Chapter 210 - A Pink Rose

It was a fairly normal Thursday morning until then. I had plans for it already. My shop closed on Thursdays, and I wanted to use the free time to relax for months ahead. Eat junk food, watch some movies, lie in bed half of the day… This sort of thing.

But before that, I had to grab something for breakfast, and this was where I found the note, accompanied by a single pink rose. It was foreboding even before I read the contents.

[Diana, forgive me beforehand for notifying you with a note, and so suddenly at that, but I couldn't bear to do so otherwise. I had to leave this place—this city, even. It's only temporary, and I hope to return in a few days. A couple weeks, at most.

I imagine you would be most distraught to read all this—trust me, this brings me no joy either, but I felt like it had to be done, for both of us. There's been a lot on my mind recently, both good and bad things. So many changes. I need solitude to process them all.

Please, my dear, do not waste your time looking for me, but wait for my soon return.

—Jean-Jacques]

This, and the rose. What did pink roses meant? A single pink rose, at that. To me, it looked like a wordless reassurance, and I accepted it like that when I put the rose in a vase.

A quick check showed that JJ wasn't anywhere in the house, and an attempt to call his phone just ended with "the subscriber you have called is unavailable or has travelled outside of the coverage area. Please try your call again later". Of course, neither did any of our common friends and acquaintances had seen him since yesterday—the same day I last saw him—either.

After that, I returned to the kitchen, opened my well and took a better look at the items. Both the note and the rose had some emotional traces on them, and I forgot about food as I deciphered them. Affection, a hint of sorrow, determination…

Well, I was determined too, so a change of plans was in order. Instead of resting, I went to see Ghost.

All the way to the Nightingale headquarters, I wondered how I missed something like this in JJ. After all, this certainly wasn't something new. And why didn't he say anything before? This was so unlike him, and it made me worry. I could imagine a dozen of nefarious scenarios in which someone forces, one way or another, him to leave the note and disappear.

And who could guarantee that he'd really return when promised? What if something happened at… whenever JJ was currently at?

"I hope I didn't distract you from anything important," I started when Ghost let me into his set of rooms. A stack of printouts on the reading table and a half-empty cup of tea showed that I interrupted his reading time.

"That's fine, that's fine. Come in, sit down!" Ghost waved my concerns off with a bright smile. "I didn't expect you to come today, Diana. Did you just decide to pay a visit to your old teacher?"

"I wish, but no. Ghost, I need your help." I sat on a chair and explained to him about JJ's disappearance.

"Went away, just like that? I'm sure he'd return as he promised, but I can see why you'd worry. Is there anything I can help here?"

"If he wanted to travel stealthily, there's a bazillion of ways for him to do that, so there's no chance for me to find him just by asking people. So I thought about using magic. There are divination spells, you told me—can we find him with this?"

"Of course. That's what divination is for. But," Ghost hummed, "I'm not good at divination. Though, worse comes to worst, you can ask someone who's better! Either way, the difficulty of search varies a lot on what you have for the… ah, how to put it? You would need something that identifies Jean-Jacques to find him with divination. Like a scent, except we aren't searching for a trail, are we?"

"There wasn't much of a trail." I looked at the note in my hands again. "Some emotions, but not enough to follow."

Ghost nodded. "Yes, that would've made things much easier, wouldn't it have?"

"So what do we need to get the 'scent', as you put it?"

"Hm, that's a good question… Let me think." He went silent for a minute, nodding to himself from time to time. "Yes, I remember reading this book on vampires... It's in our library, I can even show you."

"You know, it's a wonder to me how you can forget most of your personal history and remember the entire coven's library, Ghost."

"It's a wonder to me, too! A miracle, even."

I snorted, shaking my head. "So what about vampires?"

"Right. Did you know that blood of each vampire is as unique in their aspect composition as fingerprints and DNA? It contains traces of auras of each person whose blood a vampire drank in their life, as well as these of their sire's and sire's sire's and so on. The researcher who wrote the book suggested that it's possible to look into this connection back to the original first vampire, if there was an arch-witch dedicated enough. So, if you had even a drop of Jean-Jacques blood, finding him should be easy enough even for me."

"Wow. That's amazing… But I don't have JJ's blood." Why would I, really? "Are there any other options? Maybe hair? Though, damn, he doesn't shed hair. It just stays on his head, healthy and shiny, and I'm unsure why he even puts these lotions in it…" I muttered.

"Hair would've worked too, I suppose. Without it…" Ghost gave me a long, uncharacteristically speculative look. "Did Jean-Jacques ever drink your blood, Diana?"

It was a reasonably innocent question, but it still made me blush. "Yeah…"

"Great! Then we can use it, instead."