The Third Time Charmed continuation is dedicated to the memory of Julian McMahon, who sadly passed away on 2 July 2025. May he have found the peace that eluded Cole. Blessed be.

  Paige sighed loudly as she dropped onto her sofa, got comfy, and pulled a blanket up over her bare knees. After what felt like the longest week of her life, she wanted nothing more than to curl up on the couch with Buffy and the Scoobies, and the bowl of sweet popcorn she just microwaved. Realizing that the TV remote was just out of her reach, she huffed in frustration, heaved the whole coffee table toward her, and reached for it.

  Beside the remote sat the stack of occult books Paige had borrowed from the library earlier that week, which remained unopened. She supposed she was clinging to the hope her new sisters would be the ones to teach her about all this Wicca stuff, but it had been a week since their last meeting.

  Over the course of that day, she had confronted the Source of All Evil with her new sisters and brother-in-law, met the ghosts of the birth mother and grandmother she had never known, and learned of a nefarious plot surrounding the death of her other sister, Phoebe. Since then? Nada!

  She’d called a few times and even left messages with Leo, but Prue and Piper were always too busy to answer. Paige didn’t want to bother them, of course, but was it really such an imposition to return her call? Didn’t they want to get to know her? No, she shouldn’t think like that. Their loss was still so fresh. She understood only too well what they must be going through right now.

  For now, the best example Paige had of a witch was the redhead she was watching on screen, but somehow, she didn’t think Willow’s abuse of magic was that accurate a portrayal. At least, she hoped it wasn’t. When the end credits rolled, leaving her worried about Willow’s slow descent into darkness, Paige picked up the remote again to change channels, and it happened.

  Her head spun, her ears rang, her skin tingled, and her eyes snapped shut, forcing her to watch the Premonition playing out in her mind. She had experienced two others that week—the first allowing her to avoid a coffee stain on her favorite blouse, the second giving her the winning Lotto numbers, though the ticket had mysteriously gone blank after the draw—but this one was different.

  In shades of black and white, she watched a woman being chased into an alley. A man… No, men didn’t have pointed shark-like teeth, and their hands weren’t…tentacles!? A demon was attacking her, choking the life out of her with its elongated arms. When the vision was over, Paige frowned in confusion at the remote in her hand and the cat food commercial now being broadcast.

  When Prue and Piper had briefly explained her power, they said the visions were triggered by touch. That had been the case with her last two, the coffee cup and the Lotto ticket, respectively, but what was the connection here?

  Paige leaped to her feet. What mattered right now was the woman in her vision. She had to find her. Maybe the sisters would know how. Running to her phone, Paige hit redial. “Come on,” she urged, running a hand through her dark hair as the third ring sounded. After the sixth, she hung up. They weren’t answering. Again. “Think, Paige!”

  Just then, a distant cry caught Paige’s attention. Could it be? She moved to her window. Running through the street below, in which only one of the rough neighborhood’s streetlights was still operational, she could make out two figures through the haze of light rain. There was another cry, definitely female. Was this her, the woman from the vision?

  Paige paused momentarily before deciding she had to be sure. She would never be able to forgive herself if it were the same woman, and she had done nothing to help. She threw a jacket on over her nightclothes, slipped on her flats, and hurried out of the apartment.

  Once outside, Paige headed left, the direction she had seen the shadows going, which, incidentally, led to the alley where she disposed of her garbage. She peered around the corner, then drew her head back immediately when she spotted the woman suspended in mid-air by a monstrous green tentacle wrapped around her neck.

  “Oh my God!” Paige whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. It was happening, just as she predicted. But what should she do? Should she call the cops? No, there wasn’t time; he was choking her. She had to help.

  “That’s it, stop struggling,” the demon cooed as the suspended woman’s hands fell to her sides. “I want to watch the light leave your eyes.”

  “Watch this!” Paige roared, smacking him upside the head with a two-by-four she had picked up on her approach, which had been muted by the pitter-patter of raindrops. “Son of a…!” Her weapon, the demon, and the woman dropped to the floor. The people on TV never hurt their hands, but hers smarted, surely riddled with splinters now.

  Alarmed when she noticed the woman wasn’t moving, Paige moved to her side, then lifted her under the arms and started dragging her along the wet floor while calling out for help.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Hey! Where do you think you’re going with my prey?” the man yelled, holding his head with a human hand as he got to his feet.

  Paige gasped, looking up in fright, when a fierce meow rent the alley. A cat suddenly leaped out of nowhere onto the man’s chest and savaged his face with scratches, before being thrown off. The beige feline landed on its feet, gave Paige a look, then ran away up the alley.

  Still dragging the woman, Paige briefly registered the cute Siamese that had been hanging around her apartment lately.

  “Stupid fleabag!” the man exclaimed furiously, his face a mess of bloody claw marks. He eyed Paige. “Get back here!” His arm morphed into a green tentacle, which extended halfway up the alley in her direction. It coiled around her right ankle like a python, then pulled.

  Paige dropped the woman and grabbed for the first thing in reach—the bottom rung of a retractable fire escape ladder—just in time. Unfortunately, her grip on the wet ladder was tenuous, but she held on for dear life as the demon attempted to reel her in, causing her body to stretch horizontally across the alley.

  The monster laughed, flashing his full set of pointed teeth as Paige cried out. He pulled harder and harder, but she wouldn’t let go. Growing tired of the game, he whipped his other arm at her free ankle and heaved with all his might. At that moment, the woman disappeared amid a cluster of bright lights. A second later, the light returned, and she dropped to the floor of the alley with a thud.

  Trying to ignore the pain in her now-soaked left side, Paige scrambled to her feet, not understanding why her legs were unbound. She turned to find the demon slumped next to a dumpster, his face awash with confusion, his tentacle-like hands hovering in front of the rebar that had pierced his abdomen. Fire suddenly expelled from his mouth and eyes, and then he swelled and exploded in a cascade of steaming water.

  “What the…?” Paige muttered, trying to wrap her head around this. The rebar was affixed vertically to a block of concrete, but how had the demon fallen on it? The last thing she knew, he was about to pull her legs out of their sockets. Had she done that Orbing thing again? Had his momentum caused him to stumble? Paige drew her eyes away from the spot of the demon’s demise, just thankful that he was gone, and focused her attention on his target.

  She knelt beside the woman and checked her pulse. It was faint, but it was there. She didn’t like the look of her neck, though. The skin was red and swollen, and the tentacle pucker marks on it looked painful. What if her airway was restricted? Thinking back to how Leo had saved the cop and how she had helped him save Phoebe’s boyfriend, Paige waved her hands over the woman’s wound, willing the warm golden light to appear.

  When none came, she despaired, “Why isn’t it working? Oh, God, what am I supposed to do? I need Leo!”

  As if in answer to her prayer, Leo appeared three seconds later in a shower of blue-white sparkles. “Paige?” he asked, surveying the dark alleyway.

  “Leo? Oh, thank God!” she said, flabbergasted but relieved to see the plaid-covered angel. “Help, please! There was a demon, I think. He’s gone, but she’s hurt!”

  Leo rushed to the woman’s side, held his hand over her neck to assess her condition, and said, “She’ll be fine. I’ll heal her, then take you home before she comes around, okay?”

  After Leo Orbed Paige up to her apartment, and after her equilibrium returned, he effortlessly healed her hands and ankles. She then moved to her window. “Are you sure it was okay to just leave her there?” she asked, the worry in her voice clear.

  “You can’t risk exposure, Paige. It’s enough that she saw the demon. We can’t have her asking questions about why you were there or how you fended him off,” Leo explained. “How did you fend him off, anyway?”

  “I didn’t,” Paige answered, watching the outline of a woman appear in the street below and take a few tentative steps before breaking into a run. She sighed with relief. “I had help from a stray, and then, the demon guy just…tripped and fell, I think.”

  “Then you were very lucky! What were you even doing there?”

  “Err, saving a woman’s life?” Paige quipped, a little irked by Leo’s reproachful tone. She’d done a good thing, hadn’t she? “I had one of those Premonition thingies. What was I supposed to do, ignore it?”

  “No, I mean, what were you doing there alone, without backup?” Leo clarified.

  Paige crossed the apartment and entered her bathroom to change out of her wet clothes and dry her hair. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been alone if one of you knew how to use a little thing called the telephone,” she responded from inside.

  Leo lowered his head in shame, all too aware that Prue and Piper owed Paige a call…or four. “I’m sorry, Paige, it’s just been…a busy time. But you should have called for me if you were in danger.”

  Emerging from the bathroom in her pink robe, peeking out from beneath a bath towel with a confused expression, she replied, “Err, hello? I did call! Was my passive-aggressive jab too passive or something?”

  “No, I mean call… Oh, did I not tell you about that? Wow, I really am off my game,” Leo admitted, slumping onto Paige’s sofa and rubbing his temples. “I’m sorry, Paige, I meant to tell you. One of my abilities as a Whitelighter is to hear the call of my Charges when they’re in need, wherever they are. You’re still new to me, so Sensing you from afar is difficult right now, but if you call out for me, I’ll hear it.”

  “Oh. Yeah, that would have been a handy little piece of information to have about fifteen minutes back,” said Paige, her tone softening as she observed the man’s general weariness. “Everything okay with you, Leo?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve just been…distracted, what with Piper joining Prue and Cole’s crusade against all things evil,” the man said bitterly.

  Paige bit her lip, unsure what to say. It sounded like she wasn’t the only one feeling ignored.

  Leo sighed. He had intended to give Paige more of an introduction to life as a witch with her sisters present, but with all the demon hunting they had been doing in the last week, there hadn’t been time. The bigger issue was that the girls were resistant to interacting with Paige, and that needed to change.

  “I tell you what, Paige, why don’t you come back to the manor with me now?” Leo suggested. “We’ll talk everything through together with Piper and Prue, okay?”

  “Oh, sure, yeah, I could do that,” said Paige, trying to conceal her enthusiasm. “I’ve been wanting to ask about this whole power thing—”

  “Hang on, Prue’s calling. There’s trouble,” Leo interrupted, a deep furrow in his brow. “Better make it Monday…evening. Come for dinner, okay?”

  Before Paige could answer, Leo disappeared in a swirl of sparkles. “Sure, Monday it is, I’ve got stuff to do now, anyway. I’ve got,” she said, feeling foolish as the reality that she was talking to herself sank in, glancing at the stack of books on her coffee table, “reading to do, I guess.”

  

  Video credit: HalliwellCreations on YouTube