Sneak Peek at THE JACKAL:
Western New York State, Present Day
The whole “life is a highway”
metaphor was so ubiquitous, so overused, so threadbare and torn-patched, that
as Nyx sat in the passenger side of a ten-year-old station wagon, and stared at
the moonlit asphalt trail cutting through brush and bramble in west-ern New
York State, she wasn’t thinking a damn thing about how sim-ilar the course of
roads and lives could be: You could get sweet-sailing easy declines of
coasting. Bad, bumpy, rough patches that rattled your teeth. Uphill hauls that
you thought would never end. Bored stretches between far-apart exits.
And
then there were the obstacles, the ones that came from out of nowhere and
carried you so far off your planned trip that you ended up in a completely
different place.
Some
of these, both in the analogy and in fact, had four legs and a kid named Bambi.
“Watch
out!” she yelled as she clapped a hand on the steering wheel and took control.
Too
late. Over the screeching of tires, the impact was sickeningly soft, the kind
of thing that happened when steel hit flesh, and her sister’s response was to
cover her eyes and tuck in her knees.
Not
helpful considering Posie was the one with the access to the brake pedal. But
also completely in character.
The
station wagon, being an inanimate object set into motion, had no brain of its
own, but plenty of motivation from the sixty-two miles an hour they’d been
going. As such, the old Volvo went bucking bronco as they left the rural byway,
its stiff, cumbersome body heaving into a series of hill-and-dale dance moves
that had Nyx hitting her head on the padded roof even though she was belted in.
The
headlights strobed what was in front of the car, the beams point-and-shooting
in whatever direction and angle the front grille hap-pened to be thrown in. For
the most part, there was just a leafy morass of bushes, the green, spongy
territory a far better outcome than she would have predicted.
That
all changed.
Like
a creature rising out of the depths of a lake, something brown, thick, and
vertical was teased in the verdant light show, disappearing and reappearing as
the shafts of illumination willy’d-their-nilly around.
Oh,
shit. It was a tree. And not only was the arboreal hard-stop an immovable object,
it was as if a steel crank-chain ran between its thick trunk and the
undercarriage of the station wagon.
If
you’d steered for a collision course, you couldn’t have done a better job.
Inevitable
covered it.
Nyx’s
only thought was for her sister. Posie was braced in the driv-er’s seat, her
arms straight out, fingers splayed, like she was going to try to push the tree
away—
The
impact was like being punched all over the body, and there must have been a
crunch of metal meeting wood, but with the airbags deploy-ing and the ringing
in Nyx’s ears, she couldn’t hear much. Couldn’t breathe well. Couldn’t seem to
see.
Hissing.
Dripping. Burned rubber and something chemical.
Someone
was coughing. Her? She couldn’t be sure.
“Posie?”
“I’m okay, I’m
okay . . .”
Nyx rubbed her stinging eyes and
coughed. Fumbling for the door, she popped the release and shoved hard against
some kind of resistance. “I’m coming around to help you.”
Assuming she could get out of
the damn car.
Putting her shoulder into the
effort, she forced the door through something fluffy and green, and the payback
was that the bush barged in, expanding into the car like a dog that wanted to
sniff around.
She fell out of her seat and
rolled onto the scruff. All-four’ing it for a spell, she managed to get up on
to her feet and steady herself on the roof as she went around to the driver’s
side. Peeling open Posie’s door, she released the seat belt.
“I got you,” she grunted as she
dragged her sister out.
Propping Posie against the car,
she cleared the blond hair back from those soft features. No blood. No glass in
the perfect skin. Nose was still straight as a pin.
“You’re okay,” Nyx announced.
“What about the deer?”
Nyx kept the curses to herself.
They were about ten miles from home, and what mattered was whether the car was
drivable. No offense to Mother Nature and animal-lovers anywhere, but that
four-legged scourge of the interstate was low on her list of priorities.
Stumbling to the front, she
shook her head at the damage. A good two feet of the hood—and, therefore,
engine—was compressed around a trunk that had all the flexibility of an I beam,
and she was hardly an automotive expert, but that had to be incompatible with
vroom-vroom, home safe.
“Shit,” she breathed.
“What about the deer?”
Closing her eyes, she reminded
herself about the birth order. She was the older, responsible one, black-haired
and brusque like their father had been. Posie was the blond, good-hearted
youngest, who had all the warmth and sunny nature that their mahmen had
possessed.
And the middle?
She couldn’t go down the Janelle
rabbit hole right now.
Back over at her open door, Nyx
leaned in and moved the deflated airbag out of the way. Where was her phone?
She’d put it in a cupholder after she’d texted their grandfather as they’d left
Hannaford. Great. Nowhere to be found—
“Thank God.”
Bracing her hand on the seat,
she went down into the wheel well. And got a palm full of bad news.
The screen was cracked and the
unit dark. When she tried to fire the thing up, it was a no go. Straightening,
she looked over the ruined hood. “Posie, where is your—”
“What?” Her sister was focused
on the road that was a good fifty yards away, her stick-straight hair tangled
down her back. “Huh?”
“Your phone. Where is it?”
Posie glanced over her shoulder.
“I left it at home. You had yours, so I just, you know.”
“You need to dematerialize back
to the farmhouse. Tell grandfather to bring the tow truck and-”
“I’m not leaving here until we
take care of that deer.”
“Posie, there are too many
humans around here and—”
“It’s suffering!” Tears
glistened. “And just because it’s an animal doesn’t mean its life doesn’t
matter.”
“Fuck the deer.” Nyx glared
across the steaming mess. “We need to solve this problem now—”
“I’m not leaving until—”
“—because we have two hundred
dollars of groceries melting in the back. We can’t afford to lose a week’s
worth of—”
“—we take care of that poor
animal.”
Nyx swung her eyes away from her
sister, the crash, the crap she had to fix so goddamn Posie could continue to
give her heart out to the world and worry about things other than how to pay
the rent, keep food on the table, and make sure they had such exotic luxuries
as electricity and running water.
When she trusted herself to look
back without hurling a bunch of be-practical f-bombs at her fricking sister,
she saw absolutely no change in Posie’s resolve. And this was the problem. A
sweet nature, yes. That annoying, bleeding-heart, emphatic bullcrap, yes. Iron
will? When it came it down to it, boatloads.
That female was not budging on
the deer thing.
Nyx threw up her hands and
cursed—loudly.
Back in the car. Opening the
glove box. Taking out the nine milli-meter handgun she kept there for
emergencies.
As she came around the rear of
the station wagon, she eyed the re-usable grocery bags. They were crammed up
against the bench seat as a result of the crash, and it was a good news/bad
news situation. Any-thing breakable was done for, but at least the cold items
were clois-tered together, united in a fight against the eighty-degree August
night.
“Oh, thank you, Nyx.” Posie
clasped her hands under her chin like she was doing a devotional. “We’ll help
the—wait, what are you doing with the gun?”
Nyx didn’t stop as she passed
by, so Posie grabbed her arm. “Why do you have the gun?”
“What do you think I’m going to
do to the damn thing? Give it CPR?”
“No! We need to help it—”
Nyx put her face into her
sister’s and spoke in a dead tone. “If it’s suffering, I’m going to put it
down. It’s the right thing to do. That is the way I will help that animal.”
Posie’s hands went to her face,
pressing into cheeks that had gone pale. “It’s my fault. I hit the deer.”
“It was an accident.” Nyx turned
her sister around to face the station wagon. “Stay here and don’t look. I’ll
take care of it.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt the—”
“You’re the last person on the
planet who’d intentionally hurt any-thing. Now stay the hell here.”
The sound of Posie softly crying
escorted Nyx back toward the road. Following the tire gouges in the dirt and
the ruined foliage, she found the deer about fifteen feet away from where
they’d veered off—
Nyx stopped dead in her tracks.
Blinked a couple of times. Considered vomiting.
It wasn’t a deer.
Those were arms. And legs. Thin
ones, granted, and covered with mud-colored clothes that were in rags. But
nothing about what had been struck was animal in nature. Worse? The scent of
the blood that had been spilled was not human.
It was a vampire.
They’d hit one of their own.
Nyx ran over to the body, put
the gun away, and knelt down. “Are you okay?”
Dumbass question. But the sound
of her voice roused the injured, a horrific and horrified face turning up to
her.
It was a male. A pretrans male.
And oh, God, the whites of both his eyes had gone red, although she couldn’t
tell whether it was because of the blood running down his face or some kind of
internal brain injury. What was clear? He was dying.
“Help . . .
me . . .” The thin reedy voice was, interrupted by weak
coughing. “Out of . . . prison . . . hide
me . . .”
“Nyx?” Posie called out. “What’s
happening?”
For a split second, Nyx couldn’t
think. No, that was a lie. She was thinking, just not about the car, the
groceries, the kid who was dying, or her hysterical sister.
“Where,” Nyx said urgently.
“Where’s the camp?”
Maybe after all these
years . . . she could find out where Janelle had been taken.
This had to be Fate.
Pagan
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