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

at her neck, at the way she looked up to a sky that was still lit only by moonlight, the way she held one hand toward it as if to grasp the ungraspable 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 the window had been an old fashioned round wooden one. 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.
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?”
“How many pints of blood in the human bloodstream?” 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 don’t even need one pint of it,” Damon said, feeling rather put out. And in any case, I won’t take it from you.”
“You won’t!” the maiden exclaimed indignantly. “Why not? Just because Meredith and Caroline and Elena all have more—more . . .”—she was tracing a sort of hourglass figure with both hands—“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 of her now that he’d saved her.
“Get your things together,” he said crossly.
“Why?” The maiden snapped back, 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 wasn’t 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. “You don’t”—sob—“have my history teacher—sob. He laughs at me—sob—in front of everyone!”
“Those are the worst kind,” Damon said, remembering his humiliations across the years from Signore Lucca. “And always after you’ve been to a party and your head hurts.”
“Oh, you do understand,” the girl turned to him, sobbing, and put her head on his shoulder.
“What time frame are you looking at? And what country?” Damon said, a tiny quirk of his mouth turning up.
“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 by 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 car and a backpack pressed into her arms.
“Now remember to be surprised when they find three dead people at the library—especially the poor bloke they turned into a pile of bones.”
Bonnie shuddered and her eyes opened brown and soulful. “You saved me from the same thing happening to me.” She looked like a small, red bird, with bedraggled plumage standing straight up all over her head.
“Well—never mind about that,” the boy 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.”
“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 tip-toe, shut her eyes and aimed pursed lips at the boy 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 fathlomless 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—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. Of course, it had given her a fright to see Mr. Breyer’s car out in its normal parking space, but he must be filling in for Ms. Kemp—and starting remarkably early, too.
All in all, she’d had incredibly good luck not to run into either of the librarians!
Now she couldn’t wait to tell Elena and Meredith and Caroline what she’d done. All by her lonesome! She could hardly believe it, herself! She patted her backpack. But in here was the proof. The Conscience of A Queen was the best history paper she had ever written
and she was going to work all day to fill in the outlined bits. It might even get her an A!
Something deep down in the very back of her mind told her to look out behind her.
She did, but saw nothing but a magnificent black crow flying from a branch into the dawning day.
* * * * *
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 his younger 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, drat 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, she’d called it. The last name had been Scotch or Irish or something that he couldn’t remember, but the first name he did.
It was Bonnie.
Sweet songbird Bonnie, thought Damon, making a turn and circling the other way.
What a pity that he’d never be seeing her again.

The End

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Publication Date: 07-28-2010

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