Part Eleven

Dean was angry, that much was obvious. Piper did not know if he was angry at her, angry at the demon, or angry at the entire universe in general. She was willing to lay money down that it was a mixture of all three, and it wasn't as if he didn't have good cause, but she was still troubled. Unpredictable emotions made for unpredictable spells, that was one lesson that she and her sister had been forced to learn over and over again through the years. Piper touched at her stomach and was able to feel the thick black thread that she had not had had the time to pull out yet even through the cotton. And they weren't going to get another chance if the spell went wrong; they had already been given so many narrow escapes as it was that Piper almost believed that there really was something out there looking out for them.

Then again, she thought, staring down at the hands that she had clenched against one another in her lap. She forced one of them to uncurl and saw that her fingers were trembling. Dean was not the only one who might have some trouble keeping his emotions in check. Piper glanced once into the rearview mirror and saw that her son was staring back at her. She was beginning to wonder if he did not have some latent psychic ability from Phoebe, the way that he kept doing that. If so, she hoped that he knew that she was going to take Billie apart limb by limb, if that was what it took to prevent Billie from laying hand on him again. She hoped he knew how much she hated that she was having to put him into danger again in order to save him.

"Do you know what to do?" Dean asked her as he brought the car to a halt at the curb, shut off the engine, and then shoved the keys into the pocket of the jacket. As Piper had been the one to come up with more of the plan, she could hardly be expected to forget it, but she had a mind that Dean was asking far more to settle his nerves than he was for any other reason. He had said little on the way back to the manor site, but that muscle in his jaw had to be exhausted right now from its incessant jumping, and Piper could hear his knuckles creaking around the steering wheel from where she sat.

She turned and looked out the car window, towards the charred foundation that was all that was left of the manor, so that she would not have to answer immediately. Piper strained her eyes, but even with the streetlights she could not see what she desperately wanted to see. There were no shadowy outlines among the gloom, glimpsed from the corner of her eye and darting swiftly away whenever she turned her head. It was just an empty lot, the site of a tragedy that had taken place a year before, and owned by a half-crazy widow who kept reaching for parts of the past that were not there any longer.

"Yes," Piper said finally when she felt Dean's gaze resting hot and heavy against the side of her neck. She reached for the basket that had been sitting on the floor between her feet for the past half-hour, drawing it up and into her lap. Piper thought that she felt a spark when she ran her fingers lightly across the rose quartz and red carnelian, but she could not be sure. Simulated Power of Three, should the real thing fail to come through for her.

Piper hated to admit it, but she thought that the chances that her sisters would leave her to her fate were more than just a shot in the dark. A year ago, that thought would not have been allowed to so much as whisper at the edges of her mind. To even think it now left a bitter taste in her mouth. She sighed and shook her head so that her tangled, smoke-scented hair swirled across her shoulders. Piper got out of the car without another word, balancing her basket on her hip and holding her other hand out to Wyatt as he climbed down from the backseat. She had a moment of uncertainty as he realized that she could not rightly call Wyatt to stand by her side when she was going to be standing at the center of a storm, and while Dean was going to be occupied with battles of his own.

In the gulf created by her silence, Wyatt dashed around the car and wound up by Dean's side as he popped the trunk of the car open and began pulling out weaponry. Dean reached out gave Wyatt's hair an absent-minded ruffle. Piper thought that he was paying Wyatt and his guns roughly the same amount of attention, which was to say, still not a whole lot. That could either work in their favor or against it, Piper decided as she paused to watch him. They could not afford to be troubled or off of their games even for a moment, but if there was anyone who could stand to be distracted from the demon, it was Dean. Unfortunately, Piper did not think that he was being distracted by happy thoughts.

Piper called her son back over to her and noted the reluctance with which he came. Wyatt had had a hard year, losing his father so suddenly, and Piper frequently received the impression that he did not fully believe her when she told him that Daddy was dead and gone. He needed a male to look up to. Wyatt liked Henry well enough, but Henry wasn't…

'Henry is not one of us,' Piper's traitor brain supplied before she could stop herself. She had called him family, and she had meant it, but his trips into the shadowy parts of the night were always going to be short ones.

That did not mean that Piper did not wish, and wish badly, that her son would look at Henry the same way that he had been looking at Dean only a few moments before.

Piper did not dare kneel down so that she could be at Wyatt's level, given how her stomach still hurt, so she tilted his face up so that he was meeting her eyes. Lightning crackled across the sky above them without ever releasing the rain. "The very second that the demon shows up," she told in a voice that should have cowed all argument, "I want you to orb yourself to Grandpa and Chris, do you understand? Get yourself to safety."

Should have cowed him, but Wyatt had been born into a family that had never been one to give a damn about 'should have'. "I want to stay and help," Wyatt said. For a few seconds, he looked so determined and so much like his father that it took Piper's breath away, and she was left flailing with no clear idea of how to answer.

Dean saved her. "You should listen to your mother, little man," he said. "You have a good four or five years left before you have to worry about getting down with your bad self." 'It's his bad self that I'm worried about,' Piper thought as Wyatt looked at Dean dubiously. "I'm serious, man. I was ten before my dad sent me out." Wyatt looked only slightly mollified, and Dean met Piper's eyes for a moment as he satisfied himself that he had all the weapons that he would need and slammed the lid down.

Piper was grateful enough to him that she was willing to overlook the swearing, but she still tugged Dean to the side as the three of them opened the gate and walked across the lawn. "I don't want him to go out on his own at any age," she whispered to Dean.

Dean grinned at her as he flicked the safety off of a rifle loaded with what Piper presumed to be rock salt. The spark was gone from it. "That horse is already out of the barn and three states away, don't you think, Piper?" he asked. He hopped over the edge of the foundation and into the manor's basement.

Piper hovered on the edge for a moment as Dean turned around and extended his arms up so that he could help her leap down. Before Dean could touch her, however, her son dashed to her side and took her hand in his own. Blue lights filled her vision, there was a slight tugging sensation in her belly that made her grunt, and when her feet touched the ground again it was in the basement. Wyatt released her and gave Dean a faintly challenging look from beneath his lashes. Piper nearly laughed. Hero worship or not, Wyatt was not willing to set his new responsibilities as the miniature man of the house to the side just yet.

'He's not your new daddy, don't worry,' Piper thought, stifling the urge to run her fingers through Wyatt's hair again. It was already standing up like stalks of wheat from the attention that it had received. 'I don't know what he is, either, but we'll figure it out on the other side.'

Dean slung one of the guns off of his shoulder and cocked it as Piper hurried to the center of the basement and began setting out her crystals, three in all, one quartz and two carnelian, so that they formed a large triangle around herself. At carefully spaced intervals between the crystals went the herbs, lit on fire with Dean's lighter, as Piper noticed for the first time how badly her hands were shaking. Chicory, to obtain requests more easily. Althea and wormwood, to attract benevolent spirits. Blood root, to increase familial ties.

Caraway seeds, to keep Wyatt from harm during whatever happened next.

Rosemary, for remembrance, as Piper felt a tightness in the back of her throat.

A shimmering and a whooshing interrupted Piper as she was only midway through her preparations. She glanced up and saw a rapidly solidifying outline only a few yards away, in the place where Phoebe's punching bag had once hung. The outline filled in slowly, like a picture being colored by a child's restless hand, until it revealed Christy wearing the sneer that had taken a pretty face and then destroyed it. Piper felt her lips thinning. She threw her hands out as Christy wrinkled her lips back from her teeth in a snarl that made her look uncannily like a dog gone rapid. The power that Piper threw forth made Christy gasp and then stagger back for a second or two, only to shake it off and advance again. She was stopped quickly when a tremendous booming sound echoed through the air. Christy shrieked and vanished as the rock salt sprayed her. Dean discharged the spent shell quickly and then brought the gun back up to his shoulder, scanning around the basement for the next appearance.

"Get started," he told Piper.

Piper fished for the prescription tablet, by now quite battered from the back pocket of her jeans, and flipped rapidly through the pages until she found the correct one. Even though the crystals surrounding her were still dormant at the moment, Piper felt more powerful as she knelt among them and pressed Wyatt close against her side. When she reached the spell that she had written out in a shaky hand, the letters jumping wildly every time that the car had struck a bump, she raised her voice towards a shout.

"Seeker of prey," Piper yelled at the top of her lungs. "Come to me so that I may, bringing you within my sight, and create an end this night, to rest all of this I will lay."

The wind did not rise into a frenzy. Further lightning did not crash against the sky. Instead, Piper struggled to take a breath as the air became inexplicably thick, like August on the Mississippi, like trying to draw molasses through a straw. She felt Wyatt drawing closer to her side and reached out to find him trembling but calm. Piper repeated the spell over and over again in her mind, wishing for it to work, willing for it to work, and hoping that she had not let her powers atrophy so badly through disuse that she would not be able to cast anything stronger than a magician's parlor trick.

The way that the air gathered and swelled, the way that it crackled and began to smell like ozone the way that it always had before she and her sisters had blown out a fuse by trying to run three hairdryers at once, told her that this was not one of the things that she needed to worry about. There was a faint pop, and then a figure appeared balanced on the edge of foundation. It was hunched over, knees…Piper fought back a gasp as she realized that Billie's knees were actually bending backwards, as if there was a praying mantis perched up there on the cement rather than a girl. Her hair hung forward in front of her face. While Billie raised her hand and flicked it back carelessly, Piper saw that she had blisters running over her face that made Piper's look like nothing more than a breakout of acne, and her eyelids were drooping downwards as if all of the skin was about to slide right off of her skull.

"I think your toy's about to break," Piper called out, but breathlessly. For the first time, she did not refer to the thing in front of her as Billie, not even within her own head.

The thing grinned. Her teeth were slimed over with blood and…something else. Piper preferred not to think about what that something else might actually be. "Won't need it for much longer," it replied. The thing craned its head up to stare at the glittering stars. Piper was almost surprised that its head did not spin all the way around first. "Do you really think that I'm going to stop because there's no roof?" It hopped down from the foundation so lightly that the dust barely stirred beneath its feet as it landed.

"No," Piper said, and bent her. She flipped rapidly through her pages until she found the right one and then began to chant.

"To darkness you belong," she began, struggling to read her own scrawl, "if death will not suffice. To hell I cast you, to the wasteland I forever bind you, by the Power of Three I destroy you." The air all around her was all but rippling. Piper was surprised that her and Wyatt's hair was not standing on end. 'You took my family,' Piper thought as she looked at what was left of Billie's face and then screamed the final line.

---

Dean had felt the air swell and pulse like this before, proof that magic existed even though he would much rather grit his teeth and say otherwise. Usually it ended with Dad, Sam, or himself getting thrown into a few hard services and, worst case scenario, a trip to the emergency room. There were worse scenarios than that running through Dean's mind now.

One shot left in the shotgun. Seven or eight when it got down to the others. Then he got to the blades.

The demon hopped down from the edge of the foundation, said its spiel, and began to stroll forward. Dean would almost believe that it did not know that he was there, were it not for the sideways glance that he saw flicked his way. Oh, it knew, and it knew that he knew, and it wanted him to know that he didn't mean anything to it at all.

'We'll see about that, you bitch,' Dean thought. 'You took my family.' He raised the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

A black swarm filled the air, and Dean heard the buzzing of bees.

---

"By the Power of Three I cast you into the wastelands with this song!" Piper screamed the last line so furiously that she did not even have time to wince as her voice cracked. It was not her best rhyme, certainly, but she thought that she could be forgiven, seeing as she had written in a car and with her mind trying to skip over to eight million other things at once. Anyway, it was not the rhyme that mattered. It was the power that she sent coursing through it.

The crystals flared into life at the same time that Dean treated the thing wearing Billie's face to a chest full of rock salt. It went rolling end over end while Dean threw the gun to the side and grabbed for another. The crystals cast a red glow over Piper's face and body, making her look as if she had been drenched in blood, and briefly illuminated what she thought was a swarm of bees. They were gone before she could be sure. She stared down at her hands, looking so much like those of Lady Macbeth, before she looked up at the crystals again. Three of them carefully chosen so that they would amplify her power, create three witches out of one. It was the best that she could do on such short notice.

It was not nearly enough.

As Piper watched, slack-jawed in horror, Billie did not rise again. Dean did.

---

It was like breathing bees, Dean thought crazily, or being underwater. He could not pull a breath, or move, or jerk away and fight. A marionette with its strings broken would have had more agency.

'What the fuck?' Dean thought, half-panicked, struggling to lift his arms or blink the eyes that no longer belonged to him. 'What is this?'

'I told you that I would not forget you, Dean,' a voice that was neither male nor female, silken and high-pitched, whispered from a place that still sounded as if it was directly behind his ear even though he knew this to be impossible. 'Didn't I tell you that I would make you pay? The check just arrived at your table.'

'Bite me.' It might lack in a certain amount of wit, but Dean thought that he was doing damned well when it came to raw sentiment. He stared out through his own eyes as the demon blinked once, twice, and then focused upon the smoldering hunk of flesh that had once been a blonde co-ed. 'I swear to God, I will be the one that kills you-' Even now, revenge was the strongest thought in his mind.

'It's like watching a monkey run into a glass wall.' The demon actually had the gall to sound amused, and Dean's fury grew tenfold.

Wyatt dashed out of the protective circle formed by Piper and her crystals. The demon tracked him like a cat finally spotting the mouse.

Revenge seemed like such a small, petty thing, after all.

---

Dean's eyes were a beautiful, mossy green that could either gleam with self-satisfaction or turn stormy with fury. When he turned to face Piper again, they shone with the golden-red of a new flame.

"Orb out of here," Piper whispered to Wyatt. "Now." He stared at her and then shook his head once, mutely. "Goddamnit, Wyatt," Piper began, nearly crying, and then pounded her first against the cement in frustration. She reached for Wyatt with a mind to bodily pick him up and throw him over the wall and to safety. He darted out of her reach.

"I want to help!" Wyatt insisted, and nearly stamped his foot. As much as Piper wanted to shake him for choosing the worst of all possible moments in which to turn defiant, it was much worse than that. He had stepped outside of the protective triangle that she had set up, and the demon had noticed.

Piper half-rose to her feet, intending to dash out after him, before she caught herself and said the spell again, and then again with the result was no better than the first attempt. She slammed her fist against the cement again when the crystals only flared weakly, light bulbs at the end of their lives. "Where are you?" Piper screamed at the surrounding walls. Her words were echoed back to her without response. Something inside of Piper broke and sent her lunging out from under protection herself, heading straight for Wyatt. She could still toss him over the edge of the foundation, still get him to safety even if she could not banish the demon where it belonged.

Piper reached her son at the same time that the demon did, felt her fingers brush against the back of his shirt. Just as she had not been able to stop herself from referring to the demon as Billie while it was in her form, neither could she now stop herself from referring to it as Dean, even with those glowing eyes. He drew his fist back and then brought it forward again and into her jaw with a strength that went far beyond the merely human. Piper's head snapped back to the point of breaking as she collapsed heavily onto the cement. Her ears rang and she did not think that she could even move her limbs, let alone stand and fight again.

Piper repeated the spell over and over again on endless loop into the dust, watching it puff up with each breath.

---

Dean felt his knuckles colliding with Piper's jaw, but from far away, as if the sensation was having to be telegraphed to him. 'NO!'

'Little late for protests, don't you think?' Oh, that son of a bitch was lucky that it did not have a neck to call its very own for Dean to wrap his hands around. There would be nothing left but pulp by the time that he was done. 'And you were the one who left that door open for me to come in. Won't that be a fun detail to think about, until I'm done with you. You're young and strong, Dean. I see our relationship lasting for a good long while.' While Piper rolled end over end across the cement and struggled to get her bearings back, the demon commanded Dean to grab Wyatt by the front of his shirt and lift him, screaming, into the air.

Dean, Sam, Wyatt, Chris. Hundreds of others, thousands, laid down on a pyre to power. Dean's flash of rage was so great that it could have powered the sun, and it felt as if it was pushing outwards, stretching the bounds of a body not nearly large enough to hold it. It certainly consumed all of his attention again, so that he hardly even noticed when the fingers uncurled to let Wyatt fall back down to the cement, or that it was he who had ordered the movement.

One more time, Dean's ears were filled with the buzzing of bees.

---

Piper's head was ringing with the force of a truly world-class hangover. So long as her thoughts were clearing again, finally, she would grateful for every single ache. "By the Power of Three," she whispered against the cement and, pushing herself up onto her hands and knees, said the spell again. Lightning crisscrossed the sky, dogs all over the neighborhood were howling and worse, cats were actually screaming, as her spell did absolutely nothing at all. If she slammed her hand into the basement floor again, she was going to break her knuckles.

Dean dropped Wyatt abruptly and arched his back, as a man would shortly before being sick. A dark cloud swarmed around his head.

Piper hardly noticed. She raised her head and screamed towards the sky, "You'll show yourselves to him, but not to me? I'm your sister!" The only sound that came back to her was that of her own ragged breathing. In a lower voice, nearly a whisper, as her throat felt so ragged and cracked that she hardly thought she could manage anything else, Piper finished, "I need you."

No response. Piper whispered the spell again. She and Dean, peas in a pod, two moths diving headlong into a flame. Neither one of them knew when to quit. Had they met under different circumstances, Piper thought that the two of them could have liked each other a lot.

At Piper's third repetition of the spell, the crystals stopped glowing the sullen red color of dying roses. They exploded, so suddenly and so violently that Piper had to throw her arm over her face to keep herself from being blinded. She looked back up and discovered that the bloody glow from the crystals had not subsided. It was swirling in a circle around them, faster and faster, until Piper could see nothing outside of the light. She felt, though, felt fingers tracing over the tattoo at her wrist, the one that was like Phoebe's many, felt fingers plucking at her blouse and could almost hear Paige mocking her for her lack of fashion. The Power of Three. Piper could have cried.

Then she did burst into tears, suddenly, as she felt a third set of hands beginning to comb through Piper's hair, separating the tangles that she hadn't bothered to deal with. She had always been a little jealous of Piper's hair, of the way that Piper had been able to grow it so long and so thick, and so had spent hours brushing and braiding it when they were children. Piper had been her very favorite doll.

"Prue?" Piper gasped, her voice choked with disbelief.

The glow expanded outwards from the protective circle until it was touching the walls of the basement themselves and, when it could find no further room to expand horizontally, lashed upwards in a bloody-colored explosion that would have all of her neighbors dialing 911 within moments. It made her skin itch, made her eyes burn, and forced her to look down. When Piper raised her eyes again, the glow was gone. So, so far as she could tell, were her sisters. Piper took a shuddering breath and pushed herself back up to her feet.

Dean was sinking slowly down to the floor, looking dazed. Piper wondered if the magic had felt the same as it washed over him as it had when it touched her. He nodded towards the blackened corpse only a few yards away from them both, so charred that it hardly looked human. Falling into two fires in the span of a day had a way of doing that. "What did you do?" he asked.

"Couldn't kill the thing," Piper said. Dean's flinch was barely perceptible, but Piper put her hand on his arm where she had before and again found that she was not shrugged away. "So I sent it to where all of the bad demons go when they're vanquished. See if it manages to get out of there before we see a new millennium or three."

Dean nodded and then nudged at Billie's body with his foot. "If it makes you feel any better," he said, "demons are attracted to people in emotional turmoil." His mouth twisted for a moment before he went on. "In order for her to attract something that big, she had to have been pretty torn up inside."

Where Dean had only nudged at Billie's body, it was still all that Piper could do not to kick it into ashes. "It doesn't," she said tightly. "But thank you." She turned her face into Dean's shoulder, her cheeks wet with tears. So, she realized a moment later, were his.

End Part Eleven