"I have to think there's a connection to our current case," Yayoi declared. Riho's first action upon discovering Shido's absence had been to call her, in case they'd begun the investigation during the early evening. Yayoi hadn't known any more than Riho, and so had come right over.
"How do you figure that?" Guni said.
"Mysterious disappearances don't grow on trees."
"Do you mean...that the night breed did this?" Riho asked hesitantly. It wasn't that she didn't understand the logic, but that she didn't want to. The idea that a breed could take Shido bodily away, without leaving evidence or alerting either Riho or Guni, was terrifying to her.
The idea of an eternity of unlife without him...
No she wouldn't think of that. Couldn't think it.
"I can't be sure, but the similarity can't be ignored."
"But Mr. Shido beat the breed last night," Riho protested. "It got away, yes, but it did lose, and it didn't even put up a serious fight. How did it get so much power, so quickly, and in the daytime besides?"
"It must have found a new host," Yayoi considered, "and not an ordinary one, either."
Guni perched on Riho's shoulder.
"A new host would give it freedom of movement," she observed, "but to be able to come here and make off with Shido?"
Yayoi sighed.
"No, it doesn't make sense, does it? Not unless the breed is a lot tougher than it looked."
"It's too bad we can't convince Shido to carry a pager or cel phone. At least then we could track him."
"Somehow, I don't think giving a government agency the ability to locate his whereabouts would be acceptable to a vampire."
Riho shivered. Yayoi had a point. She herself was a trustworthy woman–more than that–but some of her co-workers had very different motives and agendas.
"Yeah, but the last time he got himself lost he spent three days stuck at the bottom of a well. If he's going to make a habit of vanishing we need to put a leash on him."
Different people, Riho knew, reacted to trouble in different ways. When Guni got worried, she always tried to cover it with more than the usual amount of bluster. Only if she was completely terrified did she drop the attitude entirely and say what she meant. A year ago Riho wouldn't have understood that, but she–all of them, really–had been through a lot since then.
"Yes, but that was an accident of battle," Yayoi pointed out. "This is probably an enemy action."
"He's still lost, isn't he?"
"So, we have to solve the disappearances," Riho said forcefully, cutting into the debate. They both turned to look at her, surprised at her tone. "If we learn what the breed did to the other people, we'll learn what it did to Mr. Shido. And we have to find out fast, or else..."
She still couldn't say it.
-X X X-
The bells of the clock tower chimed again, eight times, eight to call the blanketing darkness and banish the last lingering thoughts of day. The Carnival was in full swing, the streets filled while elegant palazzos turned into festhalls for those restrained souls who sought only the company of their own class and did not care to go out among the masses. Though, Shido supposed, perhaps what went on behind doors and within walls was darker and more grim than the honest revels of the city. Decadent tastes and cruel pleasures were often the coin of the wealthy and titled, who had ceased to value small joys since they were so easily obtained for them.
Blighted souls, he thought, who had lost their human hearts while still living.
Again, Shido pictured the blond man in his mind's eye, the image called up by the direction of his thoughts.
Look at them, Shido. His voice was deep and rich, faintly accented. They are foolish and pathetic, caught up in their own mortality. They are like mayflies. They are born, they mate, they breed, they die. No matter how they strive, they can do nothing, for they are but specks in the eye of Time.
There was something there in the memory, something important. Shido sagged back against a nearby wall, trembling as the thoughts danced like shadows from a candle flame around his mind's edges. There was a secret to it, something implied there, something about Shido himself. He wanted to know, but he also did not, because whatever it was wasn't just important. It was also, Shido knew, frightful. Horrific.
Was this what he was seeking? This secret? More likely it was the opposite if at all, a way to avoid it. Or it might be utterly irrelevant, merely a fact of his life that had no part to play here in Carnival-time.
"Young man," a voice creaked. "Young man."
Shido's attention was pulled away from the whispers in his mind and memory.
-X X X-
"These aren't just kidnappings," Yayoi said. She had the case file spread out over the coffee table, hunting for any scrap of information, any clue to Shido's whereabouts. "In three of the incidents, the victims were seen talking to someone matching Abe's description, but only once did he apparently pick the girl up. The murders were just what they seemed, vicious killings by an evil and deranged mind, but these disappearances..."
Riho, meanwhile, was sitting at Shido's desk, her laptop logged into the NOS's criminal history database. She was attempting to cross-reference as many details of Abe's crimes and his life with past cases, in order to find some common ground. It was not an easy or rewarding task, but she kept at it with grim determination.
"I never realized how perfect a host someone like Mr. Abe would be," she said.
"Huh?" Guni flew over, curious.
"It's these results. There are so many cases from the past where his particular attributes were involved, that it's making it very slow going. For example, he was forty-two, a bachelor, and lived alone. He had no close family, no one to care for..."
"Yeah, I see what you mean. It must be pretty lonely to live like that. There'd be all kinds of unfulfilled desires, and not everyone is strong enough to accept that."
"Abe wasn't strong enough to accept much of anything wrong in his life," Yayoi snorted. "He gave himself everything money could buy."
"So why wasn't he married?" Guni asked.
"Probably he was too much of a twisted jerk, even before the night breed came along, to ever attract a woman to anything except his money, but he was smart enough to recognize the golddiggers for what they were. Not that that's all that hard, if you're not a man blinded by desire."
"So that's why Mr. Abe sought out those women."
"I guess he figured that if was just going to be paying for services, he ought to be up-front about it."
"But he was obviously unhappy. I suppose he found it easier to blame the girls he killed for his suffering, than to admit it was his own flaws that were at fault?"
"Especially when there's a night breed telling him he can have whatever he wants without compromising anything–except for giving up his soul, of course," Guni added waspishly.
"He's an art collector, too. That's a group of people that seems to be especially vulnerable."
"I wonder why that is?" Yayoi asked.
"'Cause you'd have to be crazy to spend all that cash on that junk."
Riho ignored Guni and answered seriously.
"Mr. Shido told me once that the night breeds aren't attracted by ordinary desires for money or power. It's deeper, more passionate hopes and fears, strong emotions that call to the breed. A collection isn't just pretty decorations or valuable investments, it answers something deep in the soul of the collector. They have the strength of emotion it takes to abandon your soul to the night that someone who just wants money doesn't have."
A faint smile played around Yayoi's lips as she looked at Riho.
"That's pretty insightful for someone who used to make lunch with extra garlic for a vampire."
Riho looked sheepish.
"It's just how I felt."
"No, I meant it. That's a good idea; why don't you try narrowing your search to that? You might get through things faster."
"All right." A few clicks of the mouse, a clatter of keys, and the search began again.
-X X X-
"Young man, are you all right?"
Shido opened his eyes. The woman before him was old, ancient. A wig of white hair with ornate ribbons and jewels crowned her head, with a mask depending from the forward edge to cover the upper half of her face. The skin revealed was lined and weathered by a webwork of wrinkles, and her hands, one of which clutched an ornately painted fan, were like gnarled claws of bone, or the reaching branches of a tree in winter.
"Yes, thank you," Shido said. "A memory only."
The beldame hawked and spat phlegm into the gutter.
"That for memories," she declared with surprising force. "Nasty, deceptive things they are."
He was tempted for some reason to agree with her, but some contrary impulse spoke up.
"Memories shape who we are."
"Only where you have been," she countered.
"The things we've done, the people we've known, all that is important in our lives is born from memory."
She shook her head forcefully, making her dangling ear-pendants shake and flash sparks in the torchlight.
"You are your memories, young man. You lived them once and they made you who you are. Wherever you go, whomever stands beside you, you carry your memories within you. What is more important, to be caught in a past that has come and gone, or to be able to live in the present and make the most of what you have?"
A thought came to Shido, a ghost of the past, and he realized that he'd fought this battle within himself before, decided whether memory or life, past or present was the proper path. The irony did not escape him; indeed, he relished it.
"You are right, of course," he declared, sweeping a bow over the old woman's hand and pressing a kiss to the back of it. "I cannot waste my todays in an endless search for my yesterdays. Instead, I shall make new memories to replace the old."
She smiled at him, revealing yellowed and broken teeth.
"Then do not let me detain you further, young man, but go and find what makes your Carnival."
The bells of the clock tower chimed nine times.
-X X X-
"This is almost as bad as before," Riho sighed, scrolling through another sequence of pages. "I never realized how many pieces of artwork were connected to crimes or supernatural events!"
"There certainly are a lot of them," Guni agreed.
Riho nodded, making her ponytail bob.
"It's amazing! There are haunted or cursed paintings, sculptures, poems, books, plays, musical instruments, museums, galleries, theaters, and even songs. Murders, suicides, and even non-fatal tragedies are actually common. It's kind of scary the way people act sometimes."
"People are always scary, even without the night breeds. Sometimes, I don't know what Shido sees in them."
"Guni!"
"Hey, you started it. What're you doing now?"
"Well, Mr. Abe mostly collected just paintings, so I'm narrowing the search to that. Though I might be overdoing it, if it's the fact he was a collector that attracted the breed and not anything specific." It was so easy to second-guess herself, she had so little experience in dealing with criminals or breeds. Shido might well be counting on her, and...
No. Riho couldn't waste her time like that, or his time. She's lost so much already, her family, her normal life, her hopes of growing up. She wasn't going to lose the only thing that she had left to live for. There would be no more self-doubts, no more second-guessing.
Her gaze skimmed over case-history after case-history, trying to pick out that something, that echo of similarity to the present case. Riho clicked past murders, thefts, and tragedies one after another. One disappearance case caught her eye, but it turned out to be the collector himself who'd vanished and she moved on.
Then she spotted something. It was a copy of a news magazine article from three years ago, archived on the magazine's web site. "Mad Artist's Curse Haunts Masterpiece" was the theatrical title. What caught her attention, neatly highlighted by her search engine, were the repeated references to disappearances. Pietro Montoni, a minor painter in seventeenth-century Venice, had gone mad and committed a series of grisly murders in 1687, the same year in which he painted his masterpiece, Il Carnival, his sole work to receive anything resembling critical acclaim. In addition to the killings, he had also been suspected of causing the disappearance of three persons, according to the article. In 1763, a French marquis purchased the painting upon discovering it in a private gallery, and in 1765 was executed for the killing of his wife, his daughter, and three servants. The bodies of the wife and one servant had never been found. The marquis' heir fled the guillotine to England with some of the family's treasures, and sold the painting to a Birmingham mill owner. Two generations later, another tragedy occurred. A further incident took place in 1954. The painting eventually made its way to Japan, as one of the art investments involved in the political funding scandals of the early 1990s..
"Ms. Yayoi, have you ever heard of a painting called Il Carnival?" she asked.
"I connection with the case? Let me see." She shuffled through her papers, then ran her fingertip down a list of Abe's holdings.
"Il Carnival, 1687, by Pietro Montoni?"
"Yes, that's it! Mr. Abe owned it?"
"He bought it last year from a politician's estate auction. Why?"
Riho read out the key details from the article. She was only halfway through when Yayoi got up, crossed the room, and began looking over her shoulder. Eventually, Riho scrolled the page back up to where an image of the painting was shown. Yayoi grabbed her shoulder.
"This? This is that Il Carnival?"
"Yes, I–"
"Come on, Riho; we need to get out to Abe's house. I think you're on to something!"