again. "I can't climb over that windowsill. We have to go right out the front door." Henry looked her in the eye. He was breathing hard, but his voice was steady. "You're going to need both of your hands free."
Truer words had never been spoken. Piper took several deep breaths until she felt calmer and handed Chris over to Henry. Chris cried that much harder, clinging to her neck until Piper thought that she was going to become the first person in history to be strangled by her own toddler.
"Shh, shh, shh," Piper murmured to him in order to quiet his cries. She pulled him close to her again so that she could stroke at his hair. It was still so soft, his and Wyatt's both, almost as fine as it had been on the days that she had brought them home from the hospital. It wasn't fair, she thought, it wasn't fair that they were growing up so fast and so much had changed, all the while there could be so much left behind to remind Piper of the babies that they had been. "It's going to be all right, Chris, Mommy's here, Mommy's going to keep you safe." Piper closed her eyes so that Henry would not see the tears that were pricking them suddenly. "I promise you, Mommy will keep you safe." And Mommy would find a way to keep Wyatt safe, and Mommy would find a way to get Henry to the hospital, and while she was at it, Mommy would find a way to bring Leo and Paige and Phoebe back, and Prue, also, and even Cole, since she was so busy performing miracles and the list of the dead ran for so long. "I just need for Henry to carry you right now. Come on, you know Henry, you know that he's a good guy." Piper felt the arms around her neck loosen by a fraction, just enough so that she could pull him away from her chest without gagging.
"Hey, buddy, you know you're all right with me," Henry said as he took Chris with his good arm. Even that movement made his entire body go rigid with pain, but he recovered quickly. Henry gave Piper and her hands a significant look as soon as he had Chris settled against his hip. Chris had apparently been through enough that day so that he was pretty equal opportunity in who he clung to, as within seconds he was gripping Henry's neck every bit as hard as he had held Piper's.
Piper scarcely nodded before she raised her hands towards the ceiling and let the magic course through her. It was only at the last moment that she remembered that her goal was to freeze, not to blow the roof right off and halfway across the street. Piper really thought that she deserved to blow something up.
In spite of her intention to freeze rather than hurling a pure, raw charge at it that would scatter embers in all directions and make the inferno that much worse, the force with which the power traveled through her was still enough to make her vision first double and then triple. If had not done that since she had first discovered her powers. The tips of Piper's fingers tingled and her mouth fell open in a soft gasp, but the fire above her head froze like a giant, terrifying relief painting. She spun and fired off several more shots at the walls, freezing the fingers of flame that were beginning to crawl down them as well, before she turned back to Henry. He obviously needed help in getting back to his feet. The problem lay in finding a way to touch him that would not only hurt him worse.
"I got it," Henry told her finally, waving off her attempts to help. He held Chris against his chest with his good arm, put his bad one against the wall, and pushed himself back up to his feet. Henry's face bled free of color with the pain as he clenched his teeth together tightly to avoid crying out with the pain and began to sway back and forth so alarmingly that Piper did not even see how he was still standing. She ducked herself quickly beneath his bad arm before could fall, wincing along with him as he let out a strangled noise. Piper could feel his heart hammering wildly through the thin, sweat-soaked fabric of his shirt.
"I'm okay," Henry said after several long moments, and untangled himself from Piper as well as he could without hurting himself further. He was still listing from side to side like a willow tree in a strong wind. Piper feared that it would not take more than a strong nudge to topple him. It hurt to look at him for more than a few seconds at a time.
Piper shook out her still tingling hands and glanced once more at the ceiling before she led Henry out the door. She had not been able to vanquish the demon in Billie earlier, though she had been able to throw her back several yards and into a fire that should still have been able to do some damage, and this was a thought that still hung in the back of her mind and troubled her. Piper could still throw Billie hard enough and far enough to make her head ring, though, that she had proved. The idea of tossing Billie down the street and bouncing her from one car to the next was one that cheered Piper up far more than it had any right to.
"Piper!" someone yelled from the living room, a male voice that still cracked with panic, almost like a child's. It could have been relief that flooded through Piper's veins as she recognized the voice as Dean's or it could have been nothing more than adrenaline from her seemingly endless supply, but it was still enough to throw Piper straight to the top of a high, giddy wave. Her knees wavered beneath her for a moment, and she grabbed at the doorframe for support. "Chris!" the voice continued.
"Oh, thank God," Piper whispered beneath her breath as she let go of the doorframe and straightened. "De-" The smoke entered her lungs, choking her and making her doubled over on a fit of coughing. Before she could gather her breath to try again, the ceiling above her erupted once more into a roar of crackling noises and a wall of heat. Her hand still over her mouth, Piper whirled around to see that the fire that she had frozen only moments before had burst into life again. "How the hell?" Piper muttered in disbelief, only to hurl herself to the side a second later as a lick of flame, nearly sentient, curled down and struck against the carpet in the very place where she had been standing. Henry dodged in the other direction, shielding Chris's body from stray embers with his own. Chris's continued shrieking, begun again after scarcely a moment's respite, was the loudest sound in the room. A wave of heat pressed Piper flat to the floor, tendrils of sweat hair clinging to her face and a line of small blisters breaking out from her cheekbone down to her nose. There was a little room to breathe down here by the floor, away from the smoke that was turning the rest of the room into a thick black haze, and Piper inhaled deeply before she looked up again. Any hopes she might have been entertaining that her eyes had been playing cruel jokes on her were dashed as she saw the fire continuing to blaze away happily. There was a loud cracking sound from one corner of the room that made Piper think of two planks being slammed together.
Piper had heard guns going off before, had even on a few memorable occasions actually had one fired at her. She still did not connect the dots on the sound that she heard until it was followed by several more even louder in volume and by Henry calling out sharply, "Piper, stay down!" Several more staccato sounds occurred in quick succession, like…like all of the bullets left in a gun going off after being superheated in just a few minutes time. Piper shrieked and threw both of her hands over her head as she swore that something passed over her hair closely enough to leave a red mark across her knuckles. She lunged back up to her feet as soon as there was a break in the bullet-fire, ignoring Henry yelling at her to stay where she was.
"We have to get out of here before the whole place comes down!" Piper yelled back in the loudest voice that she could manage. A final bullet cracked through the air, causing Piper to gasp and duck. The air was thicker than ever, hot and actually gritty as it slid down her throat. It was all that Piper could do to manage a regular speaking voice, let alone a yell. The room was filled with swirling smoke; she could barely even see her own hand in front of her face, let alone Henry or Chris. From the living room, Piper heard the sound of a great deal of glass breaking, and then Wyatt joined his brother in shrieking as loudly as he was capable. Among the indecipherable slew of words came one, said over and over again: "Mommy!"
"Mommy," Piper mouthed along with Wyatt before she began staggering along blindly back towards the door. Henry grabbed for her elbow out of the smoke and nearly got himself hurled against the wall before Piper collected herself and realized who he was. Piper directed the blast towards the fire again instead, freezing it, only for it to begin to whirl and dance once more mere seconds later. She kept herself from gaping only by an extreme act of will and instead listened as her eldest sound continued to scream form the living room, sure that Henry was about to try to talk her down from doing something foolish. Like rushing into the living room and throwing Billie into the wall instead.
"Cover your head," was all that Henry said before he released her elbow so that she could go. Chris and Wyatt were screaming in rhythm with one another, like the wailing of the fire engines that could come racing down Henry's street any moment now.
Piper bolted from the bedroom and down the hallway in spite of the fact that she could hardly breathe, let alone see, and ignoring every scrap of conventional wisdom that told her to crawl in order to avoid the worst of the smoke inhalation. That would not be nearly fast enough. She could hear Henry's feet pounding close behind her.
Piper was not sure what it was that staggered her more as she reached the living room at last, the relatively clean air that filled her burning, twitching lungs or the sight of her son, alive and whole and unharmed. All of the windows in Henry's living room were broken, and Dean was desperately trying to shove Wyatt out of one of the windows and into what he thought was the safety of the front lawn. Wyatt was struggling fiercely against him, drumming his heels against the windowsill and screaming, "Mommy!" over and over again. There was already blood running down his wrist from where he had cut himself on the window frame.
"Dean!" Piper yelled across the living room. Dean spun around with such speed that he nearly dropped Wyatt altogether when he heard the sound of Piper's voice, his eyes going wide when he realized that she was real and not a phantom. If Dean looked as if he had seen a ghost, then Piper was a ghost that he had been hoping and praying to see, and he did not know how to respond once he had found her.
"Piper?" Dean asked her, almost as if he thought that she would say that, no, she was really Stephanie from down the street. He shook his head, and the focus came back into his face, his eyes, leaving him cold and hard in return. "How-"
A huge chunk of Henry's plaster ceiling came down between them with a roaring sound that was more like water than fire. Piper threw out her hands without thinking, a flash of magic that left her briefly dazzled while she was still running mostly on adrenaline and the refusal to lie down and die. The mess of plaster and flame froze in the air, the sparks cast out in a circle around them. Piper saw Dean's mouth fall open in shock for a moment, but he shook his head and recovered quickly. "You gotta get-get Chris out of here, he's the one that it wants!" Dean's face was red with the effort that it took just to keep breathing and he was still weaving back and forth. For a moment it was not Chris's name that Dean began to shout, before his lips clamped shut around the words.
Piper shook her head, but her throat closed and her voice failed her while her body took a moment to decide if she was really fit to continue leading it around. She spit out a mouthful of phlegm that tasted strongly of ash and made her nose burn before she continued, willing Dean to get it. "No, you don't understand," she said, only to pause midway through so that she could indulge in a coughing fit that made her ribs ache and set her to wondering if she was about to see her own lungs splattered across Henry's carpet. When she could, she straightened and looked Dean in the eye. "The fire started outside."
There was no flash of epiphany moving across Dean's face, no sign that he understood the full extent of what she was telling him. Piper's attention was drawn next to the flash of gold that she saw moving just outside of the window, scuttling so low to the ground that she could barely be seen at all over the sill. The blonde in Billie's hair caught the flames and threw them back in motes of pure gold. Piper's lips curled back from her teeth; she knew that she looked like a dog and did not care. Before she could shout a warning, Billie's hands were reaching across the sill, grabbing Dean around his throat, and jerking him back against the frame so hard that Piper was no sure which would crack first, the wood or his spine. For only a second, Billie's arms were encased in a shiny covering almost like cling-wrap before she tore through with an audible ripping sound. The fingers around Dean's neck flexed and tightened as he gagged.
Dean let go of Wyatt with so little care that it was a wonder that Wyatt was able to catch himself at all. Piper saw Dean mouth the word, "Go," at Wyatt, saw Wyatt pause with his face turned up and his mouth twisted in worry before something within the boy broke. He raced back across the living room, dodged the eerie frozen spectacle of the frozen plaster, and leapt into Piper's arms. She fell to her knees so that she could receive him, and even so the force of a tearful, dive-bombing four year-old was nearly enough to knock her straight onto her ass. Piper wrapped her arms around him every bit as hard as he was clinging to her, as hard as she had been pressing Chris to her chest only a short time before. It was several seconds before she remembered that her son just might want to breathe. Piper forced her arms to loosen, only for Wyatt to cry and worm against her that much harder. Behind her, his brother continued to scream in one unending wail. Piper knew that Dean needed her to rise to her feet and come to his aid, but it was so hard to remember that when she had her baby pressed against her again. Thoughts of revenge were exposed for the ridiculous, petty things that they were when she had her lips against the crown of his head.
It was the crack of a gunshot that made Piper's head snap up again. She had not noticed the gun in Dean's hand until then. She did not think that he noticed it now. His face was both devastated and devastating as he stared down at Billie, still alive and pink and whole, and mouthed words that Piper could not make out. Billie put her hand against Dean's chest and hurled him backwards so hard that his feet seemed to actually leave the floor. He did not stop until he collided with Henry's coffee table hard enough to snap one of the legs clean away and make Piper wince in sympathy.
Billie grinned down at Dean where he was gaping at her in horror. "Yes," she said, "but you're the one who had to go and make it all personal. Tit for tat, as they say." She lifted her head finally so that she could make eye contact with Piper at last. Their eyes locked, and Piper felt a surge of the hatred that she had been so sure that she had released moments before, rancid and sour after it had been locked up for so long with no hope of reaching its target. Her entire body began to tingle; the rest of the room receded away to leave only Billie, crouching on the windowsill and grinning across the room at Piper like she had a right to be there, like the fact that she kept taking Piper's families and destroying them meant nothing to her at all. "Hello, Piper," she cooed.
Piper straightened from her crouch slowly, and never once let her eyes waver from Billie's. She had to struggle for a moment to make Wyatt release his grip upon her blouse, only for him to slide down and wrap his arms around her knee just as hard. Piper's hands were trembling, she was clenching them into fists so hard, wanting to vanquish Billie so much that if she had given in she likely would have thrown Billie straight through Henry's wall and through the neighbor's as well. Billie's knees were bent back at an angle that she could not have possibly managed if she had still been human as she crouched on the sill, encouraging Piper even further, until she remembered how little effect her last attempt to vanquish Billie had had. One family was more than enough. Billie was not going to get to take another because Piper could not keep herself together.
"Over my dead body you are going to take Chris, Billie," Piper said, unable to stop herself from using Billie's real name even through she knew that the thing crouching on the windowsill was not Billie any longer and likely had not been for some time. She was still shaking with the need to lunge forward and wrap her hands around Billie's throat. "Or did you forget how well trying to take my boys' power worked for you the last time?"
Billie's laugh made Piper wonder if someone had not already beaten her to the punch when it came to Billie's throat. It had a thick quality to it, as if her voice box had been crushed. "Keep him," she said, and made a negligent flicking gesture.
Piper felt a hand the size of a ham come down upon the collar of her blouse and jerk her backwards so hard that she gagged from the force of the fabric catching her throat. Piper slammed against the wall and began to rebound down to the ground again, only to have another visible hand slam her against the wall once more, hard enough to send flakes of plaster cascading into her hair. She wheezed Dean's name around her bruised ribs as she saw him begin to rush to her aid, only to get flung back against the other wall, and flicked out her hands. The flames that scuttled up and down the wall froze a split-second before dean would have been immolated in them.
Wyatt had refused to release his grip upon Piper's knee even as she was jerked backwards, so that eh was bounced off of the wall every bit as hard as Piper herself. He made a thumping noise as she fell off of her and to the ground. Wyatt had stopped screaming, as Chris was continuing to do in Henry's arm only a few yards away in defiance of the room's limited oxygen supply, and was crying without making a sound. Piper sobbed out her son's name and tried to reach for him, grunting and struggling against the invisible hands, but she could not even raise her wrists from the wall. Henry tried to rush to her aid, only to be hurled away and into the wall with one of the most terrible sounds that she had ever heard before in her life. He did not move again.
'I'm going to kill you,' Piper thought, staring across the room at the thing that wore Billie's face. They eyes were clearer and sharper than Billie's had ever been and the bones beneath the skin shifted and rolled into new shapes that almost, but not quite, approximated a human face, as if Billie herself was nothing more than an ill-fitting mask that was beginning to wear out and was on the verge of being thrown away altogether. 'Before I let you come near my sons again, I am going to put my hands around your throat, and I am going to squeeze until you're not there anymore.' Piper meant the promise more than she had meant anything else in her life, perhaps even her wedding vows.
Billie's face twitched into a frown long enough to make Piper wonder if the ability to read minds was not also included among the demon's powers. It wrenched her away from the wall one final time and then slammed her back again, hard enough to knock the back of her head against the plaster, leaving her dazed and dangling. She lived within a gray haze for several seconds, until she heard her son scream as he was dragged into the center of the room.
Not Chris. Wyatt. Piper felt her mouth fall open, and she gaped for a moment before she recovered herself and to fight and kick as hard as she was capable, ignoring the pounding in her head and the urge to retch that was rising in her. "No," Piper grunted beneath her breath, "no, no, no." She slammed her heels into the wall with enough force to leave deep dents behind. Not Wyatt. Not either of them, not while there was a single drop of blood left within her body, but not Wyatt. Not after they had fought so hard, not after she knew that he had such a tremendous capacity in him for good.
Because he also had a tremendous capacity for evil. Other mothers could pretend that their children were filled with nothing but good; Piper could not. She bit savagely into her own lower lip to keep herself from crying.
'I'm going to kill you,' Piper thought again, and wondered if maybe Wyatt's resemblance to his father was not more superficial than she had previously thought. She hardly noticed when Dean launched himself away from the floor one final time and tackled Billie hard around her midsection, so fixated was she on the terrified boy that she could not reach, until the cold, invisible hands that were keeping her pinned to the wall vanished and allowed her to fall back to the floor. There was a terrible, wet sliding noise from her stomach that reminded her of a zipper being drawn down, though the pain was in a class that defied all of Piper's previous experiences. She clenched her teeth together hard to keep from screaming, heard her breath whistling. Chris rushed over to her immediately, smearing blood all over himself as he launched himself into her midsection without regard for the deep wound that ran across her gut. Piper wrapped one hand around him, tried to hold the edges of her skin together, and called Henry's name in an increasingly strident tone of voice. He began to kick his feet sluggishly, but did not wake.
Wyatt remained in the exact same place where the demon had dragged him, his hands over his face. He did not so much as twitch in response to all of Piper's attempts to capture his attention again.
Piper jerked her head towards Dean and saw, to her mixed horror and jealousy, that he had reversed the gun in his hands so that he was now holding it by the barrel and was bringing the butt of it down again and again on Billie's face. 'I'm going to kill you.' Piper watched for a few moments more, noting the way that the blood was flicking up from the gun to stain Dean's knuckles and wrist before she called out, "Dean."
The sound of his own name made Dean react as if he had received a physical blow. He leaned back and stared down at the body that he was crouching over, which was by now making only the most spastic of movements. Piper craned her neck so that she could look at what was left of the face, only to glance away again quickly. Her experience as a Charmed One kept her from being sick, as she had seen much worse over the years, but her experience as a cook was for once working against rather than for her. Billie's face bore an unfortunate resemblance to strawberry jam.
Dean rolled away from Billie, and Piper released the freeze that she had cast onto the mess of plaster and flames. It crashed down on Billie, smothering her in fire. Piper only wished that she could believe that they were getting anything other than a temporary reprieve. "Lean on me," Dean instructed her as he knelt by her side. He could not look her in the eyes, almost as if he was afraid of what he would find there.
"I can stand." Piper was trying to keep her voice low and gentle, the way that she might when dealing with a frightened animal. Mostly, she thought that she just sounded tired and sick, with a quaver in her voice that she could not bring back under her control. "Go help Henry." Dean looked her in the eyes at last. The cold, the darkness, that had driven him across the room and into beating Billie senseless was gone, and the green was warm again. He looked frightened and younger than a man in his late twenties, and for a moment it was all that Piper could do not to reach out and cup his face. She would only smear more blood across his cheek, when they were both covered in so much of it as it was.
"Wyatt," Piper called when Dean had left her so that he could go help Henry back to his feet. Wyatt turned finally at the sound of her voice so that he could look at her with large, haunted eyes. He had stopped crying. If not for the tear tracks on his face, it would be easy to believe that his red-rimmed eyes were a result of the smoke and the heat. Piper felt tears springing into her eyes all over again and put one of her hands over her mouth, never mind that she could now taste her own blood spreading across her tongue and teeth. "Baby, come here."
As if there had been a chain around Wyatt's ankle that had been unlocked suddenly, Wyatt launched himself up from the singed carpet and rushed over to Chris, throwing his arms around him and squeezing him until Chris had to stop screaming and squeaked instead. After a moment, he took his brother's hand and led him over to Piper so that he could hug her instead. He clung to her more gently than Chris had, but Piper could still feel his arms trembling with the need to climb into her lap as if he was still a baby. Piper lowered her face into his hair and smelled that clean baby scent, incongruous with the stoic miniature adult that he was turning into so far ahead of his age, and dropped a kiss onto the crown of his head. She then unwrapped her arm from around her midsection and, hanging onto Chris with her other hand, used Wyatt for a few seconds in order to push herself back up to her feet. He withstood it like a half-sized soldier, his expression unchanging.
Blood whooshed from the wound as soon as Piper took the pressure of her forearm off of it, soaking the front of her blouse and her jeans. Swirls of purple and yellow danced along the edges of Piper's vision, and there was a roaring sound in her ears that temporarily blotted out all other sound. Piper staggered and probably would have fallen if not for the two small boys at her side. She closed her eyes and struggled to stay conscious while most of the blood in her body seemed to be raining down onto Henry's carpet. When she opened them again, both Henry and Dean were standing in front of her. "I'll lead," Henry was saying.
Dean glanced to the pile of rubble where, if there was any justice in the universe at all, Billie was turning into a charcoal briquette in spite of the fact that fire had had little effect on her before. He looked as if there was nothing that he wanted to do more than lunge into the fire himself, and as if nodding his acquiescence was the hardest thing that he had ever done. The group of them staggered out of the house and into the cool, sweet air that was the best that Piper had ever breathed before in her life. She dropped to her knees with her boys on either side of her as soon as they were a safe distance away on the lawn. Piper leaned over and began to retch, as she felt as if she had been forced to swallow the contents of a used fireplace, and at long last heard the sounds of an approaching fire truck. The entire encounter had taken less than fifteen minutes from its beginning to its end.
Piper's nerves were still wound so tightly that when she first felt hands along her back and shoulders, she was convinced that it was Billie struggling free from the flames, and it was all that she could do not to spin around and take a swing at her. "Piper," Dean whispered behind her, his voice raspy and hoarse from the smoke. Piper felt first a hand touching her hair, then her face, before something inside her broke and she pressed her face forward and against the side of Dean's neck. "Come on, we gotta leave before it digs out."
Right. Leave. Run. Piper had trouble processing all of these thoughts, had trouble processing any thoughts at all, as she looked around at all of the damage that had been wrought. She didn't like this, this feeling of being a victim, and as she wracked her brain she could only think of one thing that separated this from every other battle that she had fought before. "This isn't the right place," she muttered. It was not the right place and, more importantly, was not the right frame of mind. A whole year's worth of not being in the right frame of mind, frankly. When Piper thought of it, it was almost enough to make her sick.
"Leave," she told Dean abruptly as the sound of the approaching firefighters finally pierced through her fog. "Now."
Dean jerked away from her so fast that she nearly tumbled back down to grass as she realized for the first time how much she had been leaning on him. "What?" The green eyes were filled with hurt, that terrible cold nowhere in evidence. 'Save it up,' Piper wanted to tell him. 'You're going to need every drop, because I don't think that magic alone is going to be enough.' No more than it had been for Phoebe, or for Paige, or for Leo.
Instead, Piper reached out and touched his face gently, taking his chin gently so that eh could not runt his face away. They were both so covered in blood that it no longer mattered what marks they left on each other. "I trust you, Dean," Piper said, wishing that she was not sporting such a whiskey voice at the moment, so that she would sound more sincere and less as if Dean was about to be propositioned by Brigitte Bardot. "But the police don't, and this is the second fire today where a mysterious stranger has come to my rescue."
Whatever arguments that Dean might have been harboring died in his throat. He glanced over his shoulder at the house for a moment before he nodded once, pushed himself back up to his feet, and rushed for his car. Piper waited until he had driven away before she collapsed back onto the lawn, her eyelids fluttering downwards. The first of the firefighters reached her a few moments later.
End Part Eight