Boone looked at the jacket, slung over the armchair in his charm room, and heaved a sigh of frustration. He didn’t know why now of all times, he chose to interfere. To step up and take a role in the life of someone he didn’t think he knew. What if the guy just told him off, or figured Boone had swiped the jacket? There was no telling, but there it was. Taunting him.

He’d found the worn leather motorcycle jacket left behind on a bar stool last night at the Hair of the Dog, but he’d had no indication of who’d left it. It was the sort of thing that had to be sentimental, though, so before some no-integrity bar scoundrel found a free nice coat, he picked it up and brought it home. He figured he could manage to find whoever it belonged to on his own, but that hadn’t been going so well. Since the previous night, he’d slid the jacket on himself a total of three times, and not only were the results unhelpful, but also uncomfortable. There was blood soaked into this hide, and the salt of the sea, and the sweat of strange men--though of course, the jacket was well-tended and showed no signs of the life it had seen.

Though they did little to bring him closer to the owner’s identity, the things he saw, tasted, and heard, did give him a couple of significant clues. One of which was that the man he was looking for was a vampire. That didn’t do much to faze him, but in Hollow Grove, it left a large pool of candidates. He had yet to see anything set in a place he recognized, so this was clearly someone from out of town, though Boone found himself wishing that he could catch just a glimpse of what the wearer had gotten up to recently. Finally, he resolved to try again, and strolled over to the chair to pick up the jacket, swiftly putting it on. 

This time, the room he saw when he opened his eyes had a familiarity he could hold onto. The place was unkempt, random articles of clothing and discarded food containers were among the clutter strewn across the floor and the table. But the wallpaper was a dead giveaway--it had to be the inn. But this wasn’t Jacket Guy’s room, it was the other man’s room. His face wasn’t clear, and his voice was filtered and distorted, like cotton packed into Boone’s ears. Those things weren’t what he was meant to receive, he understood that with perfect clarity as soon as he found himself feeling instead. Somehow, it was worse than the blood, worse than the dull ache of nothingness that swelled in the pit of his stomach before, and Boone could only take a few seconds of it before he shrugged the jacket off and tossed it back into the chair. The jacket wasn’t the only thing that was lost, here. The helplessness, the bitterness, the frustration, it all surged so suddenly that it tied his gut into angry, confused knots.

After a break, and a couple drinks to come down, he determinedly tried again, and this time he got a name, a face. The man seemed to be friendly with a woman who worked at the bar, a werewolf he’d started seeing a few months back. This was good, since he could come to her in public. Showing up at the hotel wasn’t going to help without more details. Though the woman acted a bit stilted when he stopped in to ask about the man, she knew who he was, and where to find him. Same hotel, different room, and she didn’t seem bothered telling a strange witch how to track him down. Granted, it was hard not to believe Boone had something to give back to this Lachlan guy when he literally had the man’s coat on his arm.