color?"she ventured.
Damon nodded, pleased. He himself wouldn't be caught dead in any color other than black, but he was wil ing to put up with - even encourage - Jessalyn's oddities. They might get him made a vampire faster.
"I want your blood,"the princess whispered, as if to prove him right.
"Here? Now?"Damon whispered back. "In front of al your servants?"
Jessalyn surprised him then. She, who had been so timid before, stepped out of the curtains and clapped her hands for silence. It fel immediately.
"Everyone out!"she said peremptorily. "You have made me a beautiful garden in my room, and I am grateful. The steward" - she nodded toward a young man who was dressed in black, but who had wisely placed a dark red rose in his buttonhole - "wil see to it that you're al given food - and drink - before you go!"At this there was a murmur of praise that made the princess blush.
"I'l ring the bel pul when I need you" - to the steward.
In fact, it wasn't until two days later that she reached up and, a little reluctantly, rang the bel pul . And that was merely to give the order that a uniform be made for Damon as quickly as possible. The uniform of captain of her guard.
By the second day, Bonnie had to turn to the star bal s as her only source of entertainment. After going through her twenty-eight orbs she found that twenty-five of them were soap operas from beginning to end, and two were ful of experiences so frightening and hideous that she labeled them in her own mind as Never Ever. The last one was cal ed Five Hundred Stories for Young Ones, and Bonnie quickly found that these immersion stories could be useful, for they specified the names of things a person would find around the house and the city. The sphere's connecting thread was a series about a family of werewolves named the Düz-Aht-Bhi'iens. Bonnie promptly christened them the Dustbins. The series consisted of episodes showing how the family lived each day: how they bought a new slave at the market to replace one who had died, and where they went to hunt human prey, and how Mers Dustbin played in an important bashik tournament at school.
Today the last story was almost providential. It showed little Marit Dustbin walking to a Sweetmeat Shop and getting a sugarplum. The candy cost exactly five soli. Bonnie got to experience eating part of it with Marit, and it was good.
After reading the story, Bonnie very careful y peeked through the edge of the window blind and saw a sign on a shop below that she'd often watched. Then she held the star bal to her temple.
Yes! Exactly the same kind of sign. And she knew not only what she wanted, but how much it should cost.
She was dying to get out of her tiny room and try what she had just learned. But before her eyes, the lights in the sweetshop went dark. It must be closing time.
Bonnie threw the star bal across the room. She turned the gas lamp down to just the faintest glow, and then flung herself on her rush-fil ed bed, pul ed the covers up...and discovered that she couldn't sleep. Groping in ruby twilight, she found the star bal with her fingers and put it to her temple again.
Interspersed with clusters of stories about the Dustbin family's daily adventures were fairy tales. Most of them were so gruesome that Bonnie couldn't experience them al the way through, and when it was time to sleep, she lay shivering on her pal et. But this time the story seemed different. After the title, The Gatehouse of the Seven Kitsune Treasures, she heard a little rhyme:
Amid a plain of snow and ice
There lies kitsune paradise.
And close beside, forbidden pleasure: Six gates more of kitsune treasure.
The very word kitsune was frightening. But, Bonnie thought, the story might prove relevant somehow.
I can do this, she thought and put the star bal to her temple.
The story didn't start with anything gruesome. It was about a young girl and boy kitsune who went on a quest to find the most sacred and secret of the "seven kitsune treasures,"the kitsune paradise. A treasure, Bonnie learned, could be something as smal as a single gem or as large as an entire world. This one, going by the story, was in the middle range, because a "paradise"was a kind of garden, with exotic flowers blooming everywhere,