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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?”
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—
