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 was starting to feel better she was hustled up to have the oil removed, except that which had soaked into her skin. Women then appeared who measured her, calling out the numbers as they did, and by the time Bonnie had tramped to the wardrobe station, three dresses were waiting for her on a bar. There was a black one, a green one, and a gray one.
I’ll get the green for sure because of my hair, Bonnie thought blankly, but after she had tried all three on, a woman took the green and gray away, leaving Bonnie in a little black bubble dress, strapless, with a glittery touch of white material at the neck.
Next was a giant sanitary room, where her dress was carefully covered with a white paper robe that kept ripping. She was led to a chair with a hair dryer and the rudiments of makeup, which a white-shirted woman used to put too much on Bonnie’s face. Then the hair dryer was swung over her head, and Bonnie, with a stolen tissue, took off as much makeup as she dared. She didn’t want to look good, didn’t want to be sold. When she finished she had silvery eyelids, a touch of blush, and velvety rose-red lipstick that wouldn’t wipe off.
After that she just sat and finger-combed her hair until it was dry, which the ancient machine announced with a ping.
The next station was a bit like the day after Thanksgiving at a big shoe store. The stronger or more determined girls managed to wrench shoes away from their weaker sisters and jammed them on one foot, only to start the process again the next minute. Bonnie was lucky. She saw a tiny black shoe that had a faintly silvery bow coming down the ramp and kept her eye on it while it passed from girl to girl until someone dropped it and then she swooped in and tried it on. She didn’t know what she would have done if it hadn’t fit. But it did fit, and she went to the next station to get its mate. As she sat waiting, other girls were trying on perfume.
Bonnie saw two entire bottles go down the bodices of girls and wondered if they meant to sell them or try to poison themselves with them. There were also flowers.
Bonnie was already dizzy with perfume and had decided not to wear any, but a tall woman bellowed over her head and a garland of freesia was pinned to frame her curls, without anyone asking her permission.
The last station was the hardest to bear. She had on no jewelry and would have worn only one bracelet with the dress. But she was given two: slim unbreakable plastic bracelets, each with a number on it — her identity from now on, she was told.
Slave bracelets. She had now been washed, packaged, and stamped, so that she could be conveniently sold.
Damon! she cried voicelessly, but something had died inside her, and she knew now that her calls would not be answered.
“She was picked up as a runaway slave and confiscated,” the sweetshop man told Damon impatiently. “And that’s all I know.”
Damon was left with a feeling he didn’t often have. Sickening terror. He was really beginning to believe that this time he had cut it too fine; that he would be too late to save his redbird. That any of several dreadful scenarios might have played out before he got to her.
He couldn’t stand to visualize them in detail. What he would do if he didn’t find her in time…
He reached out and without the slightest effort gripped the sweetshop man around the throat, lifting him off the floor.
“We need to have a little chat,” he said, turning the full force of his menacing dark eyes on the bulging ones of his prey. “About just how she got confiscated.
Don’t struggle. If you haven’t hurt the girl, you’ve got nothing to fear. If you have…”
He pulled the terrified man completely across the counter and said very softly, “If you have, then, by all means struggle. It won’t make any difference in the end — if you know what I mean?”