Chapter 16

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

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

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

Becky was different. Becky was very, very different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She hadn’t come out again.

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

I messaged Charlotte a little while later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You could say that, yes.”

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

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

“I’m not sure your rules apply anymore,” I answered levelly.

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

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

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

“A what?”

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

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

“ ... Jesus. So they killed her...”

“Just to get to me,” I finished.

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

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

“Oh?”

“I took one of them alive.”

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

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

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

“Yes, why?”

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

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

“Yeah,” she practically growled. “That’s him. What is his status.”

“Extremely unpleasant.”

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

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

“Excellent. Arnold is preparing the files now.”

“Who?”

“Bob”

“Ah. Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I will keep in touch,” I ended the conversation simply.

“Pete? Make Toussant pay.”

“Oh, I fully intend to!”