07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

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.