Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 10, 2011 22:23:13 GMT -5
This series of scenes actually takes place during "The Demon of Confusion". Considering prior to this story you have not met any of the people in it other than Kevin (and JD, but that was in Charmed), it wouldn't make sense to post it there. As I did with Piper, Leo, Wyatt, and Chris, here is a chart to help you tell who is who.
Soul.................................................Body.......................Power
Cassia Reynolds..................................Jen (15 – 36)...........Alex (none)
Jennifer “Jen” Kingsley (Owens).............Alex (7 – 28)............JD (whitelighter – disabled)
Alexis “Alex, Jelly” Porter (Owens)..........JD (22 – 22).............Ron (none)
Jonathan David “JD” Williams.................Ron (35 - 56)...........Cassia (whitelighter)
Ronald “Ron” Ryans.............................Cassia (17 – 17)........Jen (none)
So basically JD, who is in Ron's body, is the only one with powers. And since one of those is glamouring, he did that a lot. This situtation with Jen, Alex, and Josh is complicated . . . But for record's sake, Alex has met Jen, Ron, and Cassia, but she mostly deals with JD. And Jen's met Ron, JD, and (obviously) Alex, but she mostly deals with Cassia. Ron avoids all of them. Alex has never met Josh. Keep in mind you are dealing with people who after twenty years have long had cause to wonder if they would ever return to their own bodies.
Oh, and technically the nickname "Jelly" is exclusively Jen's, but since she used it only while looking like Alex, it is listed this way.
The following scenes are what happens when Alex, Jen, Cassia, JD, and Ron figure out that they are in their own bodies once more. In addition there are two elders (Kevin and another who will eventually be revealed, but this is the elder that rescued Hank, and yes, he's up to something) and Josh, Jen's husband.
Oh, and when it comes to Kevin, he tends to switch between his no effort age (the age he was when he became an elder, thirteen or so), his comfort age (late teens, early twenties), and his authoritative age (also known as his actual age, which is late thirties). In this batch of scenes he uses his comfort age, because that's what he usually uses around the whitelighters under him . . . unless they are in trouble.
Anyway, enjoy.
Alex wasn’t sure what it was that actually woke her. She had been shooting pool with Denny and Jess. Mikayla had been draping herself all over Jess, something that never failed to make Alex want to roll her eyes. However, when it came to pool, Alex took every advantage she could. For almost seventeen years she had been perfecting her game of pool. As far as Jess and Mikayla were concerned, Alex was some newbie that Denny found playing pool against a pool sharp, and playing badly.
The truth of the matter was that Denny had found her two years early beating the pants off her mentor, JD. Denny had been highly impressed and decided to take her under his wing. Denny though she was some college age kid. He wasn’t far off, she supposed. Seven or eight years wasn’t all that bad. Of course given a few more years and she’d have to leave . . . again. It was getting rather tiresome. Being stuck in JD’s eternally twenty-two-year-old body sucked for more reasons than just his gender.
When she had first found herself in the body of a young man more than three times her age, Alex had been seven. Things had gone downhill from there. She had tried to find some way to get into her family’s life, but nothing had seemed to work. Then, JD pointed out that it probably was a good thing, since she wasn’t going to be aging as long as she was in his body. At nine she had just glared at him. What did he know?
Unfortunately a lot as Alex learned over the two decades she had known him. She tried to concentrate on how she had ended up in bed. She remembered being in Denny’s pool room and then a then she’d felt dizzy. That had to be it. She’d felt dizzy and then she was lying prostrate in a bed. There was no memory of falling, but she supposed she must have fainted or something.
She opened her eyes and found herself staring into the dark brown eyes of a complete stranger. Her own eyes widened as she scrambled away. “Get away from me,” she squealed and then her eyes formed saucers as she realized her voice had completely changed.
The man the eyes belonged to looked at her worried. “What’s wrong sweetheart?”
“Sweetheart?!?” She stared at him stunned as she pulled covers around herself on the side of the bed. The pieces began to click together in rapid succession and she gulped for breath. “Oh my word! You’re Josh. You think . . .” she heaved in several deep breaths. “I’m me, again.” She looked down at herself covered by sheets and blankets and took in several deep breaths. “Oh my word! Oh my word!” Her heart was pounding as she looked up at him. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
Josh looked at her confused. “Jen?”
“I’m. Not. Jen!” she informed him in no uncertain terms.
Josh frowned as realization dawned on his face. With disbelief written all over his face, he whispered, “Are you Alex?”
The only response she gave him was a quick jerking nod of her head.
“Where’s my wife?” Josh asked, looking around in concern. “Where’s Jen?”
“I don’t know,” Alex informed him as she backed away. “Call Cassia’s number, if I’m back in my body, maybe Jen is, too.”
Josh nodded and pulled open a dresser. “Clothes are in there,” he told her as he grabbed his cell phone off his dresser and headed out of the room, leaving Alex alone to dress and come to grips with what had happened.
Josh was only two steps out of the room when his cell rang.
Jen looked around uncertain. Only a moment before, she had been half awake in bed with Josh. Now she wasn’t sure where she was. She was standing, but she hadn’t been expecting to be standing so she’d almost tumbled over. Glancing around, she realized that the room actually was familiar.
Her eyes narrowed as she looked around. “This makes no sense,” she mumbled as she looked down at the clothes she now wore. They were oddly out of her normal taste and the fact that she wore anything was peculiar. She hadn’t been when she’d been in bed. The only thing that was familiar, besides the vague sense that she should know this room was the gentle bump of her belly where her baby lay.
With a sigh she looked around for a phone. She was halfway down the hall when she passed a mirror. It took a second or two for what she saw to sink in and cause her to freeze. She took two steps backward and looked into the mirror. Instead of the face she had grown accustomed to seeing, she saw her face, her real face. As she tried licked her suddenly dry lips, she glanced down at her belly. Sure enough, her baby was still there. Somehow she had been transferred back to her own body and miraculously her baby had come with her. Oddly enough the clothes seemed to still fit. Who was she to question magic?
Her mind followed that to an obvious conclusion, one she didn’t like. If she was here, that meant Alex was where she had been . . . in bed . . . with Josh.
Jen ran down the hall and checked in the bedroom. There were no visible phones. She started pulling open drawers on the vanity and then she thought to check her pocket.
Finding the phone there, where it had been all along, she punched in the familiar number of Josh’s cell.
“Jen?” Josh’s voice asked a moment later as he answered.
“I’m me, again.”
His sigh of relief was obvious even over the phone. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Yeah,” she assured him. She didn’t say anything more as blue white orbs filled the room and turned into a young man she didn’t recognize in his late teens, early twenties. “I’ll get back to you. Love you, sweetheart.”
Her eyes widened as the young whitelighter jerked back as if shot. She saw pain in his eyes that was veiled so fast she almost convinced herself it was never there.
“Cassia, I tried calling, but you didn’t answer,” he informed Jen.
Jen gulped and didn’t say a word. Who was this guy? He clearly knew what had happened to them, but she guessed that wasn’t all that surprising. Cassia wouldn’t have had need to keep it from the people she knew.
“Just because you don’t have your powers,” he continued, not yet noticing that this wasn’t Cassia. “doesn’t mean you are allowed to skip staff meetings.”
Jen barely kept a full belly laugh from escaping her. Staff meetings? Was he serious?
“It’s not as if you need to be able to orb to get to them,” he added. “I have them at my apartment for good reason . . . grant you it’s mostly so that Kari can provide the snacks almost no one has to eat, but does anyway to be polite.”
Jen blinked. Who was Kari?
“That’s not the point though,” he rushed to assure her. Jen was beginning to wonder if there was one.
“I’m not Cassia,” Jen interrupted before he could say anything else. It would likely be interesting to see what he was talking about, but she decided it would be better to tell him now.
He looked at her. He stood very still, breathing slowly. Several seconds passed before he said, “Oh. My apology, Mrs. Owens. I’m glad to see you are back to normal. I’d best be finding Cassia.”
Without so much as an introduction, he disappeared again in blue and white orbs. Jen took a second to absorb what had just happened, but only a second and then she decided she had more important things to deal with right now . . . like letting her husband know that she was still on the line.
Cassia frowned as she looked away. One second she had been in the apartment where she had lived for the last seventeen years and the next she was in the middle of a large courtyard. It was almost as if she had orbed without orbing.
She stood still trying to take in her surroundings, but she couldn’t concentrate. Pain radiated from her wrists. She looked down and her eyes widened. Blood streamed from straight cuts across them. She hadn’t cut her wrists. And then she saw them slowly healing. A whitelighter couldn’t heal themselves, not when it was something deadly to them like a darklighter’s arrow. Someone who was part whitelighter couldn’t heal themselves at all . . . everything was potentially deadly to them.
Humans, normal humans like she had been for over twenty years, couldn’t heal anyone, not others and certainly not themselves. As the cuts on her wrists completely closed up and all that was left was the blood that had bled out of them, Cassia realized that everything had changed. She wasn’t a normal human any more. She was a whitelighter, again. A smile spread on her lips as she took in the news. It felt good to be a whitelighter, again.
Kevin watched Cassia hidden from her and everyone else by a cloak of invisibility. He would have taken a step forward, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him. He looked over to see another elder standing next to him.
“You shouldn’t,” the other elder recommended.
“She’s my responsibility,” Kevin reminded him. “I need to talk to her.”
“No, you need to avoid talking to her,” the other elder argued. “She needs to be here for a while?”
“What?! Are you nuts?” Kevin turned to stare at him. “Why would I leave her here?”
“You’ll see,” the other elder assured him. “In time you will see. She’s got her powers back. This will give her the chance to get used to that before she gets back into her routine. Trust me.”
“Trust you?!” Kevin stared at him, annoyed. “One of my whitelighters is stuck in a mental institution and you’re telling me to not even speak to her.”
“She needs to find a way to get out without out help,” the other elder informed him. “This isn’t something I am deciding off the top of my head. Kevin, the council of elders has spoken on this. She defied them and clipping her wings . . . isn’t exactly a punishment for her.”
“So they are punishing her for not making a living woman into a whitelighter,” Kevin formulated in disbelief. “You want me to just leave her here.”
The other elder nodded. “It is the will of the council, but it’s more than that. She needs to be here. I can’t explain it, but she needs to be here.”
Kevin shook his head. “I can’t just do that. What if her charges need her and she can’t get away from here. We can’t leave them vulnerable.”
“She can always get a message to you,” the other elder reminded him. “And you can pass that message on to another whitelighter who can help them out. Most of her charges should be okay for a few months and . . .”
“A few months?!” Kevin shook his head. “No. Not a chance.”
“A few months is nothing compared to the two decades she spent in Jennifer Kingsley’s body,” the other elder reminded him. “She’ll be fine and at least until she’s out of there . . . so will her charges.”
Kevin looked across the yard at where Cassia was and then back at the other elder.
“Go find JD,” the other elder suggested. “I’ll explain things to Cassia.”
“JD?” Kevin asked surprised. “Why JD?”
“Because you need to find out where this asylums missing mental patient is,” the other elder informed him, “and JD is your best bet at figuring out where to look. We need to figure out how to deal with him. I’m not concerned about the girls. They seem to have acclimated themselves to everything that has happened as best they can and I think they understand enough about magic and why it needs to be kept secret that they won’t expose it. Now, go find JD.”
JD heaved in a deep breath as he took in the scene in front of him. Moments before, he’d been in the park feeding pigeons and now, he found himself in a small pool room. He recognized one of the room’s occupants as Alex’s friend, Denny, but there was no reason he should have found himself here. He watched them as they each took their time setting up their shots. Denny made three shots before he missed.
“Your turn, JD,” a young woman around twenty informed him.
My turn? he thought as he looked frowning at the pool table. He hadn’t played very much pool, not in this century anyway.
“JD?” the young woman waved a hand in front of his face. “Are you here?”
He frowned and looked around him. Something was very wrong here. Other than other whitelighters, what few elders he communicated with, and the two girls, Alex and Jen, little as he saw Jen, no one had called him JD in over two decades. Most of his charges didn’t even know he existed let alone know he was their whitelighter.
“JD?” Denny walked over to him. “Is everything all right?”
JD gulped and shook his head. “Sorry, I need some air. Do you mind?”
The young woman shook her head. “No, that’s okay. You do look kind of pale.”
That’s because I’m dead, he thought to himself, even if it was entirely inaccurate. His being dead didn’t affect his skin tone in the least. “Thanks,” was all he said as he headed out of the room and up the stairs. Once he’d reached the top of the landing he tried to orb out. Try seemed to be the key word, because nothing happened.
“You okay, kid,” Kevin’s voice asked from behind him.
JD turned around and looked at him. In number of years actually spent living, or whatever one could call the whitelighter facsimile of living, they were close in age. Kevin still lost out to him by a few years. And if you counted the number of years since birth, JD beat him by over half a century. In fact the only way Kevin won was if you counted only the years Kevin had been an elder against the number of years JD had been a whitelighter. Even then, Kevin only barely won.
“How’s it feel to have your own skin back?” Kevin asked with a grin.
“It would feel better if I also had my powers back,” JD informed him.
Kevin shrugged. “Done. Anything else?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” JD assured him.
“Good,” Kevin informed him. “I need to locate Ronald Ryans.”
JD glanced down the stairs. “How are you at pool?”
“What?”
“I can get Ron where he needs to go,” JD informed him, “but I haven’t the slightest clue how to deal with the three people down there. One of them is a friend of Alex’s or at least Alex in my body. I suspect Alex would like to get back that friendship. The other two, I don’t know. You can help by dealing with them. Find Alex and get her some introductions. Please.”
Kevin nodded. “Be careful.” With a smile on his face Kevin altered his appearance so that he went from looking like a nineteen-year-old version of himself to looking like JD. “Be careful,” he repeated before he headed down the stairs.
JD grinned and orbed back to the park.
Ron looked around himself suspiciously. He had been wishing himself out of that asylum for so long he wasn’t ready to believe this was real. They didn’t understand his need to die. How could they? When he tried to explain that he was trapped in the body of a teenage girl who never aged, they just thought he was even more crazy. What sane man wanted to be stuck in the body of an eternal teenage girl? None of it had made sense. He’d tried making her look like a man, but nothing he did worked. He reached back an angry hand to deal with the try and pull out the offending long hair. He wasn’t allowed around scissors and they hadn’t let him cut that hair since he’d arrived. It was nearly to his shoulders . . . or her shoulders as it were.
Except when he reached back there was nothing there. He reached a little higher and his wrist scratched against a five o’clock shadow. Startled he moved his hand down a little lower and rubbed his hand against the stubble. He just sat there in wonderment for several minutes as he felt his face and his hair.
If this was real and permanent, then maybe he didn’t have to die quite yet. It wasn’t as if he really wanted to die. He just couldn’t stand being that stupid girl any more.
“She’s not stupid, you know,” an unwelcome voice informed him from behind.
Ron turned around to glare at JD. He rose off the bench he’d found himself sitting on and stepped over it.
JD watched him. He opened his mouth to speak and that’s when Ron leapt at him.
Ron started pummeling him. “You did this to me!” He yelled.
JD, aware that they were gaining an audience knew he couldn’t us magic, which meant no orbing. He pushed up on Ron and tried to roll out from under him. It didn’t work so well.
JD grunted as a fist met with his throat. It was good thing he didn’t actually have to breathe. He managed to avoid the next blow and with a stronger shove he managed to move Ron enough to roll out of the way. “What’s the big idea?”
“You can’t just fix this and pretend nothing happened,” Ron yelled at him as he threw another punch.
JD ducked it. “I’m not trying to. But at least it’s a start. I understand . . .”
“You understand nothing,” Ron informed him as he leapt at JD, again.
JD side stepped him and grabbed Ron by the arm. He pulled Ron’s arm behind his back and wished he had put in some practice with self defense sometime in the last two decades. There hadn’t been any good reason to though. He was a whitelighter. He’d chosen to accept the job along with everything that went with it when he had died. And whitelighters were pacifists.
JD didn’t feel very much like a pacifist right now. The idea of just letting Ron beat him up was not appealing. Just because Ron couldn’t kill him, didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt him and JD wasn’t interested in pain.
Ron struggled to get out of JD’s grip, but the more he struggled the more freaked out he got. He began seeing creatures with human features, but with horns and tails closing in on them. “Let me go!” he screamed as one creature sneered at him.
JD watched with growing concern as Ron lashed out at a little girl who was looking at him with curiosity.
“Get it away from me!” Ron screamed as he backed away from the crowd into JD.
“Get what away from you?” JD asked in a low voice.
Ron swung around, this time escaping JD’s grip and his eyes widened. “You’re one of them!” He glanced around him and started running into the first opening he could find in the crowd.
JD sighed and ran after him. Clearly Ron was not ready to be let loose on society. The problem was, he couldn’t just let him loose on a mental hospital either. If this freak out was in any way magical, he couldn’t risk it. And the elders would be furious if he brought Ron to them. And so he ran. He’d figure out what to do with Ron once he caught him. And as long as people could see him, he couldn’t use magic to do it. JD was glad that he didn’t have to glamour to look like himself anymore, but he certainly would have preferred the day gone better, because today was awful.
Soul.................................................Body.......................Power
Cassia Reynolds..................................Jen (15 – 36)...........Alex (none)
Jennifer “Jen” Kingsley (Owens).............Alex (7 – 28)............JD (whitelighter – disabled)
Alexis “Alex, Jelly” Porter (Owens)..........JD (22 – 22).............Ron (none)
Jonathan David “JD” Williams.................Ron (35 - 56)...........Cassia (whitelighter)
Ronald “Ron” Ryans.............................Cassia (17 – 17)........Jen (none)
So basically JD, who is in Ron's body, is the only one with powers. And since one of those is glamouring, he did that a lot. This situtation with Jen, Alex, and Josh is complicated . . . But for record's sake, Alex has met Jen, Ron, and Cassia, but she mostly deals with JD. And Jen's met Ron, JD, and (obviously) Alex, but she mostly deals with Cassia. Ron avoids all of them. Alex has never met Josh. Keep in mind you are dealing with people who after twenty years have long had cause to wonder if they would ever return to their own bodies.
Oh, and technically the nickname "Jelly" is exclusively Jen's, but since she used it only while looking like Alex, it is listed this way.
The following scenes are what happens when Alex, Jen, Cassia, JD, and Ron figure out that they are in their own bodies once more. In addition there are two elders (Kevin and another who will eventually be revealed, but this is the elder that rescued Hank, and yes, he's up to something) and Josh, Jen's husband.
Oh, and when it comes to Kevin, he tends to switch between his no effort age (the age he was when he became an elder, thirteen or so), his comfort age (late teens, early twenties), and his authoritative age (also known as his actual age, which is late thirties). In this batch of scenes he uses his comfort age, because that's what he usually uses around the whitelighters under him . . . unless they are in trouble.
Anyway, enjoy.
Alex wasn’t sure what it was that actually woke her. She had been shooting pool with Denny and Jess. Mikayla had been draping herself all over Jess, something that never failed to make Alex want to roll her eyes. However, when it came to pool, Alex took every advantage she could. For almost seventeen years she had been perfecting her game of pool. As far as Jess and Mikayla were concerned, Alex was some newbie that Denny found playing pool against a pool sharp, and playing badly.
The truth of the matter was that Denny had found her two years early beating the pants off her mentor, JD. Denny had been highly impressed and decided to take her under his wing. Denny though she was some college age kid. He wasn’t far off, she supposed. Seven or eight years wasn’t all that bad. Of course given a few more years and she’d have to leave . . . again. It was getting rather tiresome. Being stuck in JD’s eternally twenty-two-year-old body sucked for more reasons than just his gender.
When she had first found herself in the body of a young man more than three times her age, Alex had been seven. Things had gone downhill from there. She had tried to find some way to get into her family’s life, but nothing had seemed to work. Then, JD pointed out that it probably was a good thing, since she wasn’t going to be aging as long as she was in his body. At nine she had just glared at him. What did he know?
Unfortunately a lot as Alex learned over the two decades she had known him. She tried to concentrate on how she had ended up in bed. She remembered being in Denny’s pool room and then a then she’d felt dizzy. That had to be it. She’d felt dizzy and then she was lying prostrate in a bed. There was no memory of falling, but she supposed she must have fainted or something.
She opened her eyes and found herself staring into the dark brown eyes of a complete stranger. Her own eyes widened as she scrambled away. “Get away from me,” she squealed and then her eyes formed saucers as she realized her voice had completely changed.
The man the eyes belonged to looked at her worried. “What’s wrong sweetheart?”
“Sweetheart?!?” She stared at him stunned as she pulled covers around herself on the side of the bed. The pieces began to click together in rapid succession and she gulped for breath. “Oh my word! You’re Josh. You think . . .” she heaved in several deep breaths. “I’m me, again.” She looked down at herself covered by sheets and blankets and took in several deep breaths. “Oh my word! Oh my word!” Her heart was pounding as she looked up at him. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
Josh looked at her confused. “Jen?”
“I’m. Not. Jen!” she informed him in no uncertain terms.
Josh frowned as realization dawned on his face. With disbelief written all over his face, he whispered, “Are you Alex?”
The only response she gave him was a quick jerking nod of her head.
“Where’s my wife?” Josh asked, looking around in concern. “Where’s Jen?”
“I don’t know,” Alex informed him as she backed away. “Call Cassia’s number, if I’m back in my body, maybe Jen is, too.”
Josh nodded and pulled open a dresser. “Clothes are in there,” he told her as he grabbed his cell phone off his dresser and headed out of the room, leaving Alex alone to dress and come to grips with what had happened.
Josh was only two steps out of the room when his cell rang.
Jen looked around uncertain. Only a moment before, she had been half awake in bed with Josh. Now she wasn’t sure where she was. She was standing, but she hadn’t been expecting to be standing so she’d almost tumbled over. Glancing around, she realized that the room actually was familiar.
Her eyes narrowed as she looked around. “This makes no sense,” she mumbled as she looked down at the clothes she now wore. They were oddly out of her normal taste and the fact that she wore anything was peculiar. She hadn’t been when she’d been in bed. The only thing that was familiar, besides the vague sense that she should know this room was the gentle bump of her belly where her baby lay.
With a sigh she looked around for a phone. She was halfway down the hall when she passed a mirror. It took a second or two for what she saw to sink in and cause her to freeze. She took two steps backward and looked into the mirror. Instead of the face she had grown accustomed to seeing, she saw her face, her real face. As she tried licked her suddenly dry lips, she glanced down at her belly. Sure enough, her baby was still there. Somehow she had been transferred back to her own body and miraculously her baby had come with her. Oddly enough the clothes seemed to still fit. Who was she to question magic?
Her mind followed that to an obvious conclusion, one she didn’t like. If she was here, that meant Alex was where she had been . . . in bed . . . with Josh.
Jen ran down the hall and checked in the bedroom. There were no visible phones. She started pulling open drawers on the vanity and then she thought to check her pocket.
Finding the phone there, where it had been all along, she punched in the familiar number of Josh’s cell.
“Jen?” Josh’s voice asked a moment later as he answered.
“I’m me, again.”
His sigh of relief was obvious even over the phone. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Yeah,” she assured him. She didn’t say anything more as blue white orbs filled the room and turned into a young man she didn’t recognize in his late teens, early twenties. “I’ll get back to you. Love you, sweetheart.”
Her eyes widened as the young whitelighter jerked back as if shot. She saw pain in his eyes that was veiled so fast she almost convinced herself it was never there.
“Cassia, I tried calling, but you didn’t answer,” he informed Jen.
Jen gulped and didn’t say a word. Who was this guy? He clearly knew what had happened to them, but she guessed that wasn’t all that surprising. Cassia wouldn’t have had need to keep it from the people she knew.
“Just because you don’t have your powers,” he continued, not yet noticing that this wasn’t Cassia. “doesn’t mean you are allowed to skip staff meetings.”
Jen barely kept a full belly laugh from escaping her. Staff meetings? Was he serious?
“It’s not as if you need to be able to orb to get to them,” he added. “I have them at my apartment for good reason . . . grant you it’s mostly so that Kari can provide the snacks almost no one has to eat, but does anyway to be polite.”
Jen blinked. Who was Kari?
“That’s not the point though,” he rushed to assure her. Jen was beginning to wonder if there was one.
“I’m not Cassia,” Jen interrupted before he could say anything else. It would likely be interesting to see what he was talking about, but she decided it would be better to tell him now.
He looked at her. He stood very still, breathing slowly. Several seconds passed before he said, “Oh. My apology, Mrs. Owens. I’m glad to see you are back to normal. I’d best be finding Cassia.”
Without so much as an introduction, he disappeared again in blue and white orbs. Jen took a second to absorb what had just happened, but only a second and then she decided she had more important things to deal with right now . . . like letting her husband know that she was still on the line.
Cassia frowned as she looked away. One second she had been in the apartment where she had lived for the last seventeen years and the next she was in the middle of a large courtyard. It was almost as if she had orbed without orbing.
She stood still trying to take in her surroundings, but she couldn’t concentrate. Pain radiated from her wrists. She looked down and her eyes widened. Blood streamed from straight cuts across them. She hadn’t cut her wrists. And then she saw them slowly healing. A whitelighter couldn’t heal themselves, not when it was something deadly to them like a darklighter’s arrow. Someone who was part whitelighter couldn’t heal themselves at all . . . everything was potentially deadly to them.
Humans, normal humans like she had been for over twenty years, couldn’t heal anyone, not others and certainly not themselves. As the cuts on her wrists completely closed up and all that was left was the blood that had bled out of them, Cassia realized that everything had changed. She wasn’t a normal human any more. She was a whitelighter, again. A smile spread on her lips as she took in the news. It felt good to be a whitelighter, again.
Kevin watched Cassia hidden from her and everyone else by a cloak of invisibility. He would have taken a step forward, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him. He looked over to see another elder standing next to him.
“You shouldn’t,” the other elder recommended.
“She’s my responsibility,” Kevin reminded him. “I need to talk to her.”
“No, you need to avoid talking to her,” the other elder argued. “She needs to be here for a while?”
“What?! Are you nuts?” Kevin turned to stare at him. “Why would I leave her here?”
“You’ll see,” the other elder assured him. “In time you will see. She’s got her powers back. This will give her the chance to get used to that before she gets back into her routine. Trust me.”
“Trust you?!” Kevin stared at him, annoyed. “One of my whitelighters is stuck in a mental institution and you’re telling me to not even speak to her.”
“She needs to find a way to get out without out help,” the other elder informed him. “This isn’t something I am deciding off the top of my head. Kevin, the council of elders has spoken on this. She defied them and clipping her wings . . . isn’t exactly a punishment for her.”
“So they are punishing her for not making a living woman into a whitelighter,” Kevin formulated in disbelief. “You want me to just leave her here.”
The other elder nodded. “It is the will of the council, but it’s more than that. She needs to be here. I can’t explain it, but she needs to be here.”
Kevin shook his head. “I can’t just do that. What if her charges need her and she can’t get away from here. We can’t leave them vulnerable.”
“She can always get a message to you,” the other elder reminded him. “And you can pass that message on to another whitelighter who can help them out. Most of her charges should be okay for a few months and . . .”
“A few months?!” Kevin shook his head. “No. Not a chance.”
“A few months is nothing compared to the two decades she spent in Jennifer Kingsley’s body,” the other elder reminded him. “She’ll be fine and at least until she’s out of there . . . so will her charges.”
Kevin looked across the yard at where Cassia was and then back at the other elder.
“Go find JD,” the other elder suggested. “I’ll explain things to Cassia.”
“JD?” Kevin asked surprised. “Why JD?”
“Because you need to find out where this asylums missing mental patient is,” the other elder informed him, “and JD is your best bet at figuring out where to look. We need to figure out how to deal with him. I’m not concerned about the girls. They seem to have acclimated themselves to everything that has happened as best they can and I think they understand enough about magic and why it needs to be kept secret that they won’t expose it. Now, go find JD.”
JD heaved in a deep breath as he took in the scene in front of him. Moments before, he’d been in the park feeding pigeons and now, he found himself in a small pool room. He recognized one of the room’s occupants as Alex’s friend, Denny, but there was no reason he should have found himself here. He watched them as they each took their time setting up their shots. Denny made three shots before he missed.
“Your turn, JD,” a young woman around twenty informed him.
My turn? he thought as he looked frowning at the pool table. He hadn’t played very much pool, not in this century anyway.
“JD?” the young woman waved a hand in front of his face. “Are you here?”
He frowned and looked around him. Something was very wrong here. Other than other whitelighters, what few elders he communicated with, and the two girls, Alex and Jen, little as he saw Jen, no one had called him JD in over two decades. Most of his charges didn’t even know he existed let alone know he was their whitelighter.
“JD?” Denny walked over to him. “Is everything all right?”
JD gulped and shook his head. “Sorry, I need some air. Do you mind?”
The young woman shook her head. “No, that’s okay. You do look kind of pale.”
That’s because I’m dead, he thought to himself, even if it was entirely inaccurate. His being dead didn’t affect his skin tone in the least. “Thanks,” was all he said as he headed out of the room and up the stairs. Once he’d reached the top of the landing he tried to orb out. Try seemed to be the key word, because nothing happened.
“You okay, kid,” Kevin’s voice asked from behind him.
JD turned around and looked at him. In number of years actually spent living, or whatever one could call the whitelighter facsimile of living, they were close in age. Kevin still lost out to him by a few years. And if you counted the number of years since birth, JD beat him by over half a century. In fact the only way Kevin won was if you counted only the years Kevin had been an elder against the number of years JD had been a whitelighter. Even then, Kevin only barely won.
“How’s it feel to have your own skin back?” Kevin asked with a grin.
“It would feel better if I also had my powers back,” JD informed him.
Kevin shrugged. “Done. Anything else?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” JD assured him.
“Good,” Kevin informed him. “I need to locate Ronald Ryans.”
JD glanced down the stairs. “How are you at pool?”
“What?”
“I can get Ron where he needs to go,” JD informed him, “but I haven’t the slightest clue how to deal with the three people down there. One of them is a friend of Alex’s or at least Alex in my body. I suspect Alex would like to get back that friendship. The other two, I don’t know. You can help by dealing with them. Find Alex and get her some introductions. Please.”
Kevin nodded. “Be careful.” With a smile on his face Kevin altered his appearance so that he went from looking like a nineteen-year-old version of himself to looking like JD. “Be careful,” he repeated before he headed down the stairs.
JD grinned and orbed back to the park.
Ron looked around himself suspiciously. He had been wishing himself out of that asylum for so long he wasn’t ready to believe this was real. They didn’t understand his need to die. How could they? When he tried to explain that he was trapped in the body of a teenage girl who never aged, they just thought he was even more crazy. What sane man wanted to be stuck in the body of an eternal teenage girl? None of it had made sense. He’d tried making her look like a man, but nothing he did worked. He reached back an angry hand to deal with the try and pull out the offending long hair. He wasn’t allowed around scissors and they hadn’t let him cut that hair since he’d arrived. It was nearly to his shoulders . . . or her shoulders as it were.
Except when he reached back there was nothing there. He reached a little higher and his wrist scratched against a five o’clock shadow. Startled he moved his hand down a little lower and rubbed his hand against the stubble. He just sat there in wonderment for several minutes as he felt his face and his hair.
If this was real and permanent, then maybe he didn’t have to die quite yet. It wasn’t as if he really wanted to die. He just couldn’t stand being that stupid girl any more.
“She’s not stupid, you know,” an unwelcome voice informed him from behind.
Ron turned around to glare at JD. He rose off the bench he’d found himself sitting on and stepped over it.
JD watched him. He opened his mouth to speak and that’s when Ron leapt at him.
Ron started pummeling him. “You did this to me!” He yelled.
JD, aware that they were gaining an audience knew he couldn’t us magic, which meant no orbing. He pushed up on Ron and tried to roll out from under him. It didn’t work so well.
JD grunted as a fist met with his throat. It was good thing he didn’t actually have to breathe. He managed to avoid the next blow and with a stronger shove he managed to move Ron enough to roll out of the way. “What’s the big idea?”
“You can’t just fix this and pretend nothing happened,” Ron yelled at him as he threw another punch.
JD ducked it. “I’m not trying to. But at least it’s a start. I understand . . .”
“You understand nothing,” Ron informed him as he leapt at JD, again.
JD side stepped him and grabbed Ron by the arm. He pulled Ron’s arm behind his back and wished he had put in some practice with self defense sometime in the last two decades. There hadn’t been any good reason to though. He was a whitelighter. He’d chosen to accept the job along with everything that went with it when he had died. And whitelighters were pacifists.
JD didn’t feel very much like a pacifist right now. The idea of just letting Ron beat him up was not appealing. Just because Ron couldn’t kill him, didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt him and JD wasn’t interested in pain.
Ron struggled to get out of JD’s grip, but the more he struggled the more freaked out he got. He began seeing creatures with human features, but with horns and tails closing in on them. “Let me go!” he screamed as one creature sneered at him.
JD watched with growing concern as Ron lashed out at a little girl who was looking at him with curiosity.
“Get it away from me!” Ron screamed as he backed away from the crowd into JD.
“Get what away from you?” JD asked in a low voice.
Ron swung around, this time escaping JD’s grip and his eyes widened. “You’re one of them!” He glanced around him and started running into the first opening he could find in the crowd.
JD sighed and ran after him. Clearly Ron was not ready to be let loose on society. The problem was, he couldn’t just let him loose on a mental hospital either. If this freak out was in any way magical, he couldn’t risk it. And the elders would be furious if he brought Ron to them. And so he ran. He’d figure out what to do with Ron once he caught him. And as long as people could see him, he couldn’t use magic to do it. JD was glad that he didn’t have to glamour to look like himself anymore, but he certainly would have preferred the day gone better, because today was awful.