A/N An extra long chapter for the long weekend. Our action climax! I hope you all enjoy.

SIXTEEN

New York 1888

Nikola,

I know it has been a long time since I have written, but you yourself are notorious for being unable to keep correspondences. I wonder if you have even opened any of my letters, or if they litter your desk along with other minutiae.

I remember you saying to me before you left for America that I shouldn't fear your absence as I would never need you as much as I anticipated. I find this difficult to write-

I know James has telegrammed you about the Whitechapel murders

I shot him, Nikola. I have his blood on my hands.

If ever I needed you, my dearest friend, it would be this hour.

Yours,

Helen.

He folded the letter to create three equal sections and tucked it away into his notebook, ignoring the tremor in his hands. He had no idea how to respond to her missive and he found himself later lacking the courage to write back. What could he say to her? That he had been vindicated in his misgivings of her engagement with Druitt all along?

How petty and selfish that would be…

She asked him many years later in the ghostly light garden of Colorado Springs if he had read any of her letters. That one sprung to mind immediately, but he made dismissive noises that he hadn't read as many as he would have liked to.

He certainly couldn't tell her that the letter was most precious to him for the last line alone.

Nikola refused to carry the small cage that trapped the energy elemental on his person, so Helen had it with her in a reinforced pocket of her coat. While he made scathing remarks about how he had already done so much of the work that he didn't want to be burdened further, he couldn't fool her from ignoring the genuine tremor of fear in his voice whenever it was mentioned.

He, unexpectedly, had fallen asleep fitfully on the plane. Sometimes twitching in his restless slumber, chased by some awful nightmare. Helen thought again of those mysterious words "…remember what you promised…" but contentedly kept her peace on the subject.

The Sybarites had insisted they come along as well. Aurelian discreetly fed silver wisps to Ylerin regularly on the flight, and she had regained a more normal pallor than the sickly one she had fallen into.

Kate had plugged into her walkman, fastidiously cleaning her guns as she was apt to do when she was anxious. Helen was just grateful this was her private plane, rather than a commercial flight. Will was flipping through the medical text again, and suddenly put it down and looked at Helen. "These guys kind of have a touch of mad genius about them."

She quirked a smile at him. "What do you mean?"

"Their theories of abnormal evolution and gene mutation – and that actually the abnormals are probably more 'normal' than we are, for lack of a better term. That we're probably just diluted mutations of abnormals and we didn't come first at all."

Helen nodded agreeably. "They're probably right, they certainly advocated a very radical and new approach to classifying abnormals and humans. Vuarez is a bit of an extremist though."

Will looked puzzled, his eyebrow raised. "Is?"

"He's still alive, both doctors are abnormals themselves, though Arminta died twenty years ago. Vuarez … was probably the more controversial of the pair. His line of work is probably closest to what we view as eugenics, except in the abnormal world. Bit tragic, really. A lot of his research and projects were shut down by the Sanctuary."

Will put down the medical text, something forming in the back of his mind. "Why?"

"He wanted to experiment on gene mutations in humans to form a base study to analyze the evolutionary pattern in abnormals. But his work mainly went without funding and approval because of his proposed experimentations on humans. It became a bit of an equality issue, as while the more radical experiments were banned for ethical reasons, he had many which were quite benign that we use on animals and such all the time in the medical field."

Will looked at her pointedly, "Magnus. Come on."

She looked at him confused. "What?"

Will held up the text, his eyes boring into hers. "You're telling me this Vuarez is a scientist in the network. And his name is Vuarez."

Helen blinked in shock. "But … he retired decades ago. And he never worked in Paraguay, he was based in Rio de Janeiro..." She let out a shaky breath. "I've been foolish overlooking this, haven't I?"

Will had the grace to merely nod and Helen dug into her coat for her phone. She tapped into a basic cache of the Sanctuary network database and looked through department transfers and rehires.

"I'm right, aren't I?" Will said.

Helen groaned, holding her face in her hand. "But why? Why target me? Why commission the murders of innocent women, leak evidence of the Ripper case to intelligence networks, threaten the UN … it's unfathomable."

Nikola suddenly groaned beside them, stirring in his sleep, and half-awake muttered, "Desperate men … do desperate things…"

Helen sat on a small overturned tree by the side of the road, feeling the small weight of the glass sphere against her stomach. It was so light it was as if it weren't even there. It was amazing to think how much power and destructive force was held in the delicate cage.

She could hear Will and Kate chattering away with Henry on a satellite phone, going over the Asuncion Sanctuary's security protocols, entrances and exits, and coming up with the best way of announcing themselves. The Sybarites had already dryly suggested they just knock on the front door, and she was inclined to agree with them.

She felt the tree shift as Nikola sat down beside her. She glanced at him with a smile, before returning her gaze to the Sanctuary just a few hundred yards in front of them.

He surprised her by softly asking, "Have I disappointed you somehow?"

"What do you mean, Nikola?" She asked.

"Oh, I don't know … in waffling about this I guess. Maybe if I'd decided to really start helping sooner—"

She hushed him, shaking her head and brushing away his apology. He merely shrugged and with a small grin said, "I never like to look un-gentlemanly."

"You've behaved yourself rather well, this time."

He stood up and offered out his hand to her. "To the three?"

She felt a small pang in her chest at the missing two who she wished dearly could still be with them, but felt glad as well for finally having some broken bonds mended between the remainder of the Five.

He clung to her hand a moment longer than necessary as they both surveyed the small fortress with their friend locked inside.

John felt the next spray of blood fly from his lips, attempting in vain to stifle it in his chest, but failing as he coughed. His throat burned and his breathing was laboured.

He hung there, still grimly determined not to despair. If he could buy them just one more day, one more hour from this lunatic, and he would be at peace with himself.

Doctor Vuarez looked at him with cold eyes, and John laughed at him, baring his pink-smeared teeth at the man out of spite. "Poke me and prod me," he thought, "but you'll never truly know me."

"Doctor … you won't believe this."

Vuarez looked to the screen his assistant was pointing at and John saw his eyebrows shoot up in alarm. Before he could wonder at what had so startled the doctor, the door to the laboratory swung open and he saw Kate with one of the lab workers in a stranglehold, her gun pointed to his temple.

Oh, Helen, you didn't…

To John's dismay he saw Will, Helen, Nikola and the pale pair enter next. No, no, no … they weren't supposed to come here to this death trap.

Helen's eyes were full of fear, anger and a flash of hope when she saw John, and she immediately trained her gaze to Vuarez. She flashed a steely grin at him and in a dangerously cheerful voice chirped, "Doctor."

Vuarez gave her a shark's grin back, his voice just as evenly tempered. "Doctor Magnus."

"You've been giving me a lot of trouble recently," She commented mildly in a wild understatement. Vuarez hid his surprise at seeing her alive well, and merely nodded courteously back to her.

She held up a small glass sphere with what looked like a writhing black mass inside and said, "I believe you were looking for this."

Vuarez couldn't hide his surprise this time and an ugly expression of shock and rage flashed by his face. John knew instantly what she had brought and his heart dropped. For all the lecturing she had given him on doing the foolish, noble thing she had neglected her own preaching astoundingly.

"Now, you let my man go and you can have this."

Vuarez laughed bitterly. "You really think I believe you'll just hand the elemental over to me? Doctor Magnus, I'm not as naïve as you're playing."

She shrugged dismissively, uncaring. "You're right, let's just be honest with each other then. You let him go, you surrender your lab and yourself to me. You'll be placed under arrest and will face a trial with the Heads of Houses, and you will likely face a full criminal trial for the woman you murdered. I suspect, though, that you aren't agreeable to these terms."

"Not at all." A gunshot suddenly rang out, but the doctor was a poor shot and it buried itself harmlessly into the wall a foot from Kate's shoulder. Kate snarled and pointed the gun to Vuarez's head, pushing her hostage away from her. If Vuarez didn't care for the safety of his men it was no use holding one as leverage.

John noticed Nikola give an imperceptible nod to the male of the pale abnormals, Aurelian was it? The male suddenly flew towards the security guards by the circuit box, knocking their heads together and bleeding silver mist from their noses. Nikola transformed in a split second and slashed through the circuitry, the lights in the lab flickering and the board exploding in sparks.

The lab turned into a nest of mayhem after that. Shots fired out here and there, many whizzing in John's direction and being blocked by the blue walls of energy. He couldn't keep track of where Helen went, as the Sanctuary team scattered, either neutralizing guards or pushing lab assistants out of harm's way. Vuarez cursed, darting off somewhere away from the rounds of fire.

John noticed that the pale ones and Nikola were systematically cutting power and searching for whatever his prison was being generated by. He watched them, entranced, and wondered himself as to the power source of his cage. Would they be able to find it? How was it turned off?

He was suddenly overwhelmed by another violent seizing in his chest, and he curled his head into his chest, coughing explosively and overpowered by the coppery smell of his own blood. Weak, he began to see coloured lights dance before his eyes, and to the strange orchestra of electricity, screams, and the pounding of his own heart in his ears, John fainted dead away.

Helen noticed John slump over and hang slack, like a puppet with its strings cut and yelled, "Nikola!" Nikola looked over and saw John, muttering a curse under his breath, and darted to the next power frame. They were running out of time.

Where the hell had they put the generator? Nikola searched at a furious pace, his eyes black and his talons cutting a deadly swathe through the men who stood in his way.

Kate similarly was taking no prisoners, shooting with deadly accuracy to drop anyone who was attempting to rush towards her instead of out the door. She saw a flash of gray hair out of the corner of her eye and yelled, "Doc, to your left!"

Helen bolted after Vuarez, anger pumping through her veins.

"Blood demon, here." Aurelian let the man he had been draining drop to the floor, and pointed to a doorway. He had finally found someone whose memories weren't jumbled so much by fear that he could ascertain the location of the generator. They kicked the door open and found a separate room where the generator was housed.

It stood taller than Nikola and hummed with a weighty presence of energy. He couldn't help but take a moment to admire the beauty of it, the fine craftsmanship and delicate almost artistic touch that had gone into its making. But Aurelian testing the strength of the structure brought him back to the task at hand, and he swallowed his regret that they would have to destroy it.

He struck it with superhuman force and barely made a dent. "Ow," he groaned, shaking out the tremor in his hand.

Aurelian looked expectantly at him, poking his head out into the lab to see if anyone had noticed where they were. Nikola placed his hands flat against the generator and tried to feel the energy signature it was giving off, if there was a weakness anywhere, some sort of surge he could corrupt.

He wouldn't be able to overload it, it was already dispensing and cycling through planets worth of more energy than he could produce on his own without aid from his inventions. He tried siphoning the power away, but he couldn't draw nearly enough.

Aurelian looked at him incredulously. "Nothing?"

Nikola growled back, "You try it."

"You're the one they call genius!"

Nikola snarled, beating his hand ineffectually against the generator's surface. He had to find a way to switch off the power … he had to do something.

Helen ducked quickly as another bullet whizzed by her head. She saw Vuarez grimace as he tried to squeeze off more rounds but was met with the dead click of an empty magazine. Cursing, he sped down the corridor, but now without needing to fear suppressing fire, Helen could run at her fastest pace.

Within a few meters she had caught up to him, and daring, she launched herself along the ground, her leg swooping round and kicked his feet out from under him. Vuarez came crashing to the ground with a yell, and Helen grappled with him to keep him pinned down.

Ylerin skidded into view, she had doubled round to try and cut him off in a pincer movement, and elbowed Vuarez in the back of the head as he tried to kick back. A terrible shudder ran through his body and he went limp long enough for Helen to press her gun to his head.

He wheezed, his vision exploding with stars, as he tried to catch his breath, feeling the cold muzzle pressed into his forehead. Helen similarly had to calm down as she stared into the face of the man who had tried to destroy everything she had kept sacred.

"You've murdered countless of innocent lives … of abnormal and human alike. You've schemed to put the whole world in a stranglehold and you've paid your way in blood. What … what kind of ambitions does a man like you have?"

Her knee was pressed into his chest so he couldn't get up, and his laugh came out in a wheeze around the strangling weight. He blinked at her with slit eyes. "And who are you to decide who lives and who dies? Who is considered a man and who is considered a beast? You are human, to be classified and researched as any other 'abnormal' as you want to call me. But I don't see you locked up in a cage like the poor souls I see in all of your Sanctuaries."

He struggled to prop himself up on his elbows, and Helen allowed him some purchase though dug the muzzle of her gun more firmly into his forehead, so he could speak.

"You should have left well enough alone. Human fear, xenophobia and systematic persecution are just another one of your species' traits. The laws of nature would have willed out, species strong enough to survive would, ones that could cohabitate peacefully, perhaps in ignorance of each other, would have. But no … in your conceit you've decided everyone needs the charity of humans and you've damned us all to experiments and cages. To live by your rules. You may call us 'residents' but your quaint euphemisms don't disguise the fact that in your laws we're a lesser type of being.

"And if we are to live by that sort of law, does it not only make sense for us to want what you consider equal and great? And if it is denied us than shall we not revolt against the system that beholds us to it?"

Helen was stunned, but grimly stared into his bewitchingly pitiful eyes as she remembered the slain bodies of those who had come to her in need of help, that she had sworn to protect as best she could. "That's very poetic, Loyola, but your twisted sense of right has caused so much death and bloodshed. You've only proven the ignorant right that abnormals should be seen as dangerous and to be feared. Can't you see you've gone backwards?"

"Backwards?" He laughed, uncaring as to the gun held against his head, or the mayhem of screams they could hear all around them. "Every peasant rabble or human revolution has acquired hostages of war and atrocious acts to gain innovation and progress. Even on a baser level, every species has had to prove its right to survive by eliminating or controlling another one. Nature will out, Doctor Magnus."

Helen could only stare astonished at the man, who turned his eyes heavenwards and whispered, "The earth made over again in the image of her natural children. Yes … perhaps you're right in thinking there's something a touch whimsical about that."

Helen didn't notice as her gun lowered slightly, overwhelmed by the sudden warring conflicts in her soul. He had gone insane with his dreams, yes, and somehow along the way they had become perverted and twisted beyond any hope of achieving good. But at the very core he had wished for the very thing she had when she built the Sanctuary.

Vuarez sensed her hesitation and coiled back as if to strike, but a pair of pale hands suddenly placed themselves about his neck. Ylerin bent her head delicately and whispered sweetly into his ear, "I am a beast and I feed on you." With a sudden, savage twist she snapped his neck.

Helen stumbled away from Vuarez on shaky legs, looking up stunned at Ylerin. "You … you shouldn't have killed him."

Ylerin gave her a soft smile, holding out her hand to help Helen to her feet. "Nature of the beast, Doctor."

Helen walked back into the main area of the laboratory in a slight daze, her head swimming with what had just happened. She saw John suspended in the blue globe of energy, his body seizing violently, and she was galvanized into action. She saw Nikola and Aurelian at the other end of the room and rushed over.

"Nikola, he's dying!"

Nikola looked over at John, let out a growl of frustration, and suddenly dug his hand into Helen's coat. She would have slapped him for the impunity if it weren't a desperate situation. He pulled out the glass sphere with the elemental contained inside.

"Nikola, don't—"

"There's no other way!" He held the sphere aloft, and then sent it hurtling towards the generator. The glass exploded against its surface, and everyone backed away, anxiety thick in the air.

The small sphere of the EM shield fluctuated, the elemental raging within, and the enormous amount of power from the generator surged through, overpowering the shield. When the shield failed it looked as if the small mass burst and all of a sudden a swarm of black funneled into the generator.

Nikola's face was drained of all colour, and Helen had to grab his shoulders and wrench him back away. "Come on," she urged and they ran out of the room.

The walls of John's cage surged, sputtered, and then suddenly disappeared. The elemental had greedily sucked away the generator's power, cutting the main line that fed John's prison. He dropped to the floor and Aurelian caught him just in time. Though John was much taller, he was weak and light in Aurelian's arms. They laid him gently on the floor, and Helen dropped to her knees so she could examine him.

The lights of the lab sputtered and exploded. Kate and Will rushed to where they were all gathered. Kate had some blood sprayed against the left side of her face, and her gun was holstered in her belt. For now, they were alone and without resistance.

Machines whined as they shut down, and they looked around nervously as the elemental surged through the lab, free and running about a new playground.

"We have to go, Magnus," Will yelled above the din.

"And let that thing run loose?" She called out back, pulling back John's eyelids to check his pupils.

"Helen," Nikola urgently tugged on her arm. "It's coming for John."

She looked up and felt someone, Nikola most likely, suddenly pull her back away from John. A surging black swarm rushed towards him, plunging in through his chest. Helen cried out, but strong arms held her back. John's eyes snapped open, but then suddenly closed again. Everyone could feel the hairs on the back of their necks suddenly stick up as the elemental screamed its displeasure at a weakened host.

It began to curl up out of John, crackling and surging as it searched. The blackness began to mass and hover in Nikola's direction.

Helen swore she felt the whisper of a kiss against her neck before she was shoved away from him, Will catching her so she wouldn't stumble.

The elemental reared and plunged into Nikola, disappearing down his mouth and swallowing him whole.