gave her a chance.
“Oh, well, you being a redhead and all — it put me in mind of Aliana’s message, you know. To the real Bonny.” She pronounced it oddly, sort of swallowing the y, but at least it wasn’t Bonna.
“Which of them? Which message, I mean?” Bonnie screamed.
Eren gave her an are you kidding look. “Help when you can, shelter when you have room, guide when you know where to go,” she said in a sort of impatient chant, then looked chagrined and added, “And be patient with the slow.” She attacked her food with an air of having said everything there was to say.
Oh, boy, Bonnie thought. Somebody had really taken the ball and run with it.
Elena had never said any of those things.
Yeah, but — but maybe she’d lived them, Bonnie thought, a tingling breaking out all over her body. And maybe somebody had seen her and made up the words. For instance, that crazy-looking guy she’d given her ring or bracelet or something to.
She’d given her earrings away to people with signs, too. Signs that said: POETRY FOR FOOD.
The rest of dinner was a matter of picking up food with the spork and not looking at it, crunching it once, and then deciding whether to spit into her still-writhing napkin, or to try to swallow without tasting.
Afterward the girls were marched into another building, this one filled with pallets, smaller and not so comfortable-looking as Bonnie’s at the inn. She was now horrified at herself for leaving that room. There she had had safety, she had had food that she could actually eat, she had had entertainment — even the Dustbins were clothed in a golden glow of remembrance now — and she had had the chance of Damon finding her. Here she had nothing.
But Eren seemed to have some mesmeric influence on the girls around, or else they all were Aliana-ites too, because when she shouted “Where’s a pallet? I’ve got a new girl in my bedroom. Think she’s gonna sleep on the bare floor?” And eventually, a dusty pallet was passed hand over hand into Eren’s “bedroom”—a group of pallets all spread with the heads together in the middle. In exchange, Eren handed over the wriggling napkin Bonnie had given her. “Share and share alike,” she said firmly, and Bonnie wondered if she thought Aliana had said that, too.
A whistle shrilled. “Ten minutes until lights-out,” a hoarse voice shouted. “Every girl not on her pallet in ten minutes will be punished. Tomorrow section C goes up.”
“All right! We’re going to be bloody deaf before we’re sold,” Eren muttered.
“Before we’re sold?” Bonnie repeated stupidly, even though she had known what would happen from the first moment she had recognized this as a warehouse for slaves.
Eren turned and spat. “Yeah,” she said. “So you can have one more breakdown and then that’s it. Only two per customer, and by tomorrow you may wish you’d saved one up.”
“I wasn’t going to have a breakdown,” Bonnie said, with all the courage at her command. “I was going to ask how we’re going to be sold. Is it at one of those horrible public places, where you have to stand in front of a crowd in just a shift?”
“Yeah, that’s what most of us will be doing,” a young girl, who had been crying quietly through dinner and the pallet-arranging time, spoke up in a soft voice. “But the ones they pick out as special items will have to wait. They’ll give us a bath and special clothes, but it’s all just so we look more presentable for the clients. So the clients can inspect us more closely.” She shuddered.
“You’re frightening the new girl, Mouse,” Eren scolded. “We call her Mouse, because she’s always so scared,” she told Bonnie.
Bonnie silently screamed, Damon!
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 full 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 all 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 tell 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 actually work. He could tell 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 tell her he’d be back…soon. Soonish. Soonishly.
Damon pressed his tongue against a canine and felt the prompt rewarding sharpness and length. He really 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 really 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 allowance, 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 intelligent slave as recompense. He was still wearing his captain of guard suit. He could have the boy to kill, 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 all 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 all over. Damon! Help me!
Then she saw a girl who couldn’t seem to get up off her pallet 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 finally her protests led the women to actually 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 pulled out at the roots. Finally, 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
