It had been about another hour of mindscape time before we returned to the real world; the sudden revelation, as innocently as it had been discovered, had put something of a damper on the rest of Emma's exploration.

It would have been a lie to say that this was something that I had considered before, but now that it had been said out loud, I couldn't help but marvel at the obviousness of it and the mental gymnastics I must have put myself through to have never considered it before.

At least one of my parents wasn't my real parent.

Of course, there were a whole bunch of possibilities. The first was that one of them had cheated on the other, and the betrayed parent had simply tried to forgive and forget. The question was, which one? The obvious answer to that was that it was my mother, Debbie, who had cheated on my father, had the child of some random guy, and Phil had, for whatever reason, decided to stay. But there were problems with that theory.

The first was that no matter how much I despised my mother before her death, even I could see the way she looked at my father; she was completely and utterly in love with him. She had never been the abusive one of my parents. Still, she had willingly turned a blind eye to what my father had done to me and tried to force me to accept not only the insultingly transparent explanations but also forced me to lie to people like my school teachers when certain injuries couldn't be hidden from sight. The point of saying this is to highlight the fact that Debbie never, not once, went against Phil in any way at all, not in thought, not in action, not even in sentiment. If my father did something to me, Debbie automatically supported it, simply by virtue of the fact that he had done it, and he would have had a good reason. The levels of faith and support she gave that man were absolute, so much so that under any other circumstances, I would have always considered her the benchmark for what a loving, devoted woman should look like.

The chances of her cheating on him were absurd.

Of course, there was always the possibility that she hadn't always been like that, and the way she acted toward Phil was just overcompensating for something she had done in the past. After all, if an affair on her part had resulted in my birth, then, by definition, any action she was atoning for had taken place when I wasn't around to witness it. Maybe those levels of love and loyalty that she epitomized really were all an act to make up for her infidelity before I was born. I couldn't really say. I had no knowledge of who she was or what she was like before, but I found it very hard to believe that she had been any different then to how she had always been after I came along. It just didn't seem like her.

The second option was that my father had cheated and had forced some other woman's baby on my mother. In some ways, this seemed the more likely option. First of all, it would explain why my mother exhibited none of the maternal protective instincts with me that every other woman on earth seemed to possess. Secondly, of the two of them, Phil was easily the one who cared about the relationship the least. He did what he wanted to, and everyone else was just expected to go along with it.

But therein also lay the problem with that theory. Phil could be described as a lot of things, none of them positive, but if you were to look at him from the perspective of someone outside the family - namely someone who didn't know about the zeal in which he tortured me during my childhood - there was one thing that stood out among all others.

Apathy.

Phil simply couldn't muster the energy needed to care, not about anything. It was hard, sometimes, to even see that he acknowledged the fact that he had a wife, let alone imagine him summoning the enthusiasm needed to cheat on her. Then to care about a child of that fling enough to take custody of me away from his other woman? That was almost comically out of character. It simply wasn't possible. And yes, it would have had to have been a fling, there is no conceivable way Phil Roberts could possibly give a shit about something as in depth as a full blown affair. That was simply too much like hard work. It was a bit of a contradiction when I thought about it: the fervor in which he punished me for even the slightest perceived wrong, but his total lack of enthusiasm for literally anything else in his life.

I don't know; maybe he wasn't always like that. Maybe he used to be... well, not a nice guy, but perhaps a normal one, and his wife having an affair had knocked all of that out of him. Maybe I was a constant reminder of the pain my mother inflicted on him, and I was an easy target. Yet, out of the two of them, he was easily the one I would have said was more likely to cheat.

Okay, yes, the possibility that I was adopted crossed my mind, but really? That was even more absurd. Why the hell would you adopt a child just to abuse him for eighteen years, then pretend he didn't exist for the years afterward? On top of that, I had no real understanding of the adoption process, but surely there had to be checks of some sort on the prospective parents, right? Social services involvement, background checks, follow ups; I had memories of my childhood going all the way back to when the human mind was physically capable of storing long term memories - about two years old - and I couldn't remember anything like that ever happening. And, again, the idea that Phil adopted a baby? Even if Debbie wanted one? No, sorry, I just couldn't see it. He was too lazy, he was too selfish, he would have immediately known that kids are hard work, and hard work was the one thing he avoided above all else.

Phil Roberts wanted a quiet life. He didn't want power, he didn't want fame, he didn't want success or money or status, he wanted easy. And Debbie wanted Phil. That was it. That was the sum of their life's ambitions, and I had never understood where I fitted into any of that. Now that it was abundantly clear that I wasn't the biological child of one of them, I had even less of an idea of who the hell I was when it came to my family.

Those thoughts, standing outside the library in my city, had brought up a whole host of disturbingly unpleasant memories, ones that Emma - being right there with me - was subjected to whether either of us was ready for it or not. She saw it all; she didn't quite feel what I felt, she never felt the pain I had gone through as a child, but the memories were vivid enough for it to be pretty easy for her to imagine. The hiss and the smell of my skin when Phil put a cigarette out on my arm, the sound of the crack when he broke it a few years later. The ringing in my ears when he threw a full beer can at my head, the dizziness and the fever when he had decided I was faking an illness, then the barely caught septic infection when he finally understood I wasn't, the unbelievable cold and fatigue in my body when he had made me walk the four miles home from school in my gym clothes in the snow because I was three minutes late getting to the car when he was waiting for me. The hours I had spent on my D-Day diorama, only for Phil to step on it and destroy it on his way to get a snack from the kitchen and then the boot to the ribs on his way back because I had made a mess, then the beating I got for throwing up on the carpet from the pain and shock of a grown ass man kicking the twelve year old me in the side.

It was a vicious cycle. A memory would jump into my head, not one that I was consciously trying to remember, but it was the "don't look down" sort of logic; the more I tried to push those memories back down, the more they would jump out at me, and Emma would experience them all with me in real time. It's not that I didn't want her to see them; I was happy for her to see everything, but considering the fact that she'd had a great man as a father, and he had just given his life to save hers, this was not the time for her to be exposed to all this. But my mind didn't seem to give a shit what the rest of me wanted, and the memories kept coming, and Emma's face fell more and more as each memory was relived in stunning, crystal-clear clarity.

"Pete, I... I'm..." She looked up at me, her eyes filled with something that blurred the lines between pity and horror.

I took her hand and shook my head. "It's okay. We should go. These won't stop for a while."

"No, I need to see this," she tucked herself closer to me.

"Maybe, but not right now. It's too much."

"This is what Rhodri was talking about, wasn't it?" She looked up at me. "When he said you seemed like you were always waiting for the next attack. It's because you were. You've never known safety."

I swallowed hard and nodded again. "Yeah, I guess he saw more than I expected him to. It's time to go, Emma."

She didn't say anything; she just took one last look around my city and gave a short, resigned nod. "Okay."

*******

A moment later, we both emerged back in the real world, naked and holding each other after our passionate coupling a little while earlier. Emma looked up at me, then down at my body, then down at herself, then back up at me again. "We're still naked," she blushed. "How long were we in there?"

"You tell me," I smiled back at her. "You should have an innate understanding of the passing of time."

Her brow furrowed for a moment before. "About thirteen hours in the mindscape, which is..." she blinked, "...about twenty minutes out here? That can't be right."

"Time works differently in there, remember, so yeah, we've only been in there about twenty minutes."

"Wow, that's pretty cool. I can see why you'd use that to sleep."

"Next time we go in," I pulled her close, running my fingers through her hair. "We'll look around your palace properly and find your office. You should have your own bed in there."

She shook her head vigorously. "No, I don't want to sleep in my own bed. I don't ever want to sleep apart from you again. Can I sleep in your bed with you?"

"I..." It was my turn to frown. "I don't know. I don't see why not. Jeeves?"

"She is able to access all of you, Sir." My friendly, aged butler answered almost immediately. "Including your bunker, at any time."

"I heard him!" Emma beamed, looking up at me again. "This is so cool! I can hear your subconscious!"

"I think he said he was our subconscious," I chuckled back at her.

"That's even cooler!"

I rolled my eyes playfully, then leaned down to kiss her. She moaned softly as she melted into my lips, her hand coming up to rest on my cheek, holding me in place as mine kept running through her hair. "Okay, what do we do now?" she smiled up at me after we finally broke apart.

"We need to move soon," I sighed. "We're okay here for a little longer, but the more time we give them, the more likely they are to find us or maybe just set up some sort of cordon to stop us from leaving the area."

She nodded. "How are you feeling? You said you needed to rest to get your energy back before we moved again. I don't think you were asleep for very long."

I did a quick internal check. "No, I wasn't," I frowned. "But I think I'm okay in terms of power. I'm not full, but I'm a lot fuller than I expected to be after such a short time. It must be you."

"Me?"

"Yup, apparently all I needed was the love of a good woman." I nudged her with a smile.

"Well, good, 'cause you've got it." She leaned up and pressed another kiss to my lips.

"Are you okay?" I asked as gently as I was able. "That was a lot for you to take in, in one go."

Her smile faltered a little. "Which part?"

"All of it, I guess. Your city, my city, everything you learned... everything you saw."

"From when you were young?"

I nodded after a beat of silence. "Yeah, that too."

She sighed and leaned her head back onto my shoulder. "My city is amazing. I don't know why, but I feel like I've only just scratched the surface of what it all means. I suppose if I have the ability to sleep at that faster rate, I'll have a lot more free time to explore it properly, which I can't wait for. Your city was even better; it's just so... big, and strong, and powerful, and... I don't know. It feels like it's been there forever, just waiting for you to find it."

"That's funny," I nodded. "I thought the same thing about yours."

"You did?"

"Mmhmm."

"That's interesting." She started running her fingers over my chest. "Mine felt new to me. I wonder why we both had the same thoughts about each other's cities but not about our own. Have you felt that way about any others?"

"No, just yours."

"So many puzzles." She mused for a moment. "And then there were all the things I learned from your library. God, I hope I'm able to store information like you are; that would make things so much easier."

"Yeah, it's useful, but there are downsides, as well."

Her fingers froze on my chest. "Your childhood," she nodded. "That was... I'm so sorry you had to go through that. I don't know what else to say. I can't believe there are people out there who can be so cruel. I feel like such an idiot now."

"Why?"

"Because in the office, I practically screamed at you that violence was never the answer, that you just enjoyed it, and I didn't have the first idea how much you had been the victim of it, or how violence had basically shaped the entirety of your childhood and your formative years. No wonder you were ready for a fight at the party and when you found out about the Praetorians. You had been waiting for it for your entire life. I can see now how stupidly naive I was, thinking that just because I had a good upbringing, you must have had one as well. I'm sorry."

I shook my head. "You don't have to be sorry. Your parents gave you the best life they could, mine chose another direction. That's not your fault."

"No, but being a sheltered little princess with some very strong opinions is."

"Have your opinions changed?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You had those opinions before... well, before everything that's happened and before you learned everything you did at my library. Do you still have those opinions now?"

"No, of course not, how could I?"

"Exactly." I smiled. "There's nothing wrong with thinking a certain way. You're only in the wrong if you keep thinking those things after you learn something that should change your mind. You were misinformed, not stubbornly holding onto stupid ideas. So what about the Praetorians? Still think they can be reasoned with?"

"I don't know," she admitted after a moment. "I'd like to believe that some of them have been led down that path by people who know better. That they've had things hidden from them or have outright been lied to or manipulated into believing the things they do. Those people? Maybe they can be reasoned with. I mean, you did manage to convert a bunch of them at the compound. But the people in charge, the people who know what they're doing? No, they need to meet Elliot."

Who?" I scrunched up my face.

"Elliot. Haven't you ever seen Pete's Dragon?"

"Um, I don't think so."

She giggled. "It was a movie when I was a kid. Pete was a kid and he was friends with a big green dragon, and the dragon's name was Elliot. Your name is Pete. You have a Dragon, so... I thought the name would fit."

There was a heartbeat of silence, then I snorted out a laugh. "Okay, that's a good one." I chuckled. "But, you understand what will happen when they do meet... Elliot, right? What will happen to them? What I might need to do?"

"I do, yes."

"And that doesn't bother you anymore?"

She opened her mouth to answer but paused. "It's not that the idea of killing doesn't bother me anymore, it does, but... I don't know. Now I can see that if I ever want peace for our people, if there's any hope for our survival, then you were right: it's them or us. If they have to die for the rest of our people to live, then that's for the Dragon to decide. If he says they do, then they do. Some people are just beyond redemption. And if anyone is stupid enough to stand in the way of you getting to them, I'd like to think you'd give them every chance you could to let them stand down, but at the end of the day, it's their choice to take that chance or not."

I nodded slowly. That's what I needed to hear. As much as my bonding to Emma was quickly becoming a cornerstone of who I was, as much as I loved her, I still had a job that needed doing. Now that I had fully accepted my role as the Mantle, the option to simply give up and live the quiet life was gone. As I had said to Bob, this war was going to end, one way or another, and I would much rather have Emma's support and understanding than have to do this alone.

"Thank you," I whispered, the relief evident in my voice, even to me.

"Pete," Emma said, looking up at me. "We're in this together. You don't have to worry about me going off on you like I did in the castle. Look at Ian; he would have killed me, he wanted to kill me, he did kill my uncle Marcella. He lied to me and to my family for years, and I saw the look on his face when he thought he'd caught us. He was happy. He was excited. People like him need to go if we are going to have any chance of surviving as a species, let alone unifying as one. I understand that now, and I understand the burden that's been put on your shoulders, having to deal with all of that."

I nodded again. "I appreciate that. I'm sorry about your uncle."

"He was a good man. He used to tease me all the time when I was little," she said with a smile. "Him and my Dad used to..." the words died on her lips. I knew what she was feeling; I didn't need my powers or our bond for that. I pulled her in a little tighter.

"I know. I'm sorry." I said softly, holding her naked body against mine.

"It still doesn't feel real," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Like, logically, I know he's gone, but the rest of me refuses to believe it. I'm still expecting to get back home, the castle still in one piece, Mum and Dad waiting for me, Jamie, Raj, all the others, still alive and well, Uncle Marcella tapping his watch at me; you know, everything the way I left it. I know that isn't going to happen, but... I don't know. Sometimes, it just hits me, and the pain is overwhelming, but other times, like now, it's still there, but it's as if it's in the background. Just waiting to jump out at me."

I nodded again, just letting her talk. I knew that sort of pain all too well, but hers was so much worse than anything I had felt before. The only silver lining for her, one that I had never had, was that she could never argue that any of it was her own fault. I'd had no such luxury; all the deaths that had occurred around me had been directly tied to the fact that they were in my life. If they hadn't been, they would probably still be alive and well, too.

It wasn't much of a mercy, but it was something, and I was grateful that she had at least that.

"You said it'll never get better, didn't you?" She asked after a while.

I shook my head. "It'll never really go away," I answered honestly after a pause of my own. "It's more like it gets easier to handle. I'm here, though. If you ever need to talk, or vent, or just... let it out, I'm here."

"I know," she said. I could feel her cheek move with her soft smile against my shoulder. "You don't know what that means to me. You really are my rock. Thank you."

I smiled and nodded, letting her lay there in silence for a little while, letting her process some tiny fraction of all the things that had happened to her in the last day, before I spoke again. "Your Dad said we needed to meet him at the place you vacationed when you were six, we have to assume your mother is headed there too. If we're going to link up with her again, we need to know which direction we need to head in."

She huffed out a short laugh. "Yeah, that was always my favorite. Mykonos, one of the Greek Islands. I always wanted to go back there."

"Well, I guess you're getting your chance now," I smiled before turning my attention inwards. "Jeeves?"

"You would need to get to an airport, Sir, and the one you arrived at is almost certainly being watched. I would recommend you make your way to the nearest international airport and blend in with the crowd. A plane to Mykanos would be fairly simple from there."

"Sounds simple enough. Where's the nearest airport?"

"Salzburg, just over the border in Austria."

"Hmmm, what about passports and stuff?"

"I'm sure a man of your particular talents could conjure up something appropriate, Sir."

I rolled my eyes but chuckled. "Okay, looks like we're headed to Slazburg first to get a flight."

"But how?" Emma asked with a frown, looking up at me. "We don't have any money or anything to get there."

"Leave that with me. I can get us there."

Her frown deepened. "You're not going to steal money, are you? You've managed to convince me that you may have to be violent sometimes, but stealing some normal person's car or robbing them blind is not something I'm okay with."

"Hmm, how do you feel about banks?"

"I hate them."

"Then we won't have a problem."

"You're going to rob a bank?"

"Not in the way you mean," I laughed. "I just convinced my bank that my account has a bottomless amount in it. I can spend what I want and nobody would ever notice."

Emma seemed to think about that for a moment before she shrugged. "Yeah, that works. Corrupt bastards deserve it," she grinned up at me. "That means we're going to have to get up, though, doesn't it?"

"'Fraid so," I smiled.

She groaned loudly but pulled herself up into a sitting position. I moaned just as loudly as I got another good look at her perfectly hanging chest. She looked down at the object of my focus, turned to face me a little more, gave one of them a firm squeeze, and purred at me. "They're all yours. Just like the rest of me."

********

Okay, even I can admit that we got lucky.

By the time we had gotten dressed--which, in itself, took a lot longer than strictly necessary because of all the looks we were giving each other, not to mention the many occasions we succumbed to temptation to have a good caress of each other--and then climbed out of the cave and back to the surface, night was well and truly upon us. The day that had been so gloriously sunny, cloudless, and with a gentle breeze from the east, had turned quite miserable over the course of our time in the cave. The cloud cover blotted out the moon, which significantly hindered the natural ambient light levels on the mountainside when we finally stepped out of the cave's entrance.

The Praetorians were everywhere on the mountain, moving in groups of three or four, but with the darkness from the clouds, it meant that all of them were searching by torchlight and hence could be spotted from a literal mile away. Despite how many of them there were, none of them were particularly close to us, nor were they close enough together to stop us from slipping between their patrols with next to no effort. It was more a matter of knowledge and skill than luck that Emma knew precisely where we were on the mountain and how to get to the nearest road, but more impressive was that she was able to navigate us around that particular road - which turned out to be pretty heavily guarded - and to a little dirt track that the Praetorians didn't seem to know existed.

In just a few hours of careful, quiet walking, she managed to lead us off the mountain without so much as a hiccup. I'd been all for fighting our way down; there was still a large part of me that wanted every last one of those fuckers to pay for the audacity of hunting us. But Emma only had to give me one look to rein that impulse in. She understood how I felt--hell, after the day we'd had, she had every reason to want to obliterate them too--but slipping away undetected gave us the best shot at getting out for good.

It took us about two hours to get off the mountain and another two to reach the nearest town--far enough from the castle ruins to finally exhale the breaths we'd been holding. And, in a rare break from tradition, things just kept going our way.

The sun was already rising by the time we hit town, and with it came signs of life. Shops opened, shutters rolled up, and lights flicked on. That meant one thing: breakfast. A small diner just off Main Street gave us hot food and coffee- well, coffee for Emma, I just had a coke. Even better, the local car hire dealership--the one that usually catered to ski tourists--was open too.

One quick stop later, and we were on the road in a sleek, top-end SUV. Some forged paperwork, a few mysteriously malfunctioning cameras, a small dent to my bottomless, untraceable bank account, and a helpful attendant with a sudden case of selective amnesia ensured that nobody would remember we'd ever been there.

After that, the miles seemed to melt away with the rising of the sun. It only took another ninety minutes to get to the border town of Bad Reichenhall and only another forty-five minutes longer to finally cross the border into Austria. The border guard at the checkpoint, as far as he and his computer were concerned, had nodded through a perfectly normal looking vehicle, with a perfectly normal couple inside, about twenty seconds before a random computer glitch caused all evidence of it, and us, to mysteriously vanish, along with the guard's memory of it. There were no actual passport checks, fortunately, I'm not sure how I would have managed if there wereThere was no force on earth that would ever be able to have tracked that SUV from any point since we had picked it up. In fact, the GPS low-jack on the car was currently showing it bouncing between locations in Mumbai, Sydney, and Northern Florida, seemingly at random, every few seconds.

Thirty miles of Austrian highway later, we were pulling into the main entrance of Salzburg International Airport. We returned the car to the airport branch of the rental company, along with a computer glitch that made their systems think it had been there the whole time, walked to the ticket desk, and booked the next flight to where we needed to go. Same routine as we had used to cross the Austrian-German border, and we were away. There was a bit of a wait in the departure lounge, but fourteen and a half hours after we stepped out of that cave, we were boarding a flight to the Aegean Sea and the stunning island gem of Mykonos.

Throughout that whole fourteen hours, our conversation swung between easy chats and comfortable silences. We both had a lot to process, Emma more so than me, but both of us seemed perfectly content to just be in each other's company while we sat with our thoughts. At other times, we just played games to pass the time. For the entire car journey to Salzburg, we played a game by trying to make a swear word, or the closest thing to an insult, out of the letters we saw on other cars' number plates, or tried to see how many other countries' nationalities were represented by the passing traffic. Sure, it was fun, it passed the time, and it let us get to know each other a little better without delving back into the deep stuff, but what surprised me most of all was just how easy it all was. I'd known Emma for a little over two days; a good chunk of that first day was spent with us hating each other, then fighting for our lives at the castle, so as far as our relationship and our friendship was concerned, we had been together for less than twenty-four hours, and yet it felt like we'd known each other forever. Not months, not years, forever. Today didn't feel like the beginning; it didn't feel like the start of something beautiful; it felt like just another day that we were together, one that had already happened countless times before and one that would happen countless more times in the future. I had no idea what made me feel that way, but it was marrow deep. Whatever it was, I liked it. No, I didn't just like it; I loved it. I loved how I felt around her; I loved how easy it was to be myself around her; I loved how comfortable we felt around each other. I loved the easy way her hand slipped into mine or mine rested on the small of her back. Sure, there was some sexual tension in the air, and I wanted to rip her clothes off and ravish her at every opportunity we had, but what made it real, what made it more, was the fact that the tension was very much secondary to everything else we were both feeling.

But my favorite part of that whole time, by far, was the moment she rested her head on my shoulder as the plane leveled off, closed her eyes, fell asleep, and crawled into my bed - no, our bed - in my bunker and pulled me in with her. As well as I had slept in that bed for every night I had used it, that was the best night's sleep I could ever remember having.

The flight itself was short, only about two hours, but - with Emma's presence right next to me - that was apparently all I needed to completely replenish the last of my energy reserves and top myself up back to full.

"Oh, wow," Emma breathed when we both woke up as the plane started its descent to land. "I can feel that."

"Feel what?" I arched an eyebrow as I stretched my body as much as I was able in one of those seats.

"You," she was looking at me with a strange expression on her face. "I can feel your power, not in a bad way, it's like my connection to your city lets me understand how..." she paused, looking for the right word, "...how depleted you are. I'd never met you the last time you were full, so I'd never noticed the difference, but..." she gulped slowly. "I can certainly see why Evo women are drawn to power. If they have this sense of someone, like the one I'm getting from you, then I'm not surprised that they consider it an aphrodisiac." She leaned in and whispered into my ear. "Tonight, when we find my mum, and after we've settled in, we are going to have sex again."

I couldn't help but chuckle, quickly dipping my head and pressing a kiss against those beautiful, parted lips. She squeaked in surprise before, once again, melting into it. There was something different about kissing Emma; I mean, being with her in general was more than a little special, and I had no idea if our first time in the cave was a one off due to our bonding, or if that was the way our sex life would always be, but just being with her, just kissing her, just letting her head rest on my shoulder while her fingers squeezed themselves into mine, there was something completely different to anything I had felt before. Okay, realistically, I had no way of really knowing that. I'd had a few flings, and my time with Faye had been cut tragically short, so I had nothing to accurately compare it to. Maybe this was just what love felt like. Maybe it was a byproduct of our rapidly deepening bond. Maybe this was something unique to an Evo-Inquisitor relationship. Maybe this was something entirely new and a result of our places as both halves of the Mantle, but it felt... Strong.

Even I could see that was a strange word to use, but it was the only one that felt right. Emma, as easy as our time together had been since we left the cave, was still doing much better than common logic should have allowed. Her father had just been killed, we were heading to an island to find her mother with no idea if she had actually made it out, we were still being hunted, and we had nothing close to a plan of where to go next - at least not any further than my need to burn Rome to the ground along with the Praetorians who lived there. Emma should have been a mess, she should have been distraught, she should have been panicking, or at least pretty damned worried. But there was nothing.

More than that, I should have been fucking furious! They killed Bob. They killed Rhodri. They attacked me and my friends again, and they had come pretty close to finishing the job. After every single encounter I'd had with these fuckers before, I had been left with a burning, rageful compulsion to chase my enemies down, to hunt them to the ends of the earth, and to rip them to pieces in the slowest, most agonizing way possible. I'd been filled with a fury so blinding that I had barely contained the urge to jump straight into the next fight.

But now, there was nothing.

I was calm.

And that kiss, that single moment of connection, was all it took to settle my nerves about finding Isabelle. It was like I was pulling strength straight from the wonderful woman beside me, like she was grounding me, like she was the source of this new patience inside me. Maybe, by that logic, she was pulling strength from me, too. Maybe my presence in her mind and beside her body was what she needed to temper that soul-consuming grief that should have brought her to her knees by now.

But what was more interesting, I wasn't concerned about it. I had been very aware of how Emma should have been grieving in the cave. I knew it was coming, even if it hadn't come yet. I had been very aware of how hard and painful life would be for her in the immediate future. Now? I don't know. It's not like I didn't care; I absolutely did, but it was as if something within us was silently leaching away that concern and replacing it with something that could only be called strength.

"You're feeling that connection too, aren't you?" Her voice yanked my thoughts back to the moment.

"I'm certainly feeling something."

Her eyes flicked to mine, a flash of worry behind them. "Is everything okay?"

"I'm not sure," I admitted carefully. "Something is different."

"What do you mean?"

"I should be... well, I should be raging, I should be furious, I should be baying for blood, I have been after every other fight I've been in, but I'm not. It's like being with you is calming me. And you, you should be..."

"In pieces," she nodded, resting her head back on my shoulder. "I know. I've considered that too. Emotionally, I know I should be feeling the pain and the sadness, and I am, but it's not what it was in the castle when you first told me that he was gone. At that moment, it felt like the whole world was about to swallow me, that there would never be any light or happiness in my life again. It was... haunting. But here, with you, I don't feel that. Professionally, I'm wondering if this is something to do with our bond. Do Evos dampen their pain somehow? Can they control their emotions like that?"

I shook my head. "Not that I know of. I was certainly never able to do it."

"Hmm," Emma nodded again. "That's interesting. I feel like I'm taking my strength from you. I know I will have to grieve properly, and probably soon, but until we get to safety again, I know I need to keep going, and I'm using our bond and your strength to help me. I don't suppose you know if that's normal?"

I shook my head again. "No idea. I'm sorry. I'm still working with only half a deck, but Uri said he was never bonded. His wife was human, so he doesn't know either. But our bond is different anyway. And Evo bonding with an Inquisitor has never happened before, or if it has, it was so far back that there are no records of it. And then you have to consider the Mantle."

Her head shot up. "Oh my god, I've just realized. I'm the Mantle, too, aren't I? Just a different version of it than you."

I chuckled again. "Yup. Welcome to the club, I guess."

"Shit," she huffed. "That makes working this all out a lot harder because the Mantle is something unique to us, and I won't be able to work out which part of this is from a normal bond, which part is because of our inter-species bond, and which parts are unique to the Mantle."

"Professional curiosity in overdrive, eh?" I smirked at her.

She smiled self-consciously. "Sorry, It's the way I've always been. If something doesn't make sense, then my brain fixates on it until I figure it out.

"Don't apologize. I like it." I smiled and kissed her forehead. "And I was the same when it came to computers and things like that. I just needed to know how they worked."

She smiled back at me. "I saw that in your memories. It's funny how you were that way with machines, and I was like it with people."

"Two halves of the same coin," I murmured.

"Like our roles as the Mantle," she nodded softly.

"I guess we really were made for each other," I smiled, casting a look up at the air steward who was pacing up the central aisle, checking the tray tables on our seats were up ready for landing.

Emma blinked. "You think that's possible?"

"What?"

"That this was all sort of... preordained?"

"I don't have the first idea," I snorted out a laugh. "I have a Dragon literally living in my head, and I'm not sure how he got there, only that Uri was carrying it before, but it needed to choose me. It's safe to say his choice has been made, but I don't know how, when, or why. Then there's you. We'd never met before, but the Dragon..."

"Elliot," she corrected me with a grin.

"Elliot," I rolled my eyes with another laugh, "seems to have had plans for you the whole time. So either he made that decision the moment we met, or he knew all along. So I don't have the slightest clue of how any of this works. All I can say with any sort of certainty is that I feel like I've known you forever. And I don't mean that in some sort of grand, romantic statement; I mean it literally."

"Yeah," she sighed, turning to glance out of the window and over the rapidly approaching island. "I know what you mean. Like this, us..." she gestured her hand between us, "...is just another chapter of a story that's been told countless times before."

"So the question is: Was this really pre-planned by the Dragon, sorry, by Elliot," another eye roll, "or is this our story, and he's just feeding us contextual information?"

"Oh, that's a good point." She nodded enthusiastically. "Like, he's done this before, so he's feeding us his experiences, and we're just interpreting that as a feeling that we're part of something older."

I shrugged. "Unfortunately, I don't think that's an answer you're going to find anytime soon. Not unless you ask him."

"Wait, you can talk to him?!?"

I laughed again. "No, Em. I can't talk to him."

"Why not? Have you ever tried?"

I opened my mouth to speak and then let my jaw fall open. "No. It never even occurred to me to try!"

She giggled in that melodic, beautiful way she did before she shook her head. "You really aren't a people person, are you? Okay, when we find my mum and get settled, we're going to give it a go."

My eye twitched. "I can't tell if that's a good idea or not. I mean, what do you say to a Dragon?"

"I dub thee Elliot, most masterful of metaphysical creatures." She grinned at me. "Maybe we should bring steak, just in case."

"Oh right," I laughed. "You've never seen him yet, have you?"

"No, why?"

"He's huge. You'd need at least a couple of fully grown cows."

"I'll see what I can rustle up," she giggled back. "Okay, it looks like we're going to land soon. We'll need to get a cab from the airport to the villa. It's on a Peninsula just outside Kalafati."

"Got it. I'll get us through the airport and then into a taxi, but you'll have to give directions." I nodded.

She leaned up and kissed my cheek. "Nothing like a bit of teamwork, eh?"

********

It took about an hour to get through Mykonos airport. Still, with every single person there, along with every single computer system, letting us pass through before suddenly having every memory or record of us wiped away, it was relatively uneventful. Finding a taxi on the rank outside the main terminal was just as easy, and we were soon traveling east, across the center of the island, around the southern base of Mount Palaiokastro, and then swinging southeast toward the coast.

Mykonos was, in a word, breathtaking. Crystal-clear, turquoise waters, impossibly clear and inviting, surrounded a coastline of pristine white-sand beaches so perfect they almost looked sculpted. Those picture-postcard, white-painted houses overlooked them on sunlit tiers, all of them with those trademark blue shutters and the occasional cobalt blue dome. Churches, their bells hanging silently in the midday light, were dotted throughout the settlements, but it wasn't hard to imagine those bells ringing out over the sea. Windmills, or things that I assumed were windmills, were dotted around the landscape, like silent sentinels watching the relaxed passage of time. Although there wasn't much in the way of vegetation on the land, that meant that you could see for miles in any direction, especially as we passed over the slopes at the base of the mountain, and the Aegean sea stretched out to fill the view to the horizon. Blue on perfect blue, just like I had always imagined it to be. It was sunny, it was warm, and the gentlest of breezes kept that heat at a pleasant, relaxing level without ever becoming oppressive.

For someone used to complaining about the weather, it was the closest thing I could imagine to paradise.

Finally, after skirting around the town of Kalafati and heading south toward a little outcropping of land, we finally left the main road and pulled onto a narrow, gravel-covered dirt track.

"Stop!" Emma suddenly barked, the taxi driver slamming his foot onto the break more through reflex than anything else. Her hand tightened in mine, and her eyes were scanning rapidly over the landscape.

My focus, however, was firmly fixed on her. "What is it?"

She swallowed hard. "Pete, my mother's the leader of our order. She is a literal princess. She is one of the most important people of our species... and there isn't a single guard on the road. There should be a car ready to block the road, an armed guard ready to check IDs and confirm who we are, but there isn't. That shouldn't be possible. There should be someone here."

I nodded slowly. "How many guards should be with her?"

"I don't know, maybe ten? Two with her at all times, the rest to watch the perimeter and guard the road. But that's without taking into account the fact that the only ones with her would have been the members of her detail who made it out of the castle, and we know that at least two of them were killed.

"The two guards who helped us get to the car pool." I nodded again and turned my eyes back toward the distant outline of the peninsula's plunge into the sea. I let my mind expand. "There are twenty-three voids out there."

"No," she shook her head vigorously. "Nononono, that's far too many."

"Could any other friendly Inquisitors have made it here before we did?"

She shook her head again. "No, she'd be on security lockdown. Nobody on the team would be allowed to tell anyone else, not even friendly guards, where they are. And even if they ignored that rule - which they wouldn't do - if there were that many friendly guards, at least one of them would definitely be on this road."

"Shit," I muttered under my breath.

"Can you..."

I shook my head, already knowing what she was about to ask. "No, I can't tell which of the voids is her. I need to get down there and deal with this personally." I cast a quick look at the driver. His eyes were still vacantly fixed on the road, his mind and his body running on autopilot while he was under my influence. "Back up, make it look like you took a wrong turn, and then get us back onto the main road." The car started moving immediately. "Once I get out, you take her a mile down the road. Wait one hour; if I'm not back by then, you take her back to the airport." I then handed Emma my bank card. "If something goes wrong, run..." she started to speak as her eyes went wide, but I held up my hand to stop her. "...Don't argue with me on this, Em. I can't do what I need to do if I'm worrying about you. If something happens to me, there is enough money on this card to let you disappear forever. You know where I live; you know where the Sect is from my memories. Try there first. If you can't get there, or if you don't trust them, then you run, and you keep running until you find someone friendly to help you. Do you understand?"

"No, I won't! I'm not leaving you or my mother to..."

"Emma!" I barked at her. "I need you to stop fucking around and listen! This may be nothing, this may be something, but something that is easy to deal with. This may kill me. We don't know yet, and we won't know until I get down there. We can't turn around and walk away, not while there's a chance that your mother is in there; neither of us is willing to leave her. So we need to prepare for the worst possible outcome."

"Pete, please, I can't..."

"You can, Emma, and you will. You are strong, much stronger than you think, and you can do this. I need you to be safe. I can't do this while also worrying about you and where you are."

"Then I'll come with you! You won't have to worry if I am right next to you, shielded!"

I paused. That was some pretty sound logic. "You really want to see that? You know there's going to be violence if the Praetorians are down there, and we still don't know if your mother is still alive. Is that something you think you can handle?"

She opened her mouth for a moment, apparently thinking about that possible outcome before her eyes hardened. "We do this together, or we don't do it at all." She nodded firmly.

I held her eyes for a few heartbeats before sighing deeply. "Okay, fine. But you do what I say, when I say it. This is my world, and as bad as things were at the castle, we weren't the ones initiating it. This is hunting, and that is the part you were most against in your office."

She nodded again. "I remember. You said you had to hunt them down to stop them from killing the people you loved. This is what you meant."

I held her eye. "You sure you want this?"

The look of steely resolution in her gaze was unmistakable. "I'm sure."

"Okay, you ready?"

"I'm ready."

"Let's g..."

I didn't get a chance to finish my sentence as the front passenger window exploded in a shower of glass fragments, and the driver's head snapped to the side, a spray of arterial blood erupting over his side window. The crack of a distant gunshot echoed through the air a second later as the sound of the gunshot caught up with the bullet. "DOWN!" I shouted over her squeak of surprise, grabbing her head and pushing it down toward her knees, out of view of our window, "Fucking assholes!" I growled as I kept the pressure on her head to keep her head down, and casting a last look at the innocent cabbie. Another bystander killed in the name of the Praetorian's megalomaniacal crusade. "I'm so sick of this!"

"What do we do? If they see us charging toward the villa, they'll kill my mother." She panted, her eyes darting around wildly but making no attempt to sit up.

"Then we can't let them see us," I answered plainly, trying to get a good layout of the area around us without letting the sniper know that we were still there. "They haven't fired again. I'm hoping that means they didn't know we're here."

"What? Then why would they shoot the driver if they didn't know it was us?"

I frowned. "We'll be sure to ask them. They're gonna want to send someone out here to check who he was and to get the car off the road. Not even they can afford to leave a murder victim out in plain sight."

"You want to stay here?!?"

"Beats you being shot out there," I shrugged.

"How are you going to stop them from killing us as soon as they get here?"

"I'm working on it. How long is the track to the house?"

"You're working on it?!?" She blinked at me until I arched my eyebrow at her. "I'm not sure. I haven't been here in twenty years. Maybe about a mile?"

"Decent shot," I nodded. "And it will take them about twenty minutes to get here. Okay, kneel on the floor." She blinked at me again. "I need you off the seat so I can pull it down and get us into the trunk."

Understanding dawned on her face, and she scrambled into the footwell of the backseat. Emma wasn't a big girl, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a tight squeeze nonetheless, and with even less room available to her due to her not being able to show any part of her body to the window, it took her a good few minutes longer to get down there than it usually would have. Finally, though, I managed to slowly reach up to the seat release catch and pull the backrest of the rear bench toward us. Fortunately, the trunk was empty, and it took much less time for Emma to climb into the trunk than it did for her to get into the foot well.

I must admit, though, getting myself in behind her was a much more awkward affair, and I was only able to pull the seat back into place with the use of my powers. There was absolutely no way I could have done it without them or some sort of expertise in contortionism.              

With the seat back in place and the trunk lid firmly closed, it was pitch black in there. There was only the sound of our breathing and the gentle rustle of the wind moving around outside. Neither of us said anything, but I could feel her hand flexing against my hip. Luckily, thanks to our bond, we didn't need to speak to be able to communicate.

"One," her voice echoed through her mind as visions of the violence I had unleashed in the castle flashed behind her eyes. I understood immediately. It was not something I had ever needed to do, but I had heard of some people using this - or something like this - as a form of self-calming. It was a way to ground herself when things got too stressful for her.

"Two,"

"Three"

"Are you okay?" I whispered to her, trying to let her feel the strength and resolve in my voice.

She swallowed hard. "I'm okay. I'm just worried."

"We'll be okay. I won't let anything happen to you."

"I..." there was a pause. "I wasn't worried about me."

"I know. Isabelle will be fine, too."

"How do you know that?"

"Because she's too important to them. They need her alive. If they wanted to kill her, they'd have done it already."

"How do you know they haven't?"

"Because they wouldn't still be here if they did."

"What if it's a trap? What if they've killed her and are waiting for us?"

I shook my head, even though I knew she couldn't see me. "That was an awful place to spring an ambush. They'd have waited until we were much further down the road, and they wouldn't have sprung it at all unless they were certain they could overwhelm everyone in the car immediately. The shot that killed the driver was a good one, but it was taken by someone told to turn back an attack and not take any chances. They are buying time."

"So you think she's still alive?"

"Yeah. They'll want to take her to another compound like the one they took me to. She's too important to kill outright; she knows too much, things they will want her to tell them. She can give them information about the entire Inquisition order. Hell, if they turned her, she could even legitimize their crusade."

"Do you think they'd be able to?"

"Turn her?"

"Yeah,"

"God, no," I snorted. "She'd die first. But it's gonna take them a couple of months to work that out. But that means that she's alive now. I'd bet they're waiting for extraction, probably a boat. It's not like they can just take her in cuffs back to the airport and load her onto a plane without drawing attention to themselves. And they will have no idea when the rest of the Inquisition is coming, either. So they are hunkering down and repelling boarders until their own people get here."

She nodded. I couldn't see it, but I could feel her head moving next to mine. "What are you going to do to them?"

"Whatever I have to. We aren't losing your mum today. If that means that they all have to die, so be it."

She nodded again. "Thank you. I can't lose her, too."

"You won't." I'm not sure why, but my confidence in that statement was as solid as granite. I wasn't certain why I was so certain, but something was telling me that not only was she alive, but she was in that villa. Nothing from my powers could tell me that. As far as my abilities were concerned, there were twenty-three voids in that villa, and I had no way of knowing if she was one of them. But I knew. I don't know why, but I absolutely knew that she was alive and being held in there. And I also knew that hell itself would soon seem like a pleasant vacation compared to what I was about to do to the people holding her.

About fifteen minutes later, the sound of footsteps on gravel started to come from outside the car. Only a few minutes after that, the voices came. "You two stay back while I check the vehicle," one of them said, his voice barely above a whisper, but the authority was clear in it. There were two distinctive sets of grunts before the sound of rifles being cocked echoed into the trunk. Emma stiffened noticeably.

The car rocked a little as a door was opened, then again as the first man checked the interior. "Wow, Gibson put that shot right through his temple at 1,500 yards."

"For fuck sake, don't tell him that. We'll never hear the end of it," another voice grumbled.

"Car's empty," the first voice said. "Cover the trunk while I open it."

Emma's breath started coming in short, panicked pants.

"I'm right here, babe," my voice whispered through her mind. "You're safe."

"But..."

"No buts. Do you trust me?"

"Yes, of course."

"Then we'll be fine."

There was another jolt through the body of the car, then another, then another as one of the men tried to open the trunk, but my powers had made the mechanism weigh more than the car itself and no human alive could possibly hope to open it. "Trunk's locked. Put a few bullets in there to be sure."

A few seconds later, daylight pierced the inky blackness of the trunk lid as a dozen silenced bullets smashed through it, each of them crashing harmlessly into the shield I had put up and dropping onto the carpeted floor. Emma's frantic eyes found mine in the suddenly banished darkness, and I flashed her a wink. "Told you.

"Okay," the voice from outside came again. "It's empty. Let's get the corpse out of the way, and I'll drive the car back to the villa. We can toss the driver into the sea, then take it easy until the rest of the team gets here tomorrow. That bitch will wish she told us what the boss wanted to know."

I flashed another glance to Emma, whose eyes widened at the implication. Isabelle was alive, and we had until tomorrow to get her out of there. "Never underestimate people's need to open their mouths." I grinned at her. "They'll tell you all sorts of things if they don't think anyone is listening."

"She's alive!"

"And that's exactly how she's going to stay. We can wait in here, quietly, until these lot fuck off, then hit them when they least expect it."

A few minutes later, the car started rocking more violently, the sounds of grunting and wheezing coming from the front of the car as the guards pushed the driver out of the front seat and into the passenger side. "Jesus fucking christ, how the hell can one guy be so damned heavy."

"Taxi driver," another voice said. "Sit on your ass all day, everyday, that's what that life does to you."

"He never heard of a gym? Or, I don't know, a fucking salad?"

"Dude, have you seen your waistline? If you get popped, you ain't gonna be any easier to move."

"Fuck you," the first voice said through a smattering of chuckles from the others. "Go on, in the back. Let's get back to the villa. Enjoy the sun for a bit longer before we are shipped back to base again."

A few more lurches of the car later -- accompanied by the satisfying thunk-thunk-thunk of doors slamming shut -- the engine rumbled to life. Then came that unmistakable feeling of motion as the car started rolling, the floor beneath us vibrating like a cheap motel bed on coin-operated overdrive.

The bigger bumps - from larger rocks or pot holes - were worse. Those things threatened to bounce us straight into the lid of the trunk, it was only my powers that anchored us to the floor of it instead, preventing us from causing a loud enough bang to warrant further investigation by our new ride-mates, but also hitting the lid hard enough to do some actual damage. I didn't know if I was capable of getting a concussion, but I was pretty sure that Emma was, and now wasn't the time to experiment.

In only a few minutes, the slight whine of the brakes told us that we were slowing down, and then, a few seconds later, our bodies were lurched slightly as the car came to a halt. "A'right, lets get fatboy over the cliff," one of the voices said from the front. "Then I need a fucking beer. It's been a long couple of days."

"Any more news from the boss about the castle?" another voice asked as the car doors were opened.

"Nah, nothing new," the first voice answered with a sigh. "Huge losses, but it looks like the targets were taken out, and they captured a few stragglers, too." My ears pricked up. "Doubt we'll hear much more until we get back to Rome, though. You know what the prefects are like with telling us grunts what's going on."

The car started rocking again as, apparently, the three men started to pull the body of the driver out of the front passenger seat. "I had a few friends in one of the teams sent to the castle." A third voice said. "Maybe they'll be able to tell me what happened."

"If they made it out."

There was a pause and another sigh. "Yeah. Finger's crossed, eh?"

"A'right, you got him?" The first voice asked.

Two sets of "yeah"s answered quickly, albeit with a strained edge to their voices, before the first man spoke again. "Okay, let's go. Slowly now."

Emma and I lay there in silence, not even risking a heavy breath as the sounds of crunching gravel moved further and further away. Finally, though, we couldn't hear them any more, and even after waiting for about another half an hour, they never came back. "Are they gone?" Emma's voice echoed through my mind.

"I'm checking," I responded, even the voice in our heads sounding distracted. I had let my mind expand again; the voids were everywhere, but with some concentration, I was slowly able to get a read on where each of them were in relation to me.

It wasn't as easy as it sounded. My mind, for all its astounding abilities, was only able to really track the voids in two dimensions; namely, I could tell which direction they were in, and how far away they were, meaning that as they moved - and at least half of them were moving - I was slowly building an idea of the patterns in where they all were in relation to each other. There were problems with it too, though. For example, I couldn't see - or sense - through any of the voids. If one of them passed behind another one, even if there were dozens of feet between them, the one at the back was invisible to me for the whole time the front one was obstructing my "view." There were other problems, too. Yes, after a while, I was confident that I hadn't missed any voids, and had an accurate count of them. I also knew, roughly speaking, where they were, but I had no information at all about how that translated to the villa.

One of them, for example, was above me - obviously on an upper floor - and was about twenty feet away. But I had no idea whether there were any walls or windows between us. If there was a solid wall blocking his view of the car, then I could get out with Emma, fuck her brains out over the hood of it, and he would never have seen us. But if it was a window, he would be on us before the lid of the trunk was even all the way open. Multiply that by the more than twenty sets of eyes guarding the villa, and getting out of the trunk unseen started to become either a pretty easy or incredibly dubious prospect depending on where the car had been parked in relation to the rest of the villa.

"Can you see anything out of the bullet holes?" I asked Emma.

She tried to turn her body, but there simply wasn't enough room to move. "No, not really. I can see through two of them, but all I can see is a wall."

Okay, time for plan B. "I'm gonna try to get out through the back seats again," I said slowly. "I'll keep the shield up in case they spot me, but stay here until I give the all clear. Just in case."

"Pete," She said before I could move. "If they see you..."

"I know," I breathed. "They might kill Isabelle, just so she isn't rescued. But I can't think of another option."

"Could we wait until dark?"

"I mean, yeah, we could. But if their buddies are coming tomorrow, we'd be cutting our time pretty short. We need to get Isabelle, then get the hell out of here before they turn up."

"Just... be careful, okay?"

"I won't do anything to risk your mom's life, I promise."

"I know you won't," I could just about see her smile through the darkness. "But, still, be careful for me."

I leaned forward and kissed her softly. "I will."

My mind reached out and depressed the small button to release the back seats and I slowly lowered them forward, all while keeping a close eye on the movement of the voids. If any of them froze, there was a good chance they could see us, and if any started rushing toward us then we were going to have to move fast.

Nothing happened.

I slowly crept out of the trunk, keeping myself low and twisting my body until I was lying along the back seat. I took a deep breath and then slowly... so very slowly... lifted my head to look out of the window

"Oh for fuck sake," I groaned.

"What is it?" Emma whispered from the trunk

"We're in a garage," I had to bite down on the chuckle that wanted to rise from my chest at the ridiculousness of it all. "Come on, we can get out fine. Nobody can see us."

I opened one of the car doors and climbed out, before turning and helping Emma out as well. I could have opened the trunk for her, but the guards thought it had been locked, so leaving it open after she climbed out would have only raised suspicions if one of them came back this way, and slamming it closed would cause far more noise than we could afford. An open car door, on the other hand, that would have been a lot easier to explain away, especially considering the guards had never closed the front passenger door after hauling the driver out of there.

Holding one of my hands, Emma pulled herself out of the car. "I remember this place," she said with a soft, nostalgic smile on her face. "We used to play hide 'n' seek around here. There should be a door into the kitchen area of the villa just on the other side of the courtyard. Straight across from there." She pointed to the open double doors that allowed entry to the garage. Technically, we were out in the open, but the three Praetorians had parked the taxi toward the very back of the garage, meaning that anyone wanting to see this far into it would need to be standing directly outside the doors, and my constant monitoring of the voids around us told me that nobody was anywhere near us. Of course, that didn't count for the possibility of blocking Evo's in the area - those were infinitely harder to spot - but I had my walls up, and none of them were standing in front of the doors either. "It's only about twenty feet."

Twenty feet. That was about how far away one of those voids was, and it was above us. If there was a window overlooking the gravel courtyard, there would be no way to cross unseen.

Unless...

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, sifting through all of the voids in the area. The one I had been worried about was still there, but in a slightly different place. It seemed to be wandering back and forth along a straight line, always at that higher elevation, but getting further away, then stopping for a moment, then coming back, pausing again in the middle, then moving away in the opposite direction, and pausing again. The void - or, more accurately, the Praetorian Inquisitor it represented - was patrolling, and one stop on his route took him to a point directly overlooking the courtyard. "Was there a window above the door to the kitchen?" I asked quietly

"I... I can't remember." she frowned. "I was six when I was here last. I'm sorry."

"It's okay, we will just have to move quickly." I took her hand and led her toward the garage doors, pressing her to the blindspot by the wall as I waited. The guard stopped above the courtyard, waited for about ten seconds, then turned and carried on toward the back of the villa. I waited another five seconds and darted my head out. The window was right there, but, for the moment, it was empty. "Okay, we'll wait 'til he comes back, then move over to the door. But stay close to the wall, and try to run quietly, okay?"

She gave me a short, curt nod and kept her eyes on me while we waited. The guard started walking back toward the window, coming into view as I darted my head back into cover. Another ten seconds, and he was moving on again. "Go!" I hissed, yanking on her hand and almost dragging her across the painfully exposed stretch of the courtyard and crashing into the wall as silently as possible. My mind stretched out again, this time looking for people on the opposite side of the kitchen door.

Nothing.

I reached down and gently tried the doorknob. It twisted open easily and the door quietly inched open. "In here," I whispered, watching as the guard above us started his return journey. He probably couldn't see us from his place above, but it wasn't a chance I was willing to take. I dragged Emma inside, pushing her into a corner next to a cupboard, and pushed the door almost closed again, holding it a fraction of an inch from the frame just so it wouldn't make a noise.

The guard paused above us. I could hear the creaking of the floor under his weight. Ten seconds. Then he started to move again. I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding, my eyes still locked on the sounds coming from the ceiling above us, and gently pushed the door fully closed.

I turned to look at Emma. She was still staring at the ceiling, tense as a wire, every sound from beyond the walls sharpening the edge in her eyes. But as the moments stretched and no footsteps came, she let out a slow breath. Her gaze flicked to mine. I gave her a soft nod and turned to take in the rest of the room.

I froze.

I didn't speak. Didn't breathe.

There were bodies. Everywhere.

The kitchen wasn't small, not by any reasonable standard. But the eight bodies scattered around it made it feel cramped, claustrophobic -- like the walls had closed in to keep the dead from escaping.

One of them was draped across the heavy old dining table, his body twisted, arms limp over the edges like a discarded puppet. Another was slumped against a bench, head tilted back, blood dried like rust beneath him. The rest lay crumpled where they'd fallen, limbs tangled, faces slack in death.

Beside me, Emma choked back a gasp. Her hand flew to her mouth too late to catch it fully. I saw the recognition hit her -- not just horror, but knowing.

She still wasn't used to death. I was, but the shock of it still hit me. However, my brain was already working, dissecting the scene.

Five of the dead were riddled with bullets.

The man on the table had taken so many rounds to the chest it was hard to tell where the armor ended and the body began. The one by the bench looked similar -- his torso a ragged ruin of flesh and blood-soaked cloth. Another lay just inside the corridor doorway, flat on his back. His hand still clutched at the torn mess of his throat, eyes wide, mouth frozen mid-scream, the horror of his dying moments etched forever onto his face.

Numbers four and five were deeper into the room, their bodies crumpled where they'd fallen -- cartridges scattered like brass petals all around them. Both were slumped forward, one hand outstretched, the other still clenched around nothing.

Their weapons were gone. But the scorch marks on the floor, the blood spray, the tight pattern of casings, broken crockery, spilled food -- it all told the same story.

These two had gone down fighting.

I could almost see it. The moment that the Praetorians had burst into the room through the same door we had just entered through. The first and second guards were taken completely by surprise, both of them cut down before they could so much as raise their weapons, their breakfast had still been in their hands when they had been hit. The third man, the one who had been hit in the neck, had been given a little more time to react; he'd gotten a few shots off before taking that round to the throat. Four and five hadn't been in the kitchen when the attack came, but they had come running to help their friends, both of them had put up a good fight, using the doorway and the kitchen cabinets for cover as they tried to move toward the third man, but neither of them had made it.

I turned around, there was blood on the wall next to the door. That meant that they had at least taken some of the Praetorians with them, but they had all been killed protecting Isabelle.

My stomach turned. I swept the room again -- slower this time. Counting. Eight bodies. Five gunned down in the fight. Which meant--

I saw them.

Tucked into the far corner of the kitchen. Behind the table. Out of the worst of the mess -- like someone had tried to keep them separate. Or maybe they'd been forced to kneel there. Neat. Ordered. Lined up like cattle.

Three men.

Hands bound behind their backs with cable ties, digging deep into pale wrists.

All three of them had been executed.

Single shots. Close range. One each to the head.

Clean. Efficient. Brutal.

The blood had fanned out behind them in wide, dark smears across the stone. Flies were already gathering. They hadn't fought. They hadn't been allowed to. Or maybe they had fought somewhere else in the house, maybe they had been brought here to see the fates of the rest of their team.

Executed.

This wasn't combat -- this was control. Malicious, malevolent, sadistic control.

Behind me, I heard Emma make a small, broken sound -- barely a breath -- as she recognized some of the dead guards, but it gutted me worse than the scene in front of me.

"No..." she whispered.

She was moving before I could stop her -- stumbling forward, dropping hard to her knees beside one of the bodies. Fingers trembling as they hovered just above the man's shoulder -- like touching him might break what little was left.

"Cale," she breathed.

A name. A member of her mother's security detail that she would have seen every day, perhaps for years. A man who had dedicated his life to protect her. People who were supposed to protect all of them.

Emma didn't sob. She didn't cry out. She didn't scream. She couldn't, and she knew it. But the way her body shook -- the way her breath caught in her throat -- it was worse.

A silent kind of breaking.

She bowed her head -- forehead pressing against the cold shoulder of the dead man at her knees. One of her mother's men. One of the men, I suddenly understood from her mind, that she had seen countless times over the years he had been in her mother's service. One of the people who was supposed to always come back. Her fingers curled tight in the blood-soaked fabric of his jacket -- clinging like a child might cling to a parent's hand.

I saw her shoulders hitch -- once, twice -- a soundless sob strangled into nothing. The kind that wrecks your lungs but never reaches the air.

"Emma," I whispered, my voice barely above a breath as I reached down and rested my hand on her back, my eyes firmly fixed on the door, but my mind still tracking the voids around us.

For a heartbeat she didn't move. Then, slowly, she let go of the jacket. Fingers unclenching like they didn't want to obey, but her mind telling them that they had to. When she looked up at me, her eyes were glassy, red-rimmed but dry. Not because there were no tears for her fallen friends, but because there was no time for them.

"We have to find your mother," I said, as gently as I could.

She nodded. Just once, but something had shifted behind her eyes. Seeing those five men gunned down in battle would have been hard, of course it would. But seeing the other three, executed, butchered, murdered, as if they were nothing, that was something else entirely. Her eyes were sharper, colder, infinitely more dangerous. She understood properly now, she'd had a concept of the people we were dealing with from the castle, but this was different. She knew what would happen to the people - what I would do to the people - who executed helpless men like this, whether they were under orders or not.

And when the time came, she would in no way try to stay my hand.

"We'll come back for them," I whispered, nodding to the men around our feet. She just nodded again, her face a mask of pain and grim determination. I took a deep breath and stretched my mind again.

Twenty-three voids. One of them was Isabelle, I still didn't know why I was so sure she was still alive, and now didn't seem to be the time to question it, but I knew. Of all the voids, she would be one of the ones that wasn't moving. She'd be restrained. Ideally in a place away from any windows or any other obvious means of escape or rescue. She would also be guarded, meaning that a number of other voids would be close to her, not close enough for her to lash out at, but close enough to make sure she couldn't move a muscle without being seen. But those men wouldn't be completely still like she was, they'd be pacing, or at least fidgeting.

It didn't take long for me to find what I was looking for. Or more accurately, identify the small group of people who weren't moving in a predictable, patrolling pattern like everyone else was. But something made me pause. I could see the voids as clear as day now, but there were other things in the room with them, things that I could only really focus on because they weren't moving. Slight distortions in the background noise of-whatever it was I was looking at. Like convection currents in the air above hot asphalt.

Blocking Evos. Three of them, in a room with two other voids, one of which was staying perfectly still, a foot or so lower than the others. Isabelle-sitting. Okay, four people were guarding Isabelle, three of them were Evos, and none of them were more than a few dozen feet away. What about the rest of the villa? I let my mind watch, but even though I occasionally caught glimpses of other distortions, none of them were staying still enough for me to even count, let alone track. Half the time, I didn't know if I had seen anything at all, but it was enough to tell me that there were more people in the house than just those creating the voids, and enough to tell me that we had been very lucky not to be spotted by any of them on our flight from the car to this kitchen. "What's in that direction?" My mind whispered to Emma's as my finger pointed toward the three distortions.

"Um..." Emma frowned. "Over there is the dining room," she nodded directly across the halfway on the other side of the kitchen doors. "From there..." she frowned a little deeper, trying to remember the layout of a building she hadn't stepped foot in for more than two decades. "I think the lounge area was to the right of that. That's roughly where you're pointing to."

"Okay," I nodded. "We go straight into the dining room, we don't want to be caught in the hallway. I don't think there's anyone in there, but there are Evo's in the house, blocking me, so I can't be sure."

Emma knew what I was talking about from my memories. She swallowed hard but didn't say anything, she just fixed her eyes on the closed door across the hallway and nodded again. I popped my head out to make sure there was nobody near us. I knew that none of the voids were in the area-they were all watching the perimeter, and it made sense that any other Evos would be doing the same-but I needed to be sure.

The hallway was empty in both directions. I tugged Emma's hand and we crossed quickly, keeping low, slipping through the door on the opposite side of it. Luckily no one was inside. If there had been, they wouldn't have lasted long.

I let the powerball in my palm flicker out, and the shadows folded in around us. There was plenty of light coming in through the two small windows in the room, but that just made the shadows between them seem all the darker. The quiet felt deafening. My heart was thundering against my ribs, a hard, pulsing beat that drowned out the world for a moment. Adrenaline was burning through me--though it didn't feel like the kind I used to know. Charlotte had warned me about that. She said Evos didn't process it the way humans did-it lingered, it festered, it was completely different to how it had always felt in my life before my powers. I understood now.

It wasn't fear. Not even fury. It was something colder. Something sharper.

It was intent.

A deep, unshakable drive to act. To move. To destroy anything that stood in my way. I could feel it under my skin, humming like static, whispering that I had the power, that I should use it--now. It wasn't nerves. It wasn't panic. It was pure, focused purpose. It was violence, waiting to be given shape.

But I wasn't alone.

That changed everything.

I'd protected Emma before--through the castle, through the flight down the mountainside--and both times I'd been confident I could keep her safe. I had my shield. As long as she stayed close, nothing could touch her. Even the Praetorians on the mountain, disorganized and scattered as they were, hadn't posed much of a threat out there. I had the advantage. I was the advantage. And sure, maybe there was some arrogance in that--but it was an arrogance earned. I'd backed it up.

This wasn't the same. Not even close.

Emma was still covered, shielded, protected, she had been from the moment the bullet had shattered the car window. But Isabelle wasn't. I didn't know where she was--not exactly--and my shield needed sightlines to work. She was exposed. Vulnerable. Guarded. And that changed the equation entirely. A single noise, one wrong step, all it would take was a creak in the door as it opened, for one of her guards to see that I wasn't another Praetorian, and she could die before I even laid eyes on her. That wasn't a risk I could take.

Emma would lose her mother.

And I'd lose the strongest ally I'd ever had.

I wanted to move. I wanted to go in hard and fast, crush everything between us and Isabelle, put an end to the threat posed to Isabelle before the window to act closed. I wanted to fight, I wanted to kill, I wanted to make them suffer for the entirety of the short time they had left to live, just for the sheer audacity of threatening my family!

But I couldn't. Not yet.

This wasn't just about winning. It was about surviving. About keeping Emma alive. About rescuing Isabelle and giving us a chance to fight our way out. I couldn't make a move until I was certain it wouldn't make everything worse. That meant patience. That meant planning. That meant knowing where the threats were and neutralizing them before they could react.

Because they would react. Reinforcements would come. And when they did, I'd have to hold this place, hold Emma and Isabelle and everything, against whatever the Praetorians sent.

And this room wasn't the place to do it.

Too exposed. Too quiet. Nowhere to run. If we were going to lie low, it should've been in the car. In here, it was only a matter of time before someone found us, and when they did, we'd be boxed in and Isabelle would be dead before I could do anything to stop it.

We couldn't wait. Not anymore.

It was time to come up with a plan.

"Okay, I need you to stay in cover. I'd bet my spleen that the people guarding your mom are armed. Let me go in first and..."

"Dude, you need to stop keeping on about it!" A voice interrupted me from just outside the window of the dining room. Emma and I immediately ducked out of sight behind one of the enormous table's chairs. "It was a dream. That's it!"

"A dream that we all had, at the same time?" A second voice hissed back. "You saw it too, you saw that Dragon thing. You saw the fires. You saw the bodies of our friends, and the rest of us running back to the city. You saw it just like I did, so don't pretend you're not a little freaked out by it!"

I blinked at Emma, who, in turn, looked just as surprised at me. The voice's description sounded an awful lot like the dream I'd had before our bonding; the one where I had first recognized Emma behind me.

"Alright, fine. It freaked me out, too," the first voice sighed. "But what exactly do you want me to do about it? I don't know shit about dreams, and I know even less about shared ones. I can only deal with what's in front of me, not some vision we all seemed to have dumped on us without any plausible explanation."

There was a pause. "Okay, that's fair." the second voice finally admitted. "It's just... shit, I don't know. Where the hell do you think it came from?"

"I'm not sure that's the important part," the first voice didn't sound as dismissive anymore. "Or at least that's not what I took away from it."

"What do you mean? What was more important?"

"Did you hear what that Dragon thing said?"

"That voice came from the Dragon??" The second voice gasped. "I didn't know where it came from!"

"Yeah, it was him. 'Run, little vermin. There is no rock you can hide beneath, no hole deep enough to protect you from what's coming, and no amount of running or fighting can save you! Your time will come soon enough, and your deaths will not be pleasant. I'll burn and bury you right here next to your friends, and then you'll know the real meaning of power.'" There was a quick pause. "That sounded like a warning to me, and I don't know about you, but I'm not planning on fucking around with a Dragon."

I blinked again, harder this time. Those were the exact words I'd used in my dream-except I wasn't the Dragon in that, not unless that was the Praetorians' interpretation of dream told them I was. Either way, I had never really considered the possibility that they had seen it, too. And that, in turn, raised some interesting questions about the other dreams I'd had before it.

I flashed a glance to Emma and started to creep closer to the window. The voids against the background white of reality showed me that they were just beneath the opening in the wall. There was no way for us to do anything without them hearing it, and if they heard it, they could intervene, or at least raise the alarm before we were ready to defend ourselves. As enlightening as their little chat was, they needed to either move on, or be dealt with.

"Look, man," one of them said, although I'd lost track of which one was which by now. "All I'm saying is that something strong enough to force a shared dream onto everyone we know, and then make that kind of threat? Dragon or not? That's something I don't want to deal with, Rome be fucked."

Fuck, well that made it more complicated. I literally just told Emma that I would try to spare those sorts of people. I lifted my head, just a few inches, just enough to peek my eyes over the sill of the window...

And the door to the dining room swung open.

Emma gasped as she spun around and both of the people stepping through it - a man and a woman - froze as they first spotted her, and then me.

Time froze.

It's amazing how much a mind can process in such infinitesimal periods of time. Things that, if you were given a picture of the moment later, you would struggle to pick out, and yet they were the first thing that jumped into my head. Firstly, they weren't armed. That was odd. But it was explained a heartbeat later by the fact that neither of them had auras.

They were Evos.

The look of surprise, then shock, then recognition, then determination, that washed over their faces all happened in less than a few seconds, but that is all I needed.

My mind smashed into theirs.

In 1983, the United States, along with some of their Caribbean allies, invaded the tiny island nation of Grenada. At the height of the battle, they had put more than seven thousand expertly trained and well equipped troops on Grenadian soil. There were less than two thousand poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly equipped soldiers opposing them. It was a roll-over.

The disparity between the two sides can accurately be summed up by the fact that at the time of the conflict, the population of the Island was a little over 110,000 people, the size of the American military in 1983 was over 2 million, meaning that the US could put twenty times more soldiers onto the Island nation than the number of people who actually lived there.

In military circles, Grenada had become a euphemism for a foregone conclusion. There was no way that Grenada could have possibly stood up to the might of the US, not even close.They never stood a chance. They could put up a good show, they could make things interesting for a while, but that was about it.

The same went for the two Evo minds that I smashed into.

I hit both minds at the same time, paralyzing them in place as they were forced to deal with the shock of having their blocking walls practically bulldozed out of existence in an instant. This wasn't the same as the fight at the compound where a bunch of Evos combined their power to attack me, those had all been on the mindscape together. This was different. There were two separate mindscapes, two separate battles, and two separate roll-overs.

The man on the left fell first. He was standing on his walls, maintaining his block, when they were obliterated beneath him and he was tossed back into his city like a ragdoll. By the time he respawned closer to his castle, I was already kicking the door in and incinerating everything inside, his entire conscious mind with it. Flames and smoke belched out of every window of the building, and his office - the room in the highest point of the tallest tower - was wracked by an inferno that only the dragon could muster. He dropped to his knees, his hands clasped to his head, the scream dying almost instantly on his lips before his avatar poofed out of existence.

The woman took a little longer. She had been closer to her well when her walls exploded inward. She somehow managed to dodge the hail of falling masonry - although I had no idea why she bothered, it's not like chunks of her own mind could hurt her - and flew at me, sword in hand as I crossed the threshold into her city. Just like one of those creatures who had jumped at me during one of my dreams, I caught her by the throat in mid-air, then let the fires take her. I was still holding the charred, crumbling remains of her avatar in my hand when I turned her castle to rubble.

It took less than five seconds of real world time to eliminate the threat, but during the few minutes of mindscape time I had been afforded during that slaughter. I came up with an idea.

********

Ten minutes, that's all it had taken.

People like to think that their minds are impenetrable fortresses, that their character and their personality are too big to be destroyed, that their mental resilience could withstand all but the most prolonged and brutal of tortures.

The two Evos had thought that too, and it had taken mere seconds to prove them wrong. The ten minutes had, instead, been taken up with creating what I dubbed my "mini-Toussants." Two Evos, completely unharmed to the casual observer, but whose entire conscious mind had been replaced by a sliver of my power, and acting on my orders, now stood motionless in the room with Emma and me, then they turned and disappeared out of the room, before coming back, both carrying dangerous looking rifles.

I nodded to the first one, and he turned and walked out the door. A minute later, I heard his voice from the other side of the window. "What the hell are you doing? You're supposed to be patrolling, not standing here wagging your gums! I could hear you from inside. Get back to your posts!"

I had no idea if the Evo I had occupied was in a position of authority or not, but he didn't need to be. Either the two Inquisitors outside the window would listen and obey, or my puppet's silenced assault rifle - cocked and ready - would get them out of the way.

"Shit, sorry. We were talking about that dream and got a little carried away." One of them said.

"Yeah," my puppet replied. My words, his voice. "That was pretty fucked up, but we've got a job to do. Keep your head in the game until tomorrow and we can deal with it then."

"Got it." The first voice said.

"It won't happen again." The second said.

They both turned their backs on my puppet and walked away. If they had been a little more aware, they may have questioned why the Evo behind them - a man with his own patrol to perform - waited a few seconds before starting to follow them. They'd be dead before they asked the question anyway.

A moment later, satisfied that the two eavesdroppers were out of the way, the second Evo - the woman - stepped to the door to the living room and pushed it open, then stepped inside.

I could see what she was seeing. The four men in the room. Two keeping watch out the windows on the far wall, their backs to the door. Another man standing against the wall to the left, one sat on the bench against the wall to the right, and Isabelle, tied to a chair between them.

The two men not by the windows looked up at her.

She shot them.

A quick burst into the head of the man against the wall first, he had his weapon at the ready. He went down in a riot of bullets and blood spray. The second guard, the one who had been sitting, took a second to comprehend what had just happened, and more than that, his rifle was laying loosely over his lap and in no position to be aimed and fired. His chest exploded with the rest of the puppet woman's clip before he could even pick it up, but the strangled shout from his lips was still loud enough to cause problems.

The yell wasn't needed, though. No matter how Hollywood chooses to portray it, silenced shots are nowhere near silent, and anyone within about twenty meters would hear it easily. The two men at the windows were already spinning and taking aim before the second man had slumped to the side, but that was all the opening I needed.

Incidentally, that was the same moment as the puppet man outside unloaded his entire clip into the backs of the two Inquisitors that had been shooed away from the window.

The puppet woman exploded as one of my powerballs blasted right through her, her legs managing to stay upright for an amazingly long few seconds as everything above her thighs was turned to crimson mist. The powerball smashed into the wall between the last remaining guards and washed outwards, the shockwave hitting the two of them at the same time and reducing their body to a skin-sack of broken bones, burst blood-vessels and liquified organs. They were dead before they hit the ground.

Isabelle hadn't made a sound as the carnage unfolded around her. She had just watched with a detached sort of morbid curiosity. But her face - gagged mouth and all - lit up as Emma and I stepped into the room just as the puppet woman's legs finally succumbed to gravity and toppled over.

It had been quick, it had been effective, it had solved the problem of what to do about the guards while not being able to shield Isabelle, but it hadn't exactly been quiet. The yell from the second guard, the burst of suppressed gunfire, all of them had been heard by other Praetorians in the villa, and a good number of them were already moving toward us. I doubted they would be in a talking mood when they discovered what I had done to their friends.

"Untie Isabelle and stay close to her," I barked to Emma as she shot across the room to her mother.

"Shield?" she smiled up at me. The horror of our earlier discovery being momentarily banished by the fact that her mother was alive and well, and that we had rescued her in time.

"Yup." I grinned back before turning to Isabelle. "We're gonna have to fight our way out of here. Are you good to move?"

Emma had just pulled the gag out of her mouth when she answered. "I'm fine. I can move. I'm so glad you're both okay."

"What happened?" Emma asked as she started working to untie her bonds. "How did they know about this place so fast?"

Isabelle shook her head. "I don't know. We got here last night. They hit us first thing this morning. They must have sent a team here immediately after the castle to get here so fast. My detail?"

Emma froze, looked up into her mothers eyes and shook her head. "They killed them all. Some were..." she swallowed hard. "Some were executed."

The snarl that left Isabelle's lips was feral enough to remind me of me during the deepest pits of my rage. "Pete," she growled at me. "I will consider it a personal favor if you kill every single one of those animals as painfully as possible!"

"I'll see what I can do," I nodded to her as I turned back to the door, my shield fully in place now. "And it's good to see you're okay."

"Mum," Emma whispered as she finally got the last of Isabelle's ropes free. "Dad, he... he didn't make it."

Isabelle froze.

It was hard to describe the sight of someone's heart breaking in real time. It wasn't the first time I had seen it. Rhodri had given me my first taste of that soul consuming pain during the party, and Emma had shown me the same sort of agony when I had delivered the news at the castle, but this was different. The last two times had happened during a battle, and even though the levels of pain were obviously there, I had been too busy fighting and killing to really watch it. This time, I wasn't, and for the briefest of moments, Isabelle showed me what love and loss - real love and real loss - looked like.

And then she showed me real strength.

As soon as the words left Emma's mouth, Isabelle froze; like it took those few moments for the weight of the words to land. But when they did, a whole world of anguish, misery and torture washed over her. Her face drained of color, her eyes widened, her breath caught in her throat in a silent, soul-crushing sob, and her jaw fell open as if all the pain that humanity was capable of feeling wanted to fly out of her lips. Her face scrunched up, her eyes pressed closed, the corners of her parted lips were pulled downward and the quivering breath that preceded the heartbroken scream was sucked in, ready to be unleashed.

And then she swallowed hard, let out that explosive breath in a deep, controlled release, and looked down at her equally heartbroken daughter, and gave her a simple nod.

I didn't know why Isabelle chose to pull her emotions back, it was clear to anyone, even me, that her heart had been shattered, that she was holding back the deepest of agonies, that she wanted to scream and wail and sob until there was no energy left in her body. Maybe it was because she wanted to stay strong in front of Emma. Maybe she understood that now was not the time to fall apart. Hell, maybe she felt like she had to maintain some sort of decorum thanks to her position as leader of her order. Either way, she did the one thing I had never been able to do. She put the needs of someone else before her own, swallowed what must have been a mountain of grief, leaned forward, and kissed her daughter's forehead.

Real strength. Pure and simple.

"They're coming," I said quietly. I didn't want to say it, I didn't want to interrupt such a profound moment, but time was very quickly running out, and I needed both of them ready to move if the situation called for it. Isabelle's ankles were still tied to the chair, but with a quick glance and a nod, Emma stooped down and started to work the knots loose.

"Pete, what's the plan?" Isabelle pulled my attention back to her.

"I don't really have one," I half shrugged, my eyes on the door while my mind tracked the voids as they converged on us. "We only realized what was going on an hour ago. There wasn't time to come up with anything more elaborate than this." One of the voids was approaching one of the windows outside, hunkering down beneath it. I spun to face that direction. "You ready?" I asked both women. They each nodded. "Okay, here they come."

A second later, a grenade was tossed through the window closest to the void, then another through the other window. Obviously a blocking Evo had got to that one without me spotting him.

No matter.

He, or she, obviously wasn't a very good Evo, otherwise they would have seen the next part coming. The grenades were lifted into the air by my powers, and then dropped back out of the window. A second later, two screams were drowned out by the sounds of two explosions, and a good portion of the wall was blown inwards. The debris and the masonry bounced harmlessly off my shield, but through the hole in the wall, I could see a group of five men running from the direction of the cliffs toward the house. A powerball turned them into flying body parts and gore.

Oh well. There goes any chance of doing this quietly.

I frowned.

Actually... Why the fuck am I trying to do this quietly??

"Time to move," I yelled to the two women in the center of the room, both of them watching chunks of rock bounce off what appeared to be thin air. "Out through the hole. Now!"

Isabelle and Emma were both moving in seconds, neither of them bothering to question my reasoning, let alone the situation around them. They were hopping through the gap in the partially demolished wall and down the two or three foot drop to the floor before I had even made it across the room. I jumped down to join them, and together we started running in the direction of those five men-turned-stains.

Then I stopped.

I turned around

And I swung my arm toward the house.

Technically speaking, the powerballs that I had unleashed in the real world had always come in one of two forms. Either the big car-sized fucker that reduced people to mush, or the smaller, football-sized fucker that... well, that also turned people to mush, just in a much smaller area. Neither of these, however, were anything close to the largest and most powerful ball of energy I had ever unleashed.

That particular honor went to the very first one I'd ever created. The one I had used against Rhodri's city during the duel at the party. That one had been the size of a small building and had completely obliterated the walls of his city. Something about that event had taught me a lesson in scale, and I had never really thought to use one as big as that ever since. I didn't need them to be anywhere near that size to have the desired effect, and making them as powerful as that was just an unnecessary use of energy... so I never had.

Until now.

The powerball that smashed into the villa wasn't much smaller than the villa itself, and the gouge that was ripped out of the ground as the ball raced above it was easily deep enough for me to stand in without being able to see over the edge. The bullets that were flying toward us from the Praetorians who had entered the living room after our escape were batted out of the way - not that they could have done any damage to my shield anyway - and the ball crashed into the exact spot where the hole had been blown in the wall.

The villa exploded.

I don't mean that in the "a bomb went off" sort of exploded.

I mean it in the engineering diagram kind of explosion.

Every single constituent part of the structure was ripped from every other bit, and blasted in a straight line, directly away from the point of impact. Every brick, every roof tile, every floorboard, every light bulb, every ounce of plaster, every scrap of the obliterated furniture, every nail, every screw, every plug socket... every body part of the men ripped apart in the blast... everything... all of it was ejected at supersonic speeds directly away from the point of detonation.

I couldn't tell you what happened to the people inside. They just ceased to exist.

All that was left of the once proud and beautiful villa was a vaguely square shaped hole in the ground, and a steady rain of bricks and debris falling from the sky... and the garage. That was still intact, too-somehow.

The three of us just stood and stared at it. "That was..." Emma started. "...big."

I mean, she wasn't wrong.

"Is that all of them?" Isabelle spoke next after the gentle breeze had carried Emma's words away.

I shook my head. "I don't know. I can't sense any more voids, but that doesn't mean a few blocking Evos aren't still around."

Isabelle nodded but didn't say anything else.

A blood stump of a severed arm thudded onto the ground a few feet in front of us. We all looked up, then back at the arm again. "Alright, let's go check, then we can get out of here. If the garage is still standing, the taxi should be okay to get us out of here."

I had taken a single step forward when Emma squeaked. I spun around and my heart jumped into my throat.

A man, an Evo, wide eyed and frantic looking, had one arm around Emma's throat from behind, and his other hand held a gun to her head. "Don't fucking move!" he hissed. "I know who you are. You so much as twitch and I blow this bitch's brains out!" Panic flashed across Emma's face for a moment before her eyes met mine, then an eerie sort of calm washed over her.

"And what do you think happens to you if you do that?" I replied, surprising even myself with the calmness in my voice.

"Oh, I'm already dead. I know that," the Evo snarled. "I know what you did to the Conclave, and at the compound in Russia. I know what you did to Toussant. You are an abomination! You need to be put down!"

"You really think that killing you is the worst thing I can do to you?" I smirked at him. Yes, I know, I was playing with fire, but as long as he was talking, I was giving myself time to come up with a plan. "If you knew what I really did to Toussant, you'd know that there are a hell of a lot worse things that can happen to you than death."

"Pete..." Isabelle started, but I held up my hand to cut her off.

"Does the name Sterling mean anything to you?" I tilted my head to the side. The man's eyes somehow managed to grow even wider. He swallowed hard. I smiled. "You do. Good. I bricked up his castle, I locked him in there, and that was after I had drained his well dry and filled it in forever... Mostly. There is enough power in there to keep him alive for a very, very long time, but he can't use it, because he is trapped inside his own mind. If you pull that trigger, what I did to Sterling will seem merciful compared to what I do to you."

The man blinked harder, his eyes flicking around as if looking for backup that wasn't coming. My mind, on the other hand, was racing. What could I do to protect Emma? The man was already inside my shield. Putting aside the very obvious question of how he managed that, it meant that it was now completely useless when it came to protecting Emma. Could I form a new one? One that wrapped seamlessly around her body? No, I still didn't have the first idea of how to do that. What about just putting one between the barrel of the gun and her head? No, the muzzle was flush to her skin, there was no space to put it.

What about just killing him? A powerball small enough could kill him without harming Emma, right? I didn't know. Those things were pretty powerful, even the small ones, and the most tiny of miscalculations would be enough to obliterate Emma along with her assailant. More than that, this guy was an Evo, with Evo reflexes. His mind worked just as fast as mine, meaning that the fraction of a second it would take to summon the powerball and launch it at him would stretch out to about thirty seconds to his mind. More than enough time to pull the trigger and kill the woman I had fallen in love with. The same limitations applied to attacking his city like I'd done to the two inside the villa. Yeah, I could take him, I could take him quickly, but nowhere near quick enough to stop him from pulling the trigger.

Fuck Fuck Fuck! Think, dammit. Just keep him talking!

"Why don't you tell me what you want?" I finally said after what felt like an eternity of us staring at each other.

"What?" he blinked at me. "What do you mean?"

"Well," I gestured to the strangely calm looking Emma. "You have something I want, and I would like her back... alive. What do you want in return for that?"

The Evo snorted. "Don't give me that bullshit. I want to get out of here alive, and there's no way you're going to let that happen, so if I'm dying, I'm taking one of you with me!"

"Why?"

"Why?" he scrunched up his face. "Why what?"

"Why wouldn't I let you get out of here alive? I mean, I need a messenger. How else would the Praetorians know what happened here?"

"But... you don't let anyone go?"

It was my turn to snort. Yes, I know, I was playing a dangerous game, but the moment this asshole knew the value of what he was holding, there would be nothing on earth that would make him give her back to me. So playing things cool, or at least not showing my hand, was the only option I really had. "Oh, is that what they're telling you?" I shook my head with another smirk. "Actually, I've let loads of you people live. Sure, most of them have been captured, but they're alive and well, and I have every intention of keeping them that way. I only kill the people who leave me no other choice."

He squinted at me. "Who?"

"Who have I let live?" I asked. He nodded. "Well, Julius and Nathanial from the compound, for a start, I don't pretend to know all of their names, but I can show you their faces, if you like."

The man's eyes widened. "Julius is alive?"

"Yup, He calls me the Dynast. That mean anything to you?"

The man's mouth opened and closed a few times, before he swallowed and nodded.

"I would like to think that I'm an honorable man," I went on when it became clear the asshole in front of me wasn't going to say anything. "Unless I'm crossed. So I will give you a fair choice. If you pull that trigger, you will die. It won't be quick, it won't be easy, and I'll make sure you feel every single moment of it. Your other choice is to walk away. Drop your weapon, turn around, and leave. If you do that, I give you my word that you won't be harmed. Not by me, not by these two, not by anybody. As far as I can tell, you haven't done anything that would require me to kill you, so - unless you give me a reason to..." I let the sentence hang in the air.

"You'll let me go?"

"I... actually, I'll tell you what. If I understand correctly, your Praetorian buddies are due tomorrow. You can stay here, and we'll leave. You can even keep your gun. Let her go, and we will walk away. And if any of us even turn our heads in your direction, you're free to pull the trigger as many times as you like."

He squinted at me. "Why would you let me live?"

"Because," I sighed. "Whether you want to believe it or not, you have been lied to. Quite spectacularly, in fact. You have been fed a monumental pile of horseshit, so much so that I doubt you would recognize the truth if it kicked you in the balls. But I don't actually want to kill you, I don't want to kill anyone. And once this war is over, I would like for all of our kind, even people like you, to be able to live in peace. Together. No more war, no ridiculous ideas of ruling the world, no paranoia, no hypocrisy, just peace. You can't build a world like that on a foundation of dead bodies."

The man nodded thoughtfully for a moment. "Okay," he finally said. "Turn around. When you're facing away from me, I'll let her go, and you all start walking. You look back at me and I start shooting."

"Fair enough," I cast a look at Isabelle, nodded, and then turned back to the man. "It was nice talking to you."

I turned around and faced back toward the ruins of the villa, and took a single step.

"Actually," the man said, something sadistic in his voice. "I'd rather die, and take this little cunt with me! All will bow to the Praetorians!"

I spun back around, my eyes wide and my heart jumping straight back into my throat. The Evo had released his arm from around Emma's throat and stepped behind her, his gun now pressed to the back of her head. But it was his smile that caught my attention. The evil, malicious, diabolical, almost insane curl of his lips.

Before I could do anything...

Before I could even think...

He pulled the trigger.

Time slowed to a crawl. The booming, reverberating sound of the gunshot crashed into my ears at about the same time the bullet smashed into Emma's skull. The sound was drowned out a second later by Isabelle's scream as Emma's head snapped forward, her hair flicking up and over the front of her face. With the forward momentum of her head and the shot that had caused it, she crumpled forward to the floor.

Nonononono!! Not again. Fuck.. Emma!... Fuck! No!

The echo of the gunshot had not even faded from the air when I smashed my way into the man's head, and less than ten real world seconds later, he was lying in a heap on the floor, his eyeballs melting down his face as his mind was subjected to the unending inferno, not of the Dragon's wrath, but of mine. The man would live, he would live for a really fucking long time, decades, in fact. And every single second of it would be filled with the sorts of pain that would drive even the strongest of warriors to absolute madness. There would be no mercy, there would be no powers, there would be no way for him to escape the palace I had locked him inside, and there would be no end.

By the time I was back in the real world, Isabelle was on her knees; the heart wrenching howls of utter despair more savage than any punishment I could inflict upon myself. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I couldn't comprehend what was happening. As painful as Faye and Becky's deaths had been, they didn't even come close to this. Everything in my existence wasn't just pain, it was the purest form of agony, and it was all my fault. I had done this, I had allowed this to happen, I had failed... again. I had allowed yet another person I loved to die on my watch, and, once again, my best hadn't been good enough.

Tears filled my eyes. My breaths came in ragged, broken hitches, my throat felt like it was about to close up, static seemed to fill my ears, and the hole in my chest where my heart had once been was threatening to consume me from the inside out.

"Urgh, fuck, that really hurt," A muffled voice echoed through the air.

Isabelle and I froze.

Emma groaned, her hand coming up to rub at the back of her head.

"Emma??" Isabelle shot forward, her hands reaching out for her daughter in the same way her eyes were racing over her: in complete disbelief.

"I'm okay," she groaned. Rolling onto her back and sighing hard.

"What... What..." I blinked again and again, dropping down next to Emma and Isabelle, not willing to believe my own eyes. "I don't understand."

She chuckled, letting her mother pull her up into a sitting position. "Well, while you were buying time, Jeeves and I came up with an idea that would actually work."

"Jeeves?" I spluttered.

"Yes, Sir. Bullet proof skin."

"But... But you said she couldn't have abilities like that!"

"No, Sir. I said she didn't have a way to power them."

"But... then how?"

"She didn't power them, Sir. You did."

"I told you," Emma smiled at me. "I said it felt like I was taking strength from you. Turns out, it is pretty literal. You've been feeding me power, and I can use that power however I see fit. We decided that making my skin bulletproof, like yours, was pretty high on the list of priorities, given the situation."

"And you didn't think to tell me?" I half laughed, half screamed.

"Thought you'd appreciate the surprise," she grinned. "Besides. I was kinda hoping he'd take your offer and you wouldn't have to kill him."

"Can... can someone please tell me what's going on?" Isabelle was flicking her eyes frantically between the two of us, the expression of confusion on her face warring with the overwhelming relief we were all feeling.

"Sorry, mum." Emma grinned again. "Pete and I have bonded."

"Bonded."

"Yes, bonded. We're.... We're together now. Turns out, I'm the Dynast, too. Well, part of it."

Isabelle shot a look of sheer increduluity at me. I just shrugged and nodded. "I didn't think she liked me either. But, yeah... Surprise."

Isabelle flicked another glance at Emma, then to me again, then back to Emma... then burst into laughter.

********

Author's note.

You people have absolutely no idea how tempting it was to leave that chapter as a cliffhanger, but, for once, I thought I'd be nice to you all. I hope you are enjoying the story. Feel free to leave any feedback.