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.
Who happened to look like something out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel.
If he hadn’t been introduced to her as Fritz, she would have called him Jeeves.
Not that Jo spent all that much time talking to him. Before they pulled out of the underground parking garage, he apologized profusely and explained that the partition between the front and the back had to be raised for security purposes—and she’d told him she understood. But like there was any other response?
As a result, she knew nothing of where they were. The rear windows of the sedan were so deeply tinted, they might as well have been made of funeral draping, and then there were her eyelids. The subtle ride of the luxury suspension, coupled with the deep bucket seat, meant things felt like she was in a cradle, and after all the drama, it wasn’t long before she—
“Madam?”
Jo woke up with a spastic slapping, her panic-palms hitting the leather acreage of the back seat like it was a horse’s rump.
The butler, who had opened the rear door and was leaning in, looked apoplectic. “Madam, my sincerest apologies! Forgive me, I have been attempting to rouse you and—”
“It’s okay, it’s all right.” Jo pushed her hair out of her face and blinked as she glanced past his shoulder. “That’s where I live.”
Stupid response. Like he’d thrown a dart at a map of Caldwell’s suburbs and had no idea where they were?
“Yes, madam, I have returned you safely unto your abode.”
In another panicked flare-up—this time, an internal one—Jo went into her brain and double-checked what she remembered of the night. Thank God, she had it all: The fighting scene at the abandoned mall, the training center’s facilities, the blood tests . . . Manny and Butch . . . Syn.
Who she had not been able to say goodbye to. And who still hadn’t texted her back.
The butler stepped to the side as she got out, and even though he stood by her, clearly waiting to be dismissed, she had to take a moment to look toward the light in the horizon. A new day had arrived.
In more ways than one.
“Thank you,” she said to the—what were they called? Doggen?— butler.
“You are most welcome, madam.” The old male bowed low. “I will see you to your door the now.”
He closed the car up and locked it, and then they walked together to the entrance of her apartment building.
“How can you be out in the sunlight?” she asked.
The butler’s snow-white brows went up. “I, ah, it is my kind. We are able to tolerate it quite well. It helps us serve our masters. We can perform tasks that they cannot when the sun is high. It is our pleasure to be of indispensable utility.”
He reached forward to the heavy door, and Jo, concerned he would struggle, leaned in to help him with the weight. But that old man pulled things open like they didn’t weigh a thing.
So much stronger than he looked.
“So, um . . . thank you,” Jo said as she stepped inside.
She expected to say her goodbyes there. Instead, he followed her all the way to her apartment, a cheerful, sprightly figure in his formal uniform—who got some serious attention from her neighbors as they stepped out of their own door for their morning jog.
The couple from across the hall stopped dead in their Lululemons as they got a gander at him.
“Hi,” Jo said to the pair. No reason to make an introduction.
“Greetings,” the butler said as he bowed low.
Before he could offer to go in and scramble them up some eggs or maybe make their bed, Jo gave a wave that she hoped was the kind of hi-goodbye her fellow tenants would be efficient in returning.