Ben mumbled contently to himself as he covered yet another sheet of paper with purple scribbles. He put the paper aside, once again casting a longing glance at the giant drawing Daddy and Nana were making: they hadn't let him draw with them, and that was wrong, because you were supposed to share. Mommy always said so.
"That's pretty, sweetie," Mommy said with a smile as she placed another piece of paper in front of him. She was sitting on the floor by his side, but Ben knew that she, too, would like to draw with Daddy and Nana because she kept peeking at their drawing. And yet she always knew in advance when he was about to put a crayon in his mouth. Ben sighed. Life was tough.
"If the lesser elemental summoning pool is here," Erzsebet said, pointing at the map, "and the smithies are here, then the plague brewers should be somewhere around here."
"The more I learn about the Underworld, the less I want to know about it," Paige muttered, grimacing.
"Maybe the more sensitive souls would rather draw with your son while we work," Erzsebet said wryly, handing a pink crayon to Cole.
"You don't like the plague brewers either," Cole pointed out evenly. "And I'm not drawing in pink," he non sequitured, not taking the crayon from her hand.
"You asked for a different color to mark the brewers' location."
"Well, now I'm asking for a different color that isn't pink," he said. His mother eyeballed him and he added stubbornly: "It's my map and it's not going to be pink."
Erzsebet sighed heavily as she dropped the pink crayon back into the box.
"Here," she said, offering Cole another crayon. "Royal blue: virile enough, I hope."
"Thank you." -- he refused to acknowledge her sarcasm and turned his attention back to the map, that now covered the whole extension of about six hundred square inches of wrapping paper.
"I still don't understand how you can remember the location of all these places," Leo remarked, watching the map with great interest, "and yet you can never remember where you've parked your car at the mall."
"Same reason why you know what the names and the powers of all your charges are," Cole replied lightly, keeping his eyes on the map, "and yet you can't remember the names of Piper's cousins for the life of you."
He straightened up and massaged the sore muscles of his neck, grunting as his back expressed its resentment for the time he'd spent on the floor, bent over the map.
"Wandering about the parking lot looking for my car is a nuisance," he told the Whitelighter. "Taking a wrong turn in the Underworld could get me killed."
"Still," Paige pointed out, "you haven't been to any of these places in at least two years."
"You have memories of your childhood," Cole sighed. "That was twenty years ago. I have memories of mine; that was a century ago. My mother remembers the Black Death; different life spans, different memories."
Just then, the Turner's Book of Shadows came to life, getting everyone's attention as its pages started to flip by themselves.
"What is that?" Erzsebet asked, frowning.
"It seems that we have identified one of the demons," Benjamin announced, watching with interest as the pages gradually started to settle down. "The one Phoebe vanquished."
"It also seems that my Book of Shadows beat yours to it," Cole said slyly to Paige as he stood up to go see what was written in the book.
Paige made a face on him, but before she could retort the pages of the book came to a rest, and she promptly stood up, too, eager to know the demon's identity.
"Oh." -- Benjamin didn't say anything else, but his tone alone said volumes and Cole quickly closed the gap between him and his Book of Shadows.
"What now?" Erzsebet asked testily.
"That would explain their timing," Piper muttered, staring at the entry.
"What?"
"Egon," Cole sighed, rubbing his face, "comes from a long line of Power Brokers."
He didn't have to look up from the Book of Shadows to know that the loud cracking sound he heard was a crayon being snapped between his mother fingers.
"A folk that also happens to dwell in the Sh'a Barshee," Erzsebet said grimly.
"But Egon was vanquished," Phoebe pointed out. "Can a Chameleon also be a Power Broker?"
"That's unheard of," Cole said. "But possible, I suppose."
He turned his eyes back to the Book of Shadows, studying the entry with a pensive expression.
"This Egon seems to have some renown as a Power Broker," he remarked. "I can easily see why the Chameleon would want to tag along with him."
"But why would Egon want to associate with a Chameleon?" his mother finished the thought for him, absently fingering Ben's hair as the toddler abandoned his drawing and went to nestle on her lap.
"Cannon fodder?" Piper offered.
"Probably," Cole said, nodding his head. "And if so, Egon was most likely the one with all the connections. The good news is that, without him," he proceeded, walking back towards the map, "the Chameleon will probably have a hard time finding a buyer for the powers. Power Brokers can be rather bigoted."
He gingerly picked up the map from the floor and placed it on the table where the world map had been.
"Can't he just sell them to the final customer?" Phoebe asked while she collected the crayons and placed them back into the box.
"Would you buy a purse from someone who knocked at your door claiming it was Prada?" Erzsebet asked flatly, standing up with Ben in her arms and going to join Cole by the map.
"So," she said to Cole without waiting for Phoebe's answer, motioning with her chin toward the map of the Underworld, "how does this work?"
"Hum…" -- he frowned slightly, staring at the crystal in his hand -- "Piper?"
"Is there any blood left?" Piper asked from her place by the two Books of Shadows.
"No." -- he had wiped the crystal clean of his mother's blood as soon as Paige gave up on scrying the world map: upper level demons could never be too careful with their blood.
"Where is the athame?" Erzsebet asked. "Go stay with your mother while we do this," she told Ben as she handed him back to Phoebe, "lest you start having ideas."
She held out her hand and Cole made another cut next to the one that had been done to draw blood for the first scrying.
"Hold the end of the string," Piper instructed Cole after he smeared his mother's blood over the crystal, "and hang the crystal above the map."
She placed her hands on the arms of her chair and pushed herself up with a small grunt.
"Keep in mind that you're not actually doing anything here," she told him as she approached the map. "Don't try to guide the crystal: just focus on what you're scrying for and let magic work."
"You know I hate it when you say…Hey!" -- Cole watched, perplexed, as the crystal quickly traveled to the upper left corner of the map but, instead of settling down, started to move in circles around one spot. "What's it doing?"
"Is the Chameleon running in circles?" Paige asked, intrigued.
"At this speed? No way." -- Cole shook his head -- "He would be going from the poison wells to the summoning pool and back in a few seconds. That is, what?" -- he looked at his mother -- "Fifteen yards?"
"I have absolutely no idea," Erzsebet said, frowning at the crystal, "but definitely too distant to be possible."
"What is at the center of the circle?" Benjamin asked her, standing by her side and watching the crystal with great interest. It was twitching and pulling at the end of the string, yet it never changed its course in what looked like a geometrically perfect circle.
"Not much, if memory serves me," Erzsebet said. "Cole?" she called, giving him an interrogative look. "I recall you spending a lot of time at those parts back in the 1930s, to see that blue skinned wench, what was her name? Darla? Marla?"
"Mara," Cole said curtly when his frantically risen eyebrows didn't shut her up.
With the corner of his eye he could see Phoebe purse her lips; he sighed and turned his eyes back to the map, for now avoiding eye contact with his beautiful, loving, prone-to-start-an-argument-over-something-that-had-happened-before-even-her-mother-was-born witch of a wife.
"If you leave the wells and walk this way," he said, pointing in the crystal's general direction with his free hand, "you'll soon find yourself in the middle of nothing. It's imps' territory, and while it's convenient for the sorcerers to have them nearby, no one in their right mind would try and make a potion or perform a summoning ritual with a bunch of imps bustling around."
"Okay, so this could be why the Chameleon chose this place to hide," Piper pondered. "But why can't the crystal find his exact location?"
"Maybe it has found his exact location," Benjamin uttered, scratching his chin. "It just can't reach it. If you ask me, it looks like the area is magically shielded."
"By a Chameleon?" Cole said, raising a skeptical eyebrow. "It would take much more power than any Chameleon…"
He stopped mid-sentence as realization sank in, and his mother bitterly voiced his thought:
"Except that this particular Chameleon currently has enough power to shield the entire state of California. It seems he did learn a trick or two from Egon, after all," she added grimly.
"Is he using your powers to conceal himself?" Piper asked.
"I have no such power," Erzsebet sighed, shaking her head. "But you can bet he is tapping on my powers to pull this off."
"We need to wait until he lowers the shield," Cole sighed, running his hand across his face. "We're never gonna break through it. Not in the Underworld, not with white magic."
He stared at the map in silence for a while before giving his mother a sideways look:
"If I say I'm sorry about this mess, you're gonna punch me, aren't you?"
"Damn right I will," she deadpanned, with her eyes still trained on the crystal and its accursed trajectory.
"We need to know the exact moment when he lowers the shield," Phoebe said pensively, shifting an increasingly restless Ben to her hip. "If he's holed up to plan his next move, once he lowers the shield he won't lose any time."
"If you can provide a few smaller crystals," Benjamin told her, "I think there's something in Cole's Book of Shadows that might help."
"I'll get the crystals," Paige said, heading to the trunk where they kept the crystals and gems while Leo went to fetch the Turners' Book of Shadows.
"You had better not be thinking of dropping this crystal." -- Erzsebet glared at Cole when she saw him start to lower his arm.
"We already know where he is," he argued, "and my arm is starting to ache."
"He might move," she admonished him. "After I get my powers back, you are free to take chances with yours; until then, do not move this arm."
"Fine," he sighed, but waited for his mother to look the other way before he rolled his eyes.
"You watch and learn," Phoebe told him as she walked past him with Ben in her arms, "and give me a full report afterwards."
Cole gave her an interrogative look and she proceeded:
"Your son needs a change and his afternoon snack as well; move this downstairs when you have a chance."
"Will do." -- Cole smiled at her before turning his attention back to his father as Paige returned with the crystals and Benjamin started to explain how to position them.
"Nana!" Ben called out, looking at Erzsebet over Phoebe's shoulder and waving a chubby hand at her.
"Come on, sweetie, we'll be right back and you can be with her then," Phoebe told him without stopping. "This diaper is in dire need of a change."
"Na-na!"
"Could you just come with us and be there while I change the diaper?" Phoebe asked with a sigh, stopping at the doorway and turning to Erzsebet. "The diaper change is enough of a drama as it is."
"As long as you keep in mind that I changed my last diaper one hundred and seventeen years ago," the demoness told her as they walked through the door, "and I am not planning a comeback."
"Not a word," Cole warned a grinning Paige as she put the last crystal in place and turned her eyes to him.
- x x x x x -
"So," Erzsebet said, staring grimly at the oval shaped opal stone that sat on the coffee table, "do you plan on ruining my day any further?"
"Mother…" Cole started to say, but she cut him off with an impatient wave of her hand.
"Because, really, you might as well just do it already and take the rest of the day off, go watch TV or something. Assuming, of course, that there is another television in this household, one that is not featuring a singing purple dinosaur."
"Dis!" Ben rejoiced, bouncing excitedly on her knees as Barney broke out in his "I love you" theme song.
"Mother…"
"Are you even sure that this works?" she snapped, pointing at the stone.
"Father is sure," he said defensively, and his mother turned her glare towards Benjamin.
"If your powers leave that area, the stone will heat up and glow," Benjamin assured her. "We used the same spell to track down Asmodeus," he reminded her, referring to the first demon they had vanquished together.
"It's been fourty minutes and nothing happened yet," Erzsebet sighed, frustrated. "And don't you remind me that we held longer sieges in the past," she hissed at Cole when he raised his eyebrows. "The last thing I need right now is to think about that accursed fortnight we spent in the surroundings of Zekraena."
Before Cole could reply, Leo orbed in, and Erzsebet promptly turned her attention to the Whitelighter, shooting him an inquisitive glare. When she, Phoebe and Ben had joined the others in the living room, the demoness hadn't been in the least pleased to know that the Elders had summoned Leo, and now she narrowed her eyes, watching him intently as he addressed Benjamin:
"They, hum… they think you should go back now. At least until the powers are retrieved and we can proceed."
Erzsebet huffed at Leo's words, but she didn't say anything and turned her attention back to Ben while Benjamin stood up with a good-natured sigh.
"They do have a point," he reasoned. "Right now, I'm not needed here."
"Uh-hum," Leo grumbled noncommittally, Benjamin's assessment clearly not shared by the five people who would have to entertain his very irked wife in his absence.
"Use this time to get some rest," Benjamin said, placing his hand on Erzsebet's shoulder. "Jumping between time zones has never agreed with you," he gently admonished her when she glared at him, "and the deprivation of your powers is taking its toll on you."
"I am fine," she said curtly. Benjamin only arched his eyebrows in response, and she gave in with an aggravated sigh: "I will rest."
Erzsebet turned back to Ben, who was now impatiently tugging on her sleeve to show her that the song had finished and the DVD menu was being displayed on the TV screen. While Phoebe used the remote to go back to the first song, the demoness deliberately inspected the DVD cover, making a point of ignoring the look that Benjamin exchanged with Cole over her head.
With one last pat on Cole's shoulder and a polite nod to the others, Benjamin vanished in the air, and for a moment the only sound in the room was the words of "A Circle's Shape Is Round" coming from the TV and Ben's merry babbling along.
"So," Phoebe finally spoke, turning to Erzsebet with as much poise as she could feign, "you'll be staying for dinner?"