56

Disclaimer/Warning: This work is not mine. Contacting the original author is impossible, but I like to think they would be okay with my posting it here for as many people to see as possible. This work is NOT complete and it will NEVER be complete. I'm sad too.

With that said, enjoy.

- - -

"Thank you, Brother," Simone said after taking a sip from the glass of water I handed her.

The Sibling radiated bone-deep exhaustion. She was a decade younger than Anna, but her eyes were empty in a way I recognized.

"This is highly irregular, Brother," the head of the committee complained.

"There is work for him here," Tara said dismissively.

She was the youngest Brother on the selection committee, and the only one that voted against Kyle. Her eyes had not met mine since I entered the room.

Stephanie sat in front of a semi-circular table where the selection committee sat in judgment. Her face expressed patience, but her body was dangerously tense.

"We can send someone for him when the time comes," the head said petulantly.

"Let's just get this over with," Tara told him.

Iane turned to look at me from her chair beside Stephanie. The committee requested her presence to bear witness against Stephanie's suitability for the black ring.

The interview was not a commonly used tool to select a Brother. Stephanie needed to be handled delicately according to Robert and the committee had decided to humor him.

"He will still be sanctioned for this," the head said unable to resist a sidelong reprimand. "Bloodline or not; there are rules!"

Tara glanced at Simone.

The interview did not go well for Stephanie. The committee members were infuriated that I gave her a ring, but did not have the courage to face me directly. Iane siding with Stephanie's right to be called a Brother only fueled their anger.

The questions turned brutally personal when Tara brought up Stephanie's rape. The two women fought a verbal duel, which neither walked away from with a clear-cut victory.

"It's time to vote, and let the Enforcer do his job," the head said finally. "All in favor?"

Tara raised her hand and smirked.

"Against?" he asked.

The four Brothers voted as a block.

"Simone," the head said in annoyance.

The Sibling had her head down.

"Simone!" the head said loudly.

"She's joined her crest Brother," Tara said softly.

The Brothers turned slowly towards me. The silenced 9mm's in my hands clapped together, and then again.

"I suppose this means I'm not on your list today," Tara said after I double-tapped the fallen Brothers.

"Not today," I said.

"Simone?" she asked looking at the Sibling again.

"The water," I replied.

"Killers usually have preferences," she said curiously.

"Death doesn't," I said looking at Stephanie.

She paled and ran for the garbage can.

"Thank you," she said after recovering. "You were right; it would have been painful if I didn't have something in my stomach."

Pointing at the pitcher of water got me a smile.

"I brought my own," she said tipping a flash to me.

She washed her mouth out before walking to the door and opening it to let the rest of the Foot in. They studied the room without comment until they saw Simone.

"You killed a Sibling!" one of the Foot that had not sparred me said angrily.

The bullet entered through his cheek and came out the top of his head. Everyone's eyes went to the 9mm I held at my hip. They waited quietly while I put two bullets into the Brother's chest.

"Can we get started now?" Stephanie asked the remaining Foot.

Tara studied us quietly.

"We can decide her fate, Brother," Iane said approaching her.

"Excuse me?" Tara asked.

"I will be taking Simone's place on the selection committee," Iane informed her.

"There's never been a selection committee with only two members," Tara replied.

"Five members have never retired at the same time," Iane pointed out. "An Ekaterina gave Stephanie her ring; there was a time that would have been enough."

"Hmmm," Tara intoned.

The two women walked out of the room whispering to each other. The Foot Brothers studied the bodies with an eye towards what the best place to begin the clean up was.

I put the guns away and leaned against the wall.

It was a busy week but as Samantha predicted things quieted down significantly when the loudest complainers about the committee's fates were silenced.

My return home after visiting a handful of those Brothers drove in how much my living environment had changed since Stephanie left.

Susan and Nancy had spent every night since Stephanie moved in after the rape, but their absence was in many ways was expected. Michael moving out made the air seem heavier; he spent some his free time during the day at my house but made his bed at Stephanie's.

Before Stephanie moved out, I understood on some level that Siblings needed to be around each other in numbers, but Doris Alex and Melisa's reaction to an even emptier house for the summer put that need on display.

Melisa opened my house to the sorority for the summer, while Doris Alex could not seem to leave the house without stumbling over a Sibling that needed a place to spend the night.

Life turned towards normal when a new male Sibling moved in. Samantha's baby brute, Simon, completed his training at her capable hands and was ready to start college.

More than a few colleges tried to recruit him for their football program in his senior year in high school, but had to respect his desire to serve as a 'missionary' first.

Samantha stopped his Brother tour when he walked through her door and kept him until she decided he was ready to be returned to the wild. She had no intention of letting him go completely, so asked that he be allowed to live with me.

Samantha had the rest of Simon's life perfectly mapped out, and the boy seemed overjoyed that she was taking care of all the details.

His face when she left him with us resembled what a first grader looked like when his mother abandoned him at the stairs of a school. The only thing that prevented him from running after her car was her acceptance of his Sibling crest ring; she told him it would not be returned until he graduated but their future together might was etched in stone.

Simon's air of innocence caused my crest Siblings to adopt him as their little brother. The sorority followed their lead and not long after so did Michael's fraternity. No one was surprised when Simon began wearing a pledge-pin even though the fall semester was still a couple of months away.

The university was happy that Simon chose to play football for them. Unfortunately, it was not a painless transition; the coach did not like Samantha and I attending Simon's physical and first workout. He really did not appreciate it when I ripped up the workout program he designed for Simon. His new player's willingness to walk away from the program made him pay attention me though.

He challenged the workout program I wanted for Simon so the next day I put the players he could gather and Simon through mine. The coach should have been proud that he had to tell most of the players to stop before they got hurt trying to keep up with me.

"Is he human?" an exhausted Simon asked the girls when we got home.

After I established people needed to go through me to hurt her precious Sibling, Samantha loosened the apron strings and stopped visiting every day.

I thought about Simon as I took a final walkthrough of the undecorated sorority chapter house. He struck me less childlike and more like a puppy; he certainly followed the Siblings and me around like one. I nodded thinking that I should keep an eye on Michael, who would be unable to resist getting Simon into situations Samantha would not approve of.

My crest Siblings and the sorority officers walked a couple of steps behind me as I inspected the chapter house. Melisa supplied ready answers for my questions about the rooms.

"Is everything to your satisfaction?" Bethany, the sorority president, asked me nervously when we made it back to the chapter room.

"Can I see the interior design drawings?" I said reaching out a hand.

Doris Alex put a folder in it, and the girls fidgeted as I went through it slowly. I was the only one that noticed Sally and Bethany's tenseness when I got to the last drawing.

They must have decided not to take any chance that I would miss catching their hands in the cookie jar.

"What's wrong, David?" Melisa asked.

I pulled the drawing out of the folder and handed it to her. Doris Alex blanched when she looked at it over Melisa's shoulder. There was no missing the guilty parties when Melisa's green eyes turned on them.

"Who switched the plans for David's room?" Melisa whispered.

They did not need me to resolve how Sally and Bethany were going to get what they really wanted so I left.

My hands checked Jason's gifts automatically when the Brothers entered my backyard. The looks of surprise on Melisa and Doris Alex's faces when they noticed the approaching visitors placed one of the .45s in my hand.

There are reasons that visits to an Enforcer's home are arranged beforehand through Siblings.

Doris Alex and Iane stared at each other as the Ian Sibling arranged Anna's wheelchair at the table. Robert, Samantha, Jeremy, and Roderigo sat down.

Siblings are good indicators of a Brother's mood, and the ones accompanying my unexpected guests looked like they were standing in a minefield.

"We have a problem," Roderigo said unceremoniously.

Samantha not looking around for Simon was a bad omen.

"Brothers rarely visit me unless there's a problem," I said. "Did Samantha guess incorrectly, and the removal fifteen Brothers on her list of complainers caused a harsher reaction than expected?"

"Seventeen," Samantha corrected. "Two Brothers tried for an Enforcer and failed."

I raised an eyebrow at her.

"The security of your identity as the third Enforcer is still tight," Anna told me. "We've made it known who the other two are to continue hiding you behind the Ekaterina name."

"Retiring the selection committee left any doubt?" I asked.

"Iane suggested to Tara that her tale of survival should star Leon," Robert told me. "I supported the idea so the circle of Brothers that know who you are is still under our control."

"Our problem has nothing to do with the minor purge that you initiated," Jeremy said with closure.

I waited instead of saying anything. Kiera opened a folder and took two large pictures out. She handed them to Roderigo who placed them face up on the table. I looked down at them with curiosity.

"Your mother and sister," he said.

"I don't have a mother," I said meeting his eyes.

Silence stretched out for a long time until Melisa reached out to pull the picture of the teenage girl closer to me.

"Her name is Katherine," she said to me. "She turned sixteen two weeks ago."

I sat back and relaxed.

"We discovered your family..." Robert got out before I interrupted.

"Jason is dead," I told him.

The Brothers glanced between each other but could not decide on a new approach.

"You kept your physical gifts hidden very well when you were a boy," Doris Alex said. "It would have been enough for us to overlook them, if we had come to see you as a potential Enforcer. Every Brother with that type of promise has their background researched by Bloodline Siblings."

"Jason gave you away," Iane told me. "He did not hide his physical skills. You were easily his equal in those early martial arts classes. We couldn't get a measure of you, but Jason was not as difficult to get close to."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Jason was paid very well to take a lot of tests after you were brought to our attention," Iane said with a shrug.

"His results gave us a scale we could compare you against," Doris Alex continued. "Jason's reflexes might have been accepted as a freak accident of nature but you were..."

"Too well designed," Iane said. "Everything about you screamed Bloodline, which was highly improbable if not impossible."

"The Bloodlines never mixed but certain men, like du Lac, fathered children on more than one Bloodline," Doris Alex said. "Iane and I share traits like our physical beauty. It extends to a point where each Bloodline has some similarities with every other individual Bloodline. The Ekaterina are different; they only have the genetic markers common among all of us."

"At first, we thought you were part of a Bloodline cadet branch that we had lost track of," Iane told me. "It was impossible to get a blood sample when you were younger, considering your paranoia and Jason's protectiveness."

"We believed we could reduce the number of Bloodlines that might have produced you by seeing which ones you shared traits with," Doris Alex said.

"All of them was an unexpected answer," Iane said shaking her head.

"It meant either your were a Bloodline representative with no sign of a major gift, or..." Doris Alex said.

"Ekaterina," Iane finished.

"The possibility of the Ekaterina having survived the death camps had to be brought before the council," Robert said. "You were made my responsibility, which quite likely ensured that I would be chosen over Kyle's father for my predecessor's council seat if our hopes for your lineage were true."

I stared at him.

"Your past with the Brotherhood was stages of increasingly frantic activity," Robert said smirking. "First, there was the hoopla of discovering an orphan with Brother potential, who happened to walk around with what amounted to a crested Sibling already. Of course, seeing Enforcer stamped on your forehead at that age increased the amount of noise geometrically."

"Both were nothing compared to what happened after we began to suspect you were Bloodline," Doris Alex told me. "It was enough to solidify our plans, like Melisa's recruitment."

"There are absolutely no words," Iane said, "for what happened when we concluded the only Bloodline that could have given birth to you was the Ekaterina."

"If it would have ensured a blood sample, I would have sacrificed a pair of Brothers to get it," Robert said in frustration. "System children like you and Jason don't trust; with your history, I'm surprised you even went to school. We could only have gotten that sample by force. For awhile, I even considered starting an epidemic to get a needle into you."

"Your enlistment was both boon and horror," Iane said angrily. "We could test you any time we wanted, but your skills made you an extremely useful asset to them."

"We got our confirmation though," Doris Alex said with a sigh.

"An Ekaterina, decades after the line was supposed to be extinct, meant there had to have been others," Iane said.

"I tore apart several set of city records trying to find your biological parents," Robert told me. "I put the possibilities in front of Siblings that were old enough to remember, and they picked the same one."

He looked down at the picture of the older woman.

"Children of the same Bloodline resemble each other," Iane said staring at the pictures. "We've never seen such a large disparity between a Bloodline representative and the rest of his kind."

"I'd give anything to know who your father was," Doris Alex bit off in frustration. "He might have been the most useful donor to the Bloodlines in centuries. His genes advanced the Ekaterina line exponentially; your sister is leaps and bounds behind you."

"I appreciate the history lesson," I told them. "What does this have to do with me?"

"Your..." Roderigo started but looked around confused how to finish the phrase.

"Younger sister," Melisa said looking at me.

Roderigo stared at her for a second before continuing.

"Your younger sister is in danger of being damaged irreparably," he said.

Kiera handed him another pair of pictures, which he placed on the table.

"Katherine's biological father and half-brother," he told me.

Iane spit on both pictures, which garnered approving nods from my crest Siblings.

"We would preferred your crest Siblings handle telling you about Katherine, and of our intentions to recruit her," Samantha said with a wince. "Her father and brother have robbed us of the time necessary to do things that way."

"The father is an abusive animal," Anna said simply. "The brother is well on his way down that path, and his preferred target is Katherine."

I stared at them.

"We believe the brother's attention has turned sexual," Roderigo snarled.

"Katherine's schoolwork has suffered, and she's becoming increasingly reticent," Iane told me. "I think she has reached out, but none of her friends are listening."

"Her mother can no longer be trusted," Jeremy said quietly. "But Katharine is still within our reach."

"There is a problem here?" I asked them.

"We want Katherine removed from that house," Roderigo said angrily.

"Her mother never left the area," Iane said. "They live a couple of towns over."

"So remove her," I said.

"It would be better if you were involved," Samantha told me. "Katherine will have no reason to trust any of us."

"She will see me the same way she sees her brother," I told them.

"We have reasons to believe that is not true," Jeremy said.

"Her mother raised her with some very useful family legends," Robert said. "For instance, all female children must be named Katherine."

"If not for her pig of a brother, the poor dear might have outgrown those stories," Anna told me. "As it is, she is waiting for her Brother to rescue her, just like in the stories her mother told her when she was younger."

"You are wrong," I told her. "Any one, and any Brother will do."

"This is the best place for her," Iane insisted forcefully. "You have an Alexander bitch who rolls over any time you want to rub her belly; you have an unindoctrinated First; your home is a couple towns over from where she grew up."

"Simon will be good for her," Samantha added. "Not to mention, the number of candidates that will flow through your doors."

"You are a bridge between the outside and our world, David," Doris Alex said softly. "There is no other place we would choose for your sister."

"Let's also not forget that you're probably going to get a little annoyed that we didn't tell you about this sooner," Roderigo said smiling. "I'll volunteer to rescue Katherine, but I'd insist on a line of Brothers between us to let your annoyance burn itself out before you knock on my door. I've got a list of Brothers if you'd really prefer to do things that way."

"Roderigo," Anna whispered.

"Katherine is not in a good place, grandmother," Roderigo said seriously. "My vote was to kill the father and brother so we could bring Katherine and her mother inside, remember? You were the ones that wanted to talk reason."

"The mother is lost," Robert said sadly. "She could never wear a white ring."

"Katherine is in danger and something has to be done now," Iane hissed staring at me. "Doris Alex has her address, David. Go get her!"

"How dare you!" Doris Alex said standing up.

"It's okay," Melisa said from her chair. "Iane will pay for that."

"I'll pay for it now! I'll pay for it later!" Iane yelled. "I'll pay it every day for the rest of my life if that's what you want, First, but GET HER OUT!"

Everyone stared at me while Iane tried to regain control of herself. They were waiting for me to say or do something, and they were going to be waiting for a long time as far as I was concerned.

"She's scared, David," Jason said.