bonnie and damon after hours - l.j smith (open ebook TXT) 📗

with her friends, or checking out boys. “Do ye ken what I’m talking about at all, girl?”
Bonnie had shaken her flyaway red hair, looking up into the grave, gray old eyes that usually were twinkling with delight over her grandchildren, or gazing peacefully off into some distant landscape. Now those gray eyes were brooding, worrying about Bonnie.
“No,” Grannie had said, “ye ken nothing about it now. But you will, my girl. While you’re still a lassie, you will.”
Well, Bonnie interrupted her own musing, I don’t have time to “ken” that now. I have to “ken” Catherine of Aragon. And I have to work fast. She picked up a book, and turned it to the first pink Post-It note she found.
* * * * *
The figure that belonged to the guttural voice and the figure that belonged to the gnawing voice were lying back, replete, but bothered in their minds.
“I’d like to see the girl inside that building right now,” the gnawing voice whined.
There was the sound of a sharp blow.
“You wanna ruin everything, after all our research?” demanded the guttural voice. “You wanna break a window maybe, set off an alarm? Well go ahead—you won’t get any help from me. I’ll just be a face in the crowd. You’ll take the whole rap for the guy and the girl.”
The gnawing voice sniffled, “I didn’t mean to do anything to the library. I only wanted to sniff at the doors and windows.”
There was the sound of another sharp cuff, and a whimper. “I know your sniffings,” snarled the guttural voice. “They end in pawings and pryings and broken glass, and then you say, ‘Well since the window was already broken, I’ll go in. Idiot!”
For a while there was no noise except the sound of a bone splintering and a sucking as the marrow was taken out.
“Ad this way we wod’ ged indo drouble?” the gnawing voice asked finally. The blow to its owner’s nose had been not only painful, but disabling. Who could smell with a nose full of clotting blood? The gnawer rubbed it tenderly.
“I’ve told you and told you! We’ll be in the next county—hell, in the next state before the girl is missed. We’ll have plenty of time to run!”
There was a pause and then the gnawer’s voice said slowly, “But—who’s going to come open the library? It has an alarm—”
“The woman, you idiot! On weekdays, the man comes first and opens the doors. On weekends the woman comes and opens it. After dawn she’ll come and we’ll have both her and the girl. We’ll make the woman open the door; then force her and the girl into our car. Dead or alive, they come with us, and we’ll be snuggled up safe somewhere long before anyone misses them. On Fridays there aren’t many students who head straight for the library.”
There was a pause. Then, almost timidly, the gnawer said, “But whad if subone comes wid de woman?”
“Divide and conquer. It won’t be the first time we’ve taken on three.” The growler was clearly sick of questions.
“Bud . . . ”
“But, but, but! This better be a good one or I’ll kick your butt!”
A moment’s pause, then, slowly “Bud . . . the man locked the door. He must have the same key as the woman. We might be able to turn off the alarm. Then we could have the girl for”—there was a sucking, slurping sound, like a straw reaching the bottom of a glass—“for hours. Ride now. We could play . . . games.”
There was a long pause and then the guttural, growling voice spoke again. But it seemed less annoyed, even somewhat less rasping as it replied, “It’s not a bad idea. It might mean we have to give up the woman—”
“But the girl!” The werewolf with the gnawing voice panted. “She’ll be so sweet . . . and the games we can play in the dark . . .” There was a slobbering sound.
“All right! All right!” the guttural-voice panted. “But first we have to find the keys, Mr. Big Shot.”
“I found them already!” The gnawer whined triumphantly. “That was how I thod of all dis. Should we Change?
“We stay like this, half-changed,” the growler said and laughed his guttural laugh. “When she sees us like this she’ll go crazy from fear.”
The gnawer laughed his low, snarling laugh. “We can play good guy, bad guy. She’ll run right into our arms.”
“She’ll scream,” rasped the growler, “Scream and beg. No help will come. No help.”
He took the key from the gnawer and they quietly tiptoed to the library. Thn he put the key in the door.
* * * * *
Tick.
Bonnie could see nothing, could hear nothing now from the front of the library, but she was sure she’d heard a Tick.
What could it mean? There was no light being shed; from either overhead lighting or flashlight, and that would be the first thing a teacher or janitor would do, wouldn’t it? Turn on some kind of light.
Unless the person wasn’t coming to ensure obedience to the school rules. Unless they’d come for her.
Bonnie didn’t believe in ghosts, not really. But inside her mind were hundreds of locked doors, each of which held behind it a boogeyman. They were bogeymen she had shut behind firm doors when she was a child, but at night—at night they had a tendency to come out.
And so did Bonnie’s own instincts, like those of a cat. In fact, when the bogeymen unlocked their doors and came out at her, she became more animal than human. She simply let her own instincts take her where they wanted.
The overhead light went out.
And Bonnie’s instincts, in two bounds, took her ten feet to the right. Bonnie landed on palms and tiptoes like a cat, squatting. Something had landed on her chair. And it had splintered the chair to pieces.
“Hey, girl—come this way. There’s an exit!” whispered a human-sounding voice. In fact, it sounded like a nice boy, not much older than Bonnie. But Bonnie had an instinct—this was too much of a coincidence; that a nice boy should have come in with a monster.
Rapidly, on hands and knees, she began to scuttle away from the voice and the chair. She found a dark corner in the children’s section to defend herself in. Lightly and softly as a spring leaf she slipped under a table.
“You—you monster,” the nice voice was saying. “Take me! Just leave the girl out of it!”
“The meat is sweet;” chanted a terrible voice—a sound like gnawing at bones. “And so is the smell of fear so near.” It began to laugh insanely.
“I’m not afraid of you,” the nice voice said. Then another whisper, “C’mon, kid. Head to my voice.”
Bonnie didn’t move. Not because she didn’t trust the nice voice—although she didn’t. She didn’t move because she couldn’t. Her stupid muscles were frozen in place.
Meredith was right Meredith was right Why was Meredith always right But when they found Bonnie, Bonnie would be a pile of cracked and polished bones and Meredith would only know then that Bonnie had just pretended to be convinced that spending the night at the library was a really really stupid idea.
Bonnie was good at talking fast—even to herself. All that went though her head before the echoes of the nice voice had faded.
She was wedged into the corner now, under the table, protected on three sides but wide open on the fourth, And she had no weapon at all.
Timidly, like spiders that she sent out scurrying on missions in opposite directions, she tiptoed her fingers away from her. She knew Mr. Breyer and Ms. Kemp kept what they could see of the library spotless.
She also knew that they were both short-sighted and that there was a whole treasure trove of garbage underneath the library tables.
After a moment her terrified right hand came into contact with something that rolled slightly and was high and curved and—oh, God, it was only an old plastic cup, a big one, sure, McDonald’s Extra-Large Size, but what was it going to do against an enemy? Beware! Or you will feel the wrath of my plastic cup!
But her trembling left hand came across a real find. A ruler. And not any ruler, a steel one. Hurriedly, she switched the objects in her hands, just as the nice voice reached the end of the table on her right. “Quick,” it whispered, “reach for my hand now.”
There was no way Bonnie was going to reach for his hand ever, but especially not now that his voice had taken on a glutinous, sticky quality, as if he were trying not to salivate.
“We’re heeeeere,” said a gnawing voice from the left. It seemed to be coming closer and closer, just at the same pace of the nice voice.
And then there was a sound from the table.
Tick.
The noise sounded on her right.
Tick.
The noise sounded on her left.
Like a piece of sharp bone or claw being tapped on the table top.
Tick.
Tick. Tick.
The noises were closer.
Okay. There was no way for Bonnie to avoid the truth now. There were two things in the dark with her, and they were getting closer and closer, and she could barely see out between the two child-sized chairs she’d scuttled past before getting beneath the table. Something was weird, she realized suddenly. When she’d dashed under the table, she hadn’t been able to see at all—it had been a blind, instinctive rush. Now she could see, if just faintly, from the library’s high up windows. That meant that now she could dimly see the way out.
But she’d bet that the two things could see much better in the dark than she could. They knew exactly where she was. And this hunch was terrifyingly confirmed when the next tick came from the back of a chair—lower than the table.
Tick.
They’ve found you.
Tick. Tick.
Lower still.
They can see you.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
In a minute they’ll cut you off from your one way of escape . . .
Tick. Tick. Tick . . .
“Come on out,” the “nice” voice said, and now it was no longer pretending to be nice, but guttural and slobbering. “Come out and play . . . or should we come in and get you?”
GET OUT! Bonnie’s mind screamed at her.
“I know some fun games we can play togeth—”
GET OUT NOW!
Bonnie shot out of the opening between the chairs like a rabbit across a field. As she did, she flung out both hands wildly, hysterically, not knowing what she hoped to do with the objects but thrusting them out anyway.
Meredith had once tried to explain to Bonnie that panic responses like this had a purpose. When a conscious mind doesn’t know what to do, it resorts to panic—trying behaviors that no sane mind would come up with. That occasionally resulted in the discovery of a new and useful behavior, Meredith said. Bonnie had never quite understood this, but now she was seeing it in action.
When Bonnie rocketed out of the space between the chairs, she thrust the plastic cup with all her force to the left and it happened to catch the gnawing werewolf with its long muzzle closed. The force of Bonnie’s thrust jammed the plastic all the way up to the animal’s jaw.
With her right hand Bonne slashed out with all her strength with the steel ruler, catching the growling werewolf right across one eye. It gave a screaming howl and reared back.
Then everything went white.
It went white because somebody—one of the two monsters, Bonnie thought—had turned the lights on. They had