Chapter Text
Piper was pissed off.
Ever since the neurotic white lighter from the future had come into their lives, she and her sisters had been battling demons non-stop. And now, on the one day Chris hadn’t materialized to point them after some new piece of Underworld scum, one appeared of its own volition.
The demon snarled at Piper from across the attic, fangs extended over its mouth—the rest of its features almost disconcertingly human. The only other difference was the eyes—this demon’s were an unnatural gold, with slitted pupils like a cat.
Piper tried to blow him up, but the demon shimmered out and back in on the other side of the room before she could.
“Phoebe! Paige!” Piper shouted. Too late, she remembered that Paige was starting her new temp job today, and that Phoebe had an interview with a fashion magazine downtown.
“Dammit,” she cursed under her breath. Then, louder, “Chris!”
Immediately, a cloud of blue orbs descended beside Piper, coalescing into her surly young white lighter.
“Piper, what’s—” Chris dropped off mid-sentence as the demon sent an energy ball soaring towards his head. Chris ducked, then hopped back up and sent the demon flying across the room with a flick of his hand.
Telekinesis, thought Piper. Interesting.
It had been a couple of months since the Charmed Ones had found out their mysterious white lighter from the future was actually half-witch, but he hadn’t displayed any witch powers since then, and they’d all just assumed his white lighter powers were dominant—the way Paige’s witch powers had been dominant at first. Piper was both pleasantly surprised (he had just saved her life) and discomfited to realize that Chris had more power than he’d ever let on. What else had he been hiding?
The demon, caught off guard by a white lighter wielding a witch’s powers, had momentarily paused in his attack. Then, shaking his head as if to snap himself out of a trance, he went on the offensive again, throwing energy ball after energy ball in their direction. Piper had her hands at the ready to freeze, but Chris deflected all of them before she had the chance. Apparently deciding two witches was more than he had bargained for, the demon shimmered out.
“What was that?” asked Piper, turning to Chris.
“I have no idea,” said Chris.
Piper narrowed her eyes at him.
Chris put his hands up in defense. “Honestly!” he said. “I’ve never seen him in my life.”
“Ok,” said Piper. “Well, all the more reason to get rid of him sooner. If he has some grand master evil plan, I don’t want to wait to find out what it is.”
“Agreed.”
“Can you get Phoebe and Paige for me?”
“Sure,” Chris nodded, before disappearing in a reverse-shower of blue light.
Piper, sighing, turned to the Book of Shadows.
“Ok, what happened and who are we vanquishing?” Paige asked immediately upon orbing into the attic. Chris appeared seconds after, Phoebe by his side.
“No idea,” said Piper, who was still turning pages in the Book of Shadows. “I just came to the attic to do some tidying up, and a demon appeared out of nowhere and attacked me.”
“Are you hurt?” Phoebe asked concernedly, walking over to where her sister stood, looking her up and down for injuries.
“I’m fine,” said Piper, waving her hands dismissively. Then her eyes fell on Chris, and she raised one eyebrow. “Although, that’s at least partly thanks to Chris over here.”
“What?” asked Phoebe, looking from Piper to their white lighter, whose eyes had darted to his feet. “What did Chris do?”
“He used telekinesis to fight the demon,” said Piper. “Sent its fireball flying back on it.”
“Wait a minute,” said Phoebe, putting her hands on her hips. “You have an active power? How come this is the first time we’re hearing about this?”
Chris shifted uncomfortably. He opened his mouth to respond, but Paige beat him to it. Unlike the other two, she seemed more curious than annoyed.
“You have telekinesis, too?” she asked. “Does it work like mine?”
Being half-witch, half-white lighter, she meant did he have to call for objects to move them from place to place. With a start, Piper realized that Chris was the only other person, besides Wyatt, who was like Paige in this respect, and, as Wyatt was still in the mumbo-jumbo phase of learning the English language, Chris was the only one with whom she could actually talk to about it. She wondered if this was the first time Paige was realizing that, too.
Chris looked like he was about to answer again, but this time, Piper beat him to it.
“No,” she said slowly, coming around from where she had been standing, behind the Book. “He used his hands, the way Prue used to.” Phoebe raised her eyebrows at this.
“I can do it the other way, too, if I want,” Chris admitted. Then he shook his head abruptly. “But that’s not the point! The point is, there’s a demon after you, and we need to focus on vanquishing it. Piper, did you find it in the Book of Shadows?”
Piper opened her mouth to argue with him, then abruptly changed track.
“No,” she said. “Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to merit its own mention in the Book of Shadows. My guess is it was an underling, sent by some other Big Bad to see if it could catch us by surprise.”
“Ok,” said Chris, nodding. “If that’s the case, then I may have a few ideas of who it could be. But we need to act fast, before it—”
Whatever Chris had been about to say, he was cut off for a third time, because at that moment, the demon shimmered back in. Only this time, he shimmered in right behind Piper, grabbing her and putting a knife against her throat.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said. Though spoken to the whole room, his eyes were locked on Chris, who had stretched his hand out towards Piper, as if he was about to telekinetically jerk her away from him.
Chris’s eyes slid from the demon to Piper, who met his gaze with the steely glint of someone who had been in many variations of this situation before. And Chris, who had been in this exact situation before, knew he would do anything to save her from it again, even if it meant the larger goal of keeping his secret, and thus maintaining the integrity of his mission, was compromised.
The demon grinned, and started to shimmer out. Just as he was about to vanish entirely, however, Chris orbed, latching on to his trail and following him to wherever he was taking Piper.
“Where did they go?” Paige asked. She walked over to where Piper and the demon had just disappeared, glancing at the spot where Chris, too, had vanished.
“Probably somewhere in the Underworld,” Phoebe guessed. She stood next to Paige, staring down at the same spot of floor, as if she could bring her sister back purely through her own force of will.
“She’ll be ok,” said Phoebe, with more confidence than she felt. “She’s been in worse situations before.”
Paige nodded, but from the look in her eyes, Phoebe could tell that Paige knew she was more worried than she let on; and, moreover, that Paige shared her concerns.
“Well,” said Paige, suddenly all business. “Let’s go through the Book again. I’ll get the scrying crystal, and if we don’t find them in an hour, we’ll just orb down there ourselves and vanquish every demon we meet until we find them.”
“What vanquishing potion will we use if we can’t find the demon that took her?” asked Phoebe. “Piper said he wasn’t in the book, and Chris was the one who knew who a minor demon may have been reporting to…”
“We’ll just have to bring the strongest vanquishing potions we have on hand, and hope those do the trick,” said Paige, with her best attempt at optimism. “Piper has a stash up here somewhere, she made a bunch when we were trying to find a way to stop you as Evil Queen of the Underworld. And those things only get stronger with age, you know.”
Phoebe shrugged at this, acknowledging the truth of Paige’s statement.
“And, if worse comes to worse, she’s got Chris down there with her.”
“Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?” Phoebe asked doubtfully.
“Well, you better hope it’s a good thing, because right now it’s all we’ve got.”
Piper had no idea where they were. The Underworld. That much was clear. If the craggy black rock and moody, depressive BDSM club lighting wasn’t a give-away, Piper didn’t know what was. But Piper had never before been in a part of the Underworld that looked quite like this. It was almost like….a garden. Except instead of blooming flower beds and wide-open blue skies, there were twisted, grotesque rock formations springing up from the ground all around them. Some of them looked to Piper like people being tortured, screaming in horror at the dim red sky. There were flowers, too, spiky, poisonous looking ones, as well as ones that looked so beautiful Piper wanted to reach out and touch them—though she had been a witch long enough to know that their beauty just meant they were likely even more dangerous than the ones that appeared outwardly poisonous.
“Where are we?” she muttered to herself. Chris, however, answered her.
“The Garden of Evil,” he said grimly.
Piper turned to look at him. The demon who had attacked them had vanished, so it was just the two of them, standing in a circle of stones. Chris, grimacing, reached out his hand towards the two closest rocks in the ring. Just as his hand was about to pass through, however, there was flash of light and a hum of electricity, and Chris yanked his hand back, wincing.
“You knew that was going to happen,” said Piper, recalling the face Chris had made. “You know what this place is.”
“Unfortunately,” Chris muttered.
“Care to enlighten me?” Piper prompted him.
“It’s part of a territory in the Underworld run by one of the demons I was talking about earlier,” said Chris. “One of the more powerful ones who has an army of more minor demons working for him, and can afford to throw a few at you guys just to see if they get lucky. His name is Asmodeus, and he is not good news.”
“More so than any other demon?” asked Piper, raising her eyebrows. Because, so far, this wasn’t so far from the normal shtick.
Chris frowned, which was a common enough expression for him. But his eyes had a different expression, one Piper was unfamiliar with on his face. It took a little while to decipher it: fear.
“Asmodeus has a particular hatred for good witches,” said Chris. “His lover, an evil witch, was killed by one centuries ago. Ever since then, he’s taken particular pleasure in torturing the witches he captures before he kills them. That’s why this place is here. It’s literally a monument to all the witches he’s tortured and murdered. The magical remnants of their pain creates the rock shapes in this place.”
Piper looked around the garden again, noting once more the eery similarities between the rock formations and human forms.
“Well,” she said drily. “At least Phoebe and Paige will have more time to find us.”
“That’s not funny,” said Chris sharply. “I don’t think that’s funny.”
“Relax, Chris,” Piper rolled her eyes. “I’m sure we can handle it.”
Meanwhile, Asmodeus was watching his new captives from behind a one way glass in a nearby rock formation. He’d had his house, if you could call it that, built into one of the larger rock formations ages ago, so that he could watch the witches he’d caught as they were tortured whenever he wanted.
And today…a Charmed One. His gamble had paid off.
“Who did you say the other one was?” Asmodeus asked his subordinate absentmindedly.
“Her white lighter,” said the demon beside him. “But he’s more than that. When I attacked—the first time—he used telekinesis against me.”
“A witch-lighter,” Asmodeus mused to himself, watching the man curiously. “Interesting. In all my centuries of living….and killing….there have only been a handful of those….”
“There’s more,” said the demon. “I was watching them for a few days before I attacked. He claims to be from the future, sent to protect the other one’s son.”
“A time traveler?” Asmodeus expressed real surprise this time, his voice rising with it. “To protect her son? From what?”
But his demon underling just shrugged. “Apparently something attacks him in the future. And it shifts the whole course of the world.”
Asmodeus seemed to take some time to process that information, staring all the more intently at the taller of the two figures standing in the garden. After a while, he turned away from the glass.
“It’s rude to keep our guests waiting,” he said. “Let’s not do so any longer.”