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likely to bring a phalanx of Guardians down on him. He passed through the security area, then paused when Jeeves met him in the hallway and lowered his shields.
    Jake. Ethan glanced past him, into Jeeves’s station. It couldn’t be left unmanned. “You got a minute?”
    The butler’s exterior shimmered, changed; the elderly gentleman became a young, T-shirt-and jeans-wearing male, with an erect bearing and dark shaved hair that could have come fresh out of a military boot camp.
    Considering that Jake had died in the jungles of Vietnam, the kid likely had been.
    “More than that. I’m off.” Jake stuck a toothpick between his lips and scooted to the side of the doorway just as another Guardian darted past him, her dark form a blur. “Ten seconds late, Rebecca.”
    “Fuck you,” she said as she shape-shifted. Even if it hadn’t been mildly spoken, her response would have been impossible to take seriously, her feminine voice coming as it did from Jeeves’s mouth. Her dour gaze lifted to Ethan’s face, then narrowed on his grin. “Hey, Drifter. Laugh it up while you can; she asked us to let her know when you finally got your ass back here.”
    Lilith. The former demon and FBI agent now headed operations at Special Investigations. A few Guardians still chafed at the thought of following her direction, but Ethan hadn’t any argument with it—particularly as Lilith’s partner and SI’s co-director, Hugh Castleford, had been Ethan’s mentor for a century in Caelum, the realm the Guardians called home. Even if Ethan hadn’t trusted Lilith’s judgment and two thousand years of experience, he would have Hugh’s.
    “Well, then, I’ll be pleased to accommodate her,” Ethan drawled.
    Rebecca pursed Jeeves’s thin lips. “And you’ve screwed up the entry logs by failing to swipe your card. There’s no record of you at the main door, but there’s a record here at security? Red flags everywhere. And guess who has to go in and fix them?”
    Ethan adopted his best aw, shucks expression. “I’m just keeping you on your toes, Miss Becca. Training and all.”
    Rebecca spread her arms wide; Ethan could almost hear the starched shirt cracking. “Do I look like a fucking ballerina to you?” A choked laugh from Jake had her glaring in his direction. “You: Shut up. I just learned how to take my sword out of my hammerspace, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
    Jake held up his hands in surrender, but his gaze centered over her shoulder and on the monitors lining the small room. “You’ve got a motorcycle coming into the parking lot, Jeeves.”
    Rebecca turned her head; when she glanced back, Jeeves’s smile was a ghastly thing. “Speak of the devil. It’s Lilith,” she said and slammed the door.
    Ethan’s brows rose, and he looked from the still-quivering door frame to Jake. “Her hammerspace ?”
    “Her cache.” Jake shrugged and moved the toothpick from the right corner of his mouth to the left. “It’s a video-game thing. We’ve been playing DemonSlayer in our downtime.”
    “Learning a bushel from it, are you?” Ethan asked, his voice dry as desert sand. Though based on a book that accurately described Guardians, the game was riddled with errors—but, fortunately, the public assumed both were fiction.
    “There’s only so much porn you can download before the thrill is gone.” The toothpick bobbed with Jake’s unapologetic grin. “Speaking of, that’s probably why Becca’s ready to snap: I think Emo Vamp always falls asleep right afterwards.”
    “I can hear you, you bloody bastard.” Rebecca’s reply came clearly through the door, but this time it was rounded by Jeeves’s cultured voice. “And Mackenzie’s worth it.”
    Her vampire lover likely fed from her just before falling into the daysleep, then. Ethan didn’t allow his revulsion to show; the thought of the blood and feeding didn’t disgust him, but the memory of a vampire’s bloodlust, and of how easily it had slipped into his