Welcome to Chapter 11.
A quick thanks to my amazing editing team. Your grasp of the English language allows these stories to be what they are. Thank you to the rest of you for your comments, feedback, and high ratings for each chapter as well, not to mention a huge thank you for your participation on the Discord server.
Now, on with the story.
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Ten days.
It had been ten long days, and I was finally starting to think a little more clearly. To the normal human, that is nowhere near long enough to even get over a beloved family pet, let alone the potential love of your life, but I had spent every single moment of those ten days in my bunker. With the time dilation effect making every minute or real-world time stretch out into forty-five minutes in my head, I had spent more than fifteen months pulling myself together.
Jeeves had basically taken over the running of my body. Keeping me on autopilot when it came to feeding me, watering me, and taking bathroom breaks. A single thought made Jimmy, Olivia, Becky, and pretty much everyone else within a few hundred miles become unconcerned over my absence and robbed them of the desire to check in on me. None of them knew about that side of my life, and if they didn't know, they couldn't possibly understand what had happened. Charlotte knew enough to let me grieve.
The time after Charlotte had picked me up was a bit of a blur. Remembering it was like watching a movie reel of events that had happened to someone else. By the time we arrived back at her apartment, she knew that something was wrong, at least something more than surviving an Inquisitor attack. She didn't push it, she didn't ask, she just said she was there for me if I needed to talk or just share what had happened. She had pulled me into her bed, both of us fully clothed, and she had just cuddled comfortingly into the side of me. There was nothing sexual or even vaguely romantic about it. She just wanted to be there for me. She had known there had been casualties. She had known it had been bad, but other than that, she had no idea what had happened to me.
It was somewhere around 4 am when I finally took her hand and showed her everything... and I do mean
everything.
It must be explained here that sharing a memory in this manner was a lot more detailed than just letting her see what happened. Not only was she watching everything unfold through my eyes, but she was also feeling what I felt, emotionally and physically. She could smell and taste and feel everything that I had. For those few moments when my hand was in hers, she was reliving the entire party as if it was happening to her.
Her eyebrows raised at the introduction of Uri, and she almost laughed at my defeat of Rhodri during the duel. I felt her surprise at what had grown between Faye and me. I felt that swell of overwhelming joy within her that I had found something so rare with someone so perfect. The happy smile on her face was still able to brighten the pre-dawn darkness of her bedroom. She was over the moon for me. Of course, it was very short-lived.
The nerves grew within her as she watched me begin to realize something was wrong. Her hand tightened in mine as that fear grew stronger, then squeezed in abject terror as she relived the initial stages of the attack. I felt her heart shatter on my behalf as, once again, Faye was butchered before my eyes. Then she watched in horror as I absolutely
massacred
our attackers.
As soon as the memory ended, the feelings and emotions that I had shared with them ended as well, leaving only her own. She sobbed uncontrollably, trembling and shaking against me, not able to say a coherent word. She had known Faye's blonde friend, she had known Neil, she had known that woman running toward me when I was behind the bar, the one who had taken a round to the head, and she had recognized a few faces in the crowd who had run past me to the fire escape. None of them had survived.
Neither of us said anything as she cried. I was simply incapable of doing the same; the tears wouldn't come for me for a few more days. Charlotte's emotions were all over the place. She was horrified by what she had seen, and a large part of that included the punishment I had dolled out to the Inquisitors. She knew I was powerful, but seeing my loss of control and the damage I could do... It was a sobering realization. But mostly, she was heartbroken. Heartbroken over the loss of Faye, heartbroken over my life with her being cut so short, and heartbroken over the loss of the people she had known. There had been so much death. The violence of my reaction to the attack had taken her by surprise, she was not necessarily horrified at the fact I had reacted as I had, and she didn't blame me in the slightest. But the gruesome nature of it was not something she had expected. It was like shooting a pedophile in the face. He absolutely deserved it, but that doesn't prepare you for the mess. She had felt the depth of emotions within me at the loss of Faye and the rage that had exploded at her loss.
"I am so sorry." She had whispered into the darkness. Echoing the words I had said to Faye's lifeless body before I left the club. I didn't answer, I couldn't; there were simply no words.
It was the afternoon before I had managed to convince her to let me go home. I needed to be alone. She had said something about wanting to make contact with the Sect elders. Apparently, an attack on this scale hadn't happened in a generation - although I had no idea how long that represented in Evo terms - and they needed to be shown what I had shown her. Everyone within the Evo community knew that the attack had happened, and everyone knew that there had been casualties, but the details were vague.
By mid-afternoon, I was home. I walked through my door, sat on my couch, entered my bunker, and stayed there... for ten whole days.
The tears came on day two, the first attempt at sleep on day three, and the first
successful
attempt on day five. It was prolonged periods of numbness punctuated by moments of indescribable agony. Anybody who says that grief is not a physical pain has never felt it. There were endless hours where I just sat on the sofa in my bunker, staring into space as Faye's death played in an endless loop on the screens on the walls. There were times when the pain was so great that I just curled up into a ball in the middle of the floor, almost like hunger pains, but thousands of times more acute. There were times my mind simply refused to deal with the realities of what had happened and forced me to think of something else. I half-heartedly worked on the finishing touches of my project. One eye was being kept on the local news. An event like this would not go unnoticed... and yet there wasn't a word about the death and destruction in a small urban suburb. It was like the whole thing had never happened. I filed that one away for later. By day eight, the grief was starting to subside, or at least the acute pain of it. It was still there, and it would probably
always
be there, but I could string a few coherent thoughts together.
That was when the questions came.
Some of the more obvious questions could be answered quite easily. How had Charlotte known so quickly, for example? Her explanation made sense. The Evos who had survived had warned the others, those people had passed the word on, the boundaries between the Conclave and the Sect ignored in moments of crisis, and the news had eventually reached Charlotte. Other questions were not as easily answered.
If this was the largest single inquisitor attack in a generation, why had they attacked that night? How did they know the party was even happening, or where it was being held? My understanding was that Inquisitors gleaned the location and identity of an Evo from discovering the prolonged and extreme use of their powers. That couldn't apply to a one-off party.
From the little information that I had gleaned during the gathering, Uri had flown in from the other side of the continent to attend the party, he wasn't supposed to be attending, but Marco had wanted him to meet me. That meant that for the first time, the two most powerful Evos alive would be in the same room at the same time. It hadn't been planned that way, so how had the Inquisitors known? There had to be a reason that they had attacked that party and no others for god knows how many years. There were only two possible answers; Perhaps they were always watching the party. Maybe they had always known it was on and had decided to attack based on Uri being there. They couldn't possibly have known who I was on their own, could they?
But why attack
that
party and not somewhere else if Uri was the target? Uri and me being there was the only thing that set that party apart from any other target they could have chosen. It
had
to be planned in advance. The number of men and material they had brought to bear ruled it out as a spur-of-the-moment thing. Which meant that they had to have known Uri was going to be there in advance. Nobody knew me, only Marco knew what I even looked like, so the very slim chance that I was the target meant that they wouldn't have known we were
both
there until someone inside the party had passed that information to our attackers. My mind struggled to make sense of that option...
Because the only other possibility was that someone had told them.
That would mean there was a traitor in the party, and if that was the case, then that person was single-handedly responsible for Faye's death, not to mention the others. If there was a traitor, they were going to face a wrath the likes of which had not even been felt by the Inquisitors. It suddenly dawned on me that I could not trust anyone; perhaps only Charlotte had shown she was above reproach. Everyone else was suspect. The inquisitors had already signed their own death warrants, they had murdered Faye. Nothing short of their utter annihilation was going to quench my hunger for revenge. The question now was who else was going down with them.
Make no mistake, this was not a hunt for justice. Revenge and justice are
not
the same things. But I didn't care. I was going to war!
It was impossible to know, at the moment, not without significantly more information than I had available to me, and there seemed to be only a limited number of ways to get more. On the morning of the tenth day, however, I came out of my bunker to find the answer to that problem. I had powered down my phone when I got home, and turning it back on had preceded a whole minute's worth of beeps and dings from the device as notifications of missed calls and messages scrolled up the screen.
The first message was from Charlotte, hoping I was okay and letting me know that the Sect leadership, her elders, had asked if I would be willing to meet them. The Sect: that was another group that could have potentially passed the information on to the Inquisitors. Charlotte's innocence meant nothing in that regard, she could simply not have known about it. I sent a message back telling her that I was willing to meet them and that I was okay. I promised to get in touch properly in the next few days.
The next few messages were from the one person I actually needed to speak to. Marcos's message stood clear against the white background of the phone screen. "
We need to talk. Call me as soon as you can."
