07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

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.
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.
“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