¤Chapter 3¤

The next morning was cold and gloomy. Emily awoke at about nine in the morning, in her second story bedroom. Her room was painted a dark green with white carpet, and she had Green Day posters up all over her walls. The room was very clean and organized, in the corner of the room by a window sat her computer.

Emily lie on her bed for a while thinking about what she was going to do that day, and finally Emily stumbled out of her bed and over to her dresser to pick out what she was going to wear that day. She pulled open a dark brown drawer from her dresser and selected a random t-shirt that was white and dark blue and she got some jeans from the drawer below that.

Emily was definitely not a preppy girl. In fact she was almost exactly the opposite. Emily grabbed a black hair tie from the top of the dresser, put her hair in a pony tail and was ready to go for the day, not that she planned to do anything that day.

Emily loved music, she was listening to music, singing, or humming almost nonstop. Emily stepped away from the dresser and walked over to her computer desk where her MP3 player usually was. Her eyes scanned the desktop over and over... no MP3 player.

MIMI! Emily thought, grunting. She then stormed through the door to the bathroom which she shared with Mimi, and then through another door into Mimi's room. Emily was instantly swept into a sea of sickening purple, everywhere. Purple bedspread, walls, pillows, everything... it was almost enough to make Emily puke right there.

Over in the corner, sitting at her cosmetics table was Mimi, Emily's adoptive sister. Mimi's older sister and parents were killed by demons when she was three, she was then put into the experimental adoption agency that was started at magic school... Phoebe just couldn't resist her and adopted her, the adoption agency has had the support of the Charmed Ones ever since.

Mimi was a very pretty girl. She was of Asian descent and she had long full brown hair, almond shaped brown eyes, and a cute little nose. Many thought she would be prettier if she dressed a little more conservatively... Emily was one of these people. The subject had came up in Phoebe and Coop's conversations many times, but Phoebe just kept saying that she would be a hypocrite if she stopped Mimi from dressing so scantily, because that is how Phoebe used to dress when she was a teen. Besides, if they stopped her from dressing like that at home she would just put the clothes on somewhere else.

Emily stopped in the doorway of Mimi's room.

"Did you take my MP3 player again?" Emily asked Mimi in an agitated tone.

"Yea, I couldn't find mine," Mimi said running a black brush through her pretty brown hair.

"Can I have it back, PLEASE?" Emily said, getting more and more agitated.

"Okay, okay, don't have a cow," Mimi said focusing on her reflection in the oval shaped mirror. For a split second Mimi's body glowed a bright pink and then an astral projection of herself appeared near a purple night stand by Mimi's bed. All the while this was happening, the other Mimi was still brushing her hair in the mirror.

Emily hated this when Mimi flaunted her power in front of her... and Mimi knew it! The astral Mimi walked briskly over to Emily, smiled, and held out her hand with a dark red MP3 player in it.

"Thanks," Emily forced the words through her teeth as the astral Mimi melded back into the real Mimi.

"Anytime, hun," came Mimi's honey-drenched voice from the corner of the room.

Emily turned on her heels, before she did something she would regret. As much as Emily hated Mimi using her power in front of her, she had to admit that Mimi was getting pretty good at it. At first, Mimi could only control her astral self when she projected, now Mimi could control both. She had even gotten to the point where she could astral project, grab something, meld back into her real body, and the thing she grabbed as her astral self would be in her hands.

Emily reached the sanctuary of her room and threw herself down on her soft, fluffy bed. Emily plugged the earphones of the MP3 player into her ears and retreated into her own little world. She wasn't in her world very long though... her phone rung and she was thrust from the music filled abyss, into the present.

Emily picked up her light blue cell phone from the bedside table and looked at the caller ID. The picture of a handsome boy with dark brown hair, green eyes, and bushy eyebrows flashed on the screen.

Cole... Emily thought as she pressed the answer button, and held the phone about a foot away from her face. Cole and Emily both got video cell phones for Christmas last year.

"Hey!" Emily exclaimed, happy to see the face of a family member she got a long with. Along with Mimi, Emily also didn't get along with Wyatt (long story). Emily and Cole were really good friends though, they had been all their lives because they had a lot in common.

"Hey Emily, whatcha doin'? Cole said smiling into the camera of his phone. Emily could see the dark blue walls of Cole's room, and his messy bed in the background.

"Nothing much really, I just had to get my MP3 player back from Mimi again, and I was just being bored, you?" Emily replied.

"I just got paid for doing Mr. Reynolds yard work and I wanted to know if you wanted to go to the Wicca store to pick up some stuff with me."

"Sure, meet you at the corner of Prescott street and then we can walk there?"

"Sounds great, see you then," with that word Emily watched Cole press the end button on his phone and her screen went black.

Emily got up from the bed, with a little difficulty, and walked over to her dresser again, where her purse was. She unsnapped the dark brown purse and groped inside for her wallet, luckily for Emily there was about fifty dollars inside that she had leftover from Christmas. Throwing the purse over her shoulder and grabbing her dark brown leather jacket, she opened the door of her room and headed down the stairs into the living room where Phoebe was sitting, on her laptop as usual.

"Going on a walk with Cole! Be back later!" Emily yelled as she just kept walking from the living room to the entrance hall.

"Be careful!" Phoebe looked up and yelled as her daughter slammed shut the front door.

The air outside the house was crisp and it felt like fall even though it was the end of spring. Emily bundled her small jacket around her and skipped down the concrete steps and onto the sidewalk. The wind was howling awfully loud... Emily liked days like this though. She trudged about a block away, watching all the strange people as she went. She finally reached the corner of Prescott street where Cole was standing, hands in the pockets of his light grey jacket.

"Hey!" Emily waved at Cole as she approached.

"Hey," Cole said, smiling. "Let's get walking, I need to pick up some toad stool and ginger root, and I might get a journal." Cole took his witchcraft so seriously that he practically had his own potions lab in his room, complete with a cupboard full of ingredients over in his corner.

"You know... you take this witchcraft thing a little too seriously," Emily told him as they started off. The store they were going to was run out of an old house in their neighborhood by an old woman... they usually did not go to this one, but seeing as how they had no one to drive them to the one downtown they would make due.

"And you're a little obsessed with Green Day... just mind your own business," Cole said, sounding ruder than he meant to.

"Fine..." Emily said, bundling her jacket around her as a cold gust of wind blew at the two cousins faces.

"Do you need anything?" Cole said, eager to change the subject.

"No... not really, why do you need to pick up a journal?" Emily inquired

"I am gonna start my own spell book, since the Book of Shadows is at Aunt Piper's house and sticky notes aren't exactly cutting it for the spells I think up constantly," Cole replied.

"Oh, well that's a good idea," Emily said, quickening her pace to keep up with Cole's longer strides, "I might do that, too!"

"I hate going to this place... that old hag is so creepy!" Emily said as they neared the well-worn house that was their destination.

"I know... just humor her," Cole said keeping his eyes fixed on the house.

"Well, it is kind of hard when she is pretending to be a psychic and predicting someone's doom every three minutes!" Emily huffed as they stepped up the concrete steps leading to the front door of the store.

The two Halliwell teenagers approached the front door. It was a chipped, wooden door, with opaqued glass, and an "open" sign on it. Cole reached forward, grabbed the brass handle of the door, and insisted, "After you!"

"Gee, thanks!" Emily smiled a fake little smile as she hobbled in from the cold and into the dark, perfumed room.

The room was dark and draped with gossamer and curtains everywhere. Wherever you looked you would see something very antique looking on a shelf display with a small card in front of it, explaining what it was and what the price was. About fifteen feet from the entrance to the store was a desk covered with burgundy, maroon, gold, and black drapes.

Perched on top of the desk was a white cash register, and about a foot from that was a display of journals, each one different from the others. Perched behind the desk like an old, withered vulture, was an old, big nosed, wrinkled skin, hag of a woman. There were only two other customers in the house besides Cole and Emily.

"Let's hurry," Emily whispered to Cole as she pulled him off towards the gargantuan shelves of potion ingredient. The old woman had any ingredient you could imagine, on those shelves.

Cole gazed over the labels of all the vials and packets. Up near the top of one of the shelves was a large vial labeled toadstools, impossible to reach.

Emily seeing the problem and the disgruntled look on Cole's face whispered, "Just use your power, no one can see us and I want to get out of here!"

Without saying a word to Emily, Cole thought, vial and the large vial of the small mushroom-like toadstools orbed into Cole's right hand.

"Okay," Emily said looking around frantically for the ginger root, which was used in wit-sharpening potions and love potions, as well as for other uses.

"Ahah!" Emily exclaimed dropping down to the floor and picking up a large bag of roots from the bottom shelf. "There! Let's go get our journals and get out of here!"

The two cousins stepped out from behind the massive shelves of ingredients and walked forward, slowly towards the old hag, and the journal display. As she walked, Emily snapped open her purse and began rummaging through it for her wallet, she pulled it out and got out a twenty just as she reached the desk.

The old woman eyed them pretentiously as Cole and Emily nervously skimmed over the journals. Fueled by anxiety, Emily ended up just grabbing the one that appealed to her first, urging Cole to do the same as she checked out.

"Oh dearie," The lady sighed as she took the serene, light blue, journal that Emily had picked out from her, it looked almost as if the journal was made out of water.

"Dearie, dearie, me... You will meet your demise while trying to save a helpless soul, dearie," came the hoarse voice of the old hag, laying the journal on the counter for Emily. Emily thrust the twenty into the old lady's hand, telling her to keep the change.

Emily's thin hand went down to grab the fluid-like journal and run out the door, as she grasped the book the all too familiar feeling swept over her like water cascading over a waterfall.

A dark back alley, crates were everywhere... A young Asian girl with chin length black hair, about 16, was crouched down next to the crates wither her soft face buried in her hands sobbing.

"You cannot fend me off forever Dana!" came the sound of a harsh woman's voice. A grown thirty year old olive skinned woman strutted into the alley.

"NO! Get away from me!" the young Asian girl yelled, lifting her head up, extending her hand violently, and throwing a bolt of blue, surging lightning at her obvious enemy. The bolt missed by at least a foot, the girls aim must have been off because of her distress.

"Hahahaha!" the laugh of the woman was shrill as she conjured an athame in a swirl of black smoke and threw it at the young Asian girl... sadly killing her.

"Hurry Cole! We have to go!" Emily said, coming to grip with reality and grabbing her journal, running out of the store before Cole could say anything. Cole grabbed the brown leather bound journal with an eye on the front he had been eyeing and shoved everything he was buying onto the counter hurriedly, and paid.

Cole rushed out the door, leaving the old woman to sit in her store all alone... smiling to herself.

"What the hell is wrong? I know she is creepy, but she's not th–" Cole was cut off.

"I had a premonition! I think it took place in the alley next to the Hardware Store, Cole! We have to help her! Orb us!" Emily was losing it, as if this was the first time something like this had happened to her.

"Okay, come here and duck down behind this trash can with me," Cole said as he grabbed Emily's jacket-clad arm and lead her behind the garbage can where they disappeared in a swirl of blue lights.