The Jackal

by J. R. Ward

  “Aren’t you going for a hike?” Posie asked.

  Nyx let that pack fall to the floor, and then she bent down and unzipped it. Taking out one of her waters, she took a deep drink.

  “Posie, listen to me. Accidents happen. You never meant to—”

  Their grandfather entered the kitchen through the back door, unexpected and quiet as a ghost in the house. He didn’t look at either of them as he passed by with a nod and went down into the basement. The fact that he left the door open behind him was weird, and his footsteps grew softer as he descended the stairs he had built with his own hands. Maybe he needed something from down there? All of his tools and wood and boat-making supplies were out in the barn, but there were plans for canoes and fisher skiffs. And other schematics, too.

  The male could make almost anything out of wood.

  When no sounds drifted up and he didn’t return, Nyx looked at Posie. Refocused on the open door.

  “What’s he doing down there,” she muttered as she put her water bottle on the table.

  She approached the cellar stairs and listened. Then she put a foot on the top step.

  From down below, her grandfather said softly, “Tell your sister to wait up there.”

  Nyx tightened her hand on the door knob. “Posie, you go sit with Peter. We’ll be back up in a sec.”

  “Okay. You’ll come say goodbye before you leave?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nyx waited until that yellow dress flowed out of sight. Then she stepped down and shut the door behind herself. At the bottom of the stairs, she frowned as she looked around at the washer and dryer. The closed entrance to the underground rooms and the escape tunnel. The orderly shelves of paint cans, hardware, and supplies.

  “Where are you—”

  “Over here.”

  Nyx followed the sound of the voice around the base of the stairs and found her grandfather standing in front of a narrow passage in the concrete walling that she’d never seen before. And as she approached, he ducked down and shuffled out of sight. Bending low, she proceeded along a cramped tunnel in the pitch darkness. Some distance in, there was the sound of a heavy lock being released, and then light flared from a single source.

  “What is this…”

  Nyx lost her voice as she entered a metal-walled space that was ten feet square with an eight-foot ceiling. Mounted on brackets from floor to ceiling was an arsenal of weapons, ammunition, and tactical gear.

  As she grappled with shock, her grandfather went over and picked up an empty duffel bag. Putting it on a low table, he began picking off guns and clips of bullets from the display. A length of chain. A knife. A spike that looked like something out of a Dracula movie.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I cannot change your nature, either,” he said with quiet resignation. “So I send you off prepared. I know you’ve trained yourself how to shoot. I know you’ve trained yourself how to fight. You will take this and go. I will see to Posie.”

  With that, he zipped up the bag, turned to her, and held the collection of weapons out.

  “How have I lived here my whole life and not known about this?” When her grandfather did not reply, she shook her head. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “You know enough from my having kept your sister and you safe all these years.”

  “Against what threats?”

  “No part of this world—or any other—is safe. You and I know this. We are similar in this regard, though I have tried over the years to ignore the parity. I would rather you enjoy the life Posie lives.”

  “That will never be me.”

  “And yet you go after Janelle because your heart refuses to let it rest.” Her grandfather jogged the duffel. “You will need what is in here if you have any hope of returning. I will watch over Posie.”

  Abruptly, Nyx stumbled forward toward a dagger with a vicious… black blade. “Is this what I think it is?” She sent a glare over her shoulder. “Where did you get that.”

  Her grandfather stared back at her, the bag of weapons he had chosen for her hanging in the air between them.

  There was a long period of silence. And then Nyx took a step forward and accepted the arsenal.

  “You have forty-eight hours,” he said.

  “And then what? You’re coming in after me?” When there was no reply, she wanted to curse. Except… “Wait a minute. You know where the prison entrance is, don’t you.” When he said nothing, she raised her voice. “You know where Janelle is. Don’t you.”

  “You have forty-eight hours.”

  “How you can let her suffer? For fifty years.” She looked at the weapons. “Goddamn you, you know where Janelle is, and you’ve done nothing to help her get out even though she’s innocent—”

  “You believe what you must.”

  “What I must? She didn’t kill that male!”

  “Yes, she did. And I was the one who turned her in.”

  Nyx stopped breathing. Leaned forward. Put her head to the side like her hearing wasn’t working. “What did you just say.”

  “I turned your sister in for the murder.”

  Nyx started to shake her head, but it made her dizzy. “Why would you do that? How could you do that? How could you send her into that terrible place? I’ve heard the rumors—I know you have, too. She’s a female!”

  Her grandfather’s eyes stared back at her with that calm of his, and in response, a fury she had never known raced through her veins.

  Jabbing a forefinger at the old male, she spoke in a low, grim voice. “When I get back with her, I’m taking Posie, and we’re all getting away from you and this house. Blood does not make people family, and I disavow you from this moment forward.”

  Nyx wheeled around for the tunnel.

  Just before she ducked down into the low overhang, her grandfather repeated, “You have forty-eight hours.”

  Glaring over her shoulder, Nyx wished she could leave the weapons behind, but now she was even more determined to come back in one piece.

  “Or what,” she said bitterly. “You’re going to turn me in, too?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nyx re-formed about five miles away from the farmhouse and fifty yards off the shoulder of the highway. For a moment, she just stood where she came to in the low-brush, flat terrain of the valley. Her head was a damn mess, and she got lost in making up further exchanges with her grandfather, dubbing in his side of things and moving her lips as she ran through her comebacks. She wished her parting shot had been more along the lines of her being absolutely nothing like him.

  How could he betray his own granddaughter like that?

  How could he sleep every day knowing that not only was Janelle in that horrible prison, but that he had put her there for a crime she didn’t commit? It was unfathomable. Fifty years Janelle had been gone. Fifty years she had been alone in a terrifying, dangerous place with no one to help her, no one to care for her if she went hungry, got sick, was injured—and only by a stroke of luck, a random confluence of chance and highway circumstance, had Nyx finally learned how to get to their missing family member.

  Now she knew why her grandfather had tried to talk her out of going.

  And thank God she had forgotten that sleeve of bagels at the grocery. If she hadn’t had to double back to the bakery department when she and Posie had been checking out, they would have missed that pretrans crossing the road when he did.

  “Focus,” she said out loud. “You need to focus.”

  The truth about what her grandfather had done was ugly, and greater scrutiny wasn’t going to change the pockmarked face of it. Also, the countdown to daylight was on.

  Shifting her pack into place on her shoulders, she noted how much heavier it was now that she’d added the pair of guns, the bullets, and the knife he’d given her. She’d left the chain and the spike behind. And that duffel of her grandfather’s.

  She was looking forward to giving his weapons back to him. And leaving that house with both her
sisters. Christ, what a traitor they’d been living with.

  Off in the distance, something howled at the moon, and she told herself it was a farm dog. Her adrenaline gland, on the other hand, ascribed the sound to something far more deadly. The good news was that she had three-sixty visibility from where she was standing between the two big hills.

  On that note, she measured the way into town. The ribbon of pavement undulated over low rises and soft falls, the highway visible for quite some distance in both directions thanks to the hard winters that stunted the growth of anything green. A car—no, it was a truck, a boxy, nondescript delivery truck—passed her by, its headlights trained on the road ahead. As it approached the exact place where Posie had struck that pretrans, Nyx turned away and started walking in the opposite direction.

  In her head, she replayed the dying pretrans’s babbling.

  Back when he’d still been talking, he’d spoken of God, over and over again.

  At first, it had made no sense. Vampires had a different spiritual tradition from humans. If the pretrans had been of the other species? Fine. Go on about a heavenly Father and a savior named Jesus and the steeple and cross stuff when you knew you were on the verge of death. But the fixation made no sense given his biology.

  Except then Nyx had realized it wasn’t about religion or eternal salvation. It was where he had come from.

  Where he had escaped from.

  As Nyx strode over the ground cover, weaving left or right whenever there was something too large and fluffy to easily step over, she looped her thumbs into the straps of her pack. Back when she and Posie had had horses, like fifteen or twenty years ago, she’d ridden all over this valley, sometimes with her sister, sometimes on her own. Posie had enjoyed the scenery. Nyx had been looking for anything out of place, anything that didn’t make sense.

  Specifically, an entrance to the underground prison that everyone knew was out here, somewhere in the valley.

  Going back to those midnight rides, she let her memories inform her choices in direction, the decaying structures and unkempt tree lines of farms no longer used like stars in a map of the constellations. The farther she went, the more she began to worry she’d gotten it all wrong. Maybe what she was in search of was more to the west? Or—

  She stopped as she came around a short-stop rise. “There you are.”

  The abandoned church was partially collapsed now, its spire and roof caved in, its stained glass windows missing, the stone steps up to its faded red door chipped and discolored. On the approach, she took note of the paint that had peeled off its whitewashed clapboard exterior, and she compared the state of its decay to what she had last seen from horseback, maybe a decade ago?

  Time had not been kind.

  This seat of God, built, sustained, and ultimately abandoned by humans, had once serviced the spiritual needs of the farmers who had tilled the valley’s good earth. That era was over now, and the nearest house of worship that was functioning was a hundred miles away in the suburbs of Rochester. Then again, the nearest town of any note was thirty miles away. Thus the infrequency of grocery trips.

  This had to be what the pretrans had been talking about in his delirium. God on earth. For humans.

  And maybe used for something else.

  When she came up to the main entrance, she tried the double doors. Locked. Not a problem. Willing them open with her mind, she—

  Got nowhere with the dead bolt.

  She tried again, sending a command for the steel components to shift their positions. Nothing.

  Bending down, she felt a surge of triumph. “Copper.”

  Looking up to where the pointed spire should have been, she felt a tingling at her nape and across her shoulders. Humans wouldn’t use a copper lock. Vampires would, though. If they wanted to keep members of the species out of a place.

  Mental manipulation didn’t work on the stuff that made pennies.

  She had to get inside, but dematerializing into a space where you didn’t know the layout or the debris field was too dangerous. Good job the windows were Swiss cheese’d. Heading around, she picked one of the high-set empty frames, jumped up, and grabbed onto the lip.

  With a grunt, she pulled herself high and propped the front of her pelvis on the sill like it was a pair of uneven bars in the Olympics. Tilting forward, she checked out the interior. Yup. Nothing but a salad of broken beams, busted pews, and cracked slate tiles for croutons. Swinging her legs up and over, she hung for a moment and then dropped down from the sash, her hiking boots making a thunderous noise that made her wince—

  Doves fluttered into flight from hidey-holes in the tangle, and ducking down, she covered her head as wisps of feathers floated down in the moonlight. When the coast was clear, she straightened and looked around. The collapse of the roof had created an impassable terrain in the congregational area.

  “Shit,” she said to herself.

  Assuming “Peter” had emerged from some kind of secret whatever-the-hell, he couldn’t possibly have come through the mess. The splintered lumber and raw nails were an obstacle course and a half. Plus, if someone, anyone, had tried to get out of it or come up from under it, their path would show. There would be a disruption in the pattern of snapped boards and broken beams, and some blood, too, thanks to all the shards and sharpies—and pretrans couldn’t dematerialize. The exit would have had to be done on foot because he was too short to jump up to the empty window jambs.

  Oh, and then there was that copper lock.

  No, he hadn’t come through here.

  Maybe she was nuts. Maybe… he’d converted to human religion in the prison? Although it was only for vampires so how the hell would that work?

  Before she left, she looked to the altar, which was strewn with red, blue, and gold chips of stained glass. Then she glanced to where the steeple had fallen from its great height, the brass cross somehow landing faceup on top of one of the few flat boards that was not tilted or smashed. The dusty gold face of the symbol of faith caught the moonlight, flashing with a warmth that, inexplicably, made her eyes water.

  She wished she had something to believe in.

  Dematerializing out of the window hole she’d come in through, she re-formed back on the scruff around the church and checked the building’s foundation, looking for transom windows into a basement… or a storm door entrance… or a crack large enough for a one-hundred-and-ten-pound pretrans to slide out of.

  “Damn it.”

  This was going nowhere.

  The idea of heading back to the farmhouse with her tail between her legs, because she’d taken the ramblings of a dying boy, conflated them with her emotions around Janelle, and given herself a wild-goose chase, made her feel smaller in her clothes and made the pack with those weapons of her grandfather’s feel heavier.

  Nyx walked around again, looking for prints in the ground cover. Nothing—

  Later, she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint what made her turn her head. It wasn’t a sound or a flash of light or a voice, but something commanded her to look behind herself.

  At first, the congestion of overgrowth seemed like just another vine-draped knot of trees. But the more she stared at it, the more she recognized that there were contours… corners.

  There was an old iron fence under all that ivy, four-cornered by some big maple trees. And inside of it, also covered with weeds… was a graveyard.

  Walking over, she discovered that the gate of cockeyed iron points had been forced open. Someone had come through it recently, leaving the vines freshly broken, the leaves just beginning to wilt. And given the thin wedge? It had been someone who was small.

  Nyx had to push things much wider to fit her grown-up body through, and in the moonlight, the pathway that had been traveled through the graves was visible, but barely so. The ground cover of weeds and grasses had been trampled by feet that had passed through only once. Another week? A good rainstorm? The distance traveled would disappear completely.

  Nyx followed the wind
ing way through the moss-covered markers and imagined Peter, confused and scared, maybe fleeing from somebody, tripping and falling, orientating himself in the moonlight by the stone stanchions and that gate. The fear that kid must have felt? She couldn’t imagine, and had he known where to go? Had he had a safe destination?

  She was pretty sure he had just been running scared.

  Right into a hit-and-killed accident with a Volvo station wagon.

  The trail of disturbance ended at a stone crypt that was choked by vines thick as tree branches. Its marble entry was open a crack, the departure from its interior one that, like the gate, had had to be forced through the braided tentacles of the flora that had claimed the human monument of mourning.

  Gripping the thick stone panel, she had to put her back into it, and she knew, as she groaned against the resistance, that Peter must have been riding pure adrenaline as he had shoved his way out. Terror was a true source of strength, the only saving grace you could really count on when things went tits up.

  She got her flashlight out and clicked the beam on. There was a short set of stairs that led down to a stained marble floor and a sarcophagus set in the center of the space. As she moved the spear of illumination around, something scampered out of the way—

  With a quick jerk, she looked over her shoulder at the graveyard.

  Her eyes double-checked the greenery, the gate she’d forced open, the headstones and the trail the pretrans had forged.

  Nothing moved. No scents, either.

  The pounding of her heart was loud in her ears, and a flush of sweat broke out across her chest. “You’re fine,” she whispered.

  Turning back to the crypt, she rechecked the interior and then sideways’d in past the heavy panel. Descending three stone steps, she got a load of the dust. The cobwebs. And especially the footprints across the floor.

  Small footprints, with a high arch and tiny toes.

  She thought of newborn young and the way parents checked the fingers. Checked the toes.

  Closing her eyes, she wondered how Peter had been born in the prison camp. What that must have been like—