It didn't even take ten minutes to drive the distance it had taken Mary almost two hours to walk. I pulled the car up outside the pretty-looking house. The gardens were well tended, the lawn was immaculate, and the wooden shutters that were closed over the windows had probably been painted every year for decades. This was a house that had seen a lot of love.

It was about to see a lot of violence too.

"Stay here," I whispered to Mary as I unbuckled my seatbelt.

"But I..."

"Mary," I said a little more firmly. "I need you to stay here. Please. This isn't going to be pretty, and you don't want to see it."

She looked past me at the idyllic Christmas scene in her garden. The lights were still blinking from their places along the line of the roof, the hints of the Christmas tree could be made out through one of the shutters, and the wreath still hung definitely onto the front door. Under any other circumstances, this would be the last place you would expect such horrors.

She nodded solemnly.

"When I get out, I need you to lay your head in my seat. I don't want you to get caught by a stray bullet if they start shooting."

She looked down at my seat and then nodded again.

"This will be over soon, I promise." I opened the door and climbed out of the car.

I looked out at the garden and rolled my eyes. "Alright, Jeeves. I give up. What is it with these people and hiding?"

There was a little light coming from a streetlight further down the street, a little more peeking through the slats of the shutters, but otherwise, the area was dark. That made the glaringly obvious glow of the inquisitors waiting for me even more obvious. Two were hiding behind the walls, one on each side of the garden. One was behind me, lying prone at the base of a tree on a small rise overlooking the street. A fourth was just inside the doorway. All of them were breathing soft and steady, each of them was peering at me, and all of them were armed.

"Seriously, do they not know they glow in the fucking dark? This is embarrassing!"

I meant it. For a group of people who had tracked me so expertly, whittled down my location so quickly, spotted my trap so easily, and found a way to bypass it so ruthlessly, hiding behind a wall, in the dark, when they had the equivalent of a Hollywood searchlight pointed at them at all times was, frankly, ridiculous!

"It is possible, Sir. We have never explored the possibility that they cannot see their auras as we can. No inquisitor has ever said anything to us about them. Perhaps you are right; it would explain why they are so laughably bad at any activity involving a low profile."

I sighed and shook my head. "Whatever. It's something to think about later. Is the family in there?"

"Yes, Sir, An elderly gentleman and three children are in a bedroom on the upper floor and to the rear of the property.

"Cool. Okay, let's get this over with!"

I turned around to ensure Mary had lowered her head into my seat and had no view of what was about to happen. I felt the Inquisitor on the rise, steadying his breath, no doubt to control his breathing, ready for the shot with the long-barreled rifle that was almost certainly in his hands. These people were nothing if not predictable.

It's not like I could clearly see them, it was still dark, but each of the intruders was silhouetted against the glow of their aura. I could see the air currents of their breath, I could even see the ambient air temperature around them changing, but as usual, their minds were completely blank.

Man-on-the-grassy-knoll was clearly focusing all his attention on me, so much so that he didn't notice the roots of the tree that he was lying next to were un-burying themselves and coiling up behind him like a snake. My power-enhanced hearing was picking up the whispered communications off their radio earpieces.

"Position two, what is he doing?"

"He's just standing there, looking at the house."

"Is he armed?"

"Negative, no weapons sighted."

"Received. Make ready your shot, and be prepared to fire if he acts aggressively."

"Copy that."

The almost silent click as the safety switch on his rifle was flicked off was almost immediately drowned out by the wet, squelching splat as two tree roots, each like a sharpened stake, were plunged into the back of his head. He was dead before he could make a sound. Still, for good measure, the roots ripped themselves in opposite directions and spit his head open like an overripe fruit.

With a deep breath, I took a few steps into the garden.

To the outside observer, not a sound had been made. A few of them may have heard a muffled grunt and a few soft thuds coming from behind one of the walls. But they would never have guessed that an assassin's silenced weapon had inexplicably jerked its barrel upwards in its owner's hands, and the firing pin, without any input from the trigger, had sent six bullets into the skull of the man looking down at it in confusion. Most people wouldn't know that there was rarely a Hollywood-Esque scream after a headshot. The brain's ability to command other parts of the body, namely the lung, lips, or vocal cords, was usually cut off by the sudden and violent introduction of lead projectiles and skull fragments.

Perhaps a few more of them would have heard the gasps of air as the assassin's friend, hiding behind the wall on the other side of the garden, had the shoulder strap of his assault rifle suddenly and mysteriously wrap around his own neck and squeeze with the power of two freight trains pulling in opposite directions. They may not know that woven nylon straps are an incredibly strong material capable of handling massive loads before breaking. The power of those loads, when pressed down onto a human throat, wouldn't just strangle a man but would crush his windpipe, along with all the essential arteries and nerves in the neck, into a mushy pulp against his spine. They may, however, have commented on the fact that the sudden pressurization of blood inside his head would have caused his eyeballs to burst out of their sockets and blood to jet violently out of his nose and ears.

But, of course, these witnesses weren't around. There was only me, striding quietly, calmly, yet purposefully up to the door of the house after already dispatching three of the six men left guarding Mary's family.

The fourth man, the one tucked just out of sight on the inside of the doorway, was hissing desperately into his radio, trying to get a situation report from men who were no longer alive to give one. Of course, by the third attempt at contact, he had worked out that something was wrong.

"One, this is five, contact lost with all sentries. Contact is assumed hostile, over!"

"Received, five... four, terminate the family. Five, engage the target, and I will engage from the window."

A window to my left on the ground floor shattered, and the shutters burst open, but I was already too close to the house for the intruder there to get a decent shot. The man at the door lunged around the corner, his weapon raised, only for the clip to fall out of the bottom of it and the round in the chamber to eject itself harmlessly onto the wooden floor. The man only had time to blink at it before his own tactical vest yanked him forward while his pants jerked backward, tipping his body forward until his head was pressed against the door frame. The heavy composite door slammed closed.

Once, twice, then a third time. Again and again, the man's skull was crushed under the force. His body was tossed back into the house, crashing into another man running for the stairs - presumably the one sent to dispatch Mary's family. The weight of his dead friend knocked him off his feet and sent him hurtling into the post at the bottom of the stairs.

The man known as "one," still wearing his ski mask and still brandishing his submachine gun, came careening around the corner just as I crossed the threshold into the house. The collar of his sweater jerked tightly around his neck and hoisted him, kicking and thrashing, into the air; his silenced weapon unloaded half its clip into his friend and then promptly disassembled itself. Caught as he was still scrambling to his feet, the man known as "four" took most of the rounds to his chest before slumping lifelessly against the stair post.

"Now," I glared at the man being held in midair by his own clothes. "I am going to go upstairs. If a hair is so much as out of place on anyone in this family, your night is going to end very, very badly. Probably in about a week." I started up the stairs. The man stayed hovering where he was. "You know, I'm getting quite a taste for this whole torture thing; I wonder if I should be worried about that."

A few moments later, I opened the door of the rear bedroom. Stan, his face caked in dried blood, looked fearfully up at me as I stepped inside. But his face seemed to soften as he saw that I was not only unarmed but was not wearing a mask either.

"Are you... the man they sent my wife to find?" He asked in a whisper. The three children were all sleeping on the one single bed behind him.

"I am. Mary is fine; she is outside in my car." I whispered back. Stan started to pull himself to his feet. "No, please, I need you to stay here for just a little longer. I need to... err... have a chat with the man who thinks that any of this is okay."

Stan leveled his gaze at me. "I fought for my country in the Falklands, son. I am no stranger to violence."

"I know, Stan," I said with a soft smile. "But what happens if one of those children wakes up to find you're not here? What if they come downstairs, looking for you, and see... the mess? You and I may be familiar with death, but they don't need to be."

He looked over his shoulders at the three sleeping pictures of innocence. He sighed deeply, nodded, and sat back down. "Mary is okay?"

"I'm not going to lie to you; the weather took its toll on her. I've warmed her up and dried her off as best I could, but she is probably going to need a new nightie. Otherwise, she is fine. Physically, at least."

He nodded with another sigh of relief. "Thank you, son. I appreciate that."

"You have nothing to thank me for," I said as I turned back towards the door. "None of this would have happened if it wasn't for me."

*********

There is a scene in the movie Sin City where Mickey Roarke's character drives a knife into the guts of a man he is questioning just to make sure he is being taken seriously. Gerard Butler does something similar in Olympus Has Fallen. I had always thought that was just a bit of Hollywood's trademark over-dramatization, but I am never one to shy away from admitting I was wrong.

The man, who refused to be called anything but "one," was sneering defiantly at me until one of Mary's razor-sharp knives was driven through his arm and into the armrest of the chair he was pinned to. Funnily enough, he stopped sneering after that.

"Fucking Evo scum!" he spat in Swedish as Fiona and Jerry cringed from their place, removing the last of the intruder's bodies from the hallway. I had called them after speaking to Stan, and they had pulled up outside the house about fifteen minutes later. Together, they had guided Mary, her eyes closed, through the wreckage of her front porch, up the stairs, and reunited her with her family. The time was now 10:27 PM, and I was very aware that I was working on a deadline.

Jeeves was keeping me up to date on the location of the fourteen other Inquisitors; they were all still gathered at the abandoned warehouse a few miles away. Not only had they not moved, but they had also made no attempt to contact any of the members of the team left behind. Of course, the thought had occurred to me that it was the house team that was meant to maintain contact. Contact that they were almost certainly late for by now. But I was hoping that they hadn't worked out that they were being tracked yet, so I still had something of the element of surprise in my favor.

I held up Becky's blood-splattered ID card and swung it in front of one's face. I had found it on the counter in Mary's kitchen, the proof that she had been taken. Still, the fact that the note had said two people, yet Jeeves could only identify Becky, plus there now only being Becky's ID as proof, was bothering me more than it should have. "I am only going to ask you one more time; then I am going to start cutting pieces of you off and feeding them to you. Who else was taken?"

"Jesus, that's dark, dude," Jerry muttered as they dragged the last body outside and promptly incinerated it. Nothing but ash and scorch marks remained of the rest of the team. Both of my assistants had been horrified at the state of the men who had invaded Mary's house. Fiona had gagged violently when they had found the remains of the sniper on the rise, but they had both understood the stakes. These men had taken someone important to me, and there were no lengths I wouldn't go to to get them back. There may have been some sort of unspoken rules of conduct within the Conclave, but I was not beholden to them. When it came to protecting those I loved, nothing was off the table.

One glared at me.

I cut off one of his fingers and stuffed it down his throat. Unfortunately, his immunity to my powers meant that I could not force his jaw to chew it for me, nor could I compel him to swallow. His physical body was just as resistant to my powers as any other Inquisitor. His ability to resist biology was less so. I clamped my hand over his mouth and pinched his nose with my fingers. The salivary glands, stimulated by the inability to breathe, coupled with having something hard in his mouth, went into overdrive.

He swallowed.

"One done, nine to go," I said calmly yet menacingly as I pressed the blade against his next finger. "Then we move onto your toes... No prizes for guessing where we will go after that."

"Fuck you!" he barked, "I am ready to die for my creed."

"Die?" I arched an eyebrow at him. "Who said anything about you dying? I am not going to kill you, sunshine; I am going to keep you alive. It's all set up at the cottage. I have saline to keep you hydrated, Epinephrine to make sure you don't pass out on me, antibiotics to keep you infection-free, and let's be honest here. There is enough of you to feed to you to keep you alive for months... if not longer. You know, I have grown up hearing stories about how much a human body can be put through before it shuts down. You are an Inquisitor. Aren't you even a little curious to find out if your body can tolerate more than a human's?"

He chose not to answer.

"The thing is," I went on. "I have absolutely no idea how to find your boss. He sent me a lovely letter, invited me to this grand party, and ended it by saying I would be able to find him. But I will level with you; I have no fucking idea how to find him." Yes, of course, that was a lie, but one didn't need to know that. "The problem for you is that he is holding one of my friends, maybe two of them, and if I don't get to this party by midnight, he will kill them. So right now, I am just wanting to make someone suffer. It's a way of feeling like I am being productive and less helpless when, really, I'm feeling anything but. If I can't save her..." I held the ID badge up again, "Then, at least, I can punish you."

"If I tell you what you want to know, you will kill me anyway."

"Again, says who?" I squinted at him. "I don't know where you people are getting your information from, but I don't want to kill anyone. All I want to know is who they have and where they are. You don't have to give me names, you don't have to tell me trade secrets, and I don't need to know your King's master plan. All I am asking you for is which of my friends have been taken, which I would find out when I get to the party anyway, and where they are being held, which your leader seems to think I already know. If you tell me that, I will let you go. You have my word that I will not harm another hair on your head."

One looked like he was thinking about it.

"10:35. I don't know how far away this party is, but I've gotta be there by midnight. Time's-a-ticking. I don't think I need to tell you that if time runs out for me, it runs out for you, too."

"Okay, I will answer those two questions, and you will let me go, yes?" One finally said.

"You have my word."

"Okay," he said with a nod. "I don't know about the two friends. I only saw this one," he said with a nod toward the ID. "There was another team, but I think they were preparing the warehouse."

A sigh of relief washed through me. "Good, the note was obviously pre-prepared. He had already written it before handing it to Mary; maybe the plan was to pick up two hostages, but with Philippa obviously lost to the fairies and everyone else away, they must have settled for only Becky."

"Okay, and the warehouse?" I asked calmly.

"It is on the old road to the highway, the industrial park there. Do you know it?"

"Yes, I do." I didn't, I had no idea what he was talking about, but Jeeves was telling me in the background that he wasn't lying. "I don't know the name of the building, but it is the warehouse opposite the entrance to the old paper mill."

I took a deep breath. "Okay, thank you. A deal is a deal."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that," I nodded. "Fiona?" Fiona stepped into the room and, without hesitation, put two bullets into his head.

"What? I said that I wouldn't harm him. I said nothing about her! C'mon, the guy had literally just ordered the execution of three children and an innocent old man. He had just admitted to being part of the team that snatched Becky. There was no way that motherfucker was making it out of here alive."

"Can you finish up here?" I asked her as One's body slumped back into the chair.

"Yeah, we know a few discreet contractors who can come out and repair the damage," she nodded, still looking at One with an air of disgust. "We will cover the costs. It should be as good as new in a few hours."

"We should be able to wipe their memories as well," Jerry added, nodding his head toward the ceiling, and the innocent family caught up in all of this. "Although that may need you to come back later to help. It's not an easy task, and we may need some of your power to get it done properly."

I nodded as I rolled my neck; my mind was already on the fight ahead. "No problem. I have a date to get to. Then I will be straight back to help you."

********

The warehouse was big. I have no idea how big warehouses usually were, but this one struck me as a particularly large one. Normally, I wouldn't have noticed, let alone commented, but its size did pose a problem.

There were no security cameras inside.

There were dozens of the things dotted around the industrial park, a good number of them had tracked the Inquisitors entering the warehouse, and all of them confirmed that none of them had left. But that is where my information ended. With no eyes inside, I had no idea where in the warehouse the enemy was waiting, nor could I pinpoint where Becky was. At least not precisely. I could feel her in a general direction, I could feel that she was fairly close, geographically speaking. It was more like a bearing than a location. But locking that down to a particular room or even a particular part of the massive structure was impossible. These assholes seemed to have a fetish for using human shields.

I gritted my teeth. Going in all guns blazing was stupid. I could obliterate everyone in the first room with little more than a thought, but Freddy fucknuts in the second room could be waiting with a knife to Becky's throat for exactly that event. Making matters worse, without the telltale glow of their auras, the Inquisitors were extremely difficult to track. The voids against the background, as I had seen in the party, were decidedly less pronounced here. I could sort of make them out if I concentrated very hard, but I knew there were at least fourteen of the bastards in there, and I could never make out more than four or five at any one time.

"Oh well, I guess I'll have to do this the old-fashioned way."

The large, metallic, double doors burst open with a loud crash as I walked toward it. Even before fully stepping inside, I could already see the pitch darkness that filled the cavernous room beyond. The main storage of the warehouse was massive, and it was wide open. With only a few regularly placed concrete pillars to hold up the roof, the ground floor was devoid of cover or any place to hide. Half of the upper floor, directly above the entrance, had some offices, but most of it was just a network of steel catwalks that wrapped around the outer edge of the building and connected to stairs leading down to the ground level. Huge windows flanked the upper floor walls on either side, but with the moon obscured by the dark winter clouds, they were not doing much to let in any light. It was almost pitch black.

Except, of course, for the nine bright auras equally spaced out along the second-story catwalks, crouching behind the railings, dressed in black tactical gear and aiming their weapons at me. Four more were hiding behind the pillars on the ground floor.

"You don't seem very afraid," A voice called out into the darkness. Although I couldn't quite place where it was coming from.

"You don't seem very frightening," I shrugged back.

"Ah, the simple, honest bravery of the common soldier. You are a warrior, Pete. I respect that."

"Congratulations. You know I can see you, right?" I called out in no particular direction.

"It is unsurprising that an abomination to god would grant himself the ability to see in the dark." The heavily accented voice called back.

"Seriously? They think I can see them because I can see in the dark? How can they not know about... Urgh, never mind. I'll ask one of them later."

"Yup, God hates me, I'm a violation against nature, blah blah blah," I called back. "Have you ever considered you might be wrong? I mean, really. If your God created everything, then he created me too. Just as I am. In all my night-visioned glory."

"Blasphemy!" the voice roared back. "You are a creation of Satan!"

"Except the devil doesn't have the power of creation," I said back calmly and tauntingly while my eyes scanned every nook and cranny for any sign of Becky. "The Devil was an angel - created by God - his demons and minions were all angels - also created by God - before they were cast out of heaven. Only God has the power to create. Dude, this is Bible studies 101."

"And yet, your kind has the ability to grant themselves powers and gifts. That is a role reserved for the almighty alone!" The voice boomed back.

"Aaahh, so that's what this is all about. You're jealous. Envy is one of the deadly sins, you know."

"This is about restoring the natural order of things!"

"This is about control! Just like every other religion!" I shouted back, my patience being stretched by the fact that there was no sign of my captured friend anywhere. "Your order was born out of the Church's pathological need to control the masses! Anyone or anything that didn't bow to its will was labeled a heretic and destroyed. There is a massive difference between faith and religion; you want to believe in a sky daddy, that is up to you, but only the most ignorant and heretical of fools would dare to presume to know the will of GOD!"

That shut him up

"Now, I am here for my friend!" I barked up to the glows of the auras above me. "And I am about done with waiting. If she has been harmed in any way at all, your order will burn, and you will get to find out firsthand how you stand up to judgment!"

"Yes, Yes, this was all getting very religious, but the only way to beat the devout was at their own game. I'd heard that somewhere, and it seemed to be doing the trick."

There was silence in the room for a few moments before the oddly calm voice echoed into the darkness again. "You have been sentenced to death by his most excellent majesty, Maximillian Montreaux of the Royal Inquisition and the New Order. I, Jean-Pierre Toussant, willingly and with thanks to God, am to carry out this command."

"Awesome, give it your best shot," I muttered back.

"Kill him."

If there is one fact that is universally known about gunshots, it is that they are loud. On the best of days, in the most ideal of conditions, they are loud enough to do damage to a person's ears, but fire them indoors, especially in the cavernous hall of a warehouse with no materials on the floors or walls to absorb the sound, those gunshots are deafening.

Enough bullets to cut a man in half exploded out of the barrels of every weapon aimed at me. The barrels of more than a dozen assault rifles flashed against the backdrop of the auras of the men holding them. Hundreds of deadly, supersonic projectiles shot through the air. Each of them fired with pinpoint, lethal accuracy, and every single one of them hit their target.

And every single one of them bounced harmlessly off my skin and clattered to the floor.

I yawned. It was getting late, and it had been a very long day.

The murmurs of confusion and concern started to ripple through the ranks of my attackers. Some men stopped firing to check that their weapons were functioning properly, and others squeezed the triggers even harder as if that would somehow make a difference. One man, however, decided to pull out the big guns.

The Barrett.50 caliber sniper rifle is a sadist's wet dream. Take a bullet that was designed to piece lightly armored vehicles and build a rifle around it. Of course, it was designated as an anti-material rifle, as opposed to an anti-personnel weapon. It was designed to punch through the walls of buildings and the armor of light tanks, but when used against a human, the force of the impact was so great that it reduced a body to a spray of pink mist. There was simply nothing left of them.

A.50-cal round smashed into my chest. Even with the ballistic protection of the abilities that Jeeves had given me, the force was enough to spin my body around like a top! "Phwar," I spat out, "Okay, I felt that one! Now it's my turn!" Keeping my momentum, I spun back around as another.50-cal round shot past my head and punched a hole the size of a grapefruit through the concrete wall behind me. A crackling ball of energy grew in my palm in an instant and was launched with the full weight of my power in the direction the round had come from.

It occurred to me, as the energy blast ripped through the air, that I had probably wasted my time with that move. Reinard Montreaux had received a bolt with almost the full measure of my force at the party, and it had barely ruffled his hairstyle. It had washed over him like water on a duck. Yet the relative power of individual Inquisitors was still a mystery to me. Perhaps it was physics; perhaps the air being compressed to the same density as a solid brick wall, traveling at the speed of a cruise missile, simply hadn't enough space to form at the point-blank range I had used at the party. Perhaps the High Royal Inquisitor was more immune to my powers than his rank-and-file underlings. Who knows. But the blast of energy hit the two men on the catwalk with just as much force as I had hoped it would. One man, lying prone on the grated steel holding the Barrett, was being covered by another man kneeling next to him, the barrel of his assault rifle flashing against the darkness as he fired desperately.

Both of them were blown to pieces.

The force of the blast ripped that section of the catwalk from its moorings and crushed it with the force being applied to it. The men who had, moments earlier, been perched upon it were turned into smears on the wall behind them a split second before it, and a section of the roof above them exploded outward into the night.

"You people will never fucking learn, will you!" I roared out over the carnage as the air that surrounded the rest of the men on the catwalks started to suddenly heat up. "You have started a war you cannot win! And when the ruins of your Order are hiding behind the crumbling walls of your last refuge, it will be me at the door! Open your eyes, gentlemen. Feel the weight of real judgment. Witness your doom!"

"Hollywood, eat your heart out!"

The screams of the men still clinging to the upper floors as the air around them rose to unsurvivable temperatures were suddenly drowned out by the roar of its ignition. That letter kept mentioning fire, burning down my world, burning the heart out of me; well, this was my answer, and I was more than happy to provide the pyrotechnics. Everything burns, even the very air that you breathe. You just have to get it hot enough.

An inverted ocean of flame washed over the ceiling of the warehouse as the oxygen in the air ignited. Waves of fire engulfed the men on the catwalk and burned them alive. Like the surface of an ocean storm at sunset, the flames peaked and troughed as they danced and rolled through the ever-increasing temperatures of the air around it, yet stayed clinging to the ceiling.

The men on the ground floor had all stopped firing, watching in wide-eyed horror as their friends above them were incinerated where they knelt. The ammunition in the weapons and spare clips of those men started to cook off, popping as the explosive used to fire the slug detonated under the extreme temperatures. Those rounds started to shoot through the air in every direction. One hit me in the shoulder but bounced off harmlessly, and another caught one of the men behind the pillars in the thigh. He screamed out in pain before falling forward, his tactical vest suddenly pulling tight and launching him up into the inferno above. It held him there for a few seconds before dropping him back to the ground. His flaming body was lifeless and broken as it splattered back onto the hard concrete floor.

The three remaining men broke cover and ran.

A section of the catwalk that had once held the man with the.50-cal hung loosely from itsanchorings in the corner of the room. It was ripped free and launched at them as they fled. One man turned in time to see it coming. The grated mesh of the catwalk smashed into and then through his body. The force of impact turned the thick metal grid into the equivalent of cheese wire and turned his body into the equivalent of cheese. One of the railings impaled his friend through the back, carrying his instantly-limp body along with it before smashing into the opposite wall. The last man had somehow stumbled out of the way.

He probably wished he had been finished as quickly as his friends.

Striding wrathfully through the carnage of the inferno, the power sparking and crackling against my fingertip, the sea of fire burning overhead, and the crumpled, obliterated remains of his friends spread around him, the man could only watch in sheer terror as I strode dangerously towards him. I was still ten feet away when he was hoisted into the air. "WHERE IS SHE?" my voice boomed. Distorting and layering over itself a hundred times and echoing over the roar of the fire. Even I had to admit that I sounded terrifyingly demonic.

The man, kicking and thrashing in the air, stuttered. The adrenaline and the fear coursing through him had robbed him of his ability to speak, but his eyes flashed towards a door to the right-hand side of the corridor the men had been running for.

"Much obliged," I said. His eyes widened for a heartbeat before he was thrown into the nearest wall, and his skull was dashed against it.

The door was ripped from its moorings as I power-walked towards it, tossed it behind me, and into the main hall of the warehouse. Only a single wall-mounted light provided any illumination to the tiny closet-like room but tied to a chair, with a black cloth sack over her head, cowering and weeping silently, was the reason I was here.

"I'm here, baby," I said softly, quickly stepping closer.

"Hmmm?" her squeak of fear and surprise came back muffled as her head shot up in the direction of my voice. She must have been gagged under the hood.

I reached out and yanked it off her head.

The moment my eyes focused on her, the whole world seemed to wobble. Every ounce of certainty that I had felt until this moment bled away in an instant. I had expected to see those soft blonde locks of beautiful hair, those dazzling orbs of hazel in her eyes, I had expected to see tears, fear, confusion, surprise, and maybe even relief. Instead, I saw...

"Evie...?"