Chapter One
Eve
Air rushed so fast over my body, a constant stream of tears was squeezed from the outer corners of my eyes, but my vision never blurred like I prayed it would.
It’s weird how time can slow down even as your body hurtles through the air. It’s like your mind doesn’t really believe what your eyes see. It doesn’t think that what’s happening to you is real, so it processes the data slowly, trying to figure out how it’s being fooled.
Before I was pushed off the Compound’s roof ledge, I would’ve told you that bypassing your own survival instincts was the hardest part of traveling. But that wasn’t it at all. The worst part wasn’t the feel of your stomach dropping, or the way you wheeled and flapped your arms in a fruitless effort to slow yourself down, or even the sight of land getting closer by the microsecond. The worst part wasn’t even the impact itself.
Kael called it landing. He told us to land, strike our targets, run away to some place high, and jump back to our time. The genius made it sound so simple, so easy a child could do it. But the word landing implied a sense of control, and control didn’t exist in time travel. That was one thing I knew that the brilliant Kael didn’t.
Screams tore from my throat, but I couldn’t make myself stop screeching any more than I could “land.”
I blinked the rivulets of water from my eyes, quickly sharpening my vision. A sense of relief washed over me when I realized I wasn’t hurtling toward land, but instead toward the vast, open sea. I thought the cool water might soften my landing and prevent the pain of impact.
I was wrong.
Utterly and tragically wrong.
Hitting water – even undulating water – is a thousand times worse than hitting ground. I wasn’t sure of my speed or the velocity at impact, but I’d estimate it to be really damn fast. Though I had no way of knowing how hard I hit, I knew I couldn’t breathe for a long moment. Which was good. Because if I had been able to, I’d have inhaled two lungs full of briny sea and drowned immediately.
Suspended in the frothing water, I was stunned, paralyzed. I couldn’t do anything but stare into the murky salt water that stung my eyes. I couldn’t close my lids. Couldn’t cup my hands or try to propel myself up toward the orange haze cast over the surface.
My heart staggered to life, but my lungs weren’t expanding and contracting.
Bubbles surged up around me, like even the ocean had to recover from the blow I’d delivered her.
In the salt-stinging sea, I was once again reminded of the worst part of travelling: the hellish feeling of utter helplessness.
I could tell which way was up, the direction that led to air and life. Despite my inability to properly swan dive, somehow, I’d landed feet first and upright. The sun teased me, glittering overhead at the surface like a thousand crystals on the ceiling of a cave. Beautiful. Precious. And completely out of reach.
Below was a hollow, a void of infinite dark, filled with water and the death of the helpless.
But that feeling wasn’t me. I wasn’t helpless. I’d survived this before, and if I could only move, I would survive it again.
Time was precious and I was running out of it. Every second spent suspended in the water was one I couldn’t afford, but my extremities wouldn’t respond when I tried to move them. I needed to claw my way to the surface and fight to keep my head above the waves…
My ears popped from the pressure as I finally began to sink. The ocean was a vast, quiet graveyard and she would be more than happy to add me to her collection. My fingers twitched. My lungs burned. A trail of bubbles trickled out of my nose and the warm light began to dim above me. The dark shadows lurking beneath tugged at the hem of my heavy dress as the blood red fabric billowed out around me.
My descent into the abyss began so slowly, at first I thought I was imagining it. My brain was, again, trying to determine if what my eyes saw was real. But then, the water began to swallow me. I was sinking fast.
I closed my eyes, remembering Enoch. The man who wasn’t a monster until I made him one. After all, he’d only bitten Abram in my defense. To the world, he would be a terror, but to me, he was one of the only people who ever genuinely cared about me, and not just about what I could do for him.
As despair started trickling in, an arm wrapped around my stomach and a force tugged me to the surface where I could hear shouts, but couldn’t fully understand what all the commotion was about.
Note to self: salt water stung when you vomited it. It stung the back of the throat and the inside of your nostrils. The water I puked up sank into the seams of a neat row of worn, wooden slats. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes and to ease the burn in them, too. The only things I could focus on were a pair of dark, leather boots. Beyond them, there were several pairs of bare, dirty, disgusting feet. Some of the toes were hairy. Some of the nails, thick and yellow. I was too weak to raise my head to look at the people to whom they belonged.
“Give her some room!” a man shouted. The closest feet shuffled away from me.
A young man with a head of wet, sand-colored hair sat against a wooden railing, quivering as he stared. The man who shouted a moment ago chastised him. “You’re shaking like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The young man pointed to me. “She fell straight outta the sky, Captain. There’s not another boat as far as the eye can see, and not a cloud in sight.” His teeth chattered as he hugged himself.
“Why’d you jump in after her, then?” his captain asked.
The heels of the captain’s boots clicked as he circled me, stopping in my line of sight and putting himself between me and my savior. The room he’d ordered the men to give me was for his benefit, not mine. He crouched down, elbows relaxed and resting on his thighs. He looked like a pirate – which should’ve sounded crazy, but I wasn’t sure that it was, given my circumstances.
He certainly looked the part, in a dingy white shirt with a wrinkled row of ruffles cascading down his chest. The shirt gaped open, exposing a bronze chest highlighted by a smattering of dark chest hair.
The young man was still hugging himself when he replied to his captain, “’Cause I figure I’ve done a lotta bad stuff in me life, Cap. I reckoned I got the chance to save an angel and figured I oughta take it.”
The captain’s boots were tall, rising to his knees. They were scuffed and worn in places, but in spots the dark leather shone.
My eyes followed the bottom of his pointed beard upward. Black as the oil on his boots, long but full, he wore it well. There were crow’s feet at the outer corners of both eyes – eyes that were narrowed suspiciously at me.
“And what say you? Are you indeed an angel, fallen from heaven, or is it possible that you’ve stowed away on my ship, and now that we’ve spotted land, you decided to swim to shore before you were caught? Stowing away on my ship wouldn’t be prudent, but you’d have to be out of your mind to try to swim in a gown as heavy as that.”
I responded to his insult by coughing up more seawater. Some of it splashed onto his fancy boots and spotted my reflection in the shiny buckles, but the captain didn’t even flinch.
He reached out and brushed strands of hair from my face. “You’re a pretty one.” His voice was deep and gravelly and his speech was formal and stilted. He sounded like Enoch’s people had, with the same accent and formality. “It’s a shame you aren’t smarter.”