“Yup.”
“And you did the legwork of interviewing all her friends before you went off after the vampire, right?”
He shrugs noncommittally. “I talked to the girl who let me in to move out Cher’s stuff from the sorority house. She showed me the picture of the back of the vamp’s head. That’s all I needed.”
I press my lips together to keep from scolding him. “Well, we’ll have to go back there, then.”
Avet frowns. “What’s the point in that? She was taken out of the blue. Her friends wouldn’t have anything to do with that. It was a vampire, Keran. The girl who showed me the picture of the back of his head described him as having long teeth, so I went off on a hunt.”
I examine the throwing knives in my hand, wishing I had been there so I could have tossed in my two cents when Cher went missing. Though, Avet would have been so furious with the delay it takes to gather intel that he probably would have gone off with barely half a plan anyway. “There’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything, but if your vampire is getting harder and harder to track, go back to the basics. Cher’s phone contacts,” I suggest, reminding him of the simple things he often overlooks. “Do you have her phone?”
“No. Maybe. I have the things the sorority packed up when she was declared missing. They’re in the storage locker where I stashed her stuff so Tatik and Papik wouldn’t have to deal with it all. Cher’s phone could be in that mess. I called her, but it went straight to voicemail.”
I do the same on my phone and get the same result. “Well, that rules out her avoiding your phone calls.” I stare at Avet, hoping he jumps to the right conclusion before I have to push him there. “Do you think the storage locker might be a good place to start? It’s a new investigation, Avet. If the trail goes cold, we start over because we’ve missed something.”
Avet’s jaw tightens. “I’ve missed something. I hate this. Everything about it sucks.”
I grip his shoulder and give it a small shake. “That’s the spirit. I can polish up my trapping skills along the way. First stop: storage locker.”
We tug the thin knives out of the scarecrow and the pole, and a few from the ground (so embarrassing), and trot back to my car.
It feels like old times, and yet we are quieter. It’s like nothing has changed, and yet something intangible has shifted. We leaned on each other for everything. It’s good that we’ve learned to live apart, and yet strange that we’ve managed the feat, however tilted we are when we stand on our own.
Avet fists the handle of the passenger door. “I have to get some work done on your dreamless sleep draught. You get to drive until it’s fully cured.”
“You still haven’t told me what happened to your car.”
Avet does this thing when he lies: he flicks his thumb across his row of fingers on both hands. I’ve never told him this obvious clue, which means I can always rely on it. That he does the nervous tick now before he answers tells me there is far more to his missing car than he is ready to reveal. “Oh, it’s in the shop. I didn’t want to wait, so I caught a bus as far as it would take me and hitched the rest of the way. Glad I didn’t wait around. You might have eaten all the salad without me.”
“Ha ha.”
The drive will take us several hours. Even as I pull onto the main road, I feel my body settling into the groove it always relaxed into when starting out on a long drive.
Avet fiddles with the music for far too long before my irritation starts to surface. “Could you pick a station?”
“I could, but then we would be silent and ignore the elephant in the room for the entire drive to the storage locker.”
“What exactly is the elephant in the room that we’re avoiding? Name the elephant. Introduce me to the elephant.”
He clicks off the radio, turning in his seat to fix me with a face filled with true hurt. “You left without saying goodbye.”
I balk at him, unsure what to say. “Uh, I guess we can talk about that. I mean, I did tell you I was leaving. I just didn’t want a whole thing about it. Maybe I…”
Avet lets out a loud laugh and claps slowly. “Just kidding. Man, you almost started to sweat. I was talking about the real subject we’re avoiding.”
“Which is?”
“We’re really not going to talk about the fact that you went off to have a life and you did the exact opposite?”
My nose scrunches. “What are you talking about? You were in my house.”
“Yeah, your empty house with your crappy furniture and zero pictures of anyone up on the walls. I thought you were going to find a woman and settle down.”
It always surprises me the things that Avet completely overlooks, compared with the nuances he notices. Never let it be said that he is clueless. “Well, it didn’t work out like that. Turns out, I didn’t need to find a woman; I needed quiet and no one near me. So it may not look like much to you, but that place back there? That actually is my dream life.”
Avet looks crestfallen. “You have some small, sad dreams, brother.”
I jerk my thumb to the thermos between his knees where he has started brewing the potion for me. “If you can keep me from the murderous, terrifying ones, I’d be grateful.” I sneaked in four hours of sleep last night before the nightmare started all over again.