Study Break WHO Grace Whitaker OT Any WHAT Waiting WHERE Dot's Diner WHEN Saturday, September 17, 2016 around 9:30 PM
Over the last six months or so, Grace had become a familiar face around the diner. On nights like tonight, when Jamie was working the late shift, she would often come to the diner and claim a booth near the front. By now, all of the waitresses knew her name, knew she always ordered a pot of coffee — black, and knew she was there because she and Jamie had a thing (their word, not hers) going on. She'd set up camp in her booth with her laptop and whatever assortment of books she'd managed to borrow or buy that week — tonight, she had three rather old and obscure texts she'd gotten William to help her track down — and she would study them from cover to cover, desperately trying to find information about her ongoing problem.
In the beginning, there had been a lot of leads going off of what relatively little information Bishop really knew about the ring she'd stolen, inadvertently, from Catalina, but they'd all either lead to dead-ends or simply fizzled out. Because he didn't know much, they'd had to cast a large net. Things that sounded promising early on turned out to be nothing. The scope of their search was much smaller now, and Grace had been relying on the proprietor of Obscura Books to live up to the name of his store. She needed personal accounts, the kind that were old. Potentially ancient.
With a careful touch, she flipped the page of the hand-written journal of a vampire who'd been killed in the late thirteenth century. It was written in Italian, which was why she had her laptop open to a translator, but she was mostly relying on the detailed sketches within to gauge the text's usefulness. Thus far, there was nothing that seemed related to a ring or a jewel of any sort.
Not for the first time, Grace wished they'd been able to get more information out of Isaac before he'd disappeared. He'd been so interested in taking the ring. There had to have been a reason, other than mere greed. He was a warlock, after all. It was quite possible he knew something that could have helped.
Then again, maybe she was overestimating him. He certainly hadn't seemed to know how the ring worked.
Grace lifted her mug to her lips and took a long sip of the bitter dark roast. She'd already been at the diner for almost two hours. It would be a bit longer until Jamie was done for the night...and longer still before she was. At least she was able to anticipate that feeling of being able to relax in his company. So many things had changed over the last year and a half. Not all of it was bad, and for that, she could only be grateful.
Her dark eyes scanned the few others who were in the diner. Right now, it was the lull between dinner and post-bar munchies. In another couple of hours, the traffic would pick up again, same as it did every weekend. It was funny how much it reminded her of her life back in Arcadia. In a certain sense, they'd come full circle.