A/N: Whew. Sorry for the delay but I have an extra long chapter just to make up for it. When I'm saying extra long though…I'm not kidding. It just sprouted a mind of it's own and it still wanted to keep going. I finally had to put a stop to it, because it was just getting ridiculous!


I need to give a huge thank-you to small4lyfe for betaing this for me and giving me some great suggestions. And I also want to give a big thank-you to you, my readers. Your feedback means a lot to me and I appreciate the time and thought you all put into them. Thank-you all!

So enough babbling on my part. Here are some promised explanations for what is going on…



Part 17

But February made me shiver
with every paper I'd deliver
bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step


A few weeks later.

Dawn sighed happily as she drove along the freeway, her window slightly open and the wind rustling through her hair. She whistled absently to herself as the highway before her lulled her into various daydreams. However, there was one memory, formed only several hours ago, that replayed over in her mind the most.

She gently threw the covers off and tried not to wake David as she tiptoed towards the shower. She had been sure he had been sleeping soundly but he nonetheless peaked at her from behind a half-opened eyelid.

"I'm gonna go have a shower…I need to get ready to go. They're expecting me today in the afternoon." She said to him whispering, turning back towards him to gently kiss him on the forehead.

David nodded at her sleepily but wrapped his arms around her and brought her back into the bed. He nuzzled her neck and whispered into her ear. "Stay. Stay here. We'll have our own Thanksgiving feast."

Dawn giggled but pulled away. "It's very tempting, but I promised my friend and his family that I would go visit him." She giggled again as he continued to tease her ear.

Reluctantly, she extracted herself from his arms and was about to make her way to the doorway when she turned back at him and saw him watching her intently. "What?" she asked in response to his serious look.

David shook his head but she decided to push the matter. She went over to his side of the bed and sat down next to him. He curled himself around her and played with the drawstrings of her pajama bottoms. There wasn't anything lustful about his motions, but rather he looked almost sad.

"What's wrong David?"

He looked up at her and stared at her face as if trying to memorize it. "Nothing. I just miss you when you're not with me."

She smiled down at him and caressed his cheek. He stopped her hand midway and pressed it against his face. "I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't mean to be so needy." He replied trying to put a smile on his face.

Dawn laughed lightly at him. She assumed he was mocking her because she felt like she was usually the one who needed him more. Not that he ever seemed to mind. "Hmm…I think I know what's wrong with you." She had replied teasingly.

"And what would that be?"

Dawn smiled coyly. "You must just be falling madly in love with me. That's all." She had meant her words to be teasing but the look on his face indicated that he was seriously considering them.

"Is that what it is?" He had replied. "Is that why I can't sleep unless you're next to me? I toss and turn for hours when you insist on going back to that apartment of yours."

She looked at him seriously. "I don't know, you tell me. I don't want to rush anything between us. Everything has already happened so quickly…"

He interrupted her by planting a kiss on her lips. "Not quick enough, I think." He whispered to her between kisses. She allowed him to sweep her up into his arms and lay her back down on the bed. "Maybe you're right though. Maybe this pounding in my chest when you are around and the ache that replaces it when you are gone, mean only one thing."

"And what would that be?" she asked breathlessly.

David looked solemnly in her eyes before he spoke. "I love you."

She thought she was going to cry because her heart felt like bursting. "I love you too, David."

Dawn smiled as she thought of that scene over and over again in her head. They had only been seeing each other for three weeks but it already felt like she'd known him all her life. It was not that he didn't have his quirks though. She still didn't know what had happened to his hand. He always kept it covered. She had asked him about it once and he had just said he did not want to talk about it. Dawn shook her head and shrugged. They were both still entitled to their own demons. She herself, had opened up a little, but not much. It would take time before all the barriers came down.

She looked at her watch and allowed herself to get lost in her daydreams again. She still had an hour to go and the freeway was empty.

She allowed thoughts of their lovemaking to enter her mind as she continued to drive. She had been amazed at their chemistry from the beginning but this morning had been different. When he had wrapped her up in his arms and told her that he loved her she had thought she would burst from happiness. This morning had been tender and passionate. It had been like their souls were connecting and becoming a part of each other.

…

Dawn paused after she shifted the car into park. Her body was screaming at her to get out and stretch but she resisted for a moment. Part of her was aching to see Will again but another part of her wanted to put the car into reverse and leave right away. He was the last physical link to her family but she wasn't completely sure if she wouldn't be better off if she just left it behind. Ever since she had started school, it was like she had been transported into a different life. One that wasn't complicated by lies and deceptions, it was just simple and straightforward. For the first time in her life she felt like a normal person and she wasn't quite sure if she was ready to plunge back into the insanity that she had left behind.

A curtain rustling in the window however, soon made the decision for her. The door opened and Will came out to meet her.

"Hi Dawn," he said giving her a big hug.

"Hi Will," Dawn replied embracing him and giving him a small peck on the cheek. "How are you?"

"Good, good." Will looked around quickly. "Please, call me Richard, remember? My wife doesn't know about anything, and I'm sure you can imagine that it's something I don't want to get into now."

Dawn nodded quickly. "Of course, I'm sorry. I forgot."

"So how was the drive down?"

Dawn tried not to blush as Will grabbed her bag from the trunk and motioned her towards the front door. "Good. Traffic wasn't a problem, so I was able to zoom on down."

Dawn was greeted at the door by a petit brunette who offered her her hand. "Hi Dawn, I'm Marissa. I've heard so much about you."

Dawn greeted her warmly and replied in kind.

Marissa led her into the living room, and offered refreshments as they got comfortable. After Dawn had quenched her thirst, Marissa turned to her. "My condolences for your grandmother's passing. I'm so sorry that I couldn't fly over with Richard for the funeral, I just couldn't get the time off work."

"It's ok, I understand. It's nice to finally meet you though. Richard's told me so much about you as well."

They made small talk as Will dropped her things off in the spare bedroom and then returned. She told them about school and described her apartment. She even told a few anecdotes about her professors which had them all laughing. They talked for a few hours before Marissa had to excuse herself to make the final preparations for dinner.

Will turned to her after watching his wife leave the room. He looked at Dawn carefully, smiling at her. "You look so happy Dawn. What's up?"

Dawn shook her head. "Nothing much…well sorta…but...yeah, it's a long story. But I'm happy. Scared but happy."

"Scared? Why are you scared if you're happy?"

Dawn sighed. "Because part of me is never sure if I can trust it. The happiness I mean. Happy times have been so fleeting in the past."

Will looked at her sympathetically. "Then you should appreciate them all the more."

Dawn eyed him skeptically. "Well see that's the problem. I'm never sure if all the sorrow is supposed to make the small amounts of happiness all that more precious or if the brief periods of happiness only make all the sorrow more pronounced. If I let myself be happy now, am I just going to feel that much worse when it's over?"

Will leaned forward and hugged his old friend's daughter. "Be happy Dawn. Please, be happy."

Dawn nodded and tried not to laugh at her melancholy. It appeared that she would never be able to free herself completely from her family. "I just miss them all so much sometimes."

"I know. Me too. I'm surprised to see you here though. At the funeral you told me that you had reconsidered coming here to the States because your grandmother was so adamant against it, and then I get a phone call a few months ago asking me if I would meet you at the airport."

Dawn bit her lip and nodded. "I know. But I couldn't stay in that house by myself. And then I realized that there was no need to hide anymore. My father and grandmother are dead. Does it matter if the FBI catch me? What am I going to tell them, where to find their graves?"

Will's forehead creased with worry. "Does that mean you didn't take any precautions? A new identity? New documents?"

Dawn shook her head. "What was the point? I'm safe. I never did anything wrong."

Will stood up in agitation before sitting back down and making sure to keep his voice low so that his wife didn't hear. "Dawn it's still not completely safe, you know."

Dawn raised her hands in exasperation. "What? What could possibly happen now? Everyone is dead."

Will motioned for her to keep her voice low. "You know that's not true. There are still people out there that would take great pleasure in hurting Michael Vaughn's daughter or Irina Derevko's granddaughter."

"They made sure to keep me out of their business—"

"No, not just their business associates. Look, Sark was never apprehended. You know that. Did your dad ever tell you that a few months after your mom died, he and Irina went back to that university in Switzerland to see if they could uncover anything, and that they found the laboratory empty? Not destroyed, not looted, empty. The rest of the offices and such were as they had seen them when we were all last there. Sark must have gone back and collected all the Rambaldi artifacts."

"Yeah, but no one's heard a peep from him in over twenty years. Maybe he crawled into a hole and died too."

Will stood up again and started to pace. Dare he share with her the contents of Irina's journal? Her journal hadn't told him much, it merely detailed their lives over the course of the last twenty years but her last entry had been cryptic and not very clear. Well the meaning had been clear, but why she had written it and then thought to mail it to him before she died he didn't know. Unless she knew she was going to die. But these thoughts were not new to him. These thoughts had plagued him since he had received her journal eight months ago.

Protect her against Sark, was all that was scrawled on the last page.

Will shook his head. How was he supposed to do that?

"I don't think he's dead Dawn." Will whispered quietly to her. "He's too cunning to be dead. You have to remember that your grandmother trained him for years. He'll resurface." Will couldn't stop his mouth from turning into a snarl. "I just know he will."

Dawn looked at him curiously. "You really hate him don't you. I mean more than Sloane or whatever his name was."

Will looked at her intently and sat back down. "He took everything away from me. He destroyed my life."

"But you look like you're doing pretty good for yourself now. You look happy." Dawn replied. However she almost bit her lip when she looked in Will's eyes. For a happy man, they managed to be quite haunted.

Will couldn't hold the eye contact for long. "You have to understand that he's a wild card. He's unpredictable. With Sloane at least we knew what he wanted. Sloane wanted power. He wanted to bring his wife back to life. But nobody knows what Sark wants. His family didn't even give him a name! He worked with your grandmother to destroy Rambaldi's works. Then he switched sides and helped Sloane kill millions of people. I know it must be hard for you to imagine, but twenty years ago, things were very different here. You can still see some side effects sometimes, but you have to look harder for them. Then he helped Vaughn find your mother but he kidnapped you. Then he killed your mother. What more do you need to know?"

"He didn't kill my mother. She died because she got pulled into the device with Sloane."

Will looked at Dawn but didn't question how she could state that with such certainly. "Well he certainly didn't help her and I saw him standing there behind her playing on that damn flute of his."

"Flute?" Dawn asked curiously, but Will only shook his head to indicate that he didn't know any more.

Something tugged at Dawn's memory but it was fleeting and she couldn't grasp it long enough to make any sense of it.

Will stood up and began to pace in his living room, unable to contain his agitation. Dawn looked at him intently, scared that even after all these years he could hold such animosity in his heart.

"Will, please let this go. It's done. It's over. It was over twenty years ago."

Will shook his head and flinched slightly at her mistake. "No, I don't think it will ever be over Dawn. That damn little Brit is like a weed. He'll pop up when we least expect him." Will sat back down again and tried to force himself to speak in a hushed tone. "You know the only satisfaction I have is that I actually managed to shoot the little bastard the last time I saw him. You should have seen the look on his face. I don't think he expected that I'd be able to harm him in any way."

"Oh, I didn't know that. If you shot him, maybe he did die. Maybe you killed him."

Will shook his head sadly. "No, unfortunately I'm not that good of a shot. I think I only hit him on the hand…but I think I got him square on it."

…I only hit him on the hand…Dawn shook her head to clear her thoughts but Will's voice kept resonating through it. …on the hand…damn little Brit…playing on that flute of his… his family didn't even give him a name…

People call me many things but most of them are not very favorable…Well what should I call you? …call me anything you heart desires… Your parents love you very much… How do you know? They're dead…

Dawn had ceased to listen to Will's rant and mumbling because her mind was whirling insanely. She felt like her heart had just bottomed out from under her.

No, no, no, no, no…were the only thoughts that echoed over and over in her brain.

"Dawn, where are you going?" Will's voice cut through her disheveled thoughts. It was only then that she realized she had stood and picked up her purse off the couch she had laid it on earlier.

"I…I have to go…I'm sorry Will…", No, no, no, no, no…

"But what about dinner? You just got here!"

"I'm sorry…" Dawn mumbled half incoherently as she walked towards the front closet to get her coat. She had stopped thinking about anything logically; she didn't even wait for Will to return with her bags. She mumbled more apologies as Marissa came to see what was going on but she would have been hard pressed to remember any of it a few minutes later.

No, no, no, no, no, was all that echoed through her mind.

She felt her entire world hanging by a precipice now and there was only one thing she could concentrate on. She had to go back. She had to find him. She had to find out the truth.

Now.

For once and for all.

Dawn wasn't sure what speed she drove at but she took an hour off of a drive that normally took her three and a half hours. She didn't think much during the trip, or at least she tried not to. Her mind had stopped its constant denial but now too many questions kept popping up into her head and her heart kept threatening to break over and over again, until she forced her mind blank. She didn't stop for washroom break, she didn't stop for gas. There was only one destination in her mind and she wasn't going to let anything get in her way or slow her down.

The sun had set several hours ago by the time she screeched the tires as she pulled up in front of David's apartment complex.

When she found herself in front of his door though she paused for the first time, the enormity of the situation weighing heavily upon her shoulders. Her day had come full circle and now she found herself where she had begun it. That it mimicked her life was not lost on her. She had left this morning feeling free of the bonds that had tied her all her life only to come back now, to perhaps have them slipped upon her tighter than ever.

Do I really need to know the truth? she asked herself. There was a slight possibility that maybe, just maybe, everything was just a coincidence and David would think her crazy if she barged in demanding answers to insane questions. Questions like did he kidnap her when she was a baby or was he responsible for her mother's death? Crazy questions that had seemed normal to ask while she was driving over but that raised questions of her sanity while standing in front of a wooden door. A normal, sane wooden door, behind which was likely her sane, normal, completely non-psychotic boyfriend.

Dawn took a deep breath and forced herself to knock on the door. As she waited, she briefly hoped that he wasn't home and she could put off this crazy nonsense awhile longer. But as she was about to knock once again, the door opened.

David looked at her surprised, his hair sticking up slightly. His attire suggested that he had been at least getting ready for bed. "Dawn, I thought you weren't coming back until the day after tomorrow?"

Dawn forced her way past him and into his small apartment. David followed her to his couch and watched as she sat down. "Is everything ok Dawn?" he asked her seriously.

She studied his face intently for a moment. It briefly occurred to her that she could be risking her life confronting him if he was who she feared he might be but then all she had to do was look in his face. He was still the same David that laughed with her. He looked like the same person that only eight hours ago had confessed that he loved her.

Could she have been so completely fooled?

He saw the look on her face and sat down next to her.

Dawn noticed that he wore no glove or any other covering on his left hand but he kept it half hidden from sight.

"David, can I see your hand?" Dawn asked reaching for his arm.

He moved off the couch like she had burned him. "No," came his simple answer, spelling out his guilt to her with that one syllable.

Dawn got up off the couch and followed him. "Who are you?" she whispered to him trying to fight back the tears.

David looked at her solemnly "You know who I am better than anyone else. I have never lied to you."

"Then what's your name?"

David turned away from her.

"What's your name?!" Dawn asked almost shouting this time, the tears starting to flow down her face.

Dawn moved herself in front of him so that she could see his face. He saw her jaw set and turned away again. "Don't expect me to help you crucify me."

Dawn felt the tension escalate but she couldn't stop now. She had passed the point of no return. She saw that his hands hung loosely at his slide and before she could second guess herself, she grabbed his left hand and spun him around. She had expected some resistance but she found none as she lifted his hand up for her to see.

His left hand was very pale from never seeing the sun, but it also bore severe scarring. And though it was slightly grotesque to look at, the scarring told that his hand had once had a small hole through the centre of it. As she turned it around she saw that the hole was slightly larger on the other side. It had been from a gunshot and she was now holding the hand of a killer.

She dropped his hand and backed away, all the while her mind screaming out denials again.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no…

"Dawn"

No, no, no, no, no, no, no…

"Dawn!"

"No!" she screamed out loud.

"Please let me explain."

Dawn moved to back away again but she was already up against the wall. "You're Sark." She said painfully.

"I never lied to you Dawn. It would have been impossible for me to give you my name, though I desperately wished I could have. But I don't have one. I merely let you do what everyone else has done. Gather information about me from sources other than myself. Everyone has done it all my life. People have sentenced me for many reasons, some for actions I have committed but many times for actions I have not."

"What do you want from me?"

"I want you to listen to me."

"You killed my mother."

"I did not and you know that. I saved her. You just don't understand how."

"You killed all those people…"

"Will you listen to me?"

Dawn looked down exhausted and more than slightly dazed and Sark moved closer to her. He took her silence as acquiescence and led her back to the couch. He motioned for her to sit down but she looked back up at him defiantly.

"I swear to you I will not hurt you."

"You already have."

"Please sit."

Dawn finally sat down on the couch as Sark sat down next to her. He was careful not to touch her but his knee accidentally grazed hers. She saw him stare at his knee and the look on his face suggested great pain.

The silence weighed heavily on them until finally Sark sat forward. "There is much I can tell you if you are willing to listen."

He let his question hang in the air as Dawn studied him. For some reason she could not superimpose the image that Will had painted in her head of him over top of the actual man. Will's Sark was one dimensional; a cold, calculating bastard, but the man in front of her was not just that. Oh she could see the power in him. She could see that he was not a man that was scared of anything. He could be in complete control of his actions. She could see the intelligence and cunning in his eyes. She could imagine him compartmentalizing his thoughts so that he could do whatever actions he needed to. After all she had seen her father do the same thing.

Her father had been the most loving man she had ever known but she had seen him dealing with his business associates on occasion. Though she had been kept out of all his business dealings, the odd one would happen when she was around. She had seen that cold, hard look in her father's eyes when he had casually demanded results from troublesome associates. The look must have worked because he always seemed to get results. Her father had shown her that one man could be kind and compassionate, cold and calculating and sad and incomplete. Was it inconceivable that this man in front of her now, could not be all those as well? Had she not seen the same hint of sadness within him when she had listened to his music? But could his sadness excuse all the horrible things he had done?

"I don't know how much history Irina told you about myself--"

"She didn't. She never spoke of you. My father is the one that told me the whole story. Him and Will are the only ones that would sometimes speak of it."

"Tippin?" Sark asked confused. And then he understood. Of course. Richard. The man to whom he mailed Irina's envelope. The man who had obviously given Dawn enough hints to guess his identify. It figured that the one player he had dismissed as being superfluous was the very one to bring his world crashing down upon him. Twice. After all, he was the one that marked him in the first place.

Sark shook his head to clear his thoughts. After all it no longer mattered how they had arrived at this stage. The point was merely that now they were here. He waited for Dawn to elaborate.

"My father did not say much just that you were Rambaldi's grandson. He said that my grandmother rescued you from your family and in return you agreed to work with her to destroy Rambaldi's works. Then when my grandmother turned herself in, you switched sides and went to work for Sloane. You kidnapped my mother and then held the world for ransom to get what you wanted. Then you helped my father find my mother but you didn't tell him about me. You let Sloane take me away from my mother. When my father rescued mom, she told him about me and then they went in search to find me. My father told me that when my mother died you did nothing to help her. You just stood behind her played on the flute. Will thinks that's what killed her."

Sark nodded absentmindedly at the brief summary. "Please believe me, but I did not kill Sydney."

"My father told me that you had a crush on her." Dawn's face scrunched up in disbelief and pain.

Sark sighed and wondered when his life had become so complicated. Events that happened over twenty years ago still had the power to turn his world upside down. And he wondered if there was any point in trying to explain. But then he hadn't come this far, just to lose without a fight. "Irina taught me to control my emotions and how to focus on the task at hand. She trained me to charm the ladies when the situations called for it and not to get emotionally involved. To be quite honest, it was never that hard. At the time, I don't think I had ever been emotionally attached to anyone and the notion actually seemed quite absurd to me. You have to understand things that I'm only starting to understand now. But my family never really fostered in me any feelings of love or affection. I've read all the classics though, and I knew that it was possible for people to care about each other. Before I met Irina though, I thought it was a bizarre notion. She showed me that it was in fact a foolish notion. It was a weakness that could be exploited in people."

Dawn shifted uncomfortably at the mention of her grandmother. Though she had always been loving towards her granddaughter, Dawn could imagine that what Sark was telling her was true. Because above all, she had seen that her grandmother almost always got what she wanted. Her father had been the only one that she seemed reluctant to manipulate. Dawn shook her head and waited for Sark to continue though part of her mind was wondering if that was the very weakness that he had exploited in her.

"When I met Sydney, I knew she was Irina's daughter and that made her an interesting subject to analyze. Your mother was like her in so many ways, and yet fundamentally different as well. Sydney fascinated me. I suppose in some ways I imagined that I fancied her. She was strong and intelligent and for the first time in my life I had found someone, a woman no less, who was my equal. I admired her and I wanted her to admire me. Needless to say, I failed miserably in that regard."

Dawn opened her mouth to interrupt but Sark raised his hand to stop her. "Wait. Let me finish. You were born early because of what I did. I went to visit your mother in her cell and she threw her contempt for me in my face. I lost my temper and struck her. Your delivery followed soon after that. Please, know that for the very first time in my life, I regretted my actions. I regretted losing my temper so I did the only thing I could at the time. I planned for a way to set her free but it involved using you. At the time, I thought it the lesser of two evils. So I set my plan in motion. I told your father where to find Sydney and he rescued her."

"And me? How did I fit into your master plan?"

"Master plan?" Sark laughed sadly. "No, no master plan, not really. My motivation to see my grandfather's works destroyed has never wavered but do you understand why I want to destroy them? Do you really understand?"

Dawn shook her head. "Because of what he was trying to build?"

Now it was Sark's turn to shake his head. "No. Really, I could care less about his grand scheme and how all his little inventions fit together."

"The why?"

"Revenge. He took my life away from me with his damn prophecy. My family life would have been less than ideal to being with…they stole decades from me, keeping me locked in a room…My own mother thought I was the devil incarnate."

Dawn felt a flash of pity at the broken man in front of her but she stopped herself from reaching out to him. She knew he wasn't finished yet. "So what does that have to do with me? You stole back all his pieces. It's over now isn't it?"

Sark looked at her. "Almost."

He paused a moment before continuing. "Working with Irina I came to learn two things about her. The first one was obvious and it was that she hated Sloane. She hated him with passion. The second thing I learned was from asking myself why she hated him. And the reason stemmed from the fact that she loved Jack and her family. She loved them with an intensity equal to that with which she hated Sloane. I was quite amused when I learned that, for all the times she was telling me not to become emotionally attached, she was quite the hypocrite. But when I asked her about it the only thing she said was that everyone needed something good in their lives. If your motivation was only based on negative reasons then you were no better than the people you were trying to beat."

"And she was right you know. My only motivation for existing was revenge. So what would happen to me when I had exacted it? I didn't find a solution to my problem until after I started working for Sloane. Sloane was looking to unlock the key to Rambaldi's works. Emily was dying from cancer and he wanted to make her better. Don't get me wrong, it was more than that too, I think. Mostly Emily was just an excuse. But one of the components to his new master plan was The Flute. Using the flute, one could control life and even death."

Dawn wrinkled her forehead in confusion. "You have this flute. Will told me about it and my father did as well. This is the flute that needed my father's blood to work."

"You are partially correct. I didn't know it until then, but the Flute had been in my family's possession all along. I merely had to go back there and retrieve it. But let me explain what it does first, and then maybe this will make more sense. Every particle in the universe, electrons, protons, atoms, each has a certain amount of energy within them. This energy is defined by the particle's vibration. Every particle will vibrate with a slightly different frequency. This frequency is a characteristic of the particle. Follow me so far?"

Dawn nodded slowly.

"Well frequency can also be thought of as a wave pattern. Ups and downs. Now if you apply another wave pattern to an existing wave pattern, the two will merge together. If the waves have the same frequency and are in phase with each other, the resulting wave will be twice as big, like they were simply added together. If however, the waves are shifted 180 degrees, then they will cancel each other out. You know this from music and how acoustics work."

Dawn nodded again.

"Well the Flute is designed to play waves that interact with us in the most intimate of ways. Though our souls."

"What?" Dawn exclaimed incredulously.

"Our souls are tangible things are they not? Well they are made up of particles so to speak and these particles contain energy. So each particle can be manipulated by the addition of another wave thereby in effect manipulating the soul as a whole."

"And when you were playing the flute behind my mother…?"

"I was connecting her soul to the Flute. Once a soul leaves its body I cannot find it again. From what I understand the soul's particles increase to fit the space that they occupy. With no body, the soul expands indefinitely becoming one with the surroundings. I stopped that from happening and linked her soul to the Flute."

"She's in the Flute?"

"Well imagine it more like a leash. It tethers her soul to it so she does not dissipate. Have you ever seen her as a ghost?"

Dawn nodded slowly, still in shock at what she was learning.

"The Flute allows her to visit people that she has a strong bond with but it's all about energy. Everything is about energy. Her energy is getting weaker. That is why she hasn't been able to visit you more. Each soul only retains so much energy from the body it was parted from. Over time, each of them will lose energy and be able to travel less distance from their leash."

"Each of them?" Dawn asked confused for a moment but then she understood. "Of course. You have my dad and grandmother as well? "

Sark nodded. "Your grandfather was well, that's how this started. Sloane knew that if anyone was smart enough to stop him it was Jack. So he set a plan in motion to kill him. Jack was going to die. I did the only thing I could at the time."

"You were there when they died?" Dawn asked trying to understand the implications that she couldn't quite comprehend.

Sark looked down. "Yes.

"Why? Why did you start all this?"

Sark kept his eyes down ashamed. "At first I did it so that I could have some hold over Irina if I ever met her again. I thought she had betrayed me."

Dawn swallowed uncomfortably as, the implications of that became clear. "And after?"

Sark continued reluctantly. "After dealing with your mother during her captivity…I…I decided I wanted to learn what the big fuss was about. She loved your father so very much. That was twice that I had seen such love and both times it was from women I thought should have known better. I figured it could not be coincidence. Then in the laboratory, I came upon her suddenly and she caught me off guard. By the time I recovered, it was already almost too late. I started playing before I could think twice."

Dawn let the silence fall as she tried to absorb everything that was being told to her. Everything was madness but it seemed to make a strange form of sense. She had thought that the ghosts in her life were just her own form of insanity, but maybe this was worse. Maybe believing all this was more insane. But perhaps the scariest thing of all was that she knew it wasn't over yet.

"Where do I fit in to all of this? What do you want with me?" she asked when she had finally summoned the last of her courage.

Sark sighed and rubbed his eyes. And so they arrived at the crux of the matter and he was suddenly at a loss for words. He looked at the clock on the wall and noticed that it was well into the wee hours of the morning. "Are you sure you want to continue this now?"

Dawn set her jaw angrily. "Yes. No more half-lies or omitting information, I want to know everything. I want to know the truth, now."

"You've known part of the truth all along. The truth of the matter is that for the first time in my life, I know love. I thought I loved Sydney but I was wrong. I know I love you. I look at you and my heart constricts, I see the hurt in your eyes and I feel physically ill. You have made me question my very foundations for the first time in my life. The entire truth of the matter is that I also need you to help me with something else, but I think it is something that you will agree to. As for anything else that I have omitted, you will probably find it all out if you decide to help me."

"Help you with what?" Dawn asked cautiously.

Sark looked at her cautiously. "The last step. And then, after this I can destroy everything. I want you to bind your mother and father and your grandmother and grandfather's souls together."