07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

Meredith stared in utter disbelief.
In the Dark Dimension Bonnie shut her eyes. There was a lot of wind at the top of a tall building’s
window. That was all her mind had a thought for when she was out of the window and then back into
it and the ogre was laughing and Shinichi’s terrible voice saying, “You don’t really think we’d let you
go without questioning you thoroughly?”
Bonnie heard the words without them making sense, and then suddenly they did. Her
captors were going to hurt her. They were going to torture her. They were going to take her bravery
away.
She thought she screamed something at him. All she knew, though, was that there was a
soft explosion of heat behind her, and then—unbelievably—all dressed up in a cloak with badges that
made him look like some kind of military prince, there was Damon.
Damon.
He was so late she’d long ago given up on him. But now he was flashing a there-andgone
brilliant smile at Shinichi, who was staring as if he’d been stricken dumb.
And now Damon was saying, “I’m afraid Ms. McCullough has another engagement at that
moment. But I will be back to kick your ass—immediately. Move from this room and I’ll kill you all,
slowly. Thank you for your time and consideration.”
And before anyone could even recover from their first shock at his arrival, he and
Bonnie were blasting off through the windows. He went, not out of the building backward as if
retreating, but straight ahead forward, one hand in front of him, wrapping them both in a black but
ethereal bundle of Power. They shattered the two-way mirror in Bonnie’s room and were almost all
the way through to the next room before Bonnie’s mind tagged the first “empty.” Then they were
crashing through an elaborate videoset-window—made to let people think they had a view of the
outdoors, and flying over someone lying on a bed. Then…it was just a series of crashes, as far as
Bonnie was concerned. She barely got a glimpse of what was going on in each room. Finally…
The crashing stopped. This left Bonnie holding on to Damon koala-style—she wasn’t
stupid—and they were very, very high in the air. And mobilizing in front of them, and off to the sides,
and as far as Bonnie could see, were women who were also flying, but in little machines that looked
like a combination of a motorcycle and a Jet Ski. No wheels, of course. The machines were all gold,
which was also the color of each driver’s hair.
So the first word Bonnie gasped to her rescuer, after he had blasted a tunnel through the
large slave-owner’s building to save her, was, “Guardians?”
“Indispensable, considering the fact that I didn’t have the first idea where the bad guys
might have taken you and I suspected that there might be a time limit. This was actually the very last
of the slave-sellers we were due to check. We finally…lucked out.” For someone who had lucked
out, he sounded a little strange. Almost…choked up.
Water was on Bonnie’s cheeks but it was being flicked away too fast for her to wipe it.
Damon was holding her so that she couldn’t see his face, and he was holding her very, very tightly.
It really was Damon. He had called out the cavalry and, despite the city-wide mindgridlock,
he had found her.
“They hurt you, didn’t they, little redbird? I saw…I saw your face,” Damon said in his
new choked-up voice. Bonnie didn’t know what to say. But suddenly she didn’t mind how hard he