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Inside the house, everything was neat as a pin. Which was one of those sayings, like “happy as a clam,” that he wasn’t sure he understood. Were pins neat? Could they be messy?
Had clams really been properly assessed for depressive episodes?
Whatever, the counters were free of clutter, no dirty plates in the sink, no pans in the drying rack. The subtle whirring noise suggested the dishwasher was running, or maybe there was a washer going somewhere.
“Hello?” he called out.
No answer. So he went over to the cellar door. Like all vampire homes of this ilk, the sleeping quarters were down below and there was another code he had to put in. When he got two of the numbers mixed up, he had to reenter the sequence before he heard the dead bolt retract.
Finally. Light.
As he opened up the steel door, he was relieved by the illumination and thought it was funny how a ceiling fixture could elevate your mood. Of course, it was artificial optimism: In the same way a dark room could be perfectly safe, he knew that just because you could see didn’t mean the boogeyman wasn’t waiting for you around the corner.
You did have a better chance of defending yourself, though.
“Nate?”
He was halfway down the carpeted stairs when he got a sickening feeling in his gut—and as he reached the bottom and stepped off into the lower living area, he figured out what it was.
Gunmetal.
He smelled gunmetal.
Cranking his head to the left, he looked down the hall. Nate’s bedroom was the first one and the door was closed.
“My man,” he said loudly. “Whatcha doing?”
As he headed across the living room carpet, he sniffed the air some more. Definitely… a gun. Maybe it was Murhder getting ready for the night? That had to be it, right? The Brother was always armed when he left the house, and that meant making sure his weapons were in working order and in their holsters.
“Nate?”
At the closed panel, he knuckled up and rapped. “Nate.”
Putting his hand out, he watched from a distance as he gripped the knob. “I’m coming in. Right… now.”
Shuli threw the door wide and braced himself for—
“Nate?”
Stupid question. The navy blue room was relatively small, and the guy wasn’t in it. Not unless he was hiding in the closet: The big bed, which was required for Nate’s size, was pushed flush into the corner, so there was no “other side” for him to be on the floor behind. The dresser was shallow—not the kind of thing someone like Nate could play hide-and-seek with. Same with the desk. And as for the closet?
Shuli went over and pushed the slider aside to reveal the t-shirts and sweatshirts and the lonely button-down hanging on plastic hangers.
Nate hated bureaus for some reason. Said he liked to see his clothes all at once or he didn’t know what he had to pick from.
“As if there’s a huge difference,” Shuli muttered.
Just as he turned away, he saw the cell phone. It was sitting on the bedside table, next to the pillows that were set up neatly against the headboard.
With a fresh shot of dread, Shuli stepped back out of the room and looked farther down the narrow corridor.
As he breathed in through his nose, he caught the scent of his friend, although it was impossible to know whether it was from the bedroom or if the guy had really just gone through the hall.
“Nate?”
Continuing on, he passed by a couple of other closed doors that he’d always assumed were guest rooms because Nate’s parents’ master suite was down at the other end. And then he came to a flimsy pair of folding panels. Separating them, he exposed a vault-like portal made of reinforced steel.
His hand shook as he entered the code, and when the lock released, there was a hiss and a shift. Pulling the heavy weight wide, he got a clear view into the escape tunnel thanks to the banks of fluorescent lights in the low ceiling. Breathing in deep, he smelled fresh drywall—and the fabric softener Nate used on his clothes.
Later, he would wonder why he stopped calling his friend’s name.
Moving silently, he tracked the laundry scent and noted that fresh air had mixed with it. He couldn’t really find any more of that gunmetal smell, and he told himself that it was all fine. Nate had just forgotten his phone, not left it behind intentionally. Nate was just leaving out the back way of the house, after having made sure his parents were gone for the night, for no particular reason. Nate was totally not depressed because of the female he’d lost, even though he’d never actually had her.
It was all… fine.
Shuli repeated the pep talk to himself as he went down the two-hundred-yard-long chute—and somewhere along the way, he realized he’d only come here once, back when he and Nate had first started hanging out. They’d met on a construction job, Nate working because he needed money, Shuli because his sire had determined that character building was the new black.
