07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

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