--------------------------------------i
  Charmed[*reg]
  The Power of Three Kiss of Darkness The
Crimson Spell Whispers from the Past Voodoo
Moon Haunted by Desire The Gypsy
Enchantment The Legacy of Merlin Soul of the
Bride Beware What You Wish Charmed Again Spirit
of the Wolf Garden of Evil Date with Death
  Dark Vengeance Shadow of the Sphinx
  Something Wiccan This Way Comes
  Mist and Stone Mirror Image Between Worlds
Truth and Consequences Luck Be a Lady
Inherit the Witch A Tale of Two Pipers The
Brewing Storm Survival of the Fittest
  The Book of Three: The Official Companion
to the Hit Show
  Published by Simon and Schuster
--------------------------------------ii
  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
  An original novel by Jeff Mariotte
  Based on the hit TV series created by
  Constance M. Burge
  SIS-LEvery
  SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
  New York London Toronto Sydney
------------------------------------comiii
  To Maryelizabeth, who enchants me
  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should
be aware that this book is stolen property. It was
reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher,
and neither the author nor the publisher has received any
payment for this "stripped book."
  This book is a work of fiction. Any references
to historical events, real people, or real locales
are used fictitiously. Other names, characters,
places, and incidents are the product of the
author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual
events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
  SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
  An imprint of Simon and Schuster Children's
Publishing Division
  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York,
New York 10020
  [*reggg'and [*copygg'2004 Spelling
Television Inc. All Rights Reserved.
  All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or
  in part in any form.
  SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT and related
logo are
  trademarks of Simon and Schuster, Inc.
  Manufactured in the United States of
America
  10 98765432
  Library of Congress Control Number

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86852-8
  ISBN-10: 0-689-86852-9
--------------------------------------iv
  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
--------------------------------------v

  Marianne and Kevin Haas had been married for
four years but home owners for just under four weeks.
Their new home, a turquoise with yellow trim
row house, was three blocks from Golden Gate
Park, had three bedrooms, two baths, and a
thirty-year mortgage. Owning a home was worth
all the lean years of saving. Now they were free
to decorate and furnish and just enjoy the knowledge that it was
theirs, that their payments went to something substantial
instead of to a landlord, and that if they wanted to change the
trim or replace the doors or paint a giant
peace sign on their roof, they could do so without
explaining to anyone.
  What they didn't own-and in San Francisco,
it was possible to do just fine without one, so reliable was the
public transportation-was a car. Not generally a
problem, but on this particular

  Friday evening, they'd gone to the supermarket.
They needed everything, it seemed: food, cleaning
supplies, utensils, toiletries. Over the
past few weeks they'd been too busy to keep up
on day-to-day items, and in the frenzy of packing
their apartment to move, they had tossed many of their old
things. So now they found themselves laden with plastic
grocery bags, like pioneers crossing the continent
carrying all their worldly goods.
  "Maybe," Kevin found himself saying as the
plastic straps bit into his wrists, "we should have
found a place a little closer to the bus line."
  Marianne smiled at him, struggling with three
heavy bags of her own. "It won't always be like this,"
she assured him.
  "No," he agreed with a dismayed chuckle.
"Sometimes it'll be worse. Just wait until we
need to bring home a few hundred pounds of sheep
rock to finish the basement."
  "We don't have a basement," she reminded him.
"And it's Sheetrock, not sheep rock."
  Kevin laughed. "I always wondered why it was
called that."
  "Anyway," she continued, "if it's really a
problem, we could just buy a car."
  Kevin had known she would say that-she had wanted
one as long as they'd been together. He was adamant,
though, that no one in San Francisco really needed
a car. And if it wasn't necessary, why pay for
insurance, and licenses,

  and parking? Why contribute to global warming and the
hole in the ozone layer? There were just too many good
reasons to not have a car, and only one good
reason-well, four, if you counted aching arms and
shoulders as separate reasons- to get one.
"Let's not start on that," he warned her.
  She laughed at his response. "It's only
another block," she said cheerfully. The evening was
warm for San Francisco, with just a hint of the
usual crispness in the air, and Marianne glistened
from the effort. Her long blond hair caught the glow
from a streetlight and haloed her head, and the sight of
that combined with the joyful peal of her laughter reminded
him of how much in love he still was.
  He was about to say sonjiething else, when he
  was distracted by a pair
  congreater-than from headlights on the
  hill-except that he realized there was no hill
there, that this was one of the flatter sections of San
Francisco. Which meant those couldn't be headlights,
even though that was what they looked like. A pair of
bright lights, anyway, moving rapidly through the
darkness, cutting a swath before them. "Marianne,"
he said, pointing, conscious of a quiver in his voice.
"Look."
  But he couldn't say any more, because the lights darted
off to the left, and then charged right again, zigzagging like
no airplane or helicopter could possibly do.
They skimmed barely a dozen feet above
rooftops, then shot out over

  the park, and when they zoomed back into sight, they were
lower still. By now, Marianne was staring at the lights,
too, both she and Kevin speechless with awe. Kevin
was trying to gather his thoughts, to form a coherent sentence,
when the lights suddenly rushed right over their heads.
A blast of air accompanied them, as if a plane
had flown right over, and Marianne let out a wordless
scream. Instead of flying past, though, the-whatever it
was, Kevin couldn't put a name to it-came to an
abrupt halt behind them, then spun around and shot
toward them again. Kevin's hands went limp; he
felt the bags slipping from them, heard glass
breaking on the sidewalk, but all as if from a great
distance, like he was far away, observing himself from the other
side of a semi-opaque window.
  Get a grip, he mentally commanded. He blinked
a couple of times, knowing that he was overreacting
to something that must have had some kind of rational explanation.
Kevin Haas was a rational guy, after all, a
software engineer, the kind of man other people turned
to when they wanted a level head to help solve a
problem. He wasn't sure how he'd explain
what had just happened-or seemed to have happened- but
probably it had to do with working too much, with pushing
himself too hard, coming home from the office every night
to help out with everything that had to be done at the house.
There were no lights in the sky, had prob-

  ably never been anything but distant headlights
reflecting off a cloud or something. He had
overreacted, and now he'd have to clean up a huge
mess and probably go back to the supermarket later
for whatever had broken.
  Except when he looked at the sidewalk, there
were no bags, no broken glass, no smashed eggs.
His bags still hung from his arms, slicing into his
wrists and fingers. And Marianne was-
  -Marianne was nowhere. He turned this way and that,
peering into the darkness. But the street was well lit, with
houses pressing against it on both sides. He
called her name, shouted it with every ounce of volume he
could muster. Lights clicked on in house windows,
people stepped out of their doors to see what the fuss
was.
  No Marianne. No bags on the ground, nothing
to indicate that she was ever here with him.
  As he scanned for her, he thought he glimpsed
some strange lights, flickering once over Golden
Gate Park, but then they were gone. A strange
odor, like applesauce with cinnamon, lingered in the
air.
  And Kevin Haas was alone.

  JflCan lnnO:-FLL S name was Barbara
Hunsaker, and she was a new accounts manager at a
bank in San Francisco's Financial
District. She was also, at this moment, upside
down. A Spinning Demon-a low-rent version of the
powerful Spider Demon, with a similar MO, but
nowhere near her power-had her trapped in his web, like
a very large spider with an equally oversized fly.
  But the Halliwell sisters-well, two of the
three, anyway-were on the case. Piper had been
called away because of an emergency at P3, the
nightclub she owned, and Phoebe and Paige were
convinced that the Spinning Demon wouldn't be a problem
for the two of them. They had shooed Piper off to deal
with the plumbing crisis-P3, after all, being the
household's major source of income, as well as
a special source of

  pride for Piper. They had tracked the Spinning
Demon to its lair, in an abandoned warehouse near
the Embarcadero. The place smelled like seafood
after it's been left a few days in the sun, and
Phoebe was starting to think she would rather burn her shoes
than try to scrape off whatever blackish gunk she
was stepping in. It'd be over in a few minutes,
though. They'd vanquish the Spinning Demon, get
Ms. Hunsaker safely back to her home, and
all would be right in the world again.
  At least, until the next demonic emergency.
  That was why the world had the Charmed Ones. There would
always be a next emergency, and a next one, and one
after that. Innocent people would always need protecting from
evil forces they didn't understand, couldn't even conceive
of in their most horrible imaginings. Someone had to stand
between the darkness and the light. That someone was the
Halliwells. They bore the responsibility
gladly, even when-as tonight-it meant giving up the chance
to sit at home together, watching old movies on
TV while they downed a half gallon of
Choco-fudge Ripple.
  With whipped cream, and cherries.
  Remembering the ice cream made Phoebe
furious all over again. "You might as well give
it up," she told the Spinning Demon. "You know you
don't have a chance against us."
  The Spinning Demon backed away from them,

  hands extended like claws, legs spread wide for
balance. Its arms joined its torso at a spot that
would have been midway down the ribs if it had been
human. The demon's purplish black flesh was
ridged all over. In the darkness of the warehouse,
Phoebe couldn't get a better look at it. Which
is fine, she thought, because what I can see looks
pretty hideous.
  It spat something at them-should have been called a
Spitting Demon, I guess-which hit the floor and
sizzled. Acid. Got to make a point of
avoiding that.
  Without speaking, she and Paige stepped away from
each other, making themselves more difficult targets.
  They continued to advance slowly, and it kept backing
away, toward an open doorway that faced onto the
water. The breeze that blew in was cold and sharp.
From what Phoebe remembered, Spinning Demons
couldn't swim, so she wasn't too worried about it
escaping that way. From the rafters, a cocoon of
webbing gave out muffled cries. Barbara
Hunsaker, Phoebe realized. We need to finish
this up fast.
  "Let's take him!" she shouted. Using her
powers of levitation, she floated in the air, and it
reared up to follow her, temporarily losing its
balance. Paige took advantage of the moment and
hurled a vial at it-a vial that contained a
vanquishing potion she'd whipped up earlier for
precisely this purpose.

  It hit the demon-except, it didn't
exactly hit, but sailed right through the empty space
where the demon had been a fraction of a second before,
and splashed into the water behind it.
  "Where'd it go?" Paige asked.
  "I have no idea," Phoebe said. They both
ran forward. There was no sign of him in the black
waters outside, no telltale ripple.
  The thing dropped toward them on a silken line.
  "Geez, it's fast!" Paige shouted, ducking
away from it.
  Phoebe dodged it as well, shooting up into the
air again as it came down. She fired a good,
solid kick at it as they passed. She felt its
solid, slightly furred flesh give under her
boot, and the thing let out an unpleasant squeal.
  When it hit the ground, the demon skittered around
in a semicircle, moving with incredible speed.
Paige had her arm cocked back to hurl another
vial, but it loosed a stream of thick, sticky
webbing that snared her arm, driving her backward where
arm and vial alike were glued to one of the warehouse's
walls.
  "Phoebe!" Paige screamed.
  Phoebe touched down lightly behind the demon,
releasing two more quick kicks. The beast cried out again.
Phoebe didn't mind touching it with her boots, but
was hoping to not have to go hand to hand with such a disgusting
creature. She would if she had to, of course-but
what she

  really wanted was for Paige's vanquishing potion
to do the trick.
  When it spun around to attack Phoebe, she
levitated again, shooting up over the demon. Its
stream of webbing sailed into the air harmlessly.
Phoebe landed beside Paige and she grabbed her
sister's arm, helping tear it free from the Spinning
Demon's gooey web.
  "Never mind that!" Paige cried, orbing out of the
worst of the webbing. "Here!" She shoved yet another
vial into Phoebe's fist. "Just nail it!"
Paige urged.
  As Phoebe turned around to face it, the demon
was letting loose another stream of its webbing. She
took to the air, and once again the web stuff missed
her, but hit Paige squarely across the middle,
cementing her again to the wall.
  Phoebe had the vial now, though. The demon again
shot a strand straight up, intent on avoiding the
vial by using the same stunt that it had the last time.
But that time, Paige had been throwing across, so rising
into the air had enabled it to avoid her throw. This time,
Phoebe was above, hurling down. All that the demon
accomplished by clambering quickly up its webbing was
to increase the force with which the glass vial smashed against
its back. The Spinning Demon flared with a bright
orange light, screeched painfully, and was gone.
  "Good shot!" Paige called. She had freed

  u
  herself from the wall again, but the webbing was all over
her. "Now get this stuff off of me!"
  Phoebe dropped to the ground, ready to comply.
They needed to get Barbara Hunsaker down, too,
she knew. As soon as she touched the clingy webbing,
which was halfway between a solid and a liquid, she
knew it was going to be a long, unpleasant chore.
  Phoebe loved working at the Bay Mirror.
Except on those days when her editor, Elise,
ran the newspaper like Genghis Khan might have, had
the ancient Mongol hoped to rule the world the modern
way, by controlling mass media, instead of through the
old-fashioned method of conquest and pillage.
  This was, sadly, one of those days. Elise was
on a tear about something-Phoebe had tried to tune out
the specifics. I do my job the best I can, she
thought. Beyond that, she didn't care to get into the
internal politics of it any more than was
absolutely necessary. Instead, she kept her distance,
hunkered down, and read about the problems of ordinary
San Franciscans.
  And not so ordinary ones, she thought, putting down a
letter from a man who wanted advice on how to handle
visits from his dog's mother-in-law. The thing is, it
doesn't sound like he's making this up. Which means that
his dog actually has a mother-in-law-who
visits-or at the very least, he believes it does.

  She wasn't sure which was worse, and she was
equally stumped about how she could help him. We'll
come back to you, Paul in Potrero Hill.
  It was surprising how many letters still came via the
post office instead of e-mail. Phoebe couldn't
remember the last time she'd sat down with a pen and
written an actual letter instead of just typing at the
keyboard and clicking "Send." Maybe there was
something soothing in putting one's problems down on
paper, folding them up, and sending them away in a
sealed envelope. There were spells that worked in
similar fashion. One would write a problem down
on paper, say a few appropriate words, and
bury or burn the paper. I guess these are
ritualistic cries for help, she thought, looking
at the bundles of mail stacked on her desk.
  She preferred regular mail for this job,
anyway, because with e-mail there was no physical
connection to the letter-writer. Sometimes just touching the letter
itself gave her a sense of the person who had written
it, or she got a vibe from it that allowed her
to phrase her answer in the most helpful way.
  As soon as Phoebe touched the next letter in the
stack, she knew that the person who had written it
had a genuine problem. She felt a flash of fear,
bordering on panic. Someone should be calling 911
instead of writing to an advice columnist, she
thought, making a mental note of the Noe Valley
return address.


  Taking a quick look around to make sure she
wouldn't be disturbed, Phoebe opened the letter. It
started off the normal way: "Dear Phoebe. I
love your column and read it all the time." People
seemed to think they needed to butter her up to get her
attention.
  After the pleasantries, though, this letter quickly took
a turn for the strange. "I'm afraid that my sister
has been taken by space aliens. She isn't the
same since they brought her back, and I think
maybe they did something to her. But she can't remember
what, and won't talk to me about them. All she
wants to do now is exercise, and I'm afraid
it's going to make her sick. How can I help her
and get back the sister I used to know?"
  Phoebe's natural reaction wad this one up and
throw
  would have been to it in the trash, sus-
  pecting it was just some prankster out to make her look
bad by responding to patently absurd mail. But the
sensations she got from this one, the sense of impending
doom, the indistinct flashes of beings that felt
threatening, even though she could make out no detail .
. . these things made her think twice about tossing it.
  The letter was signed by Kara Bodine. The
signature had a youthful flourish to it-Phoebe
wouldn't have been surprised if the i in Bodine had
been dotted with a heart, or perhaps a flower. But it
wasn't. If Kara Bodine was, in fact,
normally the kind of person who would do

  such a thing, whatever was troubling her had squelched
that impulse.
  And there was one other factor that stopped Phoebe
short. She pushed back from her desk, folded the
letter, and stood up. Bill Conason was a
reporter on the Metro beat, and while she
didn't know him that well, she'd had conversations with
him from time to time. Recently, she'd overheard him
talking by the watercooler, and she thought perhaps he'd have
some insight into this situation.
  Phoebe's spike-heeled, ankle-wrap
sandals clicked as she crossed the newsroom toward
Bill's desk, and she knew when he looked up
at the approaching sound that he'd cast an admiring
glance at her strappy, scoop-cut olive top and
low-rise camouflage-pattern pants. That was
okay with her-he was the kind of guy who'd look and
enjoy without making a pretense at hiding his
enjoyment. At the same time, she knew he wouldn't
hit on her, and that once he'd had his glance he'd
talk to her face, not to other bodily parts, and he'd
respect her for her mind and not her body.
  Men like him were actually a rarity in the news
business, she was beginning to believe. Maybe in the
rest of life too. She liked him and, most
importantly, she thought he'd take this seriously
even though she couldn't explain to him why she did,
too, without revealing that she was a witch, and she had
no intention of doing that.


  Her prediction turned out to be right on the money.
He heard her coming, glanced away from his computer,
looked her up and down once, and then fixed a
sincere smile on his face. "What's up,
Phoebe?"
  She wheeled a chair over from an empty
desk-most of the Metro reporters were out covering the
SoMa story, the discovery of more than a dozen dead
bodies being a major news event-and rolled up
close tb him, so she could speak in low tones.
Phoebe had already determined that the body
discovery-while horrific in its own right-was
human-on-human violence, and nothing the Charmed
Ones should be looking into. "Did I hear you right the
other day?" she asked. "Saying something about reports
of UFO'S over the city?"
  He hesitated before answering, as if weighing his
words carefully. "You did," he said after a few
moments. "Why?"
  Phoebe wagged the letter at him without handing it over.
"This letter is from someone who claims her sister was
abducted," she explained. "I just wanted to know if
maybe there had been a rash of similar stories
lately, along with the sightings."
  Bill allowed himself a sardonic smile. "You
must get letters like that all the time, Phoebe." He
waved a hand around as if to encompass the whole city.
"This is San Francisco, after all. World
capital for crazies and freaks, right?"

  "Maybe so," she admitted. "But I try
to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. At least
until they've proven somehow that they don't deserve
it."
  "That's very noble of you, Phoebe," Bill said.
"And the kind of attitude that would kill a reporter
from exhaustion before he could even begin to write."
  Phoebe tossed him a grin. "Good thing I'm a
columnist instead of a reporter."
  "I'll say," he agreed. "So, you were asking
about the UFO'S."
  "Uh-huh," Phoebe said, encouraging him with a
nod.
  "Yes, there have been lots of reported sightings.
Even more than usual. Lights in the sky;
saucer-shaped objects at dusk; airplanes that
fly too low, dart around oddly-the usual kind of
thing, just more of it. And from some fairly solid
citizens too-you know: cops, mail carriers,
firefighters. A pilot or two. The kind of people
you can't just write off."
  "But I haven't seen anything about it show up in the
paper," Phoebe observed.
  "I said you can't write them off," Bill
reminded her. "That doesn't mean they can
substantiate what they said. In a city like this, a
forty-percent increase in UFO sightings still isn't
news. Not unless there's something to back it up.
Photos, video, a hundred people all seeing the
same thing at the same time. So far, none


  of that has happened. So it's just rumor, not
news-here, anyway. If you'd read the tabloids
you'd see that they're playing it up for all it's
worth."
  Phoebe shrugged. "Guess I'm reading the
wrong papers."
  "So I don't know what to tell you about your letter,"
Bill said. "Personally, I think it's just another
trend, like overpriced coffee and designer cell
phones. But I guess both of those are here to stay,
so what do I know?"
  "Thanks, Bill," she said. "Let me know if
it goes from rumor to news, okay? Or if people start
building mountains in their mashed potatoes."
  He raised a thumb toward the ceiling. "Deal,"
he assured her. "And if you hear about anyone hiding
ET'S in with their stuffed animals, you let me
know." He turned back to his computer screen before
she left, but as she walked away, she was convinced that
his gaze didn't stay there until after she was out of
sight.

  flying SaUC-ERSo? Piper said, incredulous.
"Aliens with big eyes, and fingers that glow in the
dark? Or maybe the kind with fishbowl helmets and
ray guns?"
  "Be nice," her husband admonished her. They
were in the Halliwell living room, Leo and Piper
sitting together on the couch, Paige sprawled on one
chair, and Phoebe on the floor with her back to the
wall. Phoebe had brought the letter home from the
paper, but she had waited until after dinner to bring it
up. "Obviously Phoebe doesn't think it's quite
so ridiculous."
  Piper looked to her youngest sister for support.
"What about you, Paige? I'm surprised you
haven't said anything. You're normally all over this
kind of silliness."
  Paige looked at the floor, Piper noted,
instead of at any of them, and her peaches-and-cream


  complexion turned rosy. "Maybe I'm not so
sure it's silly," she said hesitantly.
  "Oh, spare me," Piper said. She and her
sisters were witches, and they'd seen a lot of
strange things in their time-demons, wood nymphs,
leprechauns, and more. But Martians? Little green
men from space? Some things were just too far out there, even
for her. "Even if there were aliens-and that's a really
huge if-why would they abduct someone in order
to make her want to exercise? What's the point of
that?"
  "It's not just the letter, Piper," Phoebe reminded
her. "It's the vibe I got from it. Like a vision,
almost. Only not."
  "Well, that's convincing," Piper said
sarcastically.
  "But the thing is, I don't know which sister I'm
getting it from," Phoebe told them. "If it's a
vibration from the abducted sister instead of the one who
wrote the letter, then it's not surprising that it's muted
and vague."
  "She makes a good point," Leo said. He was
bending over backward to remain neutral, which Piper
found strangely annoying.
  "What if there are visitors from another
planet?" Paige brought up. "After all, there have
been reports, and sightings, almost as long as there's
been recorded history. The number of planets out
there is practically infinite. Who says we're the
only one with intelligent life on it?"

  CHARMED
  "Right now I'd settle for a room with
intelligent life in it," Piper grumbled.
  "I had a professor back at Berkeley,"
Paige went on, "who made exactly these
points. We have no idea what's on the planets
outside our own solar system. We're mostly just
guessing on the ones inside it. There are millions
and millions of planets that might possibly
support life, and nothing to say that some of those
civilizations couldn't have developed space
travel."
  "Was that his lesson plan?" Piper sniped,
feeling betrayed by the sister she had expected to back
her up on this. "Or his screenplay?"
  "Piper, if you're not even going to admit to the
slight possibility that this is on the level, then
I'm sorry I brought it up," Phoebe said.
She spoke with such apparent melancholy that Piper
was sorry for having blasted her so hard. But the whole
thing was just so ... so stupidl
  "I'm sorry too," Piper said, knowing that there was
way more on her mind these days than just Phoebe's
alien-abduction problem. "I've seen plenty of
things that most people would think were impossible or
inexplicable. I should try to be more understanding."
  "It's just ... I can't help feeling that maybe
there's really someone in trouble here," Phoebe
continued. "Not the kind of trouble that I can fix with a
snappy reply in my column, but the kind that
calls for the Charmed Ones."


  "I'll tell you what," Piper offered, hoping
to bring the conversation to a quick end. "If you find out that
there's more to this than just the paranoia of a crazy
person, we can look into it."
  Phoebe beamed, and seeing her happiness, Piper
was again a little ashamed of taking such a hard-line stance.
But only a little. "Deal," Phoebe said. "I'll
check it out tomorrow."
  "And I'll try to track down that professor,"
Paige suggested. "I think his name was Hayman,
Haywood, something like that."
  "Would you, Paige?" Phoebe asked. "I'd
appreciate that."
  "Knock yourselves out," Piper said, stretching and
standing up. "It's not like we have anything more important
to deal with."
  She left the room and found a quiet spot in the
conservatory to sit and think. But she'd only been
there a few moments when Leo came in and sat down
beside her, a frown of concern furrowing his forehead.
"Something bothering you, sweetheart?" he asked.
  Piper fixed him with a glare that she hoped spoke
volumes. "You mean besides the fact that my husband
won't take my side when my sister comes up with
such an obviously ridiculous statement?" she
asked sarcastically.
  He sat across from her, his hazel eyes blinking in
surprise. "Why is it so ridiculous?" he
asked. "I mean, sure, it sounds a little wacky.
But we've encountered some wacky things. We know there

  are several planes of existence, so why not
existence on other planets, too?"
  Piper pointed at him. "That's it exactly,"
she declared. "If there are aliens among us, don't
you think the Elders would be up on it? And wouldn't they
have said something?"
  Leo pursed his lips, considering for a moment before
answering. "Seems reasonable."
  A sudden and horrible thought occurred to Piper.
"If you had been told about something like that, you'd
share-right? You wouldn't hold out on your wife and your
sisters-in-law."
  "Of course not," Leo objected. "I mean, of
course I wouldn't hold out on you. There's been no
talk of aliens that I've heard about. Just the usual
suspects. That doesn't necessarily mean
anything, though-there's plenty they don't tell me
unless I have a particular reason to know."
  "Well, aliens in San Francisco,
abducting people and making them"-Piper could barely get
through this part without a laugh-"making them exercise?
Surely that's something they'd alert you to."
  "Seems like," Leo relented. "On the other
hand, even if Phoebe's way off base on this, it
also seems like you'd normally cut her a little more
slack. That's why I'm wondering if there isn't more
going on."
  It was Piper's turn to hesitate, not sure of
how much of what was on her mind she wanted to talk
about. And he's right about that, she thought,


  it's not just Phoebe's silly letter that's bugging
me. She decided to take it a step at a time,
reveal the outer problems but hold back the deeper
ones until she was certain she wanted to reveal them.
Piper had always been a firm believer in solving
her own problems whenever possible, in keeping her own
house in order without help from anyone.
  Even someone she loved as much as Leo.
  She looked at him, sitting across from her, clad
in a dark blue, long-sleeved T-shirt and white
jeans, looking at her expectantly with a patient,
hopeful expression. As much as Piper believed in
taking care of things herself, Leo believed in fixing
things for people. He hated to leave someone with a problem if
there was a chance he could do something to help. He could
probably help now, but there were two problems with that.
One, instead of accepting help, she wanted to learn
to cope with the situation herself so she wouldn't feel
defeated by it. And two, when it came to the deeper
issue, Leo was part of the problem. To enlist his aid,
she'd have to tell him about it.
  "It's P3," she said finally, determined
to skate across the surface of things.
"Specifically, the plumbing."
  "The plumbing?" he echoed.
  "That's right. The plumbing crisis. It's gotten
worse. A bad thing, at a nightclub. Pipes
backing up, ooky, not to mention on the stinky side.
So I hired a plumber to come and fix it."

  "You could have called me," Leo said. True
to form.
  "Leo, it's a business, and I made a
business decision. I hired a professional. At
least, I thought he was at first. He looked
professional, you know, tool belt and loose
pants. Most of the time he was working on pipes, I
was looking the other way and might have missed some of
what he was saying. Anyway, he just made things
worse. Ditto plumber number two. They came
in, they talked the talk, they worked the wrenches, and
they did absolutely nothing to fix the problem."
  Piper drew in a deep breath, blew it out, and
continued. She knew Leo's handyman background
would kick in. He obviously trusted her to run
things at the club, and he had plenty on his plate,
like helping track down the Spinning Demon that
Phoebe and Paige had vanquished earlier. But
he still had that gut reaction to Piper spending money
on stuff that he knew how to do. "So now we get
to plumber number three. Same story. The company
has a good rep-this time, I checked. A woman this
time, and she can do the job, but it's going to cost four
thousand dollars to fix it."
  Leo whistled. "Four grand for a plumbing
problem?"
  "If I'm lucky," Piper added. "If we
don't have to tear up the street in front of the club.
Because then it'll be expensive. That's her word. Like
four thousand bucks is some kind of bargain."


  "Wow."
  "Right, wow. So now I guess I'm having a
crisis of confidence. Because maybe these first two
plumbers I hired just made a small problem
worse. Or maybe this woman is trying to rip me
off. Normally I have no problem handling this kind of
thing. I'd have told this woman to just go ahead and bring
in her crew, get the work done. But now I'm just not
sure. Do I bring in yet another plumber to offer
a fourth opinion? And maybe make things worse?
I just don't know."
  Leo nodded his head sagely. "I could still take
a look at it."
  "You're a good handyman, Leo," Piper said.
"And a great Whitelighter, but I don't think either of
those talents will fix this problem. Plus, I'm
sure you've got more important things to deal with. And
besides ..." She offered a smile as she said this, and was
gratified when he returned it. "I'm not sure
I want you coming home from the club as stinky as these
other plumbers were after they rooted around in the pipes
for a while."
  He seemed to understand her hesitation. That was one good
thing, among many, about Leo- he picked up on even
subtle cues. Not everybody did, she knew.
"I'm sure you'll make the right call," he told
her. "If you want me to come in, even just to talk
with the plumbers, I'd be happy to. If you want
to handle it yourself, that's okay too."

  "Thanks, Leo," she said. "I appreciate
the offer."
  He stifled a yawn. "No problem," he said.
"That's what I'm here for. But not right now. Now
I'm going to bed."
  "I'll be up in a few," Piper assured him.
  "Okay." He rose and walked toward the
stairs, leaving her alone in the conservatory.
  What she had told her husband was the truth, about
the plumbers and how they had shaken her confidence in her
ability to do her job right. But there was more to it than that,
she knew. She was upset that, the night before, her
sisters had so readily agreed that they could handle the
Spinning Demon without her. Sure, she'd had the
problem at the club. And if she hadn't attended
to it then, it might have developed into something even
worse, though she couldn't see how, at this moment, it
could be worse. But even though she'd been wrong-even
though they really didn't, it seemed, need her-they
hadn't even thought that they did. She might as well
have been an adjunct Charmed One, a reservist
to be called up only when absolutely necessary. She
didn't like that feeling at all. Nor did she care
for the inescapable sensation that her life was consumed by two
things: being a Charmed One (adjunct or no), and
work. This whole plumbing business had just reinforced
to her how tied down she was by the club, leaving her no
time to make new friends, develop new hobbies,
travel,


  or do much of anything else. It seemed lately
like every waking moment was given over to one chore or the
other, while life's pleasures happened without her.
  And to make things even worse, she'd been
downtown with Leo the day before, and had caught him
checking out a couple of nubile young cuties
window-shopping outside a lingerie store. She
didn't really mind that-everyone looked sometimes, herself
included. But he denied it when she commented, and it was
that, more than the looking, that troubled her. Why would he
lie about something so basic?
  The only reason she could come up with was that the look
hadn't been as innocent as she had believed, at
first. That maybe he wasn't interested in just looking,
but in taking some sort of action, as well. The two
of them had been talking about trying to have a baby, and
maybe in his mind she had already gone from young wife and
companion to mother, middle-aged and stodgy. He still
told her that he loved her, that he found her
beautiful and desirable. But was she? Had she somehow
slipped from sexy to maternal without noticing?
  That's it, she told herself. You're reading way
too much into this. Just go to bed.
  After all, tomorrow you have to deal with stinky pipes.

  bill SlWERE-PEOPLE wasn't going to come easily for
Piper that night, she knew. With the rest of the
household snoozing away, she found herself back in
the living room, hoping that something on late-night
TV would take her mind off her own problems long
enough to let her crash. She sat on the couch across from the
TV, mindlessly punching the channel up button.
Old bad movie, twenty-four-hour news, newer
bad movie, inane talk show, cartoons-that held
her interest for a moment, until she realized it was a
cartoon from her childhood that she particularly
hated. She pushed mute so she wouldn't have to hear the
voices. Channel up, channel up.
  Finally, a face came on the screen that caught
her eye, a face that looked familiar at first
glance, though she didn't immediately know why. It was a
woman's face, pretty but not beautiful,


  and with no makeup whatsoever. Platinum blond
hair was held off the face with a terry headband. The
woman's eyes were clear and blue, as blue as
deep mountain lakes, and a glimmer of intelligence
shone in them. She was talking, her mouth open to reveal
straight, even white teeth. Her jaw was firm.
A no-nonsense woman, Piper thought, someone with
strong ideas and the self-confidence to carry them out. She
wasn't sure why she read so much into just a face, but
she did, and it made her want to see more.
  Then the camera zoomed out. The woman was wearing a
tight pink leotard, gray cotton gym shorts
with a pink stripe, and sneakers. Her body was
great-hard where it should be, supple and lithe, curved
in the right spots. The camera kept moving back, and
Piper could see that she was in a gym setting, with a
couple dozen women around her, sitting on mats,
watching her. They were wearing workout clothes, too, and
perspiration stains on their backs revealed that they had
been exercising. Now, though, the woman at the
front of the group was just talking. Piper turned the
sound up to an audible level.
  "... back your own bodies, and take back your
own lives," she was saying. "No one but you has the
right to dictate what your shape should be. Some of you
are going to be thin, some of you are going to be
muscular, some of you are going to be rounder, or
taller, or perkier,

  than those around you. That's just life. That's just the
variety of human existence. That's what makes
things interesting. The important thing is, you have the
body that you are supposed to have. Exercise can firm
and tone you, but it won't make a short woman
tall. And it shouldn't.
  "The ideal you still contains the word "you." You are not
your sister, your neighbor, your best friend, or a
model on a magazine cover. You are you, and no
one else. So the ideal you is simply the best you you
can be, and the Meg Winship Ideal You program can
help you achieve that. If being your best you, the ideal
you, sounds good to you, then keep watching. If you want
to become someone else, change the channel now.
We're going to be working on being us."
  Piper left the channel on, mesmerized by this
woman and her simple, upbeat message. The
woman, who Piper now understood was Meg Winship,
author of some very popular fitness books, led the
group on-screen through a series of exercises that
looked fun as well as challenging.
  Before she quite realized it, Piper was on the floor
in her loose cotton pajamas, joining in.
  Phoebe Halliwell's face was all over the
city-on buses, billboards, and newspaper
boxes, from the Wharf to the Mission, from Bay
Bridge to Golden Gate Park. Sometimes that was a
huge ego boost. Others, it was just plain annoying.
Today was one of the latter, since she had


  intentionally gone into a newsstand where no one knew
her, only to see her face plastered on a poster
provided by the Bay Mirror. She could only
hope the proprietor, and the few customers in the
place, didn't pay it any attention. Knowing her
mission, she had worn a simple outfit of blue
jeans, and a snug yellow crop top with a big red
2 emblazoned on the front. With an Oakland
A's ball cap and sunglasses on, she figured
she was as incognito as she could get. Plus, the day
was bright and sunny and warm- all unusual for San
Francisco-so the cap and shades had the added
benefit of practicality.
  She had come for the city's tabloids, and this place
seemed to have them all. They had names like Weekly
Scoop, the SF Tattler, and the InSider.
Phoebe normally steered clear of such
absurdities, not understanding how anyone could be taken
in by their breathless tales of Elvis sightings,
three-hundred-pound babies, vampire cats, and,
yes, space aliens. Even worse, though, she
thought, was the celebrity gossip-like people who act in a
movie aren't entitled to a private life
anymore. She didn't need to know who was sleeping
with whom, who'd had liposuction or a face-lift,
who was on the outs with her mother or her daughter or her
ex-best friend and manager.
  Doing her best to be inconspicuous, Phoebe
bought them all, half a dozen tabloids with
screaming headlines and ridiculous photos. She
took them to a quiet coffee shop decorated with

  chApo
  hundred-year-old photos of San
Francisco- pre-earthquake-ordered an iced
low-fat white-chocolate mocha, and read through them.
  Bill Conason was right. The UFO story may
have been roundly ignored by the mainstream press, but the
tabloids had run with it, complete with blatantly
doctored photos. San Francisco's famed
Alamo Square in a shot of Victorian houses
she had seen a thousand times, except with something
resembling a pie tin amateurishly pasted into the
sky. A gray-skinned alien she was pretty sure
she'd seen in a movie stood between the mayor and the
police chief in a photo that she believed had come
from the Bay Mirror, except that in the original,
a U.s. senator had been standing where the alien was
now.
  As nonsensical as the pictures were, though, the
stories were surprisingly consistent. People reported
seeing lights in the sky. Sometimes, the lights came
alarmingly close. On some occasions, people had
disappeared, though they had all turned up later,
unharmed. If it was some kind of mass psychosis,
it seemed to be a common one, and seemingly not
dangerous.
  With the exception of the UFO stories, most of the
tabloids had little in common with one another. Some
specialized in celebrity "news," one in
stories of the supernatural-Phoebe paged through this
one with special interest, relieved to see that none
of the Charmed Ones' exploits seemed to have been
witnessed or reported-


  some in pseudo-political muckraking, accusing
local politicians of crimes and rip-offs great
and small. There were a few features common to all:
horoscope columns, opinion columns,
household tips. There were even, she noted, some
advertisers who bought space in all the tabloids,
including a discount jewelry chain, a company that
sold collectible plates featuring pictures of
dead celebrities and religious figures, and a
fitness guru advertising an upcoming rally.
  As she closed the last of the papers, Phoebe
didn't feel especially enlightened. She had known
that she'd have to go see the woman who wrote her the
letter, so that she could check out the sister. But before she
did that she wanted to be armed with as much information as
possible, to know if this was simply an isolated
case, or one of many. And there did genuinely seem
to be some kind of UFO fever gripping the city. But
since she didn't ordinarily pay attention to these
tabloids, she couldn't tell if that was unusual,
or just another day in San Franscisco.
  She just hoped Paige was finding out something a little more
definitive.
  "Paige Matthews, of course I remember
you!"
  He didn't, of course. Paige had found
Dr. Carter Haywood, her old professor from
the University of California at Berkeley,
living in a run-down Craftsman house, all
dark brown wood with a lightly slanted, shingled
roof, in

  Cow Hollow. He had answered the door with a
broom in his hand and an apron tied around his middle,
as though on a cleaning spree, and she'd had
to identify herself three times, complete with the year
she'd been in his class, before he claimed to know her.
Then again, he had made an impression on her, but
she hadn't exactly been the ideal student, much
less teacher's pet. So of all the hundreds,
maybe thousands, of students he'd taught over the
years, there was no special reason why he should
recall Paige.
  "I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of
questions, Dr. Haywood," Paige said
tentatively. He was smiling, but he still brandished the
broom, and she was half-afraid he'd try
to sweep her off the front porch. She only
remembered bits and pieces of his UFO
theories-he had been a philosophy professor,
and talking about UFO'S, even in the face of
administrative warnings, had eventually gotten him
fired-and wasn't sure that he'd be receptive
to questions about them.
  "Of course, of course," he said, smiling
broadly. He hadn't been a young man even when
Paige was taking a class from him, but in the few
years since then, he seemed to have aged a great deal.
His face was creased, with heavy bags under his eyes,
and jowls that drooped like a basset hound's. Thick
glasses over his eyes made them seem to bulge out
from his skull. His hair was gray and wispy, though
he unconsciously


  patted it down as he stood back to invite
Paige inside. He wore a gray cardigan
sweater over his stooped form, with a buttoned-up blue
shirt underneath it, shapeless gray pants, and black
shoes. "Come in, please."
  Seeing him here brought a flood of memories
rushing back from her college days. His class had
been in one of the campus's giant lecture
halls. Paige invariably had been late, or
close to it, dashing across the plaza toward class after
everyone else had already taken their seats. A young
man would play his guitar on the plaza most
mornings, his case open for donations, and sometimes
Paige would toss a quarter or two into the case as
she scurried past.
  Inside the lecture hall, the students had sat
in auditorium-style seats while Dr.
Haywood stalked the stage. He'd never seemed
to need a single note, but had filled the class
session with a monologue that began the moment the clock
ticked nine, and didn't end until the hour was
done.
  Normally, his lectures were on appropriate
subjects. He was a particular fan of Spinoza,
she remembered, and Martin Heidegger. But Paige
recalled one day when he'd gotten off on a
tangent about the difference between actual and perceived
reality, and he'd somehow found himself talking about alien
visitors. "There could be some among us right here," he
had insisted, "right in this room. Take a look at
the classmate to your

  right, to your left. Looks human, yes? But then
ask yourself: If they had the technology to reach our
planet, when we're still so hopelessly bound within our
own solar system, wouldn't they also know enough to be able
to project whatever reality we would expect to see?
Surely they wouldn't take the trouble to come here and
walk among us while keeping their own native form.
  "What you see is not always what you get. And what
you think you perceive is not always what's there."
  He had shoved himself back on topic then, but
students in the class had talked for weeks about his
apparent belief in alien visitation. From what
Paige had heard, in the year after that, his lectures
had become more and more bizarre, until finally he was
forced from his job.
  When she entered the house, Paige wondered what
he could have been cleaning. The home's architecture
was beautiful, but virtually every horizontal
surface seemed to be covered by books or papers.
Manila file folders were everywhere-some thick as
phone books, others holding just a page or two.
Books towered in stacks on the floor, on
chairs, and on the two tables that she could see from the
entryway. There was hardly enough visible floor
to sweep. A stale, dusty odor tickled
Paige's nose, and she had to hold back a
sneeze.
  "Place is a little bit of a mess, I'm
afraid," he said.


  "That's okay. Did you live here when you were teaching
at Berkeley?"
  He chuckled, leading her on a circuitous
route through the maze. "I don't miss that commute,
I can tell you that. Before BART, it was almost
impossible. But even after that, it was a pain."
  Paige had taken the Bay Area Rapid
Transit trains through the tunnel that ran under the
bay, connecting San Francisco with the East
Bay, enough times to know what he meant. It was much
faster than driving the Bay Bridge, but at rush
hour it got crowded and unpleasant. "I'm sure
it was," she said. "It's a long trip, twice a
day."
  "But I couldn't give up this house," he went
on. "And now I'm glad I didn't. I never go
across the bay anymore. Hardly ever, anyway.
Come in here, Paige, please."
  He led her into a dining room with a huge, formal
dining table in its center. Like the rest of the house, this
room looked like someone had held a library over the
roof and shaken all the books out. But at least there were
chairs around the table. "Have a seat," he offered, and
scraped another away from the table for himself.
  In deference to the hot day, she'd worn a white
floral print sundress, and now she feared that if
the grime caking the rest of the house was also on the
chairs, she'd wind up with a huge smudge on her
bottom. But she sat, nose still tickling from all

  the dust. Maybe he'd kicked up more of it
by sweeping, though she still couldn't see anyplace he
might have been doing so. He had set the broom down
someplace, but the apron was still cinched around his middle.
"What I wanted to ask you about, Dr.
Haywood," she began, figuring the best way to do
this was just to dive right in, "was UFO'S."
  His face tightened at the sound of the word. "I ...
I don't know what you mean," he stammered.
  "Come on, Dr. Haywood. Unidentified
flying objects. You used to talk about them all the
time in class."
  "That's a bit of an exaggeration," he insisted.
"I may have mentioned them once or twice, I
suppose. Much to my later chagrin."
  "Because you got fired?"
  "I was a tenured professor. Untouchable, or
so I thought. And teaching at a university with a
well-known respect for diverse viewpoints. But
somebody took exception to my occasional mention of
an important, little known scientific phenomenon,
and I was railroaded. And that, young lady, is all
I really care to say on that subject."
  His face had turned red, edging toward eggplant,
and he tugged at the collar of his shirt as if it had
suddenly become too tight. Paige had a mental
image of him suffering a heart attack because she had
come in here and badgered him


  about a sensitive topic. "If you really don't
want to talk about it-was
  "That is exactly what I want, Ms.
Matthews, he snapped. "Not to talk about it. If
you don't mind, I'm a very busy man."
  "Please, Dr. Haywood," she replied
urgently. She was afraid it was all slipping
away because she had been too impatient to take her
time getting around to the subject at hand. It isn't,
she reminded herself, necessarily all that
important- just a matter of finding out if
Phoebe's letter-writer is a lunatic or not.
There was no need to panic, but just the same, she
didn't want to leave empty handed after taking the
trouble to locate and visit the professor. "What
I was going to say was, if you didn't really want
to talk about it, you wouldn't have put your job on the
line the way you did. That was an act of courage,
Dr. Haywood. Now, there's nothing anyone can do
to punish you further, so you've got to show the same
courage. It's important."
  "I don't see how it could be, young lady," he
said. "Since it's nothing but a lot of balderdash."
  "You didn't always think that."
  "Sometimes young people are foolish. Sometimes old people
are too. That doesn't mean we can't finally
develop some intelligence."
  Paige felt her mind spinning, trying to come up
with an angle that would encourage Dr. Haywood
to talk about his theories. From what little she
remembered-she had taken the class,

  ChAHMED
  after all, to learn about philosophy, not
UFO'S- he had been convinced that Earth was visited
frequently, and he'd claimed to have evidence. That,
she believed, was what had finally got him fired. Not
the theory, but the plainly delusional insistence that he
could prove it.
  Maybe it wasn't so delusional, though.
Maybe Phoebe's correspondent-well, her
correspondent's sister, anyway-really had
experienced what she believed she had.
  "I'm afraid I really must ask you to go now.
It's been lovely seeing you, but as I said, I'm
terribly busy, and-was
  "Wait, Dr. Haywood," Paige
interrupted. The way to pry it from him had just come
to her. It was risky. But she figured everyone already
thought he was just a crazy old man, so no one would
believe him if he reported what he was about
to see. "I just want you to know that there really is an
important reason for me to hear your theories of
UFO'S."
  "I have no theories-," he began.
  Paige cut him off again. She focused on a
particular red book, at the top of a stack on the
far end of the table. "Book," she said, holding her
hand out. The book orbed from its place on the stack,
showing up in her hand a moment later. A simple
trick, for her. She held it out toward Dr.
Haywood, and then placed it on the table before him.
"You want to see it again?"
  "No, no." The expression on his face was one
of


  awe, but with something else mixed in. She wasn't
sure, but she thought that maybe the other emotion was
fear. "No, that's ... that's remarkable."
  She shrugged. "Not really. Pretty much an
everyday thing for... for us." She left unsaid the part
about how she was a witch. He would believe what he
wanted to believe, and she didn't want to steer him
in any other direction.
  "Of course," he said, anxiety tightening his
lips and cheeks. "But for mundane Earth people, it's
... it's like a miracle."
  Another shrug. "I suppose."
  "Of course, it is," Dr. Haywood continued,
the words tumbling from him in excitement. "Obviously
the kind of matter-teleportation technology
required for something like that- and nanoscopic, I would
imagine, or else built into you in some way-is far
beyond our capabilities. I'm sure it's beyond
anything our scientists are even thinking about. That
technology alone would have enormous consequences,
world-changing ones. The global economy-if you
took shipping and travel costs out of it, you'd have an
entirely different economic picture. And the
military applications would be enormous as well.
Security considerations, anti-terrorist
measures-everything would have to be rethought. Simply
amazing."
  "Then you understand why I'm interested to know what your
theories are," Paige suggested. "In detail,
if possible."

  "Yes, indeed. I do understand. But . . . well,
this opens up a whole new realm of study for me, of
course. I was busy, but now I have to discard so much,
start over from ground zero. I'm afraid I really
must get to work-was
  "I'm busy, too, Dr. Haywood,"
Paige said, cutting him off before he went too far
down that road. "If we could get to why I came."
  Dr. Haywood nodded frantically, and Paige
noticed that he had backed a few steps farther
away from her. He seemed genuinely afraid of her
now. "Yes, yes, of course. Just one moment."
He rose from the table, went to a bookcase-he could
use a few more of those, Paige thought- and withdrew a
single volume from it. When he returned to the table,
she recognized his name under the title: The
Visitors.
  "It's all in here," Dr. Haywood said.
"Everything I've spoken about for years-I put it
all down here. Take it. It will explain all of
my theories to you, for right or wrong."
  "Thank you," Paige said. This wasn't
exactly what she'd been hoping for. She had
wanted a quick summary of who the aliens might be and
what they wanted here, not a homework assignment.
Once a teacher ..., she thought.
  "Again, I'm sorry to be so rude, but I really
must ask you to go," Dr. Haywood said. "It's very
nice to see you, but I've got so much to do."
  "I understand," Paige said. She felt a little
ashamed of herself for having tricked him, and


  for carrying on the charade now. But it had
definitely opened the floodgates. She didn't
think she had to worry he would spill the beans about
her, at least. He seemed a little too spooked
to say anything to anyone.
  A few minutes later she was outside his house,
book in hand. The day was just as sunny and warm as it
had been, and three women in shorts and sports
tops jogged past her, each wearing headphones. She
couldn't tell if they were listening to music or what,
but they had the oddest expressions on their
faces-somewhere between self-satisfied and blissful.
They glanced once at Paige, and then at Dr.
Haywood's house, and then they sped up the block
and were gone.

  1116 JOD of a police detective was a
lot less glamorous than TV shows and crime
novels made it appear. Today, for example,
cops all over the city were investigating a series of
multiple murders- possibly
gang-related-south of Market, and here Darryl
Morris was, chained to his desk.
  But every detective was responsible for his or her
own paperwork, and since Darryl's latest case had
involved the Charmed Ones, the paperwork was more
complicated than usual. Catching crooks was one
thing, but cleaning up a case when the perpetrator had
been vanquished by the Halliwell sisters was another
matter entirely. From every indication, the murders being
investigated were strictly human against human, and the
Charmed Ones were not connected to it at all. Darryl
was glad of that-otherwise, he'd have tried to dodge this
paperwork a little longer so


  he could make sure they stayed out of the limelight.
  Paperwork was not, to put it mildly, Darryl's
favorite part of the job. To stay alert through the
miasma of forms, he drank so much bad
police-station coffee that his stomach burned in
protest. His back and neck were aching from the hours of
sitting at his cramped desk.
  So when a man walked into the office, with a worried
expression on his face and a questioning look in his eyes,
Darryl was thrilled at the prospect of a
distraction. He rose, shaking off the kinks in his
muscles. "Can I help you, sir?"
  The guy turned to him, hollow-eyed, lower lip
trembling. He was upset, that much was clear.
"I... I hope so."
  "Why don't you tell me about it?" Darryl
asked. He should have offered the man a chair, but he
didn't want to sit down himself yet. "I'm
Detective Morris."
  "My name is Haas, Kevin Haas," the man
said. "My wife, Marianne . . . this is going
to sound crazy, I know, completely insane, but
I'm not insane. I'm an engineer, you know, I'm
a steady, sensible guy."
  "I'm sure you are," Darryl said soothingly.
"Just tell me what happened, Mr. Haas."
  "Well, we were walking home from the supermarket,
out in the Sunset district. And these lights came,
like a ... like a UFO, I guess. And they took
Marianne. She was with me, and then

  after the lights flew away, she was gone."
  "When was this?" Darryl asked him. Kevin Haas
was right: It did sound insane.
  "Last night," Kevin said.
  "I see. And then what did you do?"
  "Well, I... I looked for her. Tried
calling her cell phone, you know, but she didn't
answer. Finally, since I was only a couple of
blocks from home, I went there to call the police.
And there she was."
  "She was at home?"
  "Yes," Kevin replied. "She had gone
shopping with me, but somehow the lights, the UFO,
whatever it was, had picked her up and taken her
home."
  "What did she tell you about how she got there?"
  "That's the thing. She didn't remember anything
about it-didn't even remember having gone shopping with
me. But I looked in the kitchen cabinets-all the
groceries she'd been carrying had been put away,
right where they belonged. So obviously I wasn't just
nuts, she had been out with me, and she had been brought
home, somehow."
  "And you pointed this out to her?" Darryl asked. He
wasn't as certain Haas wasn't a tad nuts.
  "Yes, of course I did. But she didn't
really want to talk about it. She was too busy
exercising along with a videotape."


  "Exercising?" Darryl echoed.
  "That's right. Only the thing is, she never does
those exercise tapes. She doesn't need to.
We don't own a car, so she walks everywhere.
To work and so on. But she doesn't do workouts like this.
I don't even know where she got the tape. I think
it was called The Ideal You, or something like that.
Completely not her kind of thing. But she would barely
look away from the TV or stop working out long enough
to talk to me. She kept it up until long after I
went to bed. Finally she came in and slept for a
while, but when I got up this morning, she was at it
again. I'm afraid she's going to, I don't
know, hurt herself. Strain something, you know?"
  "It's definitely an unusual situation,
Mr. Haas," Darryl told him. "But I
don't see that there's been a crime committed."
backslash
  Kevin looked distraught at the idea that the
police might not step in to help him. "What about
kidnapping?"
  "It sounds like she was released almost immediately,"
Darryl pointed out. "Not so much kidnapped as given
a ride. If she is willing to come right out and say that
she was forcibly assaulted, then we could start
to build a case- although we'd have to know who to build
it against."
  "So you're saying you can't do anything?"
  "I'm saying it's not clear what we can do,"
Darryl answered. "Your wife is back home.
I

  agree with you about the exercise thing- pushing herself
too strenuously on a new fitness regime can be
dangerous. But I think she needs to see a doctor
about that, not a cop."
  "But there's . . . there's something out there,
Detective. Something grabbing people off the streets and
. . . and changing them. It's got to be stopped."
  "Tell you the truth, Mr. Haas, we've had
a lot of reports lately of unidentified flying
objects in the city. Much more than usual. Even
some of our own, SFPD officers, have reported
seeing them. Thing is, we haven't been able to verify
them. It's not like we can pull one over and give it a
ticket, check its driver's license and
registration, right?"
  "But... they're a public hazard."
  "We don't know that, sir."
  "Maybe you don't, Detective. But you
haven't seen Marianne!"
  Darryl saw that the guy wasn't going to go away
easily. "Give me your address, Mr. Haas,
and I'll come by and check on you both in a day or so,
see how you're both doing."
  Kevin Haas scowled and mumbled that he wasn't
crazy and should not just be dismissed, as he wrote down
his address on a piece of paper Darryl
provided. But since it was all he was going to get,
he took it and left without even a thank-you. Of
course, Darryl hadn't exactly done much to be
thanked for. It was true that there had been quite a few
UFO reports over the


  last several weeks-enough of them that the brass had
been giving some consideration to ways they might
respond. But so far, no official course of
action had been chosen. The plan seemed to be
to take down the details of each report, and then
ignore it.
  Worked for Darryl. He had enough weirdness in his
life, by virtue of knowing the Charmed Ones. The
Halliwell sisters were powerful witches-good
witches, who had helped him out many times- and he was
the only cop on the force they trusted with their
secret. Which meant that his life was plenty
complicated as it was. Adding UFO'S to it would
only make things worse.
  Still, he decided that he'd call the
Halliwells later on, to see if they knew
anything about the UFO situation. Seemed like it might
be right up their alley.
  A crew of four plumbers worked inside P3.
They had two trucks parked outside, and various
hoses and other items snaked inside and into the
pipes. It was noisy and smelly, and Piper could
only hope that all the effort-and all the money it was
costing her-would fix whatever the problem was. She had
decided to trust this crew, even if she knew it was
based on nothing more than the same gut feeling that had
led her to trust the earlier plumbers, the ones who had
compounded her problem.
  But there was no requirement that she stay

  ChAHMED
  inside and watch them. Her supervision might mean
that they would keep working instead of sitting around on her
chairs, drinking her beverages. But she believed them
to be professionals who were here to get the job done.
And the noise, not to mention the stench, was really getting
to her. She just hoped they'd be done early enough for her
to give the place a thorough cleaning and airing out, or
she wouldn't be able to open tonight.
  Just to get away from the club-and the smell-for a
while, she took a walk. Up a couple of
blocks, then down two streets, and then back. A
little exercise, she thought, a little fresh air.
Couldn't hurt. At the corner where she had planned
to turn right, she went left instead, almost as if
she'd lost control of her own legs. But then she
brightened, because she realized that by going left, she was
passing a video store she would have missed
otherwise.
  But you don't need any videos, she told
herself.
  Nonetheless, she found herself inside the store a
moment later, wandering past the racks of action
flicks and romances, comedies and cartoons. The
self-help section caught her eye, and there,
prominently displayed, she saw the face of the woman
she'd watched on TV the night before. Meg
Winship's The Ideal Y. She snatched the box
off the shelf and carried it straight to the cashier.
  Outside again, she meant to turn back toward


  P3. But those plumbers would still be working for hours,
she realized. There was time to go home and have a quick
workout before she got back to them. Plenty of time.
  Kara Bodine came to the door when Phoebe
knocked on it, and from the expression on her face,
one might have thought that her visitor was a movie star,
a president, or the pope.
  "You're Phoebe, from the papers!" the woman
exclaimed when she was able to operate her mouth.
  "Hi, yes," Phoebe said, a little chagrined by the
outpouring. She had taken off the cap and
sunglasses, but she got the feeling this woman would
have recognized her even with them on. "I'm
Phoebe Halliwell."
  "I... I wrote you a letter," Kara said. She
was in her forties-older than Phoebe had
expected, from the letter-with short, dark hair framing a
plain face, and dark circles under her eyes. She
didn't look like she'd had a lot of sleep
lately. From somewhere deep in the house, loud music
boomed.
  "I know," Phoebe said. "I got it. That's
why I'm here."
  "That is so sweet!" Kara cried, bringing her
hands up to her cheeks. "1 can hardly believe you
would do this!"
  "To tell you the truth, it's not something I

  usually do," Phoebe assured her. "But I
thought I should, this time."
  Kara again was momentarily speechless. "Would you like
to come in?" she finally asked. "It's not much, but it's
home."
  "Sure," Phoebe said. "Thanks."
  Kara led Phoebe inside, into a combination living
and dining area. The music was much louder in here, and
Phoebe winced a little.
  "That's my sister, Daphne," Kara told her.
"I talked about her, in the letter."
  "That's right," Phoebe said. "I'm glad she's
here, I was hoping to meet her too."
  "Good luck tearing her away from Meg Winship,"
Kara said with a shrug.
  "Meg who?"
  "That music." Kara almost had to shout to be heard.
"That's her Meg Winship video. I've been
living with this for a week."
  "Can I see her?" Phoebe asked. I thought
she was exaggerating in her letter when she said, "All she
wants to do is exercise." But maybe not.
  "Sure," Kara said. She nodded toward a
closed door and walked toward it. Phoebe
followed. When Kara opened it, the music blasted
through like a wave. Kara stepped to the side,
obviously unwilling to go any farther. Phoebe
went past her and into a family room, where all the
furniture had been pushed up against a wall
to make a big clear space in front of an
entertainment center.


  Daphne was on the floor, clad in pink workout
clothes and doing stomach crunches in time to the beat of the
music. She glanced and mouthed a word Phoebe
couldn't hear. "Hi," Phoebe guessed.
  "Hi, Daphne!" Phoebe shouted. "Do you
think we could turn the volume down a little?"
  "What?"
  Phoebe crossed to the entertainment center and found
the volume button on the TV. She pushed it and
watched the on-screen display move from maximum
down to a saner level. "Is this okay?"
  Daphne looked past Phoebe toward the
screen, as if afraid she might miss something
important. She didn't stop exercising. "I
guess."
  "Your sister's a little worried about you," Phoebe
told her. "She thinks maybe you're pushing yourself a
little too hard with this exercise stuff."
  "She should try it," Daphne said. "I feel
great. I'm really getting empowered."
  "That's great, Daphne. But, you know, there's
something to be said for moderation, too."
  Daphne shot her a frown. "Meg said that people would
try to keep me from being the ideal me."
  Phoebe shook her head. "No, that's not it at
all," she said with a smile. "Be all you can be.
It's just . . . you can't push yourself too hard, too
fast. It's not good for you."

  "No pain, no gain."
  "But if you wind up in the hospital, then you'll
lose all the progress you're making."
  The woman leading the exercise on TV-MEG
Winship, Phoebe supposed-switched from the stomach
crunches to leg lifts. Daphne followed suit
without responding to Phoebe's comment.
  Phoebe decided it was time to change course.
"Can I ask you about something else?"
  Daphne smiled. Sweat rolled down her
cheek. "Okay."
  "Were you, um . . . abducted? Taken on some
kind of spaceship?"
  "Did my sister tell you that?"
  "She mentioned it," Phoebe confirmed. "What can
you tell me about it?"
  Daphne did a few more leg lifts before
answering. "Nothing," she said. "Kara says she
saw the lights, and then I went away. I don't
remember a thing."
  Phoebe was struck by how nice Daphne seemed
to be-obviously she didn't want anyone interfering
with her workout, but beyond that she didn't seem to resent
the questions. On the other hand, she didn't seem able
to tell Phoebe much, either. It didn't really
matter if she remembered or not-if she wouldn't
tell Phoebe anything, there wasn't much point in
pursuing the conversation. "Okay, thanks,
Daphne," she said. She left the room, closing
the door behind her. A moment later she heard


  the volume shoot back up to ear-shattering
level.
  Kara was sitting at the dining table when Phoebe
came out. "See what I mean?" she asked.
  Phoebe nodded. "She is definitely taking the
workout thing beyond a healthy obsession," she said. "But
as far as the UFO thing, she says she doesn't know
anything about it."
  "That's what she tells me too," Kara said.
"I know it happened, though. It sounds nutty,
I'm sure. But we were here, at home, and these
lights shone in the window. When we went outside
to look, Daphne was right beside me. But then she was
gone, like they transported her onto the ship. Just like
in Star Trek or something. I screamed, and the
neighbors came out, but by then it had gone away.
We were still outside-I guess I was hysterical-when
we heard the music from inside. We went in and saw
Daphne just where you did, exercising with that video."
  "And that's not what she had been doing when you first
saw the lights?"
  "She never did that. We were eating ice cream and
watching a Sandra Bullock movie. I didn't
even know she had the tape."
  "It had to come from somewhere," Phoebe suggested.
  Kara nodded. "The question is, where? And how can I
get her to stop?"
  "Have you tried to just turn it off?" Phoebe
asked. "Throw the tape away?"


  Kara looked steadily at her. "I love my
sisterst" she said. "And she loves me. But I
think if I tried to do that, she'd kill me. I
mean it. She gets mad when I just suggest she
take a break. I really think she'd kill me."

  Meg WinSI-LIP worked in longhand, writing her
speech down with a ballpoint pen on a yellow
legal pad. She put down a sentence, then
scratched it out, thought a moment, and then wrote something
slightly different, getting closer to her precise
meaning. She knew there wouldn't be long to talk to her
audience and she wanted to get her point across in
exactly the right way.
  She had made plenty of public appearances, in
addition to writing three best-selling fitness books
and releasing several videos. In every one of them, her
message had been essentially the same. Women can
empower themselves, she taught, by setting goals, taking
control of their own bodies, and making themselves strong and
fit, which would give them the self-confidence necessary
to accomplish those goals.
  No single talk she had given, though, no book

  or video, had been as important as this one would
be. Her audience would be huge, and this was her home
turf. There would be no retreat if she was anything
less than stellar. Every publication in the San
Francisco Bay Area was running stories on
her, and plastered with advertising for the rally. Book and
video sales were booming, and the whole region was
gripped with Winship fever.
  The words she spoke had to be just right. Each word
would carry two meanings: the literal one and the deeper,
more important one. She couldn't afford to get
tongue-tied. She paused, taking in the Marin
County estate her gifts had already bought her, a
chateau-style wonderland big enough to make her feel
isolated sometimes, lonely behind its high walls.
  Meg was as wealthy as she needed to be, with every
material belonging she could possibly want. It
wasn't money she was after this time. She had paid for the
venue herself, and admission was free. No, this was about
one of those increasingly rare things that money couldn't
buy. This was about nothing less than power. And not the
kind that came from writing a check to a politician.
That power was cheap, by the standards she had in mind. This was
much more dear.
  That was what made it special. Meg smiled as
she wrote down the next line. Another few days,
and she would have everything.


  Beaver Street led straight to Corona
Heights Park. But "park" wasn't really the right
word to describe this place. In a sea of homes and
businesses, Corona Heights was a wild island.
No one could build on the steep and rocky
outcropping, so it was designated a park for
map-makers and city officials to explain why it was
left undeveloped when so much expensive real
estate surrounded it. In fact, hardly anyone
climbed it; children avoided it, and it wasn't suited
for jogging or other outdoors pursuits.
  One thing it was good for was the ritual celebration of
nature. Living in the middle of a big city, there were
precious few spots the Halliwell sisters could
go to commune with the world around them. The city's parks
tended to be crowded, and they weren't about to advertise
their special gifts. Corona Heights, then,
offered an ideal spot-so ideal that, on the
solstices, it was downright jammed with Wiccans. That
had been three nights ago, though, which meant that tonight
it would be quiet and untrammeled. No one went up
there at night-there were no lights, for one thing, and the
paths were hard to navigate even in daylight-so they
would have the solitude and seclusion they wanted.
  The hard part had been getting Piper to leave the
TV behind. At first, Paige had thought it was kind of
cute. Piper had put on sweatpants and a tank
top and pushed the furniture away so she had room
to duplicate the exercises she was

  watching on tape. Paige tried to talk to her,
kid her a little about this sudden interest in fitness, but
Piper had ignored her and kept on with her workout.
  They were still there when Phoebe came home, Piper
working out and Paige reading through the book Carter
Haywood had given her.
  Phoebe had positively blanched when she saw
what Piper was doing, and watching. She had tried
to eject the DVD from the player, and Piper had
screamed at her. Paige couldn't remember ever
seeing those two go at it like they had, and she'd
witnessed some pretty hairy sister fights. After
fifteen minutes of pointless shouting, Phoebe
dragged Paige off to the kitchen.
  "We've got to do something," Phoebe had
insisted. "Where did she get that video?"
  "I have no idea," Paige replied. "She was
in there with it when I came home."
  "It's part of this whole UFO thing," Phoebe
complained. "I don't know how, or why, but it's
all mixed up together." She told Paige about her
visit with Kara and Daphne Bodine, and the Meg
Winship tape the latter had been obsessed with.
"She was acting just like Piper," she said. "Wouldn't
stop exercising even to talk."
  "I can see how that could be a bad thing," Paige
said. "I mean, too much of anything is bad, even
if it's good, right?"
  "This has to be a strain on their hearts,"


  Phoebe pointed out. "Not to mention the permanent
muscle and tendon damage they could be doing.
They've been enchanted or something. We have to come up
with a counterspell, and fast."
  They had been working on that when Paige remembered
the date, and the Corona Heights ritual they had
planned. If they performed a spell there to free
Piper from whatever enchantment she was under, it would have an
accelerated impact. And if it worked on her,
maybe they could use it to help Daphne Bodine and
anyone else who might have fallen victim to whatever
dark magic was at work.
  Piper had been unwilling to leave the TV,
though. Phoebe unplugged it, while Paige
restrained Piper so she wouldn't simply plug it
back in. After another spirited argument-this time with Leo
joining in-Piper had finally relented, agreeing to go
to Corona Heights for the scheduled ritual.
Paige orbed them, their white robes, and their
accessories over, which was by far the easiest way
to scale its cliffs at night. Leo didn't join
them, instead returning to P3 to supervise continued
plumbing work that, he said, was keeping the club closed
for the night.
  Piper groused a little during the early stages of the
ritual, but she helped light the candles and set them
at the five points of a pentangle scraped into the
earth by previous celebrants,

  and she spoke the appropriate words along with her
sisters. Paige felt a bit distracted herself up
here. From the high cliffs at Corona Heights,
one could see for vast distances across the city, and she
kept catching herself looking for lights or swiftly
moving shapes in the sky. She still didn't believe
in UFO'S, but all the stories she'd heard,
combined with what she had read in Dr. Haywood's
book, had left her on edge. Adding in the
additional fact that Piper- whom she had always
considered one of the most levelheaded people she'd ever
met-had come under some kind of fitness-related trance
only made things worse. Part of the point of coming out
here was to reconnect with nature, but that only worked
if one could open one's mind and heart to it, and
Paige doubted she could put aside her worries
for her sister, and her questions about the UFO'S, long enough
to do so.
  Near the end of the ritual, "the three sisters
engaged in a call-and-response segment, where one
would say a phrase and the other two would give the necessary
answer. Except when it was Piper's turn, she
missed her cue. Paige turned and saw her staring
into the distance, face slack, eyes wide and
unblinking. Piper had been holding an athame, but
it had fallen from her hand and stuck, point down, in the
earth. Her legs seemed to wobble.
  "Piper!" Paige shouted, running to catch her


  sister before she fell. Phoebe turned at
Paige's cry and joined her. Just as they reached
Piper, she began to pitch forward. Paige caught
her wrist, and Phoebe got a handful of the white
robe she wore, and together they kept her from tumbling
off the edge of a thirty-foot cliff.
  "Piper, are you okay?" Phoebe asked as they
sat her down on the damp grass away from the edge.
"What happened?"
  "Fine, I'm fine," Piper answered, still sounding
like she was not altogether there. "No big."
  "Yes big," Paige declared. She was still
trembling from the momentary fright and the rush of adrenaline
that followed it. "Piper, you almost fell."
  "Almost, but I didn't," Piper said. "Can we
go home now?"
  "Soon," Phoebe replied. "We just have
to finish something up."
  "I'm finished," Piper insisted. "I'll see
you at home." She started to lurch to her feet, but
Phoebe pushed her back down.
  "You just stay there, Piper," she said.
  Piper looked at her in an off-kilter way.
"You pushed me." to 
  "That's right, and I'll do it again," Phoebe said,
increasingly alarmed by her sister's condition.
  Paige recognized Phoebe's tough-chick
voice. "I wouldn't mess with her, Piper," she
warned.
  Piper turned her dreamy gaze on Paige.
"I can take her. Been working out."

  CHARMED
  "No joke," Paige answered.
  Phoebe gripped Paige's shoulder, hard enough
to hurt. "Let's do it," she said. "Now."
  "I'm with ya, sis," Paige replied. This had
definitely gone on too long. Digging into the
pocket of the pants she wore under her robe, she
pulled out the spell she had written earlier and
rose, standing next to Phoebe so they could both read
it in the moonlight.
  Magic forces on this rise,
  Piper needs no exercise,
  Lift whatever spell she's under,
  Lest the Charmed Ones be put asunder.
  The air around Piper seemed to shimmer for a moment,
her very form becoming indistinct, as if she were
surrounded by honey or molasses. But then she came
back into focus, blinking and rubbing at her eyes like
someone just waking up from a long sleep. "What's
going on?" she asked. Her voice sounded like the old
Piper, too. "What are we doing here? For that
matter, where is- are we on Corona Heights?"
  Phoebe and Paige caught each other's glances
and traded smiles. Piper was back! "That's right,"
Phoebe said. "Third-night-after-solstice
ritual. Reconnecting with the earth."
  "Did I... I feel strange," Piper said.
  "You almost fainted," Paige told her, leaving out
the rest of it. "We caught you."


  "Oh. Well, thanks," Piper said. She
didn't sound completely convinced. "Are we
finished? It's a little cold here."
  She was right, a cool breeze had come up while
they'd been here, and even though the day had been warm,
evenings were never exactly balmy in San
Francisco.
  "Sure," Phoebe said. "We're done.
Paige, you want to take us home?"
  Paige felt relieved to have her oldest sister
back among them. They hadn't completely finished the
ritual they'd come here for, but that was probably
okay. It was mostly a symbolic thing, anyway,
and she hadn't been getting that much out of it. Now that
Piper seemed back to normal, she felt as if a
great weight had been lifted from her shoulders, and
everything else paled in importance. "Sure," she
agreed happily. "Let's go home."

  W3S awakened by music booming up through the
floorboards of her room. She glanced at the
clock beside her bed. Six o'clock. In the morning.
Tugging on a silk robe over her tank top and
pajama pants, she stormed downstairs and threw
open the living room door.
  Inside, she found Piper spread out on the
floor, touching her toes. "Piper!" Phoebe
snapped. "What are you doing?"
  Piper beamed up at her. "Good morning,
Phoebes," she said, the very picture of
slightly-out-of-breath cheerfulness. "How are you today?"
  "How am I? The question is, how are you? I thought
you were over this last night."
  Piper turned her attention back to the TV.
"Over what?"
  Phoebe snatched the remote off the floor and
lowered the volume. She felt let down,


  disappointed-she had been convinced the spell they had
performed had fixed whatever was going on with Piper.
Apparently, though, the fix had only been
temporary. "The neighbors are complaining about the
noise," she said. "And I don't mean the
neighbors next door. I mean the ones in
Nevada."
  "I have to feel the beat," Piper explained,
grabbing her leg and bending forward until her forehead
touched her knee. "It's not enough to hear the music, I
have to let it fill me."
  "Why, Piper? You look great. You're in
perfect health. What do you need this for?"
  Piper didn't speak until she had raised her
forehead from her other knee. "I'm just trying to be my
ideal me," she said. "I'm trying to regain my
lost confidence by being the best self I can be."
  "What I don't understand," Paige said from behind
Phoebe, "is how she can even say that junk with a
straight face."
  Phoebe hadn't heard Paige come in-and that was
with the volume turned down. Maybe I've already
suffered permanent hearing loss, she thought. This has
got to end. She clenched her hands into fists and called
as loud as she could. "Leo!"
  Leo orbed in a moment later, glistening wet, a
towel wrapped around his waist. "This couldn't wait
three minutes for me to get some clothes on?"
  "She's your wife," Phoebe said, gesturing
toward Piper. "What do you think?"

  Leo grimaced. "I thought you said you had removed
the spell last night."
  "We thought we did," Paige put in.
"Looks like we were wrong."
  "Apparently," Leo agreed. "But I've
checked her out. So far, there's no harmful effect from
all the exercise. I can't see that there's much
beneficial effect either. She's limber, and she's
toned, but she's not building muscle mass."
  "If it's not doing anything, she should give it a
rest," Phoebe suggested, shouting over the blaring
TV, hoping Piper would take the hint. But Piper
just kept stretching and jumping and annoying everyone around
her.
  "I guess we'd better figure this out,"
Paige said. "Before she keels over or one of us
has to tranquilize her to make her stop."
  Learning that they hadn't counteracted whatever spell
Piper suffered under agonized Phoebe. Piper had
spent a lifetime helping out her little sister-sure,
they'd saved each other's life many times over now,
but the bond that connected them went way beyond that.
  She remembered a time when she was five or six,
and terrified of going to sleep in the dark because of the
ghosts or monsters that might be hiding around her
room. Ironic, considering the varied and horrific
creatures she'd battled since then, but in those
days, of course, she'd only known a small child's
innate fear of what lurks in the darkness.


  She had complained to Prue, their oldest sister,
about her fears and asked how Prue dealt with the ghosts
and other creatures that haunted her room.
Prue-teasing, Phoebe understood now, if not
then-pointed to a china ballerina statue on her
nightstand that Phoebe had long admired. "She
watches out for me, and chases them away," Prue
told her. Phoebe had been amazed that such a
simple statue could perform such a crucial task,
but she believed her big sister's every utterance.
  Two troubled nights later, Prue went for a
sleepover at the home of one of her girlfriends.
Phoebe took advantage of the opportunity
to sneak into her room and borrow her ballerina
statue, just for the night, to see if it would protect
her as it did Prue. It seemed to work-that night,
with the ballerina next to her own bed, she drifted off
into blissful slumber, untroubled by any night
terrors. All was well until early morning, when
she reached for a glass of water on her night table and
knocked the ballerina onto the floor. It
shattered, and Phoebe knew she'd be in serious
trouble when Prue came home.
  But Piper, middle sister and peacekeeper, came
to her rescue. She accepted full
responsibility for having liberated the ballerina from
Prue's room and leaving it in Phoebe's, thereby
taking the brunt of Prue's fury when she got
home and found her statue in the trash. Phoebe still
shared

  the blame-she had, after all, broken it-but
Piper's involvement dissipated it. Best of all,
Piper did it without Phoebe asking her to, and she
never held it over her younger sister, never reminding
her of it again. Some sisters, Phoebe was sure, would
have said "Hey, remember the ballerina?" anytime
conflict came between them. But not Piper-it was just something
she could do for her baby sister, and she did it.
  Phoebe had never forgotten it, or any of the other
innumerable kindnesses Piper had done for her. She
tried to pay Piper back, but knew that a lifetime
of effort couldn't fully discharge the debt she owed.
So at a moment like this, when Piper was in trouble, the
pressure Phoebe felt to help her was a
physical ache. She didn't know what she could do,
but she had to do something.
  Phoebe drew Paige out of the room so they could
hear each other over Piper's video. "Is there
anything helpful in your professor's book?" she
asked. "We need to find out what's going on around
here."
  Paige scrunched up her face. "Not really.
The Visitors is pretty boring reading. I've
been trying to get through it, but man, the guy could put
an insomniac to sleep."
  "Well, what does he say about UFO'S?"
Phoebe pressed. "He must have some ideas."
  "He's full of ideas," Paige replied.
"That's what the whole thing is. But a lot of it is
just the usual stuff. The universe is filled with
billions


  and billions of stars, and each star has a whole
solar system around it, which means more billions and
billions of potentially inhabited planets. We
don't know exactly how old the universe is, but
if the big bang theory is true, then solar
systems farther out toward the edges are much older than
ours, which means that civilizations, if they exist, have
had more time to develop faster-than-light travel.
So maybe they're visiting us. Only what I just
said in two sentences he takes about six chapters
to conclude, complete with footnotes. And
diagrams."
  "And none of that explains why people would be suddenly
drawn to Meg Winship exercise videos,"
Phoebe added, trying to ignore the sound of
Piper's pounding through the walls. "Or what the
connection might be between somebody who was supposedly
abducted, like Daphne Bodine, or Piper, who
as far as we know has never been on a flying
saucer."
  "It was weird," Paige said. "When I was at
the professor's home, I couldn't get him to open
up at all. So I did a little trick lor him,
orbed one of his books, hoping that it would make him
think I was, you know, onbled of the aliens. I thought
he'd be so happy that I was real. But instead, it
seemed to totally freak him out. He couldn't wait
to get rid of me after that."
  "You showed him your power?" Phoebe asked,
astonished at Paige. She'd gotten in trouble for
that kind of thing before. "Are you crazy?"

  "I knew how he'd take it, Phoebe. It
would never occur to him that I'm a witch. He thought
I was part of an advanced race with technology
he's never seen. He just didn't react the way
I expected."
  Phoebe thought it over for a moment. Dane's
done, she realized. And there don't seem to be any
repercussions, so let's move on. "Okay," she
said. "Why don't you keep reading and see if you can
learn anything else?"
  "I might try visiting him again," Paige
suggested. "See if I can get him to summarize
some of it for me so I don't have to keep fighting off
a coma."
  "Okay, but if you do, be careful. You've already
frightened the poor man, apparently. You don't
want to spook him too much."
  And while you're doing that, she thought, I'll be
finding out what's so special about Meg Winship.
  Dr. Carter Haywood punched the numbers on
his telephone with trembling fingers. He held the
handpiece to his ear and listened to it ring, torn between
wanting it to be answered and hoping it wouldn't be.
After the third ring, someone picked up.
  "Ideal You Enterprises," a cheerful female
voice said.
  "M-Meg Winship, please."
  "I'm sorry, Ms. Winship is unavailable.
Would you like to leave a message?"


  What message could I leave? Dr. Haywood
wondered. "It's very urgent," he pressed.
  "I'm terribly sorry," the voice said. It
had lost some of its cheer but was still crisp and
professional. "Ms. Winship is extremely
busy, and is not accepting any calls at all
until after her upcoming rally."
  "I understand that. But... just please ask her to call
Dr. Carter Haywood. As soon as she
possibly can."
  There seemed to be a different note in the
woman's voice when she replied. "Dr. Carter
Haywood?"
  "That's right," he said.
  "Just a moment, please."
  So his name did mean something to her. Even after all
this time. With grateful anticipation, he waited for
her to come on the line.
  Meg Winship hung up the phone, disappointed.
Haywood should have been her greatest supporter. But
he was too cowardly, to afraid to learn the truth of
his own theories. Instead of being a booster, he had
become a doomsayer, a worrywart. He had
believed that he was warning her. "You're going too
far," he'd said. "You don't know what you're
getting yourself into."
  She smiled. She knew precisely what she was
getting into. She was fully aware-more aware than
she had ever been, or than most people would ever be in their
lives. Knowledge breeds

  knowledge, she thought. Once she had taken Haywood's
ideas to their logical conclusions, she had learned that
they were only the beginning. What he had seen as
answers were only more questions. But she had been able
to figure out the next question, and the next.
  And, unlike him, she had discovered whom to ask.
  That made all the difference.
  With the knowledge she gained came power- not the power she
ultimately sought, but power that would lead her toward that
greater goal. It protected her, and enabled her
to amass yet more power. Dr. Haywood-if he had
been stronger- would have been proud. But he'd turned
out to be a weak man, after all. Frightened.
  And, unfortunately, beyond her immediate control.
  Meg knew that she could manipulate women. For
lack of a better word, she thought of her power as a
kind of hypnosis, but it didn't require that her
subjects remain asleep, or in a trancelike
state. And her control, once she had exercised it,
was nearly total-she could make any woman under her
influence do anything at all, no matter how awful
or upsetting she would have found it before.
  But she couldn't extend that power to men.
Fortunately, in most instances, she didn't need
to. She would attain her goals with the help of the
city's female population, and the men would


  fall in line when the time came. She would have liked
Dr. Haywood to join her effort, but she didn't
need him to.
  There were other ways to deal with him.
  She pressed the "Intercom" button on her
phone and called for Sasha. Sasha would put things in
motion. She knew how to do that kind of thing.
  Dr. Haywood might become a problem. Most
likely, if he spoke up against her, he would be
branded a maniac. His academic career would be
recalled, his disgrace remembered, and he would be
ignored.
  But he was a loose end she didn't want to have
dangling out there. Just in case.
  She waited for almost two minutes-Sasha never
took longer than that greater-than as long as she was
on the premises. When one *ute and fifty
seconds had passed, Sasha showed up in her
doorway. "You called for me?"
  Meg nodded, jotted down Carter Haywood's
name on a slip of paper, and pushed it across her
desk. Sasha picked it up, read it, nodded. She
understood, then. To make sure, Meg lit a candle
on her desk. The smell of vanilla filled the
air.
  Sasha held the slip of paper to the candle's
flame, not letting go even when the fire licked at
her fingers. "Consider it done," she said. "Will that be
all?"
  "Yes, Sasha," Meg said, pleased at her
control over such a strong-willed woman. "That's
all."

  Sasha turned and left the office, walking
smartly and with purpose.
  Meg knew she wouldn't have to worry about Carter
Haywood at all.
  "Thanks for meeting me, Bill." Phoebe
put down her drink to shake his hand. Not wanting to go
to the Bay Mirror's office, she'd called him and
asked him to join her at the same out-of-the-way
coffee shop in which she'd read through the city's
tabloids. No one knew her here, and she had
realized she really liked the white-chocolate
mocha, even in its low-fat variety. This time, she
left the hat and shades home, but wore her hair
slicked close to her scalp, a vintage
silk-screened tee, and bleached denim jeans with
frayed edges over Ugg boots, which were
surprisingly cool on warm days.
  Bill Conason glanced at the vintage
photos on the walls as he sat down across from her.
He had already ordered a drink, and he placed it on
the table. "Nice place," he said. "City sure
looked different in those days."
  Phoebe nodded, but didn't want to get
involved in a long discussion of the effects of the 1906
earthquake. "I'm sorry for the secrecy," she
said. "I didn't want to go into the office today, but
I wanted to talk to you about UFO'S some more."
  He chuckled and took a long sip from his coffee.
"I think I told you everything I know, Phoebe."


  She didn't buy that for a second. "You were right,
you know. I checked the tabloids. Lots of
activity, lots of people reporting strange
objects, and even some abductions. And you said many of
those people have reported it to the Bay Mirror too. You
must have their names, contact information. I'd like to talk
to some of them."
  "You know that's a story we're not going to run,"
he warned her. "Not unless there's some
  huge break, like a mass sigh tive. And the
tabloids alreac can't sell it there. What are
  ing or proof posi-y have it, so you you going to do
  with it?"
  "Let's just say I have personal reasons and
leave it at that." Phoebe read the look on his
face. "I'm not going to try to sell it as a
story," she assured him. "And if I come up with
anything newsworthy, I'll bring it to you."
  He took another drink from his cup, and put it
down on the table. "Have you seen something?" he asked.
"Is that what this is about?"
  Phoebe couldn't restrain a laugh. "No,
no," she said. "It's not that. Like I said, I have a
personal reason for wanting to talk to some of these
witnesses, but it isn't that. Will you get me some
names?"
  Bill considered her request for a long moment, then
slowly nodded. "Give me your home e-mail
address," he said. "I'll send them over when I
get back to the office. You sure you're not going
to write a book or something?"

  CHARMED
  "I swear," Phoebe said. She wrote down
her e-mail address on the back of her coffee
receipt and slid it across the table to him. He
pocketed it quickly. "That's not what it's about at
all."
  "And if you reach the point that you can talk about these
'personal reasonsst you'll come to me?"
  "I promise."
  "Okay." He drained his cup and rose.
"Check your e-mail."
  She thanked him, and they left the coffee shop,
going their separate ways at the corner. He'd be
back at work in twenty minutes, she knew. She
would be at the computer in twenty-one, waiting for those
names.

  g p on the door of Dr. Haywood's
  ouse. She had tried the doorbell first, but if it
worked, she couldn't hear anything. And since there had
been no response, she had to assume that it
didn't. Finally, after knocking for more than a
minute, she heard noises from inside: a crash, and
then the shuffling of feet. While she waited, two
women jogged past the house. Like the other joggers she
had seen in the neighborhood, these wore headphones
connected to portable CD players at their waists.
  "What is it?" Dr. Haywood demanded
grumpily when he opened the door, looking more
drawn and pale than he had the other day. He
blinked a couple of times behind his thick lenses.
"Oh, Paige. It's you."
  His voice sounded strange when he said it,

  giving Paige the impression that he was
disappointed, that perhaps he'd been expecting someone
else. But maybe it's more that I still scare him, she
thought, again feeling a pang of guilt over her
deception. "Can I come in, Dr. Haywood?"
  He glanced behind himself, as if the answer to her question
was back there somewhere. "Well... is it
important?" he asked. "You know I'm a very
busy person."
  "I appreciate that, Dr. Haywood,
really," she assured him. "I just... I had a
few more questions. About your theories."
  "I would think that if there's anyone who doesn't
need to hear my pathetic theories, it would be you,
Ms. Matthews."
  Time to come clean, Paige thought. Well, almost.
"Yeah, about that," she said. "I might have been just the
teensiest bit dishonest. About what I am."
  "I saw what you did with my own eyes,
Paige. You don't need to hide anything from me."
  "I know that," she said. "It's just . . . what I
am may not be exactly what you think I am. But
I can't tell you what I really am."
  "Look . . . why don't you come in, but only
for a minute or two. I really can't spare the time
to chat with you today." Dr. Haywood was on edge,
almost frantic. He chewed his lower lip, tugged at
his gray hair with one hand. Paige had never seen
him quite so anxious.
  She followed him into the house, which hadn't


  changed since her last visit. Knowing she was coming
back here, she had worn gray this time,
cotton-spandex pants with plenty of zippers and a
charcoal scoop-neck top. "I wouldn't ask if
it wasn't really important."
  "It is important, vitally important," he
said.
  Lost me already, she thought. How could he know?
"What do-was
  "She's fooling with things she doesn't understand,"
he went on. He turned in circles in the middle
of his front room, threatening nearby piles of
books with every rotation. "And she's got to be stopped
before it's too late."
  "Dr. Hay wood," Paige said, hoping
to tether him to the earth again. "Can we just-was
  Once more, he cut her off. "Paige, if you
aren't one of them, then you've got to help. You must
help me ... help all of us."
  "I'll do whatever I can," Paige promised,
although she had no idea what it was she was supposed
to help with. Dr. Haywood was bordering on
panic, it seemed. She'd have to calm him down before
he would be able to make any
  tart by making us "Then we can sit
  sense at all. "Why don't I s
  some tea?" she suggested.
  down and talk about all of this. Rationally."
  "Yes, fine, tea. Whatever you say. It's
just..." He trailed off, tugging at his own hair
again. Paige worried about his health. If he gets
himself worked up more, he'll be in stroke territory,
she thought. She went past him, into his kitchen. She

  didn't really know if tea would help or not, but
if it gave him something to do with his hands, distracted him
momentarily from whatever was driving him into a frenzy,
then it couldn't hurt. She didn't see a teapot
but she found a cooking pot, ran some water into it, and
put it on the stove to boil while she searched the
cupboards for tea.
  Predictably, his organizational skills were the
same in here as in the rest of the house. There was a box
of tea bags in a deep drawer with assorted
silverware and utensils and the front page of the Bay
Mirror from April 11, 1989. At a glance,
she couldn't see anything especially pertinent on that
day's newspaper, and figured he had just set it in
the drawer and forgotten about it.
  When the water reached a boil, she took it off the
heat and poured it over tea bags into two cups.
"Dr. Haywood," she called. "Do you use
sugar or cream?"
  There was no answer, but she heard him shuffling around
in the other room. Then she heard the front door
open. "Dr. Haywood?" she repeated. Again, no
answer came.
  She left the cups where they were and went back to the
front room. It was empty, but the front door was
ajar. Paige stepped out onto the front porch.
  It took her a moment to spot him, because she was
looking for someone standing up, and he was lying down. In
the brown, dry grass of his front

  yard. Facedown. "Dr. Haywood!" she
shouted, running to his side. "Are you ... ?"
  She touched his shoulder. He didn't respond,
didn't move. She turned his head. His eyes were
open, but stared at her blindly. When she shifted him
back, she saw that his shirt had two jagged rips in
it, soaked with blood, and more had pooled in the grass
underneath him.
  Her backpack was in the house. She ran back
inside, grabbed it, fished her cell phone out, and
dialed 911. It was only after she had done so that
she realized she hadn't seen anyone around who might
have done this to poor Dr. Haywood. When she had
come outside, the only people she had spotted, jogging
off into the distance, had been the same two women with the
headphones and CD players that she'd seen upon her
arrival.
  "I guess it's a good thing I caught the
case," Darryl Morris said. They were standing on the
street outside Dr. Haywood's house.
Crime scene investigators in coveralls were
searching the lawn on hands and knees, bagging everything
but the dead grass. Others were working inside the house.
  "I should have asked for you," Paige admitted.
"But I was kind of freaked out, you know?"
  "You've seen worse," Darryl said flatly.
  "True," she said. "But it's usually preceded
by some creepy demon, so I'm prepared. This is
just..." Paige found it hard to continue.
  "Murder?" Darryl finished her thought. "So

  you're telling me there's no magical connection?"
  "I came here to talk to him about something we're
looking into," Paige answered. "But he went
outside while I was making tea. I don't know
why. I didn't hear anyone come to the door, and he
didn't say anything. He just went out, and then I
went out to look for him, and that's how I found him."
  "And what are the chances that you'll tell me what
you're looking into?"
  Paige thought about that for a moment. "Umm, slim
to none?"
  "That's what I thought," Darryl said. "I was
thinking about calling you guys the other day. Had a guy
in, complaining that his wife had been abducted
by aliens, and I thought it was right up your alley."
  She let that sink in. It was possible that the case
wasn't connected with the other so-called abductions they
were working on, or with Piper's condition. But just
barely. "I don't suppose his wife was drawn
to workout tapes after her abduction, by any chance?"
  Darryl's jaw dropped open so fast, she almost
broke out laughing. If she wasn't surrounded
by homicide investigators, she probably would have.
"Paige," he said tersely. "How do you know that?"
  "Just call it a hunch," she replied.
  Darryl shook his head rapidly. "Give me
something," he demanded. "This is related, isn't
it?"


  "It might be," she admitted. "It's hard
to know for sure." She told him, briefly, about
Phoebe's reader and her sister, and Dr.
Haywood's past- and the fact that he had been fired
from U.c. Berkeley for his UFO theories. "I
came to him because I needed a lesson on
UFO'S," she explained, pointedly omitting
Piper from the discussion. "What they might be, and how
they might be affecting people."
  "And this is all because of a letter Phoebe got at the
paper?"
  "Yeah, that's what started it."
  He eyed her distrustfully. "You're not leaving out
anything I should know?"
  At least he had given her an out by the way he
phrased the question. "Nope," she said. "Nothing you should
know. But if you find out anything, please give me a
call. Especially anything involving UFO'S or
someone named Meg Winship."
  He started to say something else, but then caught
himself and dropped it. Paige was glad. She
didn't want to have to lie to him. Better to just answer
his questions with the least possible detail and let him
wonder.
  When she left him there, he looked like he was still
wondering.
  Bill Conason wanted a big story.
  More than that, he needed a big story. People were
getting their news from TV and

  the Internet. Newspapers, nearly all of which were
now owned by multinational entertainment conglomerates,
were cutting staff to maximize profits. The Bay
Mirror was no different, he feared. One of these
days, the stockholders would want to see profits
boosted, and the pink slips would start to show up. When that
happened, the reporters who were household names, or
the ones with Pulitzer Prizes under their belts, would
be the ones who stayed.
  The ones who filed small stories, on time,
week in and week out, would be asked to go.
  That's what Bill Conason was, he knew.
Dependable. Steady. His editor knew he could be
counted on to dig up the facts, to get the quotes
right, to analyze the details of the story.
  But that kind of reporting no longer cut it.
Bill understood that. A reporter had to make a
splash now and then. And it had been far too long
since he'd made a splash.
  There were plenty of splashy stories in the city this
week. The bodies south of Market were big news,
and much of Metro's staff was on it. A big
story, but a story to which he had not been assigned.
  Now, though ... now, he thought he was onto
something. Phoebe Halliwell had a story on the
line, he was sure of it. The UFO bit was
crazy, but there was something to it-at least, something to the
fact that so many people seemed to believe in it, all of a
sudden.


  He'd sent her the list of names he'd promised.
She would check them out. And he'd make sure to stay
in touch, to find out what she learned when she
investigated them. Let her do the legwork, then he'd
snake the story out from under her.
  He was the reporter, after all. She was a smart
young woman, easy on the eyes, and people opened up
to her. But he was the one who could string words
into sentences. He'd take her raw material and
make it into front page news.
  He'd make a splash.
  Phoebe took the list of names that Bill sent
her and started at the top. Interestingly, although both
men and women had made the reports, it seemed that the
only people who had apparently been abducted were
women. She wasn't sure what that might mean, but
she was determined to find out.
  The first name on the list was Frieda Westen, who
lived on Telegraph Hill, a couple of
blocks from the bay. Phoebe drove to her apartment
and knocked on the door. A minute later, it was
opened by a harried-looking young man with dark, curly
hair and weary eyes. "Yes?" he said.
  "I'm here about Frieda Westen," Phoebe
explained. She flashed her press credentials,
even though she wasn't acting in her official
capacity.
  The young man barely glanced at it. "What about
her?"

  Phoebe could already hear the familiar beat of a
Meg Winship video. "She's been working out a
lot, hasn't she? Since the abduction."
  The guy nodded and swallowed. "A whole lot."
  "Look," Phoebe said sympathetically. "I
know what you're going through. I'm trying to help. Can
I see her for a minute?" In fact, she wasn't
certain what she hoped to accomplish. But she felt
that by investigating enough of the victims, she might be able
to find some kind of common thread. Since nothing else
had worked, maybe that thread would lead to a solution.
Anything was worth a try, at this point.
  The young man wiggled his shoulders. "I guess,"
he said. "Sure, if you want."
  "Thanks," Phoebe said. He led her into the
apartment, which was furnished in a tastefully
minimalist, modern style. From the living room's
huge windows there was a bay view. This was an
expensive piece of real estate.
  Inside, the music was loud, but Phoebe was
getting used to that. Nor was she surprised to find
Frieda outfitted in workout clothes, exercising in
front of a wall-mounted plasma-screen TV that
showed Meg Winship's video with crystal clarity.
  "Frieda!" the young man shouted. She looked up
from her efforts. "This is ... I'm sorry, what's
your name?"
  Phoebe took it from there, stepping forward with her
hand extended. Frieda, young and


  pretty and obviously fit, reached up
reflexively from her position on the floor and
shook it. The moment their skin touched skin, Phoebe
was shaken by a vision. An array of lights skidded
past below her, whirling frenetically. It was only after
Phoebe let Frieda's hand go that she realized
what she had seen-the city of San Francisco, as
if observed from a very fast helicopter or low-flying
plane.
  Phoebe blew out the breath she had been
inadvertently holding. "Hi," she said. "My name
is Phoebe Halliwell. I understand you had a
strange experience recently."
  "That's what Frank says." Frieda shook her
head, causing her tight blond curls to vibrate.
"I don't know anything about it."
  "And do you know why you've been driven to exercise
with Meg Winship?" Phoebe asked.
  "Well, it's good for me," Frieda replied
quickly. "I'm becoming my ideal me."
  "Maybe you already were your ideal you," Phoebe
suggested gently. "Has that occurred to you?"
  Frieda shook her head again, this time more
decisively. "No, there was room for
improvement," she said. "But I'm getting there."
  Phoebe started to say something else, but
Frieda's eyes were already locked on the screen again,
and she was taking her position for a different exercise.
Phoebe looked at Frank, who shrugged once
more. "This is the way she's

  been," he said. "Ever since it happened. Do you
think it's bad for her?"
  "It's not good," Phoebe stated.
  Phoebe went to another home after that, and another,
working her way down the list. In each one, she found
the same story. Loud Meg Winship videos,
accompanied by exercise to the point of exhaustion.
These women worked out all day, sleeping only in
fits when they collapsed on their exercise mats.
  More ominously, she thought, along the way she saw
numerous posters and handbills-glued to walls,
newspaper boxes, tucked under windshield wipers,
and elsewhere-advertising Meg Winship's coming rally.
And everywhere she went she saw women jogging with
headphones on. She couldn't help suspecting that
they were all listening to Meg Winship. Somehow the
Winship cult had reached epidemic proportions with
nobody noticing. It wasn't just Piper and
Daphne Bodine she and Paige had to rescue.
It was hundreds of women, maybe thousands of them,
all over San Francisco.
  The idea made a shiver of fear run up
Phoebe's back. She hoped she and Paige were
up to the job. Because it didn't look like the Power of
Three would be an option this time.
  When the video ended, Piper decided it was time
for a change of scenery. She had been work-


  ing hard, improving herself, creating her own ideal
her. Her self-confidence had been strengthened along
with her muscles. But she'd been doing it alone, and
there were times, she thought, that sisterhood was called for.
  After tying her hair back in a ponytail and
changing into a sleeveless, ribbed crewneck top,
slightly flared yoga pants, and white track
shoes, she headed out the door. She knew there was a
Meg Winship audio CD out there somewhere that she
could listen to as she ran. But she wasn't even sure
she needed it. Meg's voice echoed in her head,
Meg's signature music reverberated through her
bones.
  The skies over San Francisco were blue and
virtually cloudless, the sun that splashed the city warm
and welcoming. Piper loved her native city, but the
one thing that wore on her from time to time was the weather.
Gray, overcast, or foggy most of the time, she
missed seeing the sun, sometimes for weeks at a
stretch. The winters were hard, not because it turned
cold, though it did, but because it was easy to forget that
spring would bring blue skies and warm days again. As
she jogged today, she reveled in the sunshine on her
cheeks and forehead. A little SPF 45 would have been
a good idea, she thought, but going back home and
putting some on didn't enter her mind.
  After she had run about eight blocks she saw a
house-a typical San Francisco row house,

  with white walls and red trim and flowers thriving in
a window box. Piper had never been to that house, had
no idea who lived there. But she was drawn to it.
She jogged up to the door, rang the bell, and then
ran in place as she waited for an answer. From
inside, she heard familiar music.
  A young lady with strawberry blond hair, wearing
a yellow leotard and red running shorts, opened the
door. She was running in place on the other side.
"Hi," she said happily. "I'm April."
  "I'm Piper," Piper replied, just as
cheerfully. "Good to meet you. Want to run?"
  "Sure," April said. "Just let me get my
CD player."
  Moments later, they were jogging together down the
block. April spotted a Meg Winship rally
poster tacked to the plywood shielding a construction
site, and pointed it out to Piper. "You going?" she
asked.
  "Of course," Piper replied. "Wouldn't miss
it!"
  "Same here," April said. They ran along in
silence for another couple of blocks, until they
saw two women jogging across the street before them.
  "Hey!" Piper called. The two stopped and
jogged in place, waiting for them to catch up. When
Piper and April reached them, they all introduced
themselves, and ran up the hill together.

  Piper was making friends right and left. Turns out
it's easy to make friends, she thought, when you are your
ideal you.
  Nothing to it at all.

  UfllTyl I13Q come to think of the Charmed
Ones as family, but all families had their
squabbles, and this case was about to start one.
Sometimes-no, make that most of the time-those women are
trouble, Darryl thought. Trouble with a capital T and
that rhymes with P and that stands for Piper, Phoebe,
and Paige, any of them, or all three together.
Sure, they had saved the city from dangers he would have
had no clue how to cope with. And they'd helped him
out from time to time. But they played havoc with his clearance
rate, because cases in which they were involved often went
down on the books as unsolved. Since the
perpetrators were not your run-of-the-mill
criminals, the Charmed Ones usually "vanquished"
them, to use their jargon. And there was no box to check
on the police forms for that. So Darryl was constantly
on the edge of trouble-closing some



  major cases, but then leaving more officially
unsolved than any other detective in the
department.
  So when he'd seen Paige at the Haywood
crime scene, a headache had started to build that
extended to the corners of his jaw. He'd finally fought
his way clear of the last batch of paperwork and caught
a new case, and a Charmed One had beaten him to it.
She'd been at the scene when Dr. Haywood had
been murdered, although she swore she hadn't seen
anything. He believed her-Paige was no liar. The
only people she had seen in the vicinity had been some
female joggers. She had given him a
description, though it was vague, and he'd sent some
uniformed officers to scour the neighborhood for them.
But they'd come back within twenty minutes,
discouraged. Women were jogging in pairs and groups
all over the city- Darryl knew that was true because
he'd seen at least two dozen of them on his way
to the Haywood house-and without more to go on, there was no
way to isolate the ones Paige had only
half-noticed.
  Which made things more difficult, but didn't bring the
investigation to a halt. There were only so many reasons
an old man would be stabbed to death. The nature of the
murder made it seem like an acquaintance crime-a
friend or neighbor, with some powerful emotion driving
them. A random murderer would have been less likely

  to stab, and the killing would have been done in conjunction
with some other crime, like robbery. That hadn't been the
case here. The man had been stabbed, quietly and
efficiently, in the few moments between when Paige
heard him go outside and the time she got there.
  And the fact that Haywood went outside at all
supported his theory. Unless he had just stepped out for
his mail or a newspaper or something, he
probably would not have done so had there not been someone
he knew summoning him. If a stranger was out there,
he'd have been more likely to call out to Paige before
he went, or to stay at the door and talk from there.
He was an old man, frail, and probably not
especially prone to taking chances with his physical
well-being. A knife-wielding person in his yard,
or even just a stranger with a concealed knife, would have
spurred him to caution, not carelessness.
  Darryl walked back into the house-not quite one of those
overstuffed firetraps that crazy people sometimes lived
in, but on the way to becoming one-nodding to the uniformed
officer guarding the door. The officer, middle-aged
andwitha paunch that threatened to overlap his belt, gave
him a casual nod in return. "Not as bad as
some, is it?" he said.
  The comment brought Darryl up short. "What do you
mean?"
  "Well, you know. Stabbing's usually a pretty
messy way to do it. This one, though, it's pretty


  clean. Yard soaked up most of it, right?"
  Darryl fixed the officer with an angry glare.
"Dr. Haywood is a person," he pointed out.
"Unfortunately deceased, but a person nonetheless,
and deserving of your respect. Particularly at this
moment."
  The big cop wilted under his stare. "Yeah . . .
yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Guess I let myself
lose sight of that sometimes."
  "Don't let it happen again," Darryl said.
He brushed past the man and went inside. The cop
was right-it looked like Haywood never watered his
lawn; except for fog, that blood was probably the
only liquid it had tasted in months. But still, you
don't say that kind of thing out loud.
  The acquaintance theory still made the most sense
to Darryl. The hard parj: would be figuring out who
knew the ex-professor, and who might have something
against him worth killing over. In most homes, there
would be an address book, usually in a desk or
near a telephone. In this one, though, Darryl
couldn't even spot the phone. And there were so many
books that trying to find one small address book
would be worse than looking for a needle in a
haystack-it would be more like seeking out one particular
piece of hay among all the rest.
  The crime scene investigators had pretty much
given up on the inside already. There was no indication
that whoever killed Dr. Haywood had been in the
house, and based on Paige's

  ChApDo
  account, Haywood had definitely stepped
outside to meet his assailant. They had combed the
area around the doorway carefully, tagging and bagging
everything they'd found, from stray pieces of lint
to hairs to a piece of a cracker wedged in the
corner. The doorjamb still showed the fine powder used
to reveal fingerprints. The real crime scene, though,
had been determined to be the front yard.
Footprints had been identified in the
dirt-female, relatively small, athletic
shoes, which supported Paige's story of the
joggers-and Haywood's death had been almost
instantaneous. Whoever had driven the knife into him
had known what she was doing. Most stabbing victims
died slowly, as the lifeblood trickled from their
body, but his heart had been ruptured and he'd
fallen at once, bleeding out in just moments.
  Left alone in the house, Darryl tried to find
a starting point, an angle from which to consider Dr.
Carter Haywood's life and death. Paige had
been vague about why she had come here, but it had to do with
UFO'S and some investigation she and her sisters were
working on. And somehow it tied into workout videos, which was
a leap of logic that he couldn't quite make. But the
guy who had come in to file a complaint about his
abducted wife-Mr. Haas-had said that when he
came home and found her, she'd been exercising to a
video that he didn't know she owned. And Paige
had mentioned Meg


  Winship, whose name Darryl knew from her popular
books and videos, as well as the ubiquitous
posters advertising her upcoming rally. She had also
told him about Dr. Haywood's dismissal from
U.c. Berkeley over his insistence that UFO'S were
real.
  All of which made UFO'S seem like the obvious
starting point. But having reached that conclusion, Darryl
started poking around in the books that covered nearly every
surface, and found that at least half of them were about
UFO'S. He had no idea so many books on the
subject existed. How could all these people write about
something for which there's not a scintilla of hard evidence?
he wondered. But then, he had always been a
practical man, as most detectives were. He
hadn't even wanted to believe the Halliwells were
witches until it had been proven to him beyond a
shadow of a doubt.
  Darryl tried to stay relatively well informed.
Another hallmark of a good detective-he might
need to make connections between disparate ideas at any
point, and the more he knew about the world around him, the
easier that would be. So he knew the basics about;
UFO'S. There had been sightings throughout recorded
history, but the real hysteria hadn't come about until
after the first reported sighting in the United States,
in the late 1940's. Most sightings could be
easily explained away: weather balloons,
kites, bright stars, methane gas, unusual cloud
formations.

  But not all were so simply dismissed. The United
States Air Force had spent decades
investigating UFO'S, in a classified report
called Project Blue Book. The report had
concluded that UFO'S did not constitute a threat
to national security, but it had not successfully
explained what they were. UFO theorists pointed
to "evidence" of alien encounters in Roswell,
New Mexico, and the remote Nevada military
installation referred to as "Area 51." Roswell,
in particular, had been the scene of a widely
reported UFO crash, and the military there
announced that they'd recovered pieces of a flying
saucer. Very quickly, Darryl remembered, they'd
changed their story, claiming that it had, in fact,
been a weather balloon and not a saucer at all.
  So people-some reputable, others not so much-had been
seeing strange objects in the skies for
centuries, and with increasing frequency in the last
several decades. That made sense, Darryl thought,
when one considered that since the latter half of the
twentieth century, the world's population had boomed,
so there were simply more people and therefore fewer events would go
unwitnessed.
  Darryl himself was not a believer in UFO'S, but
until about six years ago, he hadn't believed in
magic, either. So who knew what was possible? He
was determined to keep an open mind. But he would need
some scientific proof, or at least the evidence of
his own senses, before he


  would conclusively agree that extraterrestrial
visitors existed.
  Which led to one possible theory of Dr.
Haywood's death. He had, according to Paige,
trumpeted the existence of UFO'S for years. If
he was on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, of being
able to prove his theories, and if the
extraterrestrials themselves were aware of this and felt
threatened, they might have killed him to silence him.
  Darryl chuckled softly. That was a theory to keep
in his vest pocket-well, metaphorically, at
least, since he didn't wear a vest-but not one
to share with the department brass. It wasn't one that he
could proceed on, but something to keep at the back of his
mind as he looked for a more mundane solution to the
crime.
  Leaving the downstairs behind, he climbed up to the
second floor and found Dr. Haywood's
bedroom. More of the same. Haywood seemed
to scratch notes on any slip of paper
available, from receipts to the envelope for his water
bill to the back of a postcard from his eye doctor
reminding him to make an appointment. The notes were
meaningless to anyone but Dr. Haywood himself,
Darryl concluded after several minutes of study.
He couldn't translate "74 mim docs 323
equals txt," which he found scrawled on the margin
of a newspaper's advertising supplement, but at
least he could read the letters and numbers. On many of the
other notes, he

  couldn't even make that much headway.
  The books here were pretty much the same as those
downstairs, as well. Books on UFO'S, some
on other paranormal subjects, and others on
topics ranging from philosophy to physics. All
non-fiction, or at least presented as such. There were
even books on the bed itself, though only covering
half of it, presumably leaving the other half
available for Haywood to sleep on.
  It was when Darryl examined these that he found what
he considered to be the most telling item so far-a
book called The Winship Way, written by one
Meg Winship. He laughed out loud when he
spotted it, then silenced himself before the uniformed cop
downstairs heard him. Drawing it from its place beneath
a stack of other titles, he looked at the
picture on the cover: Meg Winship in workout
gear, fit and healthy.
  It seemed a strange book for someone like
Haywood to own, though. He didn't seem
to exercise, and at his age and general condition, one of
Winship's workouts would probably have been fatal.
Darryl flipped the book open and on the title
page, saw a handwritten inscription.
  "To my favorite prof," it said, "Carter
Haywood, mentor and friend." Below that was a
signature that was unmistakably Meg
Winship's.
  Now, Darryl thought, we're getting somewhere.
  When Phoebe returned to Halliwell
Manor, it was quiet.


  That was unexpected. The house was almost never
utterly silent, and she had fully expected
Piper to be blaring her Meg Winship video in the
living room. "Piper?" she called. "Paige?"
  There was no answer.
  "Leo?"
  This time, at least, there was a response. Leo
orbed into the room and stood beside her. "Where's
Piper?" he inquired.
  "That's what I was going to ask you."
  "I don't know," he said. "I've been at the
club, supervising the plumbers because Piper was so
wrapped up in her workout. I thought she was still here."
  "She was when I left," Phoebe said.
  "What about Paige?"
  "She was going to go back to see her old
professor again," Phoebe told him. "To try
to get some more concrete information out of him."
  Leo looked a little nervous, Phoebe thought.
"Do you sense that Piper's in any danger?" she
asked.
  "No. Wherever she is, she feels safe," he
insisted. "But that doesn't mean she is safe. We
thought she was okay after the ritual last night, but then
today she was back at it. Since she hasn't been
acting like herself lately, we can't take anything for
granted."
  Phoebe nodded, but wasn't sure she totally
agreed. Yes, his wife was missing. But that might have
been a good thing-it might mean that

  she'd overcome this fixation with the exercise video
and gone shopping or something. "I'll call her
cell. Maybe she went to the club and you guys
missed each other when you orbed."
  "Or I could orb back and see," Leo
suggested. He crossed to the window, anxiously
looking for his wife.
  "The club was just a suggestion, Leo. She could have
gone shopping, or-was
  Leo cut her off. "Her car's still here," he
pointed out. "Wherever she went, she went on foot."
  "So maybe she just wanted some air," Phoebe
countered, getting a little nervous herself now. She
crossed to a phone and dialed the number of Piper's
cell. It rang several times, but there was no
answer. She reported as much to Leo.
  "Try Paige," he said.
  While she was dialing, though, the front door
opened.
  "Piper?" Leo caUed.
  "Paige," Paige replied. "Where's
Piper?"
  "Piper's not here," Phoebe explained. "We
were hoping maybe you knew where she was."
  "No clue," Paige said. She came into the
living room, and Phoebe was surprised by her
breathless expression. Her cheeks were rosy- okay,
Phoebe thought, rosier than usual-with excitement.
"But you guys, listen. Dr. Haywood was
murdered, while I was at his house."
  "Murdered?" Phoebe echoed, shocked at this
turn of events. "Are you okay?"


  "I'm fine," Paige assured her. "I was
inside, he was outside."
  Phoebe regarded her sister closely, and she
did look okay. Phoebe was concerned-first Piper
had gone workout-crazy, and now Paige was mixed up
in a murder. The Charmed Ones faced all kinds of
dangers, all the time, and Phoebe knew Paige
could take care of herself. But still . . . things seemed
to be spiraling toward trouble. And when that happened,
there was usually a demon behind it. But there was no hint
of a demon at this point. Phoebe's mind tried
to connect any dots she could imagine. What if the
murder was somehow related to whatever was going on with
Piper? Sure, it was a stretch-but stranger things
had happened.
  Now she was just as anxious as Leo had been.
Paige described her afternoon-the visit with Dr.
Haywood, the murder-and the fact that the only people she
had seen in the neighborhood were a couple of
apparently innocent joggers.
  "Joggers?" she repeated when Paige described
them. "Were they listening to workout tapes?"
  "I don't know," Paige said. "Maybe."
  "Phoebe, the Bay Area is a pretty
health-conscious region," Leo reminded her. "You
can't automatically be suspicious of anyone who
works out in any way."
  "I'm not," Phoebe objected. "I'm just...
looking for connections. Common threads. Just in

  CRAMMED
  case. Isn't that what the police do when a
murder is committed?"
  Leo was peering out the window again, but he turned
around and crossed his arms over his chest. "I
guess," he said. "But I'd know if anything had
happened to Piper."
  "But Piper's definitely got something going on,
Leo. It may be jamming your Whitelighter
radar," Phoebe offered. "And Paige was on the
scene of a murder. I know there's no definite
link, but that doesn't mean I'm not a little freaked
out."
  "Well, I am too," Leo admitted.
"Especially with Piper not answering her phone, and
leaving her car here." He pressed his lips together in
a thin line, and a frown wrinkled his brow. "Whether
she thinks she needs us or not, I think we need to do
something."
  "Okay, so where do we go from here?" Paige
asked.
  "Backward," Phoebe replied.
  Paige gave her a quizzical look.
  "The last time we saw her she was watching that
stupid tape," Phoebe declared. "I think we
need to pay a visit to Meg Winship."

  were 3I3113I W3S one word
to describe Meg Winship's estate. As a
journalist, Bill Conason made a mental
note in case he had the opportunity to describe
the estate in a story. Since meeting with Phoebe,
he'd been snooping around the UFO story. He
didn't know what she knew, and she obviously
wasn't talking. But he now believed there was more to it,
he had become convinced, and somehow it all tied back
to Meg Winship.
  Job stability was very important to him. Earlier
in his career, it hadn't mattered so much. He'd worked
in TV, in radio, and at newspapers in big
markets and small. He'd moved around when he had
to-Philadelphia, Des Moines, Saint
Petersburg, Houston, finally San
Francisco. There had been a kind of excitement,
almost a romance, to it all. The nomadic newsman,
going wherever there was a gig or a story.

  Eventually, he'd begun to realize that he
wasn't exactly leaving friends in his wake. He was
either fired from every job, or he had quit. Every gig
he'd left behind had narrowed his possibilities for
future employment. As other people in the business
moved around, too, his reputation spread even
to places he had never been. Recently, he'd
sent out a couple of feelers, just in case things
soured here in San Francisco, and he'd been
turned down flat.
  He had been broke before, in the earliest days of
his career. He hadn't liked it one bit. But that had
been a lot of years ago. Now, he was older.
He had credit card bills to pay, and his rent was a
lot more than the third-floor walkup he'd had
then, and he was on the hook for some gambling debts
he should have known better than to get behind on. Bill
wasn't a guy who could afford to lose his job, but
he was a guy who kept an ear close to the ground,
and he knew that job security in the newspaper
business was as bad as it had ever been.
  Making a real story out of tabloid fodder like a
UFO invasion would be hard work. But this was the kind of
story that would cancel out a lot of bad rumors, a
lot of bland reporting. It's a star-making story,
he was convinced. And he wanted it as badly as he'd
ever wanted anything in his life.
  He had parked across the street from the gate
to Winship's world. It was on a lane that felt


  rural, even though Sausalito was just five
minutes away. The gate was shaded by a giant
willow tree that must have been a hundred years old;
behind the ten-foot stucco wall he could see towering
redwoods. From the gate, which wasn't guarded but had
an electronic call box, a winding gravel
drive led up a grassy hill. The drive
disappeared now and again in shallow valleys, but it
didn't matter-its ultimate destination was easily
seen, commanding the top of the hill. Meg Winship's
house looked like something the old kings of France might
have lived in, on the banks of the Loire. The
walls were pale yellow, the color of morning
sunlight. The mansard roof gleamed, a patchwork of
multicolored slates. Its windows were large and
arched; Bill was sure that Meg could see the bay, and
probably San Francisco itself, from them. A
million-dollar view, that was for sure.
  From his own apartment Bill could see the wall of the
building across the alley, brick that had been painted
white once but then was never painted again, stained with
grease from the Chinese restaurant downstairs,
worn by wind and weather. Not that he resented Meg
Winship's millions-she had earned it, he
figured, and if he could have come up with a gimmick that
sold like hers did, he'd be right there on the
hilltop next to her.
  But he had a newsman's suspicious nature,
so he figured that anyone who had made such fast

  money probably had buried some skeletons
somewhere along the way. He wasn't ready to confront
her yet-he wanted to do some more digging before he did
that. But he'd wanted this glimpse of her natural
habitat before he really began turning over rocks.
He wanted to know who he'd be dealing with. Seeing her
home-her palace-told him all he felt he
needed to know.
  Meg Winship was filthy rich. She lived like the
villain in a James Bond movie. And all
over the city, people who had apparently been abducted
by flying saucers were turning to her workout videos like
she was some kind of messiah.
  Bill was no James Bond, but if he'd
absorbed nothing else in journalism school, he
had learned that journalists have a responsibility
to stand up to the powerful. He would do that now. Meg
Winship's wealth had made her powerful; the connection
to the UFO'S made her a story.
  The only thing Bill had to worry about now was
Phoebe Halliwell getting to it first. He took
one last look at the gate and the big walls, and then
put his car into gear and drove away.
  Paige and Phoebe stepped up to the front
gate. It was wide enough for two cars to pass each
other going through-maybe two city buses, for that
matter-and it looked like the kind of gate that should be
guarded by armed men. Probably vicious dogs on
the other side, too, Paige thought. But there was no
one in sight.

  ui
  "Here's an intercom," Phoebe pointed out.
Paige reached past her and pushed the button. Almost
immediately, a voice responded, electronics
removing all character and even disguising the speaker's
gender.
  "May I help you?"
  "Yes," Phoebe said. "We'd ... urn ...
like to see Meg Winship."
  "I'm sorry, Ms. Winship is not accepting
visitors."
  Phoebe and Paige locked eyes. Then
Paige leaned closer to the box. "Look, this is
Phoebe Halliwell from the Bay Mirror, and
if we can't see Meg Winship, there's going to be
trouble."
  "Paige!" Phoebe said sharply. "What
trouble?"
  "Okay, not trouble," Paige said toward the
intercom box. "But I could potentially embarrass
Ms. Winship in the paper. Or... or if Ms.
Winship ever has a personal problem and needs
advice, I wouldn't give it."
  "One moment, please," the voice said.
  "See?" Paige said. "You have to get tough with people
sometime. Throw your weight around."
  The box clicked once, indicating that the connection
had been broken.
  "Maybe I don't have as much weight to throw as
you'd like to think," Phoebe lamented.
  They were not going to take that as a brush-off, though.
They were prepared to camp out in Meg Winship's
driveway until she sicced the

  dogs on them, or came out herself. She had
to leave the house eventually.
  Static came from the electronic box,
surprising them. Then the voice returned. "Ms.
Winship can spare five minutes. Do you have a car?"
  Paige looked toward where they'd parked it, on the
shoulder of the country lane. "Yeah, we'll get it.
Just give us two minutes."
  "Very well," the voice said, and then cut off again.
With a buzzing sound, the gate began to open.
  Paige had waited in many places in her life,
but not many as luxurious as this one. Still, fancy
wallpaper, beautiful Italian tile floor, and
antique French furniture aside, waiting was
waiting, and at a certain point it was just downright
rude. Besides which, while the furniture was lovely,
the chair she'd been shown to was hard and rigid and
absolutely straight, made only for people composed of
strict right angles instead of soft curves. There was
no way to get comfortable in it.
  After trying for a while, she gave up and stood,
wandering over to a bookshelf. She and Phoebe had
been left in some kind of den, decorated with an
antique desk that seemed never to have been used, a
couch, a couple of chairs, one of those huge old
globes that showed what the world would look like if it were
all sepia tones, and some bookshelves. There
weren't actually


  many books on the shelves, though. Of the ones that were
there, most were multiple copies of Meg
Winship's own titles. The Winship Workout, The
Winship Way, and Your Ideal You, in hardcover and
paperback editions. On the walls, in ornate
gold frames, were photographs of Meg
Winship, including ones from the covers of the books and
others from their interior pages: Meg in skimpy
workout wear that emphasized the firmness of her
stomach, the musculature of her arms and shoulders,
the power of her calves and thighs.
  "This woman is kind of pleased with herself, isn't
she?" Paige asked quietly.
  "Wouldn't you be?" Phoebe replied. "She
looks great."
  "Yeah, well, we look pretty good, too, and
yet we don't decorate our home
exclusively with photos of us."
  Since being brought to the den by a female employee
in a traditional business suit, they hadn't seen
a living soul. Bored and more than a little annoyed,
Paige went into the hallway. The decor here was
similar to that in the den, except the walls were lined with
massive oil paintings, and Meg Winship was not the
subject of any of them. They looked like
originals, and though Paige didn't know that much about
Renaissance art, she was pretty sure they were the
real deal.
  From a room farther down the hall, she heard
feminine voices in hushed conversation. Boredom

  stirred curiosity. Walking as quietly as she
could manage in her pointy kitten heels, Paige
eased toward the open doorway and peeked inside.
  Seven women were standing at long tables, working on a
kind of assembly line. The one on the near end would
open a colorful paper folder and put one item in
it, then pass it on to the next woman. Each
woman would add something else from stacks in front of
her-photos of Meg Winship, press releases,
a photocopied interview. The last woman in line
was taking the folders and arranging them neatly in large
cardboard boxes.
  Paige hadn't really noticed any of the women,
beyond their appointed tasks, until the folder stacker
made a familiar flip of her ponytail.
  It was Piper!
  Paige hurried back down the hall, again trying
to be quiet. "Phoebe!" she stage-whispered from the
doorway to the den. Her sister was standing restlessly at
a front window. "Piper's here!"
  Phoebe spun around quickly. "She's here?
Where?"
  "Down the hall," Paige answered. "Working.
Stuffing bags."
  Phoebe crossed the big den, and together they went
back to the other room, this time not worrying about making
noise. Instead of peeking, they just walked into the
workroom. "Piper," Phoebe said firmly.
"What are you doing here?"


  Piper put a bag into the big box and then turned
to face them. "Hi, Phoebes. Hi, Paige."
  "Piper," Paige said. "You didn't answer
her question."
  Piper looked at them both with a half-smile on
her face, as if the question had been too silly
to warrant an answer. "Working," she said. "Guys,
these are my sisters, Phoebe and Paige."
  "Hi, Phoebe and Paige," the other women
said, almost in unison. Though they varied in age and
body type, they were all dressed in workout clothes.
j
  "Working on what?" Phoepe demanded.
  "We're stuffing bags," Piper said casually.
"For attendees of Meg's rally and seminar tomorrow."
  "Hundreds will be there," one of the women said.
  "We're stuffing a thousand bags," another
announced. "But I don't think that'll be enough."
  "Meg is so wonderful," a fourth said. "It's
going to be such an exciting day."
  "Yeah," Phoebe said, not sounding convinced.
"Piper, we need to talk to you."
  "Okay," Piper said, bending over to put the
next bag away.
  "Alone," Phoebe clarified. "Not here."
  "Oh, I'm sorry, Phoebe. I'm much too
busy for that. A thousand bags is a lot of bags.
And we might need more." Piper's voice is
unnaturally cheerful, Paige thought. Has she been
brainwashed, somehow? Is that what this is all about?

  "So I've heard," Phoebe said. "But what
about the club? The plumbing problems?"
  "Leo can take care of that. Right now, this is my
top priority. And if you really need to talk, we
can talk on Sunday," Piper continued. "After the
rally."
  "Umm, Sunday might be too late," Paige
put in. "Today would be better."
  "She said Sunday," one of the other women
snapped. They all turned to glare at Phoebe and
Paige.
  "Sorry, but she's our sister," Phoebe
insisted. "Piper, now."
  "We're all sisters," Piper replied. The
smile hadn't left her face, even though the other
women all looked like they were ready for a fight.
"Sisters in our empowerment."
  Phoebe gave Piper an ingratiating smile.
"Can we talk in private for a second?" she
asked. "Maybe in another room?"
  Paige understood immediately. To orb Piper out of
here, they had to get her away from these other women,
someplace where they wouldn't be observed. Piper
shrugged, glancing at her co-workers. Some of the other
women scowled, as if they didn't like the idea, but
no one moved to stop her.
  As soon as they were all out in the empty
hallway, Phoebe grabbed Piper's hand, and
Paige's. "Orb us out of here," she whispered.
  "Got it," Paige returned with a nod. She


  orbed back to the car, parked in the big circular
driveway in front of the house. But when they
arrived, she and Phoebe were alone.
  "Where's Piper?" Phoebe asked.
  "I don't know," Paige said.
  "She must have let go of my hand! Go back."
  Paige tried to comply, but immediately felt a
sensation that she guessed was not unlike ramming her
head at full speed into a large, flat rock.
She staggered and fell down on the pavement.
  Phoebe was looking at her querulously.
  "What?" Paige demanded. "I'll do it, just
hold on." She tried again to prb back into the
house, but was thrown back again. "Ow!" she complained.
  "What's the matter?"
  Paige rubbed her forehead. "Does this look
flat to you?"
  "Paige, what's going on? Why aren't you
inside?"
  "I don't know!" Paige grumped. "I can't
orb back in. It's like there's some kind of force
field."
  "You have to get Piper!" Phoebe reminded her.
  Duh, I didn't hit my head that hard,
Paige thought. "I know that. I'm trying, I just
can't get through."
  "There must be magic protecting the house,"
Phoebe said. But how? Was Meg Winship a
witch? Is that how she was controlling these women?

  "I think so," Paige said. It bothered her that
she could orb out but not back in. She hated to be
frustrated at anything, but especially at
witchcraft, at which-although she'd had a late
start-she believed she had become pretty good.
  "I guess there's only one alternative,"
Phoebe said.
  "What is it?"
  Phoebe nodded toward the front door. "We
knock."
  Paige agreed. "Oh, yeah. That'll work."
  In fact, the door opened before they'd even had a
chance to touch it. This time, though, they weren't met by a
single, business suit-clad woman, but by four
tall, muscular women dressed in pink sports
bras, jogging shorts, and sneakers. Looking at their
powerful physiques- broad shoulders, massive
upper arms, corded thighs-Paige felt very
small.
  Phoebe could take them, Paige thought. Between her
martial arts skills and her levitation powers, even
four Amazons didn't stand a chance. And these
weren't real Amazons anyway, just figurative
Amazons. She noticed that Phoebe had tensed,
and believed her sister was probably weighing the odds
as well. The women were smiling at them, but the mood
had changed. Confrontation was in the air.
  "Ms. Winship is ready to see you now," one of
them announced.

  COU-LU have spent the rest of the year searching
Carter Haywood's house without finding anything
useful. Instead, he assigned that task to a couple
of uniformed officers and took a trip across the bay,
to Berkeley, one of the few places around where
hippies were not an endangered species. A few
minutes in the administrative office of U.c.
Berkeley pointed him toward Dr. Mark Arendt,
who had once shared an office with Haywood.
Arendt looked like a hippie himself, one who had
kept the long hair and beard, anyway, although he
wore a red, patterned tie with his blue chambray
work shirt and corduroy pants. Working-class
hero, thought Darryl. Probably popular with the
coeds.
  "Help you?" he asked when Darryl entered the
office. "You're not a student."
  "No, I'm not," Darryl said. He guessed that

  Arendt had been glad to lose his slob of an
officemate-his space was immaculate, books
neatly arranged on shelves, papers tucked away
in filing cabinets. On his desk was an open
laptop computer, a telephone, a coffee mug
containing pens and pencils, and nothing else.
"Actually, I'm a police detective from San
Francisco."
  "Little outside your jurisdiction here," the
professor commented.
  "That's right," Darryl admitted. "I'm just here
looking for some information about Dr. Carter Haywood.
I understand you used to share an office with him."
  Arendt nodded. "Yes. A few years back.
He got mixed up in an unfortunate situation, and
I ended up with a private office. Silver lining,
right?"
  Darryl indicated an empty guest chair.
"Mind if I sit?"
  "Knock yourself out," Arendt offered. "Don't know
how much help I can be, though. I haven't talked
to Carter since he left the school."
  "You're not going to, then," Darryl said. "He
was murdered earlier today."
  Arendt's face fell, the frown accentuating his
age. He was much younger than Haywood, but still in his
fifties, Darryl guessed. There was as much gray
as brown in his beard and ponytail. "I'm really
sorry to hear that. You know who did it?"
  "Still working on that," Darryl admitted. "I


  was hoping you could tell me a little more about why he
left the school, what exactly happened back
then."
  Arendt settled back in his old wooden desk
chair. "I guess it's okay to talk about it now,"
he said. "Considering it's not likely to upset
Carter any."
  "Was he secretive about it?" Darryl asked.
If he had been, then that might have been a source of
conflict-in the course of trying to protect his
secret, he'd made some enemy who'd ended up
killing him.
  Arendt shook his head slowly. "I guess his
whole problem was that he wasn't secretive enough,"
he said. "I never liked to blab about him, you know.
But he didn't have sense enough to keep quiet when he
should have."
  "About what?" Darryl prodded. He knew what
Paige had told him, but her details had been
sparse.
  The professor steepled his hands on his desk and
rested his forehead on his fingertips. "I don't know
how much you know," he began, "but Carter was pretty
seriously into flying saucers, extraterrestrials,
all that stuff."
  "I've heard that," Darryl said.
  "Yeah, he didn't try to hide it. It was bad
enough when he used to talk about it in class- going on
about aliens among us, mysterious abductions, you
know-but what finally finished his career were the experiments
he conducted.

  Borrowing equipment from astronomy, physics, and
photography departments. He absolutely
believed that there were flying saucers around, and that the
only reason they weren't better known was that people
refused to believe in them. When he had concrete
evidence, they'd all come over to his point of
view."
  "So what happened?"
  Arendt smiled. "As always, he couldn't keep his
mouth shut. The administration wanted to look the other
way, but when he involved a student in the
experiments, they couldn't ignore him anymore.
Pulling crazy stunts yourself is one thing, but enlisting
student help is beyond acceptable, I guess."
  "And so he got fired," Darryl guessed.
  "That's right. I guess the administration was
worried about parents freaking out, pulling their kids,
demanding tuition refunds."
  "All of which would be frowned upon."
  "You got it. When you put the tuition money in
danger, action gets taken. Carter was out before he
could turn around."
  "Did he have any enemies that you know of?"
Darryl asked. "Perhaps his ideas personally upset
someone?"
  "Not anyone who'd be ticked off enough to kill him,"
Arendt said. "People mostly liked him-or, at least,
you know, tolerated him. He was the archetypal
absentminded professor. Very, very good in his
specialties. He just allowed


  himself to get carried away by these theories of
his-crackpot theories, to put it mildly-to the
point that they ruined his life."
  "And maybe ended it," Darryl added.
  "I suppose," Arendt said. "He published a
little after he left here, but just lunatic fringe stuff,
you know? No one in the academic community took him
seriously anymore."
  "One more thing," Darryl said, "and then I'll get
out of your hair. Do you remember a student of his
named Meg Winship?"
  Mark Arendt straightened up, his face brightening.
"Of course," he said. "I mean, even if she
hadn't become famous, I'd remember her.
Guess I didn't mention it, but the student who
got involved in Carter's experiments? That was
Meg. When he got fired, she took it hard.
Quit her T.a. job; changed her major. I
think that's when she started in on the fitness kick,
exchanging physical achievement for academic.
She dropped out; never graduated. But hey, who can
argue it didn't pay off for her? She must make more
in a year than any dozen philosophers in their
whole lifetimes."
  "You're probably right," Darryl said. He had
known that Meg and Carter Haywood were
acquaintances. But the fact that Meg had worked with him
in his UFO research put a different spin on
things, cementing the connection- although he still couldn't
figure out quite how- between the current rash of
abductions and the

  strange Meg Winship mania that gripped the
city. "Did you know her very well?" he asked.
  "She was around a lot, I guess. And Carter
talked about her plenty."
  "What do you remember?"
  Arendt tugged at his beard for a moment.
"Scholarship student," he said. "Dirt poor,
I think. Her parents died when she was very young,
Carter said, and she was raised in a succession of
foster homes. I don't remember any
particularly awful stories about them, but she was left
essentially penniless. When she got into school, she
didn't know anybody, and I can't recall her ever
bringing any friends around when she came to see Carter.
I think she was a loner, kind of sad, and she
latched on to Carter as if he were her salvation. There
was one morning that he was sick and didn't make it
to campus, and she sat around the office for hours, like
she just didn't have anyplace else to go."
  He fell silent. "Is that it?" Darryl
pressed.
  "All I can remember in any detail,"
Arendt answered. "I just have an impression of a kind
of mopey girl. I felt sorry for her. Anyone
who would hero-worship Carter like that, I thought, must have
a pretty empty life." He smiled. "Not
anymore, huh? I guess she's got everything she
needs now."
  "You're the philosophy professor," Darryl
observed. "Does anyone ever have everything she needs?
Or believe that she does?"


  Arendt jabbed a finger at the detective.
"Point to you," he said. "You ever want to hang up
the badge, maybe you've got a career here."
  Darryl smiled. "I don't think so." He
thanked Arendt and walked out onto the campus,
crowded as late afternoon classes let out. Somehow,
he had to figure out what bond still held Winship and
Haywood years after he had ceased to be her teacher.
And he definitely had to call the Halliwells and
let them know about this twist. Taking his cell phone from
an inside pocket of his blazer, he dialed their
home.
  No one answered. He left a brief
message, then closed the phone, determined to try
again later.
  "I understand that you've seen Piper," Meg
Winship said. Phoebe and Paige had been led
back to the den, where Meg had taken a seat behind the
desk. Phoebe, still steaming, had chosen to stand, but
Paige sat down again in the chair she'd had when they
were first put in here to wait. The four enormous women
had left them alone after everyone was situated.
  "That's right," Phoebe said, unconsciously
clenching her fists. "And we plan to take her with us
when we go."
  Meg smiled the thousand-megawatt smile that
graced her book and video covers. Her blond
hair was short and neatly coiffed, her tan pants
and jacket outfit casually expensive.

  Understated gold jewelry adorned her wrists,
neck, and ears. She was a little younger than Paige,
but she had the self-confidence and poise of a
successful woman decades older, the kind who could
run a corporate empire. "But, why?" Meg
asked. "As you've seen, Piper's perfectly
well and happy here. She's doing valuable work,
helping to prepare for my seminar tomorrow. In a very short
time she's become an extremely valued asset."
  "So she's working for you?" Paige demanded. "Is
that what you're trying to tell us?"
  "On a strictly volunteer basis," Meg
answered. "I have very little paid staff. Luckily, there
are so many women who have found their lives improved
by my work and want to do whatever they can to give something
back."
  "I'll bet," Paige grumped.
  Meg looked both Halliwells up and down.
"You're both in very good shape," she said. "Have you
tried my program?"
  "No," Phoebe said. "So not interested."
  Meg glanced toward the ceiling, then back at
them, as if trying to get a handle on some sudden
anger. "I have to confess, I really don't understand
your antagonism. Your sister, as I pointed out,
is perfectly fine. She's free to leave anytime
she chooses. I do appreciate her help, and would
love for her to stay on until after the seminar, but
it's entirely up to her."
  "Then we'll all be going now," Paige said.


  "Note, I said 'up to her."" Meg reminded
them. "She's an adult, perfectly in control of
her own faculties, correct?"
  "Yes, of course," Paige answered.
  "If you were to try to remove her against her will, that
would be kidnapping," Meg pointed out.
  "Excuse me, but she's our sister!" Phoebe
snapped.
  "Indeed. And, as mentioned, an adult. She can
make her own decisions."
  "And if she's being held here against her will, isn't
that kidnapping too?" Phoebe asked.
  "You're free to ask her," Meg parried. She
pushed a button on her phone, and a voice
answered immediately.
  "Yes, Ms. Winship?"
  "Please ask Piper to come in," Meg said.
  "Right away," the voice replied.
  Phoebe was convinced that there was some kind of
brainwashing going on-that somehow, Meg's videos
carried a subliminal suggestion or something that had
entrapped her sister, as well as thousands of other
local women. And somehow, it tied in to the UFO
abductions that had been occurring, although how? Piper
had never been "abducted." Meg looked
perfectly human, not alien in the least, and
Phoebe couldn't figure out how the two matched
up.
  Phoebe's mind was whirling, trying to figure out
how Meg could have magically blocked the

  house-and, more importantly, why. And what was
she? A demon? Could there really be aliens, and did
they have some sort of magical powers? That was really not
an option, as far as Phoebe was concerned, but it
angered her to know that they couldn't simply enter and
take Piper out at any time. But the fact was,
they were here now, and they weren't leaving without their sister.
  The same four women who had answered the door
escorted Piper in. Piper looked just as she had
in the workroom: perfectly happy and relaxed.
  "Okay," Phoebe whispered to Paige. "Orb
us all out of here."
  She saw Paige tense, and then shake a little in
her chair. "I can't," Paige-said. "Still
blocked."
  Phoebe decided to try a different tactic.
She turned back to Piper. "Come on, sis.
We've got to take you home now. Leo is
worried sick about you."
  "He'll be fine," Piper said, the smile still
plastered to her face. "He's a big boy."
  "Yeah, big and tough," Paige pointed out.
"If he finds out you wouldn't come home, he'll be
here in a flash, and he won't be happy."
  "Are you satisfied?" Meg asked them.
"Piper, do you want to leave with them, or not?"
  "I still have too much to do," Piper answered. "We
have to finish getting ready for tomorrow."
  "And after tomorrow," Meg pressed. "Then will you go
home to Leo?"


  "Of course," Piper said casually. "He's my
husband, right?"
  Meg looked at Phoebe and Paige with a
self-satisfied smirk on her pretty face.
"Well, ladies?"
  Phoebe noted that the four strong women had
remained in the room. They could try to just take
Piper by force. It would be a hard, physical
fight, and people might get hurt.
  Well, whatever, she thought. You'll just have to make
sure the ones getting hurt are the ones on the other
side.
  But Phoebe didn't really want to start a
brawl. Brains first, brawn as a last resort.
Especially since they were outclassed in the brawn
department. She walked over to Piper, stopping
directly in front of her big sister. The women-
Meg's Musclewomen, she was coming to think of
them-tensed. They were ready for her to start something. But
she just touched Piper's arm and looked into her eyes.
"Are you sure, Piper? This is that important
to you?"
  "Phoebes," Piper said, and she sounded like . .
. like Piper. Not like a zombie, not like a prisoner.
"I'm fine, really. I just want to help out here.
I think it's important. You can get that, can't you?
This is something I want to do. I need to do.
Okay?"
  "Yeah," Phoebe said, surprised and taken a
little off-balance by Piper's apparent sincerity. She
hadn't expected that. There had been times that Piper
had been possessed by other spirits,

  or enchanted in such a way that her decisions
weren't entirely her own. Phoebe couldn't shake
the feeling that the same thing had happened here. But
generally when that happened, Piper came across
un-Piper-like. Not this time. Piper was Piper-looked
like Piper, sounded like Piper-she had just made a
decision that Phoebe and Paige didn't agree
with. "Yeah, okay."
  "What do you mean, okay?" Paige wanted
to know. "Not okay. Not okay at all."
  "Paige," Phoebe said, "I think we have
to let her do this." She wondered for a moment if she
had become enchanted, too, if those words were really
escaping her lips.
  "What," Paige demanded, "just let her stay here
with these ... these ..." But she was unable to finish her
sentence. Phoebe understood. The women surrounding
them were powerful, imposing, but they just looked like women.
Meg Winship was strong and successful, but she was also
... well, nice. No one had treated them with
anything but civility since they'd come to this house.
  But their witchcraft didn't work here, except
one way: out. That was extremely worrying. Still,
Piper was fine, physically, and didn't seem to be
in any real danger. "Yeah," Phoebe said.
"Yeah, I think we can leave her here."
  Paige started to object, but then just closed her
mouth.
  "You're positive, Piper?" Phoebe asked.


  "Of course," Piper answered quickly. "Tell
Leo I'm fine and I'll see him tomorrow night,
okay?"
  "Okay," Phoebe agreed. She still wasn't
altogether comfortable with her own decision. But starting a
brawl in order to take Piper away from someplace
she clearly wanted to be was no better. "But if you
don't come home tomorrow night after the rally or whatever
it is, we'll be back." She directed her
closing statement toward Meg. "And we'll be
angry."
  Piper gave Phoebe a quick hug, and even her
body language made Phoebe think they'd made
the right choice. She didn't feel especially
tense or upset in any way. "Let's get out of
here, Paige," Phoebe suggested.
  "Yeah, okay," Paige said. She still seemed
kind of shell-shocked by the whole thing.
  "Come again anytime," Meg Winship offered.
  One of Meg's Musclewomen led them back to the
front door. Paige didn't say another word
until they were in the car, with the motor running. "Are
you crazy?" she asked, anger evident in her tone.
"We can't just drive away and leave Piper in
there!"
  "Sure we can," Phoebe countered. "We're
doing it. It's the only thing backslash Ve can do."
  "And then what? Just hope she really does come
home tomorrow?"
  "Of course not," Phoebe told her. "Then we
get Leo and we come back. It'd take the Power


  of Three to break through whatever magical defenses
surround this place, and we don't have that without
Piper. But with Leo on our side, we're still a
force to be reckoned with."

  Mejlaugdea to herself.
  She had effectively neutralized the Charmed
Ones-prevented them from using the Power of Three against
her. Countless demons had tried, and failed, but
she-a human, at that!-had managed it. Not without
help, she knew, and guidance. But still, it had been
her own idea, and it had worked.
  As the rest of her plan would.
  She had spent months, after Dr. Haywood's
fall from academic grace, studying and learning and
exploring. She had taken his theories in directions
he was afraid to pursue. She had made connections
that he had missed entirely, intuitive leaps
he'd been unable to manage. The student had far
surpassed the teacher.
  The more she learned, the more she needed to know.
Ultimately, she reached a point where it

  CHARMED
  all unfolded for her, though, and she understood.
She was able to draw back the veil between dimensions, and
she made the contact she had been seeking.
  And having made that contact, she had opened the most
important door-the one to absolute power. Knowledge
alone wasn't good enough. Dr. Haywood's knowledge had
been impressive, but still, the university officials
had broken him because they'd had power and he hadn't.
Money wasn't enough either. There were plenty of rich people,
even successful, well-known people who couldn't, for all
their wealth and prestige, control what the future would
bring. Wealthier people than Meg had been wiped out because
they didn't know what tomorrow held.
  That would not happen to her. She would not only know,
she would dictate tomorrow. And the next day, and the one after
that.
  Dr. Haywood had set her on the right path,
after all. He hadn't known it-would never know it, as it
turned out, since he hadn't lived to see it all
come to fruition. But he'd been the first one to glimpse
the light, and for that, Meg would always be grateful.
  Even with Leo's assistance, Phoebe and
Paige couldn't orb back into Meg Winship's
compound. Some powerful force kept them at bay- the
closest they could get was the street on the


  outside of the gate. Paige was about to go back to the
intercom and buzz to get back in when Leo stopped
her. "Don't bother," he said.
  "What?" She was positive that she had misheard
him. He was the most concerned, caring husband she had
ever heard of. There was no way he'd rest while
Piper was inside that place.
  "You said she seemed fine, right?" he asked
Phoebe.
  "I've known Piper my whole life, and she was
fine," Phoebe said adamantly. "She was
Piper. I can't explain it, but she didn't seem
like a prisoner in any way. She just wanted
to stay."
  "Then I guess we let her do it," Leo said.
  Paige looked at Leo like he was the one now
possessed. "This is a joke, right?"
  "No, Paige. Piper's been acting ... a
little strange, lately. Something's been bothering her,
and she hasn't been willing to tell me what. Or
else she couldn't figure it out herself. But if this is
really something she wants, something that'll help her-was
  "But Leo," Paige broke in, "they're
holding her there somehow."
  "Maybe they are," Leo admitted. He
looked glum, but resigned. "But maybe she's
doing it. Maybe it's what she wants. If she
wouldn't leave with you when she had a chance, I think we
have to respect that."
  "I agree," Phoebe said. "This is what she
wants."

  "Anyway," Leo added, "I don't see that
we have much of a choice. If Piper really does
want this, I don't want to storm in there and try
to take her away. It sounds like she's fine, and not in
any danger. The rally's tomorrow. If she doesn't
come home after that, then we'll come back and throw
everything we've got at the place."
  Paige still thought they were both giving up too
easily. But she couldn't disagree with Phoebe's
assessment of Piper's behavior: Piper had
seemed perfectly normal, perfectly rational, and
capable of making her own decisions.
  Still, Paige didn't trust Meg Winship for a
second. And how many moguls-even well-known ones
with familiar faces, like Meg-had their own mystical
shields? She was pretty sure that not even an
Oprah Winfrey or a Bill Gates had something
like that.
  "Okay," she relented. "If you guys are
sure...."
  "One night, Paige," Phoebe promised.
"That's all. Tomorrow, she comes home or we come
back and take the place down brick by brick,
force field or no."
  "That's right," Leo confirmed. "Let's go home
now, so we can work on figuring out what's really going
on here."
  Paige shrugged, not happy about being outvoted but
willing to go along with the majority- for the moment. She
orbed them home.


  When they reached Halliwell Manor, the phone
was ringing. Paige was closest, and she grabbed it.
"Hello?"
  "Hi, Paige," a familiar voice said.
"It's Darryl Morris. I left you a
message." Paige had been so wrapped up in
worrying about Piper that she had almost forgotten her
old professor had been murdered. "Hi,
Darryl," she said. "Have you found out who killed
Dr. Haywood?"
  "Unfortunately, no," Darryl replied. "But
I did find something I think you ought to know about." He
described the book he'd found, inscribed to Dr.
Haywood by Meg Winship, and then told her about his
visit with Dr. Haywood's former office mate.
"It doesn't mean she had anything to do with his death,"
he pointed out when he was finished. "But it proves that
there's some connection between them-or there was. I'm
trying to get copies of his phone records now,
to see if they were in contact recently."
  "Okay, Darryl," Paige said, trying
to process everything he'd told her. "Thanks for the
update. Let me know if you find out anything
else."
  "You do the same," he replied.
  "Of course," she said, knowing that if she did,
she'd have to tell him about seeing Piper at Meg's
home. Unless Meg became directly linked
to Dr. Haywood's death, she didn't want
to get Piper any more involved.
  After hanging up, Paige told Phoebe and
Leo

  what Darryl had said. Both shared her concern, but
it didn't seem to change their minds about going back
for Piper. "That doesn't mean Meg murdered
anyone. And we don't know what she wants Piper
for," Leo pointed out. "But as long as she does,
Piper should be safe there."
  "What happens if she doesn't need Piper
alive anymore?" Paige wondered.
  "Piper can take care of herself," Phoebe
reminded her. "And it's only one night."
  Paige wasn't crazy about the "only one
night" mantra Phoebe and Leo had adopted.
But they still outnumbered her, and there was nothing she could do
on her own-she'd already found that out the hard way.
Paige went upstairs to see if she could learn
any more from Dr. Haywood's book.
  "Do you know Meg Winship? I mean,
personally?"
  Henry Ralston, the store manager, shifted on
his stool. He was a healthy-looking guy, with
muscular arms that strained the sleeves of his blue
polo shirt, a deep chest, and a narrow waist.
Bill Conason sat facing him, legs crossed,
with his little notebook on his knee and a pen in hand.
They were behind the checkout counter of Play Ball, one
of the city's big independent sporting goods stores,
and Henry wanted to stay on the floor because he was
short-handed that day. Bill had wanted to interview
him


  alone in his office, where he might be more forthcoming,
but it clearly wasn't going to work out that way.
  "Well, you know, I've met her. She did a
signing here when her last book came out."
  "That would be Your Ideal You," Bill prodded.
  "That's right. It was very successful, more than two
hundred people came out to meet her
  "Good crowd. So she's been pretty popular
for a while now."
  "Oh, sure," Henry replied. "Steady
seller in books, videos, and workout clothing and
accessories. She's a brand name, and it's a good
one. People associate Meg Winship with high
quality and a healthy lifestyle."
  "Good things in a fitness expert," Bill said.
  "Yeah."
  "But in the past few weeks, would you say that
interest in her line has increased?"
  "Oh, yeah," Henry said again. "Yeah,
definitely. There's been a boom in the Winship
lines. Hard to keep her in stock."
  "What do you attribute that to?" Bill asked.
"Anything in particular?"
  "Excuse me." Henry looked toward the cash
register, where a woman in a pink satin warm-up
jacket was perusing the maps and guidebooks
displayed on the counter. "Can I help you?" he
asked her.
  She tossed a quick smile his way. "I'm just
looking for now," she said.

  Henry turned back to Bill. "I'm sorry,
where were we?"
  Bill watched the woman walk away from the counter
and join a similarly attired friend, who was examining
tennis gear. "I was asking if you have an opinion as
to what's caused the Meg Winship boom you were
talking about," he said.
  "Right." Henry considered the question for a moment.
"Well there's been an awful lot of publicity
about her big event tomorrow," he said. "That might be
driving some of it."
  "What's that all about, anyway?" Bill asked.
  "It's a kind of seminar," Henry said.
"Getting a bunch of fans together, putting them through
their paces-you know: work out with the master and get the
benefit of her wisdom in person."
  "So it's not just listening to her talk-she'll
actually be leading them in some kind of mass fitness
routine?"
  "That's the impression I get. I know a lot of
our customers are going to be there."
  Bill glanced around the store again. There were a
handful of people browsing, but no one had made a
purchase since he'd sat down behind the counter.
  "What do you think of Meg? On a personal
level, I mean, not in terms of how much business
she brings in."
  "Not a prima donna at all," Henry said.
"You know, some people with her kind of success would be
standoffish, or make a lot of demands.


  Not Meg. She was great to work with. I'd have her in
the store anytime."
  "So you haven't heard any strange rumors about
her, anything kind of, you know, underhanded about the way she
does business?"
  "Oh, not at all," Henry replied immediately.
"This is a small industry, really. If there had
been any rumors like that, I'd have heard them, for
sure."
  Bill had interviewed enough people to know that he wasn't
going to get any dirt from Henry Ralston, even
if the guy did know something. "Listen, thanks for your
help," he said, closing his notebook. He'd
only jotted down a few random thoughts.
  As he left, he noticed that the store seemed
even emptier. Outside, the expansive parking
lot was mostly vacant. Overhead lamps beamed
down circles of light on the empty blacktop,
illuminating the few vehicles that remained. As
happened on most San Francisco nights, the
day's warmth had quickly departed, and the air felt
crisp and cool. His car was parked on the far side
of the lot, away from the light that spilled from the
store's big display windows.
  He was almost to his SUV'-MORE vehicle than
he could reasonably afford, especially the way gas
prices kept climbing-when a movement from between two
other cars caught his eye. He started to turn his
head, caught a momentary glimpse of pink coming
toward him,

  and then he saw only bright flashes of light and
realized the asphalt had somehow come up and scraped
against his knees. Then he focused, realizing that he
had fallen and that the flash of pink was the satin
jacket of one of the women he'd seen inside. She
stood just beyond his reach, panting with exertion.
  But there had been two of them, he thought. Where's the
other?
  Before he had a chance to turn and look for her,
something struck the back of his head, driving it forward.
He caught himself on his palms, rubbing them raw on
the rough surface of the lot, and tried to push himself
upright. But more blows landed-kicks to his
midsection-that doubled him over in pain. Bill
Conason was reduced to squirming on the ground
while the two assailants rained a savage
attack down on him. He tried to cry out, but
only a whimper would come. He found himself praying for
blessed unconsciousness.
  Even through eyes half-closed by swelling flesh and
fogged with blood, he could see headlights sweeping
the lot. His attackers saw them, too, and melted
into the darkness. "You leave Meg alone," one of them
said as she vanished, but through the roaring in his ears and the
haze of pain, he wasn't sure he'd heard her
right. He tried to rise, but couldn't, praying someone
would spot him before he bled to death.


  In the comfort of her own room, Paige went back
to The Visitors, Dr. Haywood's book,
convinced that there were answers in it-if only she knew
where to look.
  The words were just as meaningless as they'd been before,
though. Dr. Haywood came off in the pages of his
book like a crackpot, making intellectual leaps
that just weren't supported by any evidence, ignoring
facts that didn't fit his conclusions. He claimed
that the lack of evidence backed his views-that if the
aliens wanted to be well known, they could be, but that
the limited and somewhat questionable nature of their sightings
proved that they were successfully staying out of the
limelight. This was, he opined, probably
to better study Earth, without themselves changing the
object of their research by becoming the center of
attention.
  It was the kind of argument that was hard to dispute,
primarily because it was closed, not accepting any other
interpretation of the available facts. Paige felt
herself growing upset with her former teacher. He had
somehow set himself up to be murdered, she thought, because
he had clung to his ridiculous theories, and that
had, in some way she didn't understand yet, angered
someone enough to want him dead. And she'd been right
there-she should have been able to stop it. That upset her
all the more. If he had only cried out, he might
still be alive. She could have run to his defense, and
if she couldn't save

  him, maybe at least she would have some info that would
help Darryl find the killer.
  That's what was really getting to her, she reasoned.
The Piper situation was bad enough. But if something
happened to Piper because she wasn't there to protect
her, that would be a million times worse than what
had happened to Dr. Haywood. She knew her
charge, as one of the Charmed Ones, was to protect
Innocents, and she took that responsibility
seriously. And she worried that Piper might somehow
be her Innocent this time.
  She tried to keep reading, to force herself to turn the
pages, to not lose interest in spite of Dr.
Haywood's bizarre theories. Finally, she needed
to close her eyes for a few minutes, just to stop the
words from spinning around inside her brain. But first she
thumbed through the rest of the book just to see how much she still
had to go.
  Which was when she made a surprising discovery.
Maybe Dr. Haywood hadn't chosen this
particular copy of his book at random, after all.
Penciled in the margins, near the back, were notes,
which she could only assume were his. At first, they
made no sense-a lot of equations, a few words
by themselves, with no context. But as it got farther back
in the book, there was more and more, written in a cramped,
scratchy hand.
  Alert again, Paige read through Dr.
Haywood's notes, ignoring the book's text in
favor of what had obviously been put down much more
recently.


  The more she read, the more she became filled with
terror.
  Finally, she searched the house, eventually finding
Phoebe up in the attic, slumped over the Book
of Shadows. She must have fallen asleep while
paging through it looking for something on Meg or her
crazy force field. "Phoebe, wake up!" she
said urgently, shaking her sister's shoulder. "I have
to show you something!"
  Phoebe sat up suddenly, wrinkling the pages
with her arms. "What is it?" she asked.
  "This book," Paige said, waving it at her
sister. "Dr. Haywood's book. I was reading it
again, and I found this stuff in the back. These notes
that he made."
  "What notes?" Phoebe must have been deeply
asleep, Paige thought, and was still having a hard time
tracking.
  "Dr. Haywood's notes," she said again.
"In his book." She opened Dr. Haywood's
book and pointed at his scattered handwriting. "He
changed his mind about UFO'S," she went on. "Just
over the past year or so, I think, based on the
dates he put down from time to time."
  "What do you mean?" Phoebe asked, her eyes
now focused. "What aid he think they were?"
  "Well, he used to be a pretty straightforward
aliens guy," Paige said. "You know, UFO'S were
alien spaceships, sent here from other planets
to study Earth."

  "That makes sense, I guess," Phoebe said.
"As much as anything else does, I mean."
  "Yeah, but that was before," Paige pointed out. "Then
he got a new idea. According to his notes, he was
able to back it up with serious evidence. I don't
know how . . . he's a little sketchy on that part. But
he came to believe that they weren't from outer space
at all."
  "Where else could they be from?" Phoebe asked.
  "He wasn't sure. But he thought they were from some
other realm, some other plane of existence. In other
words-was
  "Demons? UFO'S are demons?"
Phoebe's eyes were wide open now, and a look of
horror spread across her face.
  "That's what he thought. I mean, he didn't
say that specifically. But that's what it sounds like
to me." Paige paused as Phoebe stood up and
closed the Book. "It gets worse," she
continued. "He had always thought the aliens were friendly.
You know, scientifically curious, what with the probes
and everything. But basically nice guys. Only now,
he doesn't-well, didn't- think that. He
became convinced that aliens were evil. And they sound like
your garden-variety demon to me. Here, listen to this."
She flipped through the book and began to read aloud.
""They seem determined to break down those walls and
come here en masse, for their own sinister ends.
To accomplish this, they will


  be relentless. Their scouts have learned much ... our
weaknesses and our strengths, and they will not suffer an
easy defeat. It will be, I fear, a horrible time
for all humanity. They will not stop . . ." And then
it ends, as if he couldn't bring himself to write
another word."
  "Sounds like a few demons we've met,"
Phoebe said. "I'm amazed that Dr. Haywood
figured it out, though."
  "Apparently he met some of them, too. Or
thought he did," Paige answered. "The question is, which
demon was it, and is that who-or what-killed him?"

  felt strangely empty, even though everyone was
home, except for Piper. Paige had never before
realized just how much Piper contributed to the
atmosphere of the big house. As the oldest sister,
as the one the others looked up to for guidance and
direction, Piper set the tone of the place, more than
anyone else did. It's not like we live in her
shadow, or anything, Paige thought. Maybe more like
she provides the sunlight that keeps us going.
  After Paige's revelation, Phoebe just stared at
the book, silently willing it to give answers.
  "Is there anything in there that tells you who killed
your teacher?" Phoebe asked.
  Paige shrugged and frowned. "Not precisely,"
she said. "It seems like he was afraid of
something-afraid that what he was learning


  was putting him in some kind of danger. But from what,
I can't tell exactly."
  "From the UFO'S themselves?" Phoebe pressed.
  "Maybe," Paige replied. "If Dr.
Haywood was right, then the UFO'S are some kind of
manifestation of demons from another plane of
existence."
  Leo entered, leaning on the doorjamb with a
haunted look in his eyes. "I guess that seems
more likely than visitors from another galaxy,"
he said. "And if they're tied in to the whole Meg
Winship thing, we need to get Piper out of there now."
  "Remember, Piper doesn't feel like she's in
any danger from Meg," Phoebe pointed out.
  "Well, maybe Piper isn't exactly thinking
straight," Paige offered. "If Meg isn't
mixed up in this somehow, why is her house magically
shielded from us? Despite Piper's unnaturally
perky state, everything is not hunky-dory."
  "Well, if your professor is right,
Paige," Leo said, "then Meg could somehow be
involved with demons. And if that's the case-and
Piper is in her hands-then Piper might well be in
danger she doesn't know about. We've got
to figure out what's going on, and come up with a way
to get through Meg's defenses." He glanced at his
watch. "We don't have long, either. The rally is just
about a few hours away. I'll check with the Elders
about Haywood's theory. Check the Book of
Shadows again, now that we've got

  CliApDo
  more to work with. And keep going through Haywood's
notes to see if he has any other clues in
there."
  Paige nodded. "I'll make the coffee.
Industrial-strength. It's gonna be a long
night."
  Paige listened to the coffeemaker drip its
potent brew into the carafe. Her mind was racing.
Maybe we can make a potion to break through the force
field, she thought. Could it be as easy as making this
coffee? Not likely. But who knew what was
likely or possible when you were a Charmed One? The
last couple of days had just been so full of
activity, and the fact that Piper- the one she would
normally count on to help her make sense of it
all-was away from home, and possibly mixed up
in the worst of it, just made it harder to concentrate and
harder to deal with.
  She kept seeing the face of Dr. Haywood,
just before she went to make him tea, in her futile
attempt to calm him down. Then it dissolved into an
image of the stark white cocoon hanging in the dark
warehouse, and the woman's body they had peeled from
it. She had been weak, near death, but they had saved
Barbara Hunsaker. Although there had been people they
hadn't been able to help-even as powerful as the Charmed
Ones were, they couldn't be everywhere, all the
time-overall, they had made a powerful impact on
the world. Maybe that's what


  the Power of Three is all about, she thought.
Maybe it does take all three of us together
to really get it right. They would get Piper back
today. Of that, she was absolutely convinced. There was
no way another sun would set without her safely at
home.
  Before heading Up There, Leo made one last
attempt to orb into Meg Winship's house. No
luck. He had tried a few times before and, each
time, he'd ended up with a sensation much like Paige had
described.
  He was more worried than he'd admitted. He
knew Piper could take care of herself, but obviously
she wasn't herself or she wouldn't have become mixed
up in this. Even if she wasn't hypnotized or
enchanted, unless something had been really bothering her,
she wouldn't have been taken in by Meg's line. He'd
have been satisfied just to talk to her. He trusted
Phoebe and Paige completely, but he wanted
to hear Piper's voice for himself, to see if in fact
she did sound as natural as her sisters had
claimed.
  But he couldn't get through whatever defenses Meg
had put up, and when he tried dialing the phone
number of her company, all he got was a recorded
message.
  Since marrying Piper, he'd hated to spend a
night in bed alone. He had become so used to her
presence; even when she slept, just to have her comforting form
in bed beside him made

  things better. He'd seen a lot in his time-war and
tragedy, life and death, peace and pleasure. But
until falling in love with Piper Halliwell,
he realized, he had never truly known joy.
  Now that he had found it, he didn't intend
to give it up.
  Tomorrow-no, today, he corrected, he would get
Piper back. He didn't know what Meg's rally
was all about, but it didn't matter. When it was over,
either Piper would come with him willingly, or he would do
whatever it took to free her from Meg's control and
bring her home.
  He knew he was, in general, a pretty
determined guy. But he couldn't remember a time when
he'd been more so than right now.
  Piper was coming home.
  Phoebe was exhausted, and she was sure that
Paige was too. She couldn't deny that it had freaked
her out to learn that Meg Winship was linked, in some
way, to Paige's dead college teacher with the weird
UFO theories. She wanted to believe Haywood
was a lunatic, pure and simple. Maybe there was
some kind of mass psychosis going on in the city-the
madness of crowds. The more people heard stories of others
who'd seen UFO'S'-ESPECIALLY the gullible
types who read and believed those tabloid papers-the
more they convinced themselves that they had seen them as well.
  What disturbed Phoebe the most was that


  Piper had somehow become mixed up in it. She
seemed fine, she was lucid and articulate, but it just
wasn't like Piper to get so carried away by something
to the detriment of her other responsibilities.
To Piper, being a Charmed One was paramount.
  But maybe something else was bothering her, Phoebe
realized. Piper's absence meant that she suddenly
had to take on the role of oldest sister. That was a
new one for her. She had been the youngest-while
Prue was alive-and then middle: Both were
privileged positions, for different reasons. Now,
though, she found herself abruptly pushed into the one
spot she had never held, or aspired to. The
oldest, she understood, had to be a confidante, a
confessor, a brick wall of reason and understanding and
comfort. If she fell apart, where would that leave
Paige? She had to be strong, had to sound like she was
confident and knew what she was doing, even when that
felt very far from the truth.
  Delving back into the Book of Shadows-the place
she'd found so many answers to so many previous
questions-she hoped she was doing as good a job of it as
Piper would have. She kind of thought maybe she
wasn't-there's only one Piper Halliwell, after
all-but that didn't mean she would stop trying.
  By the time Bill Conason got out of the emergency
room and home in a taxi-his SUV was still

  ClUsffggMED
  parked outside Play Ball-the sun was gleaming
off the black glass surface of the Transamerica
Pyramid. From the street outside his apartment he
could see the local landmark. It towered over the
Financial District, the point at its top
seemingly sharp enough to cut the clouds as they passed
over.
  The women who'd attacked him had blackened both
eyes, knocked out a tooth, bloodied his nose and,
according to his X-rays, cracked a couple of ribs.
Bill wondered if they'd have killed him if that car
hadn't pulled into the lot. Frighteningly, he was
pretty sure the answer was yes.
  He had assured the doctor that he'd be filing a
police report, but the more he thought about that, the less
comfortable he felt trying to explain how, or why, a
couple of young women in workout wear had beat the stuffing
out of him. They'd made no attempt to rob him, and
they'd left him with only what might have been a
warning. But, given the way his ears were ringing by that
point, they might have said something else altogether, or
nothing at all.
  As he stood on the sidewalk digging for his
keys, he realized that if it was a warning, then it was
one Phoebe should get as well. And he could
deliver it without the punching and kicking that had
accompanied his version. He left his keys in his
pocket and pulled his cell phone from his jacket.
He didn't know her


  home number, but her cell was on his phone's
memory.
  As it rang, he found his keys and opened the
downstairs door. A moment later, her voice
answered.
  "I know it's early, Phoebe," he said.
"It's Bill Conason."
  "Bill, what's up?"
  "I thought this was important enough to chance ruining your
beauty sleep," he said. "I got beat up last
night, pretty bad. Couple of cracked ribs,
black eyes."
  "Oh, no!" she said, sounding genuinely
distressed. "What happened?"
  "Well, here's why I thought you should know," he
said. "I've been doing a little digging around about Meg
Winship. I think maybe I was overheard, and when
they finished with me, they warned me to keep away from
her."
  "From Meg Winship?" Phoebe asked.
  "It's hard to be sure," he admitted. "But
I think they said, "Leave Meg alone.""
  "Are you okay? All right, stupid question. But-was
  "Well, I'm not going to be running any
marathons this week, but yeah," he answered. He was
walking up the stairs now, two flights, in a
building that had an elevator. But the elevator
hadn't worked for at least six months, and of course the
landlord hadn't fixed it just in case someone came
home from the hospital with an

  ache precisely the size of his entire body.
"I mean, I'm going to take as many painkillers as
are allowed by law and go sleep for the rest of the day. But
no permanent damage."
  "That's good," she said. "And I appreciate the
warning. Did you find out anything important?"
  Bill put his key into the lock on his front
door and turned it while he tried to decide if
he'd learned anything important, and if he had,
whether he'd want to share it with Phoebe. The key
seemed like it turned too easily, but he hadn't
really been paying attention, struggling instead with the more
difficult question of how much he wanted to divulge.
  When he closed the door behind himself and flipped on
the light, he found out why.
  Two women-not the same two as the night before, but
similarly attired-stood facing him. "Hang up
the phone," one commanded.
  "Bill, what was that?" Phoebe asked, concerned.
  He didn't answer her, but he didn't end the
call either. He didn't know what was going on here,
but it couldn't hurt to have someone listening in, just in
case. "What are you doing in here?" he asked the
women.
  "Put down the phone," the taller one, in the
short sweatshirt, said. "Then we can talk."
  "I don't think we have anything to talk about. If
you leave now, I won't have you arrested." He
realized he was standing between them and the


  door he had just shut, but his apartment had a narrow
entryway before the living room, and they were crowding the
other end of it. There was no place to go but back out,
and the door opened in. To get it open, he'd have
to move closer to them, an idea that didn't fill
him with joy.
  "Bill, do you need help?" Phoebe's voice
from his phone sounded desperate. "What's your
address?"
  The women drew closer. "If you won't put it
down," the shorter one said, "we'll just have to take it
away from you. And you won't like that."
  Without saying anything more to Phoebe, he closed the
phone and dropped it into his jacket pocket.
"Look," he said hopefully, "just tell me what
you want. I'm sure we can work something out. I
don't have a lot of cash or anything, but-was
  "We don't need your money," the shorter one
said. He didn't like her tone, which managed to be
both menacing and cheerful at the same time, as if she
were really enjoying this.
  "What, then?"
  "What's the old saying?" the taller one asked.
She took a step toward him, and her partner matched
it. "Your money or your life?"
  He tried for the door then, but as soon as he
yanked it partly open, they were on him, slamming him
into it, forcing it shut again. With the weight of the three of
them against it, he couldn't get it open, and in a moment
his hand


  was pulled from the knob. His injuries of the night
before screamed with pain, and he could barely raise his
arms to defend himself. Mercifully, the battle was
short.

  called, dropping her cell phone.
  Both of them orbed into her room, Paige
preceding Leo by a fraction of a second. "What's
wrong, Phoebe?"
  "Take me here," Phoebe said, and gave
Paige the address she had begged from the night city
desk editor. "It's an emergency."
  Paige reacted immediately, and a moment later the
three of them stood outside the door to Bill
Conason's apartment. The door was wide open. In
the entryway, a crumpled form on the floor and
wide swaths of blood on the walls painted a
horrific picture.
  "Bill?" Phoebe said, rushing inside. His
face was bloody and pulpy, looking more like raw
hamburger than the thoughtful but ambitious reporter
she knew, and his joints protruded from

  ClUs caret MED
  his collapsed shape at odd angles. She put
her fingers against his neck, ignoring the blood, but
felt no pulse. "Leo," she said, her voice
shaking. "Can you?"
  Leo stepped forward, and she moved aside to give
him room. With his Whitelighter powers, Leo could
heal the injured. He knelt beside Bill for a moment,
his face furrowed with concern, and put his hands on the
fallen reporter. But then he looked up at
Phoebe, his eyes filled with sorrow. "We're
too late to help him."
  Phoebe felt tears spring to her eyes. She
had known he was dead from the instant they'd arrived, but
hearing Leo pronounce it that way removed all
hope.
  "Do you know what happened?" Paige asked,
stroking Phoebe's arm with sisterly concern.
  "He called me," Phoebe said, wiping her
eyes with her fingers. "It sounded like he'd just walked
in and there was someone waiting for him. I couldn't hear very
well, but it sounded like a female voice. Then he
went away. I got his address from the paper, and
that's when I called you."
  "Why did he call you?" Leo asked. "Who
is he?"
  Phoebe moved away from the entry, scoping out the
rest of the apartment on the off-chance that Bill's
attacker hadn't left yet. Bill's place was
small and crowded, but still neatly organized. "His
name is Bill Conason," she told the others.
"He's a reporter at the Bay Mirror. I
asked him


  some stuff about the UFO'S, and I guess at the
end he was investigating the Meg Winship angle.
He said he was attacked last night, by someone warning
him away from Meg. He wanted to warn me, just in
case."
  "So maybe whoever attacked him last night
wanted to finish the job," Leo suggested.
  "And Piper is still with Meg," Paige pointed
out. "Those other women we saw there might be
Innocents too. We have to get them out of there!"
  "Unless you've figured a way to get past the
force field, that's still not an option," Leo reminded
her. "The big rally is today. They should be safe at
least until that's over. Until then, Meg seems
to need them."
  "I guess we know what we're doing today,"
Phoebe said. She made an anonymous call to the
police on Bill's home phone, to report his
murder, then wiped it clean of her fingerprints.
Ensuring that there were no other surfaces they'd touched,
she took one last look at her murdered friend and
asked Paige to orb them home.
  Back at the Manor, they tried to formulate a
plan. "I wish we knew how to prepare for this,"
Paige said.
  "Me too," Leo said. "Even the Elders are
at a loss. They say there seems to be something big
in the offing-there's a huge amount of mystical energy
swirling around the city-but they can't

  pinpoint who's behind it, or what it's all about."
  "Well, it looks pretty much guaranteed that
Meg Winship is behind it," Phoebe speculated.
"Since Bill was warned away from her."
  "That's what bothers me," Paige agreed.
"If Meg's up to something big and bad, how is she
going to implicate Piper? Does she want her
powers, or to keep us from having the Power of Three?
Does she even know Piper's got powers? We've
got to get answers, and there's only one way to get
them."
  "Except we can't get there from here," Phoebe
lamented. "We can't get into Meg's estate. But
we know she'll be at the rally today, and the rally's open
to the public. So we'll just have to get to her then."
  "If we can," Paige said. "What if she's
been working with demons somehow? Maybe she's even a
demon herself."
  "She's no demon," Leo said. "The Elders
knew that much. She's a mortal."
  "Okay, so we see what we can find out until
rally time." Paige was building steam. "Shake a
few trees, rattle some lesser demons cages,
if necessary. This chick and her perky pink joggers are
goin' down."
  Phoebe smiled and gave her sister a high
five. "Works for me."
  The Charmed Ones didn't always know where demons
might be found-they had a tendency,


  after all, to vanquish the ones they were aware of. But
like anybody else, demons had patterns,
habits, and were often predictable. It took a few
tries, but finally they found an Ecari Demon in the
Filmore District, stalking a woman as she
hurried home after a late shift at work. His head
was bald and smooth, his face almost handsome, his
form-clad in a loose, belted shirt and pants,
almost like a karate gi, of a dark plum color-
broad and muscular. In his bearing there was a hint of
nobility, as if this demon were royalty of some
kind, used to commanding obedience.
  "Fancy," Phoebe whispered.
  "Almost too bad we'll have to get him dirty,"
Paige teased.
  They waited until the woman was safely around a
corner, then emerged from their hiding places. "Hey,
homely," Phoebe said.
  The Ecari whirled on them, his clawed hands
closing into fists. "Who dares-?"
  Phoebe and Paige stood a few paces apart,
facing him. "You might have heard of us," Phoebe
said. "The Charmed Ones?"
  He studied them for a moment, during which he did not
relax. Every mvscle in his body was coiled, ready
to fight or flee. "I had heard that you were three."
  "We are," Paige replied. "But we don't
need all three of us to deal with someone as
minor-league as you. Even two is probably
overkill."
  "You dare to mock me?" the demon complained.

  "We not only dare," Phoebe said with a grin,
"we take great pleasure from it."
  He glanced over his shoulder briefly, as if
confirming that he had already lost his prize. Then he
turned back, a resolute expression on his
face. "I think you bluff," he declared. "I
believe you have not attacked because you fear me."
  "We have not attacked," Phoebe countered, "because
we want information. If all we wanted was
to vanquish you, you'd already be gone. We'd rather find out
what you know."
  The Ecari made a move like a shrug, shifting his
shoulders-but instead of following it through, he suddenly
lowered his right shoulder and dove at Paige, his
clawed hands extended like daggers slicing through the
night. Paige orbed out and reappeared behind him.
He stumbled, expecting to encounter resistance where there
was none.
  "Boo," Paige said as he turned this way and
that, looking for her.
  He let out a low growl and swung at her again.
This time Phoebe intervened, moving in with a quick
one-two punch to his torso. The claws narrowly
missed her, but her own blows landed hard. The Ecari
grunted with pain and fell back a couple of steps.
Phoebe closed again, to follow up, but one of its
flailing hands caught her, knocking her away.
  Before the demon could press his attack, Paige
distracted him with two fast blows to the


  back of his head. When he spun around to face
her, she had already vanished from that spot. The Ecari
blinked in momentary confusion, unable to keep up with
her.
  Phoebe took advantage of the confusion,
regaining her footing and launching into a spin. She
let loose with two hard kicks as she did-the first
catching the demon in the gut, and the second, as he
began to fold in on himself, smashing into his jaw.
By the time she ended her spin, the Ecari was on the
ground, a trickle of silvery blood running from his
mouth. He put one of his hands up to his lips and
drew it away, wet and sticky.
  "You could make this easier on yourself," Phoebe
suggested. "It should be obvious by now that you can't hope
to beat us."
  "You are . . . formidable," the demon agreed,
sounding reluctant but resigned.
  "Then let's stop fighting and start talking,"
Paige said.
  "I take it you have a particular topic in mind?"
  "You take it right," Phoebe said. "You ever
heard of Meg Winship?"
  "You have no idea how little the affairs of humans
interest me," the Ecari said with a snarl. "Except
for food or sport, humans mean nothing to me."
The demon had a tone of superiority in its voice
that infuriated Phoebe.
  "You're talking to two of them, so you might

  want to choose your words carefully," she said.
  "Charmed Ones are not human," the demon shot
back.
  "Of course we are," Paige said. "I mean,
we're witches. But we're human, too. That's
kind of the point."
  "Bah!" The demon spat on the ground. "You
are by definition more than human. Mere humans could
not survive against me in battle, even for a moment."
  "You're getting off-topic," Phoebe said.
"We want to know about Meg Winship."
  "I have heard the name," the Ecari admitted. "But
I know nothing more than that."
  "What about UFO sightings around town?" Paige
prompted. "Do you know anything about those?"
  "Very little." The demon seemed upset by his own
lack of information. "Demonic manifestation of some
kind, but like nothing I have experienced before."
  "So they are demons?" Paige pressed.
  "I did not say that," the Ecari corrected her.
"I said "demonic manifestation." I do not
believe that they are demons-merely an indication of
demonic activity."
  "There must be some kind of talk in the demonic
world," Phoebe said. "Rumors, or something."
  The Ecari shrugged. "Rumors are worthless.
Everyone knows something is imminent, but no


  one knows what. Every demon you speak to has some
other theory. None of it makes any sense. The
Ecari are above all that. We exist, we feed, we
amuse ourselves. We don't concern ourselves with foolish
talk."
  "Well, aren't you special?" Paige asked.
"Too bad you don't know something useful-it just might
convince us not to vanquish you."
  The Ecari's eyes widened at the word.
"Vanquish? But you said-was
  "We never said we wouldn't," Phoebe reminded
him. "We said we wanted to talk. We've
talked. You don't know anything. You really think
we're just going to let you go, so you can feed on
Innocents?"
  "What if I could tell you . . ." The demon
let his sentence trail off.
  "Tell us what?"
  He shrugged again. "Nothing. There is nothing I can
tell you, because I know nothing about these manifestations,
or this person you ask about. All I can do is
suggest that you're wasting your time. No one knows any
more than me."
  Paige almost felt bad about vanquishing him, but
then she thought about the woman he'd been trailing,
who, it appeared, he'd been about to have for breakfast.
  After that, she didn't feel bad at all.
  Back in the kitchen of Halliwell Manor,
they told Leo what they had been able to learn.

  "Not a thing," Phoebe reported. "We questioned
half a dozen demons. It was a good night's work,
vanquishing-wise. But now I'm even more exhausted
than before, and we still don't have a clue."
  "It's like, everyone knows something's brewing,"
Paige added. "And a couple of them even seemed
to think Meg was at the center of it all. But none of
them know what it is. If she's working with any
demons, it's no one from around here."
  Leo nodded. "Which is pretty much what the
Elders came up with. Something big is in the works.
Meg is involved. But what, how, why ... all
those things are just blanks. Which makes it that much more
difficult for us to deal with."
  "Yeah," Paige agreed. "Since we really have
no idea what we'll be up against, it's hard."
  "We've been in that situation before," Leo
reminded them. "We'll just have to be ready for anything
they might throw at us."
  "And keep in mind that they're killers,"
Phoebe added. "They won't hesitate to take us
out if they need to, I'm sure."
  "They could have attacked us when we were at
Meg's," Paige said. "But they didn't."
  "I'm sure Piper would have freaked out if she had
seen that," Phoebe speculated. "We weren't a
threat to Meg at the time, so she wouldn't have wanted
to risk losing control of Piper."
  "I think you're right," Leo said, sitting down


  at the table with them. "The question remains, does she
need Piper because of Piper's powers? Or is it some
other reason?"
  "If we had Piper with us, the Power of Three
could kick her butt, magical defenses or no,"
Paige said. "But as long as she has one of us working
with her, the rest can't get in."
  Leo cocked his head, a thought forming. "I wonder
if the rest of us can't get in because Piper is there.
Could Meg somehow be using Piper's power against us?"
  A horrible idea crossed Phoebe's mind.
"What if things go bad during the rally?" she asked.
"What if we need to fight Meg, and find ourselves
up against Piper?"
  "Then we make sure Piper doesn't get
hurt," Leo said simply. "We remember that
Meg is a killer-or at least, that her
supporters are willing to kill on her behalf. And
we take no chances. There has to be a way to get
Piper out of there without being hurt."
  Phoebe hoped he was right, and not just indulging in
wishful thinking because he was worried about his wife. She
was worried, too, of course. She had been
absolutely convinced that Piper was fine, that for
whatever reason she had chosen to stay and work for Meg.
But if Meg had somehow brainwashed these women
into murdering for her, could they be sure that Piper
wasn't similarly controlled? And if she was,
how far could they go in defending themselves

  against her? Of the three of them, Piper's powers had
the potential to be most destructive, and if she
wasn't fully in command of her own abilities, then
she could be a fearsome opponent. Especially if they
were trying hard not to hurt her at the same time that she
was trying to finish them.
  The day started early for Meg Winship. Anita,
her personal assistant, buzzed her awake at
six. She got out of bed, changed into exercise
wear- Meg Winship signature-brand, of
course-and went down to her private gym for a
forty-minute workout. After that, a shower and some
breakfast, watching the morning news on three
TV'S at once. Along with the rest of the world's
violence and small tragedies were reports of a
local journalist's murder. What pleased Meg,
though, was that all three channels mentioned the rally
later at the Presidio.
  Breakfast completed, she paged Anita. The
woman joined her, crisp and clean in a charcoal
business suit with white pinstripes, and together they
walked through the house, checking on progress.
  "Is everything ready on site?" Meg asked.
  Anita nodded once. Everything about her was
no-nonsense and professional. "The chairs are being
set up right now," she said. "We wanted to wait
until the ground dried so they wouldn't sink
unevenly. The stage was constructed last


  night. I gave it the once-over this morning.
It's exactly to specifications."
  "Good," Meg said, gracing her assistant with a
smile. "Security?"
  "Sasha is on site," Anita said, naming the
head of Meg's private security force. "She's
got her people training the volunteers." Normally,
Meg's security team only had to safeguard the
house, and a couple of trusted officers went with her
when she traveled anywhere. But this rally was the biggest
thing Meg had ever tried to pull off, and they needed
volunteers to help protect the perimeter, as
well as for crowd control.
  They stopped in at the workroom where Piper
Halliwell and some others had been assembling the
goody bags for all attendees. The bags had been
finished and taken to the site, so the room was now
empty. Meg found herself hoping Piper's sisters
didn't try to make trouble at the event. She was
pretty sure they had been reassured that Piper was
fine, but that didn't mean they were finished snooping
around.
  If they did, they'd find that Meg Winship was
ready for them. Nothing had been left to chance
here-nothing could be. This day was a culmination for Meg,
the last rung on the ladder from what she had been-a
simple, suggestible schoolgirl, unsure of what
she wanted from life-to what she was becoming.
  After today, everyone would know the name Meg Winship.
And fear it. Power-the kind that

  moved nations, and made worlds tremble- would be in her
grasp. Meg's message wasn't just talk, after
all. Everyone could improve themselves, choose their own
destiny.
  It was just that most people didn't know the extent to which they
could do so. But Meg did. Having found out, she
couldn't allow herself to be anything less than her
ultimate self. She had to be her ideal Meg-and
her ideal made the dreams of most humans look
miserly by comparison. Many-possibly most-women
would be content to have achieved what she had, to be young and
beautiful and rich.
  Meg knew there was much more that could be achieved. And
because it could be, it had to be. Simple as that. She
turned back to Anita. "It's a very important
day," she said.
  "Yes," Anita agreed. "Very important."
  "Everything changes, after today," Meg told her.
Anita didn't know the real extent to which that was
true, and she wouldn't be told until it happened.
"Everything."
  "There's never been anyone like you, Meg,"
Anita said. "And there probably never will be again.
Your name will be immortal, after this."
  That's the general idea, Meg thought. Not that I
care what anyone thinks after I'm gone. But I
want everyone to know it while I'm here.

  y
  records that he had called Meg Winship the day
he died. It had been a short phone call, and there
was no guarantee that he had actually talked
to Winship. But her office had been very unhelpful,
refusing to allow Darryl to speak to her. They said it
was because she was busy getting ready for the big rally, but
the fact that he was investigating a homicide should have
carried some weight. The lack of cooperation only
increased his suspicions.
  It didn't really matter. He knew she'd be
at the rally today. He'd wait until she was
off-stage and then he'd have his conversation with her. And if
that wasn't enough, she'd return to the station with him and
they'd have it there. Entirely too many San
Franciscans had been dying lately, and while
he could only link

  ChAFTER caret MED
  Winship to one-so far-that was a good starting point.
  The latest victim was a reporter who'd worked
at the Bay Mirror. Darryl hadn't caught the
case, and didn't know many of the details yet. But
he planned to talk to the responsible detective and
he'd pay close attention. Phoebe
Halliwell worked at the Bay Mirror. So did
hundreds of other people, of course. But none of them were
Halliwells. Trouble followed the Halliwells
around like a lost puppy, and if there was a chance that this
reporter's murder was connected to Phoebe-or
to Meg Winship- Darryl wanted to know about it.
  Sasha Wilensky's family moved from the
Soviet Union to the United States when she was
just an infant. The daughter of Soviet
Olympians, Sasha grew up tall and strong.
By the time she was eighteen she had been bodybuilding
competitively for two years.
  After college, a stint in the marines was followed
by recruitment for the United States Secret
Service. She stayed in that position, part of the First
Lady's security detail, until that family
left office and Sasha retired from the Service and
went into private practice, running security for
Meg Winship. She had worked for Meg for two
years now. Compared with her previous position, the
job was pretty routine, for the most part.
  Recently, though, things had changed. Meg

  of the fittest

  had been asking her to do things she had never asked
before-things that would have shocked her, once.
  Not now. Now, she found that she was essentially
unshockable. Whatever Meg asked of her, she
agreed to without hesitation. At the back of her mind,
sometimes, was a niggling sense that something was wrong, that
she was doing things, carrying out orders, that seemed
suspect to her. But that feeling never lasted more than a
couple of seconds. By the time Sasha was in motion,
carrying out the order, it had gone away completely.
  Never before had she had the sole responsibility
for such a large event. Her usual staff of thirty
was supplemented by a hundred volunteers, women in
matching pink T-shirts. The event site, a
grassy field in San Francisco's
Presidio, was huge, with a thousand plastic chairs
set up in neat rows, and a specially constructed
stage for Meg. Sasha had placed volunteers at
the entrance, at the stage doors, surrounding the
front of the stage, at the rear driveway through which
Meg would enter, and in each aisle between the four
sections of seats. Professionals were also situated
on the driveway and at various points around the
site, to assist the volunteers should anything
unexpected happen. All the professionals and
select volunteers were linked by headsets. As things
were being set up, there was so much headset chatter that it
was giving Sasha a headache.

  C h A I caret More E D
  Now she sat at her temporary command post, a
folding table set up inside the stage construction,
massaging her temples and trying to imagine what
might go wrong. Thinking of the worst that could happen was
the most important part of her job. Someone could
sneak a gun in, attempt to assassinate Meg.
To forestall that, everyone admitted would come through a
metal detector and have any handbags or
backpacks searched at the entrance. No one with a
close-up weapon, such as a knife, would get near
enough to Meg to use it. She was also worried about
Meg's fans being carried away in the enthusiasm
of the moment and rushing the stage. The biggest, strongest
women on the staff and the largest of the volunteers were
stationed at the foot of the stage to discourage that. Some
things, like the air space overhead, Sasha simply
couldn't control, but there would be operatives in the wings
of the stage on both sides, ready to hustle Meg
away if anything unexpected happened.
  She knew, of course, that chances were there would be no
incidents at all. This was a crowd who admired
Meg Winship, and probably the most dangerous thing
Meg would face would be a zealous fan looking for an
autograph or a hug. But this was the biggest and most
heavily promoted public appearance of Meg's
career, and Sasha would take it as seriously as she
would have a public speech by the First Lady.
  She had taken her fine, platinum hair out of


  the severe ponytail she favored to rub her
temples, trying to ease the building headache there,
and was just putting it back when Anita, Meg's
personal assistant, showed up. Anita was
crisply attired, as usual, and smiling casually.
Under her arm Anita carried a red leather
portfolio.
  "How's it going?" Anita asked her.
  "Everything's under control," Sasha said, trying
to breathe through her mouth. "Do you want to go over
Meg's entrance again?"
  Anita shook her head. "No, I think we've
got it covered," she replied. She opened the
portfolio and took out a couple of
photographs. When she put them down on the table,
Sasha recognized the angles-they were taken
by surveillance cameras on the estate, one at the
front gate and another inside the main hallway.
They showed two attractive young women.
  "Who are they?" Sasha asked.
  "According to Meg," Anita said, "potential
trouble. Keep an eye out for them today. If they show
up, get rid of them-discreetly, of course, and
permanently if necessary."
  That little stray thought at the back of her mind
tickled her, like a hair that escaped from her
ponytail and worried at the back of her neck.
But as quickly as it had come up, it vanished. "You're
sure about this?" she asked Anita. She knew they
both understood what she was asking Meg's assistant
to confirm.
  "A hundred percent."

  "Very well," she said. She glanced at the
photos again, and then slid them across the table, back
toward Anita.
  "You don't want to keep them?" Anita asked.
  Sasha looked into Anita's eyes until the
woman had picked up the pictures and put them
back in her portfolio. "I never saw them," she
said. "If I were you, I would destroy them-and any
record of their existence."
  She held Anita's gaze until the light of
understanding dawned in her eyes. "Got it," Anita
said at last. "Consider it done."
  "I will."
  Anita left then, and Sasha watched her trim
figure until she was out of sight. The woman
hadn't seemed particularly surprised or put out
about the order she was passing along, Sasha realized.
She wondered what else Meg might have commanded that
she had never heard about.
  Meg Winship rode alone in the back of the
limo, reveling in the last hours of solitude before
she had to address a mass audience. She was
prepared, rehearsed, pumped up. Her whole body
seemed to tingle with the anticipation of what was to come. The
excitement and enthusiasm of a crowd invigorated
her, and this would be the biggest crowd yet. She could
hardly wait for the sensation of standing on the stage,
soaking up the applause and adoration of hundreds of
women.


  And that would just be the beginning.
  She had told no one what the day really meant.
Not even Anita, to whom she was as close as any
other person on Earth. No one else would
understand-at least, at first. After the fact, they would have
to understand, because it would all be right there in front of them,
in the open. But until they saw it for their own eyes,
they wouldn't be able to comprehend what Meg knew.
  She almost wished Carter Haywood could be here
to see it. He had been too timid to see the
truth, to carry his findings the extra step that was needed
to bring them to fruition. Once he had finally figured
out the true meaning of his discovery, he had panicked.
The only reason he wouldn't be here as an honored
guest was that he wouldn't have gone along with it. He would
have objected, and tried to prevent the full realization
of his own efforts.
  Meg didn't understand that kind of weakness. She
didn't understand weakness at all- what was life about,
if not the pursuit of strength: physical,
emotional, mental? Allowing weakness to rule was the
same as giving up. It was surrendering to something less
than one could be.
  She alone was willing and able to go all the way,
to take Carter's research, and her own independent
findings, to their ultimate conclusion. Carter had been
correct, at least in his later

  assumptions, after he'd got over believing that
UFO'S were evidence of visitors from some other
planet in our universe.
  The fact was, they were indicators of life on
another plane of reality, one separated from this
reality by the thinnest of veils. Sure, they tried
to come through, but could only send their avatars. These
entities could not interact with Earth, or influence it,
at first, and they took the forms that humans expected
to see, and could emotionally cope with.
  But Meg, building on the groundbreaking research
Carter had done, discovered a way to reach out to them,
through ritual magic, and to strengthen them. With the power
they gave Meg, she had found she could influence the
minds of women throughout the region. At first, she had
to manifest her power in concrete ways, which would be
visible to her victims, so she had chosen to use the
avatars to do so. Their shapes were almost comforting to the
women she approached-not everyday shapes, but not
completely unknown, either. Finally, as her power had
grown, fed by the admiration of her followers, she had
been able to stop using the shapes of the avatars and could
simply reach out via TV, radio, or personal
appearances. This was how she had reached Piper
Halliwell, bringing her into the inner circle and
therefore eliminating any threat the Charmed Ones might
pose to her plan. The Others told her, through their
inter-


  dimensional communication process, about the three
witches and the likelihood that they would interfere if
they could. They also taught her how to create an
impenetrable barrier around herself. The much-vaunted
Power of Three might have been able to break through, but
without Piper, the remaining sisters wouldn't have a chance.
  Using the techniques taught her by the Others, she
controlled those around her while building up her own
fan base throughout the city. And conversely,
by channeling the energies her fans spent in the
pursuit of exercise, she made herself stronger.
Today, it would finally culminate. She would lead her
most dedicated fans in a specific ritual she
had created. Their combined strength, channeled through her,
would rip open the veil and allow the Others free
entrance to this plane. Here, with powers unknown on
Earth, the Others would seem godlike, and as their
prophet on this plane, Meg would sit at their right
hand, all the power and influence she had ever wanted and
deserved at her disposal.
  Carter Haywood could have shared in it, if he
hadn't been so weak. Meg was unwilling to suffer
weakness from him, or anyone else. After today, she
wouldn't have to, ever again.
  She leaned back into the plush leather seat of the
limousine that bore her inexorably toward her
ultimate fate, toward the fate of the world.
  After today, everything would change. The

  world would be undone and remade, just as muscle was
built by breaking down tissue and building it up
again.
  Meg Winship would create the Earth's ideal
self.

  [j tflOUP-FLT time had never passed more
slowly.
  Piper was out there, with Meg Winship, who they now
had reason to suspect was behind at least two
murders, and somehow connected to the rash of apparent
UFO abductions that had plagued the city in recent
weeks. And until Meg's rally started, she,
Phoebe, and Leo couldn't get to Piper, couldn't
break through whatever mystical barrier kept them apart
from their sister.
  With no help from any of the usual sources, or
even the demons they tracked down, they had prepared
some all-encompassing spells and potions, since they
didn't know precisely what they'd be up against.
Now it was just a matter of getting to the rally and doing
what they could to get Piper away from Meg's
clutches and bring her safely back home.

  She met Leo and Phoebe on the stairs, as
they headed out. He arched an eyebrow at her.
"Ready to rumble?" he asked.
  "More than," she answered.
  "Let's get this over withand bring Piper home,"
Phoebe said.
  Leo nodded. "Sounds like a plan."
  Ascertaining that they were as ready as they were going
to be, they drove to the Presidio and found a parking
place a few blocks away. When they arrived,
they saw what must have been hundreds of women streaming
into a fenced area through a gate. The women were young and
old, fit and out of shape, of every color and race
found on the planet. Most of them wore workout
clothes of some kind, many Meg Winship signature
brands. Besides their choice of clothing, the thing they had
in common was that they all looked cheerful and glad to be
where they were. They chatted and laughed, clearly
enjoying one another's company and looking forward to the
event they were about to attend.
  "The pink shirts are the muscle," Leo said,
sizing up the situation.
  "Yeah, I think you're right," Paige said. "And
there's something else I notice."
  "What's that?" Leo asked.
  "You're not going to be able to go in there with us."
  She watched Leo looking at the crowd, the
realization dawning on him. Only women were


  going inside. A few men straggled around the
exterior perimeter, which was walled off by tall
canvas panels, like sails on the grass. The men
may have been husbands or boyfriends, Paige
speculated, here to show their support-or their
concern-for their loved ones, but it quickly became clear
that the rally was a females-only occasion and men were
definitely not invited inside.
  "Looks like you're right," Leo agreed. He
crossed his arms over his chest. "I could go in
drag." andbrvbar;
  "Nobody wants to see that," Phoebe said
quickly.
  "He's joking, Phoebe," Paige said. "You
are joking, right?"
  Leo shrugged. "Mostly. But I'm worried about
Piper."
  "Then trust us to bring her out," Phoebe said.
  "Besides, you can orb in if we need you," Paige
promised. were'
  "I'll be waiting." I
  "You'd better go now," Paige suggested.
"You're kind of calling attention to us."
  "Okay, okay," Leo said. "Call at the first
sign of trouble." He wandered away, leaving Paige
and Phoebe by themselves on the grassy lawn.
  "Shall we?" Phoebe asked.
  "Ready when you are." They linked arms and joined the
river of women going inside the enclosed area. At
the entrance they passed through

  a metal detector, but they hadn't brought
purses, so they weren't searched. The metal
detector couldn't detect the small glass potion
vials they carried in their pockets.
  Inside, chairs had been arranged in four
sections of widely spaced rows. The rows near the
front were already full, and seats were filling quickly
even toward the back. "Good turnout," Paige
said. "This is going to be standing-room-only in no
time."
  "Maybe we're in the wrong business,"
Phoebe said sarcastically.
  "You're right," Paige shot back, with equal
sarcasm. "Instead of being good witches, we should be
evil fitness gurus. Better hours, and the fringe
benefits are great."
  Intent on not calling any more attention to themselves
than they already had, Paige and Phoebe sat
quietly, scanning the crowd for any sign of
Piper and watching the rest of the women filing into the
arena. As outside, the women seemed for the most part
to be in a celebratory mood, as if something they'd
been looking forward to for a long time had finally come
to pass. Paige found herself almost envying them. She
loved her sisters and the life of a Charmed One, but it
wouldn't be a bad thing to be so happy about something
external, something that didn't involve any effort of
her own, but was as simple as finding excitement in a
glimpse of a celebrity. Her concerns-saving


  Innocents, saving the world, that kind of thing- were much
more complex, and they weighed heavily on her shoulders.
Finding something to get excited about that was less
stressful would be a happy thing, and she resolved that,
when this was over and they had Piper back, she would
make an attempt to do just that.
  First things first, though, she thought. And first was finding
Piper. She turned in her plastic chair and
shielded her eyes with her hand against the bright, warm
sun, searching the crowd behind them just in case Piper
had come in while her attention was toward the front.
As she did, though, an almost electric buzz
passed through the crowd. She's here! Paige thought,
caught up in the group's excitement in spite of
herself. She turned around again, facing the front,
trying to see what everyone was reacting to.
  Behind the stage area, Paige could see a
glimpse of a long black limousine. She figured
that must have been the car bringing Meg, which should mean that
Piper was on the premises too. She started to lean
toward Phoebe to whisper to her, when a deafening roar
went up from the crowd. The vocal roar gave way
to applause, loud and sustained, and then women were
leaving their chairs, standing, arching on tiptoes to see
over one another.
  And then Meg was on the stage, striding out as if with
grand purpose, raising her hands to the crowd, and what
had been merely deafening

  graduated to ear-destroying, the thunder of bomb
blasts at close range. Meg Winship's
smile, magnified on giant screens, was
electric, her presence stirring the faithful to new
heights of appreciation. Paige and Phoebe were
on their feet, craning their necks to see over other
women, looking, in their search for their sister, just like
everyone else in the crowd.
  After what must have been five minutes of soaking
up the adulation, Meg made sit-down motions with
her hands, bowed, clapped at the audience, and
eventually got people back into their seats. A hush
fell across the whole arena as everyone waited for her
to speak.
  "Do you see her?" Paige whispered.
  "Not yet," Phoebe replied.
  "Shhh!" several women around them shushed.
  "Thank you all so much for that wonderful
welcome," Meg said, prompting another upswell
of applause and whoops from the audience. This one
didn't last long, though, and then Meg continued, her
voice amplified by giant speakers at the edges
of the stage. "Thank you. It's so great to be here with
all of you today, on this glorious San Francisco
day. We are going to have a great time this afternoon, and you
ladies are the reason why."
  Again, a round of applause from the enthusiastic
audience. This woman could stand up there and read a
credit card bill and they'd cheer her, Paige
thought.
  "You sound like you're happy," Meg said when


  it had died down. "Are you happy today?" Another
sustained burst of cheering. "That's great," she went
on. "It's great because that's what today is all about.
What my life is all about, for that matter. I
want you-I want all of us-to be happy,
healthy, and whole. It's not just about being fit, it's not
just about having material things-it's certainly not about
having a man, br the right man, or the right woman for
that matter... I guess I should say the right life
partner. It's the whole package- happy, healthy,
and whole-and it doesn't come from any external
factor, or any set of external factors. It
can only come from within. It comes from you-making the right
choices for your body, for your mind, and for your spirit. It
comes from you accepting the Meg Winship challenge
to become the Ideal You!"
  This statement prompted an outburst almost equal
to the one that had accompanied Meg's first appearance
on stage. Paige found her mood starting to turn-the
more excited the audience got, the more turned off she
became. Sure, Meg's message was a
positive one-one that Paige agreed with, in fact.
But the way the audience reacted to her every word was what
disturbed Paige. There was no disagreement, no real
thought being given to anything Meg said-just robotic
acceptance. The crowd cheered and clapped in
absolute unison, nearly identical smiles
pasted onto their faces. Paige found the whole thing
a bit cultlike, and it scared her. She

  caught Phoebe's eye, and her sister looked just
as uncomfortable as she felt. We've really got
to find Piper, she thought, and get out of here.
  "I'm sorry, sir," the woman in the pink
T-shirt told Darryl Morris. "You can't go
in there. Men aren't invited to this event."
  "Number one, that's gender discrimination," Darryl
said. "And number two, I'm not here as a man,
I'm here as an officer of the San Francisco
Police Department. Now please let me through."
  Four other women, identically attired, closed
ranks behind the first one. "I'm sorry, sir," she
said again. "I've been told that there are no
exceptions to the rule."
  "I'm telling you that if you don't get out of my
way, I can charge you with obstruction of justice,"
Darryl warned. "Just don't make things any more
difficult on yourself, and let me in."
  "You heard her," one of the other women said.
Darryl saw more pink shirts coming their way from behind the
barricades. Someone had put out the alert. "We
don't want you in here."
  "This is a public park and a public event,"
Darryl said, trying to remain reasonable. "You
don't have the right to keep me out."
  "We're at our legal capacity," another
woman put in. "If we let you in, we'd be
breaking the law."
  "I'm just one person," Darryl said, realizing
even as he said it that it was a weak argument. If


  he hadn't been trying to get inside he would have
made the exact same argument she had: Capacity
was capacity, and "just one person" was one person too
many.
  Now, though, there were a dozen women flanking the first
one. They glared at him, arms folded over their
chests, grim expressions on their faces. He could
bully pa@ddment them and maybe start a fight,
maybe even have to injure some of them or draw his
weapon. He didn't want that. For one thing, it would
make the department look bad. And for another, on the
other side of the barricade were a couple thousand more
women who wouldn't be happy to see him.
  There were times when discretion was, in fact, the
better part of valor. And there were times when a cop just
needed a lot of backup. This was looking like one of
those times. Darryl wanted to get inside, wanted
to hear Meg Winship's talk, to try to figure out
what her game was. But it didn't look like doing
so was going to be easy.
  He retreated with a smile and a shrug, trying
to look like he was giving up. But when he got back
to his car, he called for a i lot squad to come to the
scene. Just in case. Beccter to have them here and not need
them thah need them and have them somewhere else. He
didn't think things were necessarily going to go bad.
  But if they did, he wanted to be ready.

  lflSfllp encouraged her audience to get out of
their chairs to join her in some stretching exercises.
"We always warm up first-right, ladies?" Meg
asked.
  The answer, from a thousand throats, was a resounding
"Yes!" Fast-paced music began to blare from
dozens of speakers. As one, the women left their
chairs and sat on the ground, mimicking Meg's
movements. Phoebe and Paige went along so as not
to stand out. As they did, though, Phoebe caught a
glimpse of a familiar ponytail in a taped-off,
reserved seating section a dozen or so rows ahead of
them that she hadn't seen before. Legs spread in a
wide V, fingers on toes, trying to touch her
knee with her head, Phoebe whispered, "Paige!
Piper is about twelve rows up, dead ahead."
  She saw Paige angle for a peek when they


  rose up to switch legs, and when they bent forward
again, Paige said, "I see her too."
  "We have to move up," Phoebe said.
  "How?"
  "I don't know," Phoebe answered. "But we
have to get her."
  "I know that," Paige shot back. "It's just...
I don't see a lot of people changing seats, you know?
They'll notice us."
  "Well, we have to figure out something soon or
we'll lose her in this crowd," Phoebe said. People
were starting to shush them again because they were talking while
Meg counted out the seconds. As if you can't count for
yourselves, she thought angrily.
  They agreed to wait until the stretching
exercises were done, when presumably people would be on
their feet again and they wouldn't be as obvious walking
toward the front. Phoebe had to admit that Meg
knew what she was doing-from going along with the warm-up,
she felt limber and loose. Her heart was pumping,
her breathing quickened, and she felt fresh and ready for
anything.
  Meg called for the audience to stand and prepare for a
real workout, and, with a great cheer, they did so. As the
women began to move in concert with Meg and the pounding
music, Phoebe and Paige slipped from their row.
  The routine Meg led the audience through was a
strange one, Phoebe noted. She had never

  seen anything quite like it before, and since she and Paige
were walking down the aisle between sections, she had a
clear view of the process. With both hands in the
air, palms out, Meg and her followers raised one
foot high, knee bent, then stomped it down hard,
shifting weight to that leg and throwing their hips to that
side. Bringing the hands down and shaking them, they
repeated the leg-and-hip move with the other side. Then
two quick steps forward, two back, and into the same
routine again. Meg did it all with a delighted
smile, and Phoebe noticed that most of the women in
the audience copied that part as well.
  "This must be on the video," Paige said as they
made their way down the aisle, trying to be discreet
but still heard over the music and the stomping. "Everyone
is exactly in step."
  Phoebe realized she was right. A thousand women,
give or take, and every right foot came down at the
same precise, earthshaking moment. The hands moved
in perfect unison, the hips thrust, the steps up
and back. The Rockettes couldn't have done it
better, and Phoebe was sure these women had never
all practiced together. "It's kind of weird," she
replied. "It's so... perfect."
  Paige nodded, but didn't speak. None of the
women exercising seemed aware of their presence, but
their aisle was off to the left of center stage, and
Phoebe noted that a woman in the


  wings on the far side, standing with arms crossed in a
pink T-shirt, was glaring hard at them. Then the
woman turned away slightly and held her hand
over her ear.
  "We've been spotted," Phoebe said
quietly.
  "We're almost there," Paige observed. She was
right; the reserved section was only a couple of rows
down. But Piper was in the middle of her row, so
they'd have to not only get through the tape but past a
dozen women shaking their hands and hips and stepping
forward and back.
  When they reached Piper's row, two things happened
simultaneously. Meg changed her routine, and a
line of pink shirt-clad women started up the aisle
toward them with resolute expressions on their
faces. The new routine was faster than the last, a
running-in-place thing with added fillips-arms waving
up and down as in jumping jacks, heads flopping right
to left like a dancer in that old Charlie Brozvn
Christmas TV special. The whole thing looked
comical to Phoebe, and she wondered how Meg could
ever have been taken seriously with such bizarre
routines.
  The women coming toward them didn't look so
comical, though. Phoebe grabbed Paige's arm, and
they ducked under the tape, starting down the row to where
Piper was moving in concert with all the rest. The
exercising women they passed barely glanced at them,
but managed to avoid hitting them with flailing arms and
pumping knees.

  When they reached Piper, she gave them a big
smile, but didn't stop moving. "Hi, guys,"
she said brightly. "Are you having fun? You should be
working out with us!"
  "Piper," Phoebe replied sharply. "We
need to get out of here, now!"
  "Not now," Piper objected. "We've just
started."
  "But Piper," Paige chimed in, "Leo is
really worried about you. And we've found out some stuff
about Meg that-was
  "Meg is my frst" Piper declared, cutting
Paige off mid-stream. She never lost her smile
or her rhythm. "And she's a wonderful human
being."
  "I'm sure she is," Phoebe lied, trying
to keep her sister humored long enough to get her away.
She turned to Paige. "Orb us out!"
  Paige closed her eyes and gritted her teeth.
"I can't," she said. "We're blocked here too."
  Great, Phoebe thought. Which means that Leo can't
get in, either.
  "Piper, come on," she pleaded. "Please, just
come with us."
  "No!" Piper snapped, though the smile
remained plastered in place. "Not until we're
done here."
  Phoebe felt Paige tugging on her arm, and
she turned to see what was the matter. "We have
company," Paige whispered urgently. At the end
of the row, the women in pink had massed and were moving
inexorably toward them.


  "Piper!" Phoebe said again, trying to grab her
sister's arms to get her to stop moving even for a moment
and pay attention to the importance of the moment. Piper
shook her off, though, missing the beat for a fraction
of a second. When she did, the smile turned to an
angry scowl, but it passed so quickly, it might almost
have been an illusion, a trick of the sunlight. As
soon as Piper was in tune with the other women, the
smile reappeared on her face as if it had never
left.
  Without a word, Meg shifted routines again, and
Piper and the rest of the audience flowed seamlessly into the
new one. Phoebe had to dodge Piper's right arm,
which shot out suddenly in a kind of boxing move.
"Piper, watch out!" she complained.
  "If you'd join us, you wouldn't have to worry,"
Piper pointed out.
  Phoebe supposed that was true, as far as it
went-except that if she joined them, she'd worry
about her own mental health. "Piper, those women are
coming to get us," Phoebe said anxiously.
  "Oh, that's because you're not supposed to be in this
row," Piper explained. "This section is reserved
for volunteers."
  "They were coming for us before we got to this section,
though," Phoebe pointed out.
  "Well, they're Meg's security crew,"
Piper observed, "so maybe you did something wrong."
  "I think the only thing we've done wrong is to

  try to help our sister," Paige commented. "And
they don't look like they're here to talk things out."
  Phoebe stole another glance at the security
detail, threading down the row. Paige was right: The
women in the pink shirts were mean looking, with frowns
on their faces, and enormous muscles on their
arms. The only chance to avoid a confrontation now,
she knew, was if Piper would agree to leave, they
could go the other direction down the row, and then hurry
to an exit. Piper, though, still gave no indication of
being willing to leave, or to listen to reason. As a
last resort, she tried coercion. "Piper,
they're going to beat the tar out of us if we don't go
now!"
  "I guess you shouldn't have done whatever you did that
was bad," Piper replied, sounding perfectly
casual about it.
  This comment pushed Phoebe past worried into downright
ticked off. If her big sister wasn't even going
to be the least little bit concerned that pink-shirted thugs
were threatening to beat them up, then why were they here trying
so hard to rescue Piper, when she didn't even
really seem to be in any danger?
  Of course, the answer to that was that Piper was their
sister, and Halliwells stuck together. Unless they
couldn't because they were somehow brainwashed, which was the only
possible explanation for Piper's behavior. Before
she could


  say anything else to Piper, the security guards
grabbed Paige's arm and were reaching past her
to Phoebe. "You'll have to come with us," one of them
demanded. She was at least eight inches taller than
Phoebe, with a tightly drawn platinum
ponytail and a glower in her green eyes.
  "We have every right to be here," Phoebe protested.
"Piper's our sister."
  "We're all sisters," the ponytailed one said.
She seemed to be the leader, at least of this particular
contingent. "You still have to come. You aren't supposed to be
here."
  "Get your hands off me!" Paige snapped at
the two holding her. "This is police brutality!"
  "We're not police," another woman said with a
sinister smile. Phoebe didn't like the looks of
that at all. Three of them had Paige's arms now,
and another four had come past her, closing in on
Phoebe. Phoebe looked to the women around them for
help or support, but none of them-not even
Piper-had paused in their workout or paid the least
attention to their plight. She tried to weigh their chances
of prevailing in a brawl, and decided that while they
could possibly do so, they'd have a better chance where
there was more room to move and less likelihood that the
audience would choose the pink shirts" side over
theirs. "Okay," she agreed. "We'll go with you."
  "We will?" Paige asked, fixing Phoebe with a
Have you gone insane? look.
  "Yes," Phoebe answered definitively.
Paige

  shrugged and quit struggling, allowing the security
contingent to lead her from the row. Phoebe cast a final
glance at Piper, but their sister's gaze was locked
on Meg, and she didn't even seem to notice that
they were leaving. As they left the row, Meg's pace
changed again, quickening into a kind of frenzied dance. The
women of the audience changed with her-panting now, sweat
flying as they whipped their heads this way and that.
  Once they were outside the row, the security women
released Phoebe and Paige, but surrounded them in
a close formation. The big one in charge said, "This
way," and led them toward the front of the arena. At the
foot of the stage, they were taken around to the right side,
and then behind a hastily constructed fence. From here,
Phoebe could just see a sliver of the audience, through the
opening in the fence they had entered by, and then even that was
blocked off by a wall of pink T-shirts. The
tall one with the pony-tail stood directly in
front of Phoebe and Paige. "You aren't wanted
here," she said. "You have come to stir up trouble."
  "It's a free country," Paige said
flippantly.
  The blond woman unfolded her arms, and there was
a frightening black automatic pistol in her right
hand. "Free country outside," she said, menace
dripping in her voice. "Different rules in here."

  L60 S3l on grass and scattered needles
under a pine tree. He had a view of the canvas
panels that surrounded the rally, jbut he couldn't
see inside, and in spite of his be@lment efforts,
he couldn't orb in either. He hadn't tried until
after Phoebe and Paige had merged with the crowd going
in, and now it was too late to let them know.
  That worried him more than anything else did. The
fact that Meg had magically shielded the rally told
him that she had something to hide, even there. Since he
couldn't get in, he had to rely on Phoebe and
Paige to bring Piper out. He knew there was no one
with a better chance to do just that, but as much as he trusted the
sisters, he still would have preferred to be in there himself.
Since he couldn't be, he waited nearby, just in
case he was needed for anything. The day was warm, the
sun cheerful, and the smells of

  pinesap and freshly mowed grass brought him
pleasant memories of simpler times. If his
wife hadn't been a virtual prisoner, it would have
been a nice day.
  Even from this distance, he could hear the applause
starting, then the music and the stomping. It might sound
cheerful to the average listener, but to him it was somehow
sinister. He tried not to imagine what might be going
on over there, tried to remain alert for any calls
for help from Phoebe and Paige even as he
blocked out the rest of the din.
  But as Leo watched a young father and son tossing a
Softball around, he saw Darryl Morris,
overdressed for the day's warmth in a dark blue
suit, his striped necktie knotted tightly at his
throat. Darryl looked like he was sweating, but not just
from the heat-the expression on his face was worried,
nearly frantic. He walked quickly along the
perimeter of the canvas panels, as if looking for a
way in. That gives us something in common, Leo
thought, rising from his spot under the tree and dusting off his
chinos. With a glance to make sure he was unobserved,
he orbed in just behind the police detective.
"Darryl!"
  Darryl spun around, his hand reflexively
shooting toward the holster at his hip. He visibly
relaxed when he was Leo. "Leo," he said, "it's
good to see you." Then he frowned and ticked his eyes
toward the arena. "Does this mean the Halliwells
are inside?"


  Leo nodded.
  "You know what I like?" Darryl asked
sarcastically. "I like how when I share information with one
of them and ask them to do me the same favor, they never
do. That's a good system, don't you think?"
  Leo shook his head in sympathy for his friend. "I
know exactly how you feel, but that's the way it has
to be sometimes."
  Darryl nodded sagely. "You, my friend, have the
patience of a saint."
  "Something like that, anyway," Leo admitted.
"What's going on here? Official police
business?"
  "I have a bad feeling about this whole thing,"
Darryl told him. "I was trying to find a way
in, but they've got it sealed up tighter than a
drum."
  "You don't know the half of it," Leo said.
"Even I can't get in."
  Darryl looked at him, surprise registering
on his face. "Then things must be worse than I
thought."
  "That's what I'm afraid of too," Leo
agreed.
  "Well, I've got a riot squad on the
way," Darryl said. "One way or another,
we'll get in there."
  I hope so, Leo thought. And I hope we're
not too late when we do.
  At the best of times Paige didn't like guns,
and she especially didn't like them when they were pointed
at her. "You don't need that," she said,

  CHARMED
  aware that her voice squeaked a little with fear.
  "Maybe not," said the woman holding it. "But I
have it, don't I?"
  "No one's arguing with that," Phoebe said. "I'd
just like to know why you think you need it."
  The woman looked them up and down before answering.
"We were warned to watch for you two," she said.
  "Warned?" Phoebe asked. "By whom?"
  "That's no concern of yours."
  "It kind of is," Paige disagreed quickly. A
big concern, in fact. Had Meg Winship tipped
off her security force that they might be here? Or was
it Piper-was she really that far gone?
  "No," the woman said, shaking her head. "Not
anymore. You don't have any concerns anymore."
  There was an odd smile on her face, as if she
were a mischievous tyke about to do something that would
ordinarily get her in trouble, but this time, for some
reason, it wouldn't. Paige didn't like it a
bit-not the smile, and not the implication of the woman's
statement.
  Those, combined with the gun in her hand, seemed like real
trouble.
  Paige looked from one woman to the next, but none
of them seemed dismayed by the sight of the weapon, or
even the least little bit surprised. "You can't really
expect me to believe you're going to shoot us right
here," Paige said.


  The woman shrugged. "I don't see why not,"
she said. "It's not like anybody would hear, with that
racket."
  She had a point there, Paige realized. Between the
thundering music and the motion, no one in the audience would
be likely to hear a couple of gunshots.
  "Phoebe," Paige said, a worried tone in
her voice. "I think we should ..."
  She left the sentence unfinished, but Phoebe
nodded, anyway.
  "Gun," Paige said, trying to orb it from the
woman's hand into her own. It didn't come, though.
Instead, almost as if she could feel Paige's
magical tug, the woman turned and aimed the gun
right at Paige's heart.
  Phoebe didn't waste another moment. She
swept her leg in a half-circle, knocking over
the woman closest to her. With the woman off-balance,
Phoebe shoved her into the one with the gun.
  At the same time, Paige raised her right foot
and stomped down onto the instep of the one behind her. The
woman let out a grunt of pain and raised her
foot off the ground. Paige followed up with an
elbow into the woman's jaw, knocking her backward.
  The ponytailed one with the gun let loose a
shot, but in the chaos of the moment, it went wild and
flew over the fence. More hands snatched at Paige,
but she kept moving, twisting

  from their grasp and striking out with her own to keep them
at bay. She caught a glimpse of Phoebe in
the melee, trying unsuccessfully to use her
levitation powers. Still, Phoebe was a mistress of the
martial arts, and where Paige was just holding her own,
her big sister was kicking serious butt. She let
loose with a snap kick that caught one of the bigger
women in the stomach, dropping her like a stone, and
drove her way through two others, charging toward the
pony-tailed one who still brandished the gun.
  Paige's strategy would have been different- she just
wanted to run, to get back out into the main arena, where
the sight of a gun might have had some kind of impact
on the brainwashed drones still working out with Meg. But
they hadn't exactly had a chance to compare battle
plans.
  She watched with admiration-in between fighting off pink
shirt-wearing security goons of her own-as
Phoebe waded through the others like some implacable
force. This would have been so much easier with witchcraft,
she thought. Remind me to vanquish whoever put a
magical shield over this place. Two of the women
grabbed at her arms, and as she struggled against them,
she saw that three more had collaborated to get hold
of Phoebe. They held her, the biggest one
wrapping arms like small tree trunks around her, as
the one with the ponytail leveled her automatic
weapon directly at Phoebe's head. Phoebe


  fought to free herself, but they held her too
tightly. Paige watched in horror as the smirk
came back to the ponytailed one's face and her
finger tightened on the trigger. She willed herself
to orb to the woman's side, but nothing happened.
  So she used the more human technique of lashing out
with her fists, striking the jaws of the two women who
held her. Their grips loosened; Paige dove
across the space separating them and smashed into the
leader's legs, driving her to the ground. The gun
went off with a deafening report, right next
to Paige's left ear.
  She felt hands on her shoulders and started to bat
them away, before she realized they belonged to Phoebe.
"Come on, Paige!" Phoebe shouted. "Let's
get out of here!" Her voice sounded like it was coming from
far away, or maybe underwater, and Paige
realized her ear was ringing loudly from the gunshot. But
she followed Phoebe's lead, and the two of them
dashed back out through the fence, pink-shirted security
cadre in close pursuit.
  As soon as they broke through the fence and back into the
arena, Paige had a flash of insight, something she
could see from this vantage point that hadn't been as
obvious from within the audience. "Phoebe!" she shouted
as they ran.
  "What?"
  "These women ... they're not just exercising." She
was as certain of her judgment as she had

  ever been of anything in her life. The women's
moves were precise, as choreographed as a
ballet. Paige had taken part in similar
activities enough times to recognize it for what it
was, even though hers usually involved more words and
less dance. "They're performing some kind of ritual.
And Meg's leading it!"
  Phoebe stopped in her tracks, looking from one
side to the other. Paige jerked a thumb back over
her shoulder. "Phoebes, they're still chasing us!"
  "You're right," Phoebe said, her voice filled
with awe. "It is a ritual! What's she trying
to do?"
  They started to run again, but the moment had given the
security detail a chance to get much closer than
Paige found comfortable. "Piper could freeze them
all in place and stop it!" she offered. "Except
she's part of it!"
  "Her powers probably don't work any better
in here than ours do," Phoebe added, breathless from the
running. "But we've got to do something-whatever
Meg's up to, it can't be good!"
  Paige felt a sudden impact from behind that forced
her to her knees. She tried to turn, but two of the
security guards drove into her, pushing her down on
the ground, and then more piled on. Phoebe turned
to help her, but she was immediately overwhelmed by more, coming from
every direction. The women in the audience ignored the
sideshow completely, so intent


  were they on moving in rigid conformity with Meg
Winship.
  And that, Paige thought as she writhed beneath the press
of the women bearing down on her, is the scariest thing of
all.

  L60 irOZC with one fist gripping Darryl's
upper arm. "That sounded like a gunshot."
  "Maybe," Darryl said, extricating himself from
Leo's iron grasp. "There's so much noise from
over there, it's hard to tell for sure. But it could have
been."
  Normally, Darryl knew, a gunshot sounded like
nothing else on Earth-people who cringed at cars
backfiring did so because that sounded like what they thought a
gun might sound. The real sound-the sharp, flat
crack-was unique, and genuinely terrifying,
especially in a crowded urban setting like this one,
because it meant someone was in real danger.
  "We've got to get in there," Leo insisted.
  "I'm with you," Darryl said. The question was, how?
He looked around anxiously for the riot squad he
had called for, but there was no


  sign of them. Still, if someone was shooting off a
gun behind those canvas walls, he had to get in and do
something about it. And he had a gun of his own, with a
badge to back it up. Before, he'd been unwilling
to force his way through, but now he had every reason to.
"Let's go," he said, turning and heading back
toward the entrance to the makeshift arena.
  The women guarding the way saw him running toward
them, this time with another man in tow. They stood up,
blocking the entrance with their pink shirt-clad
bodies, faces set with sullen determination. "I
thought we told you, no men!" one of them shouted as he
and Leo approached.
  Darryl flashed his badge at the women. "And I
told you, I'm a police officer," he declared.
"I'm going in."
  "No you're not," the seeming leader countered. "Not
without a warrant."
  "I have reason to believe a crime has been
committed in there," Darryl said. "And I'm going
inside." He drew back his blazer, both
exposing the service weapon in his hip holster and
making it readily accessible in case he needed
to draw it.
  The woman's eyes widened at the sight of it, as
if she hadn't really believed that he was a cop-or
if she did, she somehow didn't think he'd
seriously use the threat of force. She stared at him,
then glanced at Leo. For a second, Darryl thought
she would challenge Leo too. Instead,

  she glanced toward her pink-shirted sisters as if
for support. "You prepared to use that?" she asked.
  Darryl shook his head, barely believing his own
ears. She knew he was a cop, she knew he had
a gun, she knew he suspected that a crime had
been committed, and she still wanted to play hardball?
"Don't need it," he said. He reached for the
handcuffs tucked into the rear of his belt. "You're under
arrest for obstruction of justice," he said. "The
rest of you, either get out of the way or the same goes
for you." Addressing the leader, he added, "Turn
around and put your hands behind your back. I'll read you
your rights later."
  She was beginning to do that, her expression finally
beginning to show that she understood what she had done, when
a clamor of screams erupted from within the walls.
  "That's it," Leo stated grimly. He grabbed
Darryl's arm and orbed them around the gatekeepers.
The women who had been in front of them suddenly
reappeared a second later behind them, astonished
looks on their faces. The one Darryl had been
about to handcuff was still in the process of turning and
moving her hands behind her back. "Come on," Leo
said. "My wife's in there!"
  Phoebe had fought multiple opponents before, and
bested them. But those had usually been


  demons or other unworldly beasts. These
opponents were human, and-dangerous though they might
be-she was hesitant about using her most ferocious
attacks against them. Anyway, there were about a dozen
of them, and they had the advantage of having jumped
her while she was running, instead of poised for combat.
That shouldn't count-she should always be ready, she knew.
But this time she'd been intent on getting Paige out
of there, and then distracted by the realization that a ritual
was underway-and that Piper was participating in it.
  Now she found herself buried under a literal ton of
flesh, bone, and muscjle-like a quarterback caught
by the entire opposing team. She struggled against the
weight that crushed her. Her ribs felt like they were
on the verge of collapse, and she couldn't catch her
breath. And as if that wasn't bad enough, through the
melange of bodies piled on her, she could see the
pony-tailed woman stalking toward her with her gun
held close to her thigh and a malevolent glare in
her eye.
  Then, abruptly, the world went mad.
  Though the music continued to blare, Meg Winship
halted onstage, and the women in the audience stopped with
her. Murmurs of confusion began to spread.
Phoebe could only catch the merest glimpse of the
stage, but Meg seemed to be frozen in place, her
trademark smile now a kind of rictus,
artificial and unconvincing.

  Even the women holding Phoebe down became
aware that something was not right, and their focus shifted enough for
Phoebe to gather her strength. With a few
well-placed pokes, prods, and kicks, she
freed herself from the dog pile. Paige was submerged
beneath a similar pile, but the attention of her
captors was also on Meg instead of on their
prisoner. As Phoebe watched-every bit as caught
up in Meg's strange behavior as the rest of the
audience- Meg finally broke her paralysis,
tilting her head toward the sky and lifting her arms.
This time, her fans did not follow suit.
  "They come!" Meg shouted, her microphoned
voice carrying over the recorded music. Then
someone backstage killed the music, and Meg went
on without accompaniment. "They're here. The Others
grace us with their-was
  She froze again. Beside her, on the stage, a
shimmering blue circle appeared, warping the air in
a pattern like a stone tossed into a clear pool.
  That's not good, Phoebe knew. She's summoned
something.
  Which was, of course, the point of the whole
ritual, she immediately understood. But a summoning that
required such a complex ritual, with hundreds of
women in precise motion, wouldn't be necessary for just any
low-level demon. No, whatever came through that
circle would be something fearsome indeed.


  The women in the audience, including the pink-shirted
security guards, were now totally consumed by what was
happening onstage. Phoebe pushed aside the last
couple holding Paige down and took her sister's
hand. "Come on," she said quietly. "Things are about
to get ugly around here."
  Paige laughed. "Like they weren't already?"
  "Uglier, then." She tilted her head toward the
stage. "Demon time."
  As if on cue, the circle of light brightened,
becoming a nearly blinding opalescent color, and
then a gnarled, clawed hand, with spurs of bone
sticking out from its back like thorns on a rosebush,
gripped the side of the circle from within, like it was a
curtain. The hand was followed by an arm and then a
foot, tipped with long, horned claws. All were a
putrid yellow-green with brownish speckles. The
hand rugged the circle and the rest of the demon emerged.
It stood at least eight feet tall, and must have
weighed five hundred pounds, Phoebe guessed.
The single arm that had come through first was accompanied
by two more, giving it a disturbing asymmetry. Its
body was corpulent, with rolls of fat undulating
with its every motion. Its legs were short and stubby, big
around as fire hydrants. And its head-Phoebe
didn't even like looking at it, though she was as
caught up in it as everyone else-was a jelly-like
blob on top of a squat, thick neck, with half
a dozen orbs that

  she thought must have been eyeballs on tiny stalks,
and an enormous, slavering maw filled with
needle-sharp teeth. When it was fully visible, the
blue circle winked from existence.
  "Man, that's some seriously heinous dude,"
Paige whispered in Phoebe's ear. "When you said
it was gonna get ugly, you weren't joking."
  Phoebe nodded, silent. Meg Winship was in
motion again, approaching the horrific thing that now shared
the stage with her. "Welcome," she said to it.
"I... thought there would be more of you."
  "There is only one of mest" the demon
replied, its deep voice oddly soothing. It
sounded like some 1940's crooner, and to Phoebe, the
contrast between its appearance and its sound only made it
that much more awful. "I am all that is needed."
  Meg gave the thing a brave smile. "Again,
welcome," she said. "These women and I have worked
long and hard to bring you through to this plane. You owe us your
loyalty, and-was
  The demon didn't seem to appreciate that
concept. It backhanded Meg with one of those horrible
hands, striking her just below the jaw-line. The bone
spurs shredded her skin, blood spurted, and in the
utter silence, Phoebe could clearly hear the
amplified crack of her neck breaking. She
collapsed on the stage, and the demon thumped to the
edge of the stage, looking out at the assembled
multitude. "What a charming world," it said
simply.


  As if released from captivity by its words, the
women in the audience-the vast majority of them,
anyway-began to scream. The ensuing tumult was
earsplitting. Now, with Meg's death, they were themselves
again. Panic filled the arena. Phoebe could see
wild eyes, women turning to those next to them with no
idea what they were doing here, some beginning to push or
claw at those between them and the exits.
  And onstage, the demon, as if unhappy at this
response, prepared to climb down into the crowd.
  "We've got to do something," Phoebe said
to Paige. "And now."
  "Piper!" Paige shouted. "Where is she?"
  Phoebe stretched to see over the surging mobs,
finally catching a glimpse of her sister just a few
rows away. She grabbed Paige's hand. "Come
on!" She led Paige back toward the stage, like
two salmon pushing their way upriver against the tide
of bodies that flowed toward the rear.
  "Piper!" they both called in unison. After a
couple of tries, Piper turned her head and
caught Phoebe's eye. She looked momentarily
confused, but then smiled as she recognized her
sisters.
  "Piper, freeze them!" Phoebe commanded.
"Everyone."
  Understanding washed over Piper's face, and she
became an island of calm in the sea of rising

  terror. She raised her hands, and all around her,
the women of the audience froze in place, statue-still.
  But the demon didn't freeze. "My
subjects!" it cried in dismay, climbing down from the
stage. As it did, its obscene bulk rippled like
a barely contained vat of gelatin, and once on
level ground, it walked toward the nearest of the
frozen women.
  "Him too!" Paige shouted to Piper. Piper
tried again, but the demon didn't stop.
  "Okay, blow it up!" Phoebe suggested.
  Piper tried that as well, to no avail.
"Doesn't work," she said.
  Paige tried to orb the creature away, but her
attempt was unsuccessful. "I guess we'll just
have to kick its enormous butt," Phoebe
speculated. She started toward the stage, hands
clenched into fists, ready to intercept it. She knew
Piper and Paige were following. The thing was huge, and
she'd seen how it had dispatched Meg with a casual
blow. She had never fought something that looked so
physically imposing. The bigger they are, she told
herself. But even she wasn't convinced.
  A moment later, they were close enough for her to smell
its hot, fetid breath. She stood directly in
front of the demon, blocking it from the frozen
audience. Paige moved out to her right, Piper to her
left, so if it tried to dodge one, it would run
into another. What kind of resistance they could


  offer, she wasn't sure. But they had to keep it
from hurting any of the audience members while they got
into position to use the Power of Three.
  "You can't be serious," the demon said in its oddly
smooth, TV anchorman's voice.
  "We may not be as big as you, but we're tough,"
Phoebe said. "Try us and see."
  The thing lashed out at her, moving with unexpected
speed and grace for such an ungainly creature.
She dodged, but felt the wind from its blow whistle
past her, uncomfortably close. When the fist had
glided by, she chopped its upper arm with all her
strength. Her hand screamed with pain, but the demon
barely seemed to notice. Then she had to sidestep
because it was bringing one of its arms back for another
blow, and she didn't want to let those bone spurs
land on her. She leaped into the air, spun, and landed
a savage snap-kick. The beast didn't even
slow.
  This is not going to go well, she thought. There's no
way we can beat this thing physically.
  "Try magic again!" It was Leo's voice, and
Phoebe turned to see that he and Darryl were threading
their way through the stationary sea of femininity. "Use the
Power of Three!"
  "What do you think we're doing?" Phoebe
answered, scrambling to her feet just before the demon's
fist swiped at her. It missed, swiping a few
chairs a dozen feet into the air, but another powerful
arm drove toward her. She dodged

  again, unleashing another useless kick, and ran
toward her sisters.
  Piper and Paige worked their way toward each her
quickly. They all knew that when the demon got to the
unmoving mob, it would take out its fury on them.
Reaching each other, the three sisters clasped hands.
Phoebe liked the warmth of Piper's hand in hers,
after being apart for so long. "Power of Three," she
echoed softly, and she heard her sisters both say the
same words under their breaths.
  "Any ideas?" Paige asked the others.
  "I've got one," Piper replied. As her
sister began to speak, Phoebe felt the power within
her-the power that was always magnified when the three of them
worked together, the power that was greater, as they said, than the
sum of its parts-begin to swell.
  Horrid beast, Which here does roam,
  Let this spell, Transport you home!
  The demon stopped in its tracks, still just outside
striking distance of the nearest group of immobile
victims. It let out a plaintive howl that made
Phoebe release her sisters" hands so she could
cover her own ears, and its pain was palpable. But
although they had hurt it, it wasn't yet disappearing,
as they had hoped. Phoebe


  noticed, though, that Paige was in motion too-
pitching a vial of the vanquishing potion she had brought
with her. Her arm was strong, her aim perfect. The
glass vial arced across the bright sky, glittering as
it caught the sun.
  When it hit the demon squarely, a jet of
green flame shot straight into the air like a Roman
candle, and a noxious wave of odor, as if the
demon's putrescent color had turned to stink,
washed across them. "Since we didn't know exactly
what we'd be facing," Paige said, "I brought a
smorgasbord." She passed out a couple more
vials, and each sister took a shot with one. The
demon screeched again, blue and red flames joining
the green one. Its wail of agony echoed, but when the
flame died down, the demon was gone. Phoebe
felt Piper reach for her hand again, and she gave it
gladly. On the other side, Paige did the
same.
  "Good throw, Paige," Piper said happily.
  "Yeah," Paige agreed. "Not bad at all,
if I do say so myself."
  "And, I can't help noticing, you do," Phoebe
added.
  "That's true," Paige said. "I do, don't
I?"
  The three sisters laughed. Leo, coming up from behind
and putting a hand on Phoebe's shoulder and one on
his wife's, joined in. After a moment, he spoke.
"We're almost done here," he said. "But there is one
more thing to take care of...."

  pr had only the faintest memory of the last few
days, she couldn't deny that it was great to be back at
the Manor. She felt as if she'd been gone for
months, somehow, like she'd taken a round-the-world
cruise without Leo or her sisters-which she would never
do-and had only just come home. Everything was familiar,
everything was right, and she took great comfort in that. Even
the plumbing problem at P3 was under control, which she
was glad to hear.
  The time that she had spent under Meg Winship's
sway felt like a half-remembered dream-snatches
of it came to her now and again, but she couldn't remember
a specific timeline. She could barely even
recall Meg's face, and then only from book
covers and posters she'd seen around town. Phoebe,
Paige, and Leo had filled her in on what had
happened, and she


  believed them, but the whole thing seemed like a story
they were telling her, and not an experience that she'd
lived through. The only thing she had taken away from it
was a renewed sense of her own self-confidence. She
felt better about herself, physically and emotionally,
than she had in a long time. If that had been an
indirect gift from Meg, she was grateful.
  Meg's message had been a good one. It had
been her methods and her motives that were a
problem-summoning a demon was always a bad idea,
and Meg hadn't even known what this demon's own
goal really was. It had used her, just as she had
hypnotized and used her own allies and all the
women who had fallen under her spell.
  Now they all sat together in the living room at
Halliwell Manor, sipping herbal tea and
talking over the day's events, and Piper drew
satisfaction from simply being in the presence of those
she loved more than anything.
  "It's a good thing all those women couldn't
remember what they saw, when Meg summoned that
thing," Paige was saying.
  "I can barely remember any of it myself,"
Piper told them. "If the other women's
experiences are like mine, they won't remember much of
any of the time they spent under Meg's influence."
  "That's probably just as well," Phoebe
suggested. "Because if they did remember it, then
they'd be much more curious about what

  happened to Meg. Darryl's official
story-neck broken by a falling microphone boom,
was it?- might not hold up if they all were to dispute
it."
  "Yeah, well, I'm not saying it's a bad
thing," Paige said. "I wouldn't mind forgetting that
ugly guy myself. And his smell, too. You'd think
if Meg was going to become a vessel for some nasty,
rank demon trying to make his way into our dimension
for world domination or whatever, she'd have picked one that
was a little more attractive. After all, wasn't she
all about the body?"
  "Not entirely," Leo countered. "She had a
lot to say about the inside too. She tried
to improve the whole person, not just the exterior. It
really is kind of a shame she was manipulated by that
thing."
  "And a shame that she manipulated so many of us
to bring it here," Piper said. "I don't think I have
any ill effects from it, but I did lose a
couple of days of my life that I'll never get
back."
  "Considering what could have happened," Phoebe said,
"that's a relatively small price to pay, I
think."
  "I wish I could forget what happened to Bill,"
Phoebe said sadly. "Not forget Bill-he was a
great guy-but that phone call was awful."
  "And it's too bad Dr. Haywood wasn't
around for the big event," Paige suggested. "His
theory was right after all, I guess. The UFO'S were
never from outer space-they were just manifestations


  of the demon's growing influence, in a form that human
minds would accept."
  "And that would help Meg control our minds,"
Piper added. "And our bodies, so we could help
perform the final ritual." She took a sip from her
tea and then stood up and stretched. She'd had enough
exercise the last few days to hold her for a month,
she figured, but there was only the slightest soreness
in her muscles, a minor ache, as if she'd worked
out for ten or fifteen minutes too long instead of
days. "But you know what I thought was most interesting?"
  "What?" Leo asked.
  "The women. Meg's victims, I guess you
could call them. U." Piper remembered the faces
of the women in the audience-the women who had been, like
her, in thrall to Meg Winship's demonically
provided magic-after she had unfrozen them. They
had turned to one another, confused, uncertain,
maybe a little scared to find themselves in an unexpected
place, surrounded by strangers. But at the same
time, their faces had almost immediately softened. Smiles
had blossomed where moments before there had been fear and
discomfiture. Worsen who didn't know one another
had started to talk. Piper saw phone numbers being
exchanged, hands being held, the timid and scared being
comforted by the strong and self-assured. The women
didn't even know what they had been through, but they had
been through something and had instantly started to

  bond. Piper heard some of them suggest to others that
they work out together, or meet for tea or coffee or
lunch on some future occasion. They had made for the
exits in an orderly fashion, all panic set
aside.
  "I think," Piper said, sitting down on the arm
of Leo's chair and stroking his shoulder, enjoying the
feel of his muscular arm beneath his soft blue sweater,
"that instead of being destructive, this demon actually
did the city a favor."
  "If you don't count Meg," Paige put in.
  "Right," Piper agreed. "Not Meg. But in a
way, it strengthened us-it brought a thousand women
close together, women who otherwise never might have
known one another. Even if they never remember what
they went through, they now share a bond, and they understand that
much. I don't know what they'll do, what they'll
accomplish-but whatever it is, it can only be
positive. Those women feel good about themselves now,
good about one another, and that energy will do good things for us
all."
  "Which means," Phoebe asserted, "that Meg
gets her wish after all. Or part of it,
anyway-I guess we'll never know what she was
really after, or how much of what happened was her
ambition and how much was the demon's."
  "We may not be our ideal us," Paige said.
"But we're our pretty darn good us-and I'm
talking about the collective us, the women of San
Francisco. No offense, Leo."


  "None taken."
  "And pretty darn good is not a bad thing to be."
  The sisters laughed again. Piper noticed Leo
watching her, love in his eyes, and she leaned over and
kissed his warm, slightly stubbly cheek. "Someone
needs a shave," she whispered in his ear. "Before, you
know, we celebrate my coming home in the proper
fashion."
  Leo rubbed his face and then stood up suddenly,
almost knocking her off the chair. "You're right," he
said. "I'll go upstairs and shave. Join me
soon?"
  "Soon," Piper promised. She wanted to be
with her sisters a while longer, just to revel in the joy
of being together.
  A short while, she thought, with a silent, inner
chuckle. She thought of her husband waiting for her in
their room.
  It's good to be home.


  About the Author
  J6li rlflnOttCan is the author of several
Angel novels, including Close to the Ground,
Hollywood Noir, Haunted, and Stranger to the
Sun. With Nancy Holder, he wrote the
Buffy/angel crossover trilogy Unseen and the
Angel novel Endangered Species, and with
Maryelizabeth Hart added to the mix, the nonfiction
Angel: The Casefiles: Volume 1. He's
published many other books, including original teen
horror series Witch Season, original novel
The Slab, and more comic books than he has time
to count, some of which have been nominated for Stoker and
International Horror Guild awards. With his
wife, the aforementioned Maryelizabeth Hart, and
partner Terry Gilman, he co-owns Mysterious
Galaxy, a bookstore specializing in science
fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror. He
lives in San Diego, California, with his
family and pets, in a home filled with books,
music, toys, and other examples of American
pop culture. More information than you would ever want
to know about him is at www.jeffmariotte.com.