Page 23 of Dark Rebel's Mystery

The only other time he'd used his lethal ability had been in the temple back on Anumati, and he hadn't been aware of doing anything other than just wishing the guard dead for tormenting his sister. When the head priestess had confronted him and Morelle about the guard's death the next day, Ell-rom had been shocked, and he hadn't really believed her. Still, from that day forward, he was careful about wishing anyone dead.

Now, he was going to kill in cold blood.

Ell-rom had no idea what it would do to him, and he didn't want Jasmine to be exposed to the aftermath.

"They deserve far worse than what you are about to do to them," Kian said from beside him, his voice sounding just slightly less gruff than usual. "By delivering a swift death, you are showing them a mercy that they wouldn't have gotten from me otherwise."

Ell-rom turned to his nephew. "I know that logically, but going from an acolyte to executioner is not easy. I'm about to deliver death not in the heat of a battle or in the defense of those who can't defend themselves."

"That's the wrong way to think about it," Anandur said from the front of the vehicle. "By killing them, you will be saving countless victims. With the way our justice system works or rather doesn't, it would have taken far too long to even get these monsters arrested, tried, and sentenced, and in the meantime, they would have been free to continue the devil's work. And even if they eventually ended up behind bars, they would have been back on the streets in no time. Money talks even in the halls of the so-called justice, and those perverts have lots of it."

Ell-rom shook his head. "Are the human judges so easy to bribe?"

"Not all of them," Kian said. "But enough, and since these pedo rings seem to be run by Doomers, they can thrall jury and judges to deliver minimal sentences and then commute them even further." He crossed his arms over his chest. "I don't like taking on the vigilante role, and I would much rather leave the dirty work to the human authorities. But when a government fails to protect its most vulnerable citizens from criminals and terrorists, people need to take matters into their own hands and safeguard their children."

Brundar, who usually didn't show a reaction to anything, nodded in agreement.

Easy for them to talk. They weren't the ones with the finger on the trigger, so to speak.

"I'm not arguing with you about the merit of eliminating these evil humans, but you are not the ones tasked with their execution."

"Let me tell you about something we've recently encountered in Mexico," Kian said, shifting to face Ell-rom more directly. "We were on a wedding cruise, a grand vacation that included almost every clan member, and none of us expected to do any killing. Then, a group of us on a shore excursion stumbled upon a cartel operation." Kian's jaw tightened. "They slaughtered an entire village, including babies and elders, except for the young women and girls of that village, whom they planned on selling as sex slaves. They did that to teach the locals a lesson so no one would dare oppose them. Then they violated these women who had just witnessed their families being murdered."

Bile rose in Ell-rom's throat. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because the Guardians who were on that shore excursion, who were there to have fun, tore the monsters apart with their bare hands and fangs." Kian's eyes shone with an inner light, and his fangs elongated. "They had weapons on them, but they chose to do that up close and personal. They tore the evil scum to shreds. It wasn't quick, and it wasn't merciful."

"Talk about an execution," Anandur said. "It was done with extreme prejudice."

The gruesome descriptions should have horrified Ell-rom, and in a way they did, but somehow, they had also eased his stress and lessened his anxiety. At least he would deliver justice with just a thought, not with his hands and fangs.

He wondered if he would have been driven to such savagery if he had witnessed what those Guardians had.

If trained immortal warriors, who had no doubt experienced war and savagery before, had been so enraged by the pain and suffering they'd witnessed, the depth of human evil, then he would have probably reacted the same way and joined them in their savage act of revenge.

"Thank you for telling me this." He gave Kian a weak smile. "I will probably have nightmares because of the images you planted in my head, but I feel a little better about what I'm about to do."

"You are welcome." Kian's fangs started to recede. "Several Guardians have verified the guilt of the humans in the dungeon. You can skip verification if your thralling ability isn't fully developed yet. Perhaps it would be better if you didn't peek intotheir minds. The things you will see in there will give you much worse nightmares than what I've just shared with you."

Kian's insinuation was a little offensive. His nephew, the clan leader, saw Ell-rom as someone with a weak constitution—a former acolyte who was ill-suited to violence.

Kian wasn't wrong, but he wasn't entirely correct either. Kra-ell priesthood was not merciful, and it wasn't peaceful. It couldn't be. They served a harsh goddess and a warring population. He and his sister had trained in hand-to-hand combat from early childhood. For a Kra-ell, Ell-rom's aversion to killing was a character flaw. But if he wanted to be useful to his sister and her clan, he needed to toughen up.

"I trust the Guardians' judgment," he said, "but I still need to verify the guilt of those humans myself." He hesitated, then asked the question that had been bothering him for days, "Is there a chance that what I see in their minds could be fantasies rather than actual deeds? Imagining such horrors is despicable but does not call for an execution."

"There's a clear difference," Kian said. "As your thralling abilities develop, you'll be able to access deeper layers of consciousness where fantasies are stored. They have a fuzzier quality to them than real memories, so it's not likely that you will see them, and if you do, you'll know the difference. The tricky part can be recent memories of movies or television that can feel quite real. Still, the subject won't be personally present in those memories of what he saw, so you'll be able to tell the difference."

Ell-rom was relieved. His thralling skills were still developing, but since there weren't many humans in the village to practice on, he hadn't made as much progress as he would have liked with that. Still, he was improving.

The SUV fell silent except for the soft hum of the engine, and Ell-rom watched the barren mountains sliding past. So many of them were scorched by recent fires.

As he thought of the gross incompetence of the authorities and all the bad decisions they had made that led to this disaster, echoes of what Kian had said reverberated in his mind. When the government failed to protect its people, they needed to form their own militias to protect themselves from crime.

Ell-rom chuckled softly. He was thinking like a Kra-ell.

Back home, each tribe had its own guard and its own resources, and for hundreds of thousands of years, they had killed each other off in endless tribal wars. It took a ferocious queen to stop the endless bloodshed.

The wars had ended, but the tribal structures remained intact, and he couldn't say in good conscience that the Kra-ell system was better. The truth was that if even the gods, who'd ruled this galaxy for hundreds of thousands of years, hadn't come up with a perfect system, it likely didn't exist.

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