Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

“I don’t even know what you want from me!” Bonnie found herself saying to Shinichi. “I’ve never been able to hurt you. It was you hurting other people — like me! — all the time.”

“Well, there were your friends,” murmured Shinichi. “Although I seldom wreak my dread revenge against lovely young women with red-gold hair.” He lounged beside the window and examined her, murmuring, “Hair of red-gold; heart true and bold.

Perhaps a scold…”

Bonnie felt like screaming. Didn’t he remember her? He certainly seemed to have remembered their group, since he’d mentioned revenge. “What do you want?” she gasped.

“You are a hindrance, I’m afraid. And I find you very suspicious — and delicious.

Young women with red-gold hair are always so elusive.”

Bonnie couldn’t find anything to say. From everything she’d seen, Shinichi was a nutcase. But a very dangerous psychopathic nutcase. And all he enjoyed was destroying things.

In just one moment there could be a crash through the window — and then she’d be sitting on air. And then the fall would begin. What would that feel like? Or would she already be falling? She only hoped that at the bottom it was quick.

“You seem to have learned a lot about my people,” Shinichi said. “More than most.”

“Please,” Bonnie said desperately. “If it’s about the story — all I know about kitsune is that you’re destroying my town. And—” She stopped short, realizing that she could never let him know what had happened in her out-of-body experience. So she could never mention the jars or he’d know that they knew how to catch him.

“And you won’t stop,” she finished lamely.

“And yet you found an ancient star ball with stories about our legendary treasures.”

“About what? You mean from that kiddy star ball? Look, if you’ll just leave me alone I’ll give it to you.” She knew exactly where she’d left it, too, right beside her sorry excuse for a pillow.

“Oh, we’ll leave you alone…in time, I assure you,” Shinichi said with an unnerving smile. He had a smile like Damon’s, which wasn’t meant to say “Hello; I won’t hurt you.” It was more like “Hullo! Here’s my lunch!”

“I find it…curious,” Shinichi went on, still fiddling with the cord. “Very curious that just in the middle of our little dispute, you arrive here in the Dark Dimension again, alone, apparently without fear, and manage to bargain for a star ball. An orb that just happens to detail the location of our most priceless treasures that were stolen from us…a long, long time ago.”

You don’t care about anybody but yourself, Bonnie thought. You’re suddenly acting all patriotic and stuff, but in Fell’s Church you didn’t pretend to care about anything but hurting people.

“In your little town, as in other towns throughout history, I had orders to do what I did,” Shinichi said, and Bonnie’s heart plunged right down to her shoes. He was telepathic. He knew what she was thinking. He’d heard her thinking about the jars.

Shinichi smirked. “Little towns like the one on Unmei no Shima have to be wiped off the face of the earth,” he said. “Did you see the number of ley lines of Power under it?” Another smirk. “But of course you weren’t really there, so you probably didn’t.”

“If you can tell what I’m thinking, you know that story about treasures was just a story,” Bonnie said. “It was in the star ball called Five Hundred Stories for Young Ones. It’s not real.”

“How strange then that it coincides so exactly with what the Seven Kitsune Gates are supposed to have behind them.”

“It was in the middle of a bunch of stories about the — the Düz-Aht-Bhi’iens. I mean the story right before it was about a kid buying candy,” Bonnie said. “So why don’t you just go get the star ball instead of trying to scare me?” Her voice was beginning to tremble. “It’s at the inn right across the street from the shop where I was — arrested. Just go and get it!”

“Of course we’ve tried that,” Shinichi said impatiently. “The landlady was quite cooperative after we gave her some…compensation. There is no such story in that star ball.”

“That’s not possible!” Bonnie said. “Where did I get it, then?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

Stomach fluttering, Bonnie said, “How many star balls did you look at in that brown room?”

Shinichi’s eyes went blurry briefly. Bonnie tried to listen, but he was obviously speaking telepathically to someone close, on a tight frequency.

Finally he said, “Twenty-eight star balls, exactly.”

Bonnie felt as if she’d been clubbed. She wasn’t going crazy — she wasn’t. She’d experienced that story. She knew every fissure in every rock, every shadow in the snow. The only answers were that the real star ball had been stolen, or — or maybe that they hadn’t looked hard enough at the ones they had.

“The story is there,” she insisted. “Right before it is the story about little Marit going to a—”

“We probed the table of contents. There is the story about a child and”—he looked scornful—“a sweetshop. But not the other.”

Bonnie just shook her head. “I swear I’m telling the truth.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why does it matter? How could I make something like that up? And why would I tell a story I knew would get me in trouble? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Shinichi stared at her hard. Then he shrugged, his ears flat against his head.

“What a pity you keep saying that.”

Suddenly Bonnie’s heart was pounding in her chest, in her tight throat. “Why?”

“Because,” Shinichi said coolly, pulling the blinds completely open so that Bonnie was abruptly drenched in the color of fresh blood, “I’m afraid that now we have to kill you.”

The ogre holding her strode toward the window. Bonnie screamed. In places like this, she knew screams went unheard.

She didn’t know what else to do.

Meredith and Matt were sitting at the breakfast table, which seemed sadly empty without Bonnie. It was amazing how much space that slight body had seemed to fill, and how much more serious everyone was without her. Meredith knew that if Elena had done her best, she could have offset it. But she also knew that Elena had one thing on her mind above all others, and that was Stefan, who was stricken with guilt for allowing his brother to abduct Bonnie. And meanwhile Meredith knew that both she and Matt were feeling guilty too, because today they would be leaving the other three, even if only for the evening. They each had been summoned home by parents who demanded to see them for dinner.

Mrs. Flowers clearly didn’t want them to feel too badly. “With the help you’ve given, I can make our urns,” she said. “Since Matt has found my wheel—”

“I didn’t exactly find it,” Matt said under his breath. “It was there in the storage room all the time and it fell on me.”

“—and since Meredith has received her pictures — along, I’m sure, with an email from Mr. Saltzman — perhaps she could get them enlarged or whatever.”

“Of course, and show them to the Saitous, too, to make sure that the symbols say the things we want them to,” Meredith promised. “And Bonnie can—” She broke off short. Idiot! She was an idiot, she thought. And, as a hunter-slayer, she was supposed to be clear-minded and at all times maintain control. She felt terrible when she looked at Matt and saw the naked pain in his face.

“Dear Bonnie will surely be home soon,” Mrs. Flowers finished for her.

And we all know that’s a lie, and I don’t have to be psychic to detect it, Meredith thought. She noticed that Mrs. Flowers hadn’t weighed in with anything from Mama.