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“What did she ask you to do?”
“Take her to the Wall.”
There was a pause, and he imagined the frown on the Command’s face. “Why?”
“She was looking for her dead. I don’t know.”
“So she’s not a prisoner.”
“Like I said, she had a gun, so I wasn’t inclined to press for details. I did what she demanded. She left me unharmed. That’s all I know.”
One of the black sleeves lifted toward him, like the Grim Reaper was pointing. “I’ll know if you’re lying. Pain has a way of bringing out the truth, especially from females.”
“Do with her what you will. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Expect to be called on later.”
“Don’t rush on my account.”
The Command shifted under those robes, that body changing positions. “Don’t play hard to get. It doesn’t suit you.”
The Jackal shook his head grimly. “On the contrary, it’s the only reason you want me.”
“Oh, no.” The laugh under the hood was low and sexual. “You are so very wrong about that.”
As the Command turned away, the Jackal kept his eyes on the book and his body as still as he could.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, Nyx was worse than dead.
As Nyx stared at the lineup of armed guards in front of her, she felt herself recede from reality. Considering the number of them, the mental lapse seemed like a perfectly reasonable response, even though it was totally unhelpful. Then again, there was no thinking her way out of this. No talking her way out. No shooting her way out, even with the two guns.
“Drop your weapons,” one of the uniformed males ordered. “Or we’re going to kill you here and now.”
She was tempted to tell them she accepted what was behind door number two, even if it was the proverbial “Goodnight, Irene.” She didn’t want to die, but she knew that falling into their hands was going to be worse than taking her last breath here in this tunnel.
“Drop your weapons!” he repeated.
Too many guards. Too many weapons on them that they had been trained to use—
He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
From out of nowhere, she heard her defense teacher’s voice in her head, variations on the phrase repeating over and over again: If you cannot win, do not fight. Evade.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
Taking a deep breath, Nyx slowly lowered both her weapons. Then she closed her eyes and pictured the pool, with its waterfall and its clean scent and the candles down on the floor. She imagined herself sitting beside it, on the sofa rock, warm and safe.
Not enough. She wasn’t calm enough—
“Drop your weapons on three! One, two—”
From out of nowhere, Jack appeared in the image, and he was as he had been the night before, watching her, his astonishingly blue eyes on her—
Nyx dematerialized out from under the guards.
One second she was before them, with their guns in her face. The next she was just a scatter of molecules, traveling past them through the air, invisible.
Untouchable.
Back when this had all started, when she’d come to that old, decaying church, she couldn’t have dematerialized inside of it from where she’d been on the ground because she didn’t know the interior. Now, at least she knew the tunnel system to some degree, although she prayed that more steel barriers hadn’t dropped down from the ceiling. If they had? She was going to slam into all that steel and die a pancake.
Willing herself into a fast-track backtrack, she re-formed when she was about twenty yards from where she believed the entrance to the hidden pool’s corridor was. Her heart was pounding and her brain scattered, and she had a thought that her being able to dematerialize had been a Hail Mary and a half. She couldn’t do it again. The whole calm-and-concentrating thing was now out the window.
Left side. Hadn’t the release been on the left side?
She put one of her guns away, and patted her palm down the carved rock. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, and wished she’d paid more attention to what the damn thing had looked like—
Nyx froze and glanced over her shoulder. Shouting.
Prisoners? Or guards? Probably guards looking for her. Her heart went haywire in her chest, and she frantically patted the rock—
Without warning, there was a click and part of the walling slid back soundlessly.
“Thank God,” she said as she jumped into the darkness.
But then it was a case of panicked waiting. Three seconds, right? Jack had said it took three seconds until the panel closed automatically.
More shouting. Rushing footfalls that were heavy getting nearer.
“Close . . . close . . .” She reached out and tried to pull the barrier into place. “Goddamn it!”
She felt like she was in a horror film, standing in an elevator, praying for the doors to shut before the monster skidded around the corner on clawed feet with jaws gnashing. But the urgency wasn’t just her own survival. As pissed off as she had been at Jack, she didn’t want to be the one who blew the cover on his secret place—
