Chapter 33

“Alright, recap time,” I said with a sigh and pulled myself up off the bench. The rain pouring from the sky seemed to ease up almost instantly, and within a few minutes, it had stopped completely. There were so many red flags going up just at that. I knew the last few months had taken a massive toll on me, enough of one to convince one of my closest friends that I was something to be feared, and what I had just done was to essentially bottle it all up, swallow it all down, and get on with things as if nothing had happened. Faye, Uri, and Jeeves all shimmered into being around me, looking first at me, then sadly at the rainwater still wetting the ground, before back to me again. They knew in an instant what it meant. Faye made to speak, but I cut her off. “Save it,” I said, perhaps a little more sharply than I intended. “It is what it is. I can’t make someone trust me, believe me, or love me. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. Talking about it changes nothing, at least not right now. If all my efforts are worthy of her trusting me, she will let me know; if not...”

The words were right there, ones I had said hundreds of times in my life... “If not, then fuck her.” ... But they wouldn’t come out. I knew I didn’t mean them, but it was a coping mechanism I had been forced to use more times than I could count. It is how I survived my childhood: the ability to drop an attachment to a person like a hot rock, to cut them out of my life with surgical precision and indifference. It was how I had kept myself safe and people at arms-length in a world where the vast majority of people were only out for themselves. And yet, the words wouldn’t come.

I would have given Charlotte every part of me, but she didn’t want it. So be it; it could be dealt with later.

“First things first, how do we find Marco?” I asked, looking from one of my live-in companions to the next. “I imagine he’s gone to ground by now.”

There was a long pause, but it was Uri who spoke first. “I’m not sure that should be our first port of call,” he said slowly. I arched an eyebrow at him to continue. “The conclave is home to more traitors than just Marco, and it would be in the best interest of all of them to try and hide Marco from us or at least help him keep a low profile. It may be time to clean house, the same with the Sect.”

“Okay, I can get behind that idea,” I nodded after giving it a little thought. “But how do we do that?”

“Honestly, it isn’t going to be pretty,” Faye answered this time, seeming to be of one mind with Uri. “Yeh may have to root out the traitors by force.”

“How the fuck am I going to do that?” I asked, even the notion of that sending chills down my spine. “Thirteen Evos was hard enough; there would be ... what? ... hundreds of them in the Conclave? At least?”

Uri shook his head. “No, the Conclave and the Sect would be different; the people in there would already have their minds connected. You wouldn’t have to break into them individually. It’s ... hard to explain, but you will know what to do when you get there.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. Knowing what to do when the moment arose was not only poor preparatory advice, but it seemed to be the exact tactic that had gotten me into so much trouble already. “Fuck it, whatever,” I huffed. “So we find anyone in the Conclave associated with the Praetorians and wring them dry of any information they have about Marco. What happens if none of them have any?”

“That seems unlikely,” Uri pondered after taking a moment to consider the question. “Although, I concede that there is a chance that the people who do know may not all be there when you bring judgment.”

“Hmm, bring judgment,” I repeated back to him, letting the words roll around my mouth a little, “I kinda like that. But back to the point. We need to get as many people into the Conclave cathedral as possible and attack them. Are there, I dunno, any Evo holidays or anything?”

“There will be a service in my memory,” Uri offered.

I held his eye for a moment. “That seems ... a little in bad taste.”

“Why? They’re the ones who killed me. They hardly have the right to complain about their cover being blown at my funeral.”

“What about the people who are innocent?”

“If I know Marco, he would have corrupted as many people as possible in the Conclave, and seeing as how he was responsible for awakening people in this part of the world, I’d imagine he has infected a huge number of them. As soon as those innocent people see what is happening, I think you’ll be given quite a lot of leeway.”

“And the people who aren’t so innocent, well, they’re the ones we’re lookin’ for anyway,” Faye added with a nod.

“Alright, so we make arrangements for a service to be held in your honor,” I looked at Uri, “And then hit it when it’s at its fullest, banish the corruption from anyone who has it, finding out whose guilty and whose innocent in the process. Then we ... interrogate the bad guys. Sound about right?”

“Yup,” Faye folded her arms with a firm nod. Uri nodded, too, and so did the still-quiet Jeeves.

“Fair enough. What about this Judge character?”

“I’d imagine we will get some information about him during the process,” Uri answered. “If you remember the party, Marco and I were talking about a Rogue and how unlikely it would be for someone to realize they were an Evo, awaken and train themselves, and become powerful enough to challenge a standard Evo.”

“I remember.”

“At the time, we were talking about the attacks on other Evos, but the sentiment still holds. Those Evos were attacked by Sterling, a normal Evo who had mastered the art of disguise to a staggeringly advanced level. If there was one good thing to come out of your encounter with Sterling, it has shown us that Evos are able to hide a lot more from each other than we had previously thought. The same, I believe, applies to the Judge. Realistically, we know nothing about him, only that he was at your parent’s house when they were killed, that he was at Evie’s apartment the night she was taken, and that he is an Evo. We don’t even know his real name. But the chances of him having become as powerful as he has without any input from the Conclave or the Sect are nil.”

“If you are going to say that someone will know who he is,” I interrupted, “then I will remind you that nobody had a clue about Sterling.”

“But Sterling was workin’ alone,” Faye mused as if she was thinking out loud. “The Judge would have had to work with the people in the Conclave or the Sect—the ones who are loyal to the Praetorians.”

“So you think that we may get some information on him when we interrogate the bad guys?” I asked. Faye and Uri both nodded. “Actually, now that I think about it, how are we going to get everyone together in the Sect? They wouldn’t come to your funeral.”

“I was going to suggest asking Charlotte for help on that one, but...” Jeeves answered with a pained look.

“I think we’re gonna have to do things on our own from now on,” I sighed. “But I am sick of going off half-cocked; I want to know everything we possibly can before we go...” I froze and frowned as something suddenly occurred to me.

“What is it?” Faye asked with a tilt of her head.

“Marco wrote an email to me when we were on our way to Horlivka,” I said slowly. “He said that if anything happened to him, I should go to the Archon.”

“Oh, shit, he did, aye.” Faye gasped.

Uri frowned. “This was before my time here, but...” his eyes flicked off the middle distance as he accessed my memories and read through the email in question. “Hmm, that is ... concerning.” He finally said. “Thomas has always been an effective leader and has always seemed loyal, but he’s also perfectly placed to cause a lot of harm to the Conclave. At the same time, this could be a very effective piece of misdirection by Marco. This was sent before Marco and I got separated.”

I nodded; he was right. It was a little vague. “How did you and Marco get separated? You never told me.”

Uri flashed his eyebrows in acknowledgment and nodded. “There isn’t much to tell. We were about ten miles outside Horlivka. We couldn’t get into the city by car to meet Olena, so we dumped it and approached on foot. There were soldiers everywhere; we were hiding in a burned-out building, waiting for a patrol to pass. I crossed the street to the next building when it was safe, and when I turned back to signal for him to cross, he was gone. I searched for as long as I could, but I couldn’t miss the rendezvous. He was gone.”

I snorted, “And he’d sent me that email beforehand, so if you’d discovered he was the traitor when he rejoined his friends and killed him, I would have been suspicious, and if he got away, making you arrive at the rendezvous alone ... or anywhere else after that, for that matter ... I would have still suspected you. Fuck, you have to almost admire that level of manipulation.”

“He played it perfectly.” Uri nodded. “That email, coupled with his corruption of you and your justifiable pre-existing suspicions of me...”

“Yeah.” I sighed, looking around the plaza surrounding us. “Sorry about that,” I added with a sheepish smile. “So, how do we deal with the Archon?”

“Carefully,” he answered after a bit of a pause. “Marco designed that email to get you to kill me. I ended up dead even though it wasn’t by your hand. But if his plans went wrong and I’d killed him - which I absolutely would have done if I had worked it out sooner - then directing you to the Archon makes no sense unless he was involved. But at the same time...”

“A man with a penchant for manipulation could have considered that and used it as a way to destabilize the whole Conclave if he was found out and killed.” Faye finished with a frown.

“Well, there’s nothing like dedication to a cause,” I huffed. “Alright, I think we have a good way forward. I’ll contact Jerry and tell him to pass on news of your death to the Conclave,” I looked at Uri, “Then we will go from there.”

A series of nods rippled through my companions before all but one of them faded away. “Pete, Darlin’,” Faye whispered as she tucked her hand into mine. “What’re yeh gonna do about Charlotte?”

“Nothing,” I sighed and squeezed her hand. “I can’t spend my life chasing something I’m never going to find. I need to face reality. I’m not the happily-ever-after kinda guy.”

Faye frowned but didn’t comment. “Can I make a suggestion?” she asked.

“Go for it.”

“Yeh need some pussy.”

I choked on my own saliva for a moment. I had honestly expected some sort of advice about making things good with Charlotte or even something about not feeling sorry for myself, but I must have forgotten who I was talking to. “I’m bein’ serious!” she laughed.

“Is that an offer?” I chuckled back

She shook her head. “No, babe, not from me, not from someone yeh care about. Yeh need someone who yeh can fuck all yer frustrations into. A stress toy. Yeh need to go to a bar, find the sexiest piece of ass in the place, take her home, and fuck the shit outta ‘er.”

I frowned at her, she really was being serious. “I’m pretty sure that is what got me into this shit show in the first place.”

“Just do it, darlin’,” she smiled, lifting my hand to her lips and kissing the back of it. “Find a girl, use yer powers to seduce ‘er, fuck ‘er brains out, give ‘er the night of ‘er life, then say goodbye in the mornin’. Yeh’ll feel better, I promise.”

I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose with my free hand. Sex - anonymous or otherwise - was the last thing on my mind at the moment. Nothing could be further from my thoughts. More than that, I had just been standing in front of a mirror, berating myself for that kind of casual use of my powers.

Faye, of course, knew what I was thinking. “Dun worry about yer powers, yeh need to start embracing ‘em. Yeh ain’t gonna get through this if yeh think of yerself as the bad guy. Yer the alpha male, yer the pack leader, yer the guy at the top that all girls want. And yeh aren’t the bad guy, yer not even a bad guy. Forget about Charlotte for a night, forget about Becky, and Philippa, and even me, just for one night. Burn off some of that stress on someone willing. Yeh’ll break if yeh don’t. Trust me.”

“I...” There was no point arguing with her. I had no idea if she was right or not; It was too out of the blue to consider at the moment. “I’ll think about it,” I answered with a roll of my eyes and a shake of my head.

“Yeh do that, handsome,” she winked with a smile. “Then go find a piece of ass, and do ‘er too.”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. Despite the turmoil raging through me, despite what I had seen in Charlotte’s eyes, despite everything that had happened to me and all the things still left to be done, I laughed. Each note of it banished a little more of the shadow that had engulfed my city since I had arrived with Charlotte. The sky was still dark; it was still dull, damp, and miserable, but that brightness - or at least a small touch of it - was dancing above my city again.

Faye smiled, leaned in, and kissed my cheek before her grip on my hand loosened, and she faded away. I took a look, one more look around my city. I loved being here, I always had, ever since the first days of this new life. When I had spent those months in that Praetorian cell, unable to visit in case it tipped them off to my plan, it had been the one place I had missed more than any other. Of course, I missed home, I missed Jimmy, I missed Charlotte, I missed college and the routine that had always given me. In fact, I was lucky that I was approaching the end of the third year when my attendance was no longer required; otherwise, all the work I had put into it would have been for naught. But none of them compared to here.

Even now, even as the faded sunlight glistened off the wet ground, there was an air of beauty to it, an exceptionalism; that spark of wonder that I had felt since my very first visit all those months ago had never really faded. I had no idea if any other Evo saw their own city the way I saw this one, but this one was mine; every building, every street, every mote of light, and every truly unique plaza resonated with me. My mood - thanks to Faye and the distractions of our planning - had lightened a bit. I was no longer wallowing in the pits of despair as I had been after Charlotte’s banishment, but I knew it would be short-lived. I knew what I had done in swallowing it all down and powering through it was not healthy; I knew that it would be back and probably quite soon.

Of course, I didn’t know how soon until I sighed, took a deep breath, and let myself fall back into the real world ... only to open my eyes and find a furious-looking Charlotte still in my apartment, arms crossed, her foot tapping and glaring at me. That mood came back pretty damned quickly.

“How fucking dare you block me!” she stormed across the room, rage and hurt etched onto her face as she swung her hand back to slap me across the face.

It probably would have hurt; she put a fair amount of strength into it, but that was something neither of us would ever know. My hand shot up in a blur of motion and caught her wrist before her hand made contact with my face. “You know,” I said venomously. “I’m getting pretty tired of people thinking they can attack me without consequence! Friends get a lot of leeway; people who look at me like I’m a monster after I’ve been through Hell to protect them get considerably less so!”

Her eyes widened as my words hit home. The realization washed over her face in an instant, her hand dropping to her side as she took a step backward. I could almost see the pieces falling into place in her mind: the reason why I had shut myself away, how her look had hurt me, and how true the meaning of that look had been. Her eyes faltered and dropped to the floor. “Yeah, that.” I shook my head and turned back toward the raised platform where my bed lived.

“What are you doing?” she asked weakly.

“I’m getting changed; I’ve got things to do.”

“What sort of things? I want to help.”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Don’t you trust me?” she asked, sounding genuinely hurt.

I snorted out a laugh. “No, Charlotte. You don’t trust me. After everything I’ve done, after everything I’ve been through to keep you safe, you don’t trust me. I don’t have the time or the patience to prove myself to you again when everything I’ve done should have already done that! Why are you still here?”

“Because ... You are my friend, and I love you.”

I turned around to look at her as I peeled off my shirt. “You can’t even look at me when you say that.”

“What do you want me to say?!?” she blurted out, tears filling her eyes. “That you scared me? Of course, you fucking scared me! Those Evos you killed in the Praetorian base, there were thirteen of them... Thirteen!... and every single one of them was more powerful than me, and you slaughtered them like they weren’t even there! Then you attacked my city...”

“To protect you!!” I almost yelled back. “Marco was in there, and you didn’t even know!”

“I didn’t know,” she answered defensively.

“Of course, you didn’t know!!” I was getting pissed now. “I didn’t know until I felt him; that fucking asshole designed his spy to be invisible to you! So what, am I supposed to not trust you for being put in a situation you couldn’t control? ‘Cause that’s exactly what you are doing to me!”

“I felt your power, Pete,” she said after a pause in which we both just stared at each other. “I felt your anger. It was like staring down the apocalypse. I’ve never felt that small before; I was ... insignificant. I was completely helpless. You could have destroyed me with nothing more than a thought.”

“I’m sorry to break this to you, Charlotte,” I glared back at her. “But I have always been able to destroy you with nothing more than a thought. That didn’t seem to bother you before. But no, I went to fucking war and destroyed hundreds of people to make sure that nobody would threaten you or anyone else I care about ever again! You saw what I saw; you smelled the bodies. You felt what I felt seeing those piles of dead people! That sight is burned onto my fucking eyeballs! That is something I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life, and I get home and see the one person who kept me going through all of that, and she is scared of me! How would you feel?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Fuck your apologies,” I barked back. “It wasn’t a rhetorical question; I wanna know. How would you feel? You go through hell; you do things that you never thought you would be capable of doing, and that fear and that anger builds and builds and builds inside you until it explodes and you butcher more people than you can even count. You are forced to become something you never thought you could be ... and you get home to that from one of the people you did all that shit to protect. How would you feel?”

Charlotte looked distraught, but to her credit, she was thinking about it. She took another step back and sat dejectedly on the arm of the sofa. “Betrayed,” she finally answered. “Let down. Hurt...”

“Alone,” I finished for her, my voice a little softer now. “And that’s something I never thought I would feel again.”

She knew my past and how I had felt for the entirety of my formative years. She had felt all of it as she had lived my memories with me. That feeling of isolation had been marrow-deep since before I could remember, and the idea that she had added to that, or even reminded me of it, sent a visible jolt of shock through her, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “I’ve never felt that sort of anger before,” she wrapped her arms around herself. “I’ve never felt like I was ever in danger from you.”

“You weren’t.”

“I know.”

“And yet...” I gestured between us, at what was happening to our friendship before our very eyes. “Do you think this is over?” I asked after a short pause. “Do you think the war is won, and we all get to live happily ever after?” She opened her mouth to answer but faltered. I just sighed and shook my head. “You heard what the Praetorians said about the Sect. They are your people, people that you know ... personally—your second family. The people you trust most in the world, and at least some of them are spies, traitors, and murderers. Do you think I’m going to just overlook that? What are you going to do when you are forced to pick a side? ‘cause that time is coming fast! How scared of me are you going to be if I’m forced to burn the collective to the ground to get to them? You know I’ll do it.”

“I ... I don’t know,” she whispered. “I can’t imagine any of them being involved in this.”

“And there’s your problem,” I shook my head again as I peeled off my jeans and tossed them into the hamper, moving to find something clean. “You still think the world hasn’t changed. You think that when this is all over and when the dust has settled, everything will be just like it was. You think you’ll be able to go back to work, you’ll be able to pop home to see your second family, spend time training me, go out, have fun, and nothing will be different. I’m sorry, Charlotte, but you have no idea what’s coming.”

“Then show me.”

“What?”

“Show me that I can trust you, that no matter what happens, I will always have you, that you are still ... you.”

“How can I possibly do that? You don’t even think I’m still me now, Fuck, I’m not even sure if I’m still me.”

“Hurt me,” she said quietly.

I blinked at her. A new pair of jeans halfway up my legs. “Sorry?”

“I have spent my entire life being able to look out for myself. I’ve been able to hold my own. I’ve never been in the position I was in today where I was totally helpless, and yeah, it scared me. It scared me more that it was you who put me there, no matter how good and right your reasons were. You’re right; I am struggling to trust you, not because I think you would hurt me, but because it never occurred to me that you even could. So I want you to show me. I want you to show me how you could hurt me, what you could do to me if you wanted to, how easy it would be for you to destroy me as that asshole did to Philippa or worse. I want you to show me how I don’t have any possible hope of stopping you.”

“How the fuck would that help anything?”

“Because then I know that you love me. That you could hurt me but choose not to. You’re asking me to put your life in your hands, but we both know I haven’t seen what you are capable of, not really. Being good means nothing if you don’t have the ability to be evil, but when you do have that ability, being good is a choice. If you want me to trust you, the real you, this “you” who’s been created by all the shit that’s happened, then I need to know that when there is nothing I can do to stop you from hurting me, that you would protect me.”

“What the fuck do you think I have been doing?!? How is that any different from what I have been doing every day since we met?”

“I don’t care. I want you to show me.”

“No.”

“You showed me the party when you lost Faye,” she pushed. “I saw what you did to the men who attacked Mary’s house, I saw how you slaughtered the people who took Becky, I was right there with you when you broke Toussant’s mind, and you have shown me everything you did in the war. But all of those things happened to other people; I was never on the receiving end. Today, you showed me what it would be like if you turned on me. Now, I want you to show me how helpless I really am compared to you. How you could take what you wanted from me, how you could drain me, kill me, break me, manipulate me, that you could do all those terrible things that you say you are protecting me from but won’t. Because if this is all as bad as you say it is, if the worst is still yet to come, then I need to know that I need you and that you would never hurt me. I need to know that my life is safe in your hands, that you could do all these fucked up things but refuse to because that’s not who you are. I know you are going to say you showed me that earlier by protecting me and that you could’ve hurt me then, I know you are going to say that you have always been in that position, and I know you’re right. But I need this. Right here, right now, black and white. Show me!”

“That is insane.” I shook my head.

“Do it.”

No”

“DO IT!”

“NO!”

“THEN HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE PREPARED FOR WHAT IS COMING IF YOU WON’T SHOW ME?! I TOLD YOU, EVERYTHING WITH EVOS IS BASED ON POWER; I NEED TO SEE YOURS TO BE ABLE TO TRUST YOU!”

My patience snapped. As fucking obscene as her demand was, I hadn’t missed the fact that she had literally just told me that she didn’t trust me, and if I’m being honest, I saw red. I had done nothing, absolutely nothing, to deserve the loss of her trust, and to be confronted - head-on - by that for doing nothing more than protecting her from the traitor in our midst was more than I could handle. “Fine!” I barked at her, seething at the words that still seemed to echo around the room. “Get on your fucking knees!”

She blinked at me as my will smashed through hers, with a look of utter disbelief on her face, she sank to her knees. I batted aside the minuscule specter of her willpower - the full weight of it crushing hers like a rotten grape under the wheel of a freight train and forced her to obey. To me, her mind was not much stronger than the average human’s; it just had walls, but compared to the power I threw at her, her walls were barely more than a tripping hazard. What shocked her the most, however, was the fact that I was doing this from the other side of the room.

Reading an Evo’s thoughts, making tentative contact, sure, all those things were possible without the need for direct physical touch, but projecting this kind of power without it was unheard of, at least to her. Before her knees hit the ground, an avatar of me spawned outside her city walls, took a few steps forward, and casually jumped over them. Her mind’s eye blinked in astonishment as it completely bypassed every defense she thought she would ever need before an Avatar of her own scrambled to defend herself.

“Strip!” My real-world voice barked, and, as before, she was powerless to disobey. Her trembling hands took hold of the hem of her top and peeled it over her head without a moment’s hesitation, dropping it to the floor before reaching behind her and unclasping her bra. Her gorgeous breasts spilled out, her nipples hard against the cool air as she started shimmying her jeans and her panties off in one go.

In her mind, though, things were even more terrifying for her. Her Avatar threw itself at mine in a frenzy of attacks, but the sword she had used to decapitate Marco’s spy bounced harmlessly off my skin as if it were made of wet paper. I barely acknowledged her presence as I stormed through her city toward her palace. She seemed to understand my destination by instinct, and her face paled as every idea she could think of to stop me came up painfully, almost laughably short.

To drain an Evos well was to rob them of their power. To destroy their market was to end their life. But to destroy their palace was the most feared of all consequences for our kind. It would destroy their minds - the Evo equivalent of what had happened to Philippa - and that was if they were lucky. A worse fate was to be forever locked within your own body, the connection between it and your mind completely broken. It was literally a fate worse than death.

“Finger fuck yourself!” I growled as I stepped forward, her eyes widening as she watched my fingers move to undo my jeans again. In that moment - as my hands made to free my cock from its confines and my Avatar kicked in the door of her palace - that there was nothing I couldn’t do to her. More than that, there was nothing - absolutely nothing - that she could do to stop me. Two fingers sank into her dripping core.