Midnight

Damon was decked out in his new captain of the guard suit.

It was nice, being black on black, with lighter black piping (even Damon recognized the necessity of contrast). It had a cloak.

And he was a ful vampire again, as powerful and prestigious as even he could have imagined. For a moment he simply luxuriated in the feeling of a job well done. Then he flexed his vampire muscles more strongly, urging Jessalyn, who was upstairs, into deeper sleep, while he sent tendrils of Power al over the Dark Dimension, sampling what was going on in different districts.

Jessalyn…now there was a dilemma. Damon had the feeling that he should leave her a note or something, but he wasn’t quite sure what to say.

What could he tel her? That he was gone? She would see that for herself. That he was sorry? Well, obviously he wasn’t so sorry that he’d chosen not to go. That he had duties elsewhere?

Wait. That might actual y work. He could tel her that he needed to check up on her territory and that if he were to stay here in the castle he doubted he’d ever get anything done.

He could tel her he’d be back…soon. Soonish. Soonishly.

Damon pressed his tongue against a canine and felt the prompt rewarding sharpness and length. He real y wanted to try out those legendary Black Ops vs. vampires programs.

He wanted to hunt, period. Of course, there was so much Black Magic wine about the place that when he stopped a male servant and asked for some, the servant had brought a magnum. Damon had been having flutes every now and then, but what he real y 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 al owance, 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 intel igent slave as recompense. He was Stillwearing his captain of guard suit.

He could have the boy to kil , 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 al 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 al over.

Damon! Help me!

Then she saw a girl who couldn’t seem to get up off her pal et 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 final y her protests led the women to actual y 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 pul ed out at the roots. Final y, 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 starting to feel better she was hustled up to have the oil removed, except that which had soaked into her skin. Women then appeared who measured her, cal ing out the numbers as they did, and by the time Bonnie had tramped to the wardrobe station, three dresses were waiting for her on a bar. There was a black one, a green one, and a gray one.

I’l get the green for sure because of my hair, Bonnie thought blankly, but after she had tried al three on, a woman took the green and gray away, leaving Bonnie in a little black bubble dress, strapless, with a glittery touch of white material at the neck.

Next was a giant sanitary room, where her dress was careful y covered with a white paper robe that kept ripping.

She was led to a chair with a hair dryer and the rudiments of makeup, which a white-shirted woman used to put too much on Bonnie’s face. Then the hair dryer was swung over her head, and Bonnie, with a stolen tissue, took off as much makeup as she dared. She didn’t want to look good, didn’t want to be sold. When she finished she had silvery eyelids, a touch of blush, and velvety rose-red lipstick that wouldn’t wipe off.