Home > Prisoner of Night (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(8)

Prisoner of Night (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(8)
Author: J.R. Ward

No reason to believe the intel wouldn’t be used against you.

It was, he realized now, why he’d agreed to help her all those years ago. He’d figured someone like Nexi wouldn’t get attached to him and that meant he was off the hook for being responsible for anybody but himself. He could go his own way after they were out of where they’d been, the split clean so he could take his revenge on his father.

There had only ever been one thing for him, and that was not settling down with a female.

Still, a part of him didn’t want to see that Nexi didn’t care—or, worse, was happy—about what had been done to him. He was also ashamed, even though she wasn’t aware of any details of his captivity. Back when he’d known the Shadow, when they had worked on their escape, he’d been solid about who he was and what his purpose had to be. Now? This mission that was taking him back to where they’d been held, so long the only goal he’d ever had, abruptly felt like there were two strangers in on the action.

The female he’d just met.

And himself.

“I didn’t throw any of it out,” Nexi said. “Your shit, that is. It’s all where you left it.”

“Thank you.”

“I was just lazy. It wasn’t to honor your memory or anything.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

Nexi muttered something that didn’t carry. And then she addressed Ahmare. “You need to hide that SUV. My garage is through there.” She pointed to two tire tracks barely noticeable in the kudzu. “I’ll open it for you. You’re going to leave me the keys in case I want to use it—or decide to chop it up when both of you don’t come back.”

Nexi dematerialized, up-and-gone’ing it, and Duran looked at his female—

The female, he corrected in his head. He looked at the female. At Ahmare.

“We’re going to need to camp out overday. There’s no way we can get where we need to go before dawn because I can’t dematerialize.” He tapped his collar. “This is steel.”

“Goddamn it.” The female glanced at the sky like she was measuring the distance the sun was going to have to spin overhead in millimeters. “That’s twelve hours.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“The hell there isn’t. You can tell me where to go and I can do this myself.”

“You won’t make it out of there alive.”

She stepped right up to him. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

“You don’t have the access codes or the layout to the compound. The Dhavos will know the second you set foot on his property and he’ll have you headfirst in a grave before you can get one shot off.”

“Dhavos?” She frowned. “Wait . . . this is a cult?”

“Set up sixty years ago.” Duran shut that door himself. “Back when humans were tuning in and dropping out, the Dhavos took inspiration and created a Utopia underground. Like most megalomaniacs, he cared less about enlightenment and more about being worshipped by a captive audience, but he managed to convince about two hundred wayward codependents to join him on a bullshit spiritual journey that culminated in servitude—and not of the holy variety. He’s a rapist and a murderer and he pays for everything by selling heroin and cocaine to humans who live below the poverty line.”

“I thought dhavids were illegal under the Old Laws. The Scribe Virgin never allowed them.”

“You think anyone cares about that out here? Why do you think he put the colony in all these goddamn bushes.”

“So we’re close.”

“Not close enough to make a go during the night we have left. Come on, before Nexi changes her mind.”

Except the female didn’t move. Ahmare just glared around the clearing as if she had X-ray vision and was convinced a good, sharp stare would reveal the colony’s entrance.

Duran slapped a sting on his ass and felt a young’s satisfaction as he flicked the dead bug off his butt cheek. But when he did the same on his left pec and then his right shoulder, there was no more feeling superior over killing something smaller than him.

“I’m getting eaten alive. Do what you want with this vehicle, but Nexi isn’t going to like it if you don’t put it where the sun don’t shine—and she tends to blow up things she doesn’t like.”

Something he might keep in mind.

Ahmare’s pale eyes locked on him. “I’m bringing all my weapons with me.”

“Okay, but keep them holstered. Nexi is not going to appreciate any aggression and she’ll deal with it in a way that require stitches.”

“You know a lot about her.”

“Not really.” He clapped his palm on the side of his throat. “Come on, we’ve still got some distance to go and I don’t like the look of the horizon.”

A subtle glow was kindling in the east, the kind of thing that a human might think of as the harbinger of a new day, the pretty precursor to a peach-and-pink departure party not just for night but for the storm clouds that were retracting from the sky as well.

He wished the damn things would stay put for another hour or two. They needed time, instead of some false show of optical-only optimism that would burn them both to a crisp.

Ah, the romance.

9

THE CABIN WAS OLD and small. The covert security measures were new and plentiful.

Ahmare would have been impressed under different circumstances.

Each of the four windows had iron bars and steel mesh—although only on the inside so as not to attract attention. The front door had no doubt been wooden when the place had been built, but that flimsy option had been swapped out for a reinforced steel vault panel. Motion detectors and security cameras had been mounted in each of the corners, and more mesh covered the walls, ceiling, and floor, ensuring that no vampire could dematerialize into the interior.

She was willing to bet there was an escape hatch somewhere, a way to get underground, but damned if she could find it.

“I’m going to use your shower,” the prisoner told Nexi.

He—Duran—didn’t wait for a yes or no—or for directions, not that there was any question where the running water was located. He just walked into the closet-sized loo and shut the door.

A low rushing hum came on immediately and suggested he wasn’t wasting time, and she appreciated that. But him being efficient with the soap and water wasn’t going to affect the velocity of the daylight hours. They were still going to take forever, like a bone healing on a human.

Weeks . . . months. Before mobility could once more be had. Or at least it was going to feel like that.

Ahmare looked across at the Shadow. That the female was watching her, all hunter-tracking-prey, was not a news flash, but come on. And one of the two guns with those laser sights was still palmed.

“You mind putting your weapon back in that holster,” Ahmare said.

“You’re not in a position to make demands.”

“If I was going to come at you, I would have already.”

“Tough talk.” The Shadow didn’t seem to blink, those black eyes so steady, it was as if they were made of glass, like the lens of a camera. “You like old Schwarzenegger movies? Bet that’s the closest you’ve ever gotten to a real fight.”

Ahmare made a show of checking out the interior again. The fact that the Shadow had figured out she was a teacher, not an actual fighter, seemed like a portent of failure. Sure, she had been trained in self-defense after the raids, and she had been teaching those skills to others at gyms up in Caldwell. But that was not the same as being a soldier.

Don’t think like that, she told herself. What was the saying? ‘Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right’?

The furniture was all also-ran afterthought. Mattress on a wooden stand. Travel trunk with the lid down. Table and two chairs that were handmade, but not by someone who cared about how things looked. Then again, this bolt-hole was about war: A workstation housed gun-cleaning supplies and stones to sharpen daggers and knives. Holsters for various weapons hung on pegs. Bomb detonators and sniper rifle tripods lined various shelves.

“You ever kill somebody before,” the Shadow asked. “I’m just curious.”

“Yes,” Ahmare said roughly.

“Oh, fancy. You didn’t like it, though, did you? What didn’t work for you? The mess? You seem like someone who doesn’t like messes.”

This is just a conversation, Ahmare told herself. Given what I’m going to face, this is nothing. No problem. Just words.

“Or is it the guilt.” The Shadow leaned back against the mesh-covered wall of the cabin, crossing one combat boot over the other. “Yeah, I’m guessing you don’t like the weight of the dead around your neck. The memories hang like a heavy chain right on your sternum and make it harder to breathe. When you close your eyes, the smell of the fresh meat and gunpowder comes back to you and chokes you. It’s all about being robbed of air at the end of the day, isn’t it. No more air, no more life. Both for you . . . and him. It was a him, wasn’t it. You couldn’t kill a young or another female, I don’t think. You don’t have it in you.”

Ahmare’s eyes went to the closed door of the bathroom.

Hurry, she thought.

“So who was it? Who’d you send to the Fade.”

The Shadow started to flip her gun up and down, casually tossing it and catching the weight as if she controlled every single molecule in the weapon, in herself . . . in the whole world. She seemed, as the Beretta caught air and returned to her palm again and again, to be in charge also of gravity . . . of time itself.

That confidence was captivating in the way of a cobra. Hypnotic because it was—

The Shadow pointed the gun directly at Ahmare’s chest. “Answer my fucking question.”

—deadly.

Those black eyes flashed peridot, and Ahmare knew with absolute certainty that she was going to fail at getting Chalen’s beloved back to him. The Shadow was right. She was a classroom chump, a videogamer who excelled in an armchair but was going to be picked off first in the actual field of conflict.

   
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