The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood - Prison Camp 1)

She’d better go now so she could help with the inevitable hospitality that would be offered, Nyx thought as she ghosted out . . .

. . . and yet as she traveled in a scatter of molecules, she did not head home.

She rerouted.

When she resumed her corporeal form, it was in front of the abandoned church, the place she had gone at the start of everything, the clue that the pretrans—now known as Peter—had given her.

Moonlight fell over the chipped clapboards and penetrated through the arched window cutouts where those stained glass windows had once been.

Taking out a burner phone, she texted her sister just so no one worried when she didn’t show up immediately. She didn’t give her location, though.

She needed a minute.

As that Brother with the blue eyes went back to meet what had to be his nephew for the first time, maybe she should have been there. But Posie had taken care of the young, and it was clear a strong bond had formed between the pair of them. She would handle things.

Nyx silenced her phone and started walking. She stopped halfway down the flank of the church and remembered dematerializing up to the sill to peer down into the tangled roof collapse.

Continuing on, she went to the cemetery and pulled open the gate.

In and among the headstones, there was a scorch mark in the earth a good seven feet long and four feet wide, all the ground cover burned away, the soil black as night, the graves around it charred on their edges. She’d been right about one thing, then. The guard had gone up in smoke when the sun had come out.

The crypt’s door was solidly shut, and she had a random thought that that stone panel had gotten more action in the last few days than the previous couple of decades: Peter. Herself. The guard. And there must have been other guards from the prison who had come out to check on things. That was what had led to the shutdown.

She wasn’t sure why she had to go in. It wasn’t like there had been anything inside the crypt except the sarcophagus. But for her peace of mind—assuming she ever found any of that ever again—she had to retrace her steps tonight.

That was the only way she was going to make it through the day, stuck indoors with nothing but her incessant thoughts, her dragging sadness, and this irrational anger that—

At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at.

As she pulled the heavy door open, and the hinges creaked, and the interior was revealed . . . there appeared to be a pile of clothes in the far corner down on the dusty marble floor.

Clothes that were the color of shadows.

And that was when she caught the scent.

“Jack!” she screamed as she rushed in.

From out of his delirium, Jack heard his name called.

His brain told him this was significant. This was important. This . . . meant something.

But he didn’t have enough energy to lift his head. Move his facedown body. Shift even an arm or a foot. He’d been bleeding for quite a while now, ever since—

“Jack, oh, God, Jack . . .”

Gentle hands rolled him over on his side, and that was when his eyes provided him with a vision he had been praying for. The visage above him was that of an angel, an inexplicable angel. His female. His beloved female.

Nyx was talking to him, her mouth moving, her eyes wide and scared. And though he wanted to reassure her, he couldn’t seem to speak.

It was all right, though. Even if this last moment was all he had?

His prayers had been answered. All he had wanted, as he had lain here dying, was to see his female one last time. And here she was—

Nyx was putting something to her ear. A device of some sort, thin and glowing. And she was talking into it, urgently.

Then she put whatever it was away in a pocket, pulled back her sleeve, and bared her fangs. For a moment, he was confused—and then he realized . . .

No, he thought. She didn’t have to. It was enough that she was here, although he would have spared her witnessing his last moments if he could have—

Abruptly, the scent of her blood reached his nose, and it stirred something deep within him, a heat, a drive . . . something vital.

She put the puncture wounds she had bitten into her own flesh to his mouth, and he meant to say no. He intended to turn her generosity away . . . because the last thing he wanted was her trying to save him, failing, and having to live with some misplaced sense of blame.

But the instant her blood dropped onto his lips, his survival instinct took over.