Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

The princess had just seen them bow out of her presence when she inquired, rather irritably, where the human Damon was. Several servants with malice behind their smiles explained that he had gone with a dozen…humans…up to her bedchamber.

Jessalyn almost flew to the stairs and climbed very quickly with the gliding motion that she knew was expected of proper female vampires. She reached the Gothic doors, and heard the hushed sounds of indignant spite as her ladies-in-waiting all whispered together. But before the princess could even ask what was going on, she was engulfed in a great warm wave of scent. Not the luscious and lifesustaining scent of blood, but something lighter, sweeter, and at the moment, while her bloodlust was sated, even headier and more dizzying. She pushed open the double doors. She took a step into her bedchamber and then stopped in astonishment.

The cathedral-like black room was full of flowers. There were banks of lilies, vases full of roses, tulips in every color and shade, and riots of daffodils and narcissus, while fragrant honeysuckle and freesia lay in bowers.

The flower peddlers had converted the gloomy, conventional black room into this fanciful extravaganza. The wiser and more farsighted of M. le Princess’s retainers were actively helping them by bringing in large, ornate urns.

Damon, upon seeing Jessalyn enter the room, immediately went to kneel at her feet.

“You were gone when I woke!” the princess said crossly, and Damon smiled, very faintly.

“Forgive me, your highness. But since I am dying anyway, I thought that I should be up and securing these flowers for you. Are the colors and scents satisfactory?”

“The scents?” Jessalyn’s whole body seemed to melt. “It’s…like…an orchestra for my nose! And the colors are like nothing I’ve ever seen!” She burst into laughter, her green eyes lightening, her straight red hair a waterfall around her shoulders. Then she began to stalk Damon back into the gloom in one corner.

Damon had to control himself or he would have laughed; it was so much like a kitten stalking an autumn leaf.

But once they got into the corner, tangled in the black hangings and nowhere near a window, Jessalyn assumed a deadly serious expression.

“I’m going to have a dress made, just the color of those deep, dark purple carnations,” she whispered. “Not black.”

“Your highness will look wonderful in it,” Damon whispered in her ear. “So striking, so daring—”

“I may even wear my corsets on the inside of my dress.” She looked up at him through heavy lashes. “Or — would that be too much?”

“Nothing is too much for you, my princess,” Damon whispered back. He stopped a moment to think seriously. “The corsets — would they match the dress or be black?”

Jessalyn considered. “Same color?” she ventured.

Damon nodded, pleased. He himself wouldn’t be caught dead in any color other than black, but he was willing to put up with — even encourage — Jessalyn’s oddities.

They might get him made a vampire faster.

“I want your blood,” the princess whispered, as if to prove him right.

“Here? Now?” Damon whispered back. “In front of all your servants?”

Jessalyn surprised him then. She, who had been so timid before, stepped out of the curtains and clapped her hands for silence. It fell immediately.

“Everyone out!” she said peremptorily. “You have made me a beautiful garden in my room, and I am grateful. The steward”—she nodded toward a young man who was dressed in black, but who had wisely placed a dark red rose in his buttonhole

—“will see to it that you’re all given food — and drink — before you go!” At this there was a murmur of praise that made the princess blush.

“I’ll ring the bell pull when I need you”—to the steward.

In fact, it wasn’t until two days later that she reached up and, a little reluctantly, rang the bellpull. And that was merely to give the order that a uniform be made for Damon as quickly as possible. The uniform of captain of her guard.

By the second day, Bonnie had to turn to the star balls as her only source of entertainment. After going through her twenty-eight orbs she found that twenty-five of them were soap operas from beginning to end, and two were full of experiences so frightening and hideous that she labeled them in her own mind as Never Ever.

The last one was called Five Hundred Stories for Young Ones, and Bonnie quickly found that these immersion stories could be useful, for they specified the names of things a person would find around the house and the city. The sphere’s connecting thread was a series about a family of werewolves named the Düz-Aht-Bhi’iens.

Bonnie promptly christened them the Dustbins. The series consisted of episodes showing how the family lived each day: how they bought a new slave at the market to replace one who had died, and where they went to hunt human prey, and how Mers Dustbin played in an important bashik tournament at school.

Today the last story was almost providential. It showed little Marit Dustbin walking to a Sweetmeat Shop and getting a sugarplum. The candy cost exactly five soli.

Bonnie got to experience eating part of it with Marit, and it was good.

After reading the story, Bonnie very carefully peeked through the edge of the window blind and saw a sign on a shop below that she’d often watched. Then she held the star ball to her temple.

Yes! Exactly the same kind of sign. And she knew not only what she wanted, but how much it should cost.

She was dying to get out of her tiny room and try what she had just learned. But before her eyes, the lights in the sweetshop went dark. It must be closing time.

Bonnie threw the star ball across the room. She turned the gas lamp down to just the faintest glow, and then flung herself on her rush-filled bed, pulled the covers up…and discovered that she couldn’t sleep. Groping in ruby twilight, she found the star ball with her fingers and put it to her temple again.

Interspersed with clusters of stories about the Dustbin family’s daily adventures were fairy tales. Most of them were so gruesome that Bonnie couldn’t experience them all the way through, and when it was time to sleep, she lay shivering on her pallet. But this time the story seemed different. After the title, The Gatehouse of the Seven Kitsune Treasures, she heard a little rhyme: Amid a plain of snow and ice There lies kitsune paradise.

And close beside, forbidden pleasure: Six gates more of kitsune treasure.

The very word kitsune was frightening. But, Bonnie thought, the story might prove relevant somehow.

I can do this, she thought and put the star ball to her temple.

The story didn’t start with anything gruesome. It was about a young girl and boy kitsune who went on a quest to find the most sacred and secret of the “seven kitsune treasures,” the kitsune paradise. A treasure, Bonnie learned, could be something as small as a single gem or as large as an entire world. This one, going by the story, was in the middle range, because a “paradise” was a kind of garden, with exotic flowers blooming everywhere, and little streams bubbling down small waterfalls into clear, deep pools.

It was all wonderful, Bonnie thought, experiencing the story as if she were watching a movie all around her, but a movie that included the sensations of touch, taste, and smell. The paradise was a bit like Warm Springs, where they sometimes had picnics back at home.

In the story, the boy and girl kitsune had to go to “the top of the world” where there was some kind of fracture in the crust of the highest Dark Dimension — the one Bonnie was in right now. They managed somehow to travel down, and even farther down, and passed through various tests of courage and wit before they got into the next lowest dimension, the Nether World.