The Return: Midnight by L. J. Smith

Author:L. J. Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Young-adult Fiction, Dark Fantasy
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

Bonnie woke and realized she had only been unconscious for a few minutes. She began to shiver, and once she started she couldn’t seem to stop. She felt a wave of heat envelop her, and she knew that Damon was trying to warm her, but still the trembling wouldn’t go away.

“What’s wrong?” Damon asked, and his voice was different from usual.

“I don’t know,” Bonnie said. She didn’t. “Maybe it’s because they kept starting to throw me out the window. I wasn’t going to scream about that,” she added hastily, in case he assumed she would. “But then when they talked about torturing me—”

She felt a sort of spasm go through Damon. He was holding her too hard. “Torturing you! They threatened you with that?”

“Yes, because, you know, Misao’s star ball was gone. They knew that it had been poured out; I didn’t tell them that. But I had to tell them that it was my fault that the last half got poured out, and then they got mad at me. Oh! Damon, you’re hurting me!”

“So it was your fault it got poured out, was it?”

“Well, I figure it was. You couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t gotten drunk, and—wh-what’s wrong, Damon? Are you mad too?” He really was holding her so that she really couldn’t breathe.

Slowly, she felt his arms loosen a little. “A word of advice, little redbird. When people are threatening to torture and kill you, it might be more—expedient—to tell them that it’s someone else’s fault. Especially if that happens to be the truth.”

“I know that!” Bonnie said indignantly. “But they were going to kill me anyway. If I’d told about you, they’d’ve hurt you, too.”

Damon pulled her roughly back now, so that she had to look him in the face. Bonnie could also feel the delicate touch of a telepathic mind probe. She didn’t resist; she was too busy wondering why he had plum-colored shadows under his eyes. Then he shook her a little, and she stopped wondering.

“Don’t you understand even the basics of self-preservation?” he said, and she thought he looked angry again. He was certainly different from any other time that she’d seen him—except once, she thought, and that was when Elena had been “Disciplined” for saving Lady Ulma’s life, back when Ulma had been a slave. He’d had the same expression then, so menacing that even Meredith had been frightened of him, and yet so filled with guilt that Bonnie had longed to comfort him.

But there had to be some other reason, Bonnie’s mind told her. Because you’re not Elena, and he’s never going to treat you the way he treats Elena. A vision of the brown room rose before her, and she felt certain that he would never have put Elena there. Elena wouldn’t have let him, for one thing.

“Do I have to go back?” she asked, realizing that she was being petty and silly and that the brown room had seemed like a haven just a little while ago.

“Go back?” Damon said, a little too quickly.

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