Home > The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(33)

The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(33)
Author: J.R. Ward

The Command’s voice was low and deep. “I understand that you were in the restricted area and you had a gun to your head. That an inmate threatened you. Is this true?”

Prison tunic. He’d made Nyx put that tunic on.

The guards didn’t know she was from the outside. Except why the lockdown if they thought she was one of them?

“It was,” he answered. “But it is over.”

“Who was it. Where do I find her and that gun.”

“I don’t know.”

There was a pause, and he knew damn well the Command was testing the air for scents other than his own. “Did you enjoy your bath just now?”

“Don’t be jealous. It doesn’t look good on you.”

“Watch yourself, Jackal. I’m short-tempered tonight.”

“Things not going to your liking? Such a pity—”

A guard rushed up to the Command. “There’s a female in prison gear cornered by the western checkpoint. She is armed, but she is about to be subdued.”

The Command’s head swiveled back to the Jackal. “Well. It looks as if this little problem has solved itself. Any explanations you’d like to offer before I enjoy interrogating her?”

The Jackal reclined back against the wall, putting his hand down on his stack of books again. As Macbeth resumed its position front and center on his chest, he shrugged.

“I don’t know her or where she came from.” All true. “She had a gun. I did what she told me to do. Then she made me face the wall and count to ten before I turned back around. I went to fifteen, just to be sure, and I found that she was gone. She’s your problem, not mine. You run this place, after all.”

“What did she ask you to do?”

“Take her to the Wall.”

There was a pause, and he imagined the frown on the Command’s face. “Why?”

“She was looking for her dead. I don’t know.”

“So she’s not a prisoner.”

“Like I said, she had a gun, so I wasn’t inclined to press for details. I did what she demanded. She left me unharmed. That’s all I know.”

One of the black sleeves lifted toward him, like the Grim Reaper was pointing. “I’ll know if you’re lying. Pain has a way of bringing out the truth, especially from females.”

“Do with her what you will. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Expect to be called on later.”

“Don’t rush on my account.”

The Command shifted under those robes, that body changing positions. “Don’t play hard to get. It doesn’t suit you.”

The Jackal shook his head grimly. “On the contrary, it’s the only reason you want me.”

“Oh, no.” The laugh under the hood was low and sexual. “You are so very wrong about that.”

As the Command turned away, the Jackal kept his eyes on the book and his body as still as he could.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, Nyx was worse than dead.

As Nyx stared at the lineup of armed guards in front of her, she felt herself recede from reality. Considering the number of them, the mental lapse seemed like a perfectly reasonable response, even though it was totally unhelpful. Then again, there was no thinking her way out of this. No talking her way out. No shooting her way out, even with the two guns.

“Drop your weapons,” one of the uniformed males ordered. “Or we’re going to kill you here and now.”

She was tempted to tell them she accepted what was behind door number two, even if it was the proverbial “Goodnight, Irene.” She didn’t want to die, but she knew that falling into their hands was going to be worse than taking her last breath here in this tunnel.

“Drop your weapons!” he repeated.

Too many guards. Too many weapons on them that they had been trained to use—

He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

From out of nowhere, she heard her defense teacher’s voice in her head, variations on the phrase repeating over and over again: If you cannot win, do not fight. Evade.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War.

Taking a deep breath, Nyx slowly lowered both her weapons. Then she closed her eyes and pictured the pool, with its waterfall and its clean scent and the candles down on the floor. She imagined herself sitting beside it, on the sofa rock, warm and safe.

Not enough. She wasn’t calm enough—

“Drop your weapons on three! One, two—”

From out of nowhere, Jack appeared in the image, and he was as he had been the night before, watching her, his astonishingly blue eyes on her—

Nyx dematerialized out from under the guards.

One second she was before them, with their guns in her face. The next she was just a scatter of molecules, traveling past them through the air, invisible.

Untouchable.

Back when this had all started, when she’d come to that old, decaying church, she couldn’t have dematerialized inside of it from where she’d been on the ground because she didn’t know the interior. Now, at least she knew the tunnel system to some degree, although she prayed that more steel barriers hadn’t dropped down from the ceiling. If they had? She was going to slam into all that steel and die a pancake.

Willing herself into a fast-track backtrack, she re-formed when she was about twenty yards from where she believed the entrance to the hidden pool’s corridor was. Her heart was pounding and her brain scattered, and she had a thought that her being able to dematerialize had been a Hail Mary and a half. She couldn’t do it again. The whole calm-and-concentrating thing was now out the window.

Left side. Hadn’t the release been on the left side?

She put one of her guns away, and patted her palm down the carved rock. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, and wished she’d paid more attention to what the damn thing had looked like—

Nyx froze and glanced over her shoulder. Shouting.

Prisoners? Or guards? Probably guards looking for her. Her heart went haywire in her chest, and she frantically patted the rock—

Without warning, there was a click and part of the walling slid back soundlessly.

“Thank God,” she said as she jumped into the darkness.

But then it was a case of panicked waiting. Three seconds, right? Jack had said it took three seconds until the panel closed automatically.

More shouting. Rushing footfalls that were heavy getting nearer.

“Close . . . close . . .” She reached out and tried to pull the barrier into place. “Goddamn it!”

She felt like she was in a horror film, standing in an elevator, praying for the doors to shut before the monster skidded around the corner on clawed feet with jaws gnashing. But the urgency wasn’t just her own survival. As pissed off as she had been at Jack, she didn’t want to be the one who blew the cover on his secret place—

The panel finally started to close. And as the boots got ever nearer, the fricking thing took twenty-five million years to lock into place. Just as it did, and the hidden passageway plunged into darkness, the commotion got much louder.

Directly outside the panel.

Nyx stepped back and put her free hand over her mouth. As she panted in and out of her nose, she told herself they didn’t know where she’d gone. They couldn’t know about the release. They weren’t going to find her.

In the choking sensory void, she screamed inside her skin.

“No, she must have gone this way!” one of the guards barked in a muffled voice. “The other tunnels are blocked—”

“She couldn’t have made it this far—”

“For fuck’s sake, stop yelling, I can’t hear my earpiece—”

And then a fourth voice, low and sinister: “I will shoot her the second I see her.”

“You can’t kill her. The Command wants her. You’ll get us all fucking killed.”

Nyx took another step back. And another. The idea that she was not going to get out of the prison didn’t just dawn on her. It submerged her, sinking her down into a terrible mental state.

Splaying her arms out, she moved to one side to orientate herself, and she connected with the wall when the muzzle of the gun in her hand hit the rock. As the clang of metal rang out, she froze, sweat beading on her forehead.

Her heart pounded so hard that she couldn’t tell what was coming from her chest and what might have been more guards racing to find her. Stumbling, tripping, she retreated in the darkness, the sound of her windbreaker shifting against her body under the tunic, the soft rattle inside the backpack, the shuffle of her boots over the ground, loud as bombs going off. Desperation and exhaustion drove her past the point of breaking into a state of numb despair. She tripped on something. Kept going.

After what was a lifetime, her ears perked to the sound of falling water.

The sweet, soft chime of the pool’s feed was such a relief, she worried she was imagining it. But as the water got louder, and the voices of the arguing guards disappeared, she was tempted to outright bolt for the sanctuary.

The possibility of tripping and falling was too great, and besides, there was no magic to the pool. It offered no special cover or protection.

When she finally stopped at the pool’s edge, she didn’t immediately will the candles on. She stood where she was, one hand going back to lock onto her mouth, the other keeping its death grip on her gun. Her lungs were burning even as she sucked in air through her nose, and she was aware of the cave spinning around her. Afraid she was going to pass out, she let her knees go loose and landed on her ass on the rock floor.

The ringing in her ears was not helping. She couldn’t hear properly.

And her shoulder wound hurt.

After a while, after a long, long while, she dropped the hand clamp from her mouth. When her heavy breathing eased up, she listened hard, and when she could hear nothing but the waterfall, she willed one of the candles to life.

The fragile yellow light did not carry in the dense darkness. It was more like a star in the galaxy, a twinkle far off that revealed nothing about its immediate environment.

   
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