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,