The Jackal

by J. R. Ward

  The Command leaned down even farther. “You did this to yourself. You chose this—”

  Jack moaned a denial.

  “You bastard. You fucking bastard!” they barked.

  More gunshots rang out and he didn’t flinch—and not just because he’d been drugged. He stared right at the hood, at the mesh that covered the face. The irony in all this was that the Command would suffer more than he did. This flight of their anger and retaliation was temporary; his death was permanent. There would be epic regrets, and if there was indeed a Fade? For all the Command had done, they were going to Dhunhd. No Fade for them. Meanwhile, he would wait for Nyx. For an eternity, he would wait for his female, his fighting angel who had showed him that however trapped he was, his soul remained free.

  To love who he did.

  Nyx.

  —Pop!Pop!Pop!—

  The ricocheting bullets stopped, the sharp ringing ended, the echoing explosions drifted into silence.

  Click, click, click—

  The Command was pulling the trigger over and over again, the loose folds and sleeves of the robe swinging out as from under the hood, rasping breath beat like a drum.

  Jack just stared upward, unblinking, unflinching… unbowed, though he was flat on his back and incapable of moving. Surely he was bleeding out and that explained why his immobile body felt nothing of all his wounds and he was unaware of his suffocation.

  “I hate you,” the Command growled. “I fucking hate you.”

  The Command reached up and ripped the hood off.

  Red hair tumbled loose, hanging into his face, into his eyes, the female’s calculating features and flashing, aggressive stare the source of his suffering these many years.

  He hated when she took the hood off. It was easier for him to think of her as sexless as long as it stayed on. But now, seeing that hair, seeing that face, he was reminded that she was the opposite sex, and that she demanded to mate with him whenever she fucking wanted.

  He hated that she would be the last thing he saw. But reveled in what would happen as soon as she realized that she had broken her toy, and it was never to be functional again.

  “I want to kill you,” the Command bit out, long fangs flashing.

  And that was when Jack realized… for all the bullets that had been discharged, she had not hit him. She’d shot around him, into the floor.

  There was no scent of his blood in the air.

  Meanwhile, the Command continued to breathe heavily—until she seemed to calm herself. Straightening, she looked at the gun in her hands, and then those eyes returned to his own, suspicion narrowing them.

  “Where did you get this?” The Command put the weapon in his face, so close that every breath he took was full of gunpowder residue. “Where did you fucking get this?”

  He couldn’t have answered even if he’d wanted to. Which he did not. He enjoyed her loss of control and what it did to her. He wanted her to suffer. After all these years, he wanted her to have a taste of what he had endured.

  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.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  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.

  She picked the one on the left and aimed. Just before she pulled the trigger, she had a passing image of herself at the farm, out by the lower paddock, picking soup cans and water jugs off the fence line at fifty yards.

  This was a whole different ball game.

  When she pulled the trigger, she didn’t wait to see if she had hit the target of that calf. She immediately discharged the weapon at the other guard’s lower leg. Then it was back to the first—but she’d always had good aim, and she’d nailed her mark: The first guard was hopping on one foot, and as he slumped against the truck’s hood, she aimed again—and popped him in the other knee. As he howled and went to ground, she picked off the one who was still standing by hitting the meat of his thigh, the spray of blood a graceful sprinkle that caught the headlights in a flush of red.

  As both of them writhed and hollered for help into the communicators on their shoulders, she swallowed through a dry throat. Closing her eyes, she knew what should come next.

  Her… or them. If she let them live, they were injured and armed. A bad combination—and she and Kane had to get out of wherever they were.

  “Do it,” she said under her breath.

  Bullet to the brain. Or the chest.

  Bullet to the…

  … brain. Or to the chest—

  “Shit,” she hissed as she sagged and let her forearms relax.

  Nyx just couldn’t murder two males in what felt like cold blood. It was one thing if she had a gun in her face, a direct threat to her life. But this? She wasn’t a killer. She wasn’t like Apex.

  She wrenched around. “Where do we go from here?”

  Kane looked to the guards, who were both rocking on their backs and alternating between holding one of their legs and then the other.

  “Come on,” he said.

  When he took her hand, she scurried out from under the truck bed with him, and then they tore off as fast as they could go—

  Right into a landslide.

  Some twenty feet of walling had collapsed, and she didn’t have time to wonder about the whys or the wherefores. Kane led the way up the mound of debris, and then they were on the other side, and tooling down the properly paved road that was lit from the ceiling. But they didn’t go far.

  Two or three hundred yards away, a bright light was kindling, and she could hear a big engine growling as something approached. It had to be another semi.

  “In here,” Kane said as he pulled on her arm.

  A fissure in the rock wall presented itself at just the right time. As the next semitrailer truck rounded a corner and its headlights pierced the road right where she and Kane had stood, they jumped out of sight and squeezed into a horizontal crack the size of a shallow closet.

  As he’d gone in first, she was on the outside, so she got a good look at the flank of the vehicle. Gray and black, just like the other one, with a cargo trailer that was big enough to fit two stacks of four cars. After it passed by, she caught another whiff of the sickly perfume of a diesel engine.

  When she went to leap out, Kane tugged the sleeve of her tunic.

  “No, wait. Those two guards will have called for—”

  Multi-colored flashing lights now, down from where the second semi had come from—and then the van that streaked by them had “Ambulance” written all over it. Literally. With the red cross and a logo that looked legit on its flanks, it could have passed for an official human one—which was undoubtedly the point.

  “We need to wait,” Kane said. “There’ll be another truck. And that’ll be the one you need to get on. Right on the top of the trailer. Stay flat, stay down.”

  Nyx turned her head toward him and focused her tired eyes. There was enough illumination reflecting in from the road’s light fixtures that she could make out his face. He was bleeding at his hairline and pale beneath a layer of dirt and oil.

  “What… what happened?” She sneezed into the crook of her elbow. “ ’Scuse me. What happened back by the Hive? Why the change?”

  Kane shuffled his arm around in the tight squeeze and then he was offering her a square of cloth. “You’re bleeding.”

  As she stared at the kerchief, he sighed. “I wish it were of better quality. I used to have ones of hand-loomed silk. With my initials.”

  When he put the cloth above one of her eyebrows, she winced. “What happened?”

  “The lockdown.” He shook his head as if he were frustrated. “When I tried to get to the transport area, to do the risk assessment, I could not get anywhere near it. They’d blocked off the entry to where the delivery trucks were—and no one called in for the shift was allowed anywhere near them. The guards themselves were doing the loading. I realized I had to take you another way.”

  “What about Jack?”

  “He’s going to run into the same problem even if he goes through the Command’s area. I don’t think they’re going to let even him in there. I’m so sorry.”

  Nyx didn’t go there. Couldn’t go there. She shied away from the implications of her leaving right now, without saying goodbye to Jack.

  “Shit,” she breathed. “I almost shot you.”

  Kane smiled a little. “That’s the only reason I fought with you. I never would have put upon you a hand if I had not been convinced that if I did not, I would be a dead male where I stood.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “I would have told you it all if I could have. There was no time to explain. It is I who am sorry.”

  Nyx exhaled. And then started talking fast. “Please. I have to see Jack one last time—”

  “We cannot.” Kane’s face tightened. “I can’t get you back there safely—and more than that, we are exactly where we need to be. I promised the Jackal, on my honor, I would get you out no matter what it took. Even if it meant you could not say goodbye. I never go back on my word.”

  As she closed her eyes, Kane said, “Please know, if I could do so without endangering you, I would. But where we are now is a better position than I could have hoped for. You’re so close, and I gave a male I respect my word. I will not go back upon it.”

  “I just wanted to see him one more time,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  When she looked at Kane again, the sorrow on his face was so deep and heartfelt, she knew he must have been thinking of the love he had lost so cruelly. The love he had been robbed of.

  “If you can’t do it for yourself,” Kane said, “do it for the male who loves you.”

  “I never told him I loved him.” Her voice was so hoarse, it was barely audible. “I never said the words. That’s why I want to go back.”

  “True love doesn’t require a voice. It requires the heart. He knows how you feel.”

  “Will you tell him? That I love him?”

  “On my honor.” Even though there was very little space, Kane managed to incline his upper torso in a shallow bow. “I shall tell him, I swear. For if I could have gotten one last missive unto my love, I would have. I will not fail you. Or him.”

  For a moment, she searched Kane’s face and the sorrow that clouded his eyes.

  Then she hugged him. It was an impulsive gesture not easily accommodated in the tight space, but she couldn’t not reach out. They had both lost the one they loved. Him to death’s cold embrace, her to this prison Jack would not leave.

  “I still don’t know why,” she said as they separated.

  “Know what?”

  Why Jack refuses to leave, she thought.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “The next truck
. When it comes by, you dematerialize onto the top. You’re wearing the color of the paint job, so if there’s a guard monitoring things somewhere, you should be able to pass notice. Stay flat. Keep your head down.”

  “And my eyes down,” she said roughly. “Which is the same thing.”

  “You can do this. I believe in you.”

  “The next truck.” When Kane nodded, she gripped his hand. “You are a male of worth. To help me. To be there for Jack.”

  He squeezed her palm. “I do not know about the male of worth. But I am certain that the love the two of you have for each other is worth just about everything.”

  “He doesn’t love me,” she said.

  “Of course he does. He has bonded.”

  “He’d be coming with me if that were true. Or he’d at least help me understand the why not. So no, he doesn’t love me.”

  Light flared down at the far end, a truck rambling around the turn, the engine roaring as whatever guard was driving stomped on the accelerator.

  “Here it is,” she whispered. “I have to go.”

  All she had to do was picture that pool with the candlelight, the calm place she had found grace in despite being in this harsh and hopeless prison. Except now, Jack could not be part of the vision. She needed to start giving him up right away. It was not going to get any easier.

  Kane reached forward and squeezed her shoulder. “You can do this. If you can face off at a squad of guards, you can dematerialize from here—”

  “If you move, I kill him.”

  Nyx wrenched around. In the dim light, a guard stood behind Kane, having come through the fissure from its other end. The male’s face and body were largely indistinct. The gun that was up to the aristocrat’s head was not—

  “I’ve got her.”

  Nyx whipped her head back toward the view of the road. There was a guard right in front of her, and before she could respond, he clasped a steel handcuff on her wrist and ripped the gun free of her hold.