“No, you don’t,” Avet spouts back. There is no mercy in his voice, probably because it is such an undervalued virtue in our kind of people. “You’re hiding here. There’s a big difference between hiding and actual happiness.”
I don’t argue because it doesn’t matter. If I am hiding, so what? I’ve earned the right to flee from the monsters whose empty souls I’ve looked into while they passed.
When I’m not fending off night terrors of innocents dying at the hands of the supernatural, the images of all the cursed people I’ve snuffed out plague my dreams.
They didn’t choose to become vampires. They were normal people before Bel’s curse twisted them so badly their humanity was unrecognizable.
Then slowly my own humanity became more and more of a distant memory. Beneath the curse, they were people I murdered.
Avet can’t stand long bouts of silence, so I don’t have to avoid his needling for too long. “Where’s your brew kit?” he asks me, glancing around my one-bedroom apartment as if for the first time. “I want to get started on your draught. It takes time to cure.”
I grimace, unsure where I stashed my trapping gear when I first moved in. It was so long ago. “I’ll find it. Wait until I tie the knot on your stitches at least before you turn into a squirrel and run off in another direction. One giant thing at a time. First things first: witches get stitches.”
Avet is off the chair the second after I clip the end of the string. He doesn’t need permission to poke around my place as he throws his ruined white t-shirt in the trash. He likes to get into trouble, get into things he knows he shouldn’t touch. It’s no great surprise that he beelines for my bathroom and opens up the medicine cabinet, scoffing a handful of seconds later. “Aspirin? What’s that going to do?”
“It’s for headaches, like the one you’re currently giving me.”
“Headaches? Aw, poor baby.”
“Some people might consider it rude to go through a friend’s medicine cabinet.”
Avet bats his lashes at me. “Well, I’m just happy to be considered at all.” He rummages around, turning bottles to admire the labels. “Do you have anything in here for papercuts?”
I stomp toward the bathroom so I can throw the medicine cabinet door closed. “Shut up. What are you even doing here?”
“I’ve got a boo-boo, so I might need a band-aid. Do you have one with pink hearts on it? I only like the ones that have pretty designs.”
Usually, Avet can poke at my bear-like demeanor for hours on end and it barely registers. I must be out of practice tolerating his humor because my irritability flares. “Seriously, Avet. What are you doing here?”
Avet winces at my volume. “Jeez, man. Keep it down. We’ve got neighbors.”
“We don’t have anything. I have neighbors. I have Aspirin, which I might need soon because of the headache you are giving me.”
Avet sizes up my temper, leaning back with his butt on the bathroom counter as he crosses his arms over his chest. “Fine. I’m here because I need a place to crash. That okay?”
“Normally I would tell you that you don’t have to ask; the couch is always free for you. But you showed up out of the blue with a vampire on your heels. Don’t think for a second that you’re going to bombard me with chaos and then offer up nothing by way of an actual explanation. I know you.”
Avet focuses on the ceiling, as if unperturbed by my frustration. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re going to feed me half-explanations, assuming I’ll be so curious that I’ll follow you off into whatever crazy adventure you have up your sleeve. It’s not going to work, Avet.”
He has the nerve to smirk at me. “Of course it is. You can’t resist a never-ending puzzle. You know me? I know you.”
I groan because I hate how right he is. But I stomp my foot to the floor, firm that he won’t control this. “No. Not this time. You want to stay here, you start talking. I need to know what we’re up against, what might be coming for us. I came here to get away.”
Avet touches the tip of my nose just to be cute. I hate it when he does that, and he knows it. “Which is it, brother? Do you want more information so you can involve yourself, or do you want nothing to do with any of it?”
Caught in the conundrum, I make a snap decision. “I want nothing to do with it.” Avet’s haughty smirk dies when my next words fill the air. “Which means you can’t stay here tonight. You have to leave.”
Avet’s mouth drops open. “You’re not serious.”
I shrug. “You wanted me to choose.”
Avet frowns at me as if I’ve called his clumsy crayon art ugly. “I didn’t think you’d choose wrong.”
Neither did I.
If I am being honest, I’m not sure anything Avet could say would pull me back into trapping. I chose a long time ago to walk away and have nothing to do with that life. Holding firm to my decision should have no bearing on whatever mess Avet’s gotten himself into this time.