Page 92 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
A rival. A challenger to the Alpha’s throne.
Everyone gasped. The guards froze. Morgan leapt to her feet, as did several other Assembly members, everyone horrified and bug-eyed, looking at him and each other in astonishment.
“You dare!” Alejandro shouted, lips drawn over his teeth in a vicious snarl.
“Oh, I do,” said Hawk, his voice low and dark, blood boiling like black lava through his veins. “I definitely do. And mark my words, brother . . . you’ll be sorry I did.”
Chaos.
Shouting, chairs overturned, the crash of a vase as someone knocked it over in their rush from the room. Almost all the guards ran out, followed by several of the Assembly members, the wine boy, and the scribe, who abandoned his pen and paper on the table, all of them shoving and jostling, in a great hurry to spread the news.
Alejandro was panting, seething, wanting to kill him on the spot, but he couldn’t. No one could, which gave Hawk great satisfaction. According to the Ancient Ways, the Alpha and the challenger had to meet at sunset on the day of the challenge to do battle, with the entire tribe as witness. Once the ritual words had been spoken, not even the Alpha could strike until the appointed time.
So for the moment, Hawk was untouchable. He sent Alejandro a bitter smile.
“The Arena at sunset, then,” hissed Alejandro. “And then we’ll finally see what the Bastard is made of.” Flicking a lethal look at one of the remaining guards, he added, “Get a pyre ready at the Well of Souls.” He looked back at Hawk, his green eyes glowing hatefully bright. “Salsu Maru is going to burn.”
Since ancient days, cremation had been their preferred form of burial, and Hawk knew that win or lose, someone was going to be on that funeral pyre tomorrow morning.
Because the gauntlet he’d thrown down was a winner-takes-all proposition.
The challenge of a sananu was to the death.
“Sunset,” said Hawk. Then he turned and strode out of the room.
Jack awoke with a hangover so colossal it felt as if her brain was using jackhammers and dynamite to make a break from her skull.
There was pounding, copious pounding, accompanied by dizziness, the urge to vomit, and a violent twitching of the skin beneath her left eye. She sat up—bed? Why was she in bed? Whose bed was it?—and looked around the room she found herself in.
It appeared to be some kind of tree house. Large and open and beautiful . . . she’d never seen it before in her life.
The urge to vomit became an irrefutable order, transmitted from her angry brain to her queasy stomach, which she immediately obeyed.
When the last of the heaves died, Jack looked down at the polished wood floor. It was splattered with the contents of her stomach, which seemed not so much disgusting as physically impossible. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything.
She was having trouble remembering much of anything at all.
Towel, she thought. In this situation, a rational person would go find a towel and clean up this mess. One couldn’t be expected to think clearly when faced with such a large—weirdly green—mess on the floor. Whoever’s floor it happened to be. She’d figure out what to do next after she’d cleaned up.
Satisfied with her plan in spite of the agony in her head, Jack wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, stood from the bed, and looked around the room.
Standing was a mediocre idea, at best. The room became a sideways slipping blur, and she sank back to the mattress on gelatinous legs, shaking, her skin covered in a cold sweat.
“Okay. Just take it easy for a minute. Just sit here for a minute, and get your bearings. Nooo rush.”
Clearly, she was no longer in New York. But where on Earth was she?
“All right. You’re functioning at ten percent physically and mentally, best-case scenario.” She was going to ignore the fact that she was talking out loud to an empty room, and cut herself some slack. “What you need is a big glass of water. And Advil. And a towel. Let’s just focus on those three things, and we’ll go from there.”
She tried standing again, and found it less challenging this time. She shuffled to an open door on the other side of the room, grateful that it turned out to be a bathroom. A bit primitive, sparse and masculine, but still a bathroom. She washed her face and rinsed her mouth in the sink, used the toilet, pulled a towel from a folded stack in a small cabinet, returned to the bedroom, and sopped up the mess.
When she was finished, she debated what to do with the towel. She settled on leaving it outside on the porch, because there didn’t seem to be any hamper or proper laundry facilities in her immediate vicinity, and she certainly wasn’t going to go looking.
There had been no medicine cabinet in the bathroom. No Advil. There didn’t appear to be a kitchen where she could find a drinking glass. What kind of place was this?
A theory took root.
She was on assignment. Obviously, she was in the jungle; the rainforest loomed thick and misted beyond the tree house, exotic birds called through the canopy, a brown monkey hung upside down by its tail from a branch not ten yards away, eating fruit. She was on assignment in some tropical war zone, and had gotten food poisoning. Or been given drugs?
