Author’s Note: This story is a companion piece to my other story, Vicarious Pain. It would be advisable to read that first, as a lot of things will be difficult to understand in this piece if you haven’t already been reading that. It’s the whole story told from the “other side” so to speak, from Karayan’s point of view. Yes, this story will be yaoi as well, though you probably won’t be able to see the pairings very clearly until later.

One think I think everyone should keep in mind is that I’m basically writing from the point of view of a character who, if not completely evil, is at least a bit mad. As such, the story is written from a completely different tone than Vicarious Pain, and it may be a bit more difficult to follow. The POV and tenses are a bit skewed, but intentionally so. It runs along the same timeline as the other story. Be ready for cruelty, sadism, and various degrees of evil.

And without further ado, on with it…

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Blake Wright woke up one day in his home, sleeping in his bed as he usually did. Nothing had seemed amiss when he had woken, nothing out of the ordinary. He had stretched, gotten out of bed and made his way to the bathroom, blinking tiredly from what had to have been lack of sleep the night before. Blake didn’t remember what had happened. He figured that he must have been drinking.

That was, nothing had seemed amiss until he had stepped in front of his bathroom mirror. His face had been splattered with blood, as had his clothing. His hands were covered in the vile stuff, though as far as he could tell, there were no wounds on his body. He knew that the blood couldn’t have been his own. He had no recollection of the previous night.

When he had turned on the TV that afternoon, after washing all the blood off and trying to forget what had transpired that morning, he had seen a news report on the death of a beautiful young blonde woman named Melinda Ethridge. She was the well-known secret mistress of a married Senator. She had been stabbed brutally, fifty-seven times to be exact. There had been a lot of blood.

She lived barely five blocks from Blake’s home.

Blake tried to block out the blatantly obvious signs even as he tried to fight to recall the memories from his black-out the same night as the murder. He told himself it couldn’t have been him. He didn’t even know Melinda Ethridge. He wasn’t a murderer.

It was barely a week later when Blake Wright woke up covered in blood a second time. He had washed away the tell-tale signs, telling himself again that it was all some weird coincidence. He had no recollection of what had happened the previous night—yet when he had turned on the TV that afternoon, he saw a news report detailing the deaths of a couple who lived barely two miles away from his home.

They had been brutally stabbed—the same M.O. as the perpetrator of the Ethridge crime. Both nights corresponded to the nights of Blake’s black-outs, of his lost memories.

He thought he was going crazy. He wasn’t a murderer.

A month later, Blake was arrested for both crimes. He told them that he hadn’t killed anyone, that he didn’t even know the victims. He told the police that he wasn’t a murderer.

Yet he wasn’t so sure anymore.

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I sat back in the red-upholstered chair, taking a sip of brandy out of the decanter held heavily in my hand. I can hear the clock ticking softly in the back of my mind, but I can easily tune it out. If there’s one thing a person learns being a psychic, it’s strict mental control. The time moves by slowly in this place when we have no assignment.

Our last assignment had been two days ago. Brendan had called us together and thrown a file onto the desk, telling us to go through it, that we only had a few hours until we had to go out. He said that the assignment came from the higher-ups, that it was non-negotiable. Arum had rolled his eyes and sat down in a huff behind me, looking over my shoulder as I flipped through the file. Adriana had seemed interested—she was the only one who ever really did—and Kendra had just looked blankly at the words and pictures contained within, realizing that we had to go for another kill. Two of them, to be exact. It didn’t faze her any more than it did the rest of us.

The two adults in the picture were named Sandra and William Doyle. They were a happy looking couple, with their arms around each other and their eyes smiling and laughing. Their son, Ciaran, had the same long, wavy blonde hair as his mother, the same blue eyes and sharp jaw line of his father. I had put the picture of the family aside and flipped to the next page, where there was a page with another picture of the Doyle’s son paper clipped to it. It said EMPATH in large block letters at the top of the page.

I had suddenly understood the purpose of the assignment, though I had no idea what need the organization would have for an empath. I was already a telepath, which at least had some use. Empaths tended to be weaker—they could easily be driven to insanity by the onslaught of emotions while telepaths only went insane from thought overload, something most could avoid with even weak shields.

But I had said nothing, flipping to the next page on which another picture was clipped. This one was of a man with short-clipped brown hair and a hard face, which the paper beneath had informed me was a twenty-four year old man named Blake Wright. Our assignment—or my assignment, rather—had been to use mind control to force him to kill Sandra and William Doyle, the happy couple in the picture, to obtain their son for the program.

Blake Wright was the same man we had used to murder beautiful blonde-haired Melinda Ethridge in her home the week before for intrusion into the wrong political affairs. The Justice Department had ordered that hit, but somehow, I doubted they were connected to this one. Wright was no more than a petty criminal the government could use as a scapegoat for their covert assassinations.

Blake Wright had no recollection of killing the young, beautiful blonde woman who knew too much. Yet he would eventually be arrested, tried, and convicted for the crime. I had made sure that he left enough evidence to guarantee that this would be the case.

I had flipped the manila folder closed and sat it back on the desk, folding my hands calmly. Brendan had looked at me with that patronizing gaze he always had, something that I was convinced came from nearly twenty years in the CIA: learning to be carefully superior. Arum, Adriana, and Kendra had looked at me imploringly—as I was the oldest psychic in the building, I was always the one looked to for the final say. The man who had previously held the position, a man with clairsentience and clairaudience four years my senior, had thrown himself off a cliff barely six months ago.

I had no qualms admitting that I was responsible for his suicide. Brendan knew it too, but he hadn’t reported it to his superiors, because if he had, I suspected that they would have attempted some sort of punishment. Brendan knew that my punishment could be so much worse, so he kept the information to himself.

“We’ll do it,” I had informed him, and Special Agent Brendan Richards had given me one of his rare smiles, though it was cold as ever. I had smiled back, and mine had matched.

The only one of us who had had doubts was Adriana. She had tried to hide them, but she knew by now that she could hide nothing from me. I could find my way into any of their minds and find anything that I wanted. Arum was the only one who had ever escaped my scrutiny. It had taken just one trip into the recesses of his mind to find that he really was dead inside. That amused me.

We had completed the mission the next day without much preamble, though it was troubling that we actually had to fly to Oregon again to complete it. They wanted us to stay there in case anything went wrong. I resented being the instigators of their wishes as well as their common clean-up crew, but I said nothing again, though I did lose my temper once and throw Arum into the wall in anger. His head had collided with it and he had fallen forward, blood flowing from his mouth from where he had bit his tongue. There had been no thoughts coming from him, no pain reflected on his face.

He had looked up at me and smiled, and we had flown home, with the exception of Adriana, who had just teleported herself home. I envied the girl for that power; my own bilocation was less useful. There was little one could do with a doppelgänger.

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Brendan’s listening to violin again. That’s how I know something has gone right. The strains of violin from Tartini’s “Trillo del Diabolo” are coming forth from the agent’s office when I walk inside the large facility I call my workplace. It’s an appalling place really, all cold steel and white-painted hallways. It looks sterile, but that’s how I like it, really. My apartment is different—quite opposite, really; decorated in deep reds and purples that remind me of wine. I could blend into the walls of this facility if I wanted; I’m so pale and the walls are so stark white.

Any time one’s workplace contains a morgue, it’s when one realizes that the job they have is depressing. Or it would be, really, if I remembered what depressing was. I wasn’t quite sure anymore.

I walk right into Brendan’s office without knocking, merely because I don’t feel like it and I know it will earn me a glare from the older man. I could care less whether or not he is angry with me, and the sound of his frustration and anger echoing within my head is so sweet.

Brendan looks up from his paperwork when he hears me enter and looks up at me. A bit of anger fades into his dull hazel eyes, which I expected, and his thoughts are radiating annoyance, though not as much as they would be if he had been in a bad mood in the first place. The music is emanating from a silvery CD player on one of the shelves along the walls. He always listens to the devil’s instrument when he’s in a good mood.

Brendan regards me with tired-looking eyes that radiate annoyance above all else. Even though he is only forty-one years old, his eyes look as if he has lived millennia or more. Too much stress over the years, obviously, has had its effect on him. He looks like he’s quickly approaching fifty sometimes rather than having just passed forty.

Yet despite his annoyance, he speaks cordially to me. “Karayan,” he intones, dipping his head toward me in slight acknowledgement.

“What’s got you in such a good mood?” I ask, and immediately, his thoughts turn to the empath—the one whose parents he had killed just a few days ago. There’s something inside Brendan that’s almost giddy about it, and that’s a bit frightening. Brendan is never giddy.

Brendan pulls out the file he showed me and the others a few days before, opening it so that I can see that it is quite a bit thicker than when I had originally seen it. “Things are going quite well with the empath. He’ll be easy to break, when the time comes.”

I regard him with a sneer; I could care less about breaking the minds of these poor lost souls, but I take no pleasure from it. Brendan does, and that’s where I differ from this man who is twenty years my senior. He seems pleased by the idea of watching this boy fall apart; I think it would be amusing, if nothing else, but breaking an empath has proven to be almost too easy. Most of the time, they are at least half broken before they arrive here; completely useless.

“That’s news,” I say noncommittally, moving across the room with my finger running across the top of one of the shelves mounted on the wall. I pull my finger away, pretending to regard it with some amount of consideration where I have none. There is no dust, of course. It is absolutely immaculate; the way that Brendan would love it. I remain pleased.

“He looks a bit like you, don’t you think, before the color got unsaturated?” Brendan says, sliding the photo of Ciaran alone across the desk toward where I stand. I turn and regard it with some interest, picking the photo up and glancing at it.

Brendan was right, of course. The boy did have quite a resemblance to me, if you were to add more color to my looks. His hair was quite a bit shorter than mine though still long, honey blonde where mine was platinum. His eyes were cool blue whereas mine were silvery grey, and his skin had more color than mine. His hair was wavy, but mine was straight. Still, I could see the resemblance.

“I suppose,” I say disinterestedly, placing the photograph back on the table. “What’s your point?”

Brendan smiles cruelly at me. “How do you think Tristan will react to that?”

I turn and glare at him as the song in the CD player changes to Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre”. I understand immediately what he wants now. I knew that I should have discerned it earlier from his thoughts, but somehow, I had missed it. He wants to see my reaction to the possibility of my broken ex-lover taking another. He wants to break me as well.

I make my glare ice cold when I look at Brendan. “He’ll not dare touch another after what I’ve done,” I reply coldly. “He’ll be too fearful of their safety, too afraid that he’s inadequate. He’ll be tempted, though, and that’s the beauty of it. This could turn out quite nicely for everyone.”

I can tell immediately that Brendan is disappointed at my lack of reaction. “Good luck with this empath of yours,” I say coldly. “I hope that he doesn’t fail to meet up to your expectations.”

I turn on my heel and leave the room quickly. Once I get outside, I let out my frustration, forming a large black energy ball and throwing it at the harshly white wall. The walls are reinforced, however, and it merely bounces off, hitting the wall on the other side of the hallway and dissipating.

I take a deep breath to steady myself, walking away down the hall.

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When I arrive back at my apartment that night, I am surprised to see Arum sitting in my favorite red wingback chair. He is fingering an old picture of Tristan and myself. It had been taken just before my seventeenth birthday by Adriana when we had both still been at Blackthorn Manor. Arum’s eyes have gone so black that it is almost impossible to discern the difference between his pupils and irises. That, combined with his pale skin, makes him look almost dead as he runs his hands over the frame of the picture almost reverently.

I don’t bother to ask him how he had gotten into my apartment. I know that he would just smile that suggestive smile of his and shake his head, and I know that his thoughts would never reveal it. Arum is the emptiest person I have ever met, even more so than I was sure I was myself. I thought I might have been too harsh with him when he had arrived. Eighteen years old and already he was broken. Pity.

“What are you doing here, Arum?” I ask, my voice bored. I make the way to the cabinet on the other side of the room as I speak, pulling out a wine glass and pouring myself some red wine. I sit down in the chair across from, a plush deep purple one, taking a sip of my wine as he blows a strand of multicolored hair out of his face. As usual, his mind is empty.

“You loved him,” Arum says matter-of-factly. He must have missed the memo. He had arrived at Blackthorn Manor just before I had left, hadn’t had time to catch on.

I sip the wine languidly, letting it run down my throat as I regard the younger man. It bothered me that he could understand so much about me, yet I still couldn’t get a thing from him. Anything I’d touched, and especially things I’d owned, he could pick up and use to tell me something about myself. His mind was empty, and I couldn’t read him, which bothered me more than anything. It didn’t seem like a fair trade, and I hated not having the upper hand.

I said nothing to Arum about it.

“I was a fool,” I say simply, leaning back into the luxurious cushion of the chair.

Arum stares at the picture once again, holding it more tightly before he looks up at me with those impossibly black eyes. There is energy swirling in the room; I know it and I know that I can’t hope to stop it. I’m not sure if I want to.

“I don’t understand…” Arum mumbles under his breath. “You love him still.”

I look over at Arum as if he’s just told me that I’m about to grow another head. “That’s absurd,” I managed to spit out after a second.

Arum just smiles that secretive smile of his and looks back down at the photograph. Adriana took it candidly, and neither Tristan nor I was looking at the camera. There was a blazing smile on my face; even I couldn’t tell if it was real or falsified. I couldn’t remember anymore.

“Perhaps,” he says, before standing up and replacing the picture on the table from which he picked it up. I don’t know why I left it there, to be honest. I hadn’t noticed its presence in years. I didn’t even remember deciding to display the picture that so acutely connected me to my past. It didn’t make sense to me.

“You’re beautiful when you smile, Karayan,” Arum says softly as he brushes past me. I open my mouth to reply, but he’s already gone, and I’m left confused by his words.

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I walk into the morgue the next day to see that it is occupied for the first time in nearly a month. Doctor Paul Valcourt—a man who was every bit as posh and stuck up as his name implied—is standing over the body of a woman, chest splayed open with a perfect y-incision that they taught in medical school or wherever one went to become a medical examiner. He is picking at her insides with tweezers, which I find to be absolutely appalling. Death I didn’t mind, but picking at one’s remains after death was just unnecessary, if not a bit gross. I wasn’t sure what sort of person decided they’d like to cut up dead people for a living, but Doctor Valcourt seemed like a perfect candidate.

I glance at the face of the woman the doctor was currently dissecting—because that’s really what it was that he was doing—and I recognize her immediately. She was the woman whose death I had helped orchestrate just a few days before. She really would be a beautiful woman for her age, but now, she is just a shadow of her former self, deathly pale with blue-green eyes staring blankly at the world. The luster of Sandra Doyle’s golden-blonde locks is even beginning to fade, but I’m sure that it won’t matter soon, because her face and every other part of her body will be cut up and inspected for medical research.

I walk over to the body-size metal drawers around the wall and find that one has a tag on it. I pull out the drawer with mild interest and confirm that the body inside is in fact that of William Doyle, Sandra’s husband. I roll my eyes and push the drawer back in. Paul Valcourt’s interest in the genetics of psychic ability really is getting to be overmuch.

“Did you unlock the secrets of the universe yet, Paul?” I ask, turning around to face the blond man with undisguised maliciousness in my eyes. The doctor just snorts and reaches his latex-covered hand into the body, pulling out something that looks suspiciously like a kidney and putting it on the scale next to the cutting table. I can tell that he’s annoyed with my presence because he always has the tendency to think that everyone around him isn’t quite as intelligent or dedicated as he is, and I am no exception. I’ve been trying to push him off his high horse for years.

He marks something down on his clipboard and turns away from me without response. He is already thinking about what an ignorant fool I am, which I choose to have the grace to ignore. “Somehow, I don’t think that the answer to the origins of psychic ability lie in the kidneys,” I remarked offhandedly, my tone purposely catty. Doctor Valcourt gets a look in his eyes that suggested that he wants to stab me with the scalpel he is currently holding in his hand, though he seems able to hold the urge in check, though barely.

“You simply do not understand all the work that goes into the scientific process,” Valcourt tells me, his slight accent reminding me of his childhood and schooling in France and Belgium.

“I’m sure,” I reply flatly, leaning my considerable height down to look in one of the microscopes on the table, which holds a blood sample that looks, by all rights, normal. I shake my head and walk out of the room, and I can feel Paul’s angry eyes on my back, can feel his irritation through his thoughts. Yet I just smile and walk on.