Page 60 of High Seas

I looked at Titus. “He’s not going to jump with us.”

“Then we make him,” Titus gritted, glancing at Enoch, who nodded his understanding.

* * *

Enoch

My stomach dropped. Eve was going to leave me. I rushed to her. “I’ll get him, but first I need to know where to find you. In the future, where do you live?”

“America,” she answered.

I shook my head, confused. There was no such place… yet.

She tried again, “North of here. I –” Just then, Eve grabbed her head and screamed, falling to her knees. Even the assembled vampires paused at the sound.

Titus rushed to her side and checked the tech in her hand. It was still glowing, which meant her suit was still on. “Talk to me! Eve? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know!” she screamed. “Help me. Please…make it stop.”

Eve clawed at her face, and try as I might, nothing I did calmed her. I looked to her former teammate Abram, who smiled victoriously as she writhed on the ground. I left her with Titus and went straight to him.

“Do you know what’s wrong with her? Are you doing this?”

“No,” he laughed. “But it’s nothing less than what she deserves. She’s being punished for what she has allowed herself to become.”

I looked to the man I had grown to hate, the one I no longer regretted siring, because it meant I could control him. “Then God help you, Abram, because you’ve become something far worse than she.”

There was one thing I knew that Abram didn’t yet…

“Be gone,” I told his assembled vampire army. Mouth agape, Abram watched helplessly as every one of his precious vampires turned on their heels and spilled out of my brother’s yard.

“Wait!” Abram called out to them. “What are you doing? Don’t listen to him!” He gritted his teeth. “How are you controlling them?” Infuriated, he tried to run after them.

I caught up with him easily, holding tight to the back of his close-fitting suit. “Abram?” I waited until he stopped squirming. “Stop resisting me.” As soon as the words left my lips, his limbs fell slack. When I had ordered Eve’s clone to stay in the cell, it worked right up until the moment I said the wrong phrase. I wondered how long my hold on him would last, and vowed to carefully consider everything I uttered from that point forward. His release would be an accident neither Eve nor I could afford.

I turned my focus to Eve as she lay on the ground, her palms flat on the grass. She looked up at me, panting. “I’m okay.”

“How exactly did you do that?” Asa queried, ignoring her and studying the interaction between me and Abram. I didn’t answer him, but it didn’t matter. Asa figured it out. His dark eyes twinkled like a child who had just been given a new toy. “This could change everything,” Asa murmured in a low, calculating tone.

Titus interrupted. “Is your rooftop forty feet high?”

“Feet?” Asa asked.

“My main mast is taller than his rooftop,” I offered. “Jump from the crow’s nest.”

Titus muttered a “Thanks” and helped Eve to her feet. As he steadied her, he pointed toward the shore and directed his words to me. “We need to go. If this spell you’ve put on him doesn’t hold or if something goes wrong, he’ll run and we’ll never get home. And, frankly,” he said, turning to Eve, “you need Kael to fix whatever is happening to you before it’s too late.”

Eve’s eyes hung on mine, a storm of trouble churning in them. “I have to go,” she finally said.

I knew that. I knew it, yet was seized with the desire to be selfish. I wanted her to stay.

My heart swelled in my chest, reaching out for her. She’d left me before, but back then everything happened so fast, her departure a horrifying reminder of my misery, that for years, I poured malice over every memory of her, glad she was gone. But deep inside, despite the attack and the loss of those I had come to love, I still loved her. I still looked for her in every town, in every window, on every island, and on every ship. In the face of every dark-haired woman I encountered, in the scent of every one of her clones I could find or who found me… until the moment she returned to me.

Now, I would have to wait for her again.

I would do it, but this would hurt far worse than anything I’d experienced before.

“I don’t want to, Enoch,” she intuited softly. “But I don’t have a choice.” She didn’t say the words, but they silently slipped through the connection we shared, from her face to mine.

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