“The King,” she whispered.
A black brow lifted up over the top of the wraparounds. “Last I checked, that’s right. And you are?”
Well, that escalated quickly.
About thirty minutes later, as Rhage re-formed in the middle of a bowling-alley-flat scrub brush meadow, the Ron Burgundy meme was going through his head. Then again, hard to think what else applied considering he had been up to his elbows in Danish, and now he was here. Wherever the fuck “here” was.
Looking around the valley and at the highway that ribboned through the low area between two pipsqueak mountains, he had a gut twist going on—but the uneasiness was not connected in the slightest to this stretch of ground that made him think of an old guy’s tufted, balding head. It also wasn’t about the mission they were on.
Okay, fine, not everything about the mission.
“So you did know the male,” V whispered as the brother materialized right beside him. “This Jackal?”
“I haven’t heard that name in a century.” Rhage kept his voice down as he glanced at V. “He worked with Darius for a little bit. I met him only briefly—and my born brothers are all dead. I was the only one of my sire’s male offspring to survive. So I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.”
Reaching back through the years, he tried to picture the gentlemale in question. It had been a long time, a good century, but his memory was sharp enough. He remembered that asshole Jabon and the young female—what the hell had her name been?—and the mahmen. The peach dressing gown with the stains. The scenes in the middle of Jabon’s formal receiving area in that tool’s crowded meat shop of a house.
And then Rhage had an image of meeting the Jackal that first night he’d come down from that infernal guest bedroom. The guy had been in the parlor. Ready to talk with Darius.
The male had done a double take as soon as he’d looked over.
“All my born brothers are dead,” Rhage repeated.
As the others arrived, one by one, he remembered another thing: the conviction that, when he’d been introduced to the Jackal, he had known the male from somewhere.
What if he hadn’t seen the Jackal before in the hi-how’re-ya sense, though. What if it was his own face that he recognized in the other male’s? At the time, he’d been so poleaxed by recovering from his beast coming out that he’d been drained and exhausted. Mental connections that should have been made maybe hadn’t been.
Like the fact that the pair of them looked a lot alike.
“Rhage? Where you gone, Hollywood?”
Shaking himself, he glanced at V. “Sorry. I’m back.”
Z and Phury had materialized to the site, their guns out and down by their sides. And the female, Nyx, and her grandfather, Dredrich, were standing next to what looked like a nothing-special patch in the middle of the ugly nothing-special acreage.
“Over here,” the female said, motioning to the ground.
Rhage and the brothers came across as she lowered herself onto her knees and clawed at the loose ground. Underneath, a trapdoor with a circle pull was exposed to the moonlight. When Nyx went to lift it up, the brothers interceded to help.
She was tough, Rhage had to give her credit. And she’d obviously had quite a time down underground, her limp and the fading injuries on her face and head the kind of thing that bothered him deeply because they were on a female. If she’d been male? Sure, fine, whatever. But he was never going to be comfortable with the opposite sex being all battered and fucked-up, and if that made him a throwback, fine. People could kiss his antiquated ass.
Standing over the hole in the earth, Rhage trained a flashlight into the dense darkness. There was a steep slope to the passageway, the decline disappearing out of sight.
“I’ll go first,” he said.
“And I’m after you.” When everybody looked at Nyx, her face was set in a hard line. “I’m the only one who’s been in there. You can’t do this without me because you’ll have no fucking clue where you are, and moreover, part of the prison has collapsed, so it’s very dangerous. You need me.”
Well. That just about covered it, didn’t it.
Rhage sat his ass down on the lip of the trapdoor hole, his shit-kickers dangling into the darkness. After a resolve not to think about red balloons and clowns, he dropped himself down and landed on a scramble, his weight taking him on a slide as loose soil rained on his head and he had to use his palms to slow his roll.
When his momentum stopped, he shined his flashlight around and saw a whole lot of stone that had been chipped away. “Someone dug this out?”
The female re-formed next to him. “Yes, he did.”
“Over how many years?”