Drew knew that if he didn’t act now, he would probably never get another chance. He also knew he wasn’t fast enough to take off Energúmeno’s head before the vampire did the same to Gracie.

Logic dictated his choice, but love made it for him.

The copper blade hung motionless for a moment before Drew released it from his control and it fell to the stone floor.

Energúmeno heaved Gracie at Stanton, who ripped the scarf from her throat and stuffed it into her mouth. As he pinned her arms behind her he said, “I will kill them for you, master. You can watch as I drain their blood and feed their carcasses to the fish.”

“This wasn’t Agraciana’s idea,” Drew said. “I used my ability and forced her to do it.”

Gracie uttered a muffled shriek as the vampire grabbed the front of Drew’s shirt, lifting him off his feet and spattering the front of his shirt with the odd-colored blood dripping from his wound.

“This one has value to me,” Energúmeno said. “His sons will become my personal guard, and his daughters will serve as my concubines.” He glanced at Gracie. “Since he has already chosen his woman, she can bear them for me.” He threw Drew to the ground and stepped over him. “Take them to the island.”

Samuel slipped out of the villa just after sunset to meet with the other men, and while Charlie was tempted to follow him, she knew she had to keep up an act for the security cameras. So she tidied their bedroom, cleaned and sterilized the test materials she had used in the treatment room, and then moved down to the kitchen to start making a vegetable stew for their evening meal.

Giving herself busywork didn’t stop her from brooding over the possibility that she was pregnant. Some women claimed they knew the moment they conceived, but Charlie didn’t feel any different from the way she had before they were abducted. It was also the wrong time of month for her to be fertile; her MC always ran like clockwork. According to her mental calendar she wouldn’t ovulate for another week.

I should have told him that, she thought as she added some chopped tomato to the pot of boiling water. But then I wouldn’t know how he felt about having a baby with me.

Children had always been in her plans for the future, but only as part of her professional career. Ob-gyn had always been Charlie’s calling, and she had spent all of her spare time studying and acquiring the certifications and licensing she needed to go into practice as a midwife. Seeing patients through the long, uncomfortable months of pregnancy and helping them bring their babies into the world was the kind of work she had wanted to do since the very first infant she had delivered.

Sharing in those small miracles would also make up for the fact that there would never be any of her own.

The experiments performed on Charlie had saddled her with an unwanted ability and an irreversible genetic taint; she had always considered it a moral imperative to ensure that she remained childless. Being Takyn had also ruled out the possibility of adoption; as long as there were men like Genaro eager to exploit her gift, any child she brought into her home would never be safe.

Making those decisions had been wrenching, but had also given Charlie a sense of security. Now Segundo had stolen that from her.

That was what Samuel could never understand: just how deeply violated Charlie felt. Assuming she was still protected had made becoming Samuel’s lover a little easier for her; discovering her IUD had been removed had brought everything crashing down on her head. If she hadn’t already conceived, every time they had sex the odds that she would become pregnant would multiply exponentially.

And we will be having sex, she reminded herself viciously. Every day, or Segundo hands me over to the guards.

A hissing sound brought her back to the reality of her stew boiling over the sides of the pot. Quickly she turned down the heat and reached for the paper towels. Her hand faltered as fear and despair spread through her thoughts, as black as a cloud of ink in clear water.

She couldn’t have a baby on this island. Not against her will. Not knowing that the moment it was born Segundo would take it away from her. Nor could she abort her own baby, or kill it after it was born.

Charlie walked slowly out of the kitchen, blindly following the wordless thought stream in her head. It dragged her feet across the glass floor and into the red living room, where she went to the largest of the windows and opened it.

The sound and smell of the sea came rushing in with the night breeze, cooling her hot face and the stinging tears beading on her lashes. The only place she had ever felt safe was in the water, where nothing mattered but time and tide. The problems that seemed so enormous on land melted away in the sea, which did not care about them or her. To the water she was something to be swept away, filled and taken apart, until her bones sank and buried themselves in the rich silt.

She heard a low, almost monotonous keening sound coming from her throat as she wrapped her arms around her waist and rocked, heel to toe.

Charlie immersed herself in the overwhelming bleakness, allowing it to settle over her so that it dissolved away the ravenous fear that had been tearing at her heart for months. Her hand crept to her belly, and while she didn’t understand why it was flat instead of swollen, she could feel the life kicking inside her. She couldn’t go on like this; it had to end as it should have, in the darkness of the sea she loved, where she would walk into the waves and swim out into the night, away from the island and everyone on it, until she was too tired to turn around and make it back to shore. . . .

But I hate the water.

It was seeing her hand on the doorknob that wrenched her out of the thought stream, and Charlie staggered back, one hand over her mouth as bile surged in her throat. Her shoulders struck the wall, and she slid down, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes until the last echo of the other, suicidal mind dissipated.

“Oh, God, no.” She struggled to her feet. “Pici.”

Chapter 17

The trek to the cave gave Samuel a tour of the island’s flora, although he had yet to encounter any animals other than birds. Insects and reptiles were also noticeably absent, as were any signs of previous occupation. While the brush and trees grew in thick profusion, enough so that they regularly hampered his progress, the layer of decaying vegetation on the ground seemed remarkably thin.

He stopped in a gap between some palmetto plants and knelt down, gathering up a handful of the browned, fan-shaped leaves they had shed. Beneath them he found no ants, maggots, or other insects; only bits of twig and crushed shells speckled the brown dirt. On impulse he tossed aside the leaves and dug his fingers into the soil, scooping away a handful. The new layer he exposed appeared comprised of small, light brown leaves and larger chunks of silvery wood, with hardly any soil at all.

Not soil, but mulch.

Samuel kept digging down, finding a layer of gray-white gravel under the mulch. Beneath that his fingers uncovered black powder mixed with dark gray ash.

He brought a pinch of it to his nose. “Charcoal?”

The walls of the small hole he’d dug grew wet and began to collapse in a puddle of dark brown mud. He thrust his hand in one last time, feeling for the next layer and grabbing a handful of it. When he brought his hand out of the tannin-tinted water, he saw that he held a chunk of thin, tightly compacted rotting paper.

The newspaper pages were falling apart into a pulpy sludge, but he could still make out some of the print, and a date: 29 Septiembre 1989.

Samuel sat down beside the hole, dropping the decomposing newspaper onto the ground as he looked around him again. It took thousands, perhaps millions, of years for the Earth to form an island, usually from the eruption of an underwater volcano or the accumulation of seashells deposited on shallow-water reefs, where they were cemented together by coral.

This island was neither.

“Samuel.”

He looked up at Colotl’s dark, frowning face, and watched as Tlemi emerged from behind him. Both of the islanders carried bags made of net and filled with folded cloth.

“Why you dig ground?” Tlemi asked. “We wait; we think you not find cave.”

“I found something else.” He stood and brushed off his hands. “The master made this island, didn’t he? It’s some kind of artificial habitat.”

Tlemi looked helpless as she shook her head, obviously not understanding him.

Colotl’s eyes shifted to the hole in the ground, and he muttered as he bent to fill it back in and cover the spot with a palmetto leaf.

“No dig holes in island, Samuel,” Tlemi said. She pointed to the ground and then pinched her nose as she grimaced. “Bring bad smell, make us sick.”

He turned to Colotl and made a broad gesture. “The whole island”—he pointed to the covered hole—“is like this?”

Colotl hesitated, and then nodded.

The implications made his stomach turn. “Christ.”

Tlemi touched his arm. “We go to cave, talk safe there.”

He nodded and followed the islanders through the brush until they reached a densely wooded thicket of pine. In the center of it a twenty-foot-tall, grass- and vine-covered mound rose, and it looked impenetrable until Colotl took hold of a section of dead vines that turned out to be woven over a bamboo frame. Behind it a narrow opening led into the mound.

Samuel saw flickering light and stepped inside. The gap was so narrow he had to turn sideways to fit through, but after several feet it opened out into a wide area of rough stone surrounding a bubbling spring.

The water here was clear and smelled sweet. Samuel nodded to the other men standing around it as he knelt down and looked at his reflection. Beneath the surface a series of white PVC pipes fed streams of fast-moving water into the pool.

None of it made any sense to him. “Why did the master make this cave?”

“Liniz, Colotl make,” Tlemi said as she took a napkin from her bag. “Clean water to drink.”

She opened the napkin, which had been embroidered with an outline of the island, inside which were a dozen circles around specific symbols. The circle representing the cave had three wavy lines inside it; others held different geometric shapes.