I stared silently out the window. Christmas day had come and gone, boxing day was a vague memory, and the 27th was slowly dawning over the eastern mountains. The weather was about as miserable as you would expect for this part of the world at this time of the year, but it was positively cheery compared to the stormy mood that raged inside my mind.

Jeeves and Faye, my constant mental companions, had been silent. Both of them were as brooding and sullen as me.

The aftermath of Faye's death had felt like death by a thousand cuts. The pain had been almost constant, so much so that I became numb to it, and it was only the regular spikes of abject agony that broke through. It was a lamentful, mournful, marrow-deep sorrow. It was the loss of a love and a future that I knew I was very unlikely to ever find again. Faye had been a casualty of a war that neither of us knew we were involved in. Her death was the equivalent of the casualties suffered during World War II city bombings. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was tragic, it was heartbreaking, it had threatened to rip the very core out of me, but it was random. She may very well have survived if she had been in a different part of the room when the attack on the party came.

Becky was different. Becky was very, very different.

She had been targeted, specifically and intentionally, to take advantage of her relationship with me. It wasn't a meaningless, anonymous death. A plane flying over a burning city in the mid-40s had dropped a bomb on it; the city itself, the cause it represented. That was the target. It never intentionally aimed for a specific street, let alone an individual house, certainly not an individual family or an individual person. Those thousands upon thousands of losses during that war were no less tragic or devastating than Fayes, but it was war. It was not personal. The same could not be said for Becky.

Becky was innocent. Her death, especially the manner in which she had met it, was criminally underserved. The only meaning her death held was the intended effect it would have on me. With Faye, there had been a vague but debatable concept that the party had been attacked to target me; but the more I thought about it, the less likely it sounded. When I boiled it down, and when I removed the survivor's guilt, I could let myself be convinced that it wasn't my fault. There was nothing even remotely close to that luxury when it came to Becky. Everything about her death was on me.

If I hadn't pursued a relationship with her...if I had done more to keep her safe...if I hadn't challenged the Royals so obviously, if I hadn't ignored the blatant threat against those I loved in the note at the Villa in Malaga...if I hadn't assumed they would come directly for me...if I surrendered myself to her abductors at the warehouse instead of blindly assuming I could win...she might still be alive. Hell, if I had just taken a few extra seconds to search Toussant before rushing off to find her, I might have found the remote that would have disarmed the bomb.

Add all of those factors to the inescapable fact that Becky was only taken in the first place because of her relationship with me, and I was left with a single, undeniable truth...I got her killed. This was all my fault.

You would think that this realization would fill me with soul-crushing despair. The grief and pain of her loss, the second loss I had suffered in the last few months, knowing that the blame rested firmly on my shoulders, should have broken me. But something inside me had snapped at the warehouse. The anguish, the agony, the sorrow, the grief, the despair, even the simple sadness; it just wasn't there. Instead, there was only anger.

I don't mean rage; I don't mean the blind fury that nearly drove me to massacre the office full of Inquisitors at the Malaga office. It was just anger. There was a cold calculation to it. Devoid of all the trappings of human emotion - things like mercy, compassion, empathy, and forgiveness - my anger festered. I wasn't in a rush to go out hunting for vengeance. I had no desire to take my rage out on the captive Toussant or the suspected Evie. My anger was patient and devious, It was Machiavellian in its malevolence, and I knew - I absolutely knew - without a shred of uncertainty - that it was going to be relentless.

Waking a sleeping dragon, reaping a whirlwind, letting slip the dogs of war, use whatever pretty analogy you like; the Royals had unleashed a storm that would burn down the world if it meant destroying them. And only one of us would live to see the end of it. Peace, mercy, co-existence; these things were no longer options.

The last ties to my humanity were broken; I was now a weapon of unfathomable vengeance.

Sheets of rain pelted the window; water cascaded in torrents down the glass, and the wind outside bent the trees around the cottage with the force of their gusts. Even the weather seemed more immediate in its fury than I was. I just stood there and watched.

I ignored the sharp intakes of breath from behind me. Toussant was currently nailed to a chair...Yes, nailed. I made sure that he hadn't had a single second of sleep and had been in indescribable agony since I had dragged him into the house almost three days earlier. The peeling, blistered skin on his lower legs was currently being bathed in a solution of bleach, salt, chili powder, and ice. I read somewhere that ice was one of the worst things you could put onto a major burn because it stopped the nerves from blocking pain. The contrast in temperatures between the burning skin and the freezing ice, or something like that. I didn't bother trying to understand the physics, I just wanted him to suffer. A nice dose of Epinephrine had made sure he didn't pass out on me, either.

The suffering would keep him awake, and the lack of sleep would weaken his mind.

I had no idea if breaking an Inquisitor's mind had even been attempted before, but I clearly remembered the voids starting to crack under the overwhelming power of my rage at the party. If theirs could crack, so could Toussaint's.

Evie was in one of the bedrooms. The window had been shielded to stop her from getting out, but I was no longer keeping the door locked. The rest of that first night had been filled with her begging pleas, sobbing at me that she had nothing to do with any of this, imploring me to let her go.

I had silenced her with a single statement, delivered without tone or emotion. "Evie, only one of two truths is possible. Either you are exactly who you say you are, you're completely innocent in all of this, and I owe you the deepest of apologies and one hell of an explanation for the thousands of questions you probably have. You have been dragged into a world that you didn't know existed and may never be free of again. The second possibility is that you are somehow involved in this and that you are responsible - in however small a way - for Becky's murder. If that is true, then I am afraid there are no words in any human language that can describe the hell that you are about to endure at my hands. But right now, I don't trust myself to think rationally. I want you to be innocent, but my suspicion has too many questions. I have asked a friend to come and help me to get to the bottom of this. I trust their judgment implicitly. If they tell me that you are innocent, then you are innocent. If they tell me you are not, you are going to suffer beyond comprehension. It will be a few days before they get here; in the meantime, you will be fed and kept as comfortable as possible, and you have my word that no harm will come to you. If you are innocent, you will wait. If you try to escape, you will answer my question for me. Please be patient."

Her eyes were streaming tears, and her face was pale and afraid, but she could hear the seriousness of my voice and had seen with her own eyes what I was capable of. She had simply nodded and sat down on her bed. With an adjoining bathroom to herself, she'd only left her room once since that conversation, just in time to watch me hammer in the nails keeping Toussant attached to his chair.

She hadn't come out again.

Listening to someone scream without vocal cords is beyond my ability to describe, but it suffices to say that it was a sound that would have horrified me before Becky's death and one that Evie would never forget.

I messaged Charlotte a little while later.

"I need you. As soon as you are possibly able."

"I can be there the day after Boxing day. Is everything okay?"

"No. Just come quickly."

"Shit. Okay. I will be there as soon as I can."

Now that the day was dawning on the 27th, the time of her arrival was drawing nearer. Being an Evo, I couldn't read her mind like I could a human's, at least not without breaking some serious taboos, but I was aware - even at this early hour - that she was moving. She was slowly getting closer. I was not looking forward to her getting here. Charlotte had never met Faye; the only things she knew about her were the things that I had shown her. Becky was different. Becky was a close friend. Philippa, who had so callously betrayed Becky, was also her friend; she was another investigation that would need to be conducted. One that I would need Charlotte's level head to perform fairly.

The simple fact of the matter was that in this newfound state of uncaring, emotionless anger, I was perfectly ready and willing to kill both Philippa and Evie based solely on the statistical chance that they were involved with the Royal Inquisition and this New Order. I could not even begin to fathom why Philippa had turned on Becky. That made no sense whatsoever; I had been inside her mind; there was no knowledge about this hidden war, let alone cooperation with one side or another, and yet she had betrayed her friend and lover. There had to be a reason. There also had to be a reason why Evie was there, how they had gotten around all my security, how she had been so blatantly unharmed when Becky had been so callously killed. If I was honest with myself, wanting to know those reasons was the only thing keeping them both alive at this point. I wanted them to be innocent; I hadn't lied about that part to Evie, but the cold calculation of my anger, the complete loss of any sort of compassion, and - again, if I were being honest - no small amount of fear of the answers, would be happy not to take the risk and just kill them now. Just in case.

Charlotte would help me find the answers, but there was something else I needed to do before she got here. I looked down at the phone and hit dial.

"Hello, Pete," The soft Spanish accent of Isabelle's voice flowed through the earpiece. "It is good to hear from you. How was your Christmas?" The leader of the Inquisition council sounded genuinely pleased to hear from me.

"Hello, Isabelle," I said with a sigh. "I am afraid it was not quite the festive season I had hoped for. I believe I owe you a situation update."

There was a pause on the other end of the line and then a deep breath. "I am assuming that your plan has borne fruit."

"You could say that, yes."

I spent the next two hours laying out everything that had happened. From the trap to the tracking, to the Inquisitor's expert spotting of it, and the attack on Mary and her family, and finally to the events at the warehouse, the death of Becky, and the capture of Toussant. For reasons I couldn't quite explain, I left Evie and Philippa's names out of the report. I'm not sure why; it just seemed like they were my issues to deal with and none of the Inquisitions council's concern.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line before Isabelle spoke again. "Pete, I am so sorry," she said softly. "I imagine I don't need to tell you how concerning these events are. The attack on the innocent family especially. Even historically, the protection of humans has been one of the cornerstones on which our order has stood. They have never been targeted intentionally."

"I'm not sure your rules apply anymore," I answered levelly.

"I am curious, though, if it is not too much of a personal question. Was Becky one of the survivors of the party?"

It took me a few moments to recognize her misunderstanding. "No, Isabelle, Becky was not an Evo. She was human."

There was another pause. "But she knew about you; she was a Custode Segreto?"

"A what?"

"Sorry, it's an old term coined by the Italians. A secret keeper. A human who knows of, and is involved with, our organizations. Like a trusted confidant or a close friend who is... in the know. She was one of those?"

"No, she had no idea. She died not knowing. She was just a regular, everyday, innocent human."

"...Jesus. So they killed her...."

"Just to get to me," I finished.

There was another long silence. "With everything you have probably heard about the Inquisition, given that the Conclave believes we are still at war, I can only imagine the tales you have been told about us and about our methods. Yes, centuries ago, our order was ruthless and relentless in its hunt and persecution of the Evos, but even then, the intentional and specific targeting of humans was strictly forbidden. These tactics being used by this... New Order... are, Jesus, I don't know what they are, but they need to be stopped. By any means necessary. Pete, I hope it goes without saying at this juncture, but on top of our deepest sympathies and condolences for your losses, you have our full support. It has been a long time since we have sanctioned acts of this level of violence, and I know you are not asking for my blessing, let alone our permission, but for what little it isworth, We are behind you!"

"I was hoping you would say that," I answered, still unable to feel the slightest flicker of emotion.

"Oh?"

"I took one of them alive."

"You certainly are full of surprises, aren't you?" she almost laughed down the phone. "As I told you during our meeting, we keep very strict and up-to-date records on all of our members. If you give me his name, I will forward every bit of information we have on him to you within the hour."

"Good, that will be helpful. His name is Jean-Pierre Toussnat."

There was another pause. "Did you say... Jean-Pierre Toussant?"

"Yes, why?"

There was a distinct tremble in her voice when she finally spoke. I could almost feel her trying to control the sudden burst of rage. "He is one of mine! He and his team are supposed to be in Ukraine monitoring the conflict there."

I turned to look at the man hissing and panting against the unimaginable agony radiating through his body. "Tall guy, 6'2 maybe, thinning brown hair, brown eyes, a birthmark on his left wrist."

"Yeah," she practically growled. "That's him. What is his status."

"Extremely unpleasant."

"Is there any way that you would consider making it worse?"

"Oh, I am going to be taking a while with this motherfucker" I nodded, still not feeling one way or another about it. "Making it worse is something I can absolutely guarantee."

"Excellent. Arnold is preparing the files now."

"Who?"

"Bob"

"Ah. Okay."

"Talking of Bob," She said. "I would like to put him in charge of the team we send to assist you if you have no objections. They aren't quite ready yet, but soon."

"Is he up to that?" I asked, my mind flashing back to images of the man who looked like nothing more than a glorified secretary.

"Don't let his looks and manners fool you; Bob is a fighter. That is why he is in charge of my personal security."

Well, good for you, Bob. "In that case, I have no objections at all."

"Good, I will make arrangements, and Bob will send those files over to you very soon." she smiled down the line, but that edge was still in her voice. Giving her Toussant's name had rattled her more than she was letting on.

"I will keep in touch," I ended the conversation simply.

"Pete? Make Toussant pay."

"Oh, I fully intend to!"

And with that, the line disconnected. There should have been some sort of relief at Isabelle's support, maybe even a little happiness. There should have been a righteousness that justified my plans for Toussant and those I was certain he would give up. There should have been something. But still, there was only that anger, silently and vindictively boiling just below the surface.

I turned my attention back to the window, back to the winter downpour and waited. As zen a moment as this must have seemed to the captive man behind me, it was more than it appeared. Toussant hadn't slept in more than three days, but neither had I. Standing before him, unmoving, unflinching, unwavering, I was showing him that my anger and I possessed something that would be his undoing.

We had patience.

And he would break long before we did.

********

Charlotte's beaming smile was as easy and ready as it had ever been. It was the first thing since Becky's death that threatened to break through the wall isolating me from my humanity. She waved happily at the sight of her friend as I opened the door at the top of the garden path, and after climbing out of her car, she ran through the torrential rain with her arms wide for a hug.

Her smile faltered halfway up the path, and it had vanished completely by the time she reached me. There was no hug. There was no smile. There was no warm greeting for my closest friend. I just stood aside and let her in.

"Pete, what's wrong?" she hadn't looked around the cottage yet, nor, apparently, had her nose picked up the stench of burnt flesh. She didn't notice Toussant in the corner. I held her complete attention. "Something is wrong, you... you are different."

I didn't even know how to start to tell her what had happened.

"Hey, remember Becky, the cute blonde one? Yeah, her... she's in pieces in a warehouse up the road! Sorry 'bout that."

I rested a hand on her shoulder and turned her towards the second, smaller bedroom, keeping her back to Toussant and leading her somewhere quieter to talk. For a moment, I wondered what was going through her mind. 'I need you,' followed by my marching her into the nearest bedroom, was probably something that could be misinterpreted, but even I could feel the concern radiating off her now.

I guided her to sit on the bed and sat down next to her. For the life of me, I couldn't bring myself to lift my eyes to hers. As vacant and silent as my emotions had been for the past three days, I still didn't want to see the look on her face the moment that she realized that not only was Becky dead, but that it was my fault.

"I can't speak. I don't know where to start," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "I can only show you. I am so sorry."

I held out my hand. Charlotte looked at me for a few moments, the concern turning to fear as it dawned on her that whatever had happened to me to change me so much involved - or at least included - her. She tentatively reached out her hand and rested it in mine.

I showed her everything.

I left nothing out. Everything that happened since the last time I saw her. Considering that had been just after leaving the meeting with the Sect, that was a lot.

The reunification with Faye, the meeting with Uri, Sterling's attack - her hand squeezed mine much harder for that part. The whole concept of what Sterling had done utterly terrified her. The battle with Sterling, rummaging through his memories, finding those of Matthius and Jacques, handing him over to the Conclave, Miguel's message, the meeting with Isabelle and the Inquisition, the small fight in the Westduinpark, laying the trap at home, tracking the Inquisitors as they tracked me. The arrival of Mary - another squeeze. An even harder one at the note that she brought with her. A much harder one at the conversation with Phillipa - she was starting to suspect where this was going. I showed the fight to retake Mary's home.

This wasn't the two of us in the middle of the mindscape, she was not in my city, and I was not in hers. This was her being shown in my memories and me looking at the floor as the inevitable climax drew nearer.

Finally, she witnessed the battle at the warehouse.

She crumpled.

Hers was exactly the response to overwhelming loss that had so abjectly failed to materialize in me. Her face was pale, her eyes were closed, and her skin became streaked with the tears that forced through them regardless. Her whole body shook, more than just the bouncing shoulder of her inconsolable sobs, but with the shock of everything that had happened.

I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. No words of mine, no gesture, no plan, no offer of comfort, and no condolence could possibly ease the grief that I had inflicted upon her. I hadn't given Becky up to the Inquisitors, I hadn't taken her, I hadn't beaten her and dragged her to that warehouse, I hadn't strapped the bomb to her, and I hadn't lit the fuse. What I had done was far worse. I had perfectly laid the groundwork and set the stage for those things to happen. The Inquisitors were the orchestra of Becky's death. Unwittingly or not, I was the conductor.

And I could feel myself counting down the moments until my closest friend realized this too.

Neither of us moved for hours. I felt her retreat into her own mind, into her version of the bunker. Days upon days - at least to her perception of time - of the indescribable pain that I knew all too well. At some point during that time, possibly after a week's worth of grieving in her mind, she reactivated the connection to my memories and sucked out the rest of it.

Evie, Toussant, the call to Isabelle, the things I had done to that man, and the threats - no, the promises - I had made to the mousy blonde in the next room.

Her eyes hardened immediately.

"Where is he!" she snarled. Her hands finally let go of mine. I simply nodded back to the other room. She was on her feet in moments, hurtling out of the bedroom door. By the time I had followed her through, she had already power-marched over to the cowering Toussant and kicked him so hard in the face that the short, flat heel of her boot had smashed his eye socket and left his eyeball hanging from his head. She seemed ready to finish him off, there and then, before a better idea seemed to pop into her head. She stormed into the kitchen, coming back into the room a minute or so later and pouring a bottle of clear liquid into the bucket in which Toussant's legs were bathed. "You forgot Vinegar!" she barked as the airy gasp of breath grew louder from my captives throat.

He was incapable of screaming. His vocal cords, cut in the warehouse to silence his ceaseless religious tirade, now hung loosely under the skin of his throat. I had considered cutting them out and showing them to him, but that could come later. The sound that came from his lips was more like a gasped gargle, and it was utterly terrifying.

Apparently satisfied, at least for the moment, with her addition to his torture, the tears came back again. She turned to look at me.

This was it. This was the moment; this is where I would see the hatred, the disgust, the blame in her eyes, and I would justifiably lose her forever. Instead, she almost fell across the room, wrapped her arms around me, and sobbed uncontrollably into my shoulder.

She stayed that way until the sun started to go down.

Her grief, her sorrow, and her despair soaked into the collar of my shirt as we just held each other. She cried, even as her mind retreated back into her bunker.

I did not.

I stared, unflinching, at Toussant, and he watched me stare at him, albeit through one eye. With every moment that passed, I let my eyes silently communicate one simple message.

He was going to pay for each and every single one of those tears in ways more horrific than he could imagine.

********

It was late in the evening before Charlotte had recovered enough to think clearly. At some point, we had moved back to the bedroom; we had laid on the bed with her curled into the side of me. The silence was punctuated by the occasional outpouring of her grief. I had spent the whole time patiently staring at the ceiling.

She had remarked about the change in me when she had arrived. She hadn't done so again. I think she understood how broken I was, primarily because she was feeling the strain of that despair as well, but partly because she knew I blamed myself for all of it.

Only the light from the living room, streaming through the cracks around the door, offered illumination as she sat herself up and wiped her puffy eyes. I pulled myself up next to her. It was still a faux pas to delve into the mind of another Evo, so I had consciously refrained from tracking her thoughts for the twelve or so hours that she had been here. But her physical demeanor had not shown any overt hostility or anger toward me, no matter how much I deserved it. Maybe the faux pas didn't run both ways, or maybe she just knew me that well because she seemed to know exactly what I was thinking.

"It wasn't your fault," she said softly into the darkness.

"Yes, it was," I replied. "I brought this on all of us."

"There is no way you could have known what they were going to do."

"Aside from the note in Malaga outright telling me that they would be targeting the ones I love."

She sighed heavily. "You showed me that note. Nobody would have made the mental leap from that to..."

"Charlotte, I love you," I said, still devoid of emotion, "and I appreciate the effort. But yes, they could have, and I should have. I knew they were willing to target people close to me, and I made no effort whatsoever to protect them until after she had already been taken."

"Okay..." She nodded. "Let's say you had been watching her; what more could you have done? You did everything you could to save her."

"Maybe. But if I had seen her be taken, I would have gotten to her earlier. I would have had more time to get that thing off her."

"Yeah," She nodded again. "Or that piece of shit in the other room would have just used the remote and detonated it early."

"But at least I would have tried! They were beating her unconscious, they were breaking her legs, they were stringing her up like livestock, and I was here, fucking around and jerking off. Waiting for them to come after me like I was the most important thing on earth. You know, you're right, maybe I couldn't have saved her, maybe her... her death was inevitable. Which then brings us back to the fact that I put this target on our backs by charging in and challenging them. If I hadn't done that, they wouldn't have come after her in the first place!"

"How do you know?"

"What?"

"How do you know that this has anything to do with what happened in The Hague?" She asked plainly. I just squinted at her. "The note in Malaga was threatening all of us long before your meeting with the Inquisition council. For all you know, this whole thing was planned and put into motion before you even got there. It's equally likely that they were planning all of this based purely on the fact that you killed Montreaux at the party - That is what the note said. Was the party your fault too?"

I frowned. I hadn't thought of that.

"Look. You were attacked at the party. You have shown me every single thing that you have thought and done since then. Yes, the challenge to these 'New Order' people was rash, and no, I don't think you properly thought it through. I think the Inquisition council goaded you into a response, and you gave them one. But that doesn't mean your plan was a bad one. You made every effort you could to separate and isolate yourself from the people around you. You had no way of knowing that they could still get that information. Realistically, you still don't know how they got it. How the fuck did they link you to Philippa? And how did they get her to turn on Becky? That is a whole other rabbit hole we are going to have to go down, because that girl on the phone..." she gestured her arm toward the window and the darkness outside, "... was not the Philippa either of us knows! There is something more going on, something that we can't see yet. And we are going to find out what it is." She paused and took my hand, turning to look into my eyes through the dim light. "... Together."

I took a deep breath, gave her hand a squeeze, and nodded.

"Now, first things first. Evie. She is the one you asked me about before, right? The one with the mind you'd never seen anything like."

"Yeah."

"What makes you think she was involved?"

"You mean apart from the fact they managed to get her to the warehouse without triggering a single camera in town? The fact that they beat Backy mercilessly, and there is not a mark on her? That Becky was strung up in the furthest part of the warehouse, and Evie was left in a cupboard right by the entrance? Or perhaps the conspicuous absence of a bomb on her?"

It was Charlotte's turn to nod. "Could she have told them about Philippa?"

"I mean, I can't see how. I don't think she knew about Becky or Philippa. Not unless Lori told her."

"That's Jimmy's new girlfriend, right?"

"Yeah."

"Do you think she would do that?"

"I... I don't know. I don't think so," I conceded. "She doesn't seem that type. Jimmy certainly would have been against her telling Evie, and I can't imagine him not saying something to me if she did. But she was there for the whole Olivia thing. If Lori had told her anything, why did she tell her about Becky and Philippa and not Olivia? I mean, Lori and Jimmy don't know about Philippa and me, but that could be explained by the Inquisitors going to their house for Becky, finding Philippa, and then... getting her to turn."

"So, on the balance of probability, there is no link between Evie and Becky."

"Probably not."

"Which leads us back to the question of how they knew about her." I could almost see the wheels of her mind turning. "And you haven't seen either of them since your trip to The Netherlands."

"No."

"So the only way they could have known about them is if they were watching you before you left. That means that their plan was at least partly in action before your challenge."

"But how?" I asked. "I have been monitoring the security feeds for miles in every direction since before I went to Malaga. They haven't come near the place."

"Who says they needed to be near? What is stopping them from using humans to monitor you? Your system would automatically have discounted them from your filters just by the virtue of them being human. Yes, if they were thinking of you, your mind would have picked up their thoughts. But if they were told to sit in the pub and make note of anyone going up and down the stairs to the apartments, their thoughts wouldn't have been about you. And your system wouldn't have given them a second look. For that matter, how do you know that they aren't monitoring the same feeds that you are? Shit, they could be paying the guy in the town security office to do that for them; they wouldn't even need to break into the system themselves. Pete, as good as your systems are, they are far from infallible."

I pinched the bridge of my nose. There was a certain, undeniable logic to her reasoning, but I wasn't quite ready to let myself off the hook just yet. "None of that explains how Evie was treated so kindly compared to Becky."

"No, you're right," Charlotte nodded. "It doesn't. But maybe she can. Come on. It's about time I meet her."

She pulled herself up to her feet and dragged me up with her. She looked me in the eyes as her hand came up to rest on my cheek. "Pete, you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. But you are not alone. From now on, we are in this together. You, me, and anyone else we can trust. We are going to destroy this New Order, and we are going to kill every last one of them!"

With a kiss on my cheek, she turned and led me out of the room.