The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(14)

Or what was left of it.

The bullet had hit him at the base of the jaw, and the angle of its trajectory had carried the lead slug through the interior structures of the front of his face. Its exit had been through the outside corner of the left eye, and it had taken extensive tissue and bone along with its departure.

Hollow-point bullet, she thought as her stomach rolled.

Clicking noises rose up from what remained of the mouth, and glossy red blood oozed out of the ruined anatomy, a puddle gathering width and depth on the dusty stone floor. There was twitching at the extremities, but even without medical training, she knew he wasn’t getting up anytime soon.

Nyx shuddered and leaned back against the sarcophagus, her lungs pumping too fast with draws that were too shallow. As her body went numb, her head grew fuzzy and her vision went bad bulb on her, flickering in between sight and blindness.

Control the breathing, she told herself. Slow and easy. Rebalance the carbon dioxide in the blood.

It was only through what she had practiced with her self-defense teacher that she was able to resist the urge to keep panting, and her eyes were the first function to stabilize. Then the trembling and strange paralysis that came with panic attacks eased up—as long as she didn’t look at the body. Hard to do. The male’s remains were slowly losing their autonomic jerks, death claiming what had been alive like a meal consumed—in bites.

Pushing her hair out of her face, even though there were no strands in her eyes, nose or mouth, she looked around. No backup coming into the space. No explosions. Nothing from outside of the crypt.

When she leaned down to pick up her flashlight, she realized she had a gun in her right hand. Duh.

God, she hated that fresh-copper smell of blood, and a part of her, way down inside her core, wanted to cry even though it had been a his-or-her-life situation. She needed to get over that. Forcing herself to go over, she frisked the body and came up with a bounty worth the trouble of overriding her gag reflex. Keys. A communicator. A pass card with no photo or name, just a magnetic strip. Three ammo clips that went with the gun.

This was the guard of a professionally maintained facility. She had to be close to the prison.

She pocketed or packed all of it, and stood up with her flashlight. Sending her instincts out, she listened for soft sounds and breathed deep, searching for any scents over and above the male she had . . .

Killed.

She debated hiding the body. Humans weren’t going to come this way, but maybe there would be others like him? Had she tripped an alarm of some kind? Or had he been on a regular security check? He’d come out from the side, but that wasn’t much of an indicator because he’d clearly dematerialized—

The trail of those little footsteps led her eyes to a vent down on the floor. The iron grating was about two feet high and three feet long, and given the pattern of scuffs in front of it, that was where the pretrans had gotten out of wherever he’d been. To hide his tracks, he must have put the grate back in place, even though the disruption in the dust layer was a flashing neon sign.

Going over, Nyx squatted down, put the gun and the flashlight off to the side, and squeezed her fingers in through the slats. When she pulled, the frame came out with a high-pitched screech, and she froze. When no one with a weapon appeared around her, she started breathing again, grabbed the flashlight, and trained the beam inside.

There was a shallow area about five feet down, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to dematerialize into it because she had no sense of what could be waiting for her down there. Big blind spot. Huge.

Leaning in even farther, she worried that it was her only choice—

A subtle beeping sound went off and then there was a whirrrrrrrrr.

Wheeling around, she palmed the guard’s gun and pointed it at the panel that was sliding back on the far side of the sarcophagus. In her light, the corridor that was revealed was gray, narrow . . . and empty.

For the moment.

Putting the grating back into place, she stood up and looked across at the guard. A split second later, she went over to the male’s feet and tucked his nine millimeter in her waistband.

“Sorry . . . sir.” Sir? Like she needed to be polite to a guy who’d been ready to kill her? And who, P.S., was frickin’ dead? “Just, ah, relax.”

Okay, she was losing it.

Bending down, she took the body by the ankles and pulled the dead weight—natch—across the floor. The stairs were tough. As she dragged him up the steps, the sound of the back of the skull bumping along had her wincing.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she whispered.

Out in the hot air of the night, she took a deep breath. Then she pulled the male over between a pair of lichen-covered markers and let his feet drop into the tangle of grass and ivy. Checking on the sky, she tried to remember what the weather forecast was. Sunny. Wasn’t it supposed to be sunny tomorrow?

One ray of sunshine and the body would disappear, nothing but a scorch mark in the greenery.

Nyx gunned up again and rushed back to the crypt, thinking of that scene from The Sopranos where Tony killed Ralphie Cifaretto. In the movies, on TV—for the most part—murders were slick. People were killed in a coordinated set of moves. In real life? Someone like Tony gets wasp spray in the face while he’s offing someone for hurting an animal.

Or, in her situation, she leaves a hidden entrance wide-spankingopen while she drags her first murder victim out of a crypt.