Charmed: Let Gorgons Be Gorgons (20 page)

“We tried the Power of Three spell earlier.” Phoebe formed a circle around Paige along with Prue and Piper. “What makes you think we’ll have any better luck now?”

“It
worked
earlier,” Prue countered.

“The
first
time. But it hasn’t worked since,” Phoebe reminded her.

Piper held up a hand in what had become her personal sign for her sisters to knock it off. “What are you thinking, Prue?”

“It’s possible that first Power of Three spell we did to unfreeze the congressman—the one that hasn’t worked since—might be somewhat to blame for all this.”

“How?” Phoebe asked.

“Don’t… care… try… it….” Paige’s skin was turning a deeper shade of gray. Her lips barely moved as she spoke.

Phoebe reached out and grabbed Prue’s and Piper’s hands. “Okay. Explanations later. We should do something before Paige loses the ability to speak.”

“Thank…”

“Save it.” Phoebe tried to be strong, but she was concerned that Paige would see the fear in her eyes. If this didn’t work, she didn’t know what they would do. Nothing had gotten those other statues to turn back to normal yet.

As one, the sisters took a breath and began to chant.

“The Power of Three will set you free.”

“The Power of Three will set you free.”

Phoebe was even more concerned that the spell would be useless since Paige’s nearly frozen contribution amounted to, “Power… three… free,” but she refused to give up hope.

“The Power of Three will set you free!”

The gray that was slowing taking over Paige’s already porcelain skin seemed to pause. And then it receded. Soon the color returned to Paige’s cheeks as she worked her jaw to make sure it could move.
“Much
better,” she said.

Phoebe sighed with relief before turning her attention to the other statues in the room. “Should we try it on them?”

Prue shook her head. “I mean, we can
try
, but I don’t think it will do any good. They aren’t witches. They’ve never been Charmed.”

Now Phoebe shook her head as well, but mainly in confusion. “Are you saying we’re related to that congressman we helped yesterday? Because if we are, I’m burning that family tree in the attic. It was never completely accurate anyway.”

“No. But I think when you used the Power of Three spell here and I tried to give it a Nexus boost, we might have done something else too. Something unintended. I think the gorgons might have tapped into our power somehow.”

“That sounds like a bit of a stretch to me,” Piper said.

“Oh, it completely is,” Prue admitted. “It’s a total stretch. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Hear me out.”

“This should be good.” Phoebe took a seat on the couch and was quickly joined by Piper and the now mobile Paige.

Prue rolled her eyes in the general direction of her sisters. “What is this? Story time?”

“Oh! Popcorn would be great right now!” Phoebe said.

Prue ignored her, like she usually did in these situations. “It’s like Leo said: Everyone was convinced Medusa was dead. I think she was. I think her sisters brought her back from the dead. And they somehow tapped into our powers to do it.”

All three sisters opened their mouths to speak, but Prue silenced them with a glare.

“Think about it,” Prue continued. “Stheno was focused on Medusa being at full strength. But why? Why
wouldn’t
she be strong if she’d been alive all this time? And why are three figures from ancient Greece suddenly causing havoc in San Francisco of all places? If they can teleport anywhere, why only attack people in our hometown? Just think of the potential if they plopped themselves in the middle of DC. Why settle for one little congressman who is probably going to get voted out of office next time there’s an election?”

“Actually, the people in his district are kind of fans of his backwards ways,” Piper said.

“Not the point,” Prue said. “We need to start considering these sisters as the witches they once were and not the horrible monsters that—” Prue’s voice cut off as her eyes went wide in shock.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” a voice said from behind the couch. “We can be
both
.”

Phoebe, Piper, and Paige twisted around on the couch to find three strange women standing in the middle of Prue’s living room. They looked more like witches than the monsters that had been in the stadium, but the Charmed Ones didn’t have to guess who these uninvited guests were. The real question was how the hell they got into the Nexus uninvited.

Prue was the first to put their thoughts into words. “How the hell did you get in here?”

“You might be surprised to learn that we found a way to tap into the magic of your line.” The tallest of the women stepped forward. Her voice wasn’t as gravelly as in her monstrous form, but Phoebe was fairly certain that it was Stheno.

“Yeah. We figured that out
ages
ago,” Phoebe tossed off her obvious lie as she stood alongside Piper and Paige. With Prue to their side, she hoped they made for an impressive display of strength, though she doubted that three monster-witches who could magic their way into the Nexus of the All would suddenly be afraid of them.

“Aren’t they cute?” another gorgon said. This one Phoebe guessed to be Euryale. “And this place is
fabulous
. Do we get to keep it when we kill them?”

Medusa stepped forward, glaring at Paige. “Why aren’t you stone?”

Paige looked the gorgon right in the eyes. “Guess you’re not as strong as you thought.” It was a bold gesture, and Phoebe worried that her sister was tempting fate. If Medusa was growing more powerful, they didn’t need to be one sister down at the very start of this confrontation.

Stheno jumped in before her sister could reply or react. “You might be surprised by our strength.” Her hands went up and a chill wind blew through the living room. Icicles formed on the ceiling, growing into stalactites that came down to the floor behind Phoebe and her sisters, trapping them in front of a wall of ice.

Stheno had made sure that the Charmed Ones and Prue could not escape, not that they intended to. The couch stood between the two sets of sisters who stared at each other in classic showdown. But it was only there for a moment.

The couch that Prue had carefully designed broke into thousands of little blue marbles that rolled right out of the room. At first Phoebe thought it was Prue’s doing, but her sister didn’t tend to make her furniture go away with such a flourish.

Prue took a single step forward and Phoebe braced herself for what was about to happen. “You want to see someone manipulate this environment?”

The living room started to shake, but only in the spot where the gorgons stood. The jerking grew so violent that it threw them to the ground. Stalagmites shot up from the floor around them, trapping them on all sides.

Medusa was first to get back to her feet. Her eyes began to glow.

“Don’t look!” Phoebe screamed as she quickly turned away.

A clap of thunder shook the entire castle as a crack of lightning burst through a window, smashing through the ice behind them. Phoebe and her sisters were knocked to the floor as they were showered in ice.

A second lightning bolt came at them from the other direction, but Prue brought a new wall up from the floor, placing it between them and the gorgons. It was roughly the width of the former couch, but it was enough to shield them for the moment. The wall trembled as it was struck again and again by Medusa’s lightning. A burn mark started to form in the center and Prue dropped another wall behind it just in time. Bits of burnt plaster exploded out from the first wall as the second began to warp from the middle almost immediately.

“We already know they won’t freeze. Maybe they can explode.” Piper stepped out from behind the wall and threw up her hands. She jumped back beside Paige a second later as lightning shot in her direction

“Nope,” Piper said between heaving breaths. “They don’t explode.”

The onslaught continued as Prue’s second wall continued to buckle from the power of the lightning. “I’m losing it!” Prue warned.

A blue glow enveloped the sisters as Paige’s orb shield formed around them. “Let it go! I’ve got us!”

As the second wall exploded, Phoebe thought she heard the familiar strains of a pop tune under the noise. Phoebe reflexively pulled out her phone. Coop was calling.

“Now?” Prue said. “This isn’t really the time.”

“Sorry.” Phoebe slipped it back into her pocket.

The sisters stood behind Paige’s shield, facing down the gorgons. All three sets of gorgon eyes were glowing, but the shield protected the Warren Witches from the magic.

“She’s more powerful than we thought,” Piper said.

“I thought they weren’t supposed to be witches anymore,” Paige said. “Wasn’t that part of the curse?”

“Side effect of tapping into our magic?” Piper theorized. “They might be getting that from us.”

Euryale waved a hand and the blue of the orb shield faded to clear before popping like a bubble. Without pausing, Paige grabbed onto all three of her sisters and orbed them out to the balcony behind them. “She changed my shield!” Paige said in a whisper so the gorgons didn’t know where they’d gone. “How did she alter my magic? I didn’t even know that could happen.”

“It has to be the connection,” Piper said. “There’s no telling how powerful they’ve become.”

Phoebe leaned over toward the glass door between the balcony and the living room. She took a peek, careful not to be seen. Euryale was redecorating, making all the furniture in the room melt while she searched for them. As if they would have hidden behind the sofa table. Then again, there were safer places to be than the balcony overlooking the desert sand in the middle of nowhere. The French Riviera came to mind.

Prue slipped in beside Phoebe to take a look as well. “If they’re using our magic to make them stronger, maybe we can use that against them. Overload them.”

“Give them
more
power?” Phoebe asked as they both leaned back. “I don’t know about that plan.”

“No,” Prue said. “I think it will work.”

“Okay, then,” Piper said as she stepped toward the glass doors. “Let’s do this!” If she couldn’t work her magic on the gorgons, it was possible she could affect the magical environment they were in. With her hands up, Piper tapped into the magic of the Nexus and attacked it like she would a demon, blowing open the doors in a shower of metal and glass that flew toward the gorgons.

“Man, she knows how to make an entrance,” Paige said as she followed her sister into the room.

Phoebe watched as Prue went next. She wasn’t crazy about this plan, but it was the best they could come up with at the moment. She entered last to see that the room was completely bare. The very air was crackling with Medusa’s lighting as Stheno’s cold winds whipped through the air. Phoebe had to dive out of the way of the debris from the window as it blew out to the balcony, disappearing into nothingness as it flew beyond the perimeter of Prue’s castle.

Lightning flared as Prue was suddenly at the center of a maelstrom. The walls and floor shifted and shook, throwing Stheno and Euryale to the ground. But Medusa remained standing, lightning crackling around her.

“Prue?” Piper asked, a note of warning in her voice.

“I got this!” Prue said as the entire castle rumbled and shook.

“Lightning!” Paige screamed as a bolt shot right toward Prue. It wasn’t a warning. She used the power of her orbs to pull the electricity out of the air, sending it harmlessly into the desert.

“Don’t stop, Medusa!” Stheno screamed as she pulled herself off the ground. “Destroy them, like Athena tried to destroy us.”

Medusa’s eyes went right to Paige, who did look away this time. “I’m not Athena!”

“There
is
a passing resemblance,” Euryale noted.

“It doesn’t matter who she is now!” Stheno shouted over the wind and rumbling of the building. “She was the Goddess of War once. She could be again. Kill her and we can control their magic. Then we can remake the world in
our
image. We can take control.”

“If it’s magic you want—” Prue raised her hands “—it’s magic you’ll get.”

The castle shook harder as Prue made the walls shift. The room darkened as the lights dimmed around them. Vines crawled down the walls and dropped from the ceiling, moving for the gorgons with the speed of Medusa’s lightning.

Euryale jumped in front of her sisters, waving her hands in every direction. The vines coming for them shifted into gauzy strips of fabric before disappearing.

Prue countered, opening up the floor beneath the gorgons, dropping them into the darkness beneath. They were back a moment later, rising up on a platform of ice growing from Stheno’s hands.

Prue was relentless, using the very building against them. Three of the four walls around the gorgons compacted into a box, with a fourth wall magically appearing and slamming them into a small, windowless prison. For a brief moment, there was silence. The winds had stopped. The building was still.

In the silence, Phoebe could both hear and feel her phone as it vibrated in her pocket. A text was coming in.
Now?
Was it Coop again or someone else? If it was Coop, it might be important. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the danger, but she had to know. Phoebe quickly slipped the phone out for a glimpse.

It
was
Coop. And the text provided everything she needed.

Before she could share the news with her sisters, the small prison began to tremble. Thunder and lightning burst from the box as it exploded, sending pieces of wall in every direction. Phoebe and her sister dropped to the floor to avoid the debris.

“This isn’t working.” Paige spoke over the sound of the icy winds that Stheno was forming once again. Phoebe could barely hear her. They’d gotten separated in the explosion. Phoebe was closer to the gorgons than she was to her sisters. She couldn’t let the enemy know what she’d learned. Not yet, anyway.

“They’re matching me power for power,” Prue said. “How is that possible? We’re on the Nexus.”

“So are they,” Piper said. “As long as they’re here, they might be as strong as us. Overloading them might not work.”