Chapter 35

The world was spinning when I stepped out of the mindscape and back into the small basement room with Charlotte, Evie, Fiona, Agatha, and the still-sleeping Philippa. Everything felt ... hollow, duller, as if the color had been sucked out of the world. The sun may very well have been burning bright in the sky, but I seemed to be immune from its warmth.

I just felt ... less.

Faye was gone.

The melding of her mind with Philippa’s, combined with a sizable influx of my power, had overwhelmed the sleeping brunette; like overfilling a stomach on Christmas day, her body had simply demanded rest and shut itself down. She was okay—physically, at least—but she would be sleeping for a while yet. Whether or not Faye’s sacrifice had been successful in repairing the poor girl’s mind was yet to be seen. If there was to be some artificially induced awakening, it hadn’t happened yet. Philippa was out cold, and her mind was dormant, at least for now.

That made Faye’s decision all the harder to stomach, though. I had no words to describe the ache in my heart that came with losing her all over again. Her reasons were noble, they were honorable, they were selfless, and filled with nothing but love, yet I already missed her more than any language was able to convey. The only silver lining to her decision would come if her sacrifice had worked. At least then, I would have something to point to as the good thing that came from losing her.

If it didn’t work, though, her sacrifice would have been for nothing, and the thought of that was more than I could bear. Losing her for a noble cause would be heartbreaking; losing her for nothing would be beyond comprehension. And Philippa’s newly required state of unconsciousness was not giving me an answer one way or the other.

“What happened?” Charlotte asked softly from behind me, her voice barely a whisper. I didn’t even turn to look at her; I couldn’t. I was still standing at Philippa’s bedside, looking over her, my hand having moved away from her forehead as I came out of the mindscape, but I could barely see. Tears were clouding my vision faster than I could blink them away, and I could feel my shoulders starting to shake as the heartbroken sobs started clamping onto my chest, whether I wanted them to or not.

Society, despite the best intentions and lofty declarations, still views men who cry as weak. For generations, little boys were told that crying was something that they should never do, and although great strides have been made in reversing this stigma in recent years, the sentiment still exists. Stoicism, inner strength, and broad shoulders that could carry any burden were all still traits associated with manhood. It was even worse for me. Crying was an absolute sign of weakness, and I grew up in a world where weakness was capitalized on and punished. Tears meant the torture and the abuse were working and only encouraged more of it.

The last time I cried was when I was 12 years old. I had fallen down the stairs. My father mocked me mercilessly for days for it, despite the fact - it turned out - that I had broken my arm in the process. Pain was weakness, too. Girls cried, and if I was crying, that must mean I was a girl. The man had gone out and bought a dress that would fit his 12-year-old son and then personally dropped me off at school the next morning wearing it ... broken arm and all. I didn’t have many friends at school, but one of them had seen me being dumped out of my father’s car, dragged me aside before anyone else could see me, and given me his gym clothes to wear. He then told the teachers he had found me cradling my arm in the locker room. The school had been the ones to get my arm checked in the hospital. Alec Levy, that had been the boy’s name. He developed a childhood cancer of some sort a few years later, and it killed him. I couldn’t bring myself to cry at his funeral either. I hadn’t thought about him or that incident in more years than I could count, but my father’s lesson had been learned. I never cried after that, not once.

Not after the party, when Faye had been killed.

Not after the death of Becky

Not after the death of Uri

Not after the discovery of the betrayal of Marco.

And, for perhaps more understandable reasons, not at the death of my parents.

For eight years, a tear had never left my eyes.

Now, though, my emotions weren’t giving me a choice in the matter; those tears were coming whether I wanted them to or not. Modern society may not look down on men crying anymore, at least not as they used to, but there are still plenty of men and women - especially women - out there who do, and those people instill the belief that crying is for the weak into their sons.

Now, the floodgates had opened.

Everything came out. Every shred of grief and misery, every ounce of heartbreak and sorrow, all of the anguish and the pain and the loss, the frustrations and the betrayals and the sacrifice, all of it poured from my eyes in a veritable waterfall of tears. A small part of me, that little voice of self-depreciation in the back of my mind, mocked me for my weakness, told me how I should be embarrassed and ashamed of myself for showing that weakness in front of the people who looked to me for strength, but the hulking mountain of my anger stamped on it hard enough to squash it like an overripe melon.

Of all the parts of me that understood, it wasn’t my intellect, it wasn’t my maturity, and it wasn’t my experience that understood that I needed this. It was my rage. It was the abject, unutterable fury that another sacrifice had been needed, and it was my loathing of the world and the fates that it needed to have been Faye’s. She was a hero in any and every way that mattered; it was a selflessness of the most profound and noble kind, but life was teaching me a lesson that I had never considered before.

Nobility doesn’t come cheap, and it certainly isn’t free.

It had been only a few seconds since Charlotte had asked her question, but it felt like so much longer. The pain of losing Faye all over again was making each one of those seconds drag out to a scale that would qualify as its own form of torture. But I finally turned to face her.

“Pete?” There was a sudden, apprehensive tremble in Charlotte’s voice as she saw the pain etched into my face. “Pete, what’s wrong?”

I opened my mouth, but the words wouldn’t come out; I just looked back at Philippa again. Charlotte stepped forward, a look of dread starting to fill her face as she saw my look of anguish before my eyes fell back to Philippa. I wanted to tell her that Philippa was okay, or at least that she wasn’t any worse, that maybe there was some hope for her ... but the words wouldn’t come. “Pete, what’s happened?”

She reached her hand out for me. I don’t know if it was a conscious act on either of our parts or not, but the information just flowed between us. I wanted to show her; she wanted to know, and that was, apparently, all that was needed for me to show her everything that had happened.

Charlotte’s eyes widened before a choked sob of her own fell out of her lips. “Oh ... Oh no. Faye.” It would seem that tears came perfectly easily to Charlotte. She fell into my arms, wrapping herself around me and pulling me in close. “I’m so sorry.”

I just held her, my world feeling like it was falling apart around me. A quick glance up at Evie and Fiona, both of whom were looking at me with very different looks of confusion on their faces. Fiona knew Faye; she had known since long before I had met her, but as far as she was concerned, Faye had died at the party. I never told her anything about Faye living in my head; in fact, Charlotte was the only person who knew about that, and even then, only from the time that Faye had spent with her when I had hunted for Marco’s ghost through her city. To Fiona, it must have looked like a massively delayed reaction to the loss of Faye. Either that or she had misheard something but was too polite to ask.

Evie, on the other hand, had no idea about Faye; she’d never been told anything about her. She was just letting her eye flick back and forth between Philippa and me with a look that said she just hoped someone would fill her in on the details later. But both women could see I was hurting, and the way Charlotte had crumpled into me was more than enough proof that I was hurting for a very good reason.

Only Agatha seemed to have a vague sense of what was going on. She was also looking between my sleeping friend and me, but hers was a look of something like professional curiosity mixed with no small amount of wonder. Obviously, being an Evo and having no immediate desires to smash into her mind, I had no idea what she was thinking, but she had been the person who had originally told me that Faye was waiting for me inside my city, back during the first time I had lost her. I doubted she understood the full nature of how I had essentially unwittingly downloaded my bond mate into my mind, but the look on her face suggested that she was starting to.

For the moment, though, I couldn’t think about that, or anything else for that matter. When Faye had first been killed at the party, I had been operating on pure instinct; I had been numb to everything else and letting that newly unleashed anger pull me along while the rest of my brain worked on autopilot. In hindsight, I was pretty surprised and impressed at the level of restraint I had shown on that brief trip to Malaga and not butchering everyone there because I certainly hadn’t been thinking clearly. By the time the grief really started to set in, I had discovered her in my city. Was I still pissed? Absolutely! But the heartbreaking grief that should have come at her death never really materialized for Faye in the same way it had done for Becky. Becky’s death was final; it was eternal, and there was no coming back from it. Faye’s was ... different. Less, somehow. Because she was still with me. I never really lost her.

Now, though, she was gone, she was really gone, even if her sacrifice paid off. Suddenly, her death felt just as real as Becky’s, and that delayed sense of loss had landed on my shoulders, and the weight of the world came with it. For the first time in years, I just cried. I cried for Faye, I cried for Becky, I cried for all the unfairness and cruelty that my life seemed to attract. I cried in heartbreak, I cried in frustration, and I cried in anger.

For once, I let myself ... feel.

Charlotte held me for about an hour, just letting me get that pure, raw emotion out before I felt composed enough to explain what had happened to the others. Evie just looked at me as if I had just grown a second head. In some ways, it was endearing how naive she was to the powers that had been surrounding her for months now. In other ways, though, it was reckless; she needed to understand this world if she was going to survive it. Yeah, I saw the hypocrisy of that through, too. But I just didn’t have the time or the emotional reserves to explain things to her in more depth. I was sure that Fiona or Charlotte would fill in the gaps for me. Fiona looked stunned that I was powerful enough to download the consciousness of a whole person into my mind in only a few minutes, even more, flabbergasted to learn that Faye had been fighting alongside me since a week or so after the party and possibly a little hurt that I hadn’t shared this with her before. I liked Fiona, and she had proven her loyalty and reliability to me time and time again, but as with Evie, I didn’t have the mindset to smooth ruffled sensibilities. I hadn’t told her because I didn’t trust her, I didn’t trust her because I had been manipulated into thinking her boss had been the traitor, and I had thought Uri was an enemy because Marco had infected me with his corruption, the same corruption I had banished from her when I first arrived. My lack of trust had been warranted.

Agatha, on the other hand, just looked shell-shocked. “That is remarkable,” she murmured. “Truly remarkable. It seems that your power is so great that the imprinting process we all go through during a bonding actually upgraded to allow you to absorb a whole separate consciousness.”

I just nodded. I was tempted to point out that I had done it with Uri as well, and we certainly hadn’t been bonded. But Agatha was with the Sect, and they were more than a little under suspicion. Agatha herself was clean; she knew nothing of any traitors and absolutely wasn’t one of them. But she was also old, and - stereotypically - old women were very good at a few things. Knitting, baking, spoiling grandchildren, and fucking gossiping. One slip of the tongue and it could ... actually, now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure what the repercussions could be for people finding out that Uri was alive(ish) and well inside my head. Probably nothing, but it was a risk I wasn’t willing to take. I was still in that siege-mentality, I was still suffering losses, and Faye - if she had survived the merging with Philippa - was now in a very vulnerable position. It wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination to think that the Praetorians, on learning how Faye removed herself from my mind, would start deliberately destroying the minds of the people around me to force Uri to make the same sort of sacrifice Faye had. Then, with that new host body weak and exposed, they could come in and finish the job of killing him ... or worse.

“And to imbue that consciousness into another as a form of mental healing?” Agatha was still talking. “That’s something I would never have considered. Not that anyone else would have the power to try it,” she finished with a bit of a self-admonishing chuckle.

“It wasn’t my idea,” I answered back flatly, the pain still raw in my tone.

“Oh ... yes, of course. I apologize, Pete,” she winced at her inadvertent insensitivity before glancing back down to Philippa. Her voice softened a little as she continued, “I meant no offense. Perhaps, one day, you will understand how astonishing that level of power is to the rest of us. We must all seem so ... small to you.”

It wasn’t a question; it wasn’t even an observation; it was more like she was thinking out loud. Even in my compromised state of mind, I could see that she had meant nothing by her statement. It was just a thought that passed through her mind, given voice by poorly controlled lips, and that on its own was more reason not to tell her anything about Uri. The inability to keep your own thoughts inside your head where they belong was a rather large red flag when it came to keeping secrets.

I didn’t answer her, just letting her stare off into the middle distance in the vague direction of Philppa’s bed as she let the thoughts mull over in her enhanced mind. Charlotte squeezed my hand; I had been so out of it, so lost in my emotions, that I hadn’t even realized she was holding it. I smiled weakly up to her. “What’s the plan?” She asked softly.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Just ... wait until she wakes up, I guess.”

“No, I ... I meant about the Sect.”

“Oh.”

“We’re already here, and you’re gonna have to do your cleansing thing sooner rather than later, so I thought...”

“That we’d do it while we were here. Two birds, one stone, and all that.”

She just nodded, looking apprehensive into my eyes.

“But?” I probed.

“I ... these people are my family, Pete,” she sighed. “I don’t think I can imagine any of them involved in any of this.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said, returning her earlier gesture and squeezing her hand. “I just can’t imagine why Marco and the Praetorians would mention the Sect unless they had infiltrated it.”

“Maybe it was to cast suspicion?”

“Possibly,” I nodded with a shrug. “But there was something about the way he said it. It was like he was boasting, showing off how big they were and how far they’d already got. It was like a sales pitch rather than ... I don’t know. You could be right, but we need to know either way.”

“Do you think it has anything to do with the thing Marco put inside me?”

I hadn’t thought of that. “I’m not sure. He clearly put something different into you than he did with me and the others I have found. Maybe it was because of your link with the Sect. Maybe you were the first step he took with infiltrating them.”

“But, it didn’t work.”

“No, not really. Not if your hatred of him was anything to go by. But my guess is that he made some tweaks to his methods ‘cause it sure as shit worked in me, and if it worked on me, it would have worked on members of the collective. We need to be sure, one way or the other.” I felt my anger stirring in my chest again and cast a look over to Fiona. So much time had been wasted chasing her boss when he was never doing anything worse than being a little cryptic with his information. Something that was more than a little explainable by the fact that he really was hunting a traitor. That anger happened every time I thought about how Marco’s corruption had successfully turned me against Uri, a man who could have been my closest ally, and it seemed to get more visceral each time as if the punishment I was dishing out to myself was cumulative, and getting worse each day. I couldn’t guarantee the safety of anyone found to be in league with him or his deluded friends.

A few seconds ago, when Charlotte had first brought it up, I really wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go rampaging through the collective, but it would seem that one stirring of my anger was enough to correct that misguided notion. I was already more than willing to rip off a few heads to get to the truth ... Figuratively or literally. The collective was right here, and either Charlotte was right, and the Praetorians had mentioned the Sect simply as a way of spreading suspicion, or she wasn’t, and Hell was about to come for its dues.

I rolled my neck and looked at Charlotte. She saw the look in my eyes immediately, swallowed down a gulp of trepidation, and nodded back. “I hope you’re right,” I said as I stood up. “I hope none of them are involved, but...”

“My family wouldn’t be involved,” Charlotte said firmly, standing up next to me. “And anyone who is, is no family of mine.”

I looked over to Agatha. She looked a lot less shocked, upset, or even angry than I expected her to, given the circumstances and what was about to happen. For a moment, I thought that maybe she wasn’t quite aware of what I was capable of, but the look in her eyes said differently. They were hardened with the same granite resolve as Charlotte’s. The Sect, to them, really was a family, the only one that some of them had known in a very long time - Agatha’s entire biological family, for example, were killed in the Yellow Fever Epidemic of New Orleans in 1878, the same horrific outbreak that claimed the life of renowned Confederate General, John Bell Hood. But even to her, the treachery that would be needed for one of their own to join with the Praetorians was beyond forgiveness. They were not related by something as random as biology and blood; the Sect were bound by something greater: Loyalty and unity of purpose. With that broken, a person was not worthy of life in the collective.

Evie was still looking confused and more than a little out of place. She looked like she was very aware that she was less than the small fish in a veritable shark tank. She was the pebble poking out of the sand on the tank bed, just watching things beyond her comprehension floating by, and unsure if she should consider herself fortunate to be allowed to observe this world that was so far beyond her.

In contrast, Fiona held my eyes. She knew what was coming; she had seen me in action at the party and on the sand dunes of The Hague; she was more than aware of the power of my wrath once it was unleashed. Charlotte, arguably, knew as well, perhaps even knew it better, but she had only ever seen it through my eyes in the memories I had shared with her, or with her own, but inside her own city where nothing much happened except a grand showing of my strength, which she already knew. She had never seen the violence for herself, and as faithful as those memories had been to actual events, there was something lost in their translation if only based on her physical separation from events when they had happened.

Agatha had seen war. She had fought in the War of 1812 and been part of the rebel Evos who had broken away from the Conclave. She had killed and seen friends and enemies die, a few by her own hand. I knew this from the briefest of glimpses into her mind when I checked her for Marco’s corruption. She was under no illusions about what was coming, both today and in the future.

I turned, finally, back to face Charlotte. “I think it’s best you stay here,” I said softly.

“What? No! I’m coming with you!”

“Charl, this could get messy. You don’t need to see that ... and more importantly, your family doesn’t need to see you as part of the force responsible for it if it does happen.”

Charlotte held my eyes; that resolve from her earlier faltering a little as she considered it for a second before it immediately re-solidified to an extent I really hadn’t expected. “You know one thing I learned from nursing?” she asked defiantly. “Getting a patient to like you is always secondary to doing what is best for them. This is my family. If they don’t like me for doing what needs to be done to protect them, then fuck ‘em. It’s not my job to be friends with everyone; it’s my job to keep them safe!”

“Is it?”

“It is now!” Her eyes stayed locked onto mine. “What’s that saying? Those who care don’t matter, and those who matter won’t care. The Collective has stood on the sidelines for too long, they need to see that this war isn’t about them getting involved or not, they’re already involved, and they’re losing.”

“Are we losing?” Agatha asked from behind me, following the conversation closely.

“If there are Praetorian traitors in our midst, subverting us from the inside out, without us even knowing it’s happening, what do you think is happening? Where do you think that road leads?”

Agatha looked thoughtful for a few moments before nodding. “You need to start with the council first,” she said. “And neither of you has the gravitas to call a meeting, so it looks like I am coming as well.”

“I’m coming, too,” Fiona announced. “I’ve sat out too much of this, and you may need backup.”

Charlotte didn’t even wait for me to give a response; she just nodded and smiled at the dark-haired girl behind her. Then, all eyes turned to Evie.

“I’ll ... I’ll stay here and watch Philippa,” She smiled nervously, everyone knowing that there was nothing else she was able to do in this situation. “Just ... be careful.” She added to finish, offering something of a weak smile of encouragement and concern. It was cute, and it was endearing, but it was unnecessary. That coiled, thoroughly provoked beast of anger inside me harbored no illusions that care was needed. This was going to go one of two ways: Either the people in the Collective were all innocent, and life would go on for them as normal, or they weren’t, and the ravenous, insatiable hunger for violence that my fury seemed to hold would be satisfied. I offered Evie the closest thing to a smile that I could manage and then turned back to the others.

“Okay, let’s do this.”

Entering the Collective was, in a lot of ways, the same as entering the cathedral of the Conclave. Once you knew how to get there, re-entering it at any time and from any place was pretty straightforward. I didn’t need to be in the Sect’s mansion to get into their communal consciousness any more than I needed to be in the British Library to enter the Conclave. Being here didn’t make it any easier; it just happened to be where Philippa was being kept because, at the time when that decision was being made, the Sect seemed to be the safest, closest option. The idea that there could be real traitors to our race within that order hadn’t really occurred to me. At the time, to me, they were, at worst, apathetic and non-committal observers. That had been annoying to the point of infuriation, but it hadn’t been anything to actually worry about. It was only the revelations provided by the Praetorians that had cast doubt on that, and by then, Philippa was already here.

I know it was me, I knew it was my mindset, and I knew it was my suspicion, but the Collective seemed ... duller than before. The last time I had been here, it had seemed like a vibrant, colorful community, both literally and figuratively. Filled with sunshine, people, and warmth, it couldn’t have been any more different from the formal, imperious, archaic rigidity of the Conclave. The Conclave’s cathedral was, in a very literal sense, a representation of a religious institution; there was a hierarchy of rank, there were roles for each member, and there were strict and enforceable rules and codes of conduct. Hell, even the visual representation of it was that of a massive Catholic-like cathedral. The Collective was more akin to a hippy commune. There was a freedom here, a culture of individualism where each person was free to do as they wished as long as it didn’t threaten the whole, and that was represented - in physical terms - by a sprawling rural village with all manner of buildings, gardens, and people. It reminded me - at least as far as my imagination went - of what a normal rural colonial village would have looked like in the early 1800s when the Sect and the Collective were simultaneously founded. There were cobblestone streets, small houses, slightly larger houses, the larger central Grand Hall, lots of green grass, and the smell of home cooking. It was a heady mix of nostalgia and optimism and a far cry from the vaunted, echoey cathedral of the Conclave. Whereas that seemed to be designed to make the institution seem infinitely larger than the person, making them feel how small they were compared to the whole, the Collective seemed to denote a sense of community and belonging. A person could be as involved or isolated from the whole as they wanted; it was up to them.

It was a setup I much preferred compared to the alternative. But whereas my first visit here seemed to be like visiting on a bright, warm summer’s day - as it always was inside the mindscape - today seemed to be darker. Not dark for a lack of light, but for the mood that came with me. It was like seeing through the looking glass, scraping back that thin veneer of idealism and gazing unapologetically at the reality of what I was seeing. It was like the immersion into the dream had been shattered; the houses and the immaculately manicured gardens seemed fake, or at least presented in a way that would hide the bodies that could have been buried beneath them. The glorious blue sky seemed more like a painted wooden ceiling, much closer overhead than the illusion would have you believe, and the smiles of the people were not warm and welcoming; they were hollow and speculative. Each set of accusatory eyes was judging you as worthy or not from sight alone. I have no idea how much of that was accurate and how much of it was a result of my dark mood, but the utopian dream I had seen on my first visit was not the same vision that appeared before me as I took my first look around.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, either. Charlotte’s look of grim determination seemed to mirror my own, and even Agatha held an expression of purposeful intent. Fiona was looking around curiously. I had to assume that this was her first expedition into the Collective, and she was seeing the fabled center of power of an order that had always been an elusive and mysterious entity to anyone who had grown up within the bosom of the Conclave. But the look of wonder and intrigue on her face was tempered by a healthy dose of suspicion and paranoia. More than that, the locals - the present residents of the Collective - all seemed to stop what they were doing and stare in our direction.

And all of them could see that we were not here for a jaunty visit or to enjoy the scenery.

Agatha moved first, her gaze not on our surroundings or the people but locked firmly onto the doors of the Grand Hall, and she started marching purposefully toward it. Fiona and I were right behind her, but I couldn’t tell if she was matching my suspicious glares at the people as we passed ... I was too busy glaring. Charlotte was a few steps behind us and returned the nod that I gave when my eyes met hers over my shoulder. There was an odd mix of emotions on her face; a large part of her had kept that steeled resolve, that determination to see this thing through. But now that the reality was growing closer with every onward step, that look of resolve was being filtered through the growing apprehension of what we could find.

Agatha had no such qualms or uncertainties about her task. To her, it was very simple. She had been one of the founding members of the Sect, maybe not in the literal ‘she was part of its formation,’ but she had certainly come along with those venerable members who had started the whole thing. She had fought off the attacks from the Conclave; she had killed former friends, and she had watched her people be killed around her. She had good friends, people as close to her as a real family, killed by attacks that she - like everyone else - had laid at the feet of the Inquisition, only to find out now that the Inquisition had no part in them whatsoever. The Praetorians had killed them, and any member of the Sect - from Arthur, the high council leader, all the way down to the newest acolyte - associated with the Praetorians was not only a traitor of the most severe magnitude but was guilty by association of every crime committed against the people she had loved and lost. Her anger was, perhaps, even more acute than my own. Charlotte, on the other hand, had been gifted a comparatively easy and danger-free life. She had been born long after the troubles and had been only a few years old the last time a real attack had been made against the Sect. To her, it was inconceivable that anyone would betray the Collective in the way that the Praetorians had suggested.