Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

“I wonder,” said a golden-haired man, moving through the girls around her, all of whom hurried out of his way except Mouse and Eren, “I wonder if you would go upstairs with me and perhaps tell me a story — in private.”

Bonnie tried to swallow her gasp. Now she was the one hanging on to Mouse and Eren.

“All such requests must go through me. No one is to take a girl out of the room unless I approve,” announced a woman in a full-length dress, with a sympathetic, almost Madonna-like face. “That will be treated as theft of my mistress’s property.

And I’m sure we don’t all want to be arrested as if we’d been caught carrying off the silverware,” she said and laughed lightly.

There was equally light laughter among the guests as well, and movement toward the woman — at a sort of mannerly run.

“You tell really good stories,” Mouse said in her soft voice. “It’s more fun than using a star ball.”

“Mouse, here, is right,” Eren said, grinning. “You do tell good stories. I wonder if that place really exists.”

“Well, I got it out of a star ball,” Bonnie said. “One that the girl — um, Jill, put her memories in, I think — but then how did it get out of that tower? How did she know what happened to Jack? And I read a story about a giant dragon and that felt real too. How do they do it?”

“Oh, they trick you,” Eren said, waving a dismissive hand. “They have somebody go someplace cold for the scenery — an ogre probably, because of the weather.”

Bonnie nodded. She’d met mauve-skinned ogres before. They only differed from demons in their level of stupidity. At this level, they tended to be stupid in society, and she’d heard Damon say with a curled lip that the ones that were out of society were hired muscle. Thugs.

“And the rest they just fake somehow — I don’t know. Never really thought about it.” Eren looked up at Bonnie. “You’re an odd one, aren’t you, Bonny?”

“Am I?” Bonnie asked. She and the two other girls had revolved, without letting go of hands. This meant that there was some space behind Bonnie. She didn’t like that. But, then, she didn’t like anything about being a slave. She was starting to hyperventilate. She wanted Meredith. She wanted Elena. She wanted out of here.

“Um, you guys probably don’t want to associate with me anymore,” she said uncomfortably.

“Huh?” said Eren.

“Why?” asked Mouse.

“Because I’m running through that door. I have to get out. I have to.”

“Kid, calm down,” Eren said. “Just keep breathing.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Bonnie put her head down, to shade out some of the world. “I can’t belong to somebody. I’m going crazy.”

“Sh, Bonny, they’re—”

“I can’t stay here,” Bonnie burst out.

“Well, that’s probably all to the good,” a terrible voice, right in front of her, said.

No! Oh, God. No, no, no, no, no!

“When we’re in a new business we work hard,” the Madonna-like woman’s voice said. “We look up at prospective customers. We don’t misbehave or we are punished.” And even though her voice was sweet as pecan pie, Bonnie somehow knew that the harsh voice in the night shouting at them to find a pallet and stay on it, had been this same woman.

And now there was a strong hand under her chin and Bonnie couldn’t keep it from forcing her head up, or from covering her mouth when she screamed.

In front of her, with the delicate pointed ears of a fox, and the long sweeping black tail of a fox but otherwise looking human, looking like a regular guy wearing jeans and a sweater, was Shinichi. And in his golden eyes she could see, twisting and turning, a little scarlet flame that just matched the red on the tip of his tail and the hair that fell across his forehead.

Shinichi. He was here. Of course he could travel through the dimensions; he still had a full star ball that none of Elena’s group had ever found as well as those magical keys Elena had told Bonnie about. Bonnie remembered the horrible night when trees, actual trees, had turned into something that could understand and obey him. About how four of them each grabbed one of her arms and legs and pulled, as if they were planning to pull her apart. She could feel tears leaking out behind her shut eyelids.

And the Old Wood. He’d controlled every aspect of it, every creeper to trip you, every tree to fall in front of your car. Until Elena had blasted all but that one thicket of the Old Wood, it had been full of terrifying insect-like creatures Stefan called malach.

But now Bonnie’s hands were behind her back and she heard something fasten with a very final-sounding click.

No…oh, please no…

But her hands were definitely fixed in place. And then someone — an ogre or a vampire — picked her up as the lovely woman gave Shinichi a small key off a key ring full of identical keys. Shinichi handed this to a big ogre whose fingers were so large that they eclipsed it. And then Bonnie, who was screaming, was quickly whisked up four flights of stairs and a heavy door thunked shut behind her. The ogre carrying her followed Shinichi, whose sleek scarlet-tipped tail swung jauntily from a hole in his jeans, back and forth, back and forth. Bonnie thought: That’s satisfaction. He thinks he’s won this already.

But unless Damon really had forgotten her completely, he would hurt Shinichi for this. Maybe he would kill him. It was an oddly comforting thought. It was even roNo, it’s not romantic, you nitwit! You have to find a way to get out of this mess!

Death is not romantic, it’s horrible!

They had reached the final doors at the end of the hall. Shinichi turned right and walked all the way down a long corridor. There the ogre used the key to open a door.

The room had an adjustable overhead gaslight. It was dim but Shinichi said, “Can we have a little illumination, please?” in a false polite voice, and the other ogre hurried and turned the light up to interrogation-lamp-in-your-face level.

The room was a sort of bedroom-den combination, the kind you’d get at a decent hotel. It had a couch and some chairs on the upper level. There was a window, closed, on the left side of the room. There was also a window on the right side of the room, where all the other rooms should be in a line. This window had no curtains or blinds that could be drawn and it reflected Bonnie’s pale face back at her. She knew at once what it was, a two-way mirror, so that people in the room behind it could see into this room but not be seen. The couch and chairs were positioned to face it.

Beyond the sitting room, off to her left, was the bed. It wasn’t a very fancy bed, just white covers that looked pink, because there was a real window on that side that was almost in a line with the sun, sitting as it always was, on the horizon. Right now, Bonnie hated it more than ever before because it turned every light-colored object in the room pink, rose, or outright red. The bow at her own bodice was deep pink now. She was going to die saturated with the color of blood.

Something on some deeper level told her that her mind was thinking of such things as distractions, that even thinking about hating to die in such a juvenile color was running away from the bit in the middle, the dying bit. But the ogre holding her moved her around as if she weighed nothing, and Bonnie kept having little thoughts — were they premonitions? Oh, God, let them not be premonitions! — about going out of that red window in a sitting position, the glass no impediment to her body being thrown at a tremendous force. And how many stories up were they? High enough, anyway, that there was no hope of landing without…well, dying.

Shinichi smiled, lounging by the red window, playing with the cord to the blinds.