I knew Faye.

In the brightest of days and under the darkest of night's cruel shadows, I knew her as innately and as intimately as I know myself. I could trace every freckle on her face, the spattering of them over her shoulders and onto the top of her chest, without needing a single look. I knew every line and feature of her. I knew the sound she made when she breathed. I knew her scent. Her becoming part of me had been the most natural process imaginable, and now that she was here, I couldn't imagine my city without her.

She had been quiet after Becky's death. Jeeves had been, too, knowing to give me space to process for however long that took. But as much as I had been overwhelmed by that seething, simmering anger, I had always been able to feel her presence. It was the warmth of a child's beloved blanket. It was an undercurrent of security and love, like no matter how bad things were, how long the day, or how dark the night, she would be there when I needed her.

I just didn't realize how much I needed her until I did.

I had always done things on my own; I'd had to. There was never another option. It wasn't that I misanthropically rejected support from others; it just wasn't in my nature to ask for it. So when it came to recognizing that I was struggling, I just didn't.

Becky had been murdered. I don't say this as another comment on how my thoughts about her affected my judgment but simply as a process of law. The fire department had been called to the warehouse the very night of her death and had struggled to bring the blazing inferno under control until the following afternoon. It was then that the bodies had been found. Not just Becky's, of course, but those of the inquisitors who had been punished for her kidnapping.

That had turned the whole area into a crime scene. Jeeves, with no small amount of help from Jerry, had made sure that nothing could tie any of the forensics back to me; anything that they could have was deleted as soon as it entered the systems, or at least its connection to me was. But still, there was a lack of closure. Those investigations took time, it would be more than a month before the coroner was expected to release Becky's body to her family, and it was only then that they could even begin to arrange a funeral.

I never had a chance to say goodbye. Moreover, despite Charlotte's assertions, I was still convinced that I bore the responsibility for Becky's death. That conviction was making me doubt I should go to the funeral even when there was one.

It was, perhaps, for this reason, that I found myself making something of a pilgrimage to the plaza inside my city that contained - and now honored - her effigy.

The city in my mind, for reasons which I had never really worked out or thought to ask about, was perpetually bathed in soft sunlight, like a late summer afternoon. There was no nighttime. Part of me always wondered what it would look like with its towering monoliths shadowed against the burning sunset or how the long shadows of the sunrise would play off the high city walls and flood up the long tree-lined avenues.

But with no actual sun in the sky, there was no rising or setting of it. And with no sun, there were no shadows to mark its passing.

However, since Becky's death, a single part of the city now seemed to be exempt from that one underlying constant.

My city was massive. Of course, in real terms, it took up no space at all, so it was difficult to gauge exactly how large it was. But walking at a steady walking speed of about two miles per hour, it would still take several hours to walk from one side of the city just to the enormous, imposing spire that constituted my Palace at its center, let alone walk from one side of the city to the other. With the massive area that my city covered, probably consisting of at least a few dozen square miles, there were parts of it that - despite having years' worth of time to explore it - I had never visited. My mind usually just knew where I wanted to be and put me there.

Today, like every other day, it knew where I needed to be.

Traditionally, in every other Evo city, a building's importance to that person's life was directly related to how large it was and how close it was to the city center. Mine was different. All buildings and all parts of my mind, or my city, were given equal importance and were sized and spread out accordingly. It, therefore, didn't concern me when I faded into my metropolis in the far northeastern corner of the sprawling urban area.

Things were more spread out here, less crowded; this was the closest to leafy suburbs as it was possible to get inside a walled city. The thrumming blue glow of the palace and the spires of the bustling city center were visible over the rooftops of the lower buildings around me, and the colossal city walls loomed large beyond the simple memorial garden that had sprung up here. But whereas the rest of the city was bathed in brilliant, vibrant sunlight, the air around this memorial seemed to reside in a mournful, respectful dimness, like the light itself was lowering its happy gaze in reverent sorrow and tempering its usual sunny disposition.

This wasn't the same plaza as the one closer to the city center, the one with the other, happier vision of Becky in it. In that monument, her face was turned to the heavens, and her eyes were closed in rapturous ecstasy. It immortalized the moment she climaxed with me for the first time in the hospital all those months ago.

I didn't even want to think what that plaza portrayed now, and I couldn't decide what was worse, if it hadn't changed at all, or if it had.

This one was different; I'm not sure if I would even have needed my eidetic memory to recognize it immediately. It was a bust of her smiling, happy face, as it had been that night in the club when I had taken them out to thank them for the care they had given me during my stay at the hospital. Despite the bust being made of something that looked like faded granite, her eyes still almost danced with the laughter that would forever grace her wonderful, beautiful face. She was looking a little to the side at something just over my left shoulder, and no matter where I stood, her eyes would never quite meet mine. They seemed to move as I did.

Always just that little bit out of reach.

As she now was.

Perched upon her head was a garland of pure white spring roses, and they, along with lilies, peonies, and other white flowers I couldn't place, and a series of babbling brooks, lined the tree-laden park. The water flowed in an endless, physics-defying loop around her; the playful song of its splashes was the only sound to break the dimly lit silence.

It was there that Faye found me.

I was standing there, a soft smile playing on my lips at the memories that the statue evoked when her hand laced into mine.

"She was beautiful," She said simply as her head leaned to the side and rested on my shoulder. I could only close my eyes for a moment and nod. The tears wanted to come, but this time, I was holding onto them. There would be a time and a place for that anger to be unleashed, and I was going to make sure that the broken skull of one of the men responsible for Becky's death was going to be intimately involved when it happened. It wouldn't take me long to realize where this resolve was coming from.

We stood there for a while, just gazing upon the blonde nurse's likeness. Her fingers never left mine, and that familiar, floral scent from Faye's hair gently caressed my nostrils. We were just... still.

It had to have been more than an hour before either one of us made any attempt to move. Faye seemed to know when to stay quiet, when to keep me company as I looked upon the visage in front of me, and when I was ready to leave. "Let's go home," she finally whispered as she straightened herself up and turned us back toward the city center and the towering spire of the palace.

I cast one last look back at Becky before we rounded a corner, trying one last time to get her stony, silent, dazzling eyes to meet mine, and then a building robbed her from my sight.

Even though it would have taken several long and arduous hours to walk the distance back to our de facto home at the palace, my mind did its part to speed up the process. We walked around one corner in the far northeast of my city and emerged onto a main thoroughfare only a few dozen yards from the central monolith in a seamless transition that would have made the laws of physics need to take a long, hard look at themselves in the nearest mirror - if they applied here at all, that is.

Without a word, she led me along the boulevard and onto the grand white steps that led up to the Palace. With less than a thought, not even knowing which of us it came from, we were suddenly several hundred feet higher, standing on the balcony that wrapped around the tower and led into the office. For a few long moments, we just stood there, looking out over the sprawling metropolis.

My mind had been a storm of raging emotions and vengeful intent for so long. Indescribable loss, blinding fury, plans upon plans, and that soul-crushing frustration that can only be felt by a man wandering, lost, through a maze with no idea how to get out. In every conceivable way, I was in over my head, yet I was charging forward like a bull with a headache.

Even then, even in that moment of serene stillness, I couldn't tell you what was driving me. Was it some misguided sense of principle? Was it the indomitable will of good to triumph over evil? Was it simple revenge? Or, like that man stumbling and feeling his way around that maze in the dark, was I doing the only thing I could that didn't involve just sitting down and giving up?

Every part of me was filled with pain. There is simply no way for a human mind to comprehend the scale or the gravity of the emotional connection involved in my bonding with Faye. Human language just isn't equipped to deal with that level of depth. I had met her and lost her in the space of a few hours, but the love that was built in that short time felt like it had grown over lifetimes. Soulmates was the only word that could possibly come close, and only because it goes some way to describe the unbreakable connection and resonance between the parts of us that we had no control over. My affection for Faye was marrow-deep.

And they killed her.

Becky, despite not even being a shadow of the love I felt for Faye, was somehow worse. She was the first; she was the one who dragged me out of that pit of self-pity and self-doubt that my early life had been marked by. She showed me love, attention, and genuine affection. In any other life, she would have been more than enough to make me happy.

But therein lay the problem. Meeting her also coincided with the end of my old, pre-Evo life and the start of the new one. Old Pete would have made her the very center of his universe; he would have loved her without reservation or condition. But to new Pete, she was one of many. I took her for granted in the worst possible way. I loved her in a fashion, and I knew that she loved me, but I never took that step to truly find out how deep her affections ran. I was a coward. By not looking, I could fool myself into thinking that my own actions couldn't hurt her, and the brief looks I did take were only ever enough to stroke my own ego. It wasn't until she was gone that I realized how important she was to me.

And they killed her.

They killed her to get to me.

I went to war for Faye's memory. But I committed war crimes for Becky.

Becky was the innocent bystander; she was the civilian casualty, she died for a cause that she was in no way part of. And no matter how many people implored me not to blame myself, the undeniable truth was that if she had never met me, she would still be alive. I may not have killed her, but I certainly got her killed. The pain, the abject agony that I felt at her loss, was no less than what I felt for Faye, but Becky was laced with an unhealthy, but totally justified amount of guilt.

What made things worse was that Faye - or at least part of her - was currently living in my head and holding my hand. In some small way, that tempered the rage I felt at her loss.

Becky was gone forever.

And the fury that came with that seemed like a fire that would burn down the world.

My thoughts were dragged back to the moment by a soft squeeze of my hand. I turned to find Faye looking up at me with those startling emerald eyes. "No one is ever really gone, you know," She said softly. "Not while there are people around to remember them."

"It's my fault." It was all I could bring myself to say.

She just shook her head. "Maybe you're right, maybe she would be alive if she had never met you, but that doesn't make it your fault. Mourn her, miss her, honor her, but there are people out there who really are responsible for her death. Save yer blame for them."

There was something about the way she said it that gave me pause. Charlotte had been tender and comforting in her reassurances; Marco, Uri, and even Jerry had been factual. But Faye was different. She felt everything I did in the same way that I felt it. She could feel the pain and the simmering anger - both at the Royal Inquisition and at myself. But behind her softly spoken words was a fire, a vehemence, a certainty, but more than that, there was a hint of something a little less tangible. It was almost like blaming myself took part of that fire away from the people who truly deserved it, and it was annoying to her that I was allowing that blame to be shared.

Behind those emerald green eyes was an unspoken desire to tell me to snap the fuck out of it and get to work.

I held her eyes for a moment. I found myself doing something that I had never considered before. I had always assumed, through lack of information to the contrary, that Faye wasn't the reintegration of her personality into mine, that she was not a separate person as such, but a recreation of her based on what my own mind had "downloaded" from hers. But for the first time, I tried connecting my mind to hers.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

The raw emotion surged through me like a storm wave.

Faye's love for me was almost blinding. Her pride and her support, although silent through the long and arduous days of Toussant's torture, they were enough to fill me completely with the wave of confidence I had been missing so badly. It frustrated her that I was so hung up on blaming myself, doubting the implications of everything I did, and questioning my own morality. She had practically swooned at the way I had dealt with the Inquisitors holding Mary's family hostage. The firm, grim determination, the recognition of what needed to be done, and just doing it. She had marveled at the way I had systematically dismantled Toussant and, despite the extraordinary amounts of violence involved, more than she had ever conceived of before the party, she was under no doubt that more would be needed before the war ended.

Of course, she felt the pain of Becky's loss, even more so at the loss of her friends at the party, some of whom I had never met but she had known since childhood. She would never see her family again, she would never go home, and there was no way to hide from those inescapable facts. She felt the anger at the Conclave for the centuries of lies they had told their own people; she felt the confusion at our hitherto strongest ally being - of all people - the real inquisition. Her whole sense of identity, everything she had thought she knew about herself and her place in the world had been shattered. Her mind was a maelstrom of mixed and conflicting emotions, and yet behind it all, beneath all the confusion and pain, there was intent.

The bastards needed to pay!

She didn't want me to forget about Becky, she didn't want me to stop questioning the conclave or even the sect, she didn't want me to reassess my trust issues when it came to the people around me, but she was terrified that I would be too consumed with my own guilt and too busy second guessing myself to do what needed to be done. That one day, I would doubt myself once too many times and give the enemy the opening they needed to end me. She knew I was powerful, she had watched every one of my actions since the party through my own eyes. It was a level of power that she could barely comprehend. Her heart was filled with an abject certainty that I would be the one to end centuries of bloodshed, even if there needed to be a whole lot more before the job was done.

Beneath that, however, she was fucking horny. If power was an aphrodisiac to an Evo, she was practically frothing at the lips. Both sets of them.

The touching of two minds that I hadn't felt since the party exploded through me like a nuclear detonation. Her love, her lust, her need, her hunger... her pride... it all burst inside me. She wanted me to use my anger to do more than hunt down my oppressors, she wanted me to take it out on her, she wanted the most powerful creature she had ever seen to show her how powerful he really could be with someone willing and able to take it. She wanted to be my relief.

And just like the love and the support, that overwhelming hunger took me.

Her eyes, looking up into mine, were burning with molten desire. As soon as they met my own, we fell together. The moment overwhelmed us and overtook us, our lips crushed together, her arms wrapping tightly around my neck as mine circled her and pulled her into me by the small of her back. This was no lover's embrace, this was primal. It was heat. It was need. It was passion. It was animalistic.

Her hands worked through my hair, her nails dug into my shoulders as she mewled into my lips, she dragged them around me and onto my solid chest before she ripped open my shirt with a strength that I - in hindsight - shouldn't have been surprised at. Her flowery summer dress was less of an obstacle as it bunch up under my hands before her sodden panties went the same way as my shirt. A strong grip, a hand yank, a gasp from her panting lips, and they were a tattered pile of wet lace on the floor.

Her eyes were wide and dilated in breathless lust. Her breathing was short, hard, and shallow. We both knew what was coming.

"Fuck! Take me.. please!" She almost whimpered. In less than a heartbeat, she was spun around and shoved forward, her hands bracing herself against the balcony railing as she arched her back to present her ass to me. In the time it took her to look over her shoulder at me, my pants were pooled around my ankles and I was stepping out of them. Every fiber of my rage, my frustration, my pent-up impatience was instantly forced into my granite-hard manhood. There was no foreplay, no preamble, no build-up, no pause... I smashed into her with a force that pulled a shrieking, joyful scream of pleasure from her gorgeous lips as it knocked the air right out of her. "Oh fuuuuuccckkk yes!"

This was a fuck; this was her offering - and me using - her body to take my anger out on. I wrapped her fiery red hair around my fist and pulled her head back, making her turn to look into my lust-filled eyes as her spine bowed, and I landed a mighty, loud spank onto her bare, bouncing ass.

A rumbling, animalistic growl vibrated from my chest and fell out of my lips, the sound alone was enough to have her groaning and screaming even louder. To Faye, I was the love of her life, I had shown her more affection and intimacy in the short time we had been together than in her entire life combined before it. But there was a not insignificant part of her that loved to be taken, that yearned to be claimed and owned and used. To have that trust and faith in someone which would allow her to completely surrender. She had found that in me and every single nerve ending was singing in the sublime confluence of pleasure and pain as she was ravaged.

The sound of another brutal spank cracked through the air like a clap of thunder as she screamed out over the city. I had kicked her legs together to clamp her pummeled cunt onto the savage strokes of my cock, but the rules of physics didn't apply here. I wanted her to feel the beating of my heavy balls against her swollen clit. So, with only a thought, she did. The harder pull of her hair arched her back, putting her g spot completely at my mercy and another thought inflated my cock to fill her to capacity. Stuffed full, fucked hard, and taken by the man she would surrender to in a heartbeat, Faye's mind exploded in ecstasy.

This was never meant to be a long and luxurious love-making session, this was never meant to last. It was intended to be quick, to get rid of that burning anger and frustration, to clear my mind, and the sudden onset of Faye's explosive high was all the prompting I needed to chase my own.

Faye screamed as I erupted into her with a roar that would have made the mightiest of Spartan battle-cries seem weak and pathetic by comparison. Floods of my essence poured into her in powerful ropes of spurting lust. Faye's entire body tightened up as her conscious mind was lost to the blistering pleasure, every drop of me pumped into her, and then she shattered.

With a final scream, the echoes of which faded into the skies above my city, she vanished. Fucked into oblivion and lost to the pleasure. Her mind shattered, and, with nothing to hold together the visage of her body, she shimmered out of existence.

Sweat sheened and panting, the heavy rise and fall of my chest, and the powerful intakes of air were the only sounds as I stood, clear-headed and intent, on the balcony of my bunker. I looked out over the city, basking in the euphoric embrace of Faye's spectral presence, with a newfound sense of purpose building behind my eyes.

Faye was right, Charlotte was right, the anger that I now seemed to have more of a handle on was right too...

I had work to do.

********

I blinked my eyes open and looked out of the window of the plane. Bob, or more accurately, Isabelle, had arranged for a private aircraft to fly us from a small airport not far from home, to Ukraine. Our destination was, understandably, a considerable distance from where we were able to land, but with that destination being in the middle of an actual warzone, getting any closer was a task beyond even a Princess of the Royal Inquisition.

I had no idea what kind of plane it was. It clearly belonged to someone used to living a life of high luxury, though. I could have had Jeeves find out for me, he could have found out the specifications and even the price in an instant, but I didn't care. Opulence has never impressed me, although in this case, I was inordinately grateful for the obscenely comfortable chair and adequate legroom. I had fallen asleep almost immediately, the past few weeks had been exhausting, and I was starting to be reminded of what life had been like when a lack of sleep was an everyday concern. With the time-dilation effects of my mind, a little under an hour of real world time had been all that was needed to catch up on some much-needed sleep, visit the memorial for Becky, and fuck Faye out of existence.

She wasn't really gone, obviously. But with a physical presence in the mindscape being entirely dependent on coherent thought, the power of Faye's climax had temporarily robbed her of the ability to hold her form. That had to be some sort of achievement.

Her euphoric, post-orgasmic giggle echoed through my mind at the thought just as my attention was pulled to the voices of Uri, Marco and Bob discussing the plans.

"Ahh, it awakens," Marco looked over with a teasing grin.

I grumbled something mildly coherent but managed a weak smile of my own. I hoisted myself out of my chair, crossed the gangway and slipped into the last open seat around a small four-person table. A pretty air stewardess, very top-heavy and with far too much makeup on, sauntered toward me. "Would you like refreshment, Sir?" She asked in a heavy Eastern European accent that almost reminded me of Uri's

"Coke, please," I answered with a smile. Waking up was apparently something that Evo's powers hadn't overcome yet. I would have to look into that.

The stewardess looked flustered. "I am so sorry, but we don't have any... coke."

I sighed and nodded. "Pepsi? Fanta? Something cold and full of sugar."

She blinked. "Oh, you mean Cola. Right away, Sir."

I opened my mouth, frowned, thought better of it, and closed my mouth again. That was a rabbit hole my mind wanted no part of. A few moments later, she brought a chilled bottle and a glass in from the galley and set it down on the table, leaning forward to give me a tantalizing look down her blouse.

"She wants to fuck you!" Faye's teasing voice echoed dreamily through my mind. "Go on, stud, I know you have more in you. And you can't pass up the chance to join the mile-high club, can you?"

"Urgh, maybe later," I answered with an inward roll of my eyes and a soft chuckle.

"Can I get you anything else, Sir?" the stewardess asked with her eyes firmly locked onto mine. "Anything at all?"

"Not just yet, thank you," I replied with a polite smile.

"Of course, Sir. If you want me, I will be in the galley." She winked and sauntered away, casting a flirting look over her shoulder.

"That was an interesting choice of words, don't ya think?" I could almost see Faye's beaming, excited grin. Her melodic giggle echoed through my mind again at a less inward roll of my eyes before I turned my attention back toward the group.

They had barely noticed my arrival, but when I cleared my throat, all eyes turned to me. "How are we looking?" I asked when none of them volunteered to offer an update.

"I have left messages in the usual channels," Uri spoke first. "My contact should hopefully get them in time and be able to reply. The issue we have is that all, or at least most, of our usual meeting spots have either been destroyed, heavily damaged, or are right in the middle of a combat zone. If I didn't know any better, I would say that the whole front line has been purposely placed to make this as difficult and as dangerous as possible."

"I don't understand," I said with a frown. It was the truth; I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. "What contact? And why can't she meet us in the mindscape as we do with the conclave?"

"Ah, well, she is not an Evo, for a start. She is a custode segreto, a secret keeper." He answered. I didn't fail to notice Bob taking more of an interest. "She is a human who knows about the whole war between Evos and Inquisitors and has picked a side. With the current communications blackout, it means we have to meet in person."

"Okay, what can you tell us about her?"

Uri cast a wary eye at Bob and sighed. "Forgive me; it is hard to forget decades of training and caution. You are an Inquisitor," he nodded to Bob, "historically, one of us should be trying to kill the other for that fact alone. Sitting together has been unheard of for as long as either of us has been alive, let alone give out details of our informants." He took another deep breath and continued. "I have known Olena for most of my life; her family was from the Chernobyl exclusion zone as well. Her brother's Evo mutation activated, but hers didn't. He was the one who explained it all to her."

I nodded for him to continue.

"Six years ago, her family was ambushed by an Inquisitor hit squad. She was the only survivor. Her parents were killed, her younger sister too, and her brother managed to get her to safety before they caught up with him. They tortured him for about a month before dumping what was left of his body in the Dnipro River. She knew of me from her brother and offered her services just after his funeral."

"I feel I should interject here by saying..." Bob started.

"Yes, Yes, I know." Uri nodded. "It almost certainly wasn't a hit squad from the official inquisition."

"Yes, but if Olena could provide an exact time and location for this attack on her family, we may be able to find out if any treacherous Inquisitors were in the area at the time. If nothing else, it will get justice for her family."

Uri looked slightly taken aback by that, blinking a few times before his shoulders slumped a little, and he gave a soft nod.

"Alright, I'm confused!" I threw my hands up with a sigh. "Can someone start at the beginning for me? Russia is being an asshole and invaded Ukraine. I know that much, but what the hell has it got to do with Evos and Inquisitors?"

The three other men cast a look between them before Marco decided to take point with the explanation. He was the oldest, after all, by more than a century and seemed to have something of an overview pre-prepared.

"The situation in Russia has always been something of an enigma to the Conclave. Things were running there in much the same way as they did in Europe, right up until the First World War and the revolution. Things were messy for a while, with the Russian Civil War, the establishment of the Soviet state, and communism being the main obstacles. But it was Stalin who really fucked things up.

"In the mid-thirties, he started his infamous purges. Anyone not seen as compatible with communist ideals was executed. Of course, for him, this was badly timed because that included almost all of his experienced military officer class. When the Nazis invaded a few years later, his army was woefully badly led. But from an Evo perspective, that seemed to be almost like a cover screen. We were actively hunted. We are not sure if Stalin himself was an Inquisitor..." He paused to glance up at Bob.

"Not that I am aware of," our Inquisitor representative shook his head.

Marco nodded and then continued. "... but he certainly knew about us and went out of his way to track down and execute any Evo he could find. No matter how devoted they were to the Soviet cause, no matter their contributions or achievements, none were spared. That is no small thing if you think about it. If he wasn't an Inquisitor, then he managed to find a way of identifying, tracking, and killing every single Evo in Russia, and that is before you ask how he knew about us at all. Not most of them, all of them! More than that, when the Conclave sent agents to find out what was going on, they vanished. After a few decades, we just sort of... gave up. They weren't harassing European Evos, and they clearly didn't want us there, so we left them to it. Until the invasion, that is."

Bob was frowning. "So it wasn't an Evo plot?" he asked.

"Err, no. Not at all." Marco shook his head as if he felt he had just answered that question.

"Then that makes it even stranger," Bob huffed. "Our experiences in Russia are very similar to yours. The ruling Inquisitor family was close to the Tsars; they disappeared during the revolution. But as with your Evos, all members of the Inquisition were hunted down and killed. The entire network went dark in a matter of weeks. Back then, it was not like it is now; we didn't have central station houses where inquisitors gathered, doing most of their work via news broadcasts and the internet; they were much more spread out. We would have an outpost in every medium-sized city and large rural town. There were thousands of us there. We assumed it was the start of a new war with the Evos. We sent teams in to find out what was going on... and nothing. They were never heard from again. Then again, after the second world war, the USSR just went silent. With no offensive action and no information coming out of the country, we just found ourselves watching and waiting.Then when Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the first targets was an Inquisition station house close to the border North of Kyiv."

"They hit an Evo safe house in Mariupol, too," Uri added, looking concerned.

Bob, on the other hand, was now looking more concerned than confused. "So if it wasn't you, and it wasn't us..."

"You think this rebel branch of the Inquisition has managed to take over an entire country?" I finished for them.

Bob and Uru just nodded solemnly.

"So where does this Olena fit in? How can she be an informant?" I asked. The history lesson had been nice, but it didn't really answer the question.

Uri cast another look at Bob but, this time, managed to answer without the overdramatic sigh. "Evos can't come and go safely in Russia, but humans can. If trained in what to look for, they can be used to monitor Inquisitor activities and report back to The Conclave, the Black Knights in particular..."

"Black Knights?" Bob asked. "Like the Martin Lawrence movie?"

I snorted out a laugh.

Uri ignored the question.

Bob went back to looking confused.

"When you know what you are looking for, Inquisitors are not particularly subtle." Uri went on. "Humans were able to cross the border and operate in Russia reasonably easily, but they haven't been able to find much, very little, in fact." Uri continued in his thick Ukrainian accent. "But in recent years, maybe the last decade, our scouts have reported a lot of suspicious activity in the countries bordering Russia. It didn't quite tie up to known Inquisitor methods, though, which I suppose makes sense now, knowing that they weren't Inquisitors. That was why I have been paying such close attention. We knew something was happening. We just didn't know what. After the invasion, most of our scouts were killed or displaced, but Olena has chosen to remain on the front lines; she is the best source of information we have at the moment."

"And you think that she will be able to give you a list of all suspected Inquisitor activities in the area," Bob went on. "And then we can cross reference that with activities of the actual Inquisition, which in turn could potentially identify the actions of traitors."

Uri nodded.

"So, where are we meeting her?" I asked.

"I would rather not say," Uri answered after a short pause.

"Oh c'mon, not this again." I groaned.

"She has put her life in my hands," Uri scowled back. "I am not going to abuse that trust. Marco can come with me to the meet, but otherwise, we will be going alone."

"It's okay," Bob nodded, assuming the slight was meant for him. "It is a fair precaution. I would like to investigate the site of the local Inquisition offices anyway and see if I can find any survivors. But that is on the wrong side of the front lines. Isabelle works closely with a private military contractor team, they will meet us on the ground to get us into Donetsk safely, and they can escort us to the station house and back while you meet with Lena."

Uri nodded. "Jerry can go with you."

Jerry, who had been sitting on the other side of the aisle and listening quietly, blinked. "Me?"

"No, the other Jerry. Yes, you!"

"Oh, umm.. okay." He nodded, managing to both frown and look confused at the same time.

"I hope you brushed up on your combat training as I recommended," Uri added before standing from his seat and stretching, unceremoniously signaling the meeting was over before he headed toward the bathroom at the back of the plane.

"I should report to Isabelle," Bob said softly, rummaging in his bag for his satellite phone.

I nodded as I stood. "Pass on my regards." Then turned toward my seat.

"I swear ta God Almighty, if yer dick isn't inside that stewardess in the next sixty seconds, I am cutting you off from my pussy for a month!" Faye's words echoed through my mind. I cast a look toward the front of the aircraft and the galley. The stewardess seemed to be busy but turned in time to catch my eye, licked her lips, winked, and then very intentionally bent over to do something on one of the lower shelves of a serving trolley.

I chuckled to myself and strode toward the galley to the sound of Faye's excited giggles.

I made a point of not having my dick in her for ninety seconds, though, just to remind Faye who was in charge.