Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

He liked it a lot.

There was an enormous bed with more billowing filmy black curtains almost encasing it. The only way to approach it was from the foot, where the diaphanous curtains were thinner.

Standing there in the cathedral-like silence of the great chamber, Damon looked at the slight figure under the black silk sheets, among dozens of small throw pillows.

She was a jewel like the castle. Delicate bones. A look of utter innocence as she slept. An ethereal river of fine, scarlet hair spilling about her. He could see individual hairs straying on the black sheets. She looked a little like Bonnie.

Damon was pleased.

He pulled out the same knife he had put to Elena’s throat, and just for a moment hesitated — but no, this was no time to be thinking of Elena’s golden warmth.

Everything depended on this fragile-shouldered child in front of him. He put the point of the knife to his chest, deliberately placing it wide of his heart in case some blood had to be spilled…and coughed.

Nothing happened. The princess, who was wearing a black negligee that showed frail-looking arms as fine and pale as porcelain, went on sleeping. Damon noticed that the nails on her small fingers were lacquered the exact scarlet of her hair.

The two large pillar candles set in tall black stands were giving off an enticing perfume, as well as being clocks — the farther down they burned, the easier to tell time. The lighting was perfect — everything was perfect — except that Jessalyn was still asleep.

Damon coughed again, loudly — and bumped the bed.

The princess woke, starting up and simultaneously bringing two sheathed blades out of her hair.

“Who is it? Is someone there?” She was looking in every direction but the right one.

“It’s only me, your highness.” Damon pitched his voice low, but fraught with unrequited need. “You don’t have to be afraid,” he added, now that she’d at last gotten the right direction and seen him. He knelt by the foot of her bed.

He’d miscalculated a bit. The bed was so large and high that his chest and the knife were far below Jessalyn’s line of sight.

“Here I will take my life,” he announced, very loudly to make sure that Jessalyn was keeping up with the program.

After a moment or two the princess’s head popped up over the foot of the bed.

She balanced herself with hands spread wide and narrow shoulders hunched close to her. At this distance he could see that her eyes were green — a complicated green consisting of many different rings and speckles.

At first she just hissed at him and lifted her knives held in hands whose fingers were tipped with nails of scarlet. Damon bore with her. She would learn in time that all this wasn’t really necessary; that in fact it had gone out of fashion in the real world decades ago and was only kept alive by pulp fiction and old movies.

“Here at your feet I slay myself,” he said again, to make sure she didn’t miss a syllable, or the entire point, for that matter.

“You — yourself?” She was suspicious. “Who are you? How did you get here?

Why would you do such a thing?”

“I got here through the road of my madness. I did it out of what I know is madness I can no longer live with.”

“What madness? And are you going to do it now?” the princess asked with interest. “Because if you’re not, I’ll have to call my guards and — wait a minute,” she interrupted herself.

She grabbed his knife before he could stop her and licked it. “This is a metal blade,” she told him, tossing it back.

“I know.” Damon let his head fall so that hair curtained his eyes and said painfully: “I am…a human, your highness.”

He was covertly watching through his lashes and he saw that Jessalyn brightened up. “I thought you were just some weak, useless vampire,” she said absently. “But now that I look at you…” A rose petal of a pink tongue came out and licked her lips. “There’s no point in wasting the good stuff, is there?”

She was like Bonnie. She said exactly what she thought, when she thought it.

Something inside Damon wanted to laugh.

He stood again, looking at the girl on the bed with all the fire and passion of which he was capable — and felt that it wasn’t enough. Thinking about the real Bonnie, alone and unhappy, was…well, passion-quenching. But what else could he do?

Suddenly he knew what he could do. Before, when he’d stopped himself from thinking of Elena, he had cut off any genuine passion or desire. But he was doing this for Elena, as much as for himself. Elena couldn’t be his Princess of Darkness if he couldn’t be her Prince.

This time, when he looked down at M. le Princess, it was differently. He could feel the atmosphere change.

“Highness, I have no right even to speak to you,” he said, deliberately putting one booted foot on the metal scrollwork that formed the frame of the bed. “You know as well as I that you can kill me with a single blow…say, here”—pointing to a spot on his jaw—“but you have already slain me—” Jessalyn looked confused, but waited.

“—with love. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you. You could break my neck, or — as I would say if I were permitted to touch your perfumed white handyou could curl those fingers around my throat and strangle me. I beg you to do it.”

Jessalyn was beginning to look puzzled but excited. Blushing, she held out one small hand to Damon, but clearly without any intention of strangling him.

“Please, you must,” Damon said earnestly, never taking his eyes off hers. “That is the only thing I ask of you: that you kill me yourself instead of calling your guards so that the last sight I see will be your beautiful face.”

“You’re ill,” Jessalyn decided, still looking flustered. “There have been other unbalanced minds who have made their way past the first wall of my castlealthough never to my chambers. I’ll give you to the doctors so that they can make you well.”

“Please,” said Damon, who had forged his way through the last of the filmy black hangings and was now looming over the sitting princess. “Grant me instant death, rather than leaving me to die a little each day. You don’t know what I’ve done. I can’t stop dreaming of you. I’ve followed you from shop to shop when you went out. I am already dying now as you ravish me with your nobility and radiance, knowing that I am no more than the paving stones you walk on. No doctor can change that.”

Jessalyn was clearly considering. Obviously, no one had ever talked to her like this.

Her green eyes fixed on his lips, the lower of which was still bleeding. Damon gave an indifferent little laugh and said, “One of your guards caught me and very properly tried to kill me before I could reach you and disturb your sleep. I’m afraid I had to kill him to get here,” he said, standing between one pillar candle and the girl on the bed so that his shadow was thrown over her.

Jessalyn’s eyes widened in approval even as the rest of her seemed more fragile than ever. “It’s still bleeding,” she whispered. “I could—”

“You can do anything you want,” Damon encouraged her with a wry quirk of a smile on his lips. It was true. She could.

“Then come here.” She thumped a place by the nearest pillow on the bed. “What are you called?”

“Damon,” he said as he stripped off his jacket and lay down, chin propped on one elbow, with the air of one not unused to such things.

“Just that? Damon?”

“You can cut it still shorter. I am nothing but Shame now,” he replied, taking another minute to think of Elena and to hold Jessalyn’s eyes hypnotically. “I was a vampire — a powerful and proud one — on Earth — but I was tricked by a kitsune…”