Page 38 of High Noon
Chapter Eight
Enoch
“Yarrow?”I said gently. Her lashes fluttered on her cheek a moment before she opened her eyes and gasped. She clutched her neck, finding the two marks my fangs had left.
“You bit me.”
Honestly, I felt bad doing it, but in the end knew it had to be done. She was too intelligent. She could’ve been a spy for Victor or Kael. If she’d managed to feed information to them, none of my people would have been able to track her. Yarrow was that efficient with technology. I had to ensure she was on my side, and this was the only way to guarantee she was. I couldn’t rely on the fickleness of her free will, so I took it away.
I waited as long as I could for her to wake on her own, but now I needed her to gather information for me. Something had happened at the Compound. Someone landed, but it wasn’t Eve. My source told me it was a male, but they didn’t get a chance to see if it was Abram, Titus, or Maru before the person was surrounded and swept inside. He was probably in Kael’s laboratory at this very moment, which, from what I could glean, was located two stories below ground. One floor held rooms for surgery, performing tests, and a hidden area where his own tech unit was housed, and the other floor contained all his failed experiments.
“I need your help.”
Her pupils dilated in response to my veiled command. “I will help you.”
On the small table in front of her lay her computer. I nudged it toward her. “Someone landed in the yard of the Compound. I need to know who it was.”
She pushed her glasses up and flipped open the laptop, using her fingerprints to unlock the device. Yarrow pecked at the keys and swiped at the screen, causing different icons to pop up, followed by an array of images, footage from surveillance cameras, and garbled, meaningless script I was unable to decipher.
“Aha,” she exclaimed, pressing a key. The small screens were overwhelmed with a new one. A large one.
“Abram,” I breathed. He’d somehow made it back before the others. “No one else landed?”
She shook her head. “No. Only him.” She shuddered. “I wouldn’t want to be him right now.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed to the screen, and I realized Abram was restrained. His head, shoulders, arms, hands, hips, thighs, calves, and feet were tied with thick bands. “They’re lined with silver,” she said. “See the metal glisten when he moves?”
Abram thrashed to get free, baring his fangs. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you for this,” he promised an orderly who’d come to check on him. A glass door slid open and a man in a white lab coat strode across the room. The man was thin, wearing thick glasses and boasting a head full of shaggy brown hair.
“Who is that?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Kael Frost,” Yarrow answered.
Interesting. He looked different from other videos in which I’d seen him. Frazzled. Drained. “Yarrow, I want to know what he did with the two Eve clones that landed. Do you remember that event?” She nodded and her fingers flew across the keys and screen. A list appeared. “What is that?”
“A list of clones,” she answered mechanically. “It tells which are active and which have been terminated.”
“By whom?”
“It varies. See this column?” she asked, pointing to a highlighted column of data. “This tells you whether they died in the field – during a mission – or if Kael terminated them himself.”
“And the two clones that returned?”
She slid the bar down, obtaining their assigned years. “Both terminated, by Kael.”
I scrubbed a hand down my face. “Will he terminate Abram?”
“Not until he’s completely useless to him.”
Right now, Abram was useful for the very fact that my venom was harbored within the cells of his blood. I wondered if he might be more useful to me than he was to Kael. If I could somehow order him to free himself and kill Kael Frost…
“They questioned the clones, then killed them. The reason for terminating them is listed as treason,” Yarrow said quietly. Her lips formed a pout. “My gums hurt.”
“I know, but it won’t last long,” I soothed.
“I’m really hungry.”