The Alien Agenda by Ronald Wintrick Page A

God.  She had lost all belief in the possibility of her own salvation, God accepting her after the things she had done, that she refused now to discuss it.  I believed that God would forgive.  That He would not hold against us those things we had not been able to control.  She could not believe so, however.  The things she had done weighed too heavily on her conscience.  I let the subject rest.
    “I do not think I will like being stripped of my telepathy.”  I said, referring to Brid's device.  “I don't even want to imagine what it will be like.”
    “Very much like losing our eyesight, in its own way, I should suppose.  We'll all have to wear them if we want to make the surprise complete.”  Sonafi said, rejoining the conversation just as if there had been no lapse.  She had become adept at tuning out anything to do with God, but then able to tune right back in afterward when the topic changed, as I always immediately did so.  I supposed it was her respectful way of dealing with my periodic entreaties to open her mind to the possibility that she was not irrevocably dammed.  I had become used to it, but of a sudden she had given me something else to think about.
    “Who said you were going to participate!”
    “Whose saying I'm not?”  She retorted.
    “I'm saying it right now.”  I said hotly.
    “You may be Elder, but I do not suggest you go there with me.”  Sonafi said menacingly, and she meant it, I could see.  She had grievances to air with the Others, grievances she meant to make heard.  “You will need all the help you can get.  Nor do you have a say in the matter.”
    “I had merely hoped to keep you out of this.”  I said as I saw the measure of her resolve.  “I was only thinking about you.”
    “Tell it to someone who doesn't know you better.”  Sonafi said, having none of it.  “There are few enough Elders as it is.  You can turn none of us down.  You think only of yourself and the years you would spend breaking in a new woman.  I know you well enough.”
    “If you are what you call broken in then I have failed utterly.”  I gave her an exasperated look and was rewarded with the smallest glint of amusement twinkling in her eyes.  But that was only her eyes.  She scowled at me meaningfully.
    My Sonafi is an ind ependent soul.  She does not concern herself with what others think.  Honestly, I do not think our relationship could have worked in any other way.  The dominant/submissive relationship model would have long grown stifling, if Sonafi had been that type.  It would have suffocated our independent natures, for both the dominant and the submissive.  Such relationships might suffice for short lived humanity, but we who measured our lives in eons, possibly eternity itself, we had to find something with more meaning.  Sonafi and I had found that, and maybe I was selfish, but having found it, I did not want to lose it.
    This is why so many Vampires go rogue.  That they have simply been unable to find meaning in these long lives, and that they have not found it because they do not know where to look.  A Vampire ’s physical prowess may increase as he ages, but we Vampires are no more intelligent than our Human counterparts.  Our increase in physical prowess does not equate to an equal increase in intelligence.  In many cases it actually serves to cement narrow minded views into immovable ways of seeing the world and the things that are going on within it.  A Vampire may educate himself, but an education in itself does not always elucidate, make clearer the unknown, and there was nothing more unknown than the mysteries of the mind; be it a Vampire, a Human, or an Other.  I do not think that anyone would argue that the Others had any mysterious other-worldly comprehension of the working of mind, not with their callous unconcern for the sovereign right of other beings, their total lack of morality in the face of what amounted to genocide of an entire sentient