Day 7: Resort Town, Idaho | Late Saturday Morning FH-Time
Waking to the telephone ringing off the hook only to hear Rose was missing had started the day in an awful manner for Dimitri. He'd hardly been able to get a word in edgewise with her the night before and then she bludgeoned a guardian and run away from the resort? It didn't make sense, but he had quickly taken up a determined role in the investigation.
The first task was accompanying Janine Hathaway to town to discover exactly where the five teens had run off to. Though the thought of it chilled him to the bone, Dimitri was betting on Spokane.
When his worst glare and her sharp words had still not earned them any new information from the man attending the sales window, Dimitri and Janine had decided to return to the resort.
"What could have been going through her mind?" Janine murmured almost to herself as they made their way back to the car with zero answers.
Dimitri sighed. "I believe it was in some way my fault," he admitted, knowing that Janine and the other guardians needed all the pertinent information if they were going to find Rose and her crew of misfits. "I shared some intelligence about the mall in Spokane with Rose. That has to be where they're headed."
"You told her?" Janine snapped.
"I thought she would be capable of keeping things to herself and treating the situation like a case study for instruction. Obviously I was wrong." Very wrong. Potentially heartbreakingly wrong.
"And of course the novice thought she could go off and battle a half dozen Strigoi on her own."
"It looks bad," Dimitri agreed, worrying that this was going to end with Rose dead or worse, turned. "I hadn't expected this sort of thing from her." Especially not after their conversation the night before when Rose had seemed to finally be understanding the difficulty of their situation.
"What did you expect?" Janine asked. "Because this is exactly what I'd expect from the girl who ran away with the Dragomir princess."
To Dimitri, Rose hadn't been that girl for months. "Rose is not that girl anymore. She would come to me or you before doing something rash." But he couldn't stop thinking perhaps she hadn't felt she could trust either of them.
The thought gnawed at Dimitri. Maybe he'd been too hard on Rose this week. Maybe he'd missed some sign of her plans last night. There was nothing he could do about those possibilities now other than use every resource at his disposal to locate his novice.
"And yet she didn't," Janine pointed out. "So what's is your assessment of the situation then, Guardian Belikov?" It was obvious the younger guardian was upset about this turn of events, and Janine respected that, but - he was too promising a guardian to allow him to simply rest on his 'feelings.'
"We need to speak with Lissa. If Rose didn't trust us for whatever reason, she may have told the princess," he answered, wanting to believe that the Rose he knew would not have run off and left him no way to find her.
Janine nodded. "The Dragomir Princess may be useful in finding them," she agreed, her own formality a direct reproof to Dimitri's use of a nickname. "And if she is not? What should the next step be to recover our runaways?" Janine's questions were almost academic as if Dimitri was still a novice working through a case study.
It was clear Janine was working through her own difficulties of having a lost daughter, so Dimitri didn't take offense to her line of questions. "We go to Spokane and track them down." Perhaps Janine had forgotten it was Dimitri who found Rose and Lissa the first time. There was no question in his mind he could find her again...assuming the Guardian Council allowed it.
"The question will have to be referred to the Guardian Council and the Queen," Janine said. "With the attacks on the Badicas and the Drosdovs, I don't know if they'll authorize the division of our forces."
"Of course we would follow the proper chain of command," Dimitri answered crisply. "But with Christian Ozera and Mia Rinaldi with the novices, I believe a few of us could be allowed."
Tasha. At his own mention of the Ozera boy, Dimitri realized he would need to keep her apprised of the situation personally, comfortable or not.
Janine nodded and turned to him. "I hope so too," she admitted. "Is that you volunteering to go?"
"Yes." Wild horses, Janine, wild horses. "They will need experienced Guardians if they've located the pack of Strigoi." It was a terrifying thought.
The idea of her daughter facing experienced Strigoi made Janine swallow hard. There wasn't anyway one novice or even three could be expected to take down just one Strigoi and guard the Moroi children too. "They may need more than that if they've found that."
"We will get her back," he said, sounding completely determined despite the lack of any reassuring news or information from the guardians at the lodge entrance and the humans at the bus station.
Janine looked up way up at him, her face expressionless. "Guardian Belikov, just what is your relationship to my daughter?"
Dimitri's face was as impassive as ever, but his eyes were dark with affection for Rose as he returned her mother's gaze. "She is my student and my friend. I care deeply for your daughter."
Janine watched him for a long moment, obviously assessing the answer before she nodded and kept walking. At least it wasn't Adrian Ivashkov. "We'll get them back, Belikov," she said finally, almost under her breath.
Dimitri didn't reply that failure to find her wasn't an option he would accept. He simply followed the older guardian as they hurried back to the resort to speak with Lissa.
"I know you want to protect them, but we need to know where they are." Dimitri was having to work to retain his normal calm persona and not get frustrated as he interviewed Lissa about Rose's disappearance. Something was happening, and he feared it was his fault.
Lissa sat on the bed in the room she shared with Rose while Dimitri and Janine Hathaway stared her down, heaping onto the frustration and anxiety she already felt about her missing friends. "I told you," said Lissa, "I don't know. I don't know what happened."
"I can't believe they wouldn't have told you where they were going," said Janine. Her words sounded flat, but there were lines of worry on her face. "Especially with your...bond."
"It only works one way," said Lissa sadly. "You know that."
Dimitri knelt down so he could be at Lissa's height and look her in the eye. "Are you sure there's nothing? Nothing at all you can tell us? They're nowhere in town. The man at the bus station didn't see them...though we're pretty sure that's where they must have gone. We need something, anything to go on." Because otherwise he'd be asking the Guardian Council to trust his instincts and that just wasn't going to be enough.
Lissa gritted her teeth and glared. "Don't you think if I knew, I'd tell you? You don't think I'm worried about them too? I have no idea where they are. None. And why'd they even leave… it doesn't make any sense either. Especially why they'd go with Mia, of all people."
Dimitri sighed and leaned back on his heels, not wanting to believe that the teens had all evaporated without leaving anything other than a trail of poor decisions behind them. But it seemed he didn't have a choice. Rose was gone and he didn't know if he'd be allowed to bring her back.
[ Day 1 A B | Day 2 A B | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 A B | Day 7 A B C | Day 8 | Day 9 A B | Day 10 | NFB, NFI, OOC=♥ Preplayed with myself and the cruel guardian_born who wanted to see that first conversation.]