Here we go. The big one.


As the days and weeks progressed, Chris found himself less likely to rush out as soon as Carmen got home on the days he babysat, tarrying to chat with her as Jake changed into pajamas and prepared for bed. As much as he still wouldn't call himself completely comfortable alone in Carmen's presence, he had come a long way since his first stiff meeting with her all those months ago.

Another shift he began to notice—and this one, if he were honest, frightened him somewhere deep within his psyche, leaving a pinging sense of dread always lingering in some distant corner of his mind—was that Jake now rarely, if ever, summoned him anymore. He seemed content with seeing each other the scant afternoons a week Chris spent at his house already, a far cry from the boy who had expected and looked forward to daily visits at his grandmother's home. Fast approaching was the day Jake would no longer need him at all, an encroachment that made Chris's heart race and his palms sweat whenever he contemplated it too long.

When the time came, he wondered if the Elders would summon him to formally relieve him of his duties or whether, somehow, like with his charge's whereabouts or emotional state when called, he would simply know, an overwhelming certainty deep in his gut. Regardless, the future wouldn't change just because he obsessed over it. For now, while Jake still needed him, even just a little, that was what he had to focus on. Chris was absolutely determined to make the most of the time he had left.

On one of Chris's designated days to babysit—later, neither could have said how it started, really—the pair found themselves in the midst of a competitive water fight in the middle of the kitchen. Perhaps it started when Jake dropped his dinner plate, coated in the remains of baked ziti, into a sink full of sudsy water and accidentally splashed Chris's shirt, bubbles spraying into the air around them; perhaps when Chris, filling up that sink to let the dirty dishes soak, had flicked his wet fingers to mischievously sprinkle some droplets toward Jake's nose.

Regardless, within minutes, the entire kitchen ended up hosed down, large puddles forming in patches along the floor, and the boys' shirts and pants were soaked through. While Jake attempted to scoop some water off the floor to splash Chris further, Chris, cupping his hands under the faucet, flicked on the tap to let water accumulate in his palms, churning like an eddy that swirled downstream. As the cascade overflowed past his fingers, he flung his hands in Jake's direction, sending liquid spouting through the air. With a delighted shriek, Jake dove behind the kitchen table, then around it when Chris gave chase, abandoning his source of ammo in favor of shaking his palms—and any remaining droplets—onto Jake's face.

Jake took the opportunity to duck under Chris's outstretched arms, slipping and sliding on sock-clad feet, to reach the sink, where he shut the running tap and yanked the detachable faucet out of its bay and, one hand on the knob, ready to release the stream once more, brandished the faucet triumphantly. Chris swung several steps backward, hands up in surrender.

When they heard the front door open, Jake froze, nozzle still pointed at Chris. As he listened to the muffled footsteps on the carpet, the grin slid from his face; his cheeks drained of color. Carmen had come home early.

Before the boy had time to move, to think, his mother was appearing around the threshold, her eyes lidded as she tugged the bun out of her hair and massaged her scalp with worn-out fingers. Jake cast a wide-eyed glance at Chris, whose expression was carefully blank as he stared past Jake to watch the woman's face.

It took a moment, once she opened her eyes, for Carmen to process the disarray around her. At first she stood motionless, her lips parted in bemusement, moving just her eyes, which roved over the room as she absorbed the pools of water on the floor and counter, the drenched curtains over the window, the spray nozzle damningly clasped in Jake's grip.

Then, her lips compressed into a thin line—Jake's mouth went abruptly dry—and she stepped, without a word, over to the counter. Jake shrank back as far as the cord to the nozzle would allow him, pulled taut as he backed away.

Without a word, she reached for the bottle of green dish detergent sitting beside the sink. When she turned back toward the boys, there was an unrecognizable gleam in her eyes. Before Jake could begin to parse it, to identify the expression and determine just how much hazard it posed him, she had gripped the bottle in both hands, aimed, and squeezed. The soap squirted in a wide arc across Jake's sodden shirt and the floor several feet on either side of him.

Jake was so stunned he almost dropped the spray nozzle. His first response was a surprised, nervous chuckle, which burbled out of him before he could think. Then, suddenly, he was giggling fully and with his whole chest shaking, unable to stop, and Carmen's laughter joined his.

Relief swept through Chris in a surge. As he made his way toward them, his own socked feet slipped in the line of soap that tracked across the floor between Jake and Carmen. Feet flying out from beneath him, he cracked his coccyx hard enough against the tile for tears to spring briefly to his eyes.

But Jake was smiling so widely that Chris didn't even mind the pain, and he found himself laughing, too, which filled Jake with the confidence to continue, and there they all remained, cackling into the silence until everyone gasped for breath.

"It's a mess!" Carmen choked out between giggles, "How did you even—no, wait, don't go anywhere," and she retreated from the room as Chris snuck a surreptitious hand beneath his thigh to rub the sting.

Resetting the nozzle in its place, Jake extended a hand to his fallen whitelighter, his laughter subsided but his eyes still twinkling with mirth. "Think it's funny, do you?" Chris grumbled in mock annoyance. Though he grasped the hand firmly, instead of let Jake pull him up, he gave one sharp tug, sending Jake tumbling partway into his lap. The boy's free hand, thrown out to break his fall, slipped in soapy water while Chris scooped more soap and mushed it into Jake's hair, and then Jake was giggling again breathlessly as tiny soap bubbles floated between them, alighting on their clothes and skin.

When Carmen reappeared, it was with a disposable camera, which she lifted to her face, squinting into the viewfinder. "Look here, look here," she cried. Jake swung his smile in her direction, but just before she could snap the picture, Chris pressed his fingers into Jake's sides to tickle him, prompting the boy to squeal and tug away.

When Carmen lowered the camera and Chris released Jake, the boy said to his mother somewhat shyly, "Now me and you," peering up at her with the most earnest expression.

She froze at the request, requiring several seconds before she could reply, and even then with a perplexed, "Oh…"

Watching her lips part in stunned silence, Chris took pity on her and, clambering to his feet on the slippery tile, held out a hand. "Here," he offered, "I'll take it."

Still wordless with—it felt a bit like wonder, a bit like awe—she found herself handing off the camera to the teen. Then, a tentative hand was tucked into hers, drawing her patiently back to the present, and she tilted her face to meet Jake's smile, eager as he stood beside her. When their eyes met, she felt like one of those soap bubbles, light enough to drift away, clinging to the ground by only those five small fingers clasped in hers.

Something inside her begged for more contact so, feeling emboldened by Jake's smile, she wrapped an arm around his shoulder and tugged him to her chest, turning him so his back slotted against her chest and propping her chin on the crown of his head as both her arms draped over his shoulders, hands clasped over his chest. His own hands rose to grasp hers and his head tipped back so he could peer into her eyes once more, his own filled with inexplicable admiration, and she couldn't tear her gaze away and from some distant place she heard the camera click and capture this moment, this perfect, messy moment, in stasis for eternity.


During Chris's next visit, the weather was too perfect to pass the time indoors, a blazing sun and cloudless sky that looked like a watercolor painting from the living room window, so Chris packed a bag and ferried Jake onto a bus to a local beach. Much of the sand was dotted with unfurled towels and umbrellas—there must have been hundreds—and hordes of people in bikinis and swim trunks, the boardwalk populated with everyone from dog walkers to elderly couples to children on skateboards carrying ice cream cones.

Ultimately, after trekking some distance, they found a much less populated area unsuited for swimming, the smooth swell of waves marred by the natural jetty and nearby assortment of jagged rocks jutting out of the ocean. Jake, who didn't even own a swimsuit and had never learned to swim, didn't seem to mind.

With care, the two climbed across the uneven igneous rocks of the jetty, grasping each other by the arm to avoid losing their footing on the slippery surface, until they reached the end, where waves sprayed up in white foam against the short cliff's edge.

Chris snatched up a couple of broken pieces of rock from the ground and handed one to Jake. "You ever skip stones?" he asked, and Jake, shading his eyes from the sun to peer up at his whitelighter, shook his head. "Well, it's all in the wrist. Here, watch me."

Turning toward the water, Chris flicked and released, watching the rock soar out over the ocean until a large wave swarmed up and swallowed it in one gargantuan swoosh.

Jake's laughter tinkled between them. "I don't know how to do it," he said, "but I'm pretty sure that's not right."

"Hey," Chris protested, though himself continued to grin. "I'd like to see you try. It's a lot harder than it looks."

With a determined nod, Jake gripped his rock and stared out across the water. Tilting his head, he squeezed one eye shut, his tongue just poking out past his lips from the intensity of his focus. During a brief lull as the most recent wave settled back into an ebb, he released his projectile, hurling it as hard and as far as he could.

Behind his back, Chris twiddled his fingers to send out a blast of air to scoop up the stone. Barely even touching the surface of the choppy water, it leapt up and out, then skidded farther, three, four, five times before disappearing below the surface.

Jake spun to the side, eyes gaping and alight. "Did you see that?" he cried in astonishment. "I can't believe it even worked!"

When he bounced with brimming enthusiasm on the balls of his feet, Chris had to grab his shoulder to prevent him from losing his footing. "You're a natural," the teen agreed. "You'll have to give me some pointers."

They spent the next hour finding more stones good for throwing. Jake offered a bit of poor advice that Chris made sure to follow as he continued to help along Jake's tosses from behind his back. Jake could hardly believe his continued luck.

They stood close enough to the edge of the jetty that they got regularly sprayed with salty water. By the time the sun had begun its descent behind them, the air had cooled by several degrees, and the boys stood shivering in their thoroughly soaked-through clothes.

Chris decided to forgo the cold, wet, unpleasant bus ride home and instead orbed them straight back to Jake's kitchen, where Jake immediately bounded out for a hot shower. Once his mother arrived home, he was comfortably bundled in pajamas and chattered to her with great animation about their afternoon.


That Wednesday, Phoebe came over, double stroller in tow, for the kids' lessons. She sat them down in a row on the living room couch to delve into pocket realms, dimensions that existed on other planes in which some species of demon drew special ability to drain their victims' life forces, listing numerous examples, including her own encounter with a demon who had once banished the Charmed Ones to separate worlds in order to feed on their desires. Had they not managed to use their bond to band their worlds together to present a united front against the demon, they would have perished at the hands of their corrupted desires.

"We're not the only ones who've encountered pocket realms," she said with a pointed look at her younger nephew. To his right, both his siblings tilted their heads to stare at him.

"Who, me?" he asked, feeling inexplicably defensive at the attention.

"The demon who put you in the hospital. He drew your soul—or souls—into a space where he had all the control. That's a pocket realm." Her attention shifted back to the others as she resumed her lecture. "These realms can subsist on anything: desire, fear—Barbas was a recurrent threat back in the day—love"—she nodded once toward Chris—"nightmares. The key to escaping a pocket realm is to beat them at their own game. Overcome your fears, use your desires to your advantage."

"Reclaim your nightmares," Chris muttered darkly.

"Exactly," Phoebe replied, though Chris wasn't sure she fully understood him. Sometimes, even now, in his sleep, he relived his other selves' dreams from the attack as if they were his own, the pain of every blow rained down upon Merlin's head; the horror as an impaled Bianca gasped for breath, blood on her lips; the stench of his own flesh cracking and burning at the stake… He had struggled fiercely to free his counterparts, but if Death had not appeared when he did, a creature outside the confines of time and space, Chris doubted any of them would have survived.

Phoebe reclaimed his attention before he could ruminate for long. "Here, I Xeroxed a copy of the relevant chapter in Planes, Realms, and Spirit Worlds for each of you." As she passed out the stapled packets, she said, "Get reading."


For her day off, Carmen decided to take Jake to the local zoo. They passed much of the morning outside the giraffe enclosure, Jake enamored with a foal plaintively trailing after its mother; at one point, Carmen pointed Jake's attention to the background, where one aggressive giraffe in the distance was swinging its neck forcefully into its nearby companion. They passed zebras, tigers, and chimpanzees that hooted at them when they paused to stare, with one even swinging down to meet them by the glass and making exaggerated faces at them, then curling back its lips to laugh.

When the afternoon sun began to beat too hard on them, powerful enough for heat to radiate off the concrete walkway, they relocated to the indoor reptile house to wander past lizards, boa constrictors, and one very large Komodo dragon. Once the air had cooled a bit, they detoured to the ostrich exhibit. Jake climbed onto a nearby rock to peer over the fence at three giant, flightless birds pecking at their own toes and dipping their heads low as they trotted across the enclosure.

On their way out, they even stopped by the gift shop, where Carmen encouraged Jake to pick a toy, and he walked out proudly displaying a plastic Komodo dragon with legs that moved back and forth and a voice box that uttered a hissing roar like a t-rex every time its mouth opened.

They were waiting at the bus stop just outside the zoo entrance, Jake opening and closing the toy's mouth mid-roar, when it happened. Later, Carmen would say the man appeared seemingly out of thin air and that a strange feeling of wrongness settled over him as he sidled up beside her, but at the time she barely even noticed his presence, too focused on Jake's infectious grin. She glanced over once and then back to her son, who looked up and shyly remarked, "Thank you, Mommy," with that awed, bashful expression to which she was slowly becoming accustomed.

Beside her, a gravelly voice coughed out, "Cute kid," with just a touch of a sneer, so Carmen paused to look at him again, scrutinize him this time, cautious, and that's when she really felt it, the eerie aura around him of something sinister that she couldn't begin to put into words, a sense of indescribable evil that radiated from this man's pores, from the toothy smirk plastered to his face.

Without breaking eye contact, Carmen reached beside her to grasp Jake's upper arm firmly enough for him to squeak in surprise as the man's smirk widened considerably. "No, really," he insisted, his tone making goosebumps break out in a wave down Carmen's spine. "It's almost a shame."

She turned to face the man with her full chest in order to put herself more directly between him and Jake, using her grasp to pull Jake behind her. With her other hand, she fumbled with her purse strap to yank it from her shoulder—she couldn't say what compelled her to do this, what made her think robbery was the man's intention, just a feeling in her gut that he was there for nefarious purposes—and she tossed the whole purse toward his feet. "Take it," she said quickly.

He peered down at it, then back at her, and then he slowly licked his lips. "That ain't what I'm here for, darling." And then, in his bare hand suddenly appeared a knife, just like that—no knife, knife—in the blink of an eye, and Carmen took a sharp step back, bumping into Jake, who whimpered, "Mommy?"

Eyes glued to the blade—it glimmered in the light of the setting sun, her heart was pounding, the palpitations visible even beneath her shirt—she announced with a confidence she didn't believe, "It's gonna be all right, Jake."

"Actually, Jake, Mommy doesn't know what she's talking about," the man sneered.

"Please," she begged, "Take the purse. I don't have anything else."

His teeth gleamed. In this light they appeared razor sharp. "Don't sell yourself short, darling. You've got exactly what I need." His eyes glazed past her, landing on Jake. Carmen felt her son's arm go rigid within her grip.

She didn't see the man move, but in the blink of an eye he was behind her, ripping Jake out of her grasp, and when she shouted, "No!" and leapt forward, he shoved her back so forcefully she tripped and cracked her forehead against the bus stop bench so hard her vision swam and ears rang.

She didn't hear Jake stammer, "Ch-Chr…" or see the man slam his fist into Jake's stomach to silence him with a sharp expulsion from his lungs. But a couple seconds later, when the ringing began to fade, she did hear the man jeer, "Not just yet, kid. Not ready for him to join the party." She did see, though her vision was spotty still, her son's legs collapse from beneath him as he gasped for air, watched as the man knelt beside him, one hand on his shoulder in the weird semblance of showing compassion, all as his other hand drew back, farther, farther, and then plunged the knife into Jake's chest.

He leaned in close, intimate, and into Jake's ear whispered, "Now you can call your whitelighter."

Someone was screaming, shrill and unyielding, and it took a moment for Jake to identify his mother's voice in that alien noise. Either she shouted wordlessly or he couldn't decipher the words she did shout with the way it sounded to him like a single, extended wail.

"Chris," Jake wheezed, and the man smiled and then yanked the blade up higher—Jake gave a soft grunt, a moan—before shoving the boy's limp body away from him.


Chris jolted upright from where he had slumped over the photocopied chapter he had been pretending to peruse with glazed-over eyes.

Phoebe glanced up and started to say, "Chris, is everything—" but without even standing up he was already beginning to orb. His charge's voice had been soft, almost breathless, but laden with panic, desperation, agony unlike anything Chris had previously sensed.

His mind raced too fast to even identify where he rematerialized, detecting only that it was outdoors and that Jake was lying on the ground, a puddle of blood pooling beneath his supine form, and that a demon towered over him, one foot on either side of Jake's head, staring directly at Chris as if he had been awaiting his arrival. Carmen was there; she was screaming, but Chris almost couldn't hear her.

"My master sends a message," the demon remarked. "'Come and find me.'"

But this, too, Chris barely heard, certainly did not fathom in the moment the implication of premeditation underlying the words. What he did register was the fact that this demon stood between him and his charge, and this he could not abide.

In a flash, Chris had the demon soaring backward into the bus station bench just a few feet from Carmen. Without getting up, he opened his palm, conjuring a fireball. Carmen, who seemed not to have noticed Chris's magical arrival, did appear at last to spot this supernatural phenomenon, and her unending scream stuttered to silence with a single, terrified gasp. The demon hurled the fireball in Chris's general direction, clearly without intention of hitting his mark—Chris didn't even need to dodge the attack, merely ducked his head as it sailed past—but it impeded a counterattack just long enough for the demon to leap back to his feet. With a smirk, he twiddled his fingers—the knife embedded in Jake's chest vanished in a swirl of smoke—bowed mockingly at the waist, and shimmered away.

Still dizzy from the blow to her head, Carmen leapt to her feet and stumbled over to Jake, dropping to her knees before him at the same time that Chris reached him.

Without hesitation, Chris pressed his palms into Jake's gaping wound, his stare fierce and determined as he growled, "Wyatt! Wyatt!" Then, in a voice that quavered, he said, "Hang in there, Jake." But the boy was motionless.

It took several seconds for Wyatt to appear, a swirl of orbs behind Carmen's back. Taking in the scene in moments, he dropped down between them and extended his hand over Chris's, hovering it above Jake's chest. For several seconds his hand glowed—Carmen didn't bat an eye, didn't even process what was right in front of her—until, slowly, he drew his fading hand away.

"What are you doing? Keep going!" Chris snapped.

"Chris…"

And suddenly, Carmen's racing thoughts—who was that man? where did he go? Jake, what's happened to Jake?—caught up with her. "Help…" she murmured, and then, at the top of her lungs this time, "Call for help, somebody, call for help!" This she bellowed over and over, her words frantic as the brothers sat motionless beside her.

"Heal him," Chris snarled, but Wyatt merely closed his eyes and hung his head.

Someone must have been walking by or else someone heard Carmen hollering from inside the zoo because within minutes sirens were wailing in the distance and a small crowd began to form. This seemed to shake Wyatt awake because he clamored to his feet and grabbed Chris by the forearm to try to jerk him up.

"Chris, we have to go," he said urgently. "We can't be here when the ambulance comes."

But Chris wasn't listening. "We can take him to Aunt Paige. She'll be able to help."

"Chris, come on."

Chris shook off his grip. "I have to keep pressure on the wound."

With as much compassion as he could muster, Wyatt replied, "No, you don't."

Chris's body seemed to deflate then, and this time when Wyatt tried to pull him up he succeeded. But still Chris stood there limply, shoulders sagging, didn't move, until Wyatt tugged him away, through the throng of people who had emerged to observe. Carmen didn't even glance up after them. Even with the sirens growing ever nearer, she continued to shout for help.

Wyatt dragged Chris all the way down the block, across the street, and down another, passing the speeding ambulance on their way, and didn't stop until they passed behind a long row of trees on either side of the sidewalk. He waited for Chris to say or do something, but his brother could only stare blankly back the way they had come.

Finally, gently, Wyatt said, "I'll take us back. You shouldn't orb in your condition." Chris didn't give any indication he had heard him. When Wyatt set a tender hand on his shoulder, Chris had no reaction at all.


Time passed in a blur around Chris, a tornado, with him standing in the eye of the storm. Over and over he saw Jake stumble, cry out for help, collapse, motionless, to the ground. Chris wasn't sure if this was his power, dragging him into the past as penance for his failure or a hallucination or daydream or something entirely different. Regardless, he couldn't shake the image. Every time he closed his eyes Jake's blank stare swam into view.

For days nothing felt real. And then, one morning, Chris was blinking, unseeing, at his own reflection in his bedroom mirror with a dissociated numbness, dull green eyes gazing back at him, roving across his shoulders and torso, neatly enshrouded in an uncomfortably tight suit jacket, a tie snug against his Adam's apple. He could think of nothing else to do beyond tug straight the collar of his starched white shirt for the fifth time, so finally, after long minutes, he turned away from his reflection.

It is time to go, Christian murmured.

Chris hadn't heard the interior voices for some time now, since the solstice, his barrier robust and fortified, but since Jake's death he couldn't seem to garner enough control to block them out. Nothing he attempted would quell them, and he heard them more loudly and clearly than ever before, sometimes even when they weren't speaking, their emotions or vague thoughts not yet put to words. It didn't matter; he barely registered the disturbance.

With a sense of listlessness, he found himself wandering out of his room and into the hall, where he heard and followed a pair of muffled voices drifting out of his parents' bedroom. He paused in the threshold of their open door, hands limp at his sides, uncaring of whether or not he'd get noticed.

"…hate doing it…" Piper was murmuring to her husband when Chris came close enough to hear.

Both Piper and Leo were sitting on their bed, shoulder to shoulder. Piper had dressed in a demure black, sleeveless dress and a dark gray cardigan, a string of pearls at her neck and a delicate, gold chain clasped around one wrist. She had shimmied into a pair of nude pantyhose, and two black, closed-toed block heels sat just in front of her feet. In her lap sat a small notepad, in her right hand a pen.

Setting a palm on one of her knees, Leo replied, "You know it's for the best." She gripped his fingers with hers, squeezing for reassurance.

"What are you doing?" Chris heard his own voice ask.

His parents' gazes jumped to him in surprise, a look of guilt flashing across his mother's face as she surreptitiously attempted to slide the notepad beneath her thigh. "Chris," she said, her tone laced with sympathy, "How are you doing?"

"What are you doing?" he asked again, voice hard. "Is that a spell?"

With a sigh, Piper extracted the notepad, setting it on one knee. Reluctantly, she confirmed, "A memory spell."

Something welled up in Chris's chest, his fists balling up at his sides. "Is that why you're going to the funeral?" he demanded sharply, "To alter Carmen's memories?"

Though Chris couldn't have said what in Piper's face shifted, he could tell her expression, almost imperceptibly, had hardened. Still, it retained some of its compassion, enough that her voice remained soft when she replied, "I'm going to the funeral to pay my respects for my employee's loss."

The flash of guilt Chris felt at her gently chiding tone wasn't quite enough to drown out his indignation. "What's the spell for?" he demanded.

"You know what it's for," Piper sighed. When all Chris did was fold his arms across his chest, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that he knew, that in fact he recognized the need entirely, she said aloud what he would not: "We can't let magic be exposed, Chris. She can't remember what happened."

"He was her son," Chris snapped, his voice strangled and tight.

"I know that, Chris," she said, calmly meeting his enraged glare.

You know she's right, said the normally silent Perry. Exposure is too great a risk.

From young Ian he felt a stab of fear, no specific sentiment voiced but a vague wash of wordless emotion at the word exposure, tangled within too many memories to bring any specific one to the forefront. Angrily, Chris shoved the sensation, and Perry's warning, aside.

By the time he returned his attention to reality, his father had gotten to his feet and was standing only a couple feet in front of him, hunching a bit to get Chris to meet his gaze. "…know it's difficult to put our personal desires aside for the greater good," he was saying. "Losing a charge is the most difficult experience a whitelighter can endure."

And Chris knew without a doubt what Leo was about to say, the one word Chris was desperate not to have said, could almost see it happening, see Leo's lips puckering to form around the name Chris couldn't stand right now—maybe ever again—to hear aloud.

"Ja—"

"Okay," Chris said harshly, turning abruptly away from his father to silence him, "Okay. Fine, you have to. I get it." He closed his eyes, gasping for breath as a tide swallowed him, waiting for the grief to recede enough for him to open his eyes. When he did, he found both his parents watching him, sympathy in the gentle crevices of their faces. He raised his eyes to Piper, squinted in pain and, in a much softer voice, said, "Just… let her keep the good parts, okay? Please?"

"Oh, sweetheart," Piper said, setting the notepad beside her on the mattress as she stood and went to him, hands outstretched. Before Chris could jerk away, thinking she wanted to hug him and unable to abide the comfort that would provide, she pressed a palm to either side of his face, one on each cheek, and stared directly into his eyes. "I would never erase a single minute of it."

Chris swallowed against the tight lump in his throat, mouth drier than it had ever been, and forced himself to nod, then gently tugged out of her hold, feeling all the lonelier for the loss of contact as she straightened the knot of his tie and released him.


Piper and Chris drove to the funeral home with a thick silence hanging behind the dashboard between them. When they pulled into the lot, Piper suggested he enter first; she would wait a few minutes before following. (Carmen did not know of Piper and Chris's relation and Piper intended to keep it that way, though at the moment Chris could not have cared about anything less.)

But he dutifully exited the still-idling vehicle and found himself, somehow, as if he had blacked out momentarily, inside the ornate lobby of the building, standing between two ionic pillars that ended in midair a few feet shy of the ceiling.

He thought nothing of his temporary time skip until a grave voice in his head, Perry, said, Stay tethered. He wasn't sure what the statement meant but didn't bother to ask, didn't react to the instruction at all, instead following the muted murmur of voices into another room at the end of the lobby.

This room was thickly carpeted in a way that felt suffocating, like an elderly relative's home, with intricately woven tulips and roses in various colors, connected by looping vines. Chris crept along the perimeter of the room, his back to the wall, as he scoped out the place.

At the far end of the room, in front of—Chris's mind shuttered as it registered the sight—an austere wooden casket, stood Carmen, dressed in a knee-length black dress with sleeves that ended just above the elbows, charcoal lace around the collar and again at the waist. She held something clutched in both hands, a tissue, which she continued to fold into tighter and tighter squares.

Beside her stood her mother with a hand gripping her shoulder for support. On her other side stood two solemn men Chris didn't recognize but who he assumed were Carmen's older brothers, Michael and Jordan. In the space between Chris and Carmen milled a large group of appropriately grim people, teachers, parents of kids Jake's age, not in any neat orientation but giving nonetheless the semblance of a queue, waiting to express to Carmen their sympathy.

Chris didn't leave the safety and protective anonymity of his wall until Carmen's eyes rose from her tissue and, above everyone's head, met his gaze from across the room. Something filled her face, creases of contradictory emotion, uncertainty with determination, pain with relief. In the middle of listening to some stranger offer condolences in front of her, she slipped out of her mother's hold and, without excusing herself, glided across the floor. The cluster of people parted as she passed, a sea of eyes, which she ignored, tracking after her.

As soon as she escaped her spot, Chris stepped away from the wall to meet her. She said nothing at first, and Chris wondered if he should initiate conversation, though he had no idea what to say.

"I'm glad you came," she said at last, and still Chris could think of no response. After a moment, throat too tight for words, he nodded.

He felt a touch graze his arm and, glancing down, found her hand on his sleeve, gently guiding him into a nearby deserted hallway that led to the restrooms. On their way, he cast a look behind her to see Carmen's mother gazing after them, expression inscrutable, and one of Carmen's brothers with a hand on her arm as if to hold her back from following.

Once they were alone—someone walked over to head to the bathroom but scuttled back out of the hallway when he spied Carmen—she spoke to Chris in a low voice. "The police wanted to know everything, what the"—she swallowed—"attacker looked like. I didn't know how to tell them he came out of—out of nowhere. And he had these—these abilities. But you saw, didn't you? You saw?"

Her eyes pleaded with him to confirm her ludicrous recollection, to validate what she believed she had witnessed, what she couldn't possibly have seen and yet replayed every time she closed her eyes. He could see the thin tether by which she clung to her sanity, swinging dramatically in a tornado of doubt.

If he lied, they might not even need a spell, he realized. She would believe him. He could see it in her taut expression, how desperately she wanted not to believe what she had witnessed, how she wanted someone to give her some rational explanation for her son's death. Yet Chris didn't have the heart to deny it, though he knew she would forget his reassurance soon enough anyway. At least give her one minute of honesty. With a slow nod, he said, "I saw."

She released a long breath that she had likely been holding in for days, unable to confide in anyone around her for risk of being perceived insane. Almost to herself, she whispered, "I knew it," her grim eyes staring past him at the tastefully beige wallpaper over his shoulder.

"I'm—" Chris's voice cracked. "—sorry. If I had gotten there earlier…"

She didn't tell him it wasn't his fault, which he hadn't expected, nor would he have accepted if she did offer such platitudes. But her eyes were soft as they shifted back to his. "I guess we'll never know what could have been," she sighed, her stare glassy. "If we hadn't gone to the zoo. Or if we hadn't stayed for the ostrich exhibit…"

It was different, but Chris didn't know how to explain it to her. That the mysterious creature she had witnessed had been a demon, who had targeted Jake specifically for some unknown reason, who could have tracked them no matter their location, would have found them at the bus stop outside the zoo as easily as at the beach with Chris (which at least would have given Chris a chance to orb him to safety) or at home in the comfort of his own bed. Nothing she had done differently could have prevented her son's death. But Chris couldn't tell her that without revealing more of the truth—and, more importantly, his involvement in it—than she had already deduced for herself.

She sighed, a thick, watery sound. He saw her stuff her hand into a pocket of her dress before someone exiting the restroom briefly drew his attention away. They waited in silence as the woman awkwardly sidled past them in the narrow hallway. Chris's eyes tracked the woman as she disappeared into the main room.

"I think he would want you to have this." Something thin was pressed into his hand, and he blinked down at it blankly, feeling stupid. It was the back of a photograph. When he turned it over, it showed him a snapshot of Jake on his lap, wriggling to escape, his face scrunched in laughter as Chris tickled him mercilessly.

The room around them swirled away like the flushing of a toilet. He heard a dull roar in his ears, above which shrieked a high-pitched whistle. He thought he might be falling very far into an abyss, but when he reached out a hand to steady himself against the wall he hadn't moved at all.

A sharp voice cut through the rush of sound. Stay tethered. He latched onto the voice, letting it tow him back to reality, to the beige, rough wallpaper, to the thick, oppressive carpet plush beneath his feet. His vision returned in checkerboard pieces, one square at a time, to show him the photograph of Jake he still had clenched in his hand. Blinking quickly, he looked away.

With thumb and forefinger on either edge, he blindly folded the photo on a center crease that had already been made while Carmen had it stored in her pocket. Slipping the picture into his own pant pocket, he forced out a dry, cracked, "Thanks," and watched her nod once before casting his gaze behind her, feeling suddenly and desperately uncomfortable.

From his position in the hallway, he had a decent view of the main room as well as the lobby beyond it. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted when Piper entered the building, gazing around before hitching her purse strap up her shoulder and continuing deeper into the main room.

He didn't want to send Carmen to his mother, inside whose purse, he knew, rested the innocuous piece of paper that would wipe out her memory. It felt uncomfortably like a form of torture, a form, even, of death, for all that Carmen might be happier with the false memories that would supplant the real ones in her mind. A cruel torture, to alter her very last memories with her son, horrific though they might have been. But he knew he couldn't stop the process, knew that Carmen simply could not leave the funeral home with her memories of magic in tact.

Feeling heavier than he ever had, he reached out to touch her forearm, trying to communicate all the comfort and apology of his emotion into that single point of contact as he murmured, "Your boss just came in. You probably want to talk to her."

She didn't ask how he recognized her boss, was likely too grief-stricken to register the anomaly altogether, and he knew in a few minutes she could possibly forget it anyway, whether through magic or through the natural part of being overwhelmed that would prevent her from ever drawing that connection altogether. She simply blinked, turned to stare over her shoulder, and finally said, "I guess I probably do," and shuffled back out of the hallway.

Piper noticed her halfway across the room and walked purposefully toward her. Once they reached each other at the center of the room, Piper wasted no time folding Carmen into the depths of a hug, enclosing her in such solid contact that Chris saw the woman sag into it as if Piper's arms would keep her afloat.

As Chris sidled out of the hallway, spine once again pressed along a wall, he watched Piper lean her head back from over Carmen's shoulder to murmur something in her ear. The bereaved mother nodded and released her grasp, following Piper's retreating back toward the hallway Chris had just vacated.

With Chris's gaze glued to them, his breath caught in restless anticipation, they talked in voices too quiet to overhear. Eventually, and to Chris it felt like a lifetime, Piper reached into her purse and extracted a rumpled piece of paper.

Her free hand gripped Carmen's fiercely. Chris watched Piper's lips move as she recited the words from her paper. Once she was finished, she crumpled the paper in her fist, dropped it back into her purse, and then gripped Carmen's hand now with both of hers as the young woman's brow furrow, head tipping forward as if she had developed a very sudden headache.

Piper let their foreheads touch, as if sending strength to Carmen through skin-to-skin contact. They both closed their eyes. It struck Chris that perhaps Piper, as a mother, could understand Carmen's pain more than he, as close as he had been to Jake, ever could.

Finally, Carmen straightened, and Piper released her hand. Chris saw Carmen turn to look over her shoulder and mouth the words, "Thank you," with a distracted air before parting from Piper and returning to her mother and brothers in the back of the room.

Piper made her slow trek back, caught sight of Chris, and altered her trajectory to stop in front of him. A part of him wondered why she'd risk communicating with him in Carmen's presence, but he found in the deep indifference of his thoughts that he didn't care enough to ask. Nothing felt terribly important, not enough to break the silence between them, anyway.

After casting a cursory glance around the area to assure herself no one was eavesdropping, Piper said softly, "She won't remember that you were there when it happened, so make sure you keep that to yourself."

Chris didn't expect his pain could have been amplified more than it already was, but with that statement he struggled briefly to draw a breath. In that moment, his grief crashed all the louder for losing the one person he had to commiserate, the one person who had witnessed more than he had, and here he was, now, the only one to carry the burden of the memory of what truly happened to his charge.

Once everyone was ushered into a second room lined with wooden pews, they sat through speeches, notably not one from Carmen, who sat folded over sobbing, for three quarters of an hour. After that, the group was herded back to the parking lot to follow the hearse to the cemetery. It was a beautiful day for a funeral, if one had to happen. A balmy breeze whispered around people's faces, not a cloud in sight in the azure sky. The officiator's voice carried to Chris and Piper at the back of the small crowd, although the occasional murmuring from others at times drowned him out. Mostly it was irrelevant; with the way Chris's mind kept spinning and whirling, he wouldn't have remembered what was uttered regardless.

By the time the funeral ended and Chris was left staring at a mound of freshly overturned dirt, he felt as though weeks had passed and yet no time at all. Already several minutes earlier, Piper had gone to wait for him in the car. ("Take as long as you need, sweetheart.") Chris was one of the last ones to leave.

As he turned to trudge back along the path, a hand landed on his arm. Carmen, who had once again broken away from her family to reach out to him. Perhaps she did not recall them speaking earlier, perhaps the spell had erased their conversation.

Chris peered into her face, feeling guilty for his part in her memory alteration, but she merely offered a smile laced with the deepest, soul-weary exhaustion. "He would've been glad you came," she said. Suddenly, his throat felt tight, and all he could do was avert his gaze. "I'm glad," she added softly.

I wouldn't have missed it for the world felt like the wrong thing to say, but he could think of nothing else. "Yeah," he mumbled instead, staring at his feet, at the mud that had splattered up his sneakers.

"You're the only one who understands," she whispered, almost urgently, and she couldn't know how true that was, how he understood even better than she could, with her memories washed away like grains of sand being pulled out to the ocean. "My mother and brothers—they barely knew him. They feel bad for me, but it's—" She cast a forlorn stare over her shoulder, where her family was huddled together around the filled-in grave. "Not the same."

Her grip on his arm tightened briefly, prompting him to once again raise his gaze, if only for a second before it darted away again, but she wasn't looking at him. Her hardened stare slid right past his shoulder to something unseen behind him. Expression grim, she said, "The monster who did this…" and at first Chris's eyes widened, his body jolted with shock and a stab of fear, until he realized, from the clench of her jaw and the hate spitting from her flared nostrils, that she had spoken metaphorically.

"He…" she continued, seeming at a loss for how to convey the depth of her loathing. Finally, inadequately, she concluded, "I'm glad they found him. I hope he rots in prison for the rest of eternity."

It was, Chris believed, the smallest and yet greatest of kindnesses that woven into her spell Piper had given Carmen the comfortable illusion of justice having been served. She couldn't know the truth, but at least she could resume life believing her son's killer had been apprehended. And it was the cruelest of jokes that Chris couldn't believe the same.

"Yeah," he said dully, unable to meet her eyes.

She released him then, glancing behind her at one of her brothers, who was heading in their direction. "Thank you, Chris," she said, "Really. I know how much you've done for—for Jake."

I let him die, Chris thought bleakly, vehemently rejecting her gratitude, though his outward expression remained as stone with no hint of the self-disgust underneath.

"For me," she added, insistent, as if some part of her sensed his rebuff of her words. "You turned my life around. Jake—he forgave me. I—" Her eyelids clenched shut as tears slipped past, and her voice stumbled, failed her as her brother reached them.

With a tense nod, Chris offered some parting words—for the life of him, he would not remember them even just seconds later—and started down the dirt path toward the entrance to the cemetery, where his mother waited. He and Piper made the entire drive home in silence.


For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, Chris couldn't bear the pained looks his family repeatedly sent his way, so he locked himself in his room. But even that wasn't enough; he felt the pity of their stares through the door, from a floor away, crushing down on his shoulders, suffocating him. He loosened, then removed, his tie, shrugged out of his suit jacket. With nothing else to do, he took the time to fold it in half lengthwise, tucking one sleeve inside the other, and drape it over the back of his desk chair before stepping out of his shoes and dropping limply onto the mattress.

At no point did his family disturb him in his room (even his other selves remained mute), but the weight of their presence in the house nonetheless overwhelmed him. Releasing a growl of frustration from the back of his throat, he stood again and began to pace. Even that was not enough as his socked feet padded back and forth across the carpet. He could feel the pressure mount beneath his breastbone, growing tighter and tighter until he could barely breathe.

"I can't—" he gasped and, clenching his hands into fists, he orbed.

The decision to leave was barely conscious; he certainly had no specific destination in mind. But when he rematerialized at the deserted beach where he had taken Jake only days earlier, he was not terribly surprised.

He edged out along the jetty and carefully eased his body down onto the rock, pressing his sock-clad feet over the wet rim, where low waves crashing against the edge sprayed up to mist his ankles, dampening the material there with each pass. Knees propped up, he folded his arms across them, watching the waves form in the distance, and further out still, where the horizon remained calm and unbroken.

For some time, he watched the horizon as the sun crept down behind him. The salt water soaked through the seat of his pants and left him shivering even with the sun still beating down on him. Eventually, though he wasn't sure exactly when it happened, he fished the bent photograph out of his pant pocket. He didn't look at it, didn't even unfold it, but he gripped it tightly between both hands, his knuckles white from the pressure exerted.

Chris wracked his brain, but try as he might he couldn't recall the last thing he had said to Jake, the last thing Jake had said to him, and that blankness in place of a memory stabbed him deep within his breastbone.

"I have to see him," he murmured aloud, his voice swallowed by the crash of water. Carefully, he opened the flap to stare at the scrunched-up, laughing face in the photograph, tracing the outline of the boy's smile with his index finger. It wasn't enough.

But he could do more, couldn't he? He had powerful visions across time and space. Surely, if he focused, he could bring this moment to life, could see Jake cheerful and giggling and oh-so alive once more.

Squeezing his eyes shut, his fingers clenching around the photo, he dipped somewhere deep within himself to draw his powers to the surface. The sound of waves faded as a stiff crackle rose in Chris's ears. When he opened his eyes, out on the water, hovering in the air, was a monochromatic image of Jake's prone form, covered in blood.

Chris's mouth went bone dry. "No," he rasped, "Not that." He closed his eyes, tried every strategy he knew to shut it off or stop its progression somehow, but the crackle continued. Through it he heard a voice, spotty, with an unmistakable sneer. "My master sends a message: 'Come and find me.'"

In all the chaos, in the numbness that had perched over him these past few days, Chris had forgotten the demon's salient words. This attack had not been random; it had been a message. A message for him.

A coldness had settled in his gut, leaving him more clear-headed than he had ever been. It dosed him with an icy clarity with which to view the past few months. None of the attacks were happenstance. The demon of nightmares, the assassin, every near-death experience he had gone through this past year was connected; they had to be. And so was this. He would find out who was behind it if it killed him.

Suddenly, inspiration struck. "Bianca," he breathed into the voiceless crash of waves. She had told him someone had hired her to attack, had threatened her daughter to force her to do his bidding, and he had ignored the implication at the time, relieved enough that he had convinced her to let him go that he hadn't pursued it further. If he had followed up then, Jake wouldn't be dead now. He might not be able to change the past, but he could get justice, could fill the empty space that Carmen believed had already been filled by some imaginary criminal. Bianca would have information about his attacker.


Reviews are starlight. Please let me know your thoughts, especially about this chapter. It was obviously a major one.