Welcome to Chapter 13.

A quick thanks to my amazing editing team. Your grasp of the English language allows these stories to be what they are. Thank you to the rest of you for your comments, feedback, and high ratings for each chapter as well.

Now, on with the story.

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The flames billowed out of the windows, the cream-painted exterior of the building was charred and sooted. The sounds of shattering glass and creaking timbers echoed into the air as the superstructure started to give way and collapse. The heat coming from the inferno was incredible. Thick black smoke wafted into the air, casting an ominous shadow over the whole scene of destruction.

I could only watch and ask myself one question.

How had I gotten this so wrong?

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I clapped my hands loudly, letting my voice boom over the din of the workers and the TVs. "Ladies and Gentlemen, if I could have your attention, please. My name is Pete... and I am going to be your executioner today!"

I must admit, the underwhelming response was not what I had been expecting. A few of the workers looked up, one or two of them squinted in my direction, and a single woman on the opposite side of the room cast a disapproving glance my way as she wandered from one desk to another. The rest of the room, with their headphones in and their focus squarely locked onto the screens in front of them, either didn't hear me or chose to ignore me.

I growled a little louder to myself.

With a single thought, a wall of power washed out around me. Every hair on the back of every neck stood on end, every headphone popped loudly, and every screen went blank. Almost everyone looked up this time.

"Let's try this again, shall we?" I roared into the suddenly silent office. "You know who I am, and if you don't, you sure as shit know what I am. So with that information, you can work out pretty quickly why I'm here!" The ripple of nervous murmurs was starting to get louder as the violent rage on my face fell under the gaze of more and more inquisitor eyes.

The faces now staring at me were a mix of confusion and fear; most of them were a mix of the two, but one or two of them seemed to appreciate what they were looking at before the second wave of power washed out of me. The lights in the ceiling burst, raining sparks and shards of glass down onto my targets as huge swathes of them, suddenly and almost unanimously realizing the danger they were in, burst from their desks and made for the exits. It was only when the futile pulling and useless banging at the doors illustrated to my prey how trapped they were, did that overall sense of terror finally override that knee-jerked panic and settle onto the crowd.

"No, no, no, please. Don't do this," A woman's whimpering and pleading voice echoed from somewhere close to the rear wall.

"Don't hurt us, please." Another came from my left

"Why are you doing this?" another female voice cried out from the cowering crowd of people as the whole group pressed themselves against the walls to get as far away from me as they could.

"Why?" I turned towards the sound of the second voice. "Why?!?" This was the last question I had expected to hear from the Inquisitors. We were at fucking war, and this bitch was asking why?? "I'll show you why!!"

With only a thought, every screen in the room that hadn't been knocked over and broken by the stampede flicked back to life, including the whole wall of plasma TVs to my right. Each of them started playing my memory of the attack from my point of view, starting with the moment I realized something had been wrong.

Every eye was staring in rapt attention at the display.

But mine were watching them. Looking for that telltale sign of joy or even guilt in any of them. Anything at all to tell me that they at least understood why they were all about to die.

There is something I should clear up here. Humans lie... all the time. White lies, big lies, small lies, lies of omission, outright betrayals, embellishing facts to make themselves look better or to make someone else look bad. If you think about it, humans lie with alarming regularity. But because humans lie so much, they have developed a skill that Evo's, in particular, have woefully underdeveloped: the ability to spot deception.

As far as I could tell, it was different for Evos. Jeeves, in his infinite wisdom, told me that I couldn't lie to another Evo if I wanted to. Not successfully, anyway. No matter how powerful I was, no matter how much more powerful I was than the person I was trying to deceive, I instinctively knew that the lie would fail. They may not have been able to see the truth, not without accessing my city, but they would know that what I was telling them wasn't it. It was instinct, it was primal, It was part of the evolution of the species, and it transcended power. Lying to another Evo was literally impossible.

The closest thing to a lie I had spotted in my entire time with any Evo was Rhodri and Neil's tactic to win duels, and that was hardly a lie, more like something nobody had ever thought to do before, and they simply had not been asked about it, nor had they advertised it. Hiding something from other Evos, call them lies of omission, was possible, but if Rhodri or Neil had simply been asked how they kept winning, the lie would have been discovered. There is no need to understand body language when a simple, albeit carefully worded question, could immediately tell you that you are being deceived. This meant that spotting the outward signs of deception was incredibly difficult for an Evo who had never had to develop that skill.

I, however, had spent the vast majority of my life as a human, not as an Evo. Although I could not claim to be a master of body language or micro-expressions, it was a pretty simple task to judge the look on someone's face when watching a scene as horrifyingly, graphically violent as the one I was showing to see if they were happy to watch Evo's being killed. Not being able to read the minds of any of the people in the room the way I would if they were human or an Evo, I had to do things the old-fashioned way.

The thing is, none of them were showing anything other than shock, horror, and no small amount of confusion. There were cries, whimpers, shrieks of fear, gasps of disgust or terror, even as my kin were being mowed down, long before theirs had met the same fate. Every single person in the room understood what was happening, they knew exactly who the victims of the attack were, and they knew exactly who the attackers had been. But not a single face was showing any sign of having the slightest clue why it was happening.

I had expected at least a few of them to hold the attitude of "yeah, they are Evos. We are at war. What did you expect?" If not an outright "Yay, they are dead!" But no, there was nothing. There was no defiance. There was no satisfaction. There weren't even any conspiratorial 'let's get our stories straight' glances. There was only confusion. I paused the video just before that ominous clapping started and turned back to the crowd.

"That is why!" I barked at the crowd.

The murmurs rose a little higher again. "That's impossible!" a voice echoed above the others.

"It can't be; it's a lie. It has to be!" Came another.

The crowd was now looking nervously amongst themselves, but a lot of glances were being shot towards a single man who was standing, tellingly, between the rest of the crowd and me. He looked like the man in charge. He was shaking his head as if trying to deny this was even happening.

He cleared his throat and looked at me. There was no mistaking the fear in his eyes, especially after watching his on-screen compatriots being butchered as effortlessly as the attackers had been. This is where the spotting the lie thing came into play. This guy, not to mention every other face that wasn't cringing in abject terror at the pissed-off Evo in front of them, was telling me that this was the first time they were seeing any of this. Either every single one of them was an Oscar-worthy actor, or they didn't have a clue that this had happened until I showed them. My mind, however, was working at a rate that approximated Mach Two.

How the fuck could it be possible for them not to know? Was this sort of information not widely known? Did they compartmentalize their actions, so one Inquisitor hand didn't know what the other was doing? How could they be this lax with security and yet work on a cell system for the dissemination of information? Hell, how could the Inquisitors pull off this kind of stunt without telling their own people to be prepared for some kind of reprisal? I mean, had there ever been reprisals before? Fuck! This was not going to plan!

"You," I barked at the man in the tie, who everyone else seemed to be looking at for some sort of explanation. The point of my finger, after watching what that hand was capable of, made him, and every person in the crowd directly behind him, visibly flinch. "Sit!" It was all I could do to stop myself from smirking.

With the smallest gesture of my hand, a desk chair rolled up behind him and bumped into the back of his knees, seemingly entirely of its own accord. "You and I are going to have a chat," I stared at the shrinking-looking Inquisitor and made sure to keep that dangerous edge in my voice. "What you say in that chat will determine how well the rest of your day, or life, turns out. For your friends here too. And trust me when I say that both could end at exactly the same time and with very little notice!"

"Don't tell him anything, Miguel." A man at the front of the crowd to my left shouted out. I spun around and bore my furious gaze down upon him. With a yelp, the man's tie tightened to a noose around his throat before it dragged him to the center of the room.

"This little shit stain is going to get you killed... Miguel," I glared at the choking man between us. I glanced down at a nametag comically hanging from his shirt as my hand reached out toward the desk he had been standing at. A picture frame flew across the room and into my hand. I looked at it before turning my attention to the asshole on his knees. "Steffan, this is a nice-looking family you have," I said menacingly. The man stopped struggling immediately, and his face paled. I didn't feel great about threatening his family, and even in my anger, I had no intention of following through. I didn't need him to know that, though. "Do they know what you do for a living? Do you think that, in a month or so, when they finished scraping your body parts off the walls, it will provide some comfort to them knowing that you deserved your death for working for an organization that murders innocent men and women?"

"But, we don't..." Miguel said softly as the whimpering Steffan clawed at the constrictor around his neck. "We haven't done that for generations..." His words fell away as my gaze lifted back toward him.

"Are you going to be quiet now, Steffan?" I asked, not taking my eyes off his boss. The man nodded vigorously before sucking in a deep, panting breath as his necktie was loosened. "Good. Now, off you fuck. Miguel... continue."

"It was... It was after the Philadelphia accords. We haven't been at war since then." The thinning-haired man looked at me as if this answer should have been the most obvious thing in the world. I just arched an eyebrow at him. "I don't understand. How can you not know this? You are a member of the Conclave. This should be common knowledge!" The man was getting frantic as if he could tell that these were not the answers that would see him and his colleagues make it out of there alive.

We stared at each other for a few tense moments before I took a deep breath. "Alright, calm the fuck down. Let's just say I don't have access to the Conclave's archives, and I know almost nothing of their history. All I know is that I was at a party, and you fuckers attacked it! If you want me to believe that you didn't know anything about it, you are going to have to convince me. Now, start at the beginning."

The man took a deep trembling breath, but it had the desired result of seeming to calm him. "Okay... Okay... Do you know what The Schism is?"

"The breakaway of the Sect from the rest of the Conclave?"

Miguel breathed a sigh of relief, apparently knowing that much was a good start in his eyes. "Yes. Good, okay..."

For the sake of expediency, I am going to paraphrase the explanation that Miguel gave me. Not only was he giving me some information that I already knew, but to the man's credit, he was rather nervous and had a tendency to waffle.

The Schism, as it turned out, was almost entirely confined to the American Colonies. Very few members who left the Conclave were in a different geographical location when it happened, and, in a roundabout way, this event was one of the things that turned an opposition movement into a full-scale armed conflict. At first, the Inquisition hadn't realized that it was a separation within the conclave. They saw the war erupting and thought it was a play for power, the Conclave getting up to its old tricks. They were preparing to go to war to preserve human autonomy when they realized that The Conclave had almost no influence over the Continental Congress, meaning that this act was completely counterproductive from their point of view.

The sect though, far from being the innocent party that Charlotte had made them out to be, had just enough influence to start the revolution. They wanted to be rid of the conclave and this new nation was free from Conclave influence. The Conclave, of course, didn't want that to happen and had just enough influence over the British Parliament to push them toward war. All the stories you hear, the Boston Tea Party, no taxation without representation, and so on, all grew out of legitimate grievances the colonials had. The Sect just gave them that little push to become militant.

As the war dragged on, the Conclave - or at least the old version of the Conclave that had existed before the "rule change" that Marco had told me about - basically collapsed. The number of Evos who left was just large enough to create an internal power vacuum, and their existing governing structure simply couldn't cope with the loss. By the time the Battle of Valley Forge had ended, the internal political troubles within the Conclave had been resolved. The new archon had been elected, the rules had been changed and the new Conclave leadership just wanted peace. The Inquisitors, despite watching very carefully, recognized this as an internal Evo matter and basically left it alone. All they really did in the conflict was watch to make sure the Sect didn't try to exert any undeserved influence over the newly forming country. And they didn't. Most people think that the US won the revolutionary war, but that isn't exactly true. Britain lost it in the same way that the US lost in Vietnam. They could have kept going forever, or they could have just overrun the country, but there was a lack of political will at home. Britain didn't lose as much as they just walked away. That change in the desire for war in the British political system was, surprisingly, down to the Conclave. Once the old leaders had been removed and replaced, the will to fight just... disappeared.

There would be millions of Muricans screaming heresy at this explanation. But this wasn't exactly news to anyone else in the world.

Miguel went on, seeming to be satisfied that I was paying attention and not murdering anyone.

What very few people at the time seemed to appreciate was the depth of resentment felt by the old guard of the Conclave and the new policy of peace. Resentment aimed not just at the Sect but at the new Conclave leadership as well. As Marco had explained, they basically went rogue. Thirty or so years after the end of the American War of Independence, this rogue faction decided to attack the Sect, but more than that, they went to war with the Conclave as well. History remembers this as the War of 1812. This time the inquisition did get involved. The rogue faction had gained massive amounts of influence as politically connected military leaders, and, using the backdrop of the Napoleonic War, they argued that any nation helping France should be treated as an enemy of Britain. Parliament agreed and started attacking or confiscating American ships. At the same time, they manipulated the American President, James Madison, to declare war on Britain based on the economic impact this was having in the States. Then, using that war as a way to get their armies onto American - and Sect-controlled - soil, this rogue faction essentially went on a killing spree.

With most of their numbers now in the US and the majority of them at the heads of massive armies, they turned their wrath on anyone they could find, Conclave, Sect, or Inquisition. Anybody who was not with them was against them. None of the other sides were prepared for this, and the losses started to add up. The Sect - apparently to this day - believed they were being attacked by the Conclave. The Inquisitors understood that this was a rogue faction but assumed the Conclave was silently supporting them, and the Conclave was trying everything they could to end the conflict without drawing the wrath of the Inquisition while also trying to avoid another collapse of their internal political system. The Inquisition, in particular, was completely unprepared for this new form of war. What the Conclave and the rogue faction didn't take into account was that even though most Evos couldn't harm Inquisitors with their powers, the armies of loyal soldiers with muskets surrounding them sure as shit could. This was a realization that was only now starting to dawn on the Conclave after my experiences at the party. At the time, they just assumed, as they had explained in the Cathedral, that the Inquisitors that were killed couldn't have really been inquisitors, simply by the virtue that they had been killed.

The Inquisition was at a bit of a loss. They had always hunted Evos the same way: they had sent a handful of their members against a single Evo, killed him, and then went after the next one. The problem was this wasn't working when their targets were surrounded by literal armies of men. They were being killed faster than they could replenish their numbers. The end result, as far as the war was concerned, was that the Inquisition had to raise their own armies in opposition to the ones controlled by the rogues. This led to even higher casualties, not just in the Inquisition or the Rogues but in the human population as well.

This was where the first big surprise came up. In the early months of 1814, after almost 2 long years of bloodshed, the Inquisition received an envoy from the last people on earth they expected to hear from; The Conclave. The Napoleonic wars were over, Napoleon was in exile - at least until he escaped a year later - and there was a real possibility that the 150,000 men in the European armies would be transferred to the US theater. Once they were there and doing the bidding of the Rogue faction, that would be game over. The American conduct in the war to that point had been a shambles. They hadn't won a single land engagement, and no less than eight invasions of Canada had been beaten back, sometimes by a force significantly smaller than the ones they were attacking with. There was even a case of an 8,000-man-strong force being turned around by a few hundred Canadian Militiamen. 150,000 Battle-hardened Redcoats, veterans of the fighting in France, the men who had liberated Portugal and kicked the shit out of Napoleon, would crush the US in a matter of months. Hell, they were even planning on sending over The Duke of Wellington himself. The Americans simply had nothing to match that. Not even close. Once the inevitable victory had been achieved, the Rogue faction would ruthlessly destroy the Sect and then would rebuild this new nation with themselves completely and firmly in control of it.

It turns out that this was as bad for the Conclave as it was for anyone else.

With a common enemy, the Conclave and the Inquisition formed something of an uneasy and untrusting alliance. There would be groups of Inquisitors and Evos in every American army, and between them, they would attack the members of the Rogue faction one by one. Sometimes the Evos would run interference for the Inquisitor strike. Sometimes the Inquisitor army would provide a distraction, and the Evos would take out the former member of their own organization. However, they chose to work in individual cases, the effect was undeniable. They started to win.

I had heard from Marco about the Conclave hunting down members of this faction before the party, but either he had skipped the part involving Inquisitor help, or, having happened decades before his birth, he simply hadn't known about it.

In the year or so of these joint missions, something happened that neither side expected. They started to develop a mutual understanding, bordering on respect, for each other. The Inquisition started to understand that the Evos were not all power-hungry sociopaths willing to subjugate humanity for their own gains and were watching them risk, and often sacrifice, their lives in an attempt to stop the few that were.

The Evos started to understand the risks posed by the mentality that had governed their society for generations. This rogue faction was after nothing but power. They wanted absolute control over the young nation and were willing to kill to get it. What started as a justified attempt by the Conclave to stop them before their actions drew the attention of the Inquisition - and possibly being tarnished by the same brush - developed into an understanding that the Inquisitors had their reasons, possibly justifiable ones, for protecting humanity from Evo actions.

With all the rogue faction members finally killed or captured, the Inquisition and the Conclave agreed to pull out of the conflict completely and let it run its course naturally. The War was not a victory for either side. With the twenty-year war against France finally over and without the Rogue faction pushing for War with the US, the British appetite for it, once again, faded away. The Americans, knowing they couldn't win a protracted conflict against Great Britain, were happy to accept any peace proposals that didn't involve territorial losses. The Treaty of Ghent gave both parties what they needed to justify ending the killing to their own people and that, as they say, was that.

The war, which would quickly be almost forgotten by both nations, marked a turning point for the Conclave and the Inquisition. Having shown that they could work together, and with numerous relationships being forged in the crucible of battle between people who would have once been sworn enemies, neither side wanted to go back to the way things were before. Although Miguel had no idea how many Evos had been killed in the conflict, he did know that the number of lost Inquisitors numbered in the thousands. He also knew that the Conclave had not fared much better. So, in late 1815, only a few months after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, the Conclave and the Inquisition sat down in Phildepelpia's Independence Hall, in the very same room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, and hashed out a treaty of their own. The document signed by both sides at the end of this summit came to be known as the Philadelphia accords.

"O... kay..." I said after it became clear that Miguel had finished talking, apparently thinking that this somehow answered my question. "So what was in these accords?"

The thinning-haired man sighed heavily, still seeming to be amazed that I didn't know this already. To be fair, I was starting to wonder the same thing. Parts of his story tied into what I had learned of the Sect and the Conclave from Charlotte and Marco, but the idea that the Conclave and the Inquisition had worked together, let alone had signed a formal peace agreement, was not only new information but seemed glaringly conspicuous in its absence for the parts of the story I had heard before today.

"Essentially, it ended the war between our orders. But it is a little more complicated than that," He started, apparently wrestling with the herculean task of explaining this to someone as clueless as me whilst also trying not to provoke me into another mass execution. "The world had changed. A century before that war, all of the major powers had been controlled by a king. Any Evo wanting to influence world events only had to manipulate that one human, and he could decide the fate of millions. But in the years leading up to the War of 1812, things had changed drastically. The English Civil War in the 1640s had turned Britain into a Constitutional Monarchy, there was still a King, but his powers had almost all been taken over by parliament."

"The Americans loved to say things like "Down with King George" during their revolution, but the simple truth of the matter is that King George could issue as many decrees as he wanted, the final say rested with Parliament. It's the same reason why they wanted representation for the taxes they paid. Colonial policy was handled at Westminster, not at the Palace, and so was control of the military. The King was literally insane. He could bark orders and make as much noise as he pleased; he could have ordered every revolutionary to be hunted down and executed... but it wasn't up to him. It was up to Parliament. That is also why when Parliament decided that they wanted to end the fighting, the fighting ended despite King George's demands that the Colonies be retaken. Did it ever strike you as odd that Britain was at war with them but then recognized them as their own nation only a few short years later? Parliament didn't want the hassle of holding the Colonies, they were happy to have trading partners, but the actual administration of them was too expensive and too complicated. To Britain, America just wasn't important. At least not compared to threats like the Spanish and the French."

"The same could be said for France. The French Revolution had relieved King Louis of his head, and it had become a democracy. The problem for Evos with this is that it is incredibly hard to corrupt democratically run governments. Let's use Britain as an example. The Evos would need to influence or manipulate almost half of the members of Parliament to do what they wanted. But even if they managed that, the MPs only sit for a relatively short time. If the things they had been influenced to do were not popular with the people, they would be replaced during the next election. So to keep an influence over the government, you would need to also manipulate massive parts of the general voting population to keep those people in power. That was just too much for even a large group of Evos to manage. That is why the desire for war faded so quickly after both the War of Independence and the War of 1812. MPs were replaced, and the people - who had no desire to fight the US, and most of whom agreed with the words of the Declaration of Independence - made sure that the conflicts came to an end."

"On top of all that, the Industrial revolution was starting to pick up pace, and the Conclave had realized that the fastest way to gain power was to become masters of industry."

"Is that any different from Political power?" I asked

"Well, yes, if you think about it," Miguel answered carefully. "If you own a business, you have to be making a product that is wanted by society. Be that coal mines, steel mills, railways, or - later - cars and mass-produced goods. It is just as impossible for the Conclave to create a market for useless goods as it is for them to corrupt voting patterns, so the things they made needed to have value to humanity. More than that, they needed to have people working for them. They needed to pay those people fairly to keep them working for them. Even though the working conditions were atrocious to us, looking back, they were actually a massive step forward for the people at the time. The common working-class adult became, for the first time in history, able to purchase his own house and his own land. The industrial revolution basically ended the role of the landed gentry. It started to level the playing field. That is what the Inquisition had been fighting to do for centuries. Hell, if the Evo providing that wealth had cheated to get himself into that post, if he had given himself an understanding of economics or of engineering to get into the position he now held, who cared? As long as the people beneath him were benefiting too, it was fine by us. And a democratic government made sure they did."

"Okay, I think I'm starting to follow," I said with a nod. "The Conclave changed the way they operated to the point that it fell in line with the Inquisition's objectives rather than oppose them. Couple that with the reduced opportunity for them to threaten or influence world politics, and they stopped being your enemy and started being an organization you could work with."

"Right, exactly," Miguel said with a relieved sigh. "The accords laid out the terms of the peace. The Conclave agreed never to manipulate humans for direct political power. Members of the Conclave are not allowed to hold positions of high political office, and they are not allowed to be things like Judges. It is deemed an unfair use of power. In return, the Inquisitors agreed never to attack an Evo again without first letting the Conclave address the offense. We are not allowed to summarily attack Evos without cause, either. This is why it is impossible for us to have been responsible for the attack on you and the party. We haven't conducted a raid like that since the final days of the War of 1812, and even then, it was with Conclave help."

"And yet..." I said, gesturing to the TVs on the wall. The bodies of the Inquisitor attackers and butchered Evos were still clear on the screens.

"I... I don't know. That should be impossible," Miguel looked defeated as he slumped. "It's just not how we work anymore. We watch, we monitor, and if we find an Evo crossing a line, we let the Conclave know and give them time to deal with it. We only attack if they tell us they are unable to stop the offender or..."

"Woah Woah Woah, back up..." I said, sitting a little more upright in my seat. "Are you trying to tell me that there is some sort of dialogue between the Inquisition and the Conclave?" Miguel nodded, frowning as if he was truly astonished that I didn't know this. "Who?"

"I... I don't know," he said incredulously. "That is so far above my pay grade it would make you dizzy. That sort of stuff happens right at the top. This is high-table stuff. We are grunts."

I could feel my teeth grating. Someone was lying to me, and I was starting to doubt it was Miguel. "I need you to be very, very fucking clear on this," I said with that dangerous growl behind my voice. "You are saying that someone at the top of the Conclave knows about upcoming attacks?"

"They more than know about it," Miguel answered. "We are like a policing force. We let them know when an Evo is doing something that breaches the Philadelphia accords. They then have ninety days to rein that member back in, if they won't, or - more often - can't, they pass the case back to us, and we..." He glanced at the screen nervously. "...we take appropriate action. They give us the green light to intervene."

"And how often does this happen?"

"Not often. Maybe a handful of times every few years? We haven't had to intervene 'directly' more than a few dozen times in the last 200 years. And all of them were after the Conclave had given us the information."

"That's not right," I frowned. "The Conclave and the sect both still fear the Inquisitors, not as some ancient boogeyman, but as a still-present danger. Not only are attacks and assassinations against Evos fairly common - certainly more regular than a few dozen times in two centuries - but I have been told by members of the Sect and members of the Conclave high council that large-scale attacks like that one haven't happened in fifty years. Admittedly that isn't exactly regular, but it is sure as hell more recent than 200 years ago. As far as the Evo side is concerned, you guys are still hunting us down and killing us at every chance you get."

"But... No... We don't... We can't... It's illegal... We don't do that!" Miguel was starting to get flustered again, and the people behind him had begun murmuring nervously amongst themselves. It was clear that none of them had any idea what I was talking about. "As far as I know, we don't even have the capability to do that anymore. We are not even trained in combat, let alone those sorts of military-grade assault tactics." He waved towards the screens. "As far as we are concerned, we are at peace. We have been since before our great great great grandparents were born!"

"And yet..." I gestured back to the screen again. Miguel looked like he was about to start crying. "Perhaps this will help." I finished.

With a nod at the screens, I let the playback continue. I had paused the replay of my memory from just after the point I had blown out the main front wall. The whole room watched, visibly cringing as the two groups of attackers tried to enter from each side of the breach, only to be mercilessly cut down by my fury.

Then the clapping started.

That slow, ominous crack of noise echoed around the room in the same way it had echoed around the club. Even now, after all the time that had passed - even if only to me - it still sent a shiver down my spine. The High-Inquisitor finally stepped through the swirling clouds of smoke and into view.

It would be very hard for me to overstate the reaction of my hostages at the sight of the slicked-back, black-haired man on the screen. Miguel jumped out of his seat, knocking it over as he backed away from the wall of TVs. There were gasps, shrieks, cries, and even prayers from the rest of the crowd. One woman fainted, having to be caught and held up by the people on either side of her. The whole group moved. Until that point, they had been pressed up against the walls trying to keep as far away from me as their confines would allow, but at the sight of the High-Inquisitor on the screen, they all moved to get as far as they could away from that instead.

Miguel's face was pale, even more so than it had been when he realized who I had been, he was chewing on the knuckle of one of his fingers, and his eyes had never left the screen. I remembered the knot of abject terror I had felt at first sight of the High-Inquisitor, but it had never affected me watching it on a screen, and even so, it didn't make any sense for my captives to fear him as much as Evos did. They were the same species. They were on the same side... right?

"Miguel..." I called after an appropriate amount of time, watching their reactions. "Miguel!" His eyes finally flicked back to mine. "I need you to focus!"

"But... But..."

"Sit down! Look at me!" Miguel did as he was told. "Now, who is that to you?"

"That's... that's... it's impossible."

"Miguel. I need you to concentrate. You are doing well. You may have saved every life here. Just stay with me. Who is it?"

"That's... It's..." He swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "That's Reinald Montreaux. He's a Royal, but... but he's dead."

"Oh, I know." I nodded to the screen and let the last few seconds play. Montreuax's stalking towards me ending with his body being obliterated between the wall and a one-ton pool table. Another ripple of shrieks and gaped cries rolled through the crowd before dying down to the steady cacophony of whispered murmurs. Miguel just blinked and swallowed hard. It looked like he was about to throw up.

"What? No... Well, yes... But he has been dead for more than fifteen years. This isn't possible."

"I assure you that this was less than three weeks ago."

Miguel pressed a hand to his face, his thumb on one temple and his forefinger on the other, dragging them over his closed eyes before pinching the bridge of his nose. "I'm sorry. I'm trying, I really am, but this is..."

"Impossible, yes, you said."

"No, you don't understand. He was a Royal. There is no way this could have happened."

"O...kay... Well, you can guess what I'm going to ask next, can't you?"

He sighed again, taking another look at the screen before focusing on me. "You don't know what a Royal is," He waited long enough for me to nod. "Okay... Just like Evos, most Inquisitors are born due to a rare genetic difference between them and the rest of humanity. It is not as radical as the ones that create Evos, and there is no requirement for the mother to contract an illness that can be passed to the unborn fetus, but otherwise, we are created in very similar ways. The one big difference, however, is that if two Inquisitors have a child together, their offspring is guaranteed to be an Inquisitor. Not only that but a High-Inquisitor."

I already knew this. Charlotte had briefly told me on the day she had first explored my city. I just nodded for him to continue.

"They are called that because the child is the sum of both parents' powers. Dad has X power, and Mom has Y power, add them together, and that is what the child has. It was realized pretty quickly that if two High Inquisitors had a child, it would have the power of both parents, or all four grandparents, and so on. Breed that generation, and it would multiply again. Each successive generation would birth babies exponentially more powerful than the last. And that is what happened.

"Over the centuries, this resulted in a group of small but incredibly powerful families. Four of them, to be precise. Inquisitors don't seem to suffer from the inherent genetic defects usually associated with 'in' and 'inter' breeding, and these families are encouraged to have as many children as possible. The males are told to impregnate as many Royal women as they can, as many times as they can, even if they are... directly related. It's not very tasteful, but that is what happens. These four families came to be known as the Royal families, or just the Royals."

"This was at the time when the war with the Conclave was at its height. Being able to defeat any Evo they could find gave them massive amounts of power and control over the rest of the order. When I said that our side talks to yours, that is who I meant. Between them, they are essentially in command of the Inquisition. The Montreauxs were one of the Royal families, and Reinald was its nominal leader. You could say he was one of our kings. He was the very highest person on those high tables."

"You keep saying 'was'," I interrupted.

"That's because he died in a plane crash, fifteen years ago. His whole family did. I don't know the specifics, obviously, but foul play or Evo involvement was suspected but never proven, They were headed to some sort of retreat, a holiday. Nobody really knows exactly what happened, but they had their base in Vienna and chartered a private plane to fly them to the Island of Capri... Well, to Naples, they would have had to have taken a boat from there to the Island. But the plane never made it, it crashed into a mountain in the Alps, just inside the Italian border. I think there were about twelve members of that Royal line who died. It ended their dynasty. It was... It was huge! It would be the equivalent of the US President, all his staff, every member of congress, every supreme court judge, basically anyone and everyone at the top levels of the American Government, all being killed at the same time. Our whole society fell into chaos; one of the other families had to step in to restore order."

"Then what?" I asked. Miguel was shaking like a leaf. His whole body was trembling as the revelation worked itself around his mind.

"Then... then nothing. It took years to get back to some sort of normalcy after their deaths, but..." He looked at the screen again. "... but nobody could have imagined this."

I sat in silence for a moment, drumming a finger against my thigh, before speaking again. "So let me see if I have this straight. There is a peace treaty between the Conclave and the Inquisition that at least most people in the Conclave don't know about. There is some amount of high-level discussion between the two orders, which I'm certain is a fact unknown to most Evos considering they think you are still killing us. That dialogue involves the Conclave authorizing attacks against its own members, albeit ones who break the rules that they may not even be aware of. To add to that, there are attacks being carried out by members of your order that the rest of you seem to know nothing about and strongly believe shouldn't be happening. One of them was led by a Royal who apparently faked his own death and is now spending his newfound anonymity hunting Evos... well, was. And finally, as far as the rank-and-file Inquisitors are concerned, there is not only peace between you and the Conclave, but there is even a degree of cooperation. Am I missing anything?"

Miguel thought for a moment and shook his head.

"Okay... last thing," I said after nodding. "Tell me about your friends on the mountain." I asked, referring to the dozen red dots who had gathered at a villa every day in the northern mountains overlooking Malaga.

Miguel squinted, opened his mouth, and closed it again before looking over his shoulder and out the window... towards the mountains to the West. "I... who?"

I was starting to sense a pattern here. "Okay, let me try this another way. The Inquisitors who live in this city, do they all work here?"

"Erm..." Miguel scrunched his eyes up, thinking about it. Not being able to read their minds for these answers was kind of infuriating. "I think there are a few others, but not many. There is an older man who retired; I think he lives out toward Torremolinos somewhere. I think there are a few children, but they are all still in school. But otherwise, yes. It's a guaranteed job with good pay. Being an Inquisitor is all it really takes to get through the door. There isn't any reason not to work here."

"And are there many people not at work today? Called in sick, time off, whatever?"

"No, we don't really get sick, just like you. We sometimes get visitors from different parts of the country for administrative reasons. There are a few of those here, but no... there is nobody missing who would normally be here."

"And to your knowledge, there is no reason why a group of twelve Inquisitors would be meeting just outside the city without your knowledge?"

Miguel squinted at me again. "No, I..." His eyes suddenly widened at the implication. "You don't think..."

"That's exactly what I think." I stood from my chair. The room had fallen silent. Most of them had caught onto the danger they could potentially be in. If there were a separate, rogue group of Inquisitors - capable of mounting the sort of attack that had hit the party and being led by a Royal, no less - It was safe to assume that they were watching the rest of the Inquisition too. "You need to contact your superiors. A copy of the video has been left on your systems, but they need to be aware of what is happening. You can also tell them that I will be wanting a chat in the very immediate future! Something is going on, and I am going to find out what it is, but at the moment, it looks like it involves secretive parts of both of our orders."

"Wait... why do you think the Conclave is involved?" Miguel asked as he stood as well.

"Because someone in there is talking to someone in your leadership and chose to keep that secret. That is the best-case scenario... The worst is that we are being attacked by a renegade faction of Inquisitors in clear violation of the peace treaty, and they didn't think to ask you why. Instead, they allowed the attack on the party, perhaps even supplying the details, that got more than sixty members of the Conclave killed, not to mention about a hundred of yours. Someone, somewhere, is lying. There is just too much going on for it to be a coincidence or a misunderstanding."

"You think someone is trying to restart the war?" Miguel asked, that paleness of his face never really leaving.

"It's worse than that. To the Conclave and the Sect, as far as their members are concerned, it never ended!"

*******

A few hours later, I was grinding my teeth again. I had left the office after giving Miguel a way for him or his superiors to contact me directly. I also made it clear that I would not be willing to wait for long. The Malaga office had been spared the full measure of my wrath by the virtue of my willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt. If the Inquisition wanted to keep that benefit, I was expecting them to work with me to get to the bottom of this. Uri was going to be getting the same ultimatum. At the moment, I didn't know who I could trust and was defaulting back to refusing to trust any of them. Given how pissed off I was feeling right now, getting on my bad side was a very dangerous place to be.

I looked back up from the note in my hand and at the fire. The villa where those red dots had been congregating was burning; it had already been burning when I arrived. Flames were roaring out of the windows, and part of the roof had started to collapse. The cream-painted exterior wall was charred and sooted, scared by the inferno, and the plastic seating next to the front door was melting under its fury. The heat being thrown off the flames was incredible. Any hope of finding something useful or incriminating was currently burning along with it. I had made the choice in anger to attack the bigger target first. I had assumed that the Inquisitors in the office were all guilty and I was after a body count. The higher, the better. I had considered coming here first. The red dots had still been here when I was in Constitution Square waiting for my moment, I had checked.

Now they were gone.

Of course, they were fucking watching. The first rule of counter-intelligence: Know what your enemy knows.

Pinned to a telegraph pole just to the side of the house had been a plain white envelope. With only one road in or out, it was impossible to miss. I looked back down at it and read it again, the growl rumbling aggressively from my chest. I was angry... I was more than angry. I was furious at myself for rushing in without even checking this place first. I was livid at my real enemy getting away... but I was a raging ball of incandescent fury at what was written on the note in my hand.

Hello Pete,

You are an abomination! We do God's work, and you killed our chosen leader. You murdered our King during his holy mission. For this, you and all those you love, will die slowly.

We shall see you soon.

They wanted a war... Well, I was going to fucking give them one!

********

And that's it for chapter 13.

The plot thickens for our hapless and increasingly confused hero. Webs of lies and long vaulted secrets stand between him and those responsible for the death of Faye. With the list of people he can trust and the places he can turn growing shorter by the moment, how will he know who is friend and who is foe. Stay tuned to find out.

Stories are released to a schedule which can be found on my profile. The next chapter of the Island will be submitted on Monday, and the newest chapter of this flagship series will be submitted next Thursday. As it stands, I do not foresee any interruption of that schedule over the Christmas period, but there may be a delay in the time it takes lit to post them to you.

Please feel free to rate and comment as you see fit. Authors thrive on the feedback of our readers.

In the meantime. You are all awesome.

Nova.