Chapter 2

It was a kiss for the ages. Every part of me tingled, like a spreading warmth of contentment that not even sex had ever brought me before. I just gazed at her, a smile involuntarily pulled at my lips, and, for the hundredth time in only a few minutes, I felt my heart flutter.

There was no denying it. Faye was my Soulmate.

I suppose the weight and the value of that word is what should be measured here; this was more than just love. It was certainly more than an infatuation. We were completely, totally, unapologetically bonded. This wasn’t the euphoria of a new relationship, this was not naive optimism. I didn’t know how I could tell, but this was for life.

“How can this be real?” I asked almost breathlessly, my heart pounding in my chest once our momentous kiss had finally ended.

She just smiled, resting her forehead against mine, closing her eyes, and signing in perfect contentment. “I don’t know. There is still a lot we don’t know about our kind. But there is a very easy way to tell.”

“How?”

She pulled her head back and looked into my eyes. “Like this.” Her voice echoed softly into my mind. Her lips hadn’t moved.

“Holy Shit!” I gasped. “How did you ... Can I do that to you?”

“I hope so.” She grinned, the words still not coming from her mouth. “The only people who can send messages like this ... telepathically, I mean ... are bonded pairs. It’s like the bond between us allows us to bypass that part of each other’s mental defenses. And what’s better, there is no range limit. You could be on the other side of the world, and I would still be able to talk to you. If you can do it to me as well, then there is no doubt that this is real.”

“Cool. So how do I send one to you?” My lips were moving.

“You just sort of ... think something, but you think of it as something you would want me to hear.” She shrugged at me.

I furrowed my brow and thought something.

“Testing, Testing ... one, two, three ... How now, brown cow.”

She giggled, that musical melody of perfection ringing out into the glorious mindscape air. “You are such a nerd. I love it.”

I chuckled, pulling her back in against me and resting my forehead back against hers.

“You know...” she said again after a few minutes. “There is something else that bonded pairs can do.”

“Oh yeah? What is that?”

She leaned in and whispered into my ear. “Have you ever thought what it would be like to have hot, passionate sex in your bunker?” she seemed to instinctively know that was what I called the physical manifestation of my subconscious mind, just as I somehow knew that she called hers ‘the refuge.’ “Imagine all the things we could do to each other when the laws of physics don’t apply. Zero-G fucking, me replicating myself until there are half a dozen of me, and all of us just being all over you. Being able to take you no matter how big you want to make yourself. Able to spend a week doing nothing but pleasuring each other with only an hour or so passing in the real world.”

A loud, deep, long guttural groan escaped my lips, and I twitched powerfully in my pants. “Oh, God. You are going to kill me!”

“Yup.” She giggled again. “Death by sex. You sound devastated about that.”

My hands slipped down off the small of her back, sliding onto her ass, pulling her a little tighter to me.

“Now, now, big boy.” She grinned, purring as she looked up into my eyes. “There is plenty of time for that. We had better get back to the party before we are missed. But tonight, you are coming home with me!” She pressed her lips back into mine and kissed me deeply. There was more love and passion in that meeting of our lips than I had ever felt in my life combined until that point. She finally broke the kiss with a happy sigh. “I’m never going to get tired of that.” She then pinched my ass with another giggle and faded back out of the mindscape.

“Great!” I chuckled to myself. “Now I have to mingle while sporting wood!”

A blurred and hazy thirty minutes or so later, I was standing at the bar. Marco was on one side of me, Uri was on the other, and both seemed to be having a conversation that I felt I had once been a part of, although I’d be damned if I could remember a word of it. My eyes kept flicking back to Faye. She was still in the same corner, chatting excitedly with her friends. Rhodri and Niel had left them and were now talking with another few men on the other side of the room around one of the pool tables. Jerry and Faye’s blonde friend were the only other people with Faye that I recognized. She seemed to be as unable to keep her eyes off me as I was keeping mine off her. There were many, many instances of a caught glance, a seductive, flirtatious, or even demure little smile from her as I tried to catch up with a conversation that increasingly seemed to be about something important, each of those smiles, though, was met with a beaming grin from me.

Subtlety was apparently still not my strong suit.

“ ... No, I understand all that, but you’re missing my point.” Marco was saying, the soft drawl of his Italian heritage sounding through his voice. The animated hand gestures seemed almost comically stereotypical.

“Then please make a better point,” Uri countered, seemingly rather amused by how annoyed Marco was becoming with the situation. “Or at least make your current one better.” Uri was Ukrainian, there was nothing soft about his accent.

My eyes, once again, drifted back to Faye as Marco took a deep breath.

The feelings still rattling around in my head were just as overwhelming and confusing as they had been in the mindscape. There were other girls in my life, just like I knew that she had other men in hers. But compared to what my heart, my head, and every instinct was telling me about this bonding process with Faye, they were almost meaningless.

Yes, I know, that sounds like a bit of a dick statement to make. But all of this has to be taken in context. Becky and Olivia were the only two out of the multitudes of women I had been with who I could say may have liked me for me. Olivia, I had recently learned, had been enamored with me since long before I had gained my powers, but we had only hooked up the week before. Becky was a little harder to gauge, she had been the nurse in charge of my recovery after my accident. I didn’t think I had ever consciously or intentionally manipulated her feelings towards me, but I’m certain she had been the recipient of the passive effects of my powers. Specifically, one which commanded all women who I found attractive to be overwhelmingly sexually drawn to me. She seemed to be interested in me more than that command should have allowed for, though.

Evie, one of my classmates from college, was manipulated and influenced so much that she would have fallen in love with a carrot if I wanted her to. Her mind made her unique, but that didn’t nullify the amount of manipulation I had inflicted on her. Philippa, Becky’s colleague and housemate, was almost an extension of my relationship with Becky. I had no idea if she would want something independent of my blonde nurse lover, and if she did, I had no idea how Becky would feel about that. Becky loved the excitement of it, she loved my dominance, and she loved the power I had over her when we were together. But she had not even hinted that she would want something more. Olivia had liked me since long before I had my powers, and I had made a point not to do anything to her that could alter her and twist her feelings toward me. I had wanted to see how far she wanted to go without that.

The answer, much to my surprise, was that she wanted to go a pretty long way with me ... just not yet. The relevance of all this is that Faye, in her new deep and profound understanding of me, genuinely couldn’t have cared less about me being with any of them, even sexually. Just like I wasn’t bothered in the slightest about the relationships she may be having with other men. We transcended that. My mind drifted back to what Charlotte had said about it all those weeks ago in my apartment.

Once two Evos are bonded, the physical act of sex, especially between an Evo and another human, just isn’t important. Jealousy isn’t really a thing in our species.

I frowned a little. For the briefest of moments, I couldn’t remember if she or anyone else had ever said anything else to me about bonding before tonight. I couldn’t even remember if it had been mentioned outside that conversation at all, and that chat with Charlotte was not as crystal clear in my mind as I had become accustomed to.

I shook it off. It didn’t matter for now.

My eyes flicked back over to my new paramour, the warmth filling me as our eyes met once again, the giddy smile on her lips telling me that she was feeling it too. She was beyond happy. She had found, in me, everything that she had ever wanted, everything she had ever dreamed of, and everything she had ever even thought of looking for in a man. She was ready to dedicate her immediate and eternal future to making sure that I was as happy as she was capable of making me. The whole thing had taken her by surprise as much as it had me, but if she was going to be my “wife,” then she was going to be the best-damned wife she could be. The more I looked at her, the more I felt her thoughts and feelings mirroring themselves in me. My entire life was now about making my lady happy.

“Meh, definitely worse ways to start a marriage.” I shrugged to myself, surrendering to what felt like the inevitable. I finally pulled my attention back to Marco in time for him to rearrange his thoughts and start to speak again.

“Look, if they were dead or missing, I would agree; Inquisitor involvement, absolutely.” My ears pricked up. This suddenly sounded like a conversation I should be paying attention to. “But they weren’t. All of them were found in catatonic, vegetative states. I know a few of the people assigned to care for them, there is not even enough of their mind left to make a link. Inquisitors can’t do that.” Marco took a deep breath before continuing, Uri’s eyebrows dropping a little closer to his eyes as he listened. “More than that, there have been twelve of them... Twelve!... Not all in one go, not all in one place, and seemingly no correlation between them. They just ... vanished, only to turn up some random time later, like that.” He finished with a vague gesture into the distance.

“Wait, What? ... Who?” I stammered, my grasp on the conversation seeming a little blurry. I eyeballed my drink suspiciously.

“Evos are being attacked,” Marco answered simply. “And we don’t know who is responsible.”

“So, what are you suggesting?” Uri asked after a short pause.

“I think that whoever is doing this is ... one of us,” Marco said with a sigh.

My eyes narrowed, and I looked around the room. Uri rolled his eyes at me. “Not literally one of us,” he said as if that should have been obvious. “I think Marco, here, is talking about a rogue.”

“A what?”

“A rogue is...” Marco started.

“A myth!” Uri interrupted.

“A Rogue is...” Marco repeated. “A person who managed to awaken on their own with no outside help, who managed to access and understand their powers without training and is basically living outside of the Conclave, or the Sect ... completely independent. What makes them so dangerous is that they are not beholden to our laws. But...” Marco held up a finger as Uri opened his mouth to speak again. “ ... the chance of that happening, that person realizing they are not alone, mastering dueling to a high enough competency to allow them to sneak-attack trained Evos and remaining completely undetected whilst hunting them is...”

“Impossible!” Uri finished.

“Extremely unlikely,” Marco agreed. “But, you have to concede, the end results in the victims are all remarkably similar to the damage done in an Evo on Evo attack. If I had to guess, I would say that their wells were drained and their palace destroyed. They’re just ... locked in there.”

Uri nodded his head to the side and flashed his eyebrows. Apparently, that was one point that he couldn’t argue against, and the implication seemed to be dawning on him ... If not me. Apparently, I had missed an entire conversation about a potential Evo serial killer, or serial attacker, while dealing with my enamourment over Faye.

I tried casting my mind back. Surely I had technically picked up the conversation as it had been happening, even if I hadn’t been paying attention to it. But if I had, it was just out of reach. It was an odd sensation, not being able to recall something in crystal clarity after so long with a perfect memory. My eyes flicked up again to Faye, although this time, they went unnoticed. Was this loss of ability a side effect of the bonding? Assuming that’s what it was. Was it permanent? I tried casting my mind back further. The more I tried, the more hazy things became.

Why couldn’t I remember?

More than that, how the hell had I joined this conversation? I clearly remembered, in graphic, intimate detail, my time in the mindscape with Faye. I remembered every word and touch as if it was etched into my brain - which, in a manner of speaking, it had been, as had every other memory of my life - but if I could remember that, how could I not remember walking the twenty feet across the room to the bar and joining a conversation between the two men only a few minutes ago. Something wasn’t right.

“If there is ever a problem,” Charlotte had said, “If there is ever anything you need, call me.” The fact I could remember that wasn’t lost on me either.

I subtly fished my phone from my pocket, glancing down at the screen.

No signal ... Typical ... My frown deepened ... No, wait. That can’t be right. We are in the middle of the city, there should at least be the ‘emergency calls only’ functionality. What the fuck is going on?

It was then that I felt it.

It’s hard to adequately describe what “it” was. Imagine you are standing on a busy street, talking to a friend. Even though all of your concentration is focused on them, there are countless other things around you that you can’t help but take in, even subconsciously. The noise of the traffic, of birdsong, of other people walking and talking around you, the temperature of the air, the rain, the snow, the wind rustling through your hair ... the life in the street around you.

Now take all of that away. Total, muted stillness.

I suddenly felt like we were all in one of those noise-canceling recording booths they have in music studios. There were people in this room. I could see them, I could hear their voices, I could feel their closeness, but everything else was ... muffled, and there was nothing coming in from the world outside this room at all. Even though I had edited out the ability to hear the irrelevant thoughts and feelings of all the people for miles around, I had always been aware of their presence as the background noise of my own city street. That ever-present ‘life’ around me. It was gone.

I cast my mind out, trying to pick up something, anything, not in this room. Nothing. My heart was starting to beat a little faster, my eyes flicked nervously back up to Marco and Uri. They continued their conversation as if nothing was wrong. Was this a byproduct of the bonding? Was this just in my...

“Something is wrong,” Jeeves suddenly announced. “We need to leave, Now!”

“What is it?” I asked, trying to gain a handle on the quickly growing knot in my chest “Or who?” I could still, somehow, remember the advice that Charlotte had given me. If someone was messing with me or trying to probe me, I was not going to be happy or subtle about it.

“I’m working on it, Sir,” Jeeves’ answer came quickly, a little too quickly. I could hear the tension in his voice. “You may need to hold onto something, this is going to be uncomfortable.”

“Wha...” I grasped onto the bar as I felt a pulse of energy be thrown out from my mind. Marco, Uri, and a few other people in the room, Faye included, stopped their conversation and snapped their eyes to me. Some in concern, some in curiosity, a few in annoyance ... Faye started to stand to make her way toward me, a look of worry on her face. But when that pulse of energy bounced back at me from the invisible, silent, bubble-like wall that had been secretly erected around the social club, we all felt it.

“It’s too late.” I could hear the panic in Jeeves’ voice as the knot in my stomach tightened. I could see it in the eyes of the people around me as the danger quickly dawned on everyone at once. “The inquisitors are here, we are surrounded.”

Suddenly, everything snapped into perfect clarity. I could feel the dozens of voids surrounding the building, each representing an inquisitor mind, each moving slowly and silently into position. No single one of them was strong enough or powerful enough to cause concern or even be easily noticed without intentionally looking for it. But combined, their potency grew exponentially. Linking and merging until there was an impenetrable psychic net over the entire building. That net, seemingly growing from each invisible, hostile mind, had completely cut us off from the outside world.

“INQUISITORS!” A panicked female voice shouted from somewhere behind me, jerking my focus back to the room. “RUN!”

It is one of those strange paradoxes that most people would, thankfully, never understand. People who have seen military combat talk about it a lot, but until now, I could never have imagined the peculiarity of the sensation. Everything suddenly seemed like it was happening very quickly, yet time seemed to slow down. It was a lot like the power overload in the mindscape during the duel, only infinitely more terrifying. It was a heightened sense of things, my conscious mind taking note of what was going on around me as my subconscious mind - Jeeves - took over control.

“Three exits,” My mind raced. “Main entrance where we came in, fire exit on the opposite side of the room, a staff entrance, presumably through the door behind the bar. We need to get Faye and get us out of here!”

My eyes flashed around the stampeding room as my hands relaxed their grip on the bar. She wasn’t in our corner, nor was she part of the crowd running past me to the fire exit. My mind seemed to skip over the fact that the bar staff had all disappeared. I scanned the room frantically and somehow caught sight of that fiery red hair, her terrified eyes flashing back into the club, desperately seeking mine. They locked, a silent sigh from each of us as she was dragged by her friends, along with a group of about twenty other people, towards the main entrance. She tried pulling loose, she tried to run back towards me, but her friend, the blonde one, wouldn’t let go.

The blonde reached for the door; the acute thoughts and feelings, the minds of everyone in the room under the stress of this situation, seemed to be pushing through the block that had been erected around the building. I could feel the blonde’s fear as her hand made for the door handle. I could feel the desperation in the pit of her stomach, I could feel the need to escape as she pulled the solid wooden door towards her.

It exploded violently inwards, swallowing her in a hail of splinters, shrapnel, and fire. Her body simply crumpled, pieces of her and most of the rest of the crowd flying through the air and into the room. I lost sight of Faye in the dust and smoke of the explosion but saw the red hair go down along with everyone else. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not, but there was no way she was unhurt. The fire escape exploded inwards at almost the same time, the crowd around that door being blown apart as well. The emergency push bar that had held the fire door closed scythed through the crowd, eviscerating any poor soul in its path. Three Evos were cleaved in half as I ducked away from the double explosions. Another, kneeling to help a friend who had stumbled, looked up in time for the bar to turn his head into a pulp.

The woman on the floor screamed as her friend’s blood, bone, and brain matter splashed down onto her. I was frozen. I couldn’t move, less than a few seconds had passed since the warning to run, but the whirlwind of carnage that had filled that time made it seem like an eternity ago.

I looked back over towards the main entrance, desperately trying to find my lover in the wreckage of bodies and body parts that littered the floor. The ground was a mass of writhing, groaning movement, people trying to crawl away from the danger over the bodies of their shattered friends, holding their wounds, crying out for help, or simply trying to convince themselves they were still alive.

Her fiery hair, once again, found my eye, although now, most of her face was the same blood-red color, a nasty gash above her eye leaking over the left side of her face as she dragged herself away from the door and towards me.

One of her arms was gone.

The other was clawing at the polished wood floor, trying to find a hold and pull herself towards me. The tattered remains of skin and flesh from the other were leaving a trail of her lifeblood that marked how much closer to me she had made it. I had barely had time to straighten myself up and start my dash across the room to her when they stepped in.

Dressed, head to toe in black, body armor clinging to their chests, and their faces covered by gas masks, the men who stepped through the smoking remains of the door looked like they had come straight out of a casting call for a low-budget special forces flick. The assault rifles in their hands, however, looked very real. My eyes could see them, the screams and panicked looks of the others told me that I wasn’t the only one, but to my mind, they simply were not there ... Just a void ... Surrounded in a bright white aura.

I hadn’t even looked towards the fire escape to see if the same intruders had entered when Marco, Uri, or someone dragged me off my feet and pulled me down behind the bar. The only thing on my mind as I pushed them off me was getting to Faye. I lifted my head above the bar as the men opened fire.

A woman dashing towards the bar, her eyes on me, took a round to the side of her head, the opposite side exploding outwards. Her presence in my mind blinked out in an instant. Another woman behind her took a round to the chest, and so did the man next to her, their lights fading out significantly slower, their bodies desperately trying to heal themselves and feeling every ounce of agony in the meantime until their minds dissipated into nothingness as they bled out. Rhodri and Neil were cowering behind one of the pool tables. Rhodri was desperately trying to hold onto Neil, whose only thought was getting out. He broke away, Rhodri’s terrified eyes and ignored pleas following him.

He didn’t even make it halfway across the room. Three bullets ripped into his back. The explosive flower-blossoms of blood blooming on his crisp white shirt. There was a gasp from his lips, the air in his destroyed lungs escaping through the bullet holes before they could make a sound from his mouth. His eyes rolled as he started to stumble forward.

Then a round hit the back of his head. The entire right portion of his face - skull, skin, brain, and blood - just exploded into nothingness. His body slumped into a crumpled heap, sliding a few more feet under the momentum his legs had given him. A cry of unimaginable fear, pain, and anguish filled the room as Rhodri watched the whole thing. The men spotted him and opened fire, but he ducked back behind the pool table before more opportunistic targets caught the gunmen’s attention.

My eyes flinched from the deafening sounds of gunfire as dozens more of the party-goers were mown down. Dropping one after the other in a perfectly coordinated crossfire from both sides of the room. I desperately sought out Faye, ducking slightly as the odd round thudded into the bar or skipped off the top until I found her. She was still alive, still dragging herself towards me. Her eyes flicked in abject, terrified horror between the men shooting behind her and me. I was still frantically trying to brush off the hands that were holding me back. Punching, slapping, and kicking to get myself free as Uri and Marco - looks of sheer horror on their faces - desperately tried to hold me down. All I could do was watch her.

“C’mon baby,” My mind silently willed her, not knowing if she could hear me or not, “You can make it!”

I will never know if it was that message that drew the attention of the inquisitor or if it was a coincidence, but no sooner had I thought it, one of the men behind her immediately snapped his attention to the writhing, crawling form of my love.

Faye looked back and saw him coming. She saw him aim his rifle down at her. She turned back to me quickly, her eyes on mine as a look of surrender drew across her face, and her voice whispered in my mind. “I love you.”

He fired. Her beautiful mind, the one that had captured me so suddenly, so completely, the one that had been so overwhelmingly happy to have found me, the one that I had planned to spend every day for the rest of my life exploring, went silent as it sprayed across the wooden floor. She slumped, lifeless, to the ground.

I have heard the term “seeing red” for most of my life. Usually, as a way of excusing violent behavior, the blood-lust that drags men from sanity or reason. I had never expected to ever feel it for myself, but it took a few moments for me to realize that the guttural, primal, dangerous roar that I was hearing was coming from me. I stood up straight, seemingly effortlessly brushing the hands of Uri and Marco off me, and swung my arm through the air towards the inquisitors. The ones around the main entrance were busy dispatching the rest of the survivors of the door explosion.

I could feel the energy in my body, just like I had during the duel. But there was nothing measured or controlled about this. This was pure instinct boiling over with rage. I could feel it traveling down my arm and into the palm of my tensed hand, then felt it being launched through the air and at the men killing my kin, the men who had killed my love, my Faye. The wave of energy hit them with the force of a runaway freight train, smashing them into the wall behind them. Only two of the five were unfortunate enough not to be killed by the impact, my lover’s killer among them. I stepped out from behind the bar, ignoring the men suddenly noticing me from the fire exit. Their weapons came up, and they opened fire. The bullets bounced harmlessly off my skin. - apparently, adding the ‘bulletproof’ element of my red alert program was one of Jeeves’ better ideas, and that whole program was now in full swing.

Both of my lover’s attackers were hoisted into the air by their gas masks, my actual hands still thirty feet away from them, but the telekinetic powers effortlessly yanked them off the ground. I gave them enough time to realize what was happening before slowly crushing the gas masks around them. They felt everything. I made sure of it. The force of an industrial trash compactor squeezed onto their heads, their eyes wide and their lips screaming before their skulls gave way under the pressure and exploded inwards. Their heads turned into a mulch of bone and blood, and brain. Jets of their essence squeezed around the pressure and arced into the air before I dropped their mangled corpses to the ground.

I spun towards the men at the fire exit as their panicked voices desperately requested reinforcements from outside. They were only just starting to realize the trouble they were in. My arm swung again, this time hurling one of the two marble-constructed pool tables at them with as much kinetic force as a supersonic jet. The only recognizable body part left after it had splintered against the wall behind them, having hardly slowed down in their journey through them, was a pair of twitching, spasming legs still attached to the waist of their former owner. Nothing of the man’s top half nor his friends was left. Their bodies had been utterly destroyed under the impact. A bent and broken assault rifle rocked noisily on the floor next to the mess that was left of them.

Two more men burst through the door behind the bar, looking around furiously before setting their eyes on Marco, Uri, and the others crouching behind it for refuge. They lowered their weapons, wrongly assuming that they were the threat. They didn’t even see me stalking furiously in the center of the room as their weapons were suddenly and - to them - inexplicably jerked upwards, the barrels pressed under their chins. I could just make out the panicked, confused looks in their eyes behind the gas masks before the triggers were pulled and a hail of bullets thudded into the ceiling, closely followed by the arterial spray, bone fragments, and brain matter from what had been the tops of their heads.