The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(102)

The Brothers and her grandfather came out as well, and the males stood together and talked, hands on hips, heavy-jawed faces nodding in the way males did when they had seen and done something serious.

She let them go.

She had different problems than they did.

While they were discussing options for clearing out the bodies, and then strategies for finding where the prison had gone, she was steaming angry.

The rage—wait, that was the blond Brother’s name, wasn’t it—the Rhage she was feeling was out of line, but undeniable. And it took her at least three trips around her bush to realize where it was coming from.

No body.

Jack’s body hadn’t been down there. Not in the Command’s private area, and not when she had insisted on going farther into the partially collapsed Hive.

So he had left with the rest of the prisoners. Or he was somewhere in the tunnel system—either avoiding her or maybe dying.

Or he was out in the world. Without her.

Whatever it was, she couldn’t find him—and she was pissed off. Damn it, if he had only come with her. If he had put that secret tunnel to use with her, he could have had exactly what he’d been looking for—

“Nyxanlis?”

At the sound of her formal name, she shook herself back to attention. Her grandfather had come over, and he was looking as if he wasn’t sure whether her brain had broken.

“I’m fine?” She put it as a question because she wasn’t sure what he had asked her. Wasn’t sure that she actually was “fine.”

“We’re going to the farmhouse. All of us.”

“Okay.” As her eyes went to the trapdoor, she saw that one of the Brothers was kicking earth over the panel, keeping it hidden. “I’ll come with.”

Like she had any other place to go?

One by one, the Brothers dematerialized, and she had a thought about what Posie was going to do when these warriors with their black daggers strapped handles down on their huge barrel chests showed up in the side yard.

She’d better go now so she could help with the inevitable hospitality that would be offered, Nyx thought as she ghosted out . . .

. . . and yet as she traveled in a scatter of molecules, she did not head home.

She rerouted.

When she resumed her corporeal form, it was in front of the abandoned church, the place she had gone at the start of everything, the clue that the pretrans—now known as Peter—had given her.

Moonlight fell over the chipped clapboards and penetrated through the arched window cutouts where those stained glass windows had once been.

Taking out a burner phone, she texted her sister just so no one worried when she didn’t show up immediately. She didn’t give her location, though.

She needed a minute.

As that Brother with the blue eyes went back to meet what had to be his nephew for the first time, maybe she should have been there. But Posie had taken care of the young, and it was clear a strong bond had formed between the pair of them. She would handle things.

Nyx silenced her phone and started walking. She stopped halfway down the flank of the church and remembered dematerializing up to the sill to peer down into the tangled roof collapse.

Continuing on, she went to the cemetery and pulled open the gate.

In and among the headstones, there was a scorch mark in the earth a good seven feet long and four feet wide, all the ground cover burned away, the soil black as night, the graves around it charred on their edges. She’d been right about one thing, then. The guard had gone up in smoke when the sun had come out.

The crypt’s door was solidly shut, and she had a random thought that that stone panel had gotten more action in the last few days than the previous couple of decades: Peter. Herself. The guard. And there must have been other guards from the prison who had come out to check on things. That was what had led to the shutdown.

She wasn’t sure why she had to go in. It wasn’t like there had been anything inside the crypt except the sarcophagus. But for her peace of mind—assuming she ever found any of that ever again—she had to retrace her steps tonight.

That was the only way she was going to make it through the day, stuck indoors with nothing but her incessant thoughts, her dragging sadness, and this irrational anger that—

At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at.

As she pulled the heavy door open, and the hinges creaked, and the interior was revealed . . . there appeared to be a pile of clothes in the far corner down on the dusty marble floor.

Clothes that were the color of shadows.

And that was when she caught the scent.

“Jack!” she screamed as she rushed in.





From out of his delirium, Jack heard his name called.

His brain told him this was significant. This was important. This . . . meant something.

But he didn’t have enough energy to lift his head. Move his facedown body. Shift even an arm or a foot. He’d been bleeding for quite a while now, ever since— “Jack, oh, God, Jack . . .”

Gentle hands rolled him over on his side, and that was when his eyes provided him with a vision he had been praying for. The visage above him was that of an angel, an inexplicable angel. His female. His beloved female.

Nyx was talking to him, her mouth moving, her eyes wide and scared. And though he wanted to reassure her, he couldn’t seem to speak.