Reyna frowned. She felt that way about most things at this point.
“Y’all said a lot had changed?” Jodie prompted.
Gabe and Reyna shared a look as if to ask who should start. Reyna chewed on her lip and faced Jodie. “We went after Harrington, but he knew we were coming. Penelope double crossed us and became a vampire. Then Harrington bombed the bunker and killed…killed Beckham.”
Jodie’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“So yeah. A lot has happened,” Reyna said, crossing her arms around her stomach.
“The bunker? And Beckham?” Jodie asked in utter disbelief. “Holy shit, Reyna. Are you okay?”
Reyna didn’t respond to that. She didn’t know if she would ever be okay, but she was moving forward. She was doing what Beckham would have wanted her to do. And so she crawled over the divide to the backseat and wrapped her arms around her best friend. They were both mourning the loss of someone they loved. They were both learning this new life. Reyna was glad that she had someone else to move forward with.
Chapter Six
They made it back to Washington’s mansion an hour later. Meghan and Tye had come back hours ago, and Washington came out of the basement with the good news.
“The housekeeper arrived,” he said mildly.
A woman appeared with a smile on her face and a plate of sandwiches. “You must be hungry.”
“Reyna, this is Genevieve,” Washington said. “She’s a vampire and an excellent cook. She’s been taking care of the place on and off for me and agreed to come on fulltime while we’re here.”
“Nice to meet you,” Reyna said, tentatively taking a sandwich.
Jodie took the whole plate. “I’m famished.”
“Same,” Gabe admitted. “Nice to meet you, Genevieve. Welcome to the team.”
“How do you know Washington?” Reyna asked and then bit in her sandwich, which was toasted turkey and cheese with some kind of sauce, and it was unbelievable.
“We go way back,” she said with a shrug.
“Don’t interrogate, Genevieve,” Washington said, pushing up his glasses. “Just be glad someone can take care of the place.”
“Thank you, Genevieve,” Jodie said as she stuffed her mouth. “Now which room is mine?”
They went off together as if Jodie had never left and Genevieve had always been there. Meghan and Tye came back downstairs to inform them that they’d checked out the bunker and it was destroyed. They couldn’t even get through the main entrances. They’d had to find another way in, and even then, it was clear from the heat coming off the place from the fire that nothing could survive.
No one knew what happened to the people. To Drew andLaura, who had been inside. Or Everett, who had been imprisoned for turning Reyna in to Visage and acting as a spy for Harrington. Or Sydney…their leader. The very person who had started Elle, whowasElle. Everyone thought Elle had died, and in some ways she had. They’d turned her into a vampire and when she’d come back, she’d no longer been Elle. She’d become Sydney. Now it was possible that she was really gone.
Jodie integrated well. Maybe even better than she had when she’d initially joined Elle. Back then, shehad gotten her first real taste of what the world was like. And now she realized the good that she could do working with Elle. She still didn’t like Washington. He had been one of the doctors who had experimented on her when she had been kidnapped at a young age. But he respected her space and worked hard to earn her trust, so she was coming around. And it was good to see them all work together.
“Why don’t we have communication with the other safe houses?” Jodie grumbled. “It’s been a week since New Year’s. Shouldn’t someone be able to reach us?”
Tye sighed. “I wish I knew. Meghan and I have checked a lot of the safe houses. Some of them look like people were in them, but now they’re empty. They look abandoned.”
“Where could everyone have gone?” Jodie inquired. “Are there places other than the bunker?”
“Yes,” Washington said. He frowned. “But for safety reasons, we weren’t supposed to know where they all were. So much of the information that Elle had—what do you say?—went down with the ship?”
“If we had Tony, we might’ve been able to access it,” Meghan said. Tony was Elle’s resident techie, but he had been at the bunker on the day of the explosion.
“You think it might be on a server somewhere?” Reyna asked. “Or in the Cloud?”
She was still wrestling with these terms. After years without internet or phones, she was picking up all these new things as quickly as she could.
“The main servers were in the bunker,” Washington said.
