Internally, I winced, despite the fact that the muscles of my face would not work. My back hurt. While plowing into the ground hurt, plowing into layers of wood and taking them to the ground along with me absolutely sucked.
I couldn’t say the same about chickens, though. They were delicious. I imagined them cooked nine different ways before I could get my body to emerge from the shock that always followed the landing.
My stomach growled in response to my thoughts.
Slowly, my body awakened, my suit accelerating the healing it required. I was finally able to stand up and stretch my arms over my head, leaning backward and enjoying the feeling of movement. My head poked out of the wooden hen house where the roof had recently been whole. I dusted myself off and unlatched the door, quickly securing it behind me. The chickens could fly out of the hole I’d made if they were determined enough, but I wasn’t making their escape easier.
Beyond the coop was a modest wooden barn with a loft filled with hay. A horse whinnied from inside. It was morning, and a thin layer of fog hung over the low-lying valleys in the land. On a hill above a low valley sat a large, white house with equally large, white columns. Stately rows of trees flanked a pathway that led up to the home.
Despite the commotion I caused, no one emerged.
I made my way to the barn and slipped inside, the scent of hay and dung assaulting my senses. Saddles hung from short posts. I grabbed one and hurriedly studied the horses. I didn’t know a thing about them, but I quickly decided one of them hated me, which helped me decide swiftly against stealing him. The horse was white with brown spots and looked lean and strong, but his eyes promised he would throw me and stomp my ass into the earth for good measure.
A smaller, gray horse stuck her nose out of her stall. I held up my hand so she could get my scent. I’d seen people do that with dogs on the broadcasts. It had to be similar, right? Horses and dogs were both animals. Both needed to trust the humans who cared for them. “Easy,” I coaxed softly as she snuffled against my palm.
The gray horse seemed okay with me, so I unlatched the door and reached out to pet her. That was about the moment when the otherwise docile beast pinned her ears back and began to panic. It turned out that horses were great judges of character, able to discern a threat when they saw one. I looked over my shoulder to see Terah leaning against the stall door, a smirk on her face.
“Finally, you show up without your friends.”
Instinctively, I grabbed a stake from my holster.
She smiled at the sharpened wood. “I’m getting really tired of you and your little friends pointing those things at us.”
“Are Eve and Abram here?”
“Come see for yourself.” She glanced toward the house.
“Look, I don’t want trouble. I just want to find Eve and get the hell out of here. Judging by your clothing, we didn’t make it home to twenty-one-fifty-seven.”
“You certainly did not. For such awe-inspiring capability, your kind isn’t very intelligent about using your gifts. You’ve managed to land yourselves in the middle of a war.”
“Then I should be comfortable enough here,” I quipped, waiting until she stood up straight and waved me toward the house. I kept the stake in my hand, just in case. I thought she was going to eat me there, for a sec. “I just want to go home. We won’t be here long.”
“Good,” she replied nonchalantly. Outside the barn, the sun was starting to reach its rays across the land, shining brightly. The fog was beginning to dissipate and dew lightly sprinkled the grass and hay. “But before you go, you’ll need to fix that chicken coop.”
Terah didn’t walk. She didn’t trot. She swayed her hips and displayed her sass even beneath the prim gown she wore. There had been a few times I thought she and I could get along, that we might be civil with one another. Not friends exactly, but not enemies, either.
Then there were the times when I thought there was no way I could ever be anything other than her enemy.
When she was with Enoch, he brought out a calmer side of her. Asa did the opposite. Somewhere in between lay the real Terah.
The more I was shoved into her presence, the harder it was to see her as anything other than a target. My target.
That was the crux of why I didn’t understand Eve. Somewhere along this crazy journey, she’d fallen for Enoch. And while I could see that he was the best of the three, there was something in his eyes that said he might also be the worst.
The closer we got to our time, the more I knew what we would have to face. I just couldn’t look past what I’d seen back home, and I didn’t see how Eve could. At some point, Victor had told her Enoch was the one who’d sired the vampire that killed her mother. With that knowledge, how could she love a monster like that? How could she even stand to look at it?
At one point, it comforted Eve to put a face to the fiend who ripped away her life. I envied her the knowledge, something Victor hadn’t divulged to me. I didn’t know who sired the vamps who murdered my family. It could’ve been Terah, Asa, or just as easily, it could have been Enoch. While I wasn’t sure they deserved the stake in the past years we’d visited, who was to say they didn’t now, or that they wouldn’t somewhere along the way?
Who knew when we’d make it home, or if we ever would?
During our last jump, we linked arms and jumped together in the hopes it would pull us back to our time, but it didn’t work and we didn’t land together. I had been inexplicably pulled to Terah. If Abram was drawn to Asa and Eve to Enoch, we would know for sure that the next time we travelled, it didn’t matter if one or all of us jumped or if we held hands and sang a song together… we wouldn’t land as a group.
I followed Terah down a wide dirt path made of dark red clay, imagining how best to attack her given our proximity and surroundings. We stepped in and out of beams of sunlight the tree branches let filter to the ground in an alternating rhythm of brightness and comfort, until we reached the house – which was bigger in person than it had looked from the chicken coop.
The door opened and out stepped Eve, wearing a dress even puffier than Terah’s.
“Hey,” I said, jogging up the steps to her.
Her brow furrowed, and Terah stepped around us and into the house. “What are you doing here?” Eve hissed.
“What are you talking about? I just landed and… you’re already dressed. You didn’t have any issues landing? Are you feeling okay?”
“Exactly who do you think I am?” she asked carefully.
“Eve.”
“Yeah, and you’re Titus 1777.”
The realization finally dawned that this wasn’t my Eve.
With a sly grin, she shook her head and stepped close, whispering into my ear. “I’ve been working for over a year to get close to them, and you’re not going to ruin this for me,” she quietly seethed. “Now, I want you to go. I’m about to be the first to complete our mission. My name and number will go down in history as the one who outsmarted the Triad and saved humanity. Not yours. If you get in my way, I’ll stake you instead of them.”
Triad. It’s what Victor and Kael called the three Nephilim.
“Leave,” Eve’s clone hissed again. “What part of what I said do you not understand?”