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“We don’t know,” Doug jumped in, as though to prevent Saber from saying anything further.
“So, you haven’t made any wild,crazyguesses? Haven’t come up with any absurd,impossibletheories?”
They both looked at him, Saber feeling like she’d gone white.
Heknewsomething.
“Like what?” she asked, but her voice cracked.
“Like, I don’t know…vampires?”
Saber and Doug stared at him, unblinking, not speaking.
He made that deep-throated laugh-sound again.
“This is ridiculous. Fuckingridiculous,” he said. “I have to get back to work.”
Then he got up and walked away from the table.
For the second time that day, Saber chased after him, this time with her phone number scribbled on a napkin from the café. She caught him just as he got to his old Volvo.
“Just,” she said, breathing fast. “Look, we’re not crazy, we don’t know what to believe, but I’ve seen some things. Please just text me, ok? If you see anything else or just want to talk again?”
Elijah looked down at the napkin, then shoved it in his coat pocket.
“Will do,” he said, then smoothly unlocked his car door, ducked inside, started it, and drove away in what seemed like one fluid, efficient motion.
“Strange guy,” Doug said, strolling up next to Saber.
“You’re not kidding. I couldn’t tell if he was insanely anxious or just absolutely hated people in general.”
Doug laughed a little.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Well, I’m hungry and after that, I don’t know. We hit the two stops I wanted to hit.”
“I have one more,” Saber said. “The library.”
After lunch at a Thai restaurant, on the way home, they swung by the Bainbridge Island Public Library. Saber got a membership, then cleaned them out of books about the occult, and fictional books about vampires, everything from Stephen King and Bram Stoker to Anne Rice.
“Twilight?” Doug said, looking at her stack.
“Apparently it’s a book about a girl who moves to Washington to live with her dad and discovers vampires.”
“Huh,” he said with laugh. “So a kind of biography then?”
Back home, Saber spent the remaining hours of the afternoon reading, not that it did any good. The rules for vampires changed from book to book, and the occult books were new age and silly. She wondered where a person might findseriousbooks about things like vampires, if they even existed.
Lozen came over that night and was, at first, in a sullen mood as they started going over homework.
“Did you hear about Laurel?” she finally asked. “They found her.”
Saber looked up, her face completely still. She didn’t know what to say.
“Uh…”
“You already knew,” Lozen said. “How did you know, if you weren’t at school today?”
