And okay, whatever, the brother had had to carry him out of the Tomb.
But come on. So he’d had a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle trouble walking after he’d done his duty with all of those lessers. V had taken care of him, though, and he was going to be just. Frickin’. Fine.
As Qhuinn killed the engine, he looked over. “Do you need any help getting—”
“Oh, my God,” Butch muttered, “I’m not an invalidate. Invalid. Whatever.”
With that, he swung his door open like a boss, planted one of his shitkickers on the cement, and—
Fell out of the car like a drunk, landing on his face.
As he lay there in a sprawl, arms and legs kinked at strange angles, one boot still in the fucking R8, he thought of The Wolf of Wall Street scene with the Countach.
#nailedit
The sound of Qhuinn hustling around the front bumper was the sprinkles on the top of the shit sundae, and the sight of the steel tips of those shitkickers—right at eye level—was no value add either.
“I got this,” Butch said as he lifted his cheek off that cold cement. “I needed a shave anyway.”
Unfortunately, the pathetic way he dragged his body up to the vertical cured him of any ego he might have had left. He did, however, manage to stand on his own—and he was clapping his jacket to get the dust off when the van drove in.
The stench preceded its parking.
“Whoa,” Butch muttered as he got a load of the smell. “We’re going to have to hose that fucker out.”
Qhuinn sneezed and rubbed his nose. “Either that or burn it.”
The van pulled in a couple of spots down, not that the distance helped dull the stank. Hell, you could have left the thing across the river and Butch probably would have smelled it.
The good news was that as the back of the vehicle opened, V was not any better at the disembarking thing. The brother stumbled as if his knees were over-oiled, and was only able to catch his balance on a last-minute, all-points-of-the-compass spread that made him look like he was about to be strip-searched.
As all kinds of other brothers clown-car’d out of the stink-mobile, Butch and V headed into the training center together. Neither said a goddamn thing. The determination had been made, back in the ante-hall of the Tomb, that a medical check wasn’t a bad idea. But fuck that. V had been starved, and all Butch could think of was how great a hot shower would be.
They didn’t make it anywhere close to the locker rooms or the vending machines.
Doc Jane stepped out of a treatment room just as they came up to the clinic area, and something in the way she and V looked at each other made Butch realize that ending up here on account of a checkup had all been a pretense. This had been planned.
“What’s going on?” Butch asked.
Jane took a deep breath. “I think you should come into the break room for a moment.”
Glancing at V, Butch muttered, “So you needed M&Ms bad, huh.”
“We’ll go together.” V nodded toward the door in question. “Let’s do this.”
Butch closed his eyes. “No offense, but after the last four hours and forty-three minutes—not that I was counting—I don’t have a lot of energy for any bullshit.”
“This is not bullshit.”
“Okaaaaaaay.”
Falling in with V and Jane, he had no idea what was waiting for him as he pushed opened the door. Except then he stopped and frowned.
Manny was sitting on a chair next to Jo, that human woman—and as soon as they saw him, Butch thought it was a little strange that they held on to each other’s hands. But like he mattered in whatever their tie was?
Unless . . .
“So I guess you two are related?” he said slowly. “Congratulations—you know there are some physical similarities.”
“Yeah,” Manny murmured as he stared over with intense eyes. “There are.”
Jane cleared her throat. “And it seems as though there are some other ties here.”
“Who else—and please tell me it isn’t Lassiter—”
“You.”
As Jane spoke the word, Butch blanked for a moment—because, hello, after the night he’d had, he hadn’t expected to be adding family members to his Christmas list on top of everything else. But then he thought back to a photograph Manny had shown him a while ago, one of a man who had looked shockingly like Butch himself.
“Sonofabitch,” he murmured. “So the hunch was right.”
Talk about whiplash, Jo thought. So far this evening, she’d gone from thinking she had a mom, to learning she didn’t have that mom, to discovering who her father was . . . and adding two brothers to her family tree.
Oh, yeah, and then there was the whole vampire thing, too.
Details, details.
But at least she wasn’t the only one who was at the end of the bungee cord of life. Butch, the one with the Boston accent, the one she had seen that first night in the Red Sox baseball hat, the one who had seemed so nice earlier at the scene of all the carnage . . . was also looking a little poleaxed.
Join the club, she thought.
Doc Jane spoke up. “Yup. The bloodline database—which you’d previously given a sample to, but which Manny had not—confirms that you and Jo have a first-degree male ancestry in common with him. You all have the same father.”
“Holy . . . shit.” Butch looked over at the male with the goatee who he’d come in with. “So this means she’s also related to—”
The male cut him off. “We’re going to have to talk about the implications of it all later.”
“Yeah, we’re going to have to.”
When Butch turned to Jo, she rose to her feet and tried to not look as if she were recording every nuance of his face. “So . . . um. Hi.”
She stuck out her hand. And as it floated there on the breeze by its lonesome, she felt foolish and dropped her arm. Just because the male had accepted a guy he already knew so readily did not mean the courtesy had to be extended to a stranger who was more human than his kind. For the moment, at any rate.
“Sorry,” she said as she rubbed her palm on the seat of her jeans.
“Well, I’m not,” Butch said roughly. “It’s really nice to meet you, sis.”
The next thing she knew, she was being pulled into a hard hug—at the same time Manny was being yanked up off the sofa. Butch had the arm span to hold them both . . . and after a moment, Jo let herself fall into the embraces.
Her brothers.
For the first time in her life, she was among her own family, and part of her was overjoyed, her destination reached, the search over. The problem was, she knew better than to start making Sunday dinner plans for the next seven hundred years. If she didn’t go through her transition, they were going to have to make it so she remembered absolutely nothing about this seminal moment in her life.
Manny had explained how it had to work.
With the war coming to an end, there could be no chances with the secrecy of the race. Especially not with a human . . . who happened to be a reporter.
About an hour before dawn, Jo was taken back to the real world, and what a chariot she had to ride off into the sunrise with. The long, powerful black Mercedes was, like, Uber Titanium or something—and naturally, it came with a driver in uniform.