Welcome to the finale of Chapter 10 and the opening of the second book of NewU

Massive thanks, once again to my amazing team of editors and to you all for keeping this story alive.

I know you are all eager to get into the action, so without further adieu...

********

It was a kiss for the ages. Every part of me tingled, like a spreading warmth of contentment that not even sex had ever brought me before. I just gazed at her, a smile involuntarily pulled at my lips, and, for the hundredth time in only a few minutes, I felt my heart flutter.

There was no denying it. Faye was my Soulmate.

I suppose the weight and the value of that word is what should be measured here; this was more than just love. It was certainly more than an infatuation. We were completely, totally, unapologetically bonded. This wasn't the euphoria of a new relationship, this was not naive optimism. I didn't know how I could tell, but this was for life.

"How can this be real?" I asked almost breathlessly, my heart pounding in my chest once our momentous kiss had finally ended.

She just smiled, resting her forehead against mine, closing her eyes, and signing in perfect contentment. "I don't know. There is still a lot we don't know about our kind. But there is a very easy way to tell."

"How?"

She pulled her head back and looked into my eyes. "Like this." Her voice echoed softly into my mind. Her lips hadn't moved.

"Holy Shit!" I gasped. "How did you... Can I do that to you?"

"I hope so." She grinned, the words still not coming from her mouth. "The only people who can send messages like this... telepathically, I mean... are bonded pairs. It's like the bond between us allows us to bypass that part of each other's mental defenses. And what's better, there is no range limit. You could be on the other side of the world, and I would still be able to talk to you. If you can do it to me as well, then there is no doubt that this is real."

"Cool. So how do I send one to you?" My lips were moving.

"You just sort of... think something, but you think of it as something you would want me to hear." She shrugged at me.

I furrowed my brow and thought something.

"Testing, Testing... one, two, three... How now, brown cow."

She giggled, that musical melody of perfection ringing out into the glorious mindscape air. "You are such a nerd. I love it."

I chuckled, pulling her back in against me and resting my forehead back against hers.

"You know..." she said again after a few minutes. "There is something else that bonded pairs can do."

"Oh yeah? What is that?"

She leaned in and whispered into my ear. "Have you ever thought what it would be like to have hot, passionate sex in your bunker?" she seemed to instinctively know that was what I called the physical manifestation of my subconscious mind, just as I somehow knew that she called hers 'the refuge.' "Imagine all the things we could do to each other when the laws of physics don't apply. Zero-G fucking, me replicating myself until there are half a dozen of me, and all of us just being all over you. Being able to take you no matter how big you want to make yourself. Able to spend a week doing nothing but pleasuring each other with only an hour or so passing in the real world."

A loud, deep, long guttural groan escaped my lips, and I twitched powerfully in my pants. "Oh, God. You are going to kill me!"

"Yup." She giggled again. "Death by sex. You sound devastated about that."

My hands slipped down off the small of her back, sliding onto her ass, pulling her a little tighter to me.

"Now, now, big boy." She grinned, purring as she looked up into my eyes. "There is plenty of time for that. We had better get back to the party before we are missed. But tonight, you are coming home with me!" She pressed her lips back into mine and kissed me deeply. There was more love and passion in that meeting of our lips than I had ever felt in my life combined until that point. She finally broke the kiss with a happy sigh. "I'm never going to get tired of that." She then pinched my ass with another giggle and faded back out of the mindscape.

"Great!" I chuckled to myself. "Now I have to mingle while sporting wood!"

********

A blurred and hazy thirty minutes or so later, I was standing at the bar. Marco was on one side of me, Uri was on the other, and both seemed to be having a conversation that I felt I had once been a part of, although I'd be damned if I could remember a word of it. My eyes kept flicking back to Faye. She was still in the same corner, chatting excitedly with her friends. Rhodri and Niel had left them and were now talking with another few men on the other side of the room around one of the pool tables. Jerry and Faye's blonde friend were the only other people with Faye that I recognized. She seemed to be as unable to keep her eyes off me as I was keeping mine off her. There were many, many instances of a caught glance, a seductive, flirtatious, or even demure little smile from her as I tried to catch up with a conversation that increasingly seemed to be about something important, each of those smiles, though, was met with a beaming grin from me.

Subtlety was apparently still not my strong suit.

"... No, I understand all that, but you're missing my point." Marco was saying, the soft drawl of his Italian heritage sounding through his voice. The animated hand gestures seemed almost comically stereotypical.

"Then please make a better point," Uri countered, seemingly rather amused by how annoyed Marco was becoming with the situation. "Or at least make your current one better." Uri was Ukrainian, there was nothing soft about his accent.

My eyes, once again, drifted back to Faye as Marco took a deep breath.

The feelings still rattling around in my head were just as overwhelming and confusing as they had been in the mindscape. There were other girls in my life, just like I knew that she had other men in hers. But compared to what my heart, my head, and every instinct was telling me about this bonding process with Faye, they were almost meaningless.

Yes, I know, that sounds like a bit of a dick statement to make. But all of this has to be taken in context. Becky and Olivia were the only two out of the multitudes of women I had been with who I could say may have liked me for me. Olivia, I had recently learned, had been enamored with me since long before I had gained my powers, but we had only hooked up the week before. Becky was a little harder to gauge, she had been the nurse in charge of my recovery after my accident. I didn't think I had ever consciously or intentionally manipulated her feelings towards me, but I'm certain she had been the recipient of the passive effects of my powers. Specifically, one which commanded all women who I found attractive to be overwhelmingly sexually drawn to me. She seemed to be interested in me more than that command should have allowed for, though.

Evie, one of my classmates from college, was manipulated and influenced so much that she would have fallen in love with a carrot if I wanted her to. Her mind made her unique, but that didn't nullify the amount of manipulation I had inflicted on her. Philippa, Becky's colleague and housemate, was almost an extension of my relationship with Becky. I had no idea if she would want something independent of my blonde nurse lover, and if she did, I had no idea how Becky would feel about that. Becky loved the excitement of it, she loved my dominance, and she loved the power I had over her when we were together. But she had not even hinted that she would want something more. Olivia had liked me since long before I had my powers, and I had made a point not to do anything to her that could alter her and twist her feelings toward me. I had wanted to see how far she wanted to go without that.

The answer, much to my surprise, was that she wanted to go a pretty long way with me... just not yet. The relevance of all this is that Faye, in her new deep and profound understanding of me, genuinely couldn't have cared less about me being with any of them, even sexually. Just like I wasn't bothered in the slightest about the relationships she may be having with other men. We transcended that. My mind drifted back to what Charlotte had said about it all those weeks ago in my apartment.

Once two Evos are bonded, the physical act of sex, especially between an Evo and another human, just isn't important. Jealousy isn't really a thing in our species.

I frowned a little. For the briefest of moments, I couldn't remember if she or anyone else had ever said anything else to me about bonding before tonight. I couldn't even remember if it had been mentioned outside that conversation at all, and that chat with Charlotte was not as crystal clear in my mind as I had become accustomed to.

I shook it off. It didn't matter for now.

My eyes flicked back over to my new paramour, the warmth filling me as our eyes met once again, the giddy smile on her lips telling me that she was feeling it too. She was beyond happy. She had found, in me, everything that she had ever wanted, everything she had ever dreamed of, and everything she had ever even thought of looking for in a man. She was ready to dedicate her immediate and eternal future to making sure that I was as happy as she was capable of making me. The whole thing had taken her by surprise as much as it had me, but if she was going to be my "wife," then she was going to be the best-damned wife she could be. The more I looked at her, the more I felt her thoughts and feelings mirroring themselves in me. My entire life was now about making my lady happy.

"Meh, definitely worse ways to start a marriage." I shrugged to myself, surrendering to what felt like the inevitable. I finally pulled my attention back to Marco in time for him to rearrange his thoughts and start to speak again.

"Look, if they were dead or missing, I would agree; Inquisitor involvement, absolutely." My ears pricked up. This suddenly sounded like a conversation I should be paying attention to. "But they weren't. All of them were found in catatonic, vegetative states. I know a few of the people assigned to care for them, there is not even enough of their mind left to make a link. Inquisitors can't do that." Marco took a deep breath before continuing, Uri's eyebrows dropping a little closer to his eyes as he listened. "More than that, there have been twelve of them... Twelve! ... Not all in one go, not all in one place, and seemingly no correlation between them. They just... vanished, only to turn up some random time later, like that." He finished with a vague gesture into the distance.

"Wait, What?... Who?" I stammered, my grasp on the conversation seeming a little blurry. I eyeballed my drink suspiciously.

"Evos are being attacked," Marco answered simply. "And we don't know who is responsible."

"So, what are you suggesting?" Uri asked after a short pause.

"I think that whoever is doing this is... one of us," Marco said with a sigh.

My eyes narrowed, and I looked around the room. Uri rolled his eyes at me. "Not literally one of us," he said as if that should have been obvious. "I think Marco, here, is talking about a rogue."

"A what?"

"A rogue is..." Marco started.

"A myth!" Uri interrupted.

"A Rogue is..." Marco repeated. "A person who managed to awaken on their own with no outside help, who managed to access and understand their powers without training and is basically living outside of the Conclave, or the Sect... completely independent. What makes them so dangerous is that they are not beholden to our laws. But..." Marco held up a finger as Uri opened his mouth to speak again. "...the chance of that happening, that person realizing they are not alone, mastering dueling to a high enough competency to allow them to sneak-attack trained Evos and remaining completely undetected whilst hunting them is...."

"Impossible!" Uri finished.

"Extremely unlikely," Marco agreed. "But, you have to concede, the end results in the victims are all remarkably similar to the damage done in an Evo on Evo attack. If I had to guess, I would say that their wells were drained and their palace destroyed. They're just... locked in there."

Uri nodded his head to the side and flashed his eyebrows. Apparently, that was one point that he couldn't argue against, and the implication seemed to be dawning on him... If not me. Apparently, I had missed an entire conversation about a potential Evo serial killer, or serial attacker, while dealing with my enamourment over Faye.

I tried casting my mind back. Surely I had technically picked up the conversation as it had been happening, even if I hadn't been paying attention to it. But if I had, it was just out of reach. It was an odd sensation, not being able to recall something in crystal clarity after so long with a perfect memory. My eyes flicked up again to Faye, although this time, they went unnoticed. Was this loss of ability a side effect of the bonding? Assuming that's what it was. Was it permanent? I tried casting my mind back further. The more I tried, the more hazy things became.

Why couldn't I remember?

More than that, how the hell had I joined this conversation? I clearly remembered, in graphic, intimate detail, my time in the mindscape with Faye. I remembered every word and touch as if it was etched into my brain - which, in a manner of speaking, it had been, as had every other memory of my life - but if I could remember that, how could I not remember walking the twenty feet across the room to the bar and joining a conversation between the two men only a few minutes ago. Something wasn't right.

"If there is ever a problem," Charlotte had said, "If there is ever anything you need, call me." The fact I could remember that wasn't lost on me either.

I subtly fished my phone from my pocket, glancing down at the screen.

No signal... Typical... My frown deepened... No, wait. That can't be right. We are in the middle of the city, there should at least be the 'emergency calls only' functionality. What the fuck is going on?

It was then that I felt it.

It's hard to adequately describe what "it" was. Imagine you are standing on a busy street, talking to a friend. Even though all of your concentration is focused on them, there are countless other things around you that you can't help but take in, even subconsciously. The noise of the traffic, of birdsong, of other people walking and talking around you, the temperature of the air, the rain, the snow, the wind rustling through your hair... the life in the street around you.

Now take all of that away. Total, muted stillness.

I suddenly felt like we were all in one of those noise-canceling recording booths they have in music studios. There were people in this room. I could see them, I could hear their voices, I could feel their closeness, but everything else was ... muffled, and there was nothing coming in from the world outside this room at all. Even though I had edited out the ability to hear the irrelevant thoughts and feelings of all the people for miles around, I had always been aware of their presence as the background noise of my own city street. That ever-present 'life' around me. It was gone.

I cast my mind out, trying to pick up something, anything, not in this room. Nothing. My heart was starting to beat a little faster, my eyes flicked nervously back up to Marco and Uri. They continued their conversation as if nothing was wrong. Was this a byproduct of the bonding? Was this just in my...

"Something is wrong," Jeeves suddenly announced. "We need to leave, Now!"

"What is it?" I asked, trying to gain a handle on the quickly growing knot in my chest "Or who?" I could still, somehow, remember the advice that Charlotte had given me. If someone was messing with me or trying to probe me, I was not going to be happy or subtle about it.

"I'm working on it, Sir," Jeeves' answer came quickly, a little too quickly. I could hear the tension in his voice. "You may need to hold onto something, this is going to be uncomfortable."

"Wha..." I grasped onto the bar as I felt a pulse of energy be thrown out from my mind. Marco, Uri, and a few other people in the room, Faye included, stopped their conversation and snapped their eyes to me. Some in concern, some in curiosity, a few in annoyance... Faye started to stand to make her way toward me, a look of worry on her face. But when that pulse of energy bounced back at me from the invisible, silent, bubble-like wall that had been secretly erected around the social club, we all felt it.

"It's too late." I could hear the panic in Jeeves' voice as the knot in my stomach tightened. I could see it in the eyes of the people around me as the danger quickly dawned on everyone at once. "The inquisitors are here, we are surrounded."

Suddenly, everything snapped into perfect clarity. I could feel the dozens of voids surrounding the building, each representing an inquisitor mind, each moving slowly and silently into position. No single one of them was strong enough or powerful enough to cause concern or even be easily noticed without intentionally looking for it. But combined, their potency grew exponentially. Linking and merging until there was an impenetrable psychic net over the entire building. That net, seemingly growing from each invisible, hostile mind, had completely cut us off from the outside world.

"INQUISITORS!" A panicked female voice shouted from somewhere behind me, jerking my focus back to the room. "RUN!"

It is one of those strange paradoxes that most people would, thankfully, never understand. People who have seen military combat talk about it a lot, but until now, I could never have imagined the peculiarity of the sensation. Everything suddenly seemed like it was happening very quickly, yet time seemed to slow down. It was a lot like the power overload in the mindscape during the duel, only infinitely more terrifying. It was a heightened sense of things, my conscious mind taking note of what was going on around me as my subconscious mind - Jeeves - took over control.

"Three exits," My mind raced. "Main entrance where we came in, fire exit on the opposite side of the room, a staff entrance, presumably through the door behind the bar. We need to get Faye and get us out of here!"

My eyes flashed around the stampeding room as my hands relaxed their grip on the bar. She wasn't in our corner, nor was she part of the crowd running past me to the fire exit. My mind seemed to skip over the fact that the bar staff had all disappeared. I scanned the room frantically and somehow caught sight of that fiery red hair, her terrified eyes flashing back into the club, desperately seeking mine. They locked, a silent sigh from each of us as she was dragged by her friends, along with a group of about twenty other people, towards the main entrance. She tried pulling loose, she tried to run back towards me, but her friend, the blonde one, wouldn't let go.

The blonde reached for the door; the acute thoughts and feelings, the minds of everyone in the room under the stress of this situation, seemed to be pushing through the block that had been erected around the building. I could feel the blonde's fear as her hand made for the door handle. I could feel the desperation in the pit of her stomach, I could feel the need to escape as she pulled the solid wooden door towards her.

It exploded violently inwards, swallowing her in a hail of splinters, shrapnel, and fire. Her body simply crumpled, pieces of her and most of the rest of the crowd flying through the air and into the room. I lost sight of Faye in the dust and smoke of the explosion but saw the red hair go down along with everyone else. I couldn't tell if she was alive or not, but there was no way she was unhurt. The fire escape exploded inwards at almost the same time, the crowd around that door being blown apart as well. The emergency push bar that had held the fire door closed scythed through the crowd, eviscerating any poor soul in its path. Three Evos were cleaved in half as I ducked away from the double explosions. Another, kneeling to help a friend who had stumbled, looked up in time for the bar to turn his head into a pulp.

The woman on the floor screamed as her friend's blood, bone, and brain matter splashed down onto her. I was frozen. I couldn't move, less than a few seconds had passed since the warning to run, but the whirlwind of carnage that had filled that time made it seem like an eternity ago.

I looked back over towards the main entrance, desperately trying to find my lover in the wreckage of bodies and body parts that littered the floor. The ground was a mass of writhing, groaning movement, people trying to crawl away from the danger over the bodies of their shattered friends, holding their wounds, crying out for help, or simply trying to convince themselves they were still alive.

Her fiery hair, once again, found my eye, although now, most of her face was the same blood-red color, a nasty gash above her eye leaking over the left side of her face as she dragged herself away from the door and towards me.

One of her arms was gone.

The other was clawing at the polished wood floor, trying to find a hold and pull herself towards me. The tattered remains of skin and flesh from the other were leaving a trail of her lifeblood that marked how much closer to me she had made it. I had barely had time to straighten myself up and start my dash across the room to her when they stepped in.

Dressed, head to toe in black, body armor clinging to their chests, and their faces covered by gas masks, the men who stepped through the smoking remains of the door looked like they had come straight out of a casting call for a low-budget special forces flick. The assault rifles in their hands, however, looked very real. My eyes could see them, the screams and panicked looks of the others told me that I wasn't the only one, but to my mind, they simply were not there... Just a void... Surrounded in a bright white aura.

I hadn't even looked towards the fire escape to see if the same intruders had entered when Marco, Uri, or someone dragged me off my feet and pulled me down behind the bar. The only thing on my mind as I pushed them off me was getting to Faye. I lifted my head above the bar as the men opened fire.

A woman dashing towards the bar, her eyes on me, took a round to the side of her head, the opposite side exploding outwards. Her presence in my mind blinked out in an instant. Another woman behind her took a round to the chest, and so did the man next to her, their lights fading out significantly slower, their bodies desperately trying to heal themselves and feeling every ounce of agony in the meantime until their minds dissipated into nothingness as they bled out. Rhodri and Neil were cowering behind one of the pool tables. Rhodri was desperately trying to hold onto Neil, whose only thought was getting out. He broke away, Rhodri's terrified eyes and ignored pleas following him.

He didn't even make it halfway across the room. Three bullets ripped into his back. The explosive flower-blossoms of blood blooming on his crisp white shirt. There was a gasp from his lips, the air in his destroyed lungs escaping through the bullet holes before they could make a sound from his mouth. His eyes rolled as he started to stumble forward.

Then a round hit the back of his head. The entire right portion of his face - skull, skin, brain, and blood - just exploded into nothingness. His body slumped into a crumpled heap, sliding a few more feet under the momentum his legs had given him. A cry of unimaginable fear, pain, and anguish filled the room as Rhodri watched the whole thing. The men spotted him and opened fire, but he ducked back behind the pool table before more opportunistic targets caught the gunmen's attention.

My eyes flinched from the deafening sounds of gunfire as dozens more of the party-goers were mown down. Dropping one after the other in a perfectly coordinated crossfire from both sides of the room. I desperately sought out Faye, ducking slightly as the odd round thudded into the bar or skipped off the top until I found her. She was still alive, still dragging herself towards me. Her eyes flicked in abject, terrified horror between the men shooting behind her and me. I was still frantically trying to brush off the hands that were holding me back. Punching, slapping, and kicking to get myself free as Uri and Marco - looks of sheer horror on their faces - desperately tried to hold me down. All I could do was watch her.

"C'mon baby," My mind silently willed her, not knowing if she could hear me or not, "You can make it!"

I will never know if it was that message that drew the attention of the inquisitor or if it was a coincidence, but no sooner had I thought it, one of the men behind her immediately snapped his attention to the writhing, crawling form of my love.

Faye looked back and saw him coming. She saw him aim his rifle down at her. She turned back to me quickly, her eyes on mine as a look of surrender drew across her face, and her voice whispered in my mind. "I love you."

He fired. Her beautiful mind, the one that had captured me so suddenly, so completely, the one that had been so overwhelmingly happy to have found me, the one that I had planned to spend every day for the rest of my life exploring, went silent as it sprayed across the wooden floor. She slumped, lifeless, to the ground.

I have heard the term "seeing red" for most of my life. Usually, as a way of excusing violent behavior, the blood-lust that drags men from sanity or reason. I had never expected to ever feel it for myself, but it took a few moments for me to realize that the guttural, primal, dangerous roar that I was hearing was coming from me. I stood up straight, seemingly effortlessly brushing the hands of Uri and Marco off me, and swung my arm through the air towards the inquisitors. The ones around the main entrance were busy dispatching the rest of the survivors of the door explosion.

I could feel the energy in my body, just like I had during the duel. But there was nothing measured or controlled about this. This was pure instinct boiling over with rage. I could feel it traveling down my arm and into the palm of my tensed hand, then felt it being launched through the air and at the men killing my kin, the men who had killed my love, my Faye. The wave of energy hit them with the force of a runaway freight train, smashing them into the wall behind them. Only two of the five were unfortunate enough not to be killed by the impact, my lover's killer among them. I stepped out from behind the bar, ignoring the men suddenly noticing me from the fire exit. Their weapons came up, and they opened fire. The bullets bounced harmlessly off my skin. - apparently, adding the 'bulletproof' element of my red alert program was one of Jeeves' better ideas, and that whole program was now in full swing.

Both of my lover's attackers were hoisted into the air by their gas masks, my actual hands still thirty feet away from them, but the telekinetic powers effortlessly yanked them off the ground. I gave them enough time to realize what was happening before slowly crushing the gas masks around them. They felt everything. I made sure of it. The force of an industrial trash compactor squeezed onto their heads, their eyes wide and their lips screaming before their skulls gave way under the pressure and exploded inwards. Their heads turned into a mulch of bone and blood, and brain. Jets of their essence squeezed around the pressure and arced into the air before I dropped their mangled corpses to the ground.

I spun towards the men at the fire exit as their panicked voices desperately requested reinforcements from outside. They were only just starting to realize the trouble they were in. My arm swung again, this time hurling one of the two marble-constructed pool tables at them with as much kinetic force as a supersonic jet. The only recognizable body part left after it had splintered against the wall behind them, having hardly slowed down in their journey through them, was a pair of twitching, spasming legs still attached to the waist of their former owner. Nothing of the man's top half nor his friends was left. Their bodies had been utterly destroyed under the impact. A bent and broken assault rifle rocked noisily on the floor next to the mess that was left of them.

Two more men burst through the door behind the bar, looking around furiously before setting their eyes on Marco, Uri, and the others crouching behind it for refuge. They lowered their weapons, wrongly assuming that they were the threat. They didn't even see me stalking furiously in the center of the room as their weapons were suddenly and - to them - inexplicably jerked upwards, the barrels pressed under their chins. I could just make out the panicked, confused looks in their eyes behind the gas masks before the triggers were pulled and a hail of bullets thudded into the ceiling, closely followed by the arterial spray, bone fragments, and brain matter from what had been the tops of their heads.

I snarled, looking around the room at the carnage and devastation. I was starting to be able to see them; like the voids were cracking under the intensity of my rage, cracks were starting to appear in the net around the building too. Uri must have sensed it at the same time I did.

"Can you hold them?" He shouted across the bar, "We have to get these people out of here."

I didn't even give him a look. "Go!" I shouted back, barely registering as he, Marco, and a few other people I hardly recognized dashed out, lifting and dragging the survivors to the relative safety of behind the bar. Rhodri scrambled out of his hiding place behind the remaining pool table and flung himself to the body of his friends. His face was white, his eyes wide in disbelieving terror, he was shaking Neil frantically in a futile effort to wake him up. Uri grabbed him and dragged him to safety. If I had been in any other mindset, I would have noticed that the weight of his grief matched my own. Uri shoved him and as many people as he could, out of the door behind the bar and to safety, Marco and Jerry were frantically helping him. Less than half of the hundred or so people at the start of the night were still alive, and only a handful of them were capable of moving under their own power. But not one of us thought for a second that this was over.

I could feel them moving. The fury and bloodlust were channeling my focus. It wasn't so much that I was able to just pick them out... I was now actively hunting for them. The dull vibrations of their footsteps, the adrenaline-fueled whispers of their voices, and the shrinking, cracked voids now easily traceable as they scrambled into position on the other side of the exterior wall. It was like being in a room of brilliant, white light and watching a few dozen or so patches of utter darkness float around it. I couldn't see their minds, but I could see exactly where their minds should be.

All bunched up, in a nice little group, just on the other side of the wall.

They were hunters, we were the prey. We had not only been cornered, but we had been completely oblivious to the threat until it had been much too late. That was how they worked. That was how they had always worked. There were other, more elaborate, and satisfying ways to kill an Evo, but the panicked confusion of rapid entry, gunfire, and explosives often produced the best results. Something had gone wrong on this mission, though, a mission no different from the ones they had carried out dozens of times over the years. The number of inquisitors that had arrived to undertake this task had been appropriate for the number of their targets. Well over a hundred men, complete with their vehicles and equipment, were packed into the parking lot. Every exit was covered by armed and alert sentries, and the communications post - a large box van filled with men and their equipment - monitored the frequencies of their comrades inside the building and relayed orders from their superiors. The reports from inside, the barked orders back to them, had become more and more panicked... and then they had gone silent. The second wave was in place, but the clean-up crew and the haulage vans for the anticipated Evo bodies mulled around idly, albeit now paying attention to the mission that seemed to be quickly going off script.

They had been listening to the explosive entry, the screams of their targets, the automatic gunfire... then the frantic, terrified pleas for reinforcements... now they just glanced nervously and quietly at each other. The lack of windows around the building had allowed their approach to go unnoticed, but it now also meant that they had no idea what was going on inside. The second wave was just about to enter, stacked up against the wall, ready to round the corners on either side of the building and engage their enemy, all guns blazing.

Just waiting for the order to go.

The whole wall, the entire front-facing edifice of the building, tonnes of brickwork, masonry, and reinforcing rebar exploded outwards. The once drab and featureless front wall of the working man's club was turned into an enormous claymore mine. Shrapnel, debris, and solid stone were blown into the parking lot at ultrasonic speeds, utterly destroying anything they hit.

And they hit a lot.

A house brick smashing into a human body at several hundred miles an hour wouldn't leave much left of it. Kevlar armor and ballistic helmets were no match for the sheer kinetic force of the projectiles hitting them. The thin aluminum membranes of the box van and the SUVs barely slowed the shrapnel down either. The men inside were turned to a pulp of blood and viscera as, just like their brothers outside and the communications equipment around them, their bodies practically disintegrated under the impact of the stonework. Chucks of masonry slammed into the SUVs, puncturing and sparking their gas tanks in a way that no safety features were ever designed to protect against. The men who had briefly considered themselves lucky to have been - through the sheer chance of timing - behind the vehicles and able to take some small measure of cover were consumed in the fireball as the gas tanks ignited and the vehicles exploded. What was left of their charred bodies were thrown in every direction. The men who had been stacked up next to the wall simply ceased to exist. Echoing around the parking lot, even over the sounds of the explosion, the thuds of impact, the detonating gas tanks, and the spine-chilling screams... was the roar.

The sound coming from my lips was less of a sound as it was a vocalized representation of my will, my burning rage, my abject fury, and my indescribable, soul-consuming grief. It was pure, focused power the likes of which neither Evo nor inquisitor had ever witnessed before.

The portion of the parking lot that was directly in front of the main wall of the club had been reduced to something that looked like it belonged in a warzone. The box van had been torn to shreds; the jagged, blood-soaked fingers of metal that had once been the skin around the box section cast ominous shadows on the ground around it as they burned. Fire was consuming most of the SUVs as well. A few of them had been thrown into the air under the force of the explosions, some landing on their side, some on their roof, and one had been ripped in half. Flames rippled out of most of them. Scattered around them, between them, against them, or under them were the dozens of mangled bodies, parts of what used to be bodies, and the smears of blood and viscera where shattered, destroyed men had once stood.

Whereas the attacking force in the parking lot directly in front of the club had been utterly obliterated, the men who had been lucky enough to be waiting on either side of the blast zone were relatively unscathed. They had watched in shock, then confusion, then horror as their comrades had been turned into so many stains on the asphalt. Of course, none of them knew what had caused the explosion, nor did they have any idea what had happened to the men who had made it inside. Their first thought was that it had to be some kind of ambush - a trap laid for them - What else could have caused an explosion of that destructive magnitude other than... well... explosives? With that faulty assumption dictating their next move, the surviving attackers rallied and charged toward the breach in the wall.

From my spot, a few feet in front of the bar, I watched the voids approaching. The breaths were coming out of me in deep, ragged, and heavy pulls of air. Rational thought was gone. I simply didn't care enough, at that point, to be impressed, or even surprised, by the scale of death and destruction I had caused. They had killed Faye, and now their lives were forfeit. That was about as far as my thinking went. Short of trying to calm me or talk me down, Jeeves seemed just as furious and vengeful as I was, calling out the targets as they approached.

Conscious and subconscious. Intent and instinct. I was the stalking personification of rage and righteous fury. The most primal definition of violence in its most extreme form. Even the faintest internal whisper of calming or of showing mercy was ruthlessly stamped out with a single glance over to the lifeless corpse of what should have been my wife, and the cycle began anew.

This was not revenge. This was a reckoning.

The first group of seven men entered from around the left-hand side of the breach. Their guns were up, each of them apparently expecting to find more than a single man in the center of the room. I didn't give them long to dwell on their confusion. The lead man was just about to level his weapon at me when his entire body was pulled into the air. His men could only watch in terror and listen to his blood-curdling screams as he was ripped in half at the abdomen and the two pieces flung back at them. By the time they managed to pull themselves to their feet, the debris was already in the air.

A swing of my arm had launched every piece of loose material on the left-hand side of the room at them. One man was impaled through the chest on a pool cue. Another suffered a vastly accelerated version of 'death by a thousand cuts' as a wave of broken beer glasses and bottles blasted into him. A third had his head caved in by the bent and buckled assault rifle that had been left by the fire escape. A house brick smashing into a body at several hundred miles an hour may have been capable of doing a horrific amount of damage, but a solid wood table was just as effective.

Another group of ten men had rounded the opposite corner to them, watching their comrades falling as they entered through the right side of the breach. They lasted less than a few seconds as the entire contents of the arcade corner were launched at them. A dozen quarter-ton game cabinets smashed into the group with enough force to render their body armor utterly useless. They didn't even have a chance to scream.

Silence fell on the club. It was a silence interrupted only by the sounds of falling masonry, groans from the dying, and the roaring fires in the parking lot. The death rattles of the man with a pool cue protruding from his chest mixed with the sounds of crumbling brickwork on the edges of the breached wall. The voids in the parking lots on either side of the blasted wall were faltering, hesitating, the cracks of doubt accelerating the rate at which my mind was piercing them.

And then the sound of a slow, menacing clap echoed in from the night.

From the swirling dust of the gaping maw in the building's edifice, and through the billowing smoke of carnage outside, stepped a man. His hair was impossibly black, as if it sucked the light out of the air around it, and his eyes were almost as dark. They were locked onto me with an air of entitled superiority and smugness that would have made Rhodri look almost zen. Unlike the other men who had preceded him through the breach in the wall, however, his mind was not a void. It was invisible. The minds of other inquisitors were conspicuous in their absence, the voids I had been tracking since the attack began. His mind just wasn't there. It wasn't human in its simplicity, it wasn't Evo in its defenses, it wasn't like the other inquisitors in its darkness... His mind, as far as I could see, simply didn't exist. The brightness of his Aura around him, however, was almost blinding.

But there was something about him, something about his presence that made me take a step back, something about him that drew that knot of quickly growing fear out of my gut and into my chest. It was a sense of dread that grew with terrifying speed, it was fight or flight, but both options seemed to have been robbed from me by only his presence. I was frozen to the spot for a few moments, it took every single ounce of my willpower to force myself to back away. I swallowed hard as the man regarded me. There was a coldness about his gaze, a malevolence that even my furious rage struggled to match. Every fiber of my being, every shred of my soul, and every single instinct within me was screaming out one inescapable fact.

This man meant me harm.

And what was more, he could have been one of the few people able to inflict it upon me.

It was primal, ancient, it was pure instinct. It was the undiluted personification of dread. But, as Jeeves managed to compose himself within the tumultuous confines of my mind, he noticed something else. Beneath the fear, the instinct, and the dread... was something familiar.

My eyes twitched. The room and the man before me flashed to something else. A memory. Long dank stark-grey tunnels, the marrow-deep urge to run, the threat, the danger, the unmistakable knowledge that I was being hunted by my own death.

The man flickered, at least to my eyes. His impossibly black hair shifted to thousands of needle-sharp, barb-like spikes. His pitch-black eyes erupted into flame, the smoke flowing out of them, over his powerful jaws and around his dagger-like fangs. His clapping hands morphed into clacking claws on hard concrete, and his menacing smile shifted into a hungry maw. His whole body flickered, like a nightmare in a horror movie, into the creature that had stalked my dreams a week ago and then back to the man. Jeeves' words from that night echoed through my mind.

Something is coming.

This was it, this is what was coming, this... man... was the danger that my subconscious had been trying to warn me about. I suddenly, somehow, knew what he was. This man was the thing that had hunted my kind for centuries, he was literally the thing of nightmares. This man was a High-Inquisitor. More of Charlotte's words from my time with her all those weeks ago swam through my mind.

If a High Inquisitor gets close enough to you to know who you are, just run. They are completely immune to our powers, they are utterly unbeatable in combat, and they are merciless in their hunting of us. If you ever come into contact with one... Run! Your life will depend on it.

I knew it was futile, I knew that it would have no effect at all, but my mind needed something to grasp onto as I slowly backed away from the man and toward the bar. I swung my arm again, just like I had during the duel, just like I had against the men who had killed Faye. Every single ounce of my massive power reserves was hurled at the man. The air was ripped open, the wooden floor was torn apart between us, a long line of charred hardwood followed the bolt through the air. The swinging, hanging overhead lights were yanked from their mooring as the energy blasted across the room and smashed into him.

Nothing happened. Not a single hair was blown out of place. The energy didn't miss him, it didn't wash around him. It hit him with its full force... it just did absolutely nothing. It puffed out of existence like a candle flame in a storm.

The man frowned as one of the light fittings bounced off his shoulder and smashed around his feet. He reached one of his hands up to dust himself off. My eyes twitched, and another flicker of memory flashed across my vision.

Only the chunks of concrete bouncing off it seemed to be noticed at all. The creature didn't even break its stride. It simply shook its back to dislodge the debris and closed on its prey.

My eyes narrowed, not necessarily at him, but at something that Jeeves was trying to tell me. The man started stepping forward again, that vicious evil smile on his face spread at the utter ineffectiveness of my powers against him. Powers that would have turned any other living thing into a stain on the hardwood floor.

"The dust, the debris, the light bulb," Jeeves distant voice echoed from his hiding place in my chest.

The man stalked a few more feet toward me as my back knocked into the bar behind me. He took a deep breath, his mouth opened for him to speak, his eyes narrowed a little at the almost instinctive flick of my hand, and he flashed a glance to his right.

Just in time for a ton's worth of marble and oak constructed pool table, the last one in the room, to smash him into the wall.

My powers may not be effective against him. But he sure as shit had a vulnerability to the laws of physics, and a flying pool table, traveling at the speed of a runaway train, did as much damage to him as it would to anyone else. His body was crushed, most of him bursting like a grape between the weight and force of the pool table and the solid cinder block wall behind him. The pool table was left leaning precariously up against the wall, the man's shoes were still in the middle of the room where he had been knocked out of them, and a hand and wrist hanging out of the side of the collision were all that was left of him. The knot in my chest vanished in an instant.

It was only then that I spotted the two men who had been standing behind him. Just like he had been, these men were not dressed in dark tactical gear, but in crisp black suits. Their presence in the room had been completely hidden from me by the High inquisitor's sheer presence, his blinding Aura had been like looking directly at the sun. But now, as his hand twitched against the side of the upright pool table, my vision cleared, and my eye bore down on the two men staring slack-jawed back at me.

A quick mental sweep told me that these were the last of the inquisitor attack force, the rest of them were either dead or had fled. These were the personal aides to the man who they always thought to be almost invincible. All they could do now was stare, pale-faced and wide-eyed, at the Evo, who had just utterly destroyed their understanding of how the world worked.

I didn't give them long to dwell on it.

With a thought, their ties tightened around their throats like a noose. Their hands shot up to their necks, clawing desperately at the garment in an attempt to loosen them as they were dragged across the room. In only a few seconds, my hands had closed around their throats.

They froze.

My presence before them elicited the same response in these two inquisitors as the High Inquisitor had provoked in me. They could only stare at me, dumbfounded and paralyzed in terror.

"Go back to whoever sent you," I snarled. My voice sounded different, as if dozens of them had been layered on top of each other, but every syllable smashed into their minds like a sledgehammer. "Tell them that they have started a war today that they cannot hope to win. I meant them no harm or ill will before tonight, but now I am going to destroy them, every last one of them! Tell them what happened here, and tell them I am coming!"

With that, I released them. They both fell to the floor, looking up at me, unwilling or unable to believe that they were being spared, even if only as messengers. "GO!!" My voice boomed around what was left of the club. Both men scrambled to their feet, and with only a cursory glance at what was left of their boss... they ran for their lives.

I stood in silence for a few moments, watching as the men disappeared into the billowing smoke filling the car park. My eyes wandered around the carnage; the scale of death and destruction was almost impossible to comprehend. There were bodies everywhere. Neil was still laid out, face down, on the floor a little ahead of me, I hadn't even realized that I had walked through the pool of his blood as I had been backing towards the bar. Now a set of bloody footprints marked my path away from the man I assumed had been at the head of all of this. The puddle of his blood was still growing out of the base of the pool table. Everywhere I looked, I found death.

Two dozen armor-clad Inquisitors were still lying where they fell. Most of them had suffered the sort of massive injuries that are rarely seen outside of front-line armed conflict or horror movies, I didn't even spare a glance at the charred, broken, and smeared remains of the men outside. The vast majority of the dead inside the club, however, were Evos. Visions of their laughing, smiling faces still echoed in my mind, it had been less than fifteen minutes since we were attacked. Since they were all living and laughing together. Shattered bodies, severed limbs, faces frozen in everlasting panic. The metallic taste of blood in the air.

Finally, my eyes found Faye, and that rage erupted inside me again. The building trembled on its foundations as the fury poured out of me in waves, flakes of masonry, plaster, and dust rained down from the ceiling, and a severed power cable sparked in the corner. We had only just found each other, our lives were just beginning. A lifetime of possibility and opportunity, of love and passion and happiness. Everything that I had ever wanted, the only constant ambition and dream of my life: To love and be loved equally in return. Found and lost in the space of only a few hours.

I was going to kill them all!

They had taken something from me that they could never understand, and in return, I would take everything from them. Rivers would run red to the oceans of blood, and it still wouldn't be enough to quench my thirst for revenge. My fists clenched at my sides and another dangerous growl rumbled from my chest.

I was snapped back to the moment by sirens sounding in the distance. I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was, but the suburbs of a small British city had been turned into Beirut. There is no way that wouldn't have gone unnoticed by the neighbors and reported to the authorities. At that moment, dozens of police, ambulance, and fire sirens were shattering the quiet of the night, quiet that had only just returned to this small part of it.

"Sir, we... we need to go." Jeeves' voice sounded as hollow and devastated by grief as the rest of me felt. It was the first time that I had really felt any genuine emotion coming from my aging butler. It was another thing that I shouldn't have been surprised at, as the representation of my subconscious, he was feeling the gut-wrenching pain of Faye's loss as acutely as I was.

With a sigh, I cast my last glance over at the girl of my dreams. "I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry. I will always love you."

And with that, I headed out through the fire exit and disappeared into the night.

********

An hour later, I was walking along the sidewalk of a street I didn't recognize. I had no idea where I was. I had ducked through a small park after leaving the club, walking away from the sound of the sirens until I found some houses. I had snuck through the garden of one of them and onto the street beyond, picked a direction, and just walked.

I had considered calling an uber to get me home. But I knew enough about police investigation methods. The first thing they would do would be to check the local cab companies to see if any pickups were made from that area, which would lead them straight to my door. Or at least straight to the Queen's Head. Even if I had been dropped off a mile away and walked the last stretch, they would have my details from the payment and a description of me from the driver.

Instead, I just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. My mind, however, was on full alert. I needed to be ready to duck into an alleyway at the first sign of the police. I was also aware that more than a few of the Inquisitors had fled the scene at the death of their leader. It was not a huge leap to think that one or more of them were following me. Those voids were difficult to spot at the best of times, even more so if I wasn't actively looking for them.

I had no idea where the surviving Evos had gone, either. I had seen Marco, Uri, and Jerry ushering at least twenty of them to safety, a fair number of them were injured, and although I knew that their powers would heal them - as mine had healed me after the accident - I was sure that they wouldn't have been able to leave the area without help.

Behind all of it, behind the caution, behind the wandering, behind the curiosity over what had happened to the other party-goers, was the grief. I felt hollow, it was like the very core had been ripped out of me. I know that it would get infinitely worse before it even began to get any better, and that would be a long time coming. If one out of every five thoughts was about the other Evos or about getting home, the other four were about Faye.

And with each thought of Faye, the rage swelled up inside me again. It was a viciously repeating cycle of grief and fury. I could feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins. I almost regretted releasing both of the messengers. Thoughts of extracting information out of one of them flickered through my mind. I had never considered myself a violent or vengeful person before that moment, but I would have peeled the skin from the man in a heartbeat, making sure he felt all of it, if it meant finding out where to find the rest of the organization responsible for the death of Faye was hiding. I was becoming increasingly angry at myself for not getting that information while I had the chance.

There is no better gauge of a person's anger than their willingness to resort to torture.

I was trying everything I could think of to get myself to calm down, everything from counting the number of red cars in a single street to timing how long it took me to walk from one streetlight to the next, then trying to match it exactly for the one after. No matter how hard I tried to avoid it, that look of fear and surrender that had washed over Faye's beautiful features swam before my eyes. Over and over. The sound of her voice in my head...

I love you

I had known, even before she had said it, that it was true. That her feelings for me were so deep, that despite the minuscule amount of time that we had been together, she had not only meant it, but the words were insufficient. Just like they were for my feelings for her. Her last thought in life had been to tell me, her last conscious act had been to will those words from her beautiful mind to mine. But the thing that made my heart shatter in my chest was the simple knowledge that she never got to hear me say it back, and neither of us would ever get to say it again. That was the first, last and only time I would ever hear her say it.

She was dead. It didn't seem real.

I almost jumped out of my skin when my phone rang. I felt the instinctive surge of energy flow up my spine and into my hand for a second before I calmed myself. I pulled out my phone to see Charlotte's name on the screen. I didn't want to talk to her; I didn't want to talk to anyone, but Jeeves seemed to move my fingers without waiting for me to make a decision.

"Pete? Ohmygod, you're alive!" She breathed frantically through the speaker at me.

"I'm... here," I answered back. I sure as shit wasn't okay.

"You got out, thank god! I have been going out of my mind! I have been trying to call you for ages, but it kept going straight to voicemail! I was so worried!" I frowned for a second, but Jeeves quickly filled in the blanks. My phone hadn't had any signal immediately before the attack. I'd not given it much thought during the fight, but there must have been a jammer or something, either somewhere around the club or at the local cell towers. They had obviously been deactivated now, presumably by the police investigating the incident. "Where are you? I'm coming to get you!" she asked, the adrenaline that was still coursing through my veins sounded equally present in her trembling voice.

A question popped into my head. "How do you know what happened?" My suspicion knew no bounds at this point.

"Are you kidding? Everyone knows! News of Inquisitor attacks spread like wildfire. It's one of the only things that the Sect and the Conclave members still freely talk about. How the fuck did you escape?"

"I... didn't."

"What? What do you mean? Actually, tell me later. Where are you? I'm already in the car. The club has been completely cordoned off!"

"I..." I had no idea. "I don't know. Let me just..." I tapped the screen a few times, pulling up my location on the map app and sending a screenshot of my location to her.

There was a shuffle on the other end of the line for a second while she checked her phone. "Okay, I've got it. I am two minutes away! Don't move!" With that, she hung up.

I'm not going to lie, there was a small part of me that expected another group of SUVs and box vans - another group of armed and armor-clad men - to race into the street. That paranoid part of me that questioned everything about Charlotte and her story, that asked if she had been in on it. If she was part of the reason that Faye was gone.

The question was answered ninety seconds later when a bright red mini cooper squealed around the corner and screeched to a halt next to me. The car had barely stopped when the driver's door was flung open, and my strawberry-blonde friend threw herself out of it. She practically sprinted around the idling car and threw her arms around me. "Oh God, you're okay, you're okay. Oh, thank fucking god!" I could feel the weight of her heavy breathing, I could feel the panic in her chest. I could see the paleness of her face, the wide, vaguely bloodshot eyes, puffy from fear-filled tears. I could feel the overwhelming wave of relief washing over her. Any question of her involvement was gone in moments.

She stepped back a little, her hands wandering all over me. Grabbing at my arms, running down my chest, running through my hair, checking with physical touch to confirm what her eyes were telling her and that I really was in one piece. It was only after she had convinced herself that I wasn't bleeding, broken, or burned that she let herself feel the weight of grief, anger, and adrenaline coming off me.

She backed away slowly. "Okay, I need you to listen to me." Her words were soft and calm. Or at least as calm as she was able to make them under the circumstances. "Our kind doesn't process adrenaline well. It doesn't filter out of our systems as quickly as it does in humans. I promise you are safe, and you can tell me, or show me, everything that happened. But right now, I just need you to breathe."

It is one of life's little jokes that telling someone to calm down is the quickest and surest way to make them do the opposite. I felt that momentary swell of anger building again inside me. How the fuck was I supposed to calm down after what had happened? How could I ever be calm again while the people responsible for Faye's death, no, her fucking murder, were still alive and well? How could I ever be happy, or find love, or be safe or...

Jeeves found the logic in Charlotte's words long before I did, and I felt myself releasing a breath I hadn't realized I had been holding. My fists had been clenched, and that tingle of energy had still been vibrating under my skin. Jeeves released it all. He just let it go. I felt my whole body loosen a little.

My eyes found Charlotte's, I opened my mouth to speak, but words just wouldn't come out. She seemed to understand. Her eyes, as soft and as comforting as they had always been, just held mine. She didn't understand what had happened; we both knew that. All she knew was that the party had been attacked, and I had made it out, seemingly unharmed. For that fact alone, she was indescribably grateful. She nodded and silently took my hand, leading me to her car, opening the passenger door and guiding me into the seat.

She rounded the car and got back into the driver's seat. "You're coming home with me." She said simply, her tone suggesting that this was, in no way, a request. "You shouldn't be alone tonight." I just nodded as she put the car in gear, turned it around, and headed back down the street.

I could see the glow of the flashing blue and red lights over the roofs of the houses and through the trees separating them as she navigated us through the streets. Her route home took us more or less back the way I had walked. The mass of emergency vehicles all crowded around the scene of death and destruction I had left behind me. I had no doubt that they would stay crowded around the club for many days to come. Charlotte's eyes flicked up to look at them a few times too. She had so many questions, I could feel them burning inside her. I could feel the worry in her chest, not just for me, I was okay, but for other people she had known who had been at the party. But she also knew those questions would have to wait. For now, she just drove in silence.

After a few more minutes, she turned the car toward the city center and drove us into the night.

********

Welcome one, welcome all, to the second book of the NewU series.

I told you it was going to get darker.

These scenes have been in my head for almost as long as the NewU series has been alive. What follows for the rest of this book is a decidedly more turbulent period of Pete's life, there will still be some erotic scenes, but this portion of our story is going to be dedicated to the narrative rather than the Jollies. Pete has discovered his powers, he has had his fun, and now he gets to deal with the consequences. I hope you enjoy this new direction.

In line with the opening of the second book, I am changing the way that I write. From this point onwards, I am going to try to stick to a schedule. Recent chapters have been clocking in at circa 18k words, but are taking a week to ten days each to write, add on editing time and the offerings to the lit gods, and their release date is haphazard at best. From this point onwards, I will be aiming to get one chapter per series, released every week. This means that each chapter will be decidedly shorter in length, but will be released a lot more often.

Chapter 2 of The Island is, once again, blowing me away with the reception it has been getting. Chapter 3 will be released soon as will the next instalment of NewU. Thank you all for the continued and greatly appreciated support you have shown for my work. Posting schedules will be updated on my profile.

I will see you all in the next one, and keep being awesome.

Nova