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The female broke off from him and walked around. As he gave her the space to come to the inevitable, he was acutely aware of what was going on outside the secret passageway. A squad had gone down to where she had gained entrance. And the guard whose presence had not been accounted for, who had not been where he should have been, was the one she had killed.
“Where did you put the body?” he asked. When she stopped short and glanced over with feigned regard, he rolled his eyes. “Stop the acting. After you killed him, where did you leave him?”
Silence. And then she started to pace again.
As he thought about his own prime directive, he lost interest in the art of persuasion. She was stubborn and she was arrogant, and life had corrections for that. Especially here, underground.
He had too much to lose himself to spare her the evolution.
The Jackal went back over to the sliding panel. Listening carefully, which was easy because the female sure as hell wasn’t saying anything, he heard nothing out in the tunnel. Triggering the panel to retract, he was aware of a tightness in his chest as he off-shouldered her pack and tossed it back across to her. Her gun and flashlight followed, and she caught each with a suspicious surprise.
“Good luck,” he said as he turned away. “The panel will close in three seconds on its own. Whether you’re in or out is up to you—and where you go next is the same. Good luck unto your quest.”
Stepping out into the tunnel, he walked off in the direction of the Hive. He had to hurry to catch up to where he should have been on his route G, although with the disruption the female had caused, there was a chance that all guards would be out of sync for the rest of the night.
And it had to be night, or as a vampire, she wouldn’t have been out and about in the above. It was probably earlier rather than later in the evening as well, assuming she’d wanted to provide herself with the maximum amount of travel time. No doubt she was stupid enough to think she could free whoever she had come to liberate before dawn’s inevitable arrival.
As he made note of the time frame reference, and integrated it into his knowledge of the guard shifts, he didn’t like the sense of anticipation as he waited for her to call him back.
When she didn’t, he wasn’t surprised, although the grim pall that darkened his emotions was a surprise. Why should he care about her? If prison had taught him anything, it was that one had to take care of oneself.
It was the only way to survive.
Rhage’s eyes returned unto their service in the midst of the tending to his wounds. It was early for his vision to come back upon him, but the combination of an unfamiliar environment and the fact that someone was cutting into him seemed to cultivate an urgency with regard to that particular of his senses.
’Twas all rather blurry, but he could see enough to ascertain the race’s healer, Havers, dressed in a tuxedo and bending over with a scalpel. Further, Rhage could make out his two brothers on either side of the bed he had been laid upon, both in ballroom togs. And there, across the opulent bedroom by a door, was Jabon. The master of the estate was likewise in formal evening attire, and his expression was one of great satisfaction, as if the fact that there were multiple members of the Black Dagger Brotherhood under his roof was a reward brought unto him by providence’s good nature.
Somewhere on a level down below, stringed instruments played on, and Rhage imagined members of the glymera, gentlemales and gentle females, linked by delicate touch, the fine figures moving smoothly through carefully dictated dance positions on the black-and-white marble floor of a ballroom. Colorful gowns would twirl and toss their skirting, and the diamonds and colored stones upon slender throats and wrists would flash and sparkle. No one would be smiling, and there would be a hierarchy within the hierarchy about when, and in what fashion, and by whom/to whom, eye contact could be made.
The rules of the glymera were legion and dispositive, and the consequences of violating them were dire and potentially generational in nature. More than their money and their land, their possessions and their position in the race, the aristocracy’s strictures on conduct were their most precious resource. Whether it was the purity of an unmated female or the seating chart of a dining table or the manner in which an individual responded to an invitation, they had long ago created a battlefield of their own, land mines of propriety due to combust at any moment.
