Joey had lied. Joey had deceived me. Joey had taken advantage of my trust and my love. Joey had endangered his own quest for his sister in pleasing his own selfish sexual whims and cravings.

These thoughts kept spinning around my head as I swallowed the aspirin and started getting dressed.

Joey couldn't be trusted. Joey was a danger to himself, and to me, while we are here undercover. Either I quit and go home or..

"Shit," I gasped painfully when my swollen knuckles accidentally slapped against the wooden frame of our bunk beds.

I wanted to cry, but somehow I kept myself from starting, knowing I needed to have my hand looked at and then deal with Joey's betrayal.

As I made my way towards the medical center, I went over the things Joey had been doing behind my back with the powers I had shared with him.

Ever since the afternoon Alicia had seduced him, Joey had been building up his anger over her using him on her quest for stealing the innocence from young innocent looking guys. He desired to get even with her by stealing her own innocence, and had looked for a way to achieve it.

Now I understood his sudden desire to play poker again. After playing Nick and Lenny a few times the week after he started classes, Joey had refused to join in until suddenly he was all for it and somehow talked me into playing too. I realized that Joey was in fact practicing his mental and emotional "poker face" in order to conceal the truth from me like he had done before, and his strategy worked since even my empathic senses had been fooled by his cool calm poker face.

About two weeks after I had relented to let him satisfy his sexual cravings on me, Joey gave in to his other cravings for revenge and lust, and on the second Thursday before the party, on the day of the week he only had one class, he sought Alicia out and raped her. And after he had taken more than just his revenge out on her, he installed his own version of my dad's slave program and had repeatedly raped her again over the past two weeks.

Alicia was only one of five girls which Joey had raped and installed his slave program in. One of his modifications automatically hid the rape events from their normal conscious selves, allowing him to rape and re-rape the same girl without losing the... "satisfaction" he got from raping a girl for the first time. So during the period that I was becoming used to the sex he had us do, Joey was exploring even darker sides of his sexual pallet, going far beyond the perversions I thought he could ever possibly have.

What I had considered some of the worst aspects of Steven's Joseph had somehow leaked into becoming a part of my Joey. It was a strange merger, but the Joey I knew and loved was still inside him, rationalizing everything he did with the knowledge that his victims didn't know it happened, and so it didn't change their personal lives.

That was the same logic he had used when he had enslaved the girls at his cousin's school. He took thirteen girls' virginities that night (not fifty like he had said), but because they didn't remember it happening later, they still believed they were virgins and lived exactly the way they would have if he hadn't touched them.

But he didn't follow that logic when he made some of those girls desire him whenever he scratched himself in their presence. And Joey didn't have the experience I had to program a person's mind to trigger from a simple act. Joey's programming probably would have side effects, the least of which would be the releasing of their sexual desires whenever ANY guy scratched themselves and they witness it.

The one thing I did find relieving was the fact that he never had anyone eat his shit like he had exclaimed wanting Alicia to do. And while Joey did very much get off on the concepts of controlling people, he never applied it to the people he cared about, only strangers or someone who he felt had wronged him. That is with one very important exception: me.

His feelings for me were a completely different than for anyone else. Even before Steven had gotten a hold of him, Joey had been feeling a special attraction for me and me alone. I had openly shared my abilities with him, and this he was always grateful for. But Joey had a independent nature that resented having to follow my rules. This caused a conflict within him, and it was this and his love that eventually caused his attraction to me personally.

Subconsciously he wished to extend our special relationship through the sex which we had shared with each other. Part of him wanted to give back what I shared with him, and part of him wanted to secure our relationship so I would continue sharing my abilities with him. It was greed and love compromising for sex, and even Steven's meddling hadn't tipped the scales in their struggle. While Steven's ways may have had corrupted his sexual appetite, my sacrifices for his happiness had strengthened his loving feelings for me.

But I had no reason or explanation for the thing that hurt me the most. The one thing Joey had been plotting and gathering information about doing. The one thing that was the ultimate betrayal. The one thing which had made me limit my choices down to two things.

While the nurse x-rayed my hand, I defined those two choices in my mind. I could either refuse to share my abilities with him ever again, literally abandoning him and his quest for his sister, or do the thing I had sworn I'd never do to anyone I cared about. To alter his mind and make him into something else other than the person he truly was. To make Joey believe in the things I did so I could trust him like I once had.

While I waited for the doctor to see me, I made a list in my head of the things I would have to change about Joey, but after the list grew too long I threw it out and tried it again. After a third try failed, I reconsidered my requirements, but then found a different answer than what I had been looking for.

I walked back to the dorms after receiving nothing more than a bill and instructions to keep an ice pack on my hand until the swelling subsides. But all in all I felt better. I knew what I had to do, even though it still meant doing something I didn't want to, but the weight of the decision about which of the two choices I would do was no longer on my shoulders. Or so I believed.

When I got back to the room, I wasn't surprise to find Joey there waiting since I had programmed that the night before. But the anger he was feeling did surprise me, for I felt I had been the one betrayed.

"You son of bitch! You just couldn't trust me, could you? You had to interfere with my life. MY SLAVES! You won't let me have ANYTHING of my own!" he screamed as soon as I walked in.

"Fuck you, Joey. I did trust you. And you used me. You deliberately deceived me. You... used me." I said ending in a whisper.

"The hell I did," he said only slightly louder than his normal speaking voice.

"I came here to help you find your sister. I shared everything I had with you. When you couldn't control you own sex drive, I GAVE MYSELF to you to USE as your PLAYTHING! But even that wasn't enough, was it Joey. Even after you got me used to licking your FUCKING ass every GOD DAMN NIGHT, you went and started RAPING girls?! BUT WHAT REALLY TOPS IT ALL IS THAT YOU PLANNED TO ENSLAVE ME! ME! THE ONLY FUCKING PERSON WHO WOULD <GAG> WHO WOULD HAVE GIVEN UP HIS <CHOKE> IMMORTAL SOUL FOR YOURS!"

The silence after my screaming at the top of my lungs was absolute. Joey was white from my revelation of his plans and actions, and the people in the nearby rooms had all heard my words and were probably trying to make sense of them while waiting for more.

Joey wilted into the chair he had been in when I had arrived, and while looking down at the floor he said, "I still love you."

"BULL SHIT!" I said with ever ounce of my being.

"God, what have I done?" he said, running his hands up his face and through his hair.

I was physically, mentally, and emotionally ready to counter anything he said, felt, or did that might persuade me against doing what I had to do.

"You've signed your own fate, that's what you've done" I said in a steady voice.

"What does that mean?" he said looking up with the first sign of real fear.

"You have two choices to choose from," I said while looking him dead in the eyes. "I either leave here, never to return, and never ever form a share link with you again."

"Or?"

"Or," I hesitated, feeling his anger starting to return again. "Or I alter your mind to where I can trust you would never abuse my powers agai.."

"WHAT!!" Joey screamed, cutting me off. "You want to make ME into you fucking PET?"

"Not a pet. Just return you to.."

"NO FUCKING WAY! AND YOU'RE NOT FUCKING BACKING OUT ON ME NOW!" he said getting up and rushing me.

In the few moments I had before his hands reached my throat, I saw it in his eyes. Not the thirst of blood or murder, but the thirst for power.

That terrified me even more than death possibly could. To me the thirst for power was the evil of evils, the ultimate enemy, my own personal devil. And it was in complete control of Joey, possessing him like the evil demon it was.

The instant his hands wrapped around my throat, I understood what he was going to do. Instead of trying to kill me, he was going to force me to share link with him, then before I could recover my wits, he would enslave me totally and completely to protect his power's source.

Joey was probably as ready as he ever could be to attempt such a feat. It had been my own idea to help Joey develop some kind of mental barrier that would withstand my own attempts to control him. Of course that was for the case I had been somehow tricked and been taken over. So even without the share link, Joey was confident I couldn't stop him through my telepathy, and he knew his anger was so great that I couldn't use my empathic powers on him without risking my sanity again.

But neither Joey or I ever considered how strong my abilities actually had become from straining them as Steven's prisoner or from using the telepathic amplifying drug. My desperation and fright as I felt myself losing my grip on reality caused me to surge every bit of my telepathic ability into penetrating his shield, making the pair of us cry out in pain as our brains felt their telepathic centers overload from their strain.

The headache I had woken up with earlier was nothing like the one I had now. It wasn't quite as bad as when Suzi, Joey and I had our first three way, but there was no way I could carry out any of the programming I had to do on my ex-best friend.

Through the fire ravaging my brain, an image of the handcuffs I had brought flashed in my head. I stumbled over to my wardrobe and dug through the box I had put them in, pulling them out with a jerk.

If the situation had been different, it would have been funny handcuffing Joey to the four inch thick square beam of the bunk bed frame he had helped design. Even the handcuffs had been a gift from him. A sort of joke after our close call with the police when we rescued Suzi from Michael's stolen van.

I awoke to the sounds of the bunk beds hitting the floor. I had fallen asleep by the door, just so I was out of reach of Joey's traitorous hands. The room was lit only by the flood lights from outside, but my eyes immediately found his by following the sensation of pure hatred to its source.

"If you alter a single GOD DAMN THOUGHT in my head, sooner or later I'll get around it and then I'll come after you with everything I GOT!"

"I believe you, Jo... Joseph. That's the first thing you've said today that I can really believe."

"Then don't do it. Let me go and help me find Sarah. I promise you I won't mistreat you. I love you, Tim. For whatever that's worth, I really do love you. I know you can't understand this, but that's why I wanted to trick you. I wanted to make you see how much easier it is if you just make them the way you want and make them happy to be that way. That's all anyone wants, right? To be happy?"

"No it isn't. Everyone has the right to make themselves miserable. You just don't get it, do you Joey. You don't want me to alter you, and I don't want you to alter me. Now one of us has to alter the other, and I've chosen myself to be the one miserable while making you happy again."

"But I.." he said just before I began my sweeping of his mind.

It took me less than two hours to hunt down and contain every last impulse of his hunger for power and sexual perversions. I restored every bit of the Joey I had loved and trusted with my soul, putting caps on anything I found resembling the Joseph I hated so much. I rewrote memories, I installed safeguards, and then ended up removing it all when I came up with something better.

I combined techniques used by Joey, my dad, and the group of telepaths responsible for the Eta's hidden personas, realizing that the best way to conceal telepathic tampering is to only install something to force the mind to alter itself to your design. Telepaths look for foreign thought patterns. If the changes you wish to hide were made by the subject themselves, they were virtually indistinguishable from original memories or thoughts.

That is why we couldn't access the true memories of a person with a hidden persona unless that persona took control. Similarly, Joey's and my cloak personalities hid our true ones because telepaths could only focus on the thoughts which were in control of the body. Only when our true personalities were caught altering our cloaking ones could we normally be detected.

(At least that was the theory at the time. I depended on it being true, and it would eventually be a painful mistake for me to make.)

Once that was done and Joey was safely tucked in his bunk, me and Jack went to bed together, knowing Jack and I would be sharing my bed every night for a very long time.