I hadn’t noticed it on the night, mainly because my brain had been preoccupied with the fear of bleeding out on the pavement and the pain of a knife between my shoulder blades, but the woman who had saved me was actually the picture of grace and beauty. 

From the way she waltzed down the stairs in my apartment to the way she held herself in the lift as we descended from the top floor all the way down to the sub-basement parking garage she just looked… flawlessly graceful. 

No mortal could ever hope to even come close. 

I didn’t even know her name yet. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t believe I haven’t asked this yet, but what’s your name?” I asked, leaning against the bannister at the side of the lift. 

She gave me a small smile, it was perhaps the first truly positive emotion I’d seen her direct towards me. 

“Sophia Linse,” she said, “I’ve held many names over the millennia, though, and have moved constantly throughout the world so as not to be discovered by mortals.” 

I nodded, that made sense. 

I had never heard of Immateria before, which meant that for some reason they wanted to keep their name out of the news. They didn’t want any mortals to know about them. 

These days I imagined that was probably a lot more important than it used to be. 

The Human Race wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of a blood-sucking species like the Immateria actually being real and against the might of a full army, I doubted that even an immortal species would fare very well. 

Especially against weapons like flame throwers and nuclear bombs, if the situation got desperate enough to utilise such things. 

The lift came to a stop at the sublevel basement with a ding and a woosh as the doors opened up. 

The garage of the apartment block was a stunning piece of new tech, nothing that I had personally had my hand in, but something that had been imported from places like Japan and China. 

There were three parking bays available for use at any one time, and when the car had been parked in it the license plate was scanned and registered. 

The parking bay would then drop down into an underground storage bay that was a little bit like a giant vending machine, only instead of packets of crisps and biscuits it had cars on the inside. 

Whenever you wanted to get your car back you had to scan a card that the apartment block management handed out and input the licence plate of the car that you wanted to withdraw. 

It was an innovative system and allowed the storage of many more cars than would have otherwise been possible… which was a good thing because I owned a lot of cars. 

For a job like the one I was undertaking today, though, I didn’t plan on using any of the flashy sports cars that I owned. 

Once again it needed to be something simple and business-like so that I didn’t put across the wrong image. 

I scanned my card into the interface and punched in the licence plate number for what was probably my favourite car that I used for business trips, the Bentley Flying Spur. 

Usually, if you saw someone driving a car like that, you would expect it to be a chauffeur driving someone else around, but I’d always liked to be the driver of the car myself. I liked the control of the wheel between my hands. 

“Nice ride,” Sophia remarked. 

“One of many,” I replied as I pulled the keys from my pocket and sat in the driver's seat.

The engine came to life with a purr as I turned the key, nothing beat the feeling of sitting in a well made car, and I let myself get lost in it for a moment. 

I was broken out of that by the passenger door slamming shut and Sophia sitting next to me. 

“So, where are we going?” I asked, “I take it we’re heading to your place first so that you can get changed.” 

She nodded and gave me an address that the cars on board satnav claimed was in Mayfair, the most expensive area to live in London, and also almost directly halfway between where I lived and where my offices were based at Canary Wharf. 

For someone who had spoken so much about staying under the radar, I hadn’t expected Sophia to live in such a built-up and expensive part of the city. Houses in Mayfair frequently sold for millions of pounds. 

It wasn’t my sort of scene, either. 

I preferred the modern approach, and the highrise verticality of the Battersea Apartments was much more my style. 

The drive was equal parts quick and silent. 

We’d managed to miss rush hour with the clock nearing midday, and while the streets of London were never exactly empty they were much emptier than they could have been if we’d left a couple of hours earlier. 

All told it took us about a half hour to drive from my apartment to Sophia’s house. 

And what a house it was. 

Sophia lived on Queen Street, a narrow road with equally narrow houses. But what they lacked in width they made up for in both elegance and height. 

These were clearly incredibly expensive properties and I imagined that most of them were probably used as boutique office spaces more than anything else. 

Not Sophia’s though, hers was a home. A home fit for the queen that the street was named after. 

“Right, wait here, I’ll only be a couple of minutes,” Sophia said before stepping out of the car. 

“Wait here?” I snorted, “You’ve got to be kidding, right?” 

She couldn’t seriously be expecting me to wait around outside like I was the chauffeur, that was ridiculous! 

But the look in her eye brooked no argument and once again I felt that Immateria programming kick in, making me back down. 

“Fine,” I said, “But try not to be too long, I don’t want to be late.” 

We both knew that there was no chance of being late, the meeting wasn’t set to begin for another couple of hours yet, but Sophia didn’t say anything in response. She merely shut the door, a little more forcefully than necessary, and walked into her expensive property. 

I was beginning to seriously dislike the woman, though there wasn’t anything I could do to get rid of her. 

Not yet, anyway. 

That would come later.