The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(74)

“Now, now. There’s no need for that.”

“I will shoot you in the face. I don’t give a fuck. And you’ve taken us so far away from the Hive and everywhere else, no one will hear the gun go off.”

Kane regarded the muzzle of the nine millimeter calmly. “My dear female, I am trying to save you.”

“I’m well aware of how the glymera lies. And you’ve taken me way off course, away from Jack. This was not the plan.”

A strange rumbling vibrated up from the floor, the soles of her boots transmitting it through to her feet and into her lower legs. But she didn’t look down. She kept her stare on the aristocrat’s hooded eyes.

“Take me back to Jack,” she demanded.

“I can’t,” Kane said in a low voice. “It’s too late.”

More rumbling, and then dust and small stones started to fall from the ceiling of the tunnel.

“Take me back to him right fucking now—”

Without warning, she was thrown against the wall by an earthquake’s explosive force. As the gun her grandfather had given her swung up and over, Kane ducked and shot forward, catching her around the waist. They struggled over the weapon while the ground kept shifting underfoot, the male’s superior strength winning when she couldn’t get any leverage.

Just as rocks started to tumble, he wrenched her arm over her head and pinned her.

Nyx looked up at exactly the wrong moment, and caught a fragment of the cave’s stone wall the size of a football helmet right on the temple. Pain exploded in her skull and the fight went out of her. As her body went loose, Kane got the gun and started dragging her back by the torso. With her vision on the fritz, the tips of her boots went in and out of focus, and she told herself to pull it together and get herself free—

The brightest light she had ever seen pegged her in the face.

It was the Fade.

It had to be the Fade.

In the midst of the pounding in her head, her thoughts were jumbled, but she knew enough that the brilliant illumination meant she was dying and the Scribe Virgin’s mystical eternity was coming to get her.

Next would be a door.

There would be fog and a door. Her uncle, on her father’s side, had had a near-death experience twenty-four hours before he’d actually passed. And he’d come back to consciousness enough to describe what had happened.

Bright light. Fog. A door.

Her uncle had hesitated at the door that first time—and had come back as a wahlker. But clearly, when the Fade had returned for him, he’d decided to open it. If you did that and stepped through? You were gone forever to the Other Side . . . where you were supposed to find your loved ones who had passed, waiting for you. Her father would be there, her mahmen and granmahmen, too. And Janelle.

God, it would be good to see her sister and her parents again, even as she worried about Posie being left behind with their liar of a grandfather . . . shit, Jack. Even though they had no future, she didn’t want to die on him. That seemed like an added burden to their already packed sack of crap when it came to the future—

More rumbling now, louder, closer.

And then . . . the smell of gas? Like the earthquake had ruptured a tank of fuel used to fill up those trucks they’d been talking about?

Maybe the joke was on Kane.

Maybe they were both going to die tonight, even if he had her loaded gun.



As Jack stepped into the Command’s private chamber, his eyes went to the bedding platform. Within the unadorned four walls, it dominated the barren expanse.

The steel chains that coiled on the floor at each of the four corners sparked a fury in him.

“Take your hands out of your pockets,” the Command ordered.

He went over to the mattress. There was a single sheet that covered the padded plane, and as he stood over where he had been spreadeagled so many times, he thought of Nyx—and had to clear that from his consciousness quickly. Some vampires could read minds. Even if the Command couldn’t, they could certainly read his face, his affect.

There was a click. “I want to see your hands now.”

When he looked over his shoulder, two guards were standing by the Command.

“So early with reinforcements?” Jack laughed in a low growl. “Are you sure you can spare them elsewhere.”

“I’m in a rush. They’ll help get you in position—after you take your hands out of those pockets.”

Jack had known anger before. He had known hatred. He had been in situations with the Command where he had been degraded to levels of shame and self-loathing that he couldn’t have anticipated. But never once had he felt such a roar of fury—

The dart gun went off with its characteristic pfffht, and as soon as he heard the sound, he wanted to curse the distraction of his emotions. There was no time to think or feel much more. The pinprick of pain in the pad of his pectoral was the calling card of the trance, and almost immediately, his body went limp and he fell to the floor.

The worst part of it was that as unresisting as his arms and legs were, his mind remained clear. And thus he was fully aware as the Command came to stand over him.

The hood turned to the guards. “Leave me. Stay by the door.”

There was a click as he was shut in alone with the Command, and then he was straddled, the black draping swinging as one black boot landed on the far side of him. The hood went back and forth as they shook their head.