NewU Pt. 10b

But there was something about him, something about his presence that made me take a step back, something about him that drew that knot of quickly growing fear out of my gut and into my chest. It was a sense of dread that grew with terrifying speed, it was fight or flight, but both options seemed to have been robbed from me by only his presence. I was frozen to the spot for a few moments, it took every single ounce of my willpower to force myself to back away. I swallowed hard as the man regarded me. There was a coldness about his gaze, a malevolence that even my furious rage struggled to match. Every fiber of my being, every shred of my soul, and every single instinct within me was screaming out one inescapable fact.

This man meant me harm.

And what was more, he could have been one of the few people able to inflict it upon me.

It was primal, ancient, it was pure instinct. It was the undiluted personification of dread. But, as Jeeves managed to compose himself within the tumultuous confines of my mind, he noticed something else. Beneath the fear, the instinct, and the dread... was something familiar.

My eyes twitched. The room and the man before me flashed to something else. A memory. Long dank stark-grey tunnels, the marrow-deep urge to run, the threat, the danger, the unmistakable knowledge that I was being hunted by my own death.

The man flickered, at least to my eyes. His impossibly black hair shifted to thousands of needle-sharp, barb-like spikes. His pitch-black eyes erupted into flame, the smoke flowing out of them, over his powerful jaws and around his dagger-like fangs. His clapping hands morphed into clacking claws on hard concrete, and his menacing smile shifted into a hungry maw. His whole body flickered, like a nightmare in a horror movie, into the creature that had stalked my dreams a week ago and then back to the man. Jeeves' words from that night echoed through my mind.

Something is coming.

This was it, this is what was coming, this... man... was the danger that my subconscious had been trying to warn me about. I suddenly, somehow, knew what he was. This man was the thing that had hunted my kind for centuries, he was literally the thing of nightmares. This man was a High-Inquisitor. More of Charlotte's words from my time with her all those weeks ago swam through my mind.

If a High Inquisitor gets close enough to you to know who you are, just run. They are completely immune to our powers, they are utterly unbeatable in combat, and they are merciless in their hunting of us. If you ever come into contact with one... Run! Your life will depend on it.

I knew it was futile, I knew that it would have no effect at all, but my mind needed something to grasp onto as I slowly backed away from the man and toward the bar. I swung my arm again, just like I had during the duel, just like I had against the men who had killed Faye. Every single ounce of my massive power reserves was hurled at the man. The air was ripped open, the wooden floor was torn apart between us, a long line of charred hardwood followed the bolt through the air. The swinging, hanging overhead lights were yanked from their mooring as the energy blasted across the room and smashed into him.

Nothing happened. Not a single hair was blown out of place. The energy didn't miss him, it didn't wash around him. It hit him with its full force... it just did absolutely nothing. It puffed out of existence like a candle flame in a storm.

The man frowned as one of the light fittings bounced off his shoulder and smashed around his feet. He reached one of his hands up to dust himself off. My eyes twitched, and another flicker of memory flashed across my vision.

Only the chunks of concrete bouncing off it seemed to be noticed at all. The creature didn't even break its stride. It simply shook its back to dislodge the debris and closed on its prey.

My eyes narrowed, not necessarily at him, but at something that Jeeves was trying to tell me. The man started stepping forward again, that vicious evil smile on his face spread at the utter ineffectiveness of my powers against him. Powers that would have turned any other living thing into a stain on the hardwood floor.

"The dust, the debris, the light bulb," Jeeves distant voice echoed from his hiding place in my chest.

The man stalked a few more feet toward me as my back knocked into the bar behind me. He took a deep breath, his mouth opened for him to speak, his eyes narrowed a little at the almost instinctive flick of my hand, and he flashed a glance to his right.

Just in time for a ton's worth of marble and oak constructed pool table, the last one in the room, to smash him into the wall.

My powers may not be effective against him. But he sure as shit had a vulnerability to the laws of physics, and a flying pool table, traveling at the speed of a runaway train, did as much damage to him as it would to anyone else. His body was crushed, most of him bursting like a grape between the weight and force of the pool table and the solid cinder block wall behind him. The pool table was left leaning precariously up against the wall, the man's shoes were still in the middle of the room where he had been knocked out of them, and a hand and wrist hanging out of the side of the collision were all that was left of him. The knot in my chest vanished in an instant.

It was only then that I spotted the two men who had been standing behind him. Just like he had been, these men were not dressed in dark tactical gear, but in crisp black suits. Their presence in the room had been completely hidden from me by the High inquisitor's sheer presence, his blinding Aura had been like looking directly at the sun. But now, as his hand twitched against the side of the upright pool table, my vision cleared, and my eye bore down on the two men staring slack-jawed back at me.

A quick mental sweep told me that these were the last of the inquisitor attack force, the rest of them were either dead or had fled. These were the personal aides to the man who they always thought to be almost invincible. All they could do now was stare, pale-faced and wide-eyed, at the Evo, who had just utterly destroyed their understanding of how the world worked.

I didn't give them long to dwell on it.

With a thought, their ties tightened around their throats like a noose. Their hands shot up to their necks, clawing desperately at the garment in an attempt to loosen them as they were dragged across the room. In only a few seconds, my hands had closed around their throats.

They froze.

My presence before them elicited the same response in these two inquisitors as the High Inquisitor had provoked in me. They could only stare at me, dumbfounded and paralyzed in terror.

"Go back to whoever sent you," I snarled. My voice sounded different, as if dozens of them had been layered on top of each other, but every syllable smashed into their minds like a sledgehammer. "Tell them that they have started a war today that they cannot hope to win. I meant them no harm or ill will before tonight, but now I am going to destroy them, every last one of them! Tell them what happened here, and tell them I am coming!"

With that, I released them. They both fell to the floor, looking up at me, unwilling or unable to believe that they were being spared, even if only as messengers. "GO!!" My voice boomed around what was left of the club. Both men scrambled to their feet, and with only a cursory glance at what was left of their boss... they ran for their lives.

I stood in silence for a few moments, watching as the men disappeared into the billowing smoke filling the car park. My eyes wandered around the carnage; the scale of death and destruction was almost impossible to comprehend. There were bodies everywhere. Neil was still laid out, face down, on the floor a little ahead of me, I hadn't even realized that I had walked through the pool of his blood as I had been backing towards the bar. Now a set of bloody footprints marked my path away from the man I assumed had been at the head of all of this. The puddle of his blood was still growing out of the base of the pool table. Everywhere I looked, I found death.

Two dozen armor-clad Inquisitors were still lying where they fell. Most of them had suffered the sort of massive injuries that are rarely seen outside of front-line armed conflict or horror movies, I didn't even spare a glance at the charred, broken, and smeared remains of the men outside. The vast majority of the dead inside the club, however, were Evos. Visions of their laughing, smiling faces still echoed in my mind, it had been less than fifteen minutes since we were attacked. Since they were all living and laughing together. Shattered bodies, severed limbs, faces frozen in everlasting panic. The metallic taste of blood in the air.

Finally, my eyes found Faye, and that rage erupted inside me again. The building trembled on its foundations as the fury poured out of me in waves, flakes of masonry, plaster, and dust rained down from the ceiling, and a severed power cable sparked in the corner. We had only just found each other, our lives were just beginning. A lifetime of possibility and opportunity, of love and passion and happiness. Everything that I had ever wanted, the only constant ambition and dream of my life: To love and be loved equally in return. Found and lost in the space of only a few hours.

I was going to kill them all!

They had taken something from me that they could never understand, and in return, I would take everything from them. Rivers would run red to the oceans of blood, and it still wouldn't be enough to quench my thirst for revenge. My fists clenched at my sides and another dangerous growl rumbled from my chest.

I was snapped back to the moment by sirens sounding in the distance. I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was, but the suburbs of a small British city had been turned into Beirut. There is no way that wouldn't have gone unnoticed by the neighbors and reported to the authorities. At that moment, dozens of police, ambulance, and fire sirens were shattering the quiet of the night, quiet that had only just returned to this small part of it.

"Sir, we... we need to go." Jeeves' voice sounded as hollow and devastated by grief as the rest of me felt. It was the first time that I had really felt any genuine emotion coming from my aging butler. It was another thing that I shouldn't have been surprised at, as the representation of my subconscious, he was feeling the gut-wrenching pain of Faye's loss as acutely as I was.

With a sigh, I cast my last glance over at the girl of my dreams. "I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry. I will always love you."

And with that, I headed out through the fire exit and disappeared into the night.

********

An hour later, I was walking along the sidewalk of a street I didn't recognize. I had no idea where I was. I had ducked through a small park after leaving the club, walking away from the sound of the sirens until I found some houses. I had snuck through the garden of one of them and onto the street beyond, picked a direction, and just walked.

I had considered calling an uber to get me home. But I knew enough about police investigation methods. The first thing they would do would be to check the local cab companies to see if any pickups were made from that area, which would lead them straight to my door. Or at least straight to the Queen's Head. Even if I had been dropped off a mile away and walked the last stretch, they would have my details from the payment and a description of me from the driver.

Instead, I just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. My mind, however, was on full alert. I needed to be ready to duck into an alleyway at the first sign of the police. I was also aware that more than a few of the Inquisitors had fled the scene at the death of their leader. It was not a huge leap to think that one or more of them were following me. Those voids were difficult to spot at the best of times, even more so if I wasn't actively looking for them.

I had no idea where the surviving Evos had gone, either. I had seen Marco, Uri, and Jerry ushering at least twenty of them to safety, a fair number of them were injured, and although I knew that their powers would heal them - as mine had healed me after the accident - I was sure that they wouldn't have been able to leave the area without help.

Behind all of it, behind the caution, behind the wandering, behind the curiosity over what had happened to the other party-goers, was the grief. I felt hollow, it was like the very core had been ripped out of me. I know that it would get infinitely worse before it even began to get any better, and that would be a long time coming. If one out of every five thoughts was about the other Evos or about getting home, the other four were about Faye.

And with each thought of Faye, the rage swelled up inside me again. It was a viciously repeating cycle of grief and fury. I could feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins. I almost regretted releasing both of the messengers. Thoughts of extracting information out of one of them flickered through my mind. I had never considered myself a violent or vengeful person before that moment, but I would have peeled the skin from the man in a heartbeat, making sure he felt all of it, if it meant finding out where to find the rest of the organization responsible for the death of Faye was hiding. I was becoming increasingly angry at myself for not getting that information while I had the chance.

There is no better gauge of a person's anger than their willingness to resort to torture.

I was trying everything I could think of to get myself to calm down, everything from counting the number of red cars in a single street to timing how long it took me to walk from one streetlight to the next, then trying to match it exactly for the one after. No matter how hard I tried to avoid it, that look of fear and surrender that had washed over Faye's beautiful features swam before my eyes. Over and over. The sound of her voice in my head...

I love you

I had known, even before she had said it, that it was true. That her feelings for me were so deep, that despite the minuscule amount of time that we had been together, she had not only meant it, but the words were insufficient. Just like they were for my feelings for her. Her last thought in life had been to tell me, her last conscious act had been to will those words from her beautiful mind to mine. But the thing that made my heart shatter in my chest was the simple knowledge that she never got to hear me say it back, and neither of us would ever get to say it again. That was the first, last and only time I would ever hear her say it.

She was dead. It didn't seem real.

I almost jumped out of my skin when my phone rang. I felt the instinctive surge of energy flow up my spine and into my hand for a second before I calmed myself. I pulled out my phone to see Charlotte's name on the screen. I didn't want to talk to her; I didn't want to talk to anyone, but Jeeves seemed to move my fingers without waiting for me to make a decision.

"Pete? Ohmygod, you're alive!" She breathed frantically through the speaker at me.

"I'm... here," I answered back. I sure as shit wasn't okay.

"You got out, thank god! I have been going out of my mind! I have been trying to call you for ages, but it kept going straight to voicemail! I was so worried!" I frowned for a second, but Jeeves quickly filled in the blanks. My phone hadn't had any signal immediately before the attack. I'd not given it much thought during the fight, but there must have been a jammer or something, either somewhere around the club or at the local cell towers. They had obviously been deactivated now, presumably by the police investigating the incident. "Where are you? I'm coming to get you!" she asked, the adrenaline that was still coursing through my veins sounded equally present in her trembling voice.

A question popped into my head. "How do you know what happened?" My suspicion knew no bounds at this point.

"Are you kidding? Everyone knows! News of Inquisitor attacks spread like wildfire. It's one of the only things that the Sect and the Conclave members still freely talk about. How the fuck did you escape?"

"I... didn't."

"What? What do you mean? Actually, tell me later. Where are you? I'm already in the car. The club has been completely cordoned off!"

"I..." I had no idea. "I don't know. Let me just..." I tapped the screen a few times, pulling up my location on the map app and sending a screenshot of my location to her.

There was a shuffle on the other end of the line for a second while she checked her phone. "Okay, I've got it. I am two minutes away! Don't move!" With that, she hung up.

I'm not going to lie, there was a small part of me that expected another group of SUVs and box vans - another group of armed and armor-clad men - to race into the street. That paranoid part of me that questioned everything about Charlotte and her story, that asked if she had been in on it. If she was part of the reason that Faye was gone.

The question was answered ninety seconds later when a bright red mini cooper squealed around the corner and screeched to a halt next to me. The car had barely stopped when the driver's door was flung open, and my strawberry-blonde friend threw herself out of it. She practically sprinted around the idling car and threw her arms around me. "Oh God, you're okay, you're okay. Oh, thank fucking god!" I could feel the weight of her heavy breathing, I could feel the panic in her chest. I could see the paleness of her face, the wide, vaguely bloodshot eyes, puffy from fear-filled tears. I could feel the overwhelming wave of relief washing over her. Any question of her involvement was gone in moments.

She stepped back a little, her hands wandering all over me. Grabbing at my arms, running down my chest, running through my hair, checking with physical touch to confirm what her eyes were telling her and that I really was in one piece. It was only after she had convinced herself that I wasn't bleeding, broken, or burned that she let herself feel the weight of grief, anger, and adrenaline coming off me.

She backed away slowly. "Okay, I need you to listen to me." Her words were soft and calm. Or at least as calm as she was able to make them under the circumstances. "Our kind doesn't process adrenaline well. It doesn't filter out of our systems as quickly as it does in humans. I promise you are safe, and you can tell me, or show me, everything that happened. But right now, I just need you to breathe."

It is one of life's little jokes that telling someone to calm down is the quickest and surest way to make them do the opposite. I felt that momentary swell of anger building again inside me. How the fuck was I supposed to calm down after what had happened? How could I ever be calm again while the people responsible for Faye's death, no, her fucking murder, were still alive and well? How could I ever be happy, or find love, or be safe or...

Jeeves found the logic in Charlotte's words long before I did, and I felt myself releasing a breath I hadn't realized I had been holding. My fists had been clenched, and that tingle of energy had still been vibrating under my skin. Jeeves released it all. He just let it go. I felt my whole body loosen a little.

My eyes found Charlotte's, I opened my mouth to speak, but words just wouldn't come out. She seemed to understand. Her eyes, as soft and as comforting as they had always been, just held mine. She didn't understand what had happened; we both knew that. All she knew was that the party had been attacked, and I had made it out, seemingly unharmed. For that fact alone, she was indescribably grateful. She nodded and silently took my hand, leading me to her car, opening the passenger door and guiding me into the seat.