The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(48)

The stab of jealousy that went through her was unacceptable on a lot of levels, but there was no stopping the red tide of aggression that was directed at a female she didn’t know, couldn’t see, wasn’t even around. Before she could stop herself, she also inhaled deep, curious as to what his mate smelled like, but all she got in her sinuses was a revisit to the stench of the Hive.

Probably for the best.

This was not her business.

“We should go,” she said. “We need to go—”

Jack’s shoulders jerked and his eyes swung around. For a split second, as he looked at her, his face was utterly blank.

Nyx shook her head. “Not right now. We can’t do this now. I need you back here.”

As she pointed to the concrete floor between them, he glanced down. And then he came back online.

“This way,” he said in a low voice.

As they continued on, he didn’t look back at the cell, and she took that as a good sign. Distraction in the only one who knew where the hell they were and where they needed to go was like a car without a steering wheel. In a life-or-death chase. Just before things were about to hurl off a cliff.

Her hand tightened on the butt of the gun her grandfather had given her, and she checked behind them again. No one. Yet.

Up ahead, there seemed to be nothing but more of what they were going through, the finished hallway reminding her of some kind of institution in a Stephen King novel. But eventually, they came up to a fork in the tunnel. She knew which way they were going to go even before he pointed to the right, to where things reverted back to raw stone and torches that spit and hissed fire from their mountings. Now, they were back around what they’d left behind: Bare black rock, everywhere. The smell of the earth. A dampness that was no longer overridden by an HVAC system.

Some hundred feet on, Nyx stopped without having to be told. Then again, there was nowhere else to go.

They’d arrived at the Wall.

In the flickering candlelight, the inscriptions of hundreds and hundreds of names seemed to move across the rock they had been carved into. And it wasn’t until she stepped in close that she realized the listings were made up of symbols from the Old Language rather than letters. The lines of the inscriptions were uneven, some sloping up, some down, and there were a number of people who had done the carving, the names executed in various and inconsistent styles. There were no dates, no decades or years, much less months and days. But she gathered that it had started over on the upper left because the first name was right at the ceiling . . . and then all the way across, there was a column that was halfway done, with plenty of rock beneath ready for more memorials when the time came.

Given that Janelle’s incarceration was relatively recent, Nyx went to that last name in the lineup. At first, her eyes refused to focus on the slick, reflective stone, the strobing effect of the candlelight making things a challenge even for vision unaffected by heightened emotion.

And meanwhile, her heart was pounding.

Running her forefinger across the name at the bottom, she sounded the syllables of the symbols out in her head. Peiters. And then she did the same to the one above it. Aidenn. And then the next. Obsterx.

She repeated the process over and over again, one more up, and one more up, and one more up . . .

She went slowly, and discovered that a lot of the names were misspelled. Accordingly, she didn’t jump the gun on whatever was coming next for fear of inadvertently missing something. There was one shot to do this. They were not coming back. And if she got it wrong, she might well endanger her own life searching for a sister who was—

J. A. N. N. E. L.

With a gasp, she traced the symbols one by one. Then retraced them.

As she weaved on her feet, her eyes flooded with tears—which seemed a little strange given that she felt nothing whatsoever. She was instantly numb, her body cold, her lungs freezing in her ribs, her blood seeming to stop in her veins.

“Jannel,” she whispered aloud. As if maybe the syllables added up to something different if they were uttered instead of just translated from the inscription inside her brain.

Janelle. Her sister’s name was Janelle. So this had to be another prisoner, with a name close, but not exactly—

Closing her eyes, she sagged. She had gotten it right. The name was just spelled wrong, like a lot of them were. Maybe the carvers didn’t know the Old Language any better than she did. Or maybe they were just careless fuckers who didn’t seem to get that they were disrespecting the dead when they didn’t get it correct.

As she stood there, the soft breath of the lit wicks all around her, the dropping of wax from the three-foot-tall black candles loud as an off-key chorus in her ear, she was tempted to fall apart—but mostly she wanted to scream. Janelle. Jannel. For fuck’s sake, at least the guy with the chisel could have spelled the name right.

“Is it her?” Jack asked roughly.

The sound of his voice was a reminder of where they were. “Yes.”

But before she turned around, walked away, started the process of getting herself out of the prison, she went to touch the inscription with her fingertips one last time—

What the—?

Her cell phone was not only in her hand, she’d turned it on, and all she could do was stare down at the thing and wonder how the hell that had happened and what in the hell the thing was for.

Oh . . . right. Picture. She needed to get a picture.