Page 69 of Saint of the Shadows

“Is he here?” Marisol jostled him and entered his apartment.

“Come in. Make yourself at home.” Tobias slammed the door behind him. He poked his head in a darkened doorway of his bathroom and spat. “He isn’t here,” he added as he zipped the fly of his jeans.

“Then I need your help.”

“I haven’t seen our friend since last night. Right after I saw you.” Tobias breezed past Marisol. She picked up his scent. No artificial pine aftershave this time. He reeked of sweat and stale alcohol, the smell of a rough night.

He picked up an empty pizza box off a bizarre, makeshift table made of particleboard and a stack of cement blocks. In his other arm, he collected multiple empty bottles—beers and a pint of whiskey—and moved to the small galley kitchen, where he put them in an unlined trash can. They landed with the piercingclank!of glass falling on glass. The inside of the trash can must’ve brimmed with empties. He placed the pizza box on the half-closed lid.

There wasn’t much more to Tobias’s apartment. A worn recliner sagged in Tobias-like shapes. A television, perched on another particleboard-and-cement-block construct, asked Are You Still Watching? He walked back to the living room, switched the television off, and tossed the remote onto his chair. “There’s this crazy invention where you can call to say you’re coming over at seven a.m.”

“Sorry. I can’t shake a bad feeling. I last saw him at midnight. When he said, ‘I l-’” The words caught in her throat. “But he hasn’t returned, and I found his abandoned motorcycle in the alleyway this morning instead.” Then she muttered, “Rather, his motorcycle found me.”

”This might come to you as a shock, but men can be full of shit.”

Marisol scoffed. It would be improper to draw a diagram of last night’s rooftop activities. But… “That is not the case.”

“Why? A guy never ghosted you?”

A guy never said he loved her, so she said, “He wouldn’t do that to me.” Her puffed-up insistence was more for quieting her doubts than defending Vincent’s honor.

But like a dog or a bee, she sensed that Tobias smelled her fear. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and said, “I know what’s going on.” He leaned until his lips hovered over her ear. “You’re dick drunk.” And he laughed at her.

What the ever-loving fuck? Marisol shoved him away and bound to the door. “If you’re going to be a pig…”

“That wasn’t a denial. What is going on with you two?” His question landed like an attack, and she barely had time to raise her fists.

She swallowed. Time to declare the truth. “We’re... seeing each other. It’s serious.” That wouldn’t be enough to get her off the ropes. She’d have to match blow for blow. “What’s going on with you two?”

Tobias waggled his eyebrows. “He didn’t exactly bend me over a cop car and take me, but I’m tempted to say ‘It’s serious’ just to watch how you squirm.”

She made a concerted effort to stay still. “Don’t be mean.”

He spoke through a yawn of lazily articulated consonants. “Have you checked his last-known whereabouts? You said your apartment. What about his place of residence? You know where that is, don’t you? Because you’re serious?”

“Like I said, bad feeling. His motorcycle brought me here first.”

“Following your feminine intuition.” He snorted a laugh and staggered back into the chair.

The attitude. His rough scent. The bottles. His lack of balance. It was like Dad at his worst. “Are you drunk?”

He smacked his lips and looked at her, blinking slowly, with one eyelid out of sync with the other. “I’m... not always like this.”

She cocked her head, sensing a half-truth. “Just sometimes?”

Suddenly hoarse, he said, “Too many times.”

Her sinuses burned, reliving those anxious moments when things became too unpredictable in the Novotny household thanks to Dad and the bottle.

Tobias inhaled and squeezed the bridge of his nose. In that single breath, he rattled off, “You can’t file a missing person’s report for him. It would compromise his identity. Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to send a couple of beat cops in the direction of our missing friend. That would lead to more problems.” He scratched at his stubble. “One of those problems being the Bloodsucker, I’m guessing.”

A spinneret of hope pulled her step-by-step from the doorway. “Yes.”

“What you have, kid, is a conundrum.” He cranked up the leg rest, the delicate spinneret destroyed.

“You won’t help me?”

He shut his eyes and rolled to his side. “I can’t help you. I don’t have a badge. I don’t have a gun. I’m as useful as a screen door on a submarine.”

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