Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 9, 2011 17:23:32 GMT -5
Chapter Eighteen – Whitelighters
and a nurse
Jarod didn’t know every hiding spot in the psychiatric hospital. JD and his friend, Cassia Reynolds, knew most of them. Of course they both had a couple of extra ways to get into places. He sat on a bench in the employees’ lounge with Cassia, a young woman in her mid to late teens with dirty blonde hair past her shoulders.
“Are you sure it was him?” Cassia asked, a look of concerned look on her face.
“Do I look like I was born yesterday?” he shot back. “Of course it’s him. He’s getting too close. We have to get you out of here and soon.”
She sighed. “It would be so easy to just let him see me. What do you think my chances are of getting away with that?”
He shook his head. “Pretty low. And how do you think he’s going to take it when he sees you?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she replied, sounding pretty disappointed about it.
“Come on, Cass, he hasn’t seen you since he was still in high school,” JD reminded her. “Seeing you now, looking like this.”
“You don’t have to remind me, JD,” she shot out. “I know. A girl can wish, can’t she?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She sighed. “And what about Chris? You saw him, too?”
JD nodded. “No doubt on that one either, but I doubt he’s looking for you.”
“Of course he’s not,” she laughed. “He doesn’t even know he’s met me.”
“All those years . . .”
“The price we pay for what that stupid demon did,” she shrugged. “At least they fixed it before they vanquished him. I rather like having my body back.”
He chuckled. “Same here.”
She snorted. “’Cause you had such a problem. All you had to do was glamour back into yourself. I didn’t have that option.”
“You could have,” he pointed out.
“It’s bad enough that my body was susceptible to darklighters without my being able to protect myself,” she pointed out. “I didn’t need to put Jen’s body at risk. My charges were unlikely to need me to use my powers while demons and warlocks couldn’t use their powers.”
“Half of your charges are future whitelighters,” JD pointed out. “And darklighters were still a threat.”
“I understood the risk,” she informed him, “to me, to my charges, and to Jen. I made the best decision I could and I stick by that decision.”
JD sighed. “I know and your charges all turned out fine, but it could have ended differently.”
“Which brings us back to what to do now,” she sighed. “I have to get out of here and it can’t look suspicious. And every plan you’ve come up with . . . I end up on the wrong end of a manhunt.”
“I wonder if there is a way to use Chris’ presence to our advantage,” he considered as he looked in the general direction of the garden.
“I don’t see how,” she replied. “Besides, you’re one to talk. You run and hide when a Halliwell shows up. I doubt you’d be able to put that aside long enough to ask him for help.”
“I do not,” JD protested quickly.
“Uh, huh,” Cassia shook her head with a laugh. “And that’s why you dropped my charges off in the back seat of Leo Wyatt’s van and didn’t stick around to explain the situation.”
“It’s Piper’s van,” he corrected weakly.
She rolled her eyes. “That makes it sooo much better. And that’s completely not the point.”
“What was I supposed to say?” he demanded. “’Hi, Leo. Remember me? I was Sam’s charge. You know, the one who went a little crazy when he found out he’d been stuck in a picture for fifty years.’ That’d go over real well, I’m sure.”
“A lot’s happened since then,” she reminded him as she stood up and began to pace.
“I still don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“For him to know that something good became of that whole bad situation?” she quarried as she paced the room. She stopped and looked at him. “It doesn’t matter right now, because you are going to meet his son, so let’s get going before he leaves the building.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he hedged, “not with . . .”
“My risk,” she interrupted. “Let’s go.” Before he could make any more protests, she orbed out.
JD sighed and followed suit. He had a feeling this was going to end badly.
Chris followed the nurse down the hall. If he’d had his way, he would have just orbed out, but that really wasn’t an option, not with so many people knowing he was here.
“Christopher Halliwell, is that you?” an unfamiliar female voice asked him from behind.
Chris froze for second and turned around. Behind him were two people. The young woman was clearly a patient, but she looked perfectly sane. She also looked like a complete stranger. Chris sighed and focused on her, trying to sense something that would somehow explain why this stranger knew his name.
What he found stunned him. Instead of just a general sense that she was there and that she was alive and well, he got more. To start with, she wasn’t alive and well. And neither was the young man next to her. They were some weird mixture of dead and alive that he didn’t understand at first. When he took the needed moments to process what he was sensing, he come to the conclusion that both of them were whitelighters. And he’d never tried to sense a whitelighter before, so it had never occurred to him that they would be so different.
“Do you know her?” the nurse asked, looking down the hall at the approaching duo.
Chris frowned, but was saved from answering when the female whitelighter did.
“Of course he probably doesn’t remember me,” she informed the nurse. “I worked for his mom at The Manor, but he was there so rarely and almost never during my shift.”
A whitelighter worked at his mom’s restaurant? That was news to him.
The nurse sighed. “Cassia, you were not a maid. I’ve seen your room, remember.”
Cassia? Now he was sure he didn’t recognize her. Still she knew the restaurant’s name. “Actually, my mom runs a restaurant called The Manor.”
The nurse looked at him surprised. “So you do know her?”
“Do you mind if I talk with her for a few minutes?” he asked. He didn’t know what a whitelighter was going in a mental hospital, but he did know that she had singled him out for a reason.
The nurse sighed. “I suppose so. It’s still visiting hours for a little bit longer. Don’t talk too long.”
Chris grinned at her. “Thanks. Is there somewhere we can sit down and talk?”
The nurse walked a few doors down and opened the door to a room. She indicated for them to enter. “I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes. If she starts sounding depressed, come get us. She’s not violent, so you should be safe, but . . .”
“Suicidal?” Chris asked, looking straight at Cassia.
Cassia rolled her eyes and shook her head. She headed into the room and sat down on one of the arm chairs inside.
The other whitelighter followed her in and Chris felt the need to follow suit.
“She’s been doing well the last couple of months, haven’t you, Cassia,” the nurse sounded a little patronizing.
Cassia gave her an annoyed look. “I’m not going to try and kill myself. You never have to worry about that ever, again.”
“I hope that’s right,” the nurse told her. “I’ll be just down the hall if you need me.”
Chris nodded. “Sure. Thanks.” He sat down on a second chair.
The other whitelighter leaned against the wall. “Is it safe in this room, Cass?”
Cassia nodded. “No recording devices here.” She turned to Chris with a sweet smile. “Hi, I’m Cassia Reynolds. Do not repeat that to them. They don’t know my last name.”
“JD Williams,” the other whitelighter added. “Since I’m only a visitor they don’t feel the need to look too deeply into my background.”
“Chris Halliwell, but you clearly know that.”
Cassia nodded. “I wasn’t kidding about The Manor. I worked there for nearly two decades.”
Chris snorted. “Yeah, right. I’d have noticed that. And so would everyone else. Whitelighters don’t exactly age.”
“You figured out I was a whitelighter?” she asked surprised.
“Both of you actually,” he admitted. “How did I not know a whitelighter was working for my mom all that time?”
“Well, how about that?” she offered to him. “There’s no way I would have gone to work there looking like myself.”
Chris gave her a disbelieving looking. “Why not? It’s not like any of us would have realized it.”
She sighed. “I grew up in San Francisco, in the seventies and eighties . . . nineteen seventies and eighties,” she clarified when he gave her a “so-what” look. “As in with your mom and her sisters.”
Chris’ eyes widened.
“I went to high school with them,” she informed him, “so yeah, your mom, and probably a lot of her customers would notice if Cassia Reynolds worked for her.”
“So you lied?” Chris accused.
Cassia shook her head. “No, I didn’t lie. A demon, Sjelmikser, switched around the bodies and powers of five of us. I ended up in the body of a teenage girl a little younger than I was when I died without any powers. I used her name, Jennifer Kingsley, when I applied to work for your mom, just as Jen used Alexis Porter’s name when she applied to work at Centennial.”
Chris eyes had begun to grow wide at the mention of Sjelmikser, and they just got bigger at the name of the chef who had quit The Manor just before Christmas the previous year, and when it came to the name of the assistant manager he had replaced at Centennial, whose job David now held. Had it only been this morning that David had called him to tell him his plans to marry Rose?
“There was a man in my body and after twenty years he really does appear to have gone insane,” Cassia informed him. “Two months ago as soon as JD realized he was back in his own body instead of that man’s, he found him and had him committed for real. We can only hope that the return to his real body will help calm him down. Jen and Alex fared much better.”
“Wait! Wait!” Chris protested as something occurred to him. “Alex is married. Are you trying to tell me that Jen’s the one who actually married him, but . . .”
“Let’s not go into that now,” JD interrupted. “I’m sure you’d love to figure all of that out, but right now we don’t have time. All you really need to know right now is that the real Alex has met Josh Owens once, two months ago, and was more than willing to leave him to Jen and that Jennifer Kingsley is the one who married Josh, not Alexis Porter. If you want more details about that, ask me later. We don’t have a lot of time before visitor’s hours are over and then we will both be kicked out of here.”
Chris eyed them wearily. “All right, why did you want my attention? It’s clearly not to reminisce on some odd point of my childhood that you were privy to.”
Cassia bit back a laugh. “That’s true.”
“So what is it?” he repeated. “And why can’t it wait until tomorrow when there is more time?”
“I was prepared to wait until they realized that I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t going to try and kill myself,” Cassia informed him. “Even though two months of rational behavior hasn’t done that, eventually they would have realized that. It was only a matter of time.”
“What changed?” Chris asked, hearing the past tense in all of her statements. “Why were you prepared to wait, but no longer?”
“My brother is here,” Cassia informed him. “And as much as I would love almost nothing more than to see him, to hug him close and never let go, we all know that it is forbidden.”
Chris nodded. He understood. Of course being the result of what normally was an extremely forbidden relationship, an elder and a witch, he had somewhat less respect for what the elders forbid. Still, for all that he knew nothing about his dad’s family except that he was named for his dad’s father. He didn’t even know what his grandmother’s name was.
“If he sees me, then, I’m in trouble,” Cassia added.
“Why didn’t the elders get you out of here?” Chris asked, not getting the point. “Why didn’t they deal with the guy in your body on their own? Surely they could have done that much.”
The two whitelighters looked at each other. Cassia sighed. “They could have,” she agreed, “but they won’t. I got on their bad side when I refused to allow them to turn Jen into a whitelighter while I was in her body. Now, they have told me that I have to get out of this situation on my own . . . or at least without their help.”
“You do know that I’m half elder, right?” Chris asked, wanting to make sure that didn’t matter.
JD chuckled. “We know.”
“That won’t matter,” she assured him. “Besides, whitelighter powers don’t seem to hold the answer and waiting won’t work anymore.”
“Maybe your brother’s presence is just a coincidence,” Chris suggested.
Cassia shook her head. “I’ve been dodging him for two hours. He specifically looking for someone who looks like me and he’s using my name, my full name. There’s no coincidence. If I’m not out of here tonight, I will have to decide which problem is smaller.”
Chris sighed. “I don’t know what you expect me to do. I think it would get me into trouble if I cast a spell on him. And the memory dust is dangerous, because you don’t know what you are erasing . . . not to mention you don’t know how long he’s been looking. I can’t glamour, and I’m not sure what that would accomplish anyway.”
“What about a spell that would make her brother see someone else when he looks at Cassia?” JD suggested. “The problem with a glamour is that everyone would see the wrong person, but a spell where just he sees her differently would at least convince him that this wasn’t the place he wanted to look.”
Chris looked at them for several second, considering this. “If it fails, we’ll know instantly. And if it fails, we will have a lot of clean up to do. As . . .” Chris tried and failed to remember JD’s name, so he just said, “he pointed out, we don’t have much time here.”
“Unless you’ve got another idea, it’s the best we’ve got,” Cassia pointed out.
How did I get pulled into this mess? Chris sighed. “Since you know my family, you should have contacted us sooner.”
“I didn’t want to contact you at all,” she admitted. “But I need your help. Please.”
He considered them for a moment more and then nodded. “Someone have some paper. I’ve got a spell to write.”