She was weakly trying to get up, her eyes on the bloody steel ruler on the
floor.
“Now, now. There, there. There, now,” Damon said, preventing her. “You
did some very nice work with that but you don’t need it anymore. They’re in
puppy heaven now. Well, puppy hell, more likely, but you don’t need to worry
about them, is the point.”
The maiden, who was exceptionally dainty and pretty and had, to a
vampire, the most exquisite feature of all, a particularly long and delicate column
of a neck, was looking up at him soulfully. It was nice to see that she was short.
Damon didn’t care that much for tall girls because he wasn’t very tall himself.
She also had—you couldn’t help but notice—extraordinarily large eyes in her
small heart-shaped face, giving her the appearance of a kitten. They were clear
brown eyes, with a dark ring at the outer rim of the iris, then a very light brown
ring, as if light were shining through them in the middle, and then another dark
ring around the pupil. Her hair was the color of a strawberry and curled softly all
over her head in a way that made you think “pixie.”
Altogether, she was a lovely little ornament, with fine blue veins in
naturally translucent skin.
Damon smiled at her, not bothering to hide elongated canines.
“Oooh,” the maiden gasped, taking Damon in from dark, silky hair to neatly
booted feet in one heart-rending glance. “Oooooh. Gorgeous.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I meant: ooooh, you saved me!”
“Well, I helped,” Damon said with a very deep and a very false sense of
modesty.
“Ooooh, they were monsters.”
“Well, they’re no danger now,” Damon said.
“Ooooooh, they were going to eat me!”
Damon wondered if he should moan before speaking the way the girl did.
Maybe it was some regional dialect thing. He wanted to make her comfortable.
“OOH!” he said, a bit more violently than he meant to, and the girl jerked in his
arms, her brown eyes becoming enormous. “Yes, they were,” he agreed heartily.
“Oh, my God,” said the girl, forgetting to “oooh” at all. “Who are you? You
wouldn’t take advantage of a helpless girl at a time like this, would you?” she
added, and shut her eyes, tilting her head back slightly, with the tiniest puckering
of her lips.
“Oh, well, perhaps only a little,” Damon said jovially, eyeing the lovely
lavender veins in her arched neck.
“Ooooooooh.”
Damon stood looking helplessly down at the girl, noticing uncomfortably
that she weighed almost nothing on his arm, that her skin still had the luster of its
first baby-glow, and that altogether she seemed much more like a child than like
a maiden at all.
He cleared his throat.
The brown eyes opened. They were not only unusually large but rather
wide apart, imparting a childlike look to the owner.
“Yes?” she said, looking disappointed, which did nothing for Damon’s
canines.
“Ah,” he said. He tried to impart some of the velvet of the night into his
voice. “Hm. Do you know what those two things that wanted to attack you were?”
“Oooooh, yes. The were oooooh werewolves!” She shuddered.
“So you get a lot of werewolves around here?”
“Ooooooooooo-OOh! No!”
“Ah,” said Damon, who had jumped a little himself at the end of this moan.
“Well. They were definitely creatures of the—”
“—ooooooh, night!”
“And, ah, do you know about any other creatures of the night?”
“Ooooh: werewolves and vampires and witches and ghosts and demons
and ghouls and ooooooh—”
Damon leaped at the strategic moan. “Okay, take that, go back to the
beginning and name the second.”
The brown eyes went wide and the pupils dilated with fear, then the girl
darted quick looks around the room and toward the ceiling. “Wuh-witches?” she
faltered. “I know one—knew one—that wasn’t wicked at all. She was my
grannie and she knew when she was going to die because she sent me my
birthday present a whole month early and the—”
“Stop!” said Damon. The girl had a melodious voice and listening to her
was no great trial—it was rather like listening to a nightingale or a curlew, but he
had to get his point across. “Witches was third on the list, actually. There was
something before it.”
“No,” the redhead said. “Werewolves and witches and vamp—” She
stopped, put a small, delicate-fingered hand over her mouth. “Vam-pup-pires?”
she finished, with a small gulp in the middle of the word.
Damon felt instant relief. They had got somewhere! He smiled again,
brilliantly.
The strawberry-haired girl looked at his smile. She looked at it very
carefully. Damon was happy to have overcome the linguistic challenges and
held the smile for a long time, almost a whole second.
Just as he turned the smile off, the redhead stopped examining it. Damon
knew when she did, precisely, for her eyelashes fluttered in a manner her greatgrandmother
would have approved of, her face became white as marble, and her
body folded and went limp, sending her curly strawberry head on a crash course
with the wooden floor.
It would have taken superhuman reflexes to catch her before her small
frame hit the ground, headfirst, but fortunately Damon had those. He snatched
up the little red-haired songbird almost the instant she began to fall, catching her
around her tiny waist and . . . once again they were back to square one, with him
holding her, but this time with the addition of her unconsciousness. He looked
around for something to put her on and was beginning to make use of a study
table when her eyelashes flickered again, she moaned softly, and then awoke.
“Oooh, thank God it’s just you—it’s you!” she exclaimed, going from
reassurance to terror in about a tenth of a second flat. She struggled feebly to
get out of his arms. Since her goal would have landed her on her backside on
the floor, Damon didn’t let her achieve it.
The redhead was also fumbling at her long delicate neck—a ballerina’s
neck, if he’d ever seen one—perfect for Swan Lake—“Am I . . . ? Did you
already . . .?” she implored.
“Never. I’d never take advantage of a sleeping maiden.” Because I don’t
care for cold, unreceptive flesh, Damon thought. The warmth, the vibrant
pleasure, as well as the life-force of an exquisite treat like this were to be
treasured, not squandered as she lay unconscious.
The girl was panting in his arms now like a wounded stag, with the hounds
very near. “At least—you saved me—from those monsters. They would have
tortured me.”
Looking at her, at the way she clasped the tiny gold cross at her neck, at
the way she looked up to a window that was still lit only by moonlight, the way
she held one hand toward it as if to grasp an unreachable savior, Damon was
bewildered. There was something . . . unreal about the entire moment.
And then he realized that that was exactly what it was. Unreality. She
was setting up a tableau, a picture for the canvas. One could even think of
names for it easily: The Maiden and the Vampire; or, more poetically, The Last
Reach Toward Light. If only, he thought, enthralled by what he saw in his mind’s
eye, she had been wearing a billowing white nightgown that was sliding off one
lucent shoulder, and they had been outside so she could reach for the moon
itself. What a moment! What a portrait! What a maiden!
The only problem was that she was two or three years too young.
Emotionally. Mentally.
Even, he realized, with her slimness pressed against him so firmly,
physically so.
He didn’t dine off children. And in any case . . .
“Just what is it you’re imagining that I’ll do?” he asked her wryly.
She shut her eyes and crossed her hands over her breast. A born actress
and a coquette if ever he’d seen one. “To take—my blood,” she said in tones of
heartbreaking humble acceptance.
“And just how much were you imagining I’d need?”
“Ooooh . . . well, how much blood do people have?” His maiden forgot to
look like a virgin sacrifice and put a knuckle to a dimple in one cheek, as if to
grind it in deeper. “Heh,” she said embarrassed, the mood broken, “I don’t know.”
“Well, I scarcely need a dram for supper—a dram’s an old word for a small
amount,” Damon said, feeling rather that this particular maiden might need this
explained to her. “But in any case, I wouldn’t take it from you.”
“You wouldn’t!” the maiden exclaimed indignantly, forgetting to “ooh” at all.
“And why not, might I ask? Just because Meredith and Caroline and Elena all
have more—more . . .”—she was tracing a sort of formless roundness with both
hands as if squeezing ripe peaches—“more on top, already? I’m getting it, too! I
turned seventeen two days ago! If you’d seen me dressed properly, you’d know!”
Now the mood was completely ruined for Damon. And yet he’d be—he’d
be damned if he’d let any other random creature of darkness make a meal off her
now that he’d saved her. Who knew how many clans of werewolves there were
around here? He—somehow—couldn’t just leave her in the middle of the night,
far from her home.
“Get your things together,” he said crossly.
“Why?” the maiden snapped back, tearfully defiant.
“Because I’m taking you home, you silly little nitwit. What were you doing
all alone in a great building like this that no one lives in?”
“I was studying! I have a paper due!”
“Well, if it hadn’t been for me, you would have been studying in the
afterlife right now—and don’t you forget it.”
“Well, I don’t care!” the maiden—no, the little girl said, beginning to cry in
earnest. “You don’t”—sob—“know my teacher”—sob—“for European History!”—
sob—“He laughs at me in front of everyone!”
“Those are the worst kind,” Damon said, remembering his humiliations
across the years at the hands of Signore Lucca. “And always after you’ve been
to a late party and your head is pounding.”
“Oh, you do understand,” the girl turned to him, still weeping,
and put her head on his shoulder.
“Did you say this man teaches history? European history? What time
frame are you looking at? And what country?” Damon said, with a sudden tiny
quirk of his mouth.
“England and Spain, around 1533—the years before, the years after.”
“Well, what do you know?” Damon said, once again flashing his most
brilliant smile—the one that turned girls to quivering puddles—around the room.
“I believe I might just be able to help you with that. You see I was around then—
more or less—and what I didn’t see I heard through gossip. I always say if it’s
not worth gossiping about, it didn’t happen in the first place.”
* * * * *
Dawn. Bonnie, more or less sleepwalking, was being helped out of her
Bug and a backpack was being pressed into her arms.
“Now remember to be surprised when they find two dead drifters at the
back of the library.”
Bonnie shuddered and her eyes opened brown and soulful. “You saved
me from them. I’ll never forget.” She looked like a small red bird, with
bedraggled plumage standing straight up all over her head.
“Well—never mind about that,” Damon said, once again attempting to look
modest. “And remember to type up all the bits I wrote, but not to wonder why
you’re doing it. That’s imperative.” He sent out a surge of Influence to impress
this on the girl’s mind.
“Very imperative,” Bonnie agreed in a mumble, and then they were at her
front door. “Thank you—oh, so much!” After she spoke she went on tiptoe, shut
her eyes and aimed pursed lips at point-blank range.
There was a long pause and then the lightest, warmest, moth’s brush of
lips over hers. It was the sweetest kiss she’d ever had—and the sexiest.
“Well, goodbye, then—little bird,” a voice said and Bonnie opened her
eyes to look long and deeply into fathomless black pools, and then she was
alone. Totally alone. For some reason she looked around and confirmed it.
There was her car, neatly parallel parked—wow! she was getting a lot better at
that—but she was alone and. . . and . . . well, of course she was alone! She’d
managed to pull it off—to study all night in the Robert E. Lee library, and not a
thing out of the ordinary had happened. She’d even found a side door ajar to slip
out of and so avoid a confrontation with Ms. Kemp!
Now she couldn’t wait to tell Elena and Meredith and Caroline about what
she’d done, and how the report was almost finished, all but some typing she’d do
tonight. She’d done it all by herself—even she could hardly believe it! Bonnie
patted her backpack. But in here was the proof. The Conscience of a Queen
was the best history paper she would ever write in her life, full of strange little
facts and curious quotes. It might even get her an A!
An A . . . that would be almost supernatural.
Something deep down in the very back of her mind told her to look behind
her.
She did, but saw nothing but a magnificent black crow flying from a branch
into the dawning day. Poor thing, it seemed to be shedding, though. Two black
feathers fell to the ground as it disappeared. Bonnie’s heart swelled up into her
throat, almost as if she was going to cry as she stared at those feathers, which
were so black that they shed rainbows in the breaking light, but then she braced
herself. She really didn’t know much about crows. Maybe it was something they
all did. Anyway, this one was gone.
* * * * *
Damon soared up and out, watching the neighborhoods become a
patchwork below him, and below that, to eyes attuned to the Power, the ley lines
that crossed and re-crossed here, luring in all sorts of drek, from those disgusting
werewolves to little brother Stefan.
The reason for Damon’s circling now was simple: he was hungry. He
hadn’t been able to tap the little red songbird’s veins. She was just too young,
too—innocent—to be punctured randomly like that.
And, damn it all, despite—ha!—having spent a night with her, he had
never asked her name. He would probably never know it—no, wait! She’d
written it on that first piece of paper, the title page. The last name had been
Scottish or Irish or something that he couldn’t remember, but the first name he
did.
Bonnie.
Sweet songbird Bonnie, thought Damon, making a turn and circling the
other way. His little Redbird.
What a pity that he’d never be seeing her again.