“I just want to know the real story.” She looked at Manny. “But you’re definitely half-vampire too?”
“Yes. The confirmation of this, I must confess, has taken me by surprise, even though it shouldn’t be a shock. I’ve long guessed—and so have others—that this was the case, even though my mother’s never said anything about it. But enough about me.” Manny put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m really glad you’re my sister. I can’t wait for you to meet my wife—”
“But what if I don’t go through the change.” Jo shook her head and checked the screen of her phone. Still no reply from Syn. “Then I’m not in this world. Then we’re enemies.”
She’d been toying with a fantasy about the future, one where she and Syn ended up on the same side of the species divide and shared a long, much longer than she ever expected, life together. But considering he wasn’t even responding to her texts, that all seemed highly ephemeral.
It had probably been a never-happen from the start.
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” Jane said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen with your transition.”
Jo thought of Syn.
“I just don’t want to lose my family,” she whispered, “before I even know them.”
The silence that followed was the kind of the thing that took a while to register. And when it did, she frowned.
“What else,” she demanded. “There’s something else, isn’t there.”
As things got quiet again, Jane and Manny locked eyes—like they were mentally playing rock, paper, scissors for who got to drop the next piece of news.
As Butch was chauffeured into the training center’s parking area, he decided that, on balance, he was doing good. Not wicked, frickin’ good, of course. But certainly better than fairly good, and probably a little improved over pretty good.
At least this was his operating principle right up until he tried to get out of the passenger side of the fucking R8. Qhuinn, because he was a bossy little shit, and because he felt like he had a debt to repay after Butch had done what he had to protect the guy against the Omega, had refused to allow him to drive out of the forest to the training center on his own.
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