Forever The World of Nightwalkers - By Jacquelyn Frank Page 0,52

that filled him with what was becoming a very familiar sadness.

The thought made him think of Sargent. The poor dog. To work so damn hard and his only recompense was two humans who let him starve and thirst for an entire day! The thought galvanized him, making him ease his arm from beneath her and move as carefully as he could off the bed so as not to wake her. She didn’t have an internal clock attuned to the coming of dusk, so she would sleep for as long as her body would let her and as far as he was concerned she could use it. She might not have been tromping through the woods, but she had worked just as hard comforting the mother while at the same time battling the woman with her wits.

And that thought reminded him of something else he had to do. As he moved into the main body of the house looking for Sargent, he was also looking for a phone. He found both in the kitchen, Sargent in the exact same position they had last seen him take up on the rug. But when Jackson entered the room Sargent’s ears pricked forward an instant before he lifted his head.

Jackson instinctively made the sound he used to recall Sargent, which brought the dog quickly to his side. The recall wasn’t just about commanding the dog to come, it was about releasing him from his well-trained position. It was a strange house with strange smells and rules, but Sargent, who was always brimming with curiosity, had stayed exactly where Jackson had left him, not even trying to climb up into bed with him like he usually did.

“Hungry? And I bet you gotta pee, too. I’m with you on that one, my friend.”

Jackson opened the door, hesitating a moment because he didn’t have “I know.”. iSargent’s leash any longer. It had gone up in flames along with everything else from his original uniform. There was a snapping piece of leather on his gun belt made specifically for carrying the coiled up leash, much in the way Wonder Woman wore that golden lasso of hers, freeing up his hands for other things. But the belt and all else were gone.

After he had taken care of their most immediate need, Jackson started to look for a pantry or cabinet that might have food stores. He opened the refrigerator to find it completely empty and even unplugged. The first thing he had noticed while walking Sargent was that they were really secluded, since he couldn’t see another sign of humanity in any direction, and quite possibly completely off the grid. He didn’t see any elevated wiring and there had been a series of powerful-looking solar panels at the edge of the northwest corner of the clearing the cabin was nestled in.

“Ah! Here we go,” he said with triumph a moment later when he opened the door to a small walk-in pantry. It had to be the neatest pantry on the face of the earth, with multiples of each can, and, oddly enough, each label was perfectly aligned in a forward-facing direction like a neatly ordered phalanx of aluminum and glass soldiers. The sight made him a little sick in his gut. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she did have a lover. It would be just like her to pick a man exactly like she was. Perfect. Neat. Every last damn duck in its precisely designated row.

The thought made him so surly he had an extremely powerful urge to shove everything off the shelves. My god, he thought with shock at the wave of wrath that had washed quickly through him. Why am I so hot-tempered all of a sudden?

Not universally, Menes said to him quietly, but whenever you feel your Marissa in threat … in one form or another. Jealousy is to be expected, Jackson, when the winning prize is so exceptional.

Jackson had to grudgingly admit that there was some truth in that. Perhaps even more so now that he’d kissed her … since he’d learned what she’d tasted like on his tongue and felt like in his hands. Since he’d gotten a glimpse of what she was capable of when she let her hair down.

He found a can of stew and pulled the tab up for it. Sargent started to whine eagerly in the back of his throat as Jackson searched for a bowl. He found two, dropping the first in front of Sargent immediately after dumping the