Post by StoryGirl83 on Jun 23, 2009 15:35:57 GMT -5
Chapter Ten – Sad Remembrances and Strange Coincidences
Flashback
The Book of Shadows was a like a member of the family. In deed had something happened to it the family would suffer dire consequences. It was tied to them and they to it.
Chris has been looking through it for an hour. He looked up as his mom entered the attic. “Well?”
Piper breathed a sigh of relief. “He made it through. They stopped the bleeding. He lost too much blood, so they had to give him some and that worries me.”
Chris frowned. “Why?”
“Because our blood is different . . . and it means they have a sample of his blood.”
“Probably more than one, but I don’t understand.”
“I wish you didn’t have to.”
Prue looked at the files on the counter with growing unease as Piper joined her. “All of these files saw Halliwell,” Piper commented as she turned to look at Phoebe who was looking at files on another counter.
“Yeah, well, look at all these tests he took,” as she turned around to face her sisters and stood next to Piper. “Okay, not just on blood that he took from you, but blood that he took from Phoebe and me.”
Phoebe walked over to a refrigerated storage unit.
“He has spent months trying to figure out how I survived the Oroya fever,” Piper commented stunned as she looked at the file in her hands.
Phoebe slid open the fridge.
Prue turned around with a new sheet of paper in her hands. “Yeah, well, this grant request says that he is looking for the universal antibody.”
Phoebe picks up a vile of blood with Piper’s name on it, reads it, and slides it back in before taking out the whole batch. She slid closed the door and carried it toward her sisters. “Maybe he thought it was in your blood.”
As Phoebe reached her sisters, the monkey chatter caught Prue’s attention. She turned to look at them just as one of the monkeys used a come here gesture to telekinetically pull a bannah toward her.
“Piper, Phoebe,” Prue called their attention to the banana.
As they watched another monkey waved it’s hands a little and the banana froze in mid air. The first monkey grabbed at it sorrowfully, unable to quite reach it.
“Okay, so, um, I think it’s safe to say that Dr. Williamson probably knows about us.”
“Do you think he’s been injecting our blood into those monkeys?” Phoebe asked stunned.
The monkey’s freeze wore off and the banana fell to the floor.
“I don’t know,” Prue replied a bit impatient, “but we need to get them outta here . . .”
Phoebe nodded slightly and hurried over to the caged monkey with her name above it as Prue continued to speak, “before somebody walks in, sees something flying and everybody finds out about us.” As soon as she finished speaking she headed toward the monkey cages.
Piper stared at the monkeys, her hand over her face, distressed. As Piper walked over to the cages and handed Prue the keys, Phoebe pulled the monkey out of the first cage and got pulled into a premonition of Dr. Williamson yelling something, waving his arm and sending a vile of liquid careening into the wall, shattering it. He stared down at his hand as Phoebe came out of the premonition.
Phoebe stared ahead at her sisters, catching their attention. “Okay, not only does Williamson know about our powers, he’s got one of them, telekinesis.”
“Wait a minute,” Piper protested, “you remember what he was like when I was sick. He had the CDC here, the media. If we don’t stop him, the monkeys aren’t going to be the only ones in cages.”
Phoebe looked down at the monkey in her arms as Prue looked up at one of the monkeys still in one of the cages. Piper looked down at the other monkey in the cages. All of them were thinking the same thing.
“He died.”
“From your blood?” Chris stared at her stunned.
She shook her head. “He went mad. We tried to help him. He couldn’t handle our powers and those he got from our blood. We killed him. He was an innocent and it came down to him or us. We didn’t have a choice, not really, but if he’d never met us, if he’d only had no contact with our blood, he might still be alive today.”
“You feel guilty.”
“To a degree,” she admitted,” but mostly I feel sad. And I don’t want any other doctor to go through the same thing.”
“But how do we prevent them from taking blood samples?” Chris asked with a shrug. “Or find all the samples they do take?”
“We don’t,” Piper decided dejectedly. “We can’t.”
“Then what?”
Piper sighed. “We make sure his recovery is unremarkable. He was looking into me because of my miraculous recovery from Oroya fever.”
“Well, at least stab wounds are pretty straight forward,” Chris commented. “Once you aren’t going to die, it is just a matter of rest.”
“You aren’t a doctor,” Leo commented from the couch where he had been going through some notebooks. He’d seen otherwise healthy grown men survive the blood loss of a wound only to die later from a seemingly innocuous infection.
Chris and Piper looked at him worried.
“Don’t worry,” Leo tried to assure them. “Now that he’s no longer in danger of blood loss killing him we should be able to get to him if something happens.” Leo just wished that he could be there, at the hospital, seeing to his sons care. The idea of going back to medical school just kept popping into his head.
Chris nodded, unaware of his father’s thoughts, but he didn’t really relax, not really. He turned back to the Book and started flipping pages, not really paying attention. Suddenly he stopped and started flipping backward. He has to go back over a dozen pages before he found what had belatedly caught his attention.
“Knøttlitenmester,” Chris said slowly hoping he pronounced it right.
Both of his parents looked at him. Piper walked over to him as Leo got up off the couch. “Find something?”
“Maybe.” He moved so Piper could see the page. “Seems that these demons are uncommon and generally for hire . . . we seem to be running into that a lot lately, spies for hire, that demon that switched out bodies a couple of weeks ago, and now this. Who is hiring them?”
Piper looked back at Leo as he reached them. Neither had a reply.
“At any rate they control tiny creatures who are invisible, brandishing tiny swords, and overwhelm their opponents by sheer number mixed with the fact that their opponent has no idea where they are. Sounds about right.” He looked up and said ironically, “no picture.”