by L. J. Smith
Damon pressed his tongue against a canine and felt the prompt rewarding sharpness and length. He really wanted to try out those legendary Black Ops vs. vampires programs. He wanted to hunt, period. Of course, there was so much Black Magic wine about the place that when he stopped a male servant and asked for some, the servant had brought a magnum. Damon had been having flutes every now and then, but what he really wanted was to go hunting. And not to hunt a slave and certainly not an animal, and it hardly seemed fair to wander the streets on the chance that there was a noblewoman to get to know better.
It was at that moment that he remembered Bonnie.
In a matter of three more minutes he had everything he needed to do wrapped up, including the annual delivery of dozens of roses to the princess in his name. Jessalyn had given him a very liberal allowance, and already advanced for the first month.
In a matter of five minutes he was flying, though that was very bad manners on the street, and doubly so in a market district.
In a matter of fifteen minutes he had his hands around the landlady’s neck, the one whom he had paid very well to make sure that exactly what had happened never happened.
In sixteen minutes, the landlady was grimly offering him the life of her young and not very intelligent slave as recompense. He was still wearing his captain of guard suit. He could have the boy to kill, to torture, whatever…he could have the money back…
“I don’t want your filthy slave,” he snarled. “I want my own back! She’s worth…” Here he came to a stop, trying to calculate how many ordinary girls Bonnie was worth. A hundred? A thousand? “She is worth infinitely more—” he began, when the landlady surprised him by interrupting.
“Why’d you leave her in a dump like this, then?” she said. “Oh, yes, I know what my own lodgings are like. If she was so damn precious, why’d you leave her here?”
Why had he left her in this place? Damon couldn’t think now. He’d been panicked, half out of his mind—that was what being human had done to him. He’d been thinking only about himself, while little Bonnie—fragile Bonnie, his little redbird—had been shut up in this filthy place. He didn’t want to keep thinking about it. It made him feel searing hot and icy cold at once.
He demanded that a search be made of all the neighborhood buildings. Someone had to have seen something.
Bonnie had been awakened too early and parted from Eren and Mouse. She immediately had an urge to lose control, to have a breakdown at once. She was shivering all over. Damon! Help me!
Then she saw a girl who couldn’t seem to get up off her pallet and saw a woman with arms like a man’s go over with a white ash rod to administer punishment.
And then something seemed to go blank in Bonnie’s mind. Elena or Meredith might have tried to stop the woman, or even this huge machine they were caught in, but Bonnie couldn’t. The only thing she could do was try not to have a breakdown. She had a song stuck in her head, not even a song she liked, but it repeated endlessly over and over as the slaves around her were dehumanized, broken into mechanical, but clean, mindless bodies.
She was being scrubbed mercilessly by two muscular women whose whole life doubtless consisted of scrubbing grimy street girls into pink cleanliness—at least for a night. But finally her protests led the women to actually look at her—with her fair, almost translucent skin scrubbed raw—and concentrate instead on washing her hair, which felt as if it were being pulled out at the roots. Finally, though, she was done and was given an adequate towel with which to dry off. Next, in what she was realizing was a giant assembly line, were kinder plump women who stripped off the towel and proceeded to put her on a couch and massage her with oil. Just when she was starting to feel better she was hustled up to have the oil removed, except that which had soaked into her skin. Women then appeared who measured her, calling out the numbers as they did, and by the time Bonnie had tramped to the wardrobe station, three dresses were waiting for her on a bar. There was a black one, a green one, and a gray one.
I’ll get the green for sure because of my hair, Bonnie thought blankly, but after she had tried all three on, a woman took the green and gray away, leaving Bonnie in a little black bubble dress, strapless, with a glittery touch of white material at the neck.
Next was a giant sanitary room, where her dress was carefully covered with a white paper robe that kept ripping. She was led to a chair with a hair dryer and the rudiments of makeup, which a white-shirted woman used to put too much on Bonnie’s face. Then the hair dryer was swung over her head, and Bonnie, with a stolen tissue, took off as much makeup as she dared. She didn’t want to look good, didn’t want to be sold. When she finished she had silvery eyelids, a touch of blush, and velvety rose-red lipstick that wouldn’t wipe off.
After that she just sat and finger-combed her hair until it was dry, which the ancient machine announced with a ping.
The next station was a bit like the day after Thanksgiving at a big shoe store. The stronger or more determined girls managed to wrench shoes away from their weaker sisters and jammed them on one foot, only to start the process again the next minute. Bonnie was lucky. She saw a tiny black shoe that had a faintly silvery bow coming down the ramp and kept her eye on it while it passed from girl to girl until someone dropped it and then she swooped in and tried it on. She didn’t know what she would have done if it hadn’t fit. But it did fit, and she went to the next station to get its mate. As she sat waiting, other girls were trying on perfume. Bonnie saw two entire bottles go down the bodices of girls and wondered if they meant to sell them or try to poison themselves with them. There were also flowers. Bonnie was already dizzy with perfume and had decided not to wear any, but a tall woman bellowed over her head and a garland of freesia was pinned to frame her curls, without anyone asking her permission.
The last station was the hardest to bear. She had on no jewelry and would have worn only one bracelet with the dress. But she was given two: slim unbreakable plastic bracelets, each with a number on it—her identity from now on, she was told.
Slave bracelets. She had now been washed, packaged, and stamped, so that she could be conveniently sold.
Damon! she cried voicelessly, but something had died inside her, and she knew now that her calls would not be answered.
“She was picked up as a runaway slave and confiscated,” the sweetshop man told Damon impatiently. “And that’s all I know.”
Damon was left with a feeling he didn’t often have. Sickening terror. He was really beginning to believe that this time he had cut it too fine; that he would be too late to save his redbird. That any of several dreadful scenarios might have played out before he got to her.
He couldn’t stand to visualize them in detail. What he would do if he didn’t find her in time…
He reached out and without the slightest effort gripped the sweetshop man around the throat, lifting him off the floor.
“We need to have a little chat,” he said, turning the full force of his menacing dark eyes on the bulging ones of his prey. “About just how she got confiscated. Don’t struggle. If you haven’t hurt the girl, you’ve got nothing to fear. If you have…”
He pulled the terrified man completely across the counter and said very softly, “If you have, then, by all means struggle. It won’t make any difference in the end—if you know what I mean?”
The girls were put into the largest carriages Bonnie had yet seen in the Dark Dimension, three slim girls to a seat and two sets of seats in a carriage. She got a nasty jolt, though, when instead of going forward like a carriage, the whole thing was lifted straight up by sweaty male slaves straining at poles. It was a giant litter and Bonnie immediately snatched off her freesia garland and buried her nose in it. It had the added function of hiding her tears.
“Do you have any idea of how many homes and dancing rooms and halls and theaters there are where girls are being sold tonight?” The golden-haired Guardian looked at him sardonically.
“If I knew that,” Damon said with a col
d and ominous smile, “I wouldn’t be here asking you.”
The Guardian shrugged. “Our job is really only to try to keep the peace here—and you can see how well we succeed. It’s a matter of too few of us; we’re insanely understaffed. But I can give you a list of the venues where girls are being sold. Still, as I said, I doubt you’ll be able to find your runaway before morning. And by the way, we’ll have an eye on you, because of your little query. If your runaway wasn’t a slave, she’s Imperial property—no humans are free here. If she was, and you freed her, as reported by the baker across the street—”
“Sweet-seller.”
“Whatever. Then he had a right to use a stun gun when she ran. Better for her, really, than being Imperial property; they tend to char, if you get my drift. That level’s a long way down.”
“But if she was a slave—my slave…”
“Then you can have her. But there’s a certain mandatory punishment set before you can have her. We want to discourage this kind of thing.”
Damon looked at her with eyes that made her shrink and look away, abruptly losing her authority. “Why?” he demanded. “I thought you claimed to be from the other Court. You know. The Celestial one?”
“We want to discourage runaways because there’ve been so many since some girl named Alianna came around,” the Guardian said, her frightened pulse visible in her temple. “And then they get caught and have even more reason to try it again…and it wears out the girl, eventually.”
There was no one in the Great Hall when Bonnie and the others were hustled off the giant litter and into the building.
“It’s a new one, so it’s not on the lists,” Mouse said, unexpectedly at her shoulder. “Not that many people will know about it, so it doesn’t fill up till late, when the music gets loud.”
Mouse seemed to be clinging to her for comfort. That was fine, but Bonnie needed some comfort of her own. The next minute she saw Eren and, dragging Mouse behind her, headed for the blond girl.
Eren was standing with her back against the wall. “Well, we can stand around like wallflowers,” she said, as a few men came in, “or we can look like we’re having the best time of any of them right here by ourselves. Who knows a story?”
“Oh, I do,” Bonnie said absently, thinking of the star ball with its Five Hundred Stories for Young Ones.
Instantly there was a clamor. “Tell it!” “Yes, please tell!”
Bonnie tried to think of the fairy tales that she had experienced.
Of course. The one about the kitsune treasure.
16
“Once upon a time,” began Bonnie, “there were a young girl and boy…”
She was immediately interrupted. “What were their names?” “Were they slaves?” “Where did they live?” “Were they vampires?”
Bonnie almost forgot her misery and laughed. “Their names were…Jack and…Jill. They were kitsune, and they lived way up north in the kitsune sector around the Great Crossings…” And she proceeded, albeit with many excited interruptions, to tell the story she had gotten from the star ball.
“So,” Bonnie concluded nervously, as she opened her eyes and realized that she’d attracted quite a crowd with her story, “that’s the tale of the Seven Treasures, and—and I suppose the moral is—don’t be too greedy, or you won’t end up with anything.”
There was a lot of laughter, the nervous giggling of the girls and the “Haw! Haw haw!” kind of laughter from the crowd behind them. Which Bonnie now noticed was entirely male.
One part of her mind started unconsciously to go into flirt mode. Another part immediately squashed it. These weren’t boys looking for a dance; these were ogres and vampires and kitsune and even men with mustaches—and they wanted to buy her in her little black bubble dress, and as nice as the dress might be for some things, it wasn’t like the long, jeweled gowns that Lady Ulma had made for them. Then they had been princesses, wearing a fortune’s worth of jewels at their throats and wrists and hair—and besides, they had had fierce protection with them at all times.
But now, she was wearing something that felt a lot like a baby-doll nightgown and delicate little shoes with silvery bows. And she wasn’t protected because this society said you had to have men to be protected, and, worst of all…she was a slave.
“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 t
ip 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 ro—
No, 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.