A couple of scenes from Perry's World that for various reasons weren't included in the story.

. . .

November 18
Year: 19 Anno Domini Nostri Guietta (in the year of Our Lord Wyatt)
also known as 2022 of the Common Era
The day Chris finds out Wyatt has chosen evil. [Chris is 18, Lea is 16]

"P-please! I'm begging you…" The demon whimpered from his curled-up position on the floor. His captors—two pubescent witches—stood at a distance, determination sharpening their faces.

"Oh please," the boy snapped, "What kind of demon are you? Grow a spine. Or better yet, tell us what we want to know, and then we'll leave you to your pitiful existence." He took a bold step forward, so the girl beside him reached for his arm and murmured, "Careful, Chris."

Chris shot her a glance to let her know her warning had been received. He waited a beat, in case the demon caved, but then let frustration fuel his powers. He sliced the air with his hand, sending the demon soaring across the room.

It landed with a grunt, which turned into a frantic explosion of words: "I don't know, I swear I don't! You've got to believe me."

Chris sighed. "Actually we don't have to believe anything."

"Look," Chris's cousin interrupted, exasperated, "This isn't just some nuisance bounty hunter we're talking about here. Whatever this new power comes from, it's going to be bad for all of us, demons included."

The demon attempted to draw himself up, but in his prone form ended up looking ridiculous. "Raising evil is the Underworld's common goal. What's good for evil is good for us all," he replied haughtily.

Lea rolled her eyes. "You think I'm an idiot? My mom's visions don't lie. He's going to destroy the Underworld just as much as he destroys everything else. You have to tell us so we can stop it."

The demon's eyes darted between them. In a whisper, he admitted, "He'll kill me!"

"Well, we'll kill you if you don't tell us," Chris pointed out. "So I guess you better pick when you want to die—now or later."

That gave the demon considerable pause. At length, eyes wide, he said, "You won't—you won't believe me."

"Try us."

"None of us believed it at first, either," the demon continued, at this point more than half deranged. Chris let him ramble; eventually, the verbosity might lead somewhere useful. "Who would have expected? We thought it was a trap, a joke even—"

"What was a joke?" Lea snapped. She had less patience than her cousin.

If he heard her, the demon didn't acknowledge it. He railed nonstop, "The greatest hoax of all time, isn't it? A man barely out of boyhood? The prophesized twice-blessed witch—son of a Charmed One and her whitelighter—rallying the Underworld to wage the ultimate battle the world has ever known?"

Chris was first to react. He brought a hand up, making a gesture as if to grip the empty air. The demon's rant stuttered to a halt, replaced by a soft gagging as his windpipe pressed inward. "You're lying," he deadpanned.

From behind him he heard a soft groan. He glanced over his shoulder, at Lea, who stood with her face pressed into her hands. She had moved to lean against the wall, her knees having gone weak.

"Chris," she moaned, "Chris…"

"Stop it, Lea," Chris stated firmly, "He's lying. Don't listen to a word he's saying."

But she wailed, "Why would he lie? What would that accomplish? And things have been weird for a while." She couldn't look at him, couldn't even open her eyes. "Where's he been all week? All month? God, Chris, how long's it even been?"

"Stop it, he's around all the time."

Lea jerked toward the demon. "How long?" she demanded. "How long's he been infiltrating the Underworld?"

"It started four years ago"—Chris's head spun; years?—"a month after the Great Victory."

Weakly, Lea said, "The what?"

The demon smirked at her ignorance. "The day all demons celebrate—when the link between the Charmed Ones was broken."

Forgetting his magic, Chris flew at the demon to attack with his bare hands. "You mean when they murdered my mother!" he roared. The demon let out a cross between a cry of fear and a giddy laugh. He crab-crawled backward until his spine hit the rocks, then kicked out to protect himself from the oncoming witch.

"Chris! Stop it! Stop it!"Lea shouted. But Chris refused to listen (probably didn't even hear her) until, fed up, she froze the demon mid-smirk. The sudden quiet rushed at the witches all at once. Lea yanked her cousin away from his scuffle. "Chris! You have to stop. This isn't helping." She could feel him trembling under her hold. "We need to go."

Without looking at her, Chris cut in, "No. We don't know enough. He's lying—"

"It doesn't matter. We need to get out of here. If it is Wyatt—"

"It isn't."

"But if it is," Lea pressed, "then we both know the sort of power we're dealing with. He'll sense that we're down here. He may even know what we've found out. It's not safe. Let's just go back to the manor and work things out from there."

Chris glared at her. "It's not Wyatt," he repeated. But his voice came out strangled by uncertainty. His brother was born under the gaze of a prophesy, bestowed powers of exceptional light, hailed by good magic as the coming savior. Together he and Chris had the purest heritage on the planet.

But that was Wyatt of history books. The Wyatt with whom Chris had shared a bedroom for the greater part of his childhood—the Wyatt who hated to get up for school and who played magical tag and made fun of his twerp kid brother—that Wyatt was more than whatever destiny intended for him. And Chris had seen the look tucked at the corner of his brother's eyes, when he thought no one else was watching, an expression that pulled him away from the present. Chris never knew if he was remembering something or battling some darkness between all that twice-blessed business, but whatever it was left Wyatt empty sometimes.

And Wyatt did seem predisposed to lose his temper, even before their mother's death had driven them both to the end of their tethers. Chris had always attributed it to Halliwell genes—stubborn to a fault—but could it have come from something more, something darker? Could evil have been buried within him for so long, and Chris had never given it significance?

"Well, took you long enough."

Chris and Lea spun to face the voice behind them. It was Wyatt, which brought Chris to the sick realization that, despite his vehement denial, he wasn't surprised in the least. Wyatt had started growing his hair out some time last year. Usually, at Aunt Phoebe's insistence, he wore it pulled back into a nub of a ponytail at the nape of his neck. (Chris mocked him endlessly for it.) Now it was loose, tangled around the sharp jut of his chin. Chris felt Lea's grip tighten on his arm.

"Chris," she whispered, but fell silent when she realized she didn't know how to finish her thought.

Chris swallowed the rising panic in his throat. Evenly, he forced out, "Wyatt, what is this? What the hell is going on?"

"The demon is right, Chris. I have been organizing the Underworld. I got tired of the trite volley of attacks between us and the demons. After that last attack"—he didn't have to specify, of course; there was only one that mattered—"I decided to put a stop to this silly war."

"It's not silly," Lea snapped. She gripped Chris's arm so tightly that Chris's fingers tingled, but her voice came out rich with confidence. "It's necessary. Good fights evil. That's how it works."

Wyatt gave her a look of utter disdain. "You would believe that," he sneered.

Finally, Chris snapped. "Stop it, this is crazy. You're crazy. This doesn't make any sense." Because he couldn't say what that traitorous part of him was thinking, which was that it made perfect sense, that Chris had seen this darkness lingering inside Wyatt for as long as he could remember. It had just been waiting to come to the surface.

"No, Chris," Wyatt remarked, "What's crazy is fighting the same fight over and over, when it clearly hasn't brought any lasting change. Tradition for the sake of tradition is useless to uphold. Repetition of failure, that is 'crazy.'"

"So, what?" Lea demanded, "You've been down here gathering demons so we can all get together and sing 'Kumbaya'? You think if you tell them you wanna be friends, they'll say, 'Gee, sure,' and we'll all live happily ever after?"

"Of course not," Wyatt snorted. "I am showing them the path of common ground."

"What common ground?" Lea scoffed. "We have nothing in common with demons."

"You're wrong," Wyatt said. "We have magic."

Chris felt a crushing weight of nausea settled in his gut. He could see where Wyatt was leading. Once glance at Lea's expression—one eyebrow raised as she rolled her eyes—and he knew it hadn't clicked for her yet.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she demanded.

"Lea," Chris said urgently, "let's go." They had to leave before she realized, before it dawned on her how twisted her cousin's mind had become (or had it always been this way?). Chris just couldn't stand the thought of her comprehension.

Wyatt laughed, chilling Chris's skin. "Oh, Chris gets it. I know you, Chris. You understand it perfectly."

Lea frowned. "Gets what?" She directed the question at Chris, who gave a sharp shake of his head.

"You were right," he said instead, "We shouldn't be here." Before she could protest, he dragged her into an orb. Wyatt called out to them, his tone amused. Chris ignored him. They melted into lights and rose toward the ceiling, but his brother's last words followed them: "It's not about the magic, cousin. It's the power."

. . .

Year: 20 Anno Domini Nostri Guietta (in the year of Our Lord Wyatt)
also known as 2023 of the Common Era [Kat = 12]
Kat learns to control her powers. Kat develops pyrokinesis. This is also the year that Kat defects to Wyatt for the first time.

Despite the eight-year age gap, Kat always had a very close relationship with Wyatt. It stemmed from their shared inability to bridge connections to others. Wyatt because of Gideon's traumatic attack on him as a toddler and Kat because her intangibility left her starved for affection. The Kat of this timeline is vastly different from the Katie of the other Chris's world. Whereas little Katie craves human contact, Kat's intangibility over time drivers her to complete emotional detachment.

Early in her life, she begins to exhibit behaviors of self-harm (although, of course, nothing can physically harm her because she is not physical). This acts as an unhealthy manifestation of her greatest desire: to be touched, to feel. One day she uses a knife to simulate slicing her arm. When the blade passes through her skin, it doesn't even leave a mark - and certainly doesn't hurt - but Kat feels something. It tingles. Or maybe she only imagines it. But she becomes obsessed with feeling that minuscule sensation again.

She looks for other methods to force the sensation and eventually stumbles across another harmful behavior: lighting a match under her skin. It can't burn her, but she finds that it induces the tingle that she so craves. (Unbeknownst to Kat, her instant allure to fire is an extension of her latent pyrokinetic powers.)

When Kat is eleven, the Halliwells build Sanctuary, a haven for mortals and magical creatures to escape from Wyatt's ever-expanding reign. Despite everything that has happened, Wyatt still loves his family. Even with his growing empire, he continues to search for a cure for his cousin's ailment, where everyone else has long given up hope. Eventually, he finds the answer. He realizes that they had all simply been looking in all the wrong places. The Halliwells had operated under the assumption that the only way to save Kat would be to somehow remove her powers altogether, which failed time and time again. What they should have done was treat it like any other power. Taught to control it so it didn't slip from her control.

When Wyatt realizes their mistake, he sends one of his minions to convey the message. On Wyatt's orders, a spy infiltrates Sanctuary, befriends Kat and the others, and little by little teaches Kat how to turn her powers off. Although Wyatt could easily have used to spy to gain information and disassemble Sanctuary, his sole focus was on helping his cousin. He doesn't even try to convince Kat to defect and join him; Wyatt expects nothing in return. He does it simply because he loves her.

The first time she burns herself after she has become tangible, she is completely shocked to feel the pain associated with the fire. She can't remember ever having felt pain before in her life. She becomes enthralled with the idea that something without physicality (fire) can cause physical pain. Ultimately this grows into full-blown pyromania. She lights small fires in waste baskets at Sanctuary, and later becomes bold enough to venture outside and light even bigger fires, enough to burn down dilapidated remains around San Francisco.

When she grows into her powers of pyrokinesis, she uses them for this new obsession. Everyone assumes it's a lack of control. None of them suspect that she actually enjoys setting the fires. One evening, she sneaks out of bed and spends all night outside Sanctuary, setting fires. Chris and Lea notice her absence and go out to search for her. They find her at the same time that Wyatt's probes do. [This scene is documented in the outline, January 5.] She makes a split-second decision not to return to Sanctuary and instead follows Wyatt's probes back to his throne. Wyatt welcomes her with open arms.

. . .

Year: 23 Anno Domini Nostri Guietta (in the year of Our Lord Wyatt)
also known as 2026 of the Common Era [Kat = 14]

As time passes, Kat's conscience nags at her. She ends up arguing with Wyatt frequently. During one of those arguments, Wyatt snaps: "The door is that way. You can leave whenever you want."

Kat doesn't leave then. But weeks later, she walks through the wall to enter Wyatt's room and tells him, "You told me I could leave whenever I wanted to. Well, I'm sick of being here, and I miss my family. I'm done."

Wyatt is understandably upset but doesn't stop her. She returns home, to everyone's shock. They are somewhat suspicious but still pleased to see her. Despite her admittance to Wyatt that she does, in fact, care about family, she refuses to let her mother hug her. She returns to her old bed and pretends she never left. But of course she very quickly begins to feel the suffocation and claustrophobia that Sanctuary always felt to her before she left.

Three months later, she shows up in front of Wyatt's room again with a suitcase in hand. Wyatt doesn't ask questions; he just steps aside to let her in.

She waffles back and forth like this every few months, switching sides to work with Wyatt, then having a pang of conscience that sends her back to Sanctuary, only to run away again after that oppressive lifestyle becomes too overbearing. She can't make a decision. She believes she can't ask anyone for advice because everyone is biased. Despite a loving family on both sides of the war, Kat feels utterly alone.

. . .

Year: 23 Anno Domini Nostri Guietta (in the year of Our Lord Wyatt)
also known as 2026 of the Common Era [Lea = 20]

"Well, we have to do something. I mean, we can't just let him get away with this!" The owner of the voice slammed a determined fist down on the round, mahogany table. All eyes shot to his face, flushed with passion. Of those, three people—Phoebe, Paige, and Lea—quickly averted their gazes, as if embarrassed by the man's passion.

At length, one of the three stepped in to say, "Let's not be too hasty here, Jamal. An attack is dangerous with our slim resources. Besides, that is not what Sanctuary was established for. We founded this place to protect the innocent, not punish the guilty."

Lea smirked wryly and mouthed the last few words as they were spoken. She had heard that phrase far longer than the six years The Haven had been in existence. In fact, she had heard that very same voice say those very same words multiple times throughout her childhood.

"But, Paige!" Jamal exploded in exasperation. His eyes ran over the other seven faces in the room, attempting to assess their opinions on the matter before he shared more of his own. "He massacred five hundred people. Five hundred, Paige. Innocents. Men, women… Children." A pained expression clouded his face.

Beside Paige, Phoebe said gently, "Nobody is denying that the act was committed, Jamal, or that it was horrendous. All of us have lost people we love. We all understand how you feel—"

"Do you?" Jamal retorted. "Because if I didn't know any better, I would say you sounded like you were protecting someone." Silence swallowed his statement. Suddenly, the room dropped a few degrees.

Only after a long moment did Paige speak. "I have lost my husband to the greatest monster I have ever known, an evil I am ashamed to admit shares my blood." She spoke slowly, her stare chilly. "I have faced my guilt every single day for seven years, wondering if there was something I could have done to stop him from becoming this monster who would not hesitate to murder his own uncle in the most brutal manner his twisted mind could conjure." She leaned so close to Jamal that he had to tilt his head backwards to look her in the eye. "I have put every bit of me into the effort to save as many Innocents as I can. Your daughter may be dead"—Jamal recoiled at the bluntness of her statement—"but my children have hardly seen me for the past six years because I am too busy tending to you. Your daughter is lucky not to have to live through this hell anymore. Thank the Powers that Be that she is dead. She's better off than the rest of us."

Paige sat back, feeling drained. "The Haven is a place for protection, not destruction. You want to kill Wyatt?" She did manage to contain her snort at the mere suggestion, but only barely. "The door is that way. Go right ahead."

When Jamal did not move, Paige climbed to her feet. She scowled at him, singularly unimpressed by his sudden meek disposition. The fight had been properly snuffed out of him, it seemed. Good. She made to leave the room. At the doorway, she glanced back. "Make no accusations that you can't back up, Jamal."

Lea jogged after her mother, who had moved to follow Paige as soon as the youngest Charmed One had let the door slam shut. "Mom," Leo called.

After a moment of inner debate, Phoebe turned. Paige was right: as it was she did not see enough of her daughters to excuse walking out on Lea now.

"What is it, Melinda?" she asked with a tense smile. Usually, Lea pulled a face at the use of her full name, but this time she ignored the remark.

"Mom… Where's Chris?" She lowered her voice to ask so that passersby wouldn't accidentally overhear her. Chris had always been a hot topic to the members of The Haven, and Lea found no reason to get people all worked up, especially after Jamal's explosion during the meeting. The Haven could deal with only one bomb per day.

Phoebe's smile waned. It occurred to Lea that her mother had never looked so old.

"You know I have no idea, Melinda. I never know what that boy is up to." Bitterly, she added, almost to herself, "Probably off trying to get himself blown up again. That's all he ever seems to do nowadays."

"Mom, he's doing his best," Lea protested half-heartedly. She and Phoebe had this argument too often for Lea to put the effort into it anymore. By now, she no longer expected to change her mother's negative opinion of the courageous work Chris did, and Phoebe knew Lea would admire Chris daringly putting himself in harm's way. He opened himself to peril on a daily basis in order to protect Innocents from his brother's wrath. And Phoebe wanted to support him; she really did. With Piper long gone and Leo—well, him, too, in his own way—Phoebe knew how much Chris sought approval from the rest of his family. But really, some things just went too far.

Phoebe understood "protecting Innocents" as much as the next witch, but that was what The Haven was for. There were ways to go about these things. Building a sanctuary, offering healing magic. Not throwing yourself into the direct path of danger. Except, of course, Chris, who seemed to believe he had the sole responsibility to undo the evil his brother did.

Chris couldn't understand her reticence. And what scared Phoebe most was that sometimes Lea seemed not to understand either.

Lea couldn't stand the thought of being alone right, so instead of following the winding hallway to her bedroom she made a quick left and stopped at the third door from the end. Before she could knock, a child's voice called, "Cm'in." It was her brother. Of course. He would know to expect her. Smiling to herself, Lea pushed open the door and entered.

On the floor sat a six-year-old Riley with the soft brown eyes of his mother and the cheeky grin of his father. Whenever he smiled, it reminded Lea of the last time she'd spoken to her dad. By now the memory was eight months old, but it still made her chest clench to think about it. On her worse days, Lea couldn't bring herself to look at her brother's smile. She would never admit it out loud but, after all, her brother tended to know these things.

When he looked up, she smiled at him. He responded with a closed-mouth grin, which Lea knew he did so that she wouldn't remember their father. He was extra-sensitive to the emotions of the people around him, probably because he knew he would feel the backlash. At six years old, Riley carried the emotions of the entire Haven. Lea trusted her brother with things she would admit to no one else. In many ways he was her closest confidante.

[Despite their young age, Ariel and the twins (Lottie and Riley) help out in Sanctuary to the extent of their abilities. Six years is old enough to work the filing, set up rooms for newcomers, fetch supplies for the infirmity, and basically run small errands at various people's request.]

. . .

Year: 24 Anno Domini Nostri Guietta (in the year of Our Lord Wyatt)
also known as 2027 of the Common Era [Chris = 22, Lea = 20]

Chris: "My aunts can't know about this plan until it's too late to stop me. Otherwise, we'll never make it."

Bianca (playfully): "Secret's safe with me. Assassins are discrete."

"Chris." He didn't turn around to greet the person at the door—the soft but firm voice of his oldest cousin. He had his head buried within his closet, rummaging through a large cardboard box on the floor.

"Chris."

Ignoring the tone of her voice, he called with enthusiasm, "Hey, Lea, you want my old notebook? It's got a ton of makeshift spells back from when we were little. Wow, I can't believe I forgot about this old thing! Look, this is one that Wyatt and I—"

"Chris."

She hated hearing her eldest cousin's name, and still more when it was thrown out with such casual regard, as if he were, just like any other, a well-esteemed member of their family.

Sighing, Chris turned around. Lea had seated herself on the corner of his bed. "The twins told me you stopped by." He said nothing, so she continued, "They said you dropped off some old toys."

With forced levity Chris replied, "Yeah, well, I obviously don't use them anymore, so I figured someone might as well benefit from them."

Lea's eyes lingered on his bookshelf. "And your collection's gone," she added pointedly, gesturing toward the vacated space where an assortment of snow globes had once acted as bookends.

Chris shrugged. "Prue always said she was jealous of them."

"Don't deflect, Chris," Lea snapped, "I know what this is." She sighed. "You're really going through with this thing?"

Dropping the feigned nonchalance, Chris said, "Yeah. I am."

Lea stood up, suddenly angry, as if she had expected him to come to his senses by now, and stormed away from him. She stopped, staring at the wall, hands clenched at her sides. She bit her lip until the words exploded out of her: "So that's it? You're just gonna leave? Mom was right. You're being stupid."

"I don't have a choice!" he countered, his own composure ebbing. "Look." He paused long enough to release his frustration in a soft exhale; why leave home on a negative note? "This is the only way. You know that. Bianca and I looked into every other option."

"And you're so sure you can trust her," Lea stated flatly with the taste of a stale argument on her lips.

"I'm not even gonna answer that again." He pinned his cousin with a pointed look, but she turned away, unable to meet his gaze. When she didn't respond, he continued, "This plan will work no matter what. I'm going back. If I die—"

"Stop it."

"—then Bianca will follow me into the past to finish what I started… one way or the other."

Lea blinked quickly. She ended up with little beads of water clinging to her eyelashes. "Why does it have to be you?"

"I'm the Keeper of Time. I'm the only one who can. The Angel of Death told me there was a reason I got this power. Now we know why."

Feeling petulant, Lea pressed, "Why Bianca? I could follow you."

"It needs to be someone bound to me."

"I'm family."

"It isn't enough. It would have to be a direct line. Mom, Leo, Wyatt." Chris snorted at the latter option, but Lea just winced at the sound of the name. More gently, Chris said, "Aunt Phoebe tried to do it, remember? She tried to tap into my powers, but it didn't work. That's why I've gotta be the one to go first. And that's why only Bianca can take my place if I die."

"Because you're engaged. That's why you proposed."

"No. I proposed because I love her."

"Don't be stupid, Chris. People are dying left and right. We can't be picky here, and she's a girl with a decent head on her shoulders, not to mention a body to go with it—oh please, I'm not blind. But if we lived in a normal world, you'd have vanquished her ages ago. Reality check, she's still a demon, no matter how much she's done for us."

"I love her."

"You think you love her," Lea corrected. She saw his eyes shutter, and regretted it instantly. Silent, he jerked away and left the room.

After a moment, Lea chased after him into the hallway. This wasn't an argument she could let herself lose, no matter how much he may hate her for it. "Chris, please, just think about this for a minute!"

When he turned back, he didn't look angry, only tired. "I did think about it, Lea," he murmured. "I thought a lot. Years, in fact. And guess what—I exhausted all our other options."

"But, Chris, you could die."

His expression of utter indifference chilled her blood. "So?"

He continued down the hall again. In desperation, she cried after him, "So that's what this is about? You have a death wish and you're trying to use martyrdom as an excuse." When he didn't rise to the bait, she ran to catch up, seizing him by the shoulder and wheeling him around. "If you won't listen, I'll talk to someone else. Where's Bianca?"

"With Wyatt. He's got her on a new mission. Besides, she won't fold either. I'm sorry, Lea. This is just the way it has to be. A Halliwell sent the world to hell; now only a Halliwell can bring it back." This time, when he walked away, she let him go, completely spent.

One morning when Lea was fourteen years old, she woke up and her oldest cousin was gone. He had eaten dinner with her the night before, had even made fun of the way she arranged her carrots at the very edge of her plate in the hopes that they would disappear. Years later, she'd lie awake at night trying to remember if he had acted odd that evening, if there ad been any indication—any at all—for his sudden disappearance and subsequent quest for ultimate power. With all her powers, not to mention a mother whom people considered the highest ranking psychic witch in the Overworld, somehow Lea had not seen it coming.

Today, at twenty, she woke up with the same stone lumped in her gut. She couldn't explain the sensation precisely, but it left her feeling sick. The feeling was confirmed when, a few minutes later, her mother burst into her room, cheeks blotchy and puffy under her eyes. (She never could pull off a beautiful crying face, despite all the occasions Fate had given her to practice.)

Lea just turned her face into her pillow, in case she needed to scream. She didn't, in the end. It settled somewhere in her esophagus and then slowly sank back down into the knot of her gut. When she swallowed her potential outburst completely, she turned her head to glance at the other end of the room. This week, Kat's bed was empty.

Chris was gone. In the middle of the night, just like last time—just like Wyatt. And Lea knew, even without inheriting her mother's precognition, that she would never see her cousin again.

Later that week, Kat came slinking in through a brick wall. It was some time mid-afternoon, when The Haven usually bustled with activity, so she managed to fade into the crowd until she escaped to what she hoped was the solitude of her room. But she found her sister there instead.

Lea glanced up when Kat fazed through the locked door. "Oh," she remarked softly, "Hey."

Kat froze. This wasn't right—no stern glare, no lecture on Good versus Evil, no threats of 'last chance'—just "hey."

Uneasy, the girl answered, "Hi." Not liking the silence, she awkwardly rooted around her back jean pocket for her silver lighter.

"Does Mom know you're back?" Lea wondered. When Kat shook her head, she said, "Oh. Okay."

"Is this some sort of trick?" Kat demanded suddenly. "What are you trying to do, freak me out? Make me think you don't care about all the bad stuff I do? 'Cuz it won't work, you know. You can't get to me!"

Lea sighed and turned away. "Join whichever side you want, Kat. Hell, don't join any. Play eenie-meenie-miney-moe—I don't care anymore." Before Kat could say a word, Lea stood and left. Kat remained there, rooted to the spot, stunned to silence.

It was only hours later that she found out Chris had disappeared. No one seemed to know his whereabouts. At least, if someone did, nobody was telling. Kat ran straight back to Wyatt's proverbial open arms, unable to cope with the deluge of emotion that drowned her family members at The Haven. She needed Wyatt's comfortable apathy.

To her surprise, her usually stolid cousin had much the same response when she broke the news to him.

"He's missing? Did a rogue demon get him?"

"I don't know," Kat answered, numb.

"I'll send out probes to scan for DNA. Even if he's dead, they'll know where he's buried. Witches don't just vanish."

But the probes found no trace at all. For the next few months, Wyatt became obsessed with finding his brother. His entire kingdom was put on hold. More than once, he tried to summon his mother's spirit for suggestions, but she refused to see him. Day and night he searched for Chris—and Bianca, who had suspiciously fallen off his radar within the very same week.

Her, he found. And with the right persuasion, she led him to his brother.