The Sinner

by J. R. Ward

  Also the importance of the species being separate and staying separate from humans.

  That reality was what stuck with her the most, although everything he had shared with her had seemed important. If she did go through the change, she was going to have a lot to adjust to, and she wanted to get a head start on all of it, if she could.

  Refocusing, she went back over to the vending machine. There was no need to put any coins or bills in. It was a dispenser only, not about any kind of revenue stream—and the free food, in addition to the state-of-the-art nature of this facility, made her wonder where all the money came from. The answer to that was way down the list of her priorities, though. And hey, like she was about to argue with chocolate on the gimme?

  Pressing one of the buttons, she watched the corkscrew spin… and then a Hershey bar dropped down with a clunk. Groaning, she bent over, pushed open the flap, and retrieved the candy bar. The wrapper came off easily and she tossed that in the trash. Then she took a bite and kept pacing.

  As she chewed and swallowed, she thought about Manny. The female doctor who had taken the sample. Those fighters at that site…

  … and Syn.

  More than anything, she thought about Syn. Especially about the way he had killed those things back at the outlet mall. Thanks to Manny, she now understood why he’d been so vicious about it all. He had been protecting her and avenging his own species against an enemy that had murdered innocents for centuries.

  It certainly put the violence in perspective. And made it much easier to accept.

  Then again, when she had asked if he would help her during her transition, she had voted with her feet already, hadn’t she. But Syn had always made her safe. Always.

  As she came up to the armchairs, she sat down with a total lack of grace, letting her butt land where it did. Looking up by the TV, she checked the time on a wall clock and frowned. It was past three thirty a.m. Five and a half hours had gone by? How was that even possible?

  Then again, it also felt like five years since she had ridden here with that yellow-eyed man.

  Male, rather—

  The door swung open.

  First, she merely looked up. But then, as she saw the hyper-composed faces of Manny and Doc Jane, she slowly rose to her feet. She didn’t know either of them well enough to extrapolate much, and she wasn’t sure whether that was bad or good.

  “So what were the results?” she asked.

  The female doctor—Jane—smiled, but it was in a professional way. “Why don’t you sit back down?”

  “I’m going to die, right?” It was the only thing she could think of that was worse than finding out she wasn’t related to Manny. “I’m sick or I’m—”

  “You’re my sister,” Manny said.

  Jo sagged with relief and let her body take the advice of the doctor. As she landed back in the chair, she focused on her brother’s—her brother’s!—his face. “Is this bad, though?”

  Stupid question. Really just was. The situation was complicated, and not in a fricking Facebook way.

  “No, no.” Manny came forward and sat down next to her. “Not at all. I’m thrilled.”

  “Then why don’t you look like it.”

  Jane came over and sat on the sofa. “Let me explain a couple of things. So vampire blood is very different from that of humans. Much more complex. We can now, however, isolate specific properties of it—or maybe identifiers is a better word—and as I told you, we have a database of that kind of information. So when we compared your and Manny’s blood, we were able to see clearly the commonalities, the kind that indicate you are siblings.”

  “Okay.” Jo looked back and forth between the two of them. “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “We have the same father,” Manny said. “But not the same mother.”

  Jo opened her mouth. Closed it.

  Strange, how she could feel an instant grief for the loss of someone she had never known, and was actually not tied to. Still, it was a relief to think that poor woman hadn’t suffered something no one had wanted to contemplate.

  But then who was her birth mother?

  Jo tried to hold on to what had been confirmed. “So Robert Bluff is my father.”

  “Yes.” Jane nodded. “He is.”

  “Can you tell me anything about my birth mom?”

  “No, I’m afraid we cannot. She was definitely a human, though. We know that for sure.” Jane leaned in and put her hand on Jo’s knee. “My hellren is going to look into it. From what you told Manny, about how you were adopted out of a diocese in Philadelphia from St. Francis Hospital here in Caldwell, it’s possible that my mate can find something, anything, about you. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be clandestine adoption programs running back then, for example. Anyway, we’ll do our best. I can imagine how important it is for you to find answers.”

  Jo nodded and prayed there would be something, somewhere.

  “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.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  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 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.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  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 ti
me, 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.