High Society (The High Stakes Saga #3)

How could he see good in any of this?

“And then, it took the three of us days to bury all of my people. We left your variations to rot until the innocent were laid to rest, but every time I had to step over one of them, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was you. If you were among them.”

“You must have hated me.”

“Afterward, yes, but not in that moment. In the days that followed the slaughter, I kept hoping you weren’t dead and hoping I hadn’t inadvertently killed you. I kept hoping you’d made it home safely.”

I shook my head. “I don’t see how you could have thought that. I couldn’t have.”

“You don’t know that,” he replied. “Love doesn’t have to make sense. It just is. I couldn’t switch it off, even after…” He stopped digging for a moment, folding his hands over the shovel’s handle. The sky lightened behind him, birds chirping in the canopy above like they had no idea the whole world wasn’t completely messed up.

“And then, we had to do something with your clones. There were thousands of you. I stopped counting after nine hundred. Asa refused to help bury a single one of you, and Terah followed his lead. He suggested making large pyres out of the heaps of your bodies. Numbly, I helped them make mounds of your dead, lifeless corpses. Once we had ten enormous piles around the yard, Asa lit them on fire. I couldn’t bring myself to stay and watch you burn. After that, I took off on foot to Asa’s home and found that someone had slain his people, too.”

My mouth gaped open. “I had no idea.”

“I know,” he said softly. “I didn’t tell you because I knew that the truth of what had happened broke your heart, and I wanted to spare you the pain of knowing such a thing.”

“Did Terah have a home of her own? Did they attack it?”

He shook his head. “In that time, she was unmarried. It wasn’t lawful for her to own property, so she lived in my manor instead.”

No wonder Asa harbored such hatred for us. He’d told me once that he should’ve killed me when he had the chance. Maybe if he had, this wouldn’t have happened. If they had removed the three of us, lives would have been saved, even as ours were lost.

Enoch resumed digging and I continued covering the body of the man whose son was now orphaned.

Tears never stopped falling from my eyes, but Enoch’s dried up. I could almost hear and see the hatred for Abram filling him up. But Abram wasn’t the only one he should hate.

Chapter Eleven

Titus

After the dead were buried and the sun was up, we escorted the kids to Asa’s. He was surprised to learn that there were survivors. The boy had seen the adults killed, though I wasn’t sure where he was when it happened. He wouldn’t talk about it anymore, but I felt sorry for the little guy. He was six. He shouldn’t have had to witness that.

Though I was the one to find the bodies of my family, at least I didn’t see the vamps take their lives. It was a small mercy in the face of a tragic event.

Asa, Enoch, and Terah were hefting and throwing damaged furniture and parts of the ceiling and walls down from the upper rooms. Some of the attic and roof would have to be fixed, but one thing at a time.

I was working on a smaller project, just to get some distance from the boy. The Nephilim. Everything. The chicken coop I crashed through still hadn’t been repaired. Someone had put a blanket over the top of it to keep the birds in, but that wasn’t a permanent solution, and since I was the one who broke it, I figured I’d fix it. It shouldn’t take long, and it would give me something to do so I wasn’t near the three children. Plus, I couldn’t even look at the boy without damn near crying.

I found some wooden planks piled behind a garden shed at the back of Asa’s fancy garden with its perfectly-trimmed hedges and brick-laid paths, and then borrowed a hammer and a pocketful of nails. The sun was bright and hot, but it felt good to do something physical that didn’t require a lot of thought or analysis. It wasn’t a life or death battle, or a carefully planned game of strategy. It was just laying wooden planks down and hammering the hell out of the nail heads.

“You okay?” Eve asked, coming up behind me. I paused, holding a nail tip to the wood.

“Yeah, you?”

“Yeah,” she answered quietly, hesitation in her voice. “I want to talk to you alone later,” she hinted.

I nodded, peering up at the house just as a chest of drawers flew out of the window of the room Eve had been staying in. I hammered the nail in place, then turned to her. “How many memories do you have of your childhood?”

“What do you mean?”

“I have three,” I told her. “That’s all I can remember. Three things. So, Kael either took the rest, or he planted the ones I do recall. I’m not sure which is the case, but both theories piss me off.” My jaw muscle ticked in time with my hammer fall.

Eve was quiet for a long moment. She came and held the next two planks steady as I nailed them down. “One,” she finally answered.

“We were renamed, Eve. I don’t remember my given name, and I’m not sure why I never questioned it.”

“We were too busy.”