by J. R. Ward
There was another pause. Just in case there was a punch line.
When Mayhem merely smiled pleasantly, there was a lot of blinking around the pool. Even from Apex the Whittler.
“Are you fucking insane?” Lucan said.
Kane shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s a bit inexplicable, my friend—”
“You are such a twat-waffle,” Jack blurted. “And no, I don’t know what that means, but it is not good.”
It’s time.”
As Jack spoke, Nyx was already getting to her feet, the muffled marching reaching her keen vampire ears. Strapping her pack back on under the loose tunic and resettling her outer layer, she felt like she was moving out of a place. Which was nuts. Still, this experience had been so vivid, it was like she had been down under ground for a decade.
She took a last look around as the other males went off to make sure things were safe to step out into the prison proper. The pool was as she had first seen it, gently frothing, lightly steaming, the candles all around, offering a golden haven in the midst of hard rock and hopelessness and strife.
Then she focused on Jack. He was dressed in fresh prison togs, his hair rebraided, his face drawn, likely because of the feeding and what it had cost him to be so generous with his vein. As she worried about him, she wished she could reciprocate. She wished they had more time. She wished . . .
“I know,” he murmured.
Nyx smiled even though her eyes were filling with tears. “How are you so sure what I’m thinking about?”
“I can guess.” He took her hand and put her palm on the center of his chest. “Because I feel the same.”
She reached up and stroked his face. “I wish . . . well, a lot of things. But I want you to know, no matter how much it hurts, that I’m not sorry I met you. I’ll never be sorry.”
“I will get you out of here. I promise. So you can go back to your true home.”
It was a nice thing for him to say, except he really couldn’t guarantee the outcome, could he. Yet she let his vow stand because she could feel the resolve he was forcing into the words: He was willing, with all the strength in his body and all the power of his intentions, for her to find freedom safely.
In a strange way, it was a declaration of love, wasn’t it.
“Listen,” he said urgently, “if anything happens to me, I want you to keep going. You need to save yourself. No matter how much you may want to stop and help, you must keep going. Promise me?”
“I can’t do that—”
“No,” he cut her off, and squeezed her hand. “You have to swear this to me, or I’ll be distracted, and neither of us can afford that. You have to keep going. No matter what, you don’t stop. Swear to it here and now, on your honor.”
Nyx closed her eyes. “Okay.”
“On your honor.”
“Fine. I promise. Can we be done with this?”
As she stared at her hand on his sternum, the relief that rolled out of him was palpable, and that meant the lie she’d spoken was worth it.
“You know what to do, right?” he asked as he brushed the wisps around her face back.
“I know the plan.” They’d run it through a couple of times after everyone had campfire’d their stories. “I’m ready.”
“And you know you can trust the others.”
“I do.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
When he took her hand from his chest, she lifted her mouth for his kiss at the same moment he bent down to give her one. It was but a second of contact, however, because that was all they had, and as they parted, the candles around the pool went out one by one, willed by him.
The gathering darkness seemed a bad portent.
As they headed off together, she glanced over her shoulder at the single candle that remained alit—and felt cheated by fate. Jack was the kind of male she would have liked to go through an entire life with. Instead, all she’d had him for was this life-defining event of finding out Janelle’s fate.
No offense to destiny, she’d have taken quantity over quality when it came to him. But when had providence ever cared about the opinions of the lives it ruined?
Getting out of the hidden passageway was a total blur. The next thing she knew, she was in the main tunnel and falling in with a stream of prisoners funneling toward the Hive. Mayhem was in front of her and Lucan was behind. Their cell blocks had been called in for the double shift, so the plan was for her to enter the work area with them—and they were banking on there being overruns at check-in. She was going to have to take advantage of one to slip through without being noticed.
Jack walked side by side with her for about two hundred yards, and then she felt his hand on her own. When he squeezed, she wanted to turn to him. She wanted to throw her arms around him. She wanted to . . . not lose him.
All she could do was nod subtly.
And then he was gone, paring off and disappearing down an offshoot.
Nyx’s body started to shake and her feet faltered, but she kept going. Jack was never on work rotation, so he couldn’t proceed into the restricted area with the others and not attract attention. So he was going to have to go through the Command’s compound and meet everyone on the far side where the transport trucks were.
Wherever the hell that was.
Just keep going, she told herself. Keep going and you’ll see him one last time.
To stay focused, she mentally ran through the plan, and realized she’d forgotten a part of it. She had to make sure she fell in with the prisoners who were assigned to transportation. That was her one job. If she fucked that up, and ended up in the production line, she was going to go to the wrong place—
When Kane appeared from out of nowhere, and fell in step beside her, she calmed a little. It didn’t last.
“Change in plan,” he whispered. “Follow me on my cue.”
“What?” she hissed. “What are you talking about?”
“Shh. Follow me.”
Glancing over her shoulder, she frowned. Lucan was gone. And when she looked ahead again, Mayhem had likewise disappeared. Warning bells started to ring.
“What about Jack?”
“Follow me.”
His eyes were straight ahead, so she couldn’t read them. And that face that she’d thought radiated trust? Now, she wasn’t so sure.
“Where’s Jack?” she whispered as she glanced around at the other prisoners. None of them were paying any attention to anyone else.
“This is the way we have to go to get to him.”
Under the tunic, Nyx put her hand on her gun. “Okay.”
Shit. Shit, shit . . .
They continued on another fifty yards, her nose picking up on the pungent scent of the Hive. Just before they came to its entrance, Kane tugged on the sleeve of her tunic.
As she broke off from the shuffling flow of gray figures to follow the male, all she could think was . . . this was not part of the plan.
As Jack entered the side corridor that would take him to the Command’s restricted area, he downshifted from a walk to a wander. With the entire facility on lockdown, certain routes would be cut off, so he was having to take a roundabout way to get to where he would rejoin Nyx and the others. As long as he entered the work area from the Command’s entrance, no one would stop him.
He just couldn’t afford to cross paths with the Command.
It was absolutely vital that he made sure Nyx got out free and clear before he was called into service again. If the Command got a hold on him? He would lose hours.
As well as his final goodbye with his female.
Disturbed by what was ahead, he took two more lefts, and as he rounded the last of the turns, he thought of Nyx entering the prison on her own and being smart enough to track her route inside by going in one direction only.
This was what was on his mind as he came up to an archway marked with white slashes.
As he stepped under the curve in the rock, he took another left and penetrated the Command�
�s area through a steel door. On the far side, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his prison pants, as was his usual stance—but mimicking what was normal for him, playing casual, was not the purpose. He wanted his palm on the butt of the gun he’d taken from Kane. It was one of the guards’, which the aristocrat had lifted when he’d bound them and stripped the males of their weapons. Jack was glad his friend was so damned thorough.
Making another corner, he slowed as he came up to the furnished cell. His heart began to pound as he stopped and looked through the steel mesh.
Empty. But it made sense given the lockdown. In fact, he was willing to bet that when he and Nyx had first come by here, the Command had already known about the infiltration, about the dead guard, about the problem, and had taken steps to control the risk—which was why the cell had been empty before.
The Command did not take chances with certain things.
And on that note, he started walking again, but he didn’t get far before his instincts prickled and he caught a pair of scents coming toward him. Moments later, two guards marched into his path. On their approach, he made like he was ignoring them, keeping his eyes softly focused on the air that was immediately before him, relying on his peripheral vision to inform him about their affect, their weaponry, their gaits.
They were hurrying, but their weapons were holstered. And though their heads turned to him, they promptly looked away.
“Evening, gentlemales,” he drawled as he passed them.
Which was exactly what he would have done and said had he not been in the process of smuggling out the very female that they, and everyone else on their shift, were looking for.
Their lack of response was reassuring. He wanted everything to be uneventful.
As he came up to the bifurcation in the corridor, the one where if you took a right, you went to the Wall, he remembered Nyx putting her fingertips on her sister’s name—and thought that he would have saved her female if he could have. Turning away from where they had gone, he stuck with the finished part of the tunnel, with the flooring and the sealed walls and the air that was artificially heated. The entry to the guards’ bunk was closed, and the lack of chatter on the far side of the double steel doors suggested that all, or almost all, of those males had been called into service.
Continuing on, he ran through the plan again, rehearsing the stages, and by the time he approached the entry to the work area, he was ready to—
“Looking for me?”
At the sound of the low, menacing voice, Jack stopped—and hoped that his mind had played a trick on him. The scent of sandalwood denied this possibility, however.
“You missed the turn to my quarters.” Footfalls approached, and when he did not look over his shoulder at them, the tone got sharper. “Aren’t you going to turn around?”
The back of his neck tightened, and his upper lip twitched as his fangs descended. In his pocket, his hand tightened on the butt of the gun as he ran through calculations of distance, sound, and response. If he shot the Command here in the hall, if he killed the sadistic fucker right outside the guard bunks? The noise was going to attract too much attention, and he was just guessing there were none in there—
As if on cue, a pair of guards came in from the work area. The instant they saw him and the Command, they stopped short.
When the one on the right nodded and resumed walking, it was clear that the Command had excused them both, and they passed without looking at him.
It wasn’t until their footfalls faded that he faced off at the black-draped figure—and as he did, he cleared his mind of all thoughts except for how much he detested what was before him.
The chuckle that came out from under the hood was like the hiss of a snake. “I love how you hate me.” The draped arm rose and pointed to a locked steel door. “My quarters are here, as you very well know. We’re going there now. I want what only you can provide me.”
Jack glanced over his shoulder, in the direction he needed to go.
One minute earlier and he would have avoided this intersection. Thirty seconds might also have done it.
“Do I need to call for help,” came a low snarl.
Tightening his hold on the gun, he prayed that Nyx did what she had promised to do. He prayed that she would save herself.
Because it was quite possible he’d arrived at the end of his own road.
This way,” Kane said under his breath.
Nyx gritted her teeth and tried to orientate herself. They were hurrying now, moving fast side by side, as he took her deeper into a section of the prison that she didn’t recognize. The fact that the tunnel was getting smaller and smaller, and the scents of anyone else, prisoner or guard, were getting dimmer and dimmer, made her realize how far off track they were.
How far she was from Jack—
Kane stopped without warning. And as she shot by him, underneath the loose tunic, she brought up the muzzle of her gun.
Wheeling around, she pointed the weapon at him. “Where are you taking me.”
One of the bald light bulbs happened to be directly over him, so it was difficult to read his face. Shadows were created beneath his brows so that his eyes were hidden, and those black robes did not help him look less menacing.
“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 granmahm
en, 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.
