The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(76)

No control. At another’s mercy.

“You’re going to answer me,” she spat.

Then she put her hood back into place and whistled through the mesh. When the guards opened the door, she pointed to the bed.

“Chain him up.”





Nyx closed her eyes against the Fade’s blinding light, and prepared herself for some kind of physical reaction to being on the Other Side. She also got ready for the appearance of the door, for the decision to open it or not—

What the hell was that rumbling? That vibration?

There was a grunt, and she felt her body get yanked to the side—just as the harsh glare of the Fade’s painful illumination flared and was abruptly extinguished, a tremendous wind blowing across her face and irritating the raw wound on her head. Confused and in pain, she forced her eyes open—which was weird because she’d thought they were already open.

And then things got even more confusing.

Because she was kind of thinking . . . that she was suddenly in a tunnel. As in a road tunnel, one where vehicles came and went. And there was a truck going by her. A semitrailer truck that was the color of the gray and black walls of the cave.

Shit, she must be losing her mind. Where had the paved roadway come from? And as for the truck idea, one of them certainly seemed to be plowing past her, like she was on the side of a city street and the thing was delivering a pallet-load of something to somebody’s business on a rush job.

Red brake lights flared now, reflecting off the slick walls of the cave, and there was a screeching of tires in her ears and the sharp burn of rubber in her nose. Then the back of the truck fishtailed, the rear going cockeyed to the tunnel and swinging toward her in slow motion.

Adrenaline coursed through her body. If she didn’t move, she was going to be crushed—

A force from up above shoved her down and forward as the bed came at her, and as she fell into a crouch and twisted, she realized she was under the back of the truck, in between the front wheels and the rear ones, right in the middle. Doing that math, Nyx let herself go down flat on the asphalt and covered her head, rolling in the direction the vehicle’s momentum was taking all that weight so she wasn’t mowed over by those back wheels.

The halt took a hundred thousand yards and twelve years, and she scrambled to keep up to avoid being roadkill, boots digging in, limbs flailing, body flipping around beneath the truck’s tunnel-long bed as the brakes continued to squeal and the stench of rubber got thicker, and she knew that if she hadn’t seen the Fade before, she was going to now—

And then it was done.

No more movement. No more scrambling. The truck was at a cockeyed stop, brakes hissing, that pungent rubber smell stinging her sinuses, her body flopping over one last time so that she was staring up at the undercarriage of the semi’s cargo bed.

Turning her head, she wiped the grit out of her eyes and followed the axle to the set of four tires that were eighteen inches from her torso. She was so close to them, she could see their braided tread, and she coughed at the smell of hot metal and motor oil.

“Take this back.”

She had no idea who was addressing her under the goddamn death truck—

“Kane?” she breathed as she focused on his dirt-smudged face.

“Take this.” He pushed her gun at her. “You’re going to need it. Unless you can dematerialize?”

He was speaking softly and urgently, but her brain was just not working. She was pretty sure he was using English, right?

All the confusion got cleared up real fricking quick at the sound of the cab’s doors opening at the front of the semi. In the lee of the headlights that were streaming forward down the—wait, so they really were on a road? Like a proper road? And it was a three-laner.

“Where the hell are we?” she whispered as a pair of guards walked around and met each other at the truck’s front grille.

“There was nobody there,” one of them said as dust swirled around their dark shadows.

“I saw somebody in the headlights.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“You want to take the risk I’m right? After we blew the barricade into the roadway?”

“It was supposed to be removed by the prisoners. We had no fucking choice but to use explosives. The Command wants this shit out of here now, and we need two exits to get the trucks off the site—what was I supposed to do?”

Kane put his face right into Nyx’s and pressed the gun into her palm. “We’re going to have to fight our way out of this, and I have not discharged a gun before in all my life. You’re going to have to do the shooting.”

Blinking, she told her vision to get with the program as she gripped the weapon. And then she kicked her brain’s ass into gear. Like a newsreel on rerun, she caught up with Kane’s convo, and there was no need for a PowerPoint presentation on what he was suggesting.

She looked down toward the guards as they stood arguing with each other. She didn’t require an up-close-and-personal to know they were armed and had communicators.

“Stay behind me,” she ordered.

“Yes, m’lady.”

Nyx went belly down, but in a quiet way—and then she tripod’d her elbows and aimed the gun. Between the cab’s front tires, the guards were face-to-face, their knees and the tips of their boots close together as they talked back and forth.