Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 10, 2011 22:54:31 GMT -5
Chapter Four – Changing of the Guard
Hank stared at his mother stunned. “That’s impossible! Isn’t it?”
Paige Matthews-Mitchell shrugged. “Apparently not. I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t orb Up There.”
“But how?” Hank looked at her confused. “Haven’t you been Up There before?”
Paige nodded. “Of course I have. I don’t know why I can’[t go up there right now. I only know that I can’t.”
“Then, something’s up there,” Hank decided. “There has to be. If there wasn’t they wouldn’t be keeping you out.”
“We have no reason to believe this isn’t something that just happens every once and a while.”
“In the middle of a crisis?” Hank shook his head. “No. It’s been over a week. Even if they . . . there’s no way this is their doing.”
“We’ll figure out what’s going on,” Paige assured him. “Right now, I think it’s time for you to go to bed. I think you’ve been up too long.”
“I’m okay, Mom,” he argued. “Really I am. We need to figure this out or all those people are going to die.”
“The world does not depend on you, sleepyhead,” she reminded him as she directed him up the stairs to her old bedroom. “And it certainly can’t if you are too tired to think.”
“But I’m not,” he protested.
She shook her head. “Sleep. Let the rest of us who are a bit more rested take over.” She pushed open the door to her old room and led him in. Once they were inside, she peeled back the covers and gently directed her son to sit down.
“I’m not tired,” he protested, again, even as he yawned and lay down against the pillow.
Paige pulled off his shoes and socks before picking up his feet with obvious effort and tucking them under the covers. She smiled as Hank curled up in a ball, already half asleep. She pulled the covers to his chin and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Sleep well, my little one,” she whispered.
She watched him for a few seconds as he quickly settled into sleep before she left the room and headed up the stairs.
In the attic she found her daughters rubbing sleep out of their eyes as Phoebe’s three girls piled pillows and folded blankets into a far corner of the attic. Hope looked up as Paige entered the room. “Did you talk to them? What did they say?”
“So you’re my son’s partner in crime,” Paige commented. “Off to bed with you, young lady.”
“But I . . .”
“Bed,” Paige directed, pointing toward the stairs.
Hope sighed and headed toward the stairs. She stopped and looked at Paige. “Hank looked at every page in the Book twice. It’s not in there, but he mentioned blank pages in odd spots, so maybe that wasn’t always the case.”
Paige nodded. “You’ve said your piece. Now, off to bed.” She looked at the other four girls.”
“You still haven’t heard anything from Mom and Dad, have you?” Ladybug Halliwell asked as she watched her little sister head down the stairs.
Paige shook her head. “Sorry, Sweetheart. I don’t think they are going to just appear. After all this time, it just seems too easy.”
Ladybug sighed. “I know. A girl can dream, can’t she?”
Paige smiled. “Dreaming’s allowed.”
“Is Dad still okay?” Jani, the younger of Paige’s twins asked as Chris orbed in by the podium holding the Book of Shadows.
Paige nodded. “He went to work. His department is amazingly intact, but most aren’t, so he thought he could lend a hand there.” She managed an amused smile as she added, “He also seemed to think we had enough people trying to figure out what magic is behind this without adding his complete lack of magical ability to the mixture.”
“Uncle Andy’s in a coma,” Chris announced as he finished materializing. “I stopped in to visit before heading here. It was pretty much impossible to understand Aunt Prue, but Pat told me it’s been almost two hours.” He heaved in a deep breath and added, “And Vicki says she’s seeing spots. I’m not sure what, if anything that means, but she seemed to think it was relevant. She said there are red spots mixing with white spots and then with more red spots to make purple spots. And she said she sees them only around patients sick with the . . . witch’s fever.” He mumbled the last part.
“The what?” Paige looked at him confused.
“That’s what the world has apparently named this,” he admitted.
“Poor Uncle Andy,” Jani bemoaned.
“Poor Aunt Prue,” Cilly Halliwell corrected. “Uncle Andy’s going to die. Aunt Prue’s the one that’s going to have to live without him, again.”
“There’s still time,” Ladybug argued. “We could still find a way to fix this all.”
Paige looked down at her watch. “He has until about two this afternoon before his temperature spikes and his organs . . .”
“How about we don’t remind the guy whose dad has the same disease, no matter how early a stage,” Chris interrupted to suggest.
Paige sighed. “Sorry, I just got carried away. It’s been a long week and I’m not usually up at four-thirteen in the morning.”
“So we have nothing?” Alanna, Paige’s older twin asked as she picked up the Book of Shadows and walked over to the couch.
“If there was something on those blank pages, then someone put it there, right?” Ladybug spoke up. “Maybe we could try summoning them.” She looked pleadingly at Chris. “You said it was possible. Couldn’t we try summoning Grams? Maybe she knows. I’d love to meet her.”
Chris frowned. “Maybe.”
Cilly shook her head. “That would do no good. Didn’t you hear Hope and Hank talking? Uncle Leo doesn’t know anything. Like or not, they’re contemporaries.” She pointed a finger at Alanna. “Not a word about my dad’s age.”
Alanna shrugged. “He’d be kind of handy right now.”
“Yeah, well, Hope suggested I try talking to some of the cupids, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll leave this up to you guys, but pick someone older than Grams.” That said she vanished in pink hearts.
Alanna began flipping through the Book for a summoning spell.
“How come we’ve never summoned anyone before?” Jani asked her mom. “It would be very amazing to have met Grandma Patty or Grams. Or your parents, Mom,” she added thinking about her mom’s adopted parents who had died long before she’d been born. “We’ve only met one grandparent, which doesn’t seem fair if it’s possible to summon the five we’ve never met.”
“Considering all six of your grandparents are dead,” Paige returned, “consider yourself lucky that you know even one. If it weren’t for magic . . .”
“There’d be no us,” the twins interrupted in unison.
“Mom, we know,” Alanna assured her.
“We’ve thought about it,” Jani added, “quite a bit. Since Grandpa lived in the nineteenth century and you were born late in the twentieth, it’s rather obvious . . .”
“. . . That without magic,” Alanna interrupted, again, “there’d be no us.”
Paige looked at her daughters amused. They did not normally finish, or interrupt as the case might be, each other’s sentences. Clearly Jani was right that they had thought about this a lot. “All right, we’ll try summoning someone.” She looked at the three teenage girls and Chris. “Any suggestions?"