The Wolf (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #2)(20)
“Survivor’s guilt is a bitch.” Rhage thought of Phury, and everything the guy had done for his ruined twin, Z. “I know people who were almost destroyed by it.”
The Jackal’s eyes shifted over. “You told me I could help find the prison camp.”
“I did, and I meant it.” Well, up to the point where the guy might get himself killed. The pen was actually not as mighty as the sword when you were in the field. “The choice to help is yours, but it’s not going to be a cake walk. There are serious risks to the mission, and we’ll only be able to protect you to a point.”
“I have a lot to lose,” came the soft murmur. “Nyx is . . . everything to me, and I have my son to think of—and that’s why I don’t get it. I mean, Kane’s dead. Apex is a sociopath. Mayhem actually likes being in prison—don’t get me started on that. And Lucan has always handled himself. He doesn’t need me. So what the fuck is my problem. I have true love, I have everything I could want . . . and I’m stuck here. Still in this prison, even as I walk around a free male up above.”
Rhage locked his molars on the Tootsie Roll and bit down hard, breaking through to the chocolate center. As he started chewing, the familiar pull on his teeth as the center grabbed back distracted him from how much he didn’t like orange added to anything.
Before he could respond, the Jackal threw up his hands. “I mean, goddamn . . . my female is right now in our mated home, doing the dishes that we ate our First Meal on—and I lied to her about where I was going and what I was doing. Just like I have the other dozen times I’ve come here. What the fuck is wrong with me?”
Rhage extracted the empty white stick from his mouth. “Well, at least part of it is simple.”
“Oh, yeah? Which part.”
“They’re your brothers,” Rhage said in a grim voice. “And you need to save them because when you do, you save yourself. That’s why you keep coming back here, even though you have a female of worth at home. You need to save your brothers . . . to save yourself.”
The Jackal rubbed his head like it hurt. “But they aren’t my blood.”
“Blood is not required for that job description. Trust me.”
Back at the sanatorium, Lucan was walking through the tiled corridors of the south wing’s fifth floor. As he killed time, he read the graffiti spray painted on the walls. It was remarkably unoriginal and the kind of thing, like the unconfusing layout of the hospital, that had been easy to memorize. A few trips through and he had the fonts, the colors, the map of it all down cold: Names in block letters. Couples in hearted algebra equations that ended in “4EVA.” The occasional satanic bullshit just for effect. Oh, and a line or two from Edgar Allan Poe—which he only knew because they were marked “—Edgar Allan Poe.”
The storms of earlier in the night had washed through, and the moonlight that pierced the open porch and flowed into the patient rooms gave him more than enough to read the human missives by. As he went along, the fallen plaster crunching under his boots, the hoots of owls a distant radio station of fauna-tunes, he decided that the illumination was like sunlight at the end of the day, the beams long and slanted as they crossed the corridor in a regular pattern.
Four a.m., he decided. It was probably close to four given the lunar position in the sky full of stars.
Soon enough, he’d have to go down underground with the others, and that was why he always came up here before the dawn locked him away. The wolf in him needed to breathe, had to be free—and this was the best he could do to honor that side of his bloodline.
So that it didn’t consume him.
But maybe it had already.
Trying not to think about the madness, he refocused on his promenade. There was one particular patient room that he felt drawn to, even though he couldn’t say that it was any different from any of the others. It had become a talisman of sorts, though, and as he approached it, he tracked the numbers on the doors: 511. 513. 515—
517.
It was a bad-luck number, violating all his rules. He liked even numbers, with his favorites being 2 and 4.
But 517 it was.
As he paused in the doorway, it was as if there were someone inside and he was waiting to be invited in. Which was fucking nuts. And yet as he threw a leg over the threshold, he felt like apologizing for intruding.
Just like all the spaces on the floor, the room was about ten feet square, and the set of rusty bedsprings strung between their rusty head-and footboards took up most of what open area there was. The only other furniture a small table and a stool. Both had been upside down, and about two weeks ago, he’d righted them and arranged the pair so that if there had been somebody in the room, they could have written a letter home. Or maybe read a letter from their loved ones.
And then he’d moved the empty, decaying bed support so that if someone had been lying on a mattress on the setup, they could have looked out of the flap doors and through the porch’s open-air arches, to the sky.
Fucking sap that he was. But there had been suffering here. Great, unimaginable suffering and sorrow, humans dying long, protracted deaths, surrounded by others doing the same. He’d never been a big fan of the other species, but something about this place, about the sheer magnitude of the numbers of those who had died here, gave him a shot of sympathy.
He knew what it was like to be doomed by something outside of your control.