The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(11)

The abandoned church was partially collapsed now, its spire and roof caved in, its stained glass windows missing, the stone steps up to its faded red door chipped and discolored. On the approach, she took note of the paint that had peeled off its whitewashed clapboard exterior, and she compared the state of its decay to what she had last seen from horseback, maybe a decade ago?

Time had not been kind.

This seat of God, built, sustained, and ultimately abandoned by humans, had once serviced the spiritual needs of the farmers who had tilled the valley’s good earth. That era was over now, and the nearest house of worship that was functioning was a hundred miles away in the suburbs of Rochester. Then again, the nearest town of any note was thirty miles away. Thus the infrequency of grocery trips.

This had to be what the pretrans had been talking about in his delirium. God on earth. For humans.

And maybe used for something else.

When she came up to the main entrance, she tried the double doors. Locked. Not a problem. Willing them open with her mind, she—

Got nowhere with the dead bolt.

She tried again, sending a command for the steel components to shift their positions. Nothing.

Bending down, she felt a surge of triumph. “Copper.”

Looking up to where the pointed spire should have been, she felt a tingling at her nape and across her shoulders. Humans wouldn’t use a copper lock. Vampires would, though. If they wanted to keep members of the species out of a place.

Mental manipulation didn’t work on the stuff that made pennies.

She had to get inside, but dematerializing into a space where you didn’t know the layout or the debris field was too dangerous. Good job the windows were Swiss cheese’d. Heading around, she picked one of the high-set empty frames, jumped up, and grabbed onto the lip.

With a grunt, she pulled herself high and propped the front of her pelvis on the sill like it was a pair of uneven bars in the Olympics. Tilting forward, she checked out the interior. Yup. Nothing but a salad of broken beams, busted pews, and cracked slate tiles for croutons. Swinging her legs up and over, she hung for a moment and then dropped down from the sash, her hiking boots making a thunderous noise that made her wince—

Doves fluttered into flight from hidey-holes in the tangle, and ducking down, she covered her head as wisps of feathers floated down in the moonlight. When the coast was clear, she straightened and looked around. The collapse of the roof had created an impassable terrain in the congregational area.

“Shit,” she said to herself.

Assuming “Peter” had emerged from some kind of secret whatever-the-hell, he couldn’t possibly have come through the mess. The splintered lumber and raw nails were an obstacle course and a half. Plus, if someone, anyone, had tried to get out of it or come up from under it, their path would show. There would be a disruption in the pattern of snapped boards and broken beams, and some blood, too, thanks to all the shards and sharpies—and pretrans couldn’t dematerialize. The exit would have had to be done on foot because he was too short to jump up to the empty window jambs.

Oh, and then there was that copper lock.

No, he hadn’t come through here.

Maybe she was nuts. Maybe . . . he’d converted to human religion in the prison? Although it was only for vampires so how the hell would that work?

Before she left, she looked to the altar, which was strewn with red, blue, and gold chips of stained glass. Then she glanced to where the steeple had fallen from its great height, the brass cross somehow landing faceup on top of one of the few flat boards that was not tilted or smashed. The dusty gold face of the symbol of faith caught the moonlight, flashing with a warmth that, inexplicably, made her eyes water.

She wished she had something to believe in.

Dematerializing out of the window hole she’d come in through, she reformed back on the scruff around the church and checked the building’s foundation, looking for transom windows into a basement . . . or a storm door entrance . . . or a crack large enough for a one-hundred-and-ten-pound pretrans to slide out of.

“Damn it.”

This was going nowhere.

The idea of heading back to the farmhouse with her tail between her legs, because she’d taken the ramblings of a dying boy, conflated them with her emotions around Janelle, and given herself a wild-goose chase, made her feel smaller in her clothes and made the pack with those weapons of her grandfather’s feel heavier.

Nyx walked around again, looking for prints in the ground cover. Nothing—

Later, she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint what made her turn her head. It wasn’t a sound or a flash of light or a voice, but something commanded her to look behind herself.

At first, the congestion of overgrowth seemed like just another vinedraped knot of trees. But the more she stared at it, the more she recognized that there were contours . . . corners.

There was an old iron fence under all that ivy, four-cornered by some big maple trees. And inside of it, also covered with weeds . . . was a graveyard.

Walking over, she discovered that the gate of cockeyed iron points had been forced open. Someone had come through it recently, leaving the vines freshly broken, the leaves just beginning to wilt. And given the thin wedge? It had been someone who was small.

Nyx had to push things much wider to fit her grown-up body through, and in the moonlight, the pathway that had been traveled through the graves was visible, but barely so. The ground cover of weeds and grasses had been trampled by feet that had passed through only once. Another week? A good rainstorm? The distance traveled would disappear completely.