Beware What You Wish

by Diana G. Gallagher

  “Just a little headache. I’ll be fine.” Phoebe pulled the photos from the folder and smiled. “Go get those reference books so we can track this critter down.”

  Phoebe’s smile did not reassure Prue, but she decided to let it go until they got home. Finding out if there was some unknown threat lurking below the radar had to take precedence over minor discomforts.

  “This could be just a wild goose chase,” Prue said.

  “Yeah, but at least we can do it sitting down.” Phoebe sighed.

  “You sit. I’ll be right back.” Prue smiled to reas-sure her sister, but her own thoughts were troubled.

  Prue had been astounded when Piper and Phoebe had briefed her about their hectic and harrowing shopping trip. Phoebe sometimes went for days without having a vision. This day she had had five. It was, Prue realized, inevitable that Phoebe’s power would grow stronger, too. She just needed some time to adjust to her increased sensitivity.

  It wasn’t going to be easy on Piper or her, either, Prue thought as she scanned the anthropology and archaeology book titles. Saving people from imminent disaster was always on their program, but they might have to start making decisions on the merits of each individual case.

  Prue selected four books that dealt with early South American cultures, then paused a moment to reflect.

  There was no way they could have ignored the jogger who bumped into Phoebe near the student parking lot. Phoebe’s power to divert the falling tree limb had saved the young man from a broken neck. Paper cuts, on the other hand, did not warrant Charmed attention. The sisters simply couldn’t risk missing a major event for anything that wasn’t life threatening.

  A blast of cold air sent a chill cascading down Prue’s spine. Clutching the books, she fled the frigid draft and hurried back to Phoebe.

  “So what have we got?” With her glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, Phoebe took a book. “Lost Civilizations of the Amazon. Sounds like a winner.”

  “Watch,” Prue said as she sat down. “We’ll find out that that stone is just a fancy ancient pestle or weight for a thatched roof.”

  “Much ado about nothing.” Phoebe blew dust off the old text and flipped to the index. “That would be a pleasant change in the routine, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Prue grinned. “And I’d get a perverse kick out of telling Mr. Stephen Tremaine his rare spirit stone was just an ordinary household utensil.”

  Phoebe peered at her over the rim of her glasses. “Do I detect a hint of interest?”

  “I’m not that desperate.” Prue shuddered but not at the thought of a romantic interlude with the wealthy, self-centered candidate. Another draft seemed to wrap her in a cold, invisible shroud. “I can’t concentrate in this draft. You’re a student here. Can you check these books out?”

  “Sure.” Phoebe frowned. “What draft?”

  “The one from the air conditioning vent.” Prue glanced upward and scanned the ceiling. No vents, at least not that she could see. She rubbed her arms, her frown deepening when the icy sensation passed, and quickly put a twinge of anxiety on hold. She couldn’t let her imagination turn every little thing that didn’t have an immediate, logical explanation into a potential problem of demonic proportions. She’d go nuts in a week. Maybe less.

  “Come on.” Prue stood up and gathered her things. “If we go home, I can do research in the comfort of our own photogenic couch and you can rest your aching head.”

  “Good plan.” Phoebe slammed the book closed.

  Outside, Prue welcomed the warmth of the afternoon sun on her face and arms as they headed back to the car. The sight of students wandering the campus paths or sitting in groups on the grass helped to dissipate the sense of gloom that had settled over her in the library. Somehow she had to take control of the paranoia that assumed evil lurked under every rock.

  “Somebody dropped their purse organizer.” Phoebe stooped to pick up the woman’s wallet lying in the parking space beside their car. She went into a precognitive trance the instant her fingers touched leather.

  Piper stirred the mixture of softened cream cheese, chopped scallions, and seasonings with a vengeance. Tears streamed down her cheeks, forcing her to stop to wipe them away with the back of her hand. After Phoebe and Prue had left for the university library, she had thought making the ham rolls would take her mind off missing Leo. Instead, the mundane activity had just made things worse.

  Without her sisters or some impending calamity to distract her, Piper’s thoughts automatically shifted to the emptiness she felt when Leo wasn’t around. Which was most of the time lately, she thought sniffling. She couldn’t even listen to music on the radio without falling into the pit of self-pity. Every song, whether it was about love lost or found, reminded her that their relationship encompassed both.

  Setting the bowl aside, Piper opened the fridge to get the sliced ham and closed it again when the phone rang. She brushed a renegade wisp of hair off her forehead and took a deep breath to quell the weepy evidence of her emotions as she answered.

  “Piper! It’s Phoebe. We’ve got another emergency.”

  “What’s happening?” Piper gave her sister her full attention, her personal problems forgotten.

  “A woman falling out of a window in an alley behind an old brick building. We have an address,” Phoebe said frantically. “I just hope it’s the right one.”

  “Where?” Piper scribbled down the address and fished her keys out of her bag.

  “You’re closer, Piper! If we’re not too late already,” Phoebe added. “Meet you there.”

  Piper was driving down the street before she remembered that the cream cheese filling for the ham rolls was sitting on the counter, but there was no going back. Alife literally hung in the balance. Unless she or Prue were on the scene to break the girl’s fall, the victim didn’t stand a chance.

  Four minutes and thirty seconds later, Piper burned rubber off her tires as she squealed into a parking lot at the side of the run-down apartment building. An access alley ran along the back. Prue’s car wasn’t there.

  “Guess it’s up to me.” Since seconds might be crucial, Piper leaped out of the car without shutting off the engine and bolted for the back of the building. She braced herself for the worst as she rounded the corner and lurched to a halt by a large overflowing metal trash bin.

  The alley was riddled with potholes, and the area in back of the building looked like a dump. Flies, attracted by the stench, swarmed around garbage and litter spilling out of torn trash bags. Broken glass, flattened cans, and discarded junk were piled by the back door.

  But there was no body smashed to a pulp on the pavement, Piper noticed with relief.

  Ahigh-pitched squeal drew Piper’s gaze upward past rows of dirty windows. The building was five stories tall, but she couldn’t pinpoint which floor the cry had come from until the girl shrieked again.

  “That hurt, Bobby!”

  Angered by the domestic dispute, Piper positioned herself to be ready to act no matter what window the woman came flying out of. She wished Prue and Phoebe would hurry up. She could freeze a falling body, but the woman would still be falling when the effect wore off — at the same deadly velocity without Prue’s telekinetic power to slow the descent.

  “Come on, guys,” Piper muttered, flexing her fingers. She frowned, fuming.

  “Don’t do that!” The woman yelled again.

  “What?” A man’s voice mocked her. “Can’t take a little . . . Linda! Look out!”

  Linda’s terrified scream mingled with the sound of breaking glass as she burst backward through a window on the fourth floor and started to fall. Piper froze the back of the building with Linda suspended halfway out the shattered window.

  “Okay. Now what?” Piper glanced up and down the alley to make sure nobody was watching the spectacle, then glowered toward the parking lot. No Prue or Phoebe, either, she thought, shivering as a gust of chilly wind blew through her hair. She frowned, startled by the anomaly in t
he eighty-degree heat.

  Her attention was diverted from the icy breeze by Linda’s scream when the action resumed. Reacting instinctively, she froze everything again.

  And gawked in disbelief.

  Linda was still halfway out the window.

  Piper stared at Bobby, who had clamped onto Linda’s wrist and had just started to pull her back in.

  False alarm? Piper blinked and threw up her hands in frustration dissolving the time stall she had created.

  “Bobby!” Linda’s shrill cry pierced the quiet alley.

  “Don’t worry, baby! I’ve got you!” Bobby’s voice shook with fright.

  Piper thought she saw the man’s grip begin to slip and stopped time a third time. She jerked back when a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses came to a dead stop in front of her eyes. Phoebe and Prue raced around the corner of the building as she snatched the glasses from certain doom.

  “Oh, good. We’re not too late.” Phoebe’s hand shot to her chest in relief.

  “In the nick of time,” Piper said. She held up the glasses. “I saved these, Prue. You save the girl.”

  “I’m ready whenever you are.” As Prue raised her hand, time rolled forward.

  “Don’t let go!” Linda begged Bobby. “He’s losing her!” Phoebe suddenly rose in the air.

  Prue latched onto Phoebe’s ankle as Bobby hauled Linda back inside the apartment and threw his arms around her.

  “Oh, boy.” Squeezing her eyes shut, Phoebe tried without success to lower herself to the ground.

  Piper watched with a stunned sense that everything was totally out of control. Since Bobby would have managed to abort Linda’s death dive without their help, they had dropped everything to rescue a pair of glasses. The Celebrity Charity Bazaar was two days away, and she had a dozen things to do before she went to P3 for the night. And now Phoebe, who really needed to master her new ability to levitate, was airborne in front of witnesses. “Get her down!” Piper snapped.

  “I’m trying!” Prue’s blue eyes flashed as she hauled Phoebe back to earth and clamped onto her arms to keep her anchored. “Are you cool now?”

  Phoebe nodded and looked up with a frown. “She wasn’t going to fall?”

  “Apparently not,” Piper said.

  “But I saw her smash through the window,” Phoebe insisted.

  “She did smash through the window. She just didn’t fall and go splat.” Phoebe looked so upset that Piper didn’t mention that she had left her cream cheese filling rotting on the kitchen counter to answer a false alarm. When Bobby appeared in the window to check the damage, she lashed out at him instead.

  “Hey!” Hands on her hips and itching for a fight, Piper snapped at Linda’s bully boyfriend. “Where do you get off beating up on a girl and pushing her out a window?”

  “I could give him a taste of his own medicine,” Prue offered, waving her hand.

  “What are you talking about, lady?” Bobby put his arm around Linda when she appeared beside him. “I didn’t push her.”

  “No, you’ve got it all wrong.” Linda pressed closer to Bobby as she looked down. “He was teaching me kung fu and I tripped.”

  Feeling like a complete idiot, Piper heaved a heavy sigh and held up the eyeglasses. “I’ll just leave these here.”

  “This, too,” Phoebe said softly. With a sheepish shrug, she placed the wallet on the pavement by the glasses.

  As they made a hasty departure, Piper cast a narrowed glance at her sisters. “We have to talk!”

  Athulak sped through the canyons of the city listening to the idle words of the humans who hurried along the streets or huddled behind walls. He had quickly learned to appreciate the advantages of being wind. No barrier could bar him, and no human feared him or recognized his touch.

  The witches sensed him, but they knew not his name nor his power. Like the hundred others whose carelessly uttered desires he had granted since his return, the seer did not know she had been cursed by the impulsive whim of her own words.

  Or that when Tremaine’s words freed his spirit from the stone, the events set in motion could not be undone.

  Except by the magic of the three.

  Still, Athulak was untroubled as he rode the air currents through a sunlit sky.

  What the witches did not know, they could not stop.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Absorbed in her reading, Prue absently picked up her cup and took a long swallow of coffee. The cold, bitter liquid was a jolt to her system. “Gross!” She gagged, shuddered, and set the cup down on the kitchen table with weary resignation.

  “Any luck?” Phoebe shuffled in and yawned. She paused by the stove and opened the kettle to check the water level.

  “Zilch, nada, not even a hint.” Leaning back, Prue closed the book and shoved it aside. The pile of university references had yielded some fascinating information about ancient South American tribes, but not a clue about a carved stone that resembled the one in Stephen Tremaine’s library.

  “So maybe there’s nothing to find out about that stone guy.” Phoebe turned on the burner under the kettle, stretched then rubbed her neck. “If it is a guy and not a paperweight or something.”

  “Ancient South American cultures didn’t use paper.” Prue held out her cup. “Would you dump that?”

  “Sure.” Phoebe emptied the cup in the sink, then pulled a teabag out of a canister. “Want some?”

  Prue shook her head and stared at the clouded photo she had taken of Tremaine. Maybe Phoebe was right and the artifact was just a crudely carved rock with nothing exceptional about it except its obscure origin and age. The film was the most likely reason for the flaws in the pictures, especially since the sisters hadn’t been attacked by any ferocious warrior demons from the past. They had enough problems without worrying about threats that didn’t exist.

  Like the rising rate of rescues prompted by the sudden surge in Phoebe’s premonitions, Prue thought with a guarded glance at her sister. Phoebe was leaning against the counter massaging her temples.

  “Didn’t you sleep?” Prue asked.

  “Yeah, I did.” Sinking into a chair, Phoebe yawned again. “My brain just isn’t used to the extra wear and tear yet.”

  Prue nodded. Since Phoebe had gone to sleep as soon as they had gotten home that afternoon, she and Piper hadn’t had a chance to discuss a very real problem their sister didn’t seem to recognize. Putting their lives on hold to save people from mortal and demonic danger was a responsibility they all accepted without question. Throwing their lives into chaos a dozen times a day to prevent trivial accidents was another matter entirely. Phoebe had to learn to distinguish between the two, but that wasn’t something Prue wanted to address on her own. The youngest Halliwell would be easier to convince with the persuasive power of two.

  “Feeling rested enough for a little fun?” Prue mimicked the arm movements of a Flamenco dancer. “Hard Crackers is playing at P3 tonight.”

  “You want to go now?” Phoebe glanced at the clock. “It’s almost eleven.”

  “Afraid you’ll turn into a pumpkin at midnight?” Prue joked to cloak her concern.

  “Well, I . . . okay.” Phoebe nodded and averted her gaze for a second. She smiled when she looked back, but there was no mischievous sparkle in her eyes. “Why not?”

  That’s what Prue wanted to know. Phoebe, who was never shy about scouting the dating possibilities at Piper’s club, really didn’t want to go out. That seemed even more ominous than the foggy picture of Tremaine’s spirit stone. It definitely demanded a family conference of three, she decided as Phoebe got up to turn off the stove.

  Phoebe stared apprehensively at the mass of people waiting to get into the club. She usually didn’t mind having to push her way inside because an overflow crowd meant Piper was making money and she could stay in school. Now, instead of chic, well-dressed dollar signs, every person represented a potential red alert. Pretending that she felt fine in spite of a persistent headache had been difficul
t in the unpopulated sanctuary of her own house. Braving a packed house at P3 could be a waking nightmare.

  Phoebe was ashamed to admit it, but if anyone was on the verge of impending catastrophe tonight, she didn’t want to know about it.

  “Look at that crowd! Not bad for a week night.” Prue eased out of the car and smoothed the skirt of a black dress that hugged every curve. A black lace cover-up with long, tapering sleeves that belled at the cuffs created an image of daring elegance.

  Phoebe called it Prue’s deadly black widow look; no guy who was still breathing could resist her. Prue, however, showed no mercy and rejected most of the poor souls with the courage to ask her out. That wasn’t hard to understand. They all had to err on the side of caution because of their powers. Even if she herself hit it off with the new bartender Piper had been urging her to meet the past few days, Phoebe thought, eventually her secret life as a witch would create problems most guys couldn’t handle. Being in love with a White Lighter wasn’t easy, but at least Piper didn’t have to hide what she was.

  “That’s a lot of people all right.” Chilled by a gust of wind, Phoebe rubbed her bare arms. The vibrant colors in her long wraparound skirt and matching midriff top were hotter than the night air.

  “Are you cold?” Prue asked.

  “It’s a little chilly, but I’ll warm up once we get inside. All those bodies dancing in close quarters generate a lot of heat.” Phoebe didn’t know if Rick was working tonight, but she had dressed to impress just in case.

  Prue’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement. “It’s hot out here.”

  “But I just felt —” Phoebe frowned, realizing Prue was right. It was hot.

  “Felt what?” Prue stepped closer. “A blast of arctic wind out of nowhere?”

  “Yeah.” Phoebe looked at her quizzically. “Did you feel it, too?”

  “Not just now, no,” Prue said. “I felt a windy cold shoulder in the library this afternoon. Let’s go see Piper.”

  Phoebe called Prue back when she started toward the crowd gathered around the front door. “Let’s go in the back. We don’t want to incite a riot because we can go to the head of the line.”