"Where's the other one?" Piper asked alarmed, staring at the pieces of the shattered glass scattered on the floor, just where the knocked out Chameleon should have been.
"What do you mean, where's the other one?" Erzsebet asked sharply, her head whipping toward Piper. "Wasn't anyone watching him?"
"I, uh…" -- Piper looked at Phoebe, who gave her an apologetic shrug, motioning towards the scorched remains of the Power Broker. The two sisters turned to Paige, who in turn looked at Cole, and he sighed and scratched his chin, getting a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach as he saw his mother's eyes actually manage to turn a darker shade of black.
"Leo, go get my father," he said with deliberate calmness. "Mother," he called civilly as the Whitelighter orbed out, feeling a chill run down his spine as she turned around to look at him with eyes that seemed void of emotion.
"Your wife and in laws lost my powers," his mother remarked in a quiet, almost nonchalant tone.
"We're gonna find that Chamel…" -- Phoebe's voice trailed off when the demoness' hard look turned in her direction, and Cole placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder, even though he didn't feel all too assured himself.
Before things got worse, though, the sound of Leo's orb came from the baby monitor, followed by Ben's cheerful greeting, and it momentarily drove Erzsebet to distraction.
"What the hell?…" she uttered, giving the baby monitor a perplexed look.
"It's a baby monitor," Cole told her, glad to see her attention focus on something other than their major blunder. "It helps us keep track of Ben when he's in another room."
"Is everyone safe?" they heard Benjamin ask Leo, making Cole wince and wish the Whitelighter had thought of turning off the baby monitor.
"Can they hear us?" Erzsebet asked, grabbing the monitor and frowning as Leo briefed Benjamin on the outcome of the attack. They could hear Ben's voice in the background, impatiently demanding to be orbed out of the room.
"It's a one-way device," Cole explained, but his mother wasn't paying attention any more as Benjamin's alarmed voice came from the monitor:
"What do you mean, they have gone missing???"
"What does anyone mean by 'gone missing'?" -- Erzsebet glared at the baby monitor, heedless of its one-wayness. "Orb down there," she snapped at Paige, "and have those two get their dead asses up here right away."
- x x x x x -
Fifteen minutes later, they were all gathered in the attic, sitting on an assorted mix of seats that went from a slightly wobbly barstool on which Paige was precariously perched to a loveseat where no one had dared to join Erzsebet.
"Do you think someone's spying on us again?" Paige asked, frowning. "Because, come on, what are the odds that a Chameleon would just happen to barge in while we were performing the ritual?"
"Well, we know that this one wasn't sent by the Source," Phoebe reasoned, reaching out to stop Ben from sticking a blue crayon into his mouth. "Draw something pretty for mommy, sweetie," she said, pointing at the sheet of paper that rested on a folding table, before the armchair where she was sitting with the toddler. "I mean, there isn't a new Source yet, is there?" she asked, giving Erzsebet an uncertain look.
"There's no Source," the demoness concurred curtly, staring grimly at the crystal that Paige had used to try and scry for her powers. Having remained uncooperatively still despite Paige's best efforts to tap on Erzsebet's magic, the crystal now lay discarded on top of the world map.
"The reason for that Chameleon to be here could be virtually anything," Cole told Phoebe and Paige. "Chameleons aren't exactly specialized manpower: they're lower level demons who can be hired to do all kind of minor jobs."
"So, it seems that, right now, the genome project crew over there is our best chance," Phoebe sighed, motioning towards Piper, Leo and Benjamin, who were gathered around the desk, analyzing the ashes of the vanquished Power Broker.
She rescued yet another crayon from sure death in Ben's mouth and shook her finger at the toddler:
"I know they're pretty but they're not candy. Are you hungry, munchkin? Do you want a banana?"
"No," Ben declared, vigorously shaking his head. "Nana!" he suddenly exclaimed, trying to wiggle out of Phoebe's arms and to the floor.
"Ben, nan… uh, she's, she's busy now," Phoebe said, struggling to rein the toddler.
"No, she's not," Erzsebet said wryly. "She's just sitting here wishing she hadn't gotten out of bed this morning."
Phoebe gave her an unsure look and the demoness stood up, throwing a dark braid over her shoulder with an impatient shrug.
"Nana!" Ben gleefully called out again when he saw her walk towards him, and Phoebe sighed and allowed Erzsebet to take him from her arms.
"Now," Erzsebet said as she walked back to the loveseat, looking for all the world like a woman who did not have a burbling toddler in her arms, "finding out who the second demon was won't bring my powers back."
She shifted Ben to her hip and gestured towards Piper, Leo and Benjamin with her free hand:
"What they are doing there is only one means to achieve a goal, said goal being to find that Chameleon while he's still in possession of my powers. There must be other means, and we are going to try them all."
She sat on the loveseat again, with Ben happily snuggled in her arms, and proceeded, turning to Cole while taking off the bracelet that had caught Ben's eye earlier that afternoon:
"You'll have plenty of time to learn the rules of their game later. Right now, I need you to play the game that you know."
"Here, keep yourself busy," she said, handing the bracelet to Ben and causing the toddler to squeal in delight.
"I'm not a tracker, mother," Cole sighed with a touch of impatience.
"You're a predator," she replied coldly.
Cole pursed his lips, not pleased with her choice of words, but his mother dismissed his discontentment with an impatient wave of her hand and went on, unabated:
"A tiger can't change its stripes, Cole; whether you'll use your skills for good or for evil is up to you, but nothing will change the fact that you and me, we're hunters."
Cole stared at her in silence, frowning slightly as he weighed her words. Then he stood up without a word and went to place his chair before the loveseat, straddling it and resting his crossed arms on its back as he looked at his mother.
"Lower level demon, of a breed known by its cowardice, way out of his league here," he summoned up.
"Injured albeit mildly, carrying a very powerful magic device that I'm guessing has no immediate use for him," his mother followed suit. "Where did he go?"
Cole flicked his tongue, contemplating this, and Phoebe piped in:
"To rejoin his pack?"
"No," Cole muttered pensively, shaking his head. "Chameleons are loners."
"But I can see where she's coming from," Erzsebet pondered. "Oddly enough," she quickly added.
As Cole gave his mother an interrogative look, judiciously pretending not to notice her unwilling acknowledgement of Phoebe's contribution, she proceeded:
"He needs a safe place where he can lay low while he gathers his wits and figures his next move."
"His kind doesn't like to take chances," Cole muttered, nodding his head. "He went back to the Underworld."
"Where?" Erzsebet asked, keeping her eyes at Cole even as she caught the bracelet that Ben had dropped in mid air and returned it to the toddler.
"Aa dunnorya?" Cole suggested tentatively. "Your powers wouldn't cause much of a ripple when he shimmered in there with them."
"Upper level demons' territory," Phoebe clarified to Paige in a whisper.
"The powers wouldn't, but a lower level demon in Aa dunnorya?" -- Erzsebet flicked her tongue in scorn -- "He would stand out like a cur in a lions' den."
"There aren't many areas in the Underworld where your powers would go unnoticed," Cole noted.
"The Kev'anee is pretty much no man's land," his mother reminded him. "Anyone and anything can go unnoticed there, as long as they know how to hole up."
"If he's bleeding, the crocottas will smell him before he even places both feet on the ground," Cole pointed out.
"The glass might have shattered when it hit the floor," his mother reasoned. "I threw it from a pretty bad angle; I don't think it hit him hard enough to draw blood."
"Well, there's only one way to find out," Cole said, standing up and heading towards the pieces of the glass.
"So," Phoebe asked tentatively, looking at Erzsebet, "what's a crocotta?"
"A beast that infests the Kev'anee," Erzsebet said, not bothering to look at her and keeping her eyes on Ben as she prevented him from rolling down her knees in his efforts to stick an already bare foot into his mouth.
"Looks like a big, ugly dog and reeks like a hyena," Cole added from his place knelt by the broken glass. "And is far more vicious than either of them."
He stood up, turning to his mother again:
"It seems you still can throw one hell of a pitch." -- he walked back to his seat, stopping only to pick Ben's discarded shoes -- "Must've broken the skin just above the eyebrow line, judging by the amount of blood."
"What's this Kevin-what's-his-name place?" Paige asked Phoebe, but she just shrugged in response.
"If we were talking geography," Cole explained as he sat down, "Kev'anee would be the outskirts of the Underworld."
"We're not talking geography?"
"The Underworld's territories aren't like the states of a country," Phoebe told her. "They're more like these sub-realms inside the realm."
"So, he's not at the Kev'anee," Erzsebet said impatiently, eyeing Cole. "Then, where?"
"The atmosphere in the Barshas is pretty charged as it is," Cole said as he sat down again, "with all the sorcerers' and alchemists' activity. The disturbance caused by your powers might not attract attention."
"Not in Dah Barshee, though," his mother pondered.
"Too scantly populated for his taste," he concurred, nodding his head. "He needs to mingle."
"He's in Sh'a Barshee," they both said in one voice, and as Cole said the words he knew it was true; he knew it in his guts, just like he knew that he was damn well going to hunt that Chameleon down.
"Sheeeeeeeeeeee!" Ben gleefully exclaimed out of the blue, throwing one of his socks up into the air.
"Don't be so excited," Erzsebet told the toddler evenly, catching the flying sock in the air and helping him out of the other one. "Sh'a Barshee is a rather big place."
"Yeah," Cole muttered pensively. His mother threw the two little socks at him and he caught them out of reflex, his mind clearly somewhere else as he turned a thoughtful look toward the discarded crystal.
"Why can't we scry Sh'a Barshee?" he asked.
"Because I don't even know what it is?" Phoebe said, raising her eyebrows.
"There are two Barshas," he told her, standing up and dropping Ben's shoes and socks on the folding table. "Both of which are inhabited mainly by sorcerers, alchemists, runecrafters and the likes."
He walked to the table on top of which the world map and the crystal were and stared pensively at it.
"The Dah Barshee is the high Barshee, and the Sh'a Barshee is the low Barshee. But we only need to scry the Sh'a Barshee."
"You want to scry the Underworld?" Erzsebet asked, giving him a curious look.
"As people keep reminding me," he said with a small grin, "I'm a witch. Witches scry."
"I don't think any witch has ever scried the Underworld," Paige muttered.
"I don't think any other witch has been raised in the Underworld," Cole reminded her lightly, taking the crystal by the string to which it was attached and watching as it rotated slowly around itself.
"Baby, you're gonna need a map," Phoebe pointed out.
"Did you keep the wrapping paper that came with the fish tank?" he asked her. "That should be big enough."
"Do you think you can draw a map by heart?" she asked, arching her eyebrows.
"I can mark the approximate location of some key points and name them," he told her. "I think it would be more important than the precision. What they say about there being power in a name, it's not just poetic license."
"The paper is in the trunk at the foot of my bed," Piper said, keeping her eyes on the potion she was stirring.
Cole gave Phoebe an interrogative look and she shrugged:
"Between me and Piper, who did you think would be more likely to save wrapping paper?"