The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight

by L. J. Smith

  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 examined her, murmuring, “Hair of red-gold; heart true and bold. Perhaps a scold…”

  Bonnie felt like screaming. Didn’t he remember her? He certainly seemed to have remembered their group, since he’d mentioned revenge. “What do you want?” she gasped.

  “You are a hindrance, I’m afraid. And I find you very suspicious—and delicious. Young women with red-gold hair are always so elusive.”

  Bonnie couldn’t find anything to say. From everything she’d seen, Shinichi was a nutcase. But a very dangerous psychopathic nutcase. And all he enjoyed was destroying things.

  In just one moment there could be a crash through the window—and then she’d be sitting on air. And then the fall would begin. What would that feel like? Or would she already be falling? She only hoped that at the bottom it was quick.

  “You seem to have learned a lot about my people,” Shinichi said. “More than most.”

  “Please,” Bonnie said desperately. “If it’s about the story—all I know about kitsune is that you’re destroying my town. And—” She stopped short, realizing that she could never let him know what had happened in her out-of-body experience. So she could never mention the jars or he’d know that they knew how to catch him. “And you won’t stop,” she finished lamely.

  “And yet you found an ancient star ball with stories about our legendary treasures.”

  “About what? You mean from that kiddy star ball? Look, if you’ll just leave me alone I’ll give it to you.” She knew exactly where she’d left it, too, right beside her sorry excuse for a pillow.

  “Oh, we’ll leave you alone…in time, I assure you,” Shinichi said with an unnerving smile. He had a smile like Damon’s, which wasn’t meant to say “Hello; I won’t hurt you.” It was more like “Hullo! Here’s my lunch!”

  “I find it…curious,” Shinichi went on, still fiddling with the cord. “Very curious that just in the middle of our little dispute, you arrive here in the Dark Dimension again, alone, apparently without fear, and manage to bargain for a star ball. An orb that just happens to detail the location of our most priceless treasures that were stolen from us…a long, long time ago.”

  You don’t care about anybody but yourself, Bonnie thought. You’re suddenly acting all patriotic and stuff, but in Fell’s Church you didn’t pretend to care about anything but hurting people.

  “In your little town, as in other towns throughout history, I had orders to do what I did,” Shinichi said, and Bonnie’s heart plunged right down to her shoes. He was telepathic. He knew what she was thinking. He’d heard her thinking about the jars.

  Shinichi smirked. “Little towns like the one on Unmei no Shima have to be wiped off the face of the earth,” he said. “Did you see the number of ley lines of Power under it?” Another smirk. “But of course you weren’t really there, so you probably didn’t.”

  “If you can tell what I’m thinking, you know that story about treasures was just a story,” Bonnie said. “It was in the star ball called Five Hundred Stories for Young Ones. It’s not real.”

  “How strange then that it coincides so exactly with what the Seven Kitsune Gates are supposed to have behind them.”

  “It was in the middle of a bunch of stories about the—the Düz-Aht-Bhi’iens. I mean the story right before it was about a kid buying candy,” Bonnie said. “So why don’t you just go get the star ball instead of trying to scare me?” Her voice was beginning to tremble. “It’s at the inn right across the street from the shop where I was—arrested. Just go and get it!”

  “Of course we’ve tried that,” Shinichi said impatiently. “The landlady was quite cooperative after we gave her some…compensation. There is no such story in that star ball.”

  “That’s not possible!” Bonnie said. “Where did I get it, then?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  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.

  17

  Meredith and Matt were sitting at the breakfast table, which seemed sadly empty without Bonnie. It was amazing how much space that slight body had seemed to fill, and how much more se
rious everyone was without her. Meredith knew that if Elena had done her best, she could have offset it. But she also knew that Elena had one thing on her mind above all others, and that was Stefan, who was stricken with guilt for allowing his brother to abduct Bonnie. And meanwhile Meredith knew that both she and Matt were feeling guilty too, because today they would be leaving the other three, even if only for the evening. They each had been summoned home by parents who demanded to see them for dinner.

  Mrs. Flowers clearly didn’t want them to feel too badly. “With the help you’ve given, I can make our urns,” she said. “Since Matt has found my wheel—”

  “I didn’t exactly find it,” Matt said under his breath. “It was there in the storage room all the time and it fell on me.”

  “—and since Meredith has received her pictures—along, I’m sure, with an email from Mr. Saltzman—perhaps she could get them enlarged or whatever.”

  “Of course, and show them to the Saitous, too, to make sure that the symbols say the things we want them to,” Meredith promised. “And Bonnie can—”

  She broke off short. Idiot! She was an idiot, she thought. And, as a hunter-slayer, she was supposed to be clear-minded and at all times maintain control. She felt terrible when she looked at Matt and saw the naked pain in his face.

  “Dear Bonnie will surely be home soon,” Mrs. Flowers finished for her.

  And we all know that’s a lie, and I don’t have to be psychic to detect it, Meredith thought. She noticed that Mrs. Flowers hadn’t weighed in with anything from Mama.

  “We’ll all be just fine here,” Elena said, finally picking up the ball as she realized that Mrs. Flowers was looking at her with ladylike distress. “You two think we’re some kind of babies who need to be taken care of,” she said, smiling at Matt and Meredith, “but you’re just babies too! Off you go! But be careful.”

  They went, Meredith giving Elena one last glance. Elena nodded very slightly, then turned stiffly, mimicking holding a bayonet. It was the changing of the guard.

  Elena let Stefan help her clean up the dishes—they were all letting him do little things now because he looked so much better. They spent the morning trying to contact Bonnie in different ways. But then Mrs. Flowers asked if Elena could board up the last few of the basement windows, and Stefan couldn’t stand it. Matt and Meredith had already done a far more dangerous job. They’d hung two tarps from the house’s ridgepole, each one hanging down one side of the main roof. On each tarp were the characters that Isobel’s mother put on the Post-it Note amulets she always gave them, painted at an enormous scale in black paint. Stefan had been allowed only to watch and give suggestions from the widow’s walk above his attic bedroom. But now…

  “We’ll nail up the boards together,” he said firmly, and went off to get a hammer and nails.

  It wasn’t really such a hard job anyway. Elena held the boards and Stefan wielded the hammer and she trusted him not to hit her fingers, which meant that they got on very quickly.

  It was a perfect day—clear, sunny, with a slight breeze. Elena wondered what was happening to Bonnie, right now, and if Damon was taking care of her properly—or at all. She seemed unable to shake off her worries these last days: over Stefan, over Bonnie, and over a curious feeling that she had to know what was going on in town. Maybe she could disguise herself…

  God, no! Stefan said voicelessly. When she turned he was spitting out nails and looking both horrified and ashamed. Apparently she’d been projecting.

  “I’m sorry,” he said before Elena could get the nails out of her mouth, “but you know better than anyone why you can’t go.”

  “But it’s maddening not knowing what’s happening,” Elena said, having gotten rid of her nails. “We don’t know anything. What’s happening to Bonnie, what state the town’s in—”

  “Let’s finish this board,” Stefan said. “And then let me hold you.”

  When the last board was secure, Stefan raised her from the lower embankment where she was sitting, not bride-style, but kid-style, putting her toes on top of his feet. He danced her a little, whirled her a couple of times in the air, and then nabbed her coming down again.

  “I know your problem,” he said soberly.

  Elena looked up quickly. “You do?” she said, alarmed.

  Stefan nodded, and to her further alarm said, “It’s Love-itis. Means the patient has a whole slew of people she cares about, and she can’t be happy unless each and every one of them is safe and happy themselves.”

  Elena deliberately slipped off his shoes and looked up at him. “Some more than others,” she said hesitantly.

  Stefan looked down at her and then he took her in his arms. “I’m not as good as you,” he said while Elena’s heart pounded in shame and remorse for ever having touched Damon, ever having danced with him, ever having kissed him. “If you are happy, that’s all I want, after that prison. I can live; I can die…peacefully.”

  “If we’re happy,” Elena corrected.

  “I won’t tempt the gods. I’ll settle for you.”

  “No, you can’t! Don’t you see? If you disappeared again, I’d worry and fret and follow you. To Hell if I had to.”

  “I’ll take you with me wherever I go,” Stefan said hastily. “If you’ll take me with you.”

  Elena relaxed slightly. That would do, for now. As long as Stefan was with her she could stand anything.

  They sat and cuddled, right under the open sky, even with a maple tree and a clump of slender waving beeches nearby. She extended her aura a little and felt it touch Stefan’s. Peace flooded into her, and all the dark thoughts were left behind. Almost all.

  “Since I first saw you, I loved you—but it was the wrong kind of love. See how long it took me to figure that out?” Elena whispered into the hollow of his throat.

  “Since I first saw you, I loved you—but I didn’t know who you really were. You were like a ghost in a dream. But you put me straight pretty quickly,” Stefan said, obviously glad that he could brag about her. “And we’ve survived—everything. They say long-distance relationships can be pretty difficult,” he added, laughing, and then he stopped, and she could feel all his faculties fixed on her suddenly, breath stopping so he could hear her better.

  “But then, there’s Bonnie and Damon,” he said before she could say or think a word. “We have to find them soon—and they’d damn well better be together—or it had better have been Bonnie’s decision to part.”

  “There’s Bonnie and Damon,” agreed Elena, glad that she could share even her darkest thoughts with someone. “I can’t think about them. I can’t not think about them. We do have to find them, and very fast—but I pray that they’re with Lady Ulma now. Maybe Bonnie is going to a ball or gala. Maybe Damon is hunting with that Black Ops program.”

  “As long as nobody’s really hurt.”

  “Yes.” Elena tried hard to tuck herself closer to Stefan. She wanted to—be closer to him, somehow. The way they had when she had been out of her body and she had just sunk into him.

  But of course, with regular bodies, they couldn’t…

  But of course they could. Now. Her blood…

  Elena really didn’t know which of them thought of it first. She looked away, embarrassed at even having considered it—and caught the tail end of Stefan looking away too.

  “I don’t think we have the right,” she whispered. “Not to—be that happy—when everyone else is miserable. Or doing things for the town or for Bonnie.”

  “Of course we don’t,” Stefan said firmly, but he had to gulp a little first.

  “No,” Elena said.

  “No,” Stefan said firmly, and then right in the middle of her echoing “no,” he went and pulled her up and kissed her breathless.

  And of course, Elena couldn’t let him do that and not get even. So she demanded, still breathless, but almost angry, that he say “no” again, and when he did it she caught him and kissed him.

  “You were happy,” she accused a moment
later. “I felt it.”

  Stefan was too much of a gentleman to accuse her of being happy because of anything she might do. He said, “I couldn’t help it. It just happened by itself. I felt our minds together, and that made me happy. But then I remembered about poor Bonnie. And—”

  “Poor Damon?”

  “Well, somehow I don’t think we need to go so far as to call him ‘poor Damon.’ But I did remember him,” he said.

  “Well done,” Elena said.

  “We’d better go inside now,” Stefan said. And then hastily, “Downstairs, I mean. Maybe we can think of something more to do for them.”

  “Like what? There’s not a thing I can think of. I did meditation and Attempt to Contact by Out-of-Body Experience—”

  “From nine thirty to ten thirty A.M.,” Stefan said. “And meanwhile I was trying all frequency telepathic calls. No response.”

  “Then we tried with the Ouija board.”

  “For half an hour—and all we got was nonsense.”

  “It did tell us the clay was coming.”

  “I think that was me bumping it toward ‘yes.’”

  “Then I tried to tap into the ley lines below us for Power—”

  “From eleven to around eleven thirty,” Stefan recited. “While I tried to go into hibernation to have a prophetic dream….”

  “We really tried hard,” Elena said grimly.

  “And then we nailed the last few boards up,” Stefan added. “Bringing us to a little after twelve thirty P.M.”

  “Can you think of a single Plan—we’re down to G or H now—that might allow us to help them any more?”

  “I can’t. I just honestly can’t,” Stefan said. Then he added, hesitantly, “Maybe Mrs. Flowers has some housework for us. Or”—even more hesitantly, testing the waters—“we could go into town.”

  “No! You’re definitely not strong enough for that!” Elena said sharply. “And there’s no more housework,” she added. Then she threw everything to the wind. Every responsibility. Every rationality. Just like that. She began to tow Stefan to the house so they could get there quicker.