The basement apartment opened straight onto a relatively large living room, with a kitchenette to the right and a dark hallway in the back left corner. It looked like every college apartment I’d ever seen—which, admittedly, wasn’t very many. The carpet was worn, the furniture looked pre-owned several times over, and no attempt had been made to tidy up the place or even decorate it—unless you counted the curling poster of Van Gogh’s Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, and I would have bet money that it had come with the apartment. The whole place smelled like stale body odor and ancient Chinese takeout, which had probably come with the apartment, too.
“Wait here,” Quinn told me, and there was a blur of movement toward the back hallway, way too fast for me to follow in the dim light, although I wasn’t sure I could have followed it in the middle of a sunny field, either. Before I could even register his disappearance, he was back in the same spot. It was annoying.
“Empty,” Quinn said. “As expected.” He wandered forward.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Search.” Quinn looked around, assessing our surroundings. “There are two bedrooms at the end of the hall. You go left; I’ll go right. Then we’ll work our way back out toward the door. Look for anything that might tell us where she could be: names of friends, receipts from restaurants or hotels, that kind of thing.”
I nodded. I’d searched houses before. “Do we have gloves?” I asked. Without comment, Quinn reached into the pocket of his leather jacket, pulled out a pair of surgical gloves, and handed them to me. “Thanks.”
The bedroom on the left was small, with a double bed and a nightstand crammed into a corner, and clothes covering the remaining floor space. There was no other furniture, and the tiny doorless closet was the size of a refrigerator. Judging by the posters of naked women and all the men’s clothes strewn on the floor, Victor and Darcy had kept separate bedrooms, and this one had been his. The musty, unwashed smell was stronger in here.
Still feeling silly, I pushed my stake through my two front belt loops so I could put on the surgical gloves. Then I used a foot to push around the clothes on the floor, picking up all the pants to search the pockets. After five minutes I had found a few empty packs of cigarettes, some change and crumpled dollar bills, and a handful of receipts for gas stations and seedy bars. I kept the receipts and left the rest.
Moving to the bedside table, I opened the drawers, and was immediately grateful for the surgical gloves. It was full of dog-eared porn magazines and a couple of cheap-looking . . . uh . . . sex enhancement tools. Apparently Victor had suffered from some issues with size or stamina. Or both. Making a face, I clumsily began picking up the magazines, shaking each one out. A handful of subscription cards fluttered to the floor, but nothing useful. I went through the whole pile anyway, and at the very bottom I found my first potential clue: an old snapshot of four people leaning against a red sports car. I peered at the photo. Victor and Darcy were in there, but I didn’t recognize the other two men. The group’s clothes could have come from any number of eras, but Darcy’s haircut was a perfect copy of “the Rachel,” the style Jennifer Aniston had made popular in the nineties.
Aside from the glowing good health I’d come to associate with sated vampires, all four of them looked . . . relaxed. Happy. There was a contentedness in their body language that spoke of a long familiarity with each other.
“Find anything?” came Quinn’s voice.
I jumped and whirled on him. “Goddammit, Quinn! Stop sneaking up on me!”
He leaned in the doorway, unapologetic. “I’m a vampire, Lex. It’s what we do.”
I glared at him, but held up the photo. “I found this and a bunch of receipts.”
Quinn crossed the room in a flash, taking the photo from me. “This one is Kirby,” he said, pointing at the stranger on Victor’s left, a muscular, young-looking man with an aquiline nose and thinning black hair. Every vampire I had seen, in person or otherwise, was good-looking, but this one was on the ugly end of attractive. “The other guy I don’t know.”
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
Quinn made a face. “Well, I now know more about Darcy’s sex life than I wanted to.”
“Right there with you,” I said wryly, nodding toward the pile of porn magazines.
“Other than that knowledge, I didn’t find much,” Quinn went on. “I found a lot of receipts for the coffee shops on campus, which probably means those are Darcy’s preferred hunting ground. But I doubt she’d go to one of them if she’s on the run.”
“You checked the other rooms too?” I asked, eyebrows raised. He nodded. “What about the neighbors?” I asked. “There are what, two floors on top of this one? Do you think any of them were friendly with Victor and Darcy?”
Quinn hesitated for a second, then said, “I doubt it. We don’t socialize much with the foundings—that would be the semi-polite term for humans who have no knowledge of the Old World—but I suppose it’s worth a shot.”
“Let’s go.”
I followed Quinn back through the musty apartment. Starting at the top of the door, he began unlocking the dead bolts on the inside so we could pull the door all the way open instead of squeezing through past the hinges.
But as the last bolt slid free, there was a tremendous crack and the door rocketed inward, sending Quinn back into the living room wall, which his head struck hard enough to leave a dent two inches deep. Before I could even process what had happened, I heard Darcy’s voice. “Well, if it isn’t the skank with the weird blood, come a-calling,” she drawled. “Hello, skank.”