Avet kisses my cheek and steps back, rolling his shoulders and staring at the throngs of trees before us. “No. There’s no logical reason not to go in there. I don’t know what my deal is.”
Sevan studies us with a curious tilt of her head. “You boys are sweet, you know that? How long did you two date?”
I never answer this question whenever it comes; I leave the fielding of the misconception to Avet. We often get asked if we are brothers or lovers. If I act offended when a person assumes we are dating, it’s a slight on Avet and all gay men, like how dare anyone couple me in with a group of which I am not a card-carrying member. I don’t care what people think, but I care if I am accidentally a jerk to my best friend.
Avet smirks at Sevan, hefting his backpack over his shoulder and pulling out his knife. “I don’t date straight men,” he replies. “When women hug or kiss on the cheek or hold hands, no one thinks twice. Keran and I have been through too much to hold up the almighty rules of fragile masculinity as if they deserve to dictate us. Life’s too short.”
Sevan blinks at me as if seeing the situation in a whole new light. “That’s… I had no idea. All this time, I just assumed.”
I move around to the trunk and tug out the necessary tools for putting a lost spirit to rest.
It’s just my luck that the beautiful woman assumed I was gay.
“Everyone ready for this? Because it goes fast once it all starts. Sevan, how many of these have you done?”
She bristles as if I’ve asked her if she has learned how to ride a bike without training wheels yet. “Dozens of them.”
I nod in her direction after slamming the trunk shut. “Good. I’ve got the salt, matches, and the accelerant.”
Avet holds up Zagiri’s journal. “I’ve got a personal artifact that belonged to Zagiri and the compass.” Avet holds up the vial of Ararat basil extract to show us the thing that will lead us to the body. Then he taps his backpack. “Shovel, too.”
Sevan takes a short sword from her pack and pulls out a small vial, which she opens and dribbles on the steel of her weapon. “I’ll be backup.”
Avet and I exchange glances, my eyebrows raised slightly. “I gotta say, I don’t mind having a third person around. Makes lighting a corpse on fire that much easier when we don’t have to look over our shoulders.”
Avet leads the way with the compass. The spitball drizzled with Ararat basil extract that he shot Zagiri with is connected to the vial of the stuff in his hand. It’s a game of hot and cold, with the liquid turning warmer the closer we get to the body, and colder if we are headed in the wrong direction.
The first witch to figure that potion out deserves a medal of honor or something. I don’t know how they located bodies before that.
Sevan and I are quiet as we follow Avet’s careful steps. The thickening forest closes in around us, shrouding us from the rising moon and the beam coming off the building’s floodlights. The trees are smaller on the outskirts but much larger further in.
Avet tugs out a flashlight from his backpack and hands it to me so he can focus on the temperature of the container in his fist.
We don’t need words for me to know he wants the light shone on the path ahead of him. We have spent a hundred nights just like this, sifting through nature to find a body being feasted upon by worms in the dark.
Though, more often than not, we were putting spirits to rest in cemeteries, digging up bodies that were long dead. The shallow graves of bodies hastily dumped and hidden by bramble are the worst. The elements and critters often pick them over, reminding me that my mortality is nonnegotiable. I keep thinking I’ll be immune to the decay at some point, but the rot always sticks in my stomach.
“Finally feeling some heat with this thing,” Avet announces fifteen minutes into the forest. “But it’s faint, so we still have a while to go.”
There is an agitation in Avet’s tone that tells me he still hasn’t reconciled with the portion of his gut that warns us away from this area. Still, he presses on, and so we follow, knives in hand, though I am certain the only thing we will run into is a squirrel or two. Still, I prefer being over-prepared rather than playing catch-up on the fly.
The gnawing uncertainty grows in my stomach now. It often happens like this—Avet’s worry becomes my own for no good reason other than solidarity.
“Hotter,” Avet informs us, his footsteps slowing so we don’t accidentally step on Zagiri’s body.
When he comes to a stop, switching the vial from one hand to the other, I know we must be right on top of the thing. I turn the flashlight this way and that until the beam illuminates an uneven patch of ground to my right. “There,” I tell the others. My brows knit together. “Why is she buried? I mean, poorly, of course, but that’s not the way a vampire dumps a body. They barely care if the carcass is concealed at all. I’ve never seen a vampire bury its victim.”
Avet frowns. “I only brought along a shovel because I always keep one in my go bag. I don’t get it.”
Sevan’s short sword is drawn. “We came here to put Zagiri to rest. Let’s pontificate later over hot tea and daylight. I don’t like the vibe this place is giving me.”
I set down the backpack and pull out the travel shovel, assembling the handle in pieces before I start digging. “You don’t like hanging around murder victims? I’m not sure you’ll fit in with us, then,” I tease. Humor isn’t my strong suit, but it helps me get through dark moments like these.
Though, I can’t help but agree with Avet’s apprehension that we shouldn’t be here. Sevan’s worry that the forest knows more than it is willing to reveal to us is starting to concern me, too.
A job is a job, so I do my best to push all of that out of my head while I dig around the lumpy spot. My stomach tightens when I hit what is clearly a femur. “This is her. You ready, Avet?” I flip the dirt as best I can to uncover as much of Zagiri’s remains as possible, trying not to memorize the details of a girl who should have had decades more to live.
I toss the shovel down while Sevan salts the bones, hair, and remnants of cloth.