Not for the faint of stomach. This is a scene which my editor and I agreed to
leave out of The Vampire Diaries Book 6, Shadow Souls. It’s
definitely gruesome, but I would hate for these leftovers to go to waste.
Read on at your
own peril . . . and if you’re munching something, stop!
Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie,
accompanied by the little serving girl Lakshmi, who had special permission to
show off various features of the estate, had a wonderful time walking over the
grounds surrounding Lady Ulma’s mansion. There was so much to see and to hear
or guess about: a game park where deer and rabbit grazed peacefully; a stream
that was punctuated by a carefully enhanced pond, now full of ducks; a
gone-to-seed flower garden that Damon and Elena had hired two dozen skilled
servants to bring back to life; a kitchen garden which seemed to have thrived
on neglect, and was producing cabbages bigger than basketballs and squashes
nearly three feet long. The herb garden, too, seemed to be in overgrown, but
wonderful shape, with fragrant mint, coriander, rosemary and wild basil, all
growing in profusion.
In the kitchen garden they heard the
sound of childish laughter and found a little boy playing. He was an adorable
toddler, with huge blue eyes with an expression that reminded Elena of Bonnie.
He might have been about two and a half—old enough to enjoy being tickled and
falling on his back laughing. He was dressed surprisingly richly in a blue suit
with a high, white ruffled collar that reminded Elena irresistibly of Little
Lord Fauntleroy. It was also Elena who decided that he must be the child or
relative of one of the cooks, for he seemed happy and at home in the kitchen
garden, but very timid of going outside.
He couldn’t clearly tell them his
name, for when they asked him, he responded first with “Dinny” or something
very like it, and the next time with “Rotey.” They gave up and simply played
with him with a large rubber ball for about half an hour whereupon, abruptly,
he curled up on the warm grass and went to sleep. Elena, feeling more tired
than she had expected, decided to do the same, inside the mansion.
* * * * *
That evening was special, the first
formal meal they were to have at home in the mansion, and the first that Elena
was allowed to attend. Elena and the two other girls were delighted to find
that miracles had been wrought again by the seamstresses. When they descended
to the dining room Meredith was wearing a leopard print evening dress with side
cutouts that made her look as dangerous as a predator, and yet so sexy that if
they’d had werewolf guests she might have gotten eaten, Damon joked. Elena was
in a royal blue halter dress that matched her eyes and billowed down to her
pearly sandals from an empire waistline that was trimmed with tiny multicolored
freshwater pearls. She still wore Stefan’s pendant although Damon had said that
in the privacy of their own home, he’d prefer the girls not wear token collars.
Bonnie was the one truly dressed up:
she was wearing a soft blue gown with a satin bodice decorated all over with
pale blue beading, and a full skirt overlaid with layer after layer of tulle
draping. With sapphires at her ears and arms and fingers, she looked ready to
dance at any moment.
They entered the dining room to find
that Damon was reclining at the head of the table and Lady Ulma at its foot.
The table was a singularly organically shaped structure designed to accommodate
all the couches and still leave nooks for the servers, carvers, the salt cellar
mistress (a position of obvious prestige), the spice lads, food tasters, and
all the other servants who seemed to be necessary to the functioning of a
special “family dinner.” Bonnie, though separated from Damon by several
undulations of the table, seemed to be occupying the spot of first, or
favorite, concubine. Sage amused them by explaining to Elena, that although her
back was entirely healed and her leg concealed, she should not have been at the
table at all, owing to the cut on her cheek. In a traditional household, it
would rendered her as spoilt, probably for life—but Damon had said a few grim
words to the household staff and she was seated near Lady Ulma, at the foot,
and—to her own secret amusement—being served last.
Since Damon had made it a point
beyond argument, no vampires were employed in the household except one or two
of Lady Ulma’s old family retainers, who, fortunately, did not wait at table.
The first dishes were a clear
venison soup with tiny slivers of pancake in it that Elena found delicious, and
a thick soup tasting of almonds and honey that under normal circumstances would
have served any of the girls as a meal in itself. But after this there were a
bewildering variety of savories, from which Elena picked only a few shrimp
served with a sharp vinegar, glad to find something she recognized. After that
there was a pause, and then, with actual trumpeters sounding a fanfare from the
steps above the dining hall, proud servants, holding the silver platters high
over their heads, carried in a whole roast peacock, served with its head and
tail, and half a dozen other large platters containing whole roast or boiled
animals, all too often identifiable. Damon, of course, waved each dish past
with a word or two about the presentation, all the while sipping Black Magic
from a healthy-sized gem-encrusted gold goblet. Elena could see nothing except
the peacock in her minds’ eye and was frantically ticking off things to talk
about to Lady Ulma or whoever instructed the chefs, when the horror started.
She might have missed the beginning
if there had not been another pause—though, thankfully, no fanfare this
time—and the very silence acted as a vacuum to draw all eyes to the covered
silver platter being held at the top of the stairs, as a carver pushed a little
carving table before Bonnie. The carver, a plump, pleasant, smiling man, was
clearly according Bonnie (as favorite courtesan) the honor of the first and
most tender choice of roast. He picked up a long thin knife and lovingly
stropped it against another before, he nodded with a flourish to the servant
still holding high the platter, which was about the size to fit a whole
chicken.
There was some question, afterward,
about her Power. Lady Ulma would always claim that Elena was already rising as
the carver began to uncover the dish. Elena had some vague memory of needing to
do something that was not at all clear in her mind—but it was certain that by
the time of the cover-lifting she had a clear view over the sauce lad’s
shoulder. After that, however, she was simply swept along with the series of
events.
The carver had not finished lifting
the cover when she saw it. A delicate wisp of a golden curl. Nothing that she
had ever seen inside a covered dish and nothing that belonged there. In the
silence, as steam began to plume out around the sides of the dish beside
Bonnie, Elena heard her own voice raised high, perfectly clear in the expectant
silence of the room.
“Keep
that dish covered!”
The very violence of her outburst
succeeded in making the carver pause. Even if this concubine was at this moment
at the bottom of the pack, you could never tell what might happen tomorrow.
Masters were notoriously fickle, and a lovely girl like this one might well end
up a favorite again.
The shrillness of Elena’s voice did
something else, though. It caused Bonnie to see through the plume of smoke what
looked like a little golden curl. Meredith was already on her feet, alerted by
Elena’s frantic outburst and the size of the covered dish. Now her dusky skin
turned gray and Elena knew she’d gotten it.
Bonnie’s shoulders went down and on
a whole number of levels Elena was glad: Bonnie was going to faint without a
word, and she would be followed by Elena and finally Meredith, all the Lord
Vampire’s courtesans, one, two, three. That meant, primarily, that Elena could
give in to the sucking black vortex at her feet, that kept hearing Dr. Meggar’s
voice saying, “Red meat! Red meat!” It also meant that she didn’t have to dwell
on the particularly large roast that was the base of the throne, as it were,
for the peacock. It had a frighteningly familiar silhouette with small arms and
legs doubled up and held by white frills and blue ribbon.
Bonnie’s fainting would also mean
that Elena didn’t have to deal—right now—with a great sheaf of memories that
were popping up like magicians’ cards out of a pack, and primarily that she
didn’t have to wonder in how many ways she could have prevented this greatest
of tragedies, or how to re-evaluate her view of everyone in the household that
she had come to know, including Lady Ulma.
And then Elena heard the first
shriek splinter the expectant silence and she saw that Bonnie was not going to
faint; that in fact Bonnie had thrown her head back for a whole series of
glass-shattering shrieks, and Elena knew somewhere in the dizzying cotton-wool
that was filling her head that if Bonnie did not faint then neither could she.
There was something that had to be done before she could simply fall over. And
somehow, although her lips were numb and her eyes were blind with tears that
seemed to have permanently frozen over them, obscuring her vision, she was
shuffling forward. No, she was shouldering forward, shoving her way past all
manner of servants who had a right to be there and even more that did not, but
who were so thrown off by this extraordinary turn of events that they didn’t
know where their places were.
And now Bonnie’s hands were beating
at the horror in front of her and, in slow motion, the cover was coming off,
only, thankfully, to be clamped back on by the carver, who then fell to his
knees, wailing and begging for his life. Honey and vinegar filled Elena’s mouth
and she had no memory of how she emptied it before she heard her own shrieks
also filling the room, and Meredith’s alto screams seeming to echo back at her.
Unfortunately, this seemed to make
it even harder to get to Bonnie, as the servants around Elena wanted her to
drink water, wanted her to sit down, wanted her to do anything but scream
bloody murder until she could force Bonnie to stop screaming bloody murder.
And then she saw something which
caused everything in the room, momentarily, to go black-and-white and
soundless, like a very old photo imprinting its image on her eyes. Lady Ulma
was trying to rise from her couch, but was frozen midway in doing it, with one
hand over her curving abdomen and the other clenched into a fist at her temple.
Poison? We’ve all gone mad, all the
women, at least—is it possible that we’ve been—
She’s
pregnant!
As Elena stared, forgetting to
scream in the new horror before her eyes, the fuzziness that had clouded them
just a minute ago disappeared. And she saw, with the utmost clarity, a long
spasm of contraction that rippled across the pregnant woman’s stomach and held
her frozen again as sweat appeared in great droplets at her temples. She was
trying to wipe the sweat away, but the hand that swiped at her forehead was
trembling with weakness.
She’s
going into premature labor.
It didn’t matter why. Some guiding
voice told Elena this as one part of her mind began to wonder, helplessly, if
perhaps Lady Ulma was as horrified at the thought of eating a sweet toddler, or
if Lady Ulma was worried that after this they wouldn’t help her to keep her
family home, or if, as seemed most likely, Lady Ulma simply had been scared out
of her wits by this dinner guest turned into a shrieking madwoman and the shock
had been too much for a pregnancy that had already been through so many
horrors. All the questions disappeared in a puff of smoke as Elena realized
that a tragedy was about to be doubled right here in this room, if someone
couldn’t get the hellish noise and the hysteria to stop.
But, to her immense frustration, she
still wasn’t able to get to Bonnie. Not even charging with her shoulder, first
waving, and then flinging attendants
away from her. Neither, in a room where the noise level had now reached a peak,
was she able to attract anyone sensible’s attention to ask them to bring Dr.
Meggar. Everyone was reacting to her as if she were a thrashing, screaming
maniac—like Bonnie . . .
“Damon!” Scrambling up onto her
couch, ignoring the renewed shrieks of fear and well-meant advice around her,
she looked for the only person that she could think of that might have kept his
head. To her relief, an instant later, Meredith popped up from across the
table, barely visible behind the peacock.
“Damon!”
With
Meredith’s voice added to hers she could hear herself calling through the din.
And what’s more, from her new vantage point she could see Damon. He was
standing right in front of Bonnie, ignoring Bonnie’s flailing hands smeared
with God-knew-what. But he wasn’t doing anything.
We made him promise, Elena
remembered. No mind control. No Influence to force us to do anything we really
didn’t want to.
He gave his word, Elena thought. And
somehow she knew that, once pledged, Damon would not, could not, simply break his word. If he hadn’t done it in five
hundred years, she reasoned, he wasn’t going to break it now over a screaming
teenager.
Elena and Meredith exchanged another
helpless look. Then Elena took a quick look back at Bonnie. Someone had already
tried the water- in-the-face trick. Bonnie’s normally fluffy strawberry hair
was flat and wet. And she was still screaming—like
Fazina herself, generating a truly remarkable amount of noise for one so tiny
in stature. Damon had her by the shoulders and was shaking her, but far too
gently to get anywhere with her. Elena would bet that to Bonnie he was just
another blob in a sea of blobs, and that neither comfort nor enlightenment had
emerged from the blobby ocean.
And the two of them couldn’t get out
of the room. That was bad. Damon and Bonnie were both trapped by a solid
phalanx of servants, couches, and the three other diners—not to mention the
table—between them and the two exits from the room. Lady Ulma was nearest the
exits, but she was lying on a high-backed couch that kept the crowd of
onlookers who were now thronging in the doorway from seeing her plight as Elena
had.
Elena and Meredith were reaching a
decision by a consensus of velociraptor sisterhood. It was not one that had
ever been reached before, but the situation was desperate. Elena held up a hand
flat in the air with the thumb pointing toward her and all the fingers together
as if to slice something with it, then brought her other hand sharply toward it
in a gesture as if clapping her palm with her fingers, once. Across the table,
Meredith was doing the same thing, but Elena noticed that Meredith’s smack was
a good deal more vigorous.
After one more instant, while Elena
hung in limbo, frozen by what she had to do, she turned back toward Damon,
seeing Meredith turn with her. They both called again, Elena putting all her
Power behind her voice to try to cut through the noise.
Damon heard. He had been fully
occupied with Bonnie, but now he looked up to see the two other girls standing
on their couches, both shouting at him.
Damon!
Even the telepathic channel was
over-crowded; Elena knew her voice was only getting through faintly.
She and Meredith, hands held high,
made the slapping gesture again. This time Elena increased the power of her
swinging hand to match Meredith’s.
Damon stared at them, back and forth
as Elena nodded both vigorously and impatiently. She could barely hear her own
telepathic voice as she jabbed a finger toward Lady Ulma’s couch. Make it stop! Get the doctor. Lady Ulma’s
going into labor! DO IT NOW!
Whether he picked all that up she
didn’t know, but he got the basic message. There was a little clear space
around Bonnie, where broken dishes and goblets and the ruins of many platters
of food lay on the floor. Bonnie was still beating with her hands at invisible
enemies and somehow keeping up the ear-splitting noise that rose above all the
rest.
Damon took a step into the area. He
swung the flat of his hand, stopping it just at the last second before it could
impact Bonnie’s face.
Bonnie, eyes shut, took absolutely
no notice.
Damon tried again, raising his hand,
swinging, only stop dead exactly at the moment when his fingers touched
Bonnie’s cheek.
Elena lost her cool.
“LADY
ULMA’S BABY IS GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF YOU!” she screamed, at the same time
sending the words with all the Power she could summon. “THIS HAS TO STOP! SHE’S
GOING TO MISCARRY AND IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT BECAUSE YOU COULDN’T STOP IT—”
And then Damon stopped it.
Damon kissed Bonnie.
Elena, from her perch, could see it
all. She saw how Damon, who was not so very tall himself, had to bend down to
her, and how, ignoring her tear-smeared face, he kissed her just as she was
opening her mouth for a fresh scream. Elena could see Bonnie’s eyes open and
widen and then blink as if she were coming out of some fugue state. Then she
slowly shut her eyes as she cooperated with the kiss—and then she went limp.
Her hands, which had been raised in defensive claws, relaxed and went around
Damon’s neck and then slowly, she brought them down to her sides. She swayed.
Silence spread out from them like
ripples in a pool.
Meredith and Elena looked at each
other, each slightly ashamed. There, they had been advocating violence toward a
sister, and had entirely missed Damon’s better solution. And Elena told herself
that it was not in the least because she was jealous of Bonnie—after all,
Meredith hadn’t thought of it either, and Meredith didn’t want Damon to kiss
her.
And since when do I want Damon to
kiss me? Elena asked herself, feeling something now like fear.
The silence acted as if a tonic had
spread like ripples across the entire room. The servants, who had been
bellowing or screeching at each other to shut up, shut up. The carver and his
assistants, who had been kneeling, wailing, and begging for their miserable
lives, shut up. The majordomo, who had been one of the loudest, bawling his
orders at servant after servant, took a gulp of wine and said no more.
In the silence, Elena’s words rang
out clearly. “Lady Ulma’s in labor! You and
you and you carry her couch upstairs, and—where’s Lakshmi?—there you are!
Run, run, get a litter and bring Dr.
Meggar back on it immediately.”
For just an instant everyone
hesitated. This was a slave, the same one who had gotten herself ten stripes
for overreaching herself before, and besides in the aftermath of the hysteria,
there was a sort of spell of inaction that kept everyone silent and frozen in
place.
Damon broke it. “She speaks for me
in every word,” he said, lifting his head at last from Bonnie’s, which for some
reason, made Elena feel more relaxed. “Lakshmi! Take this”—he expertly flipped
the girl a coin purse—“for the litter. Do whatever you have to do, but get him.” Damon was not shouting by any
means, but speaking in a way that penetrated every crevice in the room and the
hallway. Forcefully, that was it. He was speaking so forcefully that servants
began talking again, looking for a way to clean up the mess, the majordomo once
again began to give his orders in his stentorian voice, and the carver,
prostrate in a mess that Elena couldn’t look at without wanting to be sick,
began again wailing that he had simply followed his orders and he had nothing
to do with the choice of cuisine.
But Elena’s words, with Damon’s
backing, were already being obeyed. The couch was floating away on the backs of
hardy young men and women, whom Elena had picked because they were all of one
height, and Lakshmi was already out of the room at a dead run.
This time when Elena elbowed her way
through the servants that still separated her from Bonnie, she was able to
reach her. To her relief, she saw Meredith coming from the other direction.
“Oh God,” Bonnie was saying, her
clear brown eyes fixing on Elena. “I can’t believe—it wasn’t real, was it? It
was some sort of—joke, or—they set us up, right? Because it’s the first formal
dinner. They—” Just then Meredith arrived, said nothing at all, and took Bonnie
into her arms. Elena, who had been trying to lead Bonnie out of this place of
terrible shrapnel, gave in, and wound her arms around both of them.
They finally had to walk that way,
crabwise, out of the dining room and upstairs.
* * * * *
There was a final commotion about
the pantry before they got settled down. Damon, in a stroke of what Elena
considered pure genius, had gone stomping around the mansion yelling
impartially at everyone for insulting his concubines by profaning their
religion. It was, as Elena was to find, much easier to convince people in the
city that you were the member of a small and very scrupulous sect which forbade
the eating of anything made with human products in it, than simply to refuse a
“long pork” sandwich only to realize that the crackers and cheese you’d chosen
were equally cannibalistic.
That was what the final commotion
was about. They got Bonnie upstairs and then were about to send a couple of
reliable upstairs girls to get some cheese and crackers, when Bonnie began to
shriek again.
“No, no, no! I’ll grind your bones to make my bread! And the cheese—it’s all in
wheels; Meredith and I saw it. How do we
know what they make cheese of?” She was still almost hysterical, but she
had a point.
Uncomfortably, they avoided one
another’s eyes—too many meals already eaten, too many questions asked too late.
Who knew what they used here instead of lard? Everyone was awkward as visions
of past meals danced before their mind’s eyes. No one was particularly logical.
And then there was Lady Ulma to
worry about. Dr. Meggar had come at once, but had immediately sent them from
the room, and there had been no news after that.
It was Elena who broke out the Black
Magic. It was the only thing that Damon was quite sure was not made out of
humans or any human by-products, and they were all, in Elena’s estimation,
overdue for something “medicinal.” Damon, who had been keeping well out of the
way since dinner had finished, looked pleased as one after another of them
praised it.
With nothing on their stomachs—all
three girls had been sick since the discovery—the Magic worked quickly. They
relaxed, and finally Meredith—the most level-headed of all of them—said, “We’ve
already got half the key. Even if we live on bottled water from the outside and
fruit picked from the orchards around the mansion, we have to get the other
half. We can make it until next week.”
“I’m going to live on Black Magic
alone,” Bonnie retorted, in a
slightly
slurred voice. “I mean—the orchards—fertilizer.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Damon
said. “But just as a point of fact, those orchards haven’t been fertilized in
over twenty years. By now I’d consider the fruit on them safe.”
Bonnie nodded her head obediently,
but she had her stubborn face on. Elena went for Plan B.
“Surely, there’s somebody here who
imports food from outside. From Earth. Even macaroni and cheese would be fine.”
Lakshmi confirmed that there was
indeed an import shop so expensive she’d never actually been inside. But in the
windows, she said, were all sorts of delicacies: Spam and Green Beans and Caviar
and Ketchup.
“All colors!” she said
enthusiastically.
“We’ll live on green beans and
caviar if we have to,” Elena said, watching poor Bonnie’s reaction to the
thought of Spam. She could see how it almost made Bonnie vomit again, but she
could also see how, with a shudder, Bonnie controlled herself.
She’s really changing, Elena
thought, once again amazed at how the diminutive girl was handling herself. I
have to remember to tell her that I’m impressed.
* * * * *
In the next few days, Damon got a
reputation for being a wildly extravagant epicure. His butler arrived at the
small gourmet store that stocked fresh food from Earth and bought fresh white
Wonder bread—all the little gourmet store had in stock—jars and jars of peanut
butter, jars and jars of grape jelly, and a wide assortment of vegetables and
other canned goods.
At Lady Ulma’s mansion, the three
human concubines entered into the longest religious holiday of their year: the
Feast of the Peanut Butter Sandwiches for all Meals.
I knew when I wrote an even more gory version
of this scene (the painted, glass-eyed, candy-toothed, cooked-just-rare little
head is actually seen) that it was too much. But I had a morbid fascination to
see where the story would go, so I finished it. Also, deleting it meant
necessarily deleting a scene in which Lakshmi learns her worth, so here it is,
as originally written. The next morning . . .
Bonnie and Meredith weren’t
surprised when Elena wanted to see Damon about two things: one being who should
go and two being what she was going to wear. What did surprise them were her
choices.
“If it’s all right,” she said slowly
at the beginning, tracing a finger round and round on the large table in one of
the parlors as everyone gathered the next morning, “I would like for just a few
people to go with me. Stefan’s been badly treated,” she went on, “and he hates
to look bad in front of other people. I don’t want to humiliate him.”
There was sort of a group blush at
this. Or maybe it was a group flush of resentment—and then a group blush of
culpability. With the western windows slightly open, so that an early morning
red light fell over everything, it was hard to tell. Only one thing was
certain: everyone wanted to go.
“So I hope,” Elena said, turning to
look Meredith and Bonnie in the eye, “that none of you are hurt if I don’t
choose you to come with me.”
That should tell both of them
they’re out, Elena thought and saw understanding blossom in both faces. Most of
her plans depended on how her two best friends reacted to this.
Meredith gallantly stepped up to bat
first. “Elena, you’ve been through hell—literally—and almost died doing it—to
get to Stefan. You take with you the people who will do the most good.”
“We realize it isn’t a popularity
contest,” Bonnie added, swallowing, because she was trying not to cry. She
really wants to go, Elena thought, but she understands. “Stefan may feel more
embarrassed in front of a girl than a boy.” And she didn’t even add “even though we would never do anything to
embarrass him,” Elena thought, going around for a hug and to feel Bonnie’s
soft little birdlike body in her arms. Then she turned and felt Meredith’s warm
and slim hard arms, and as always felt some of her tension drained away.
“Thank you,” she said, wiping tears
from her eyes afterward. “And you’re right, I think it would be harder to face
girls than boys in the situation he’s in. Also it will be harder to face
friends he already knows and loves. So I would like to ask these people to go
with me: Sage, Damon, and Dr. Meggar—if Lakshmi will run and get a litter and
ask him to come.”
There was a murmur around the table,
instantly silenced when Damon said, “That’s it, then. Lakshmi, is there enough
money left to get another litter or did Dr. Meggar charge too much last night?”
There was an odd reaction to this.
Sage, Lucen, Lady Ulma and the women attendants that always seemed to follow
Elena—they all froze. Lakshmi herself went dead white, clapped her hand to her
pocket and then, trembling visibly, drew out the purse of geld he had thrown
her the day before. She held it toward Damon in both hands, her entire body
turning into gelatin before everyone’s eyes. She ended up crawling on her knees
to him, holding it above her head and saying—as far as Elena could understand
through the sobs—“Oh, I beg you—I forgot—I beg you—I never touched a geld
myself—master—I swear—”
“Stop it,” Damon said sharply, but
Elena saw that this was not the time for sharpness or logic. She hastily took a
third body in her hands, a body that seemed all coltish young bones, with
barely enough flesh to cover them.
“Lakshmi,” she said, over and over,
even when impatience nudged her urgently to be on the way. “Little Lakshmi. Do
you know that Lady Ulma might have lost her baby, if not for you?”
“I ran,” sobbed Lakshmi. “I didn’t
even bargain with the litter men.”
“I know you did. And because of you, Lady Ulma is safe, and the baby is
safe. Do you understand?”
“But the money—”
“Troll the money!” Elena cried,
using a vulgar expression which, in its long form, meant “give the money to a
troll”—in other words, waste it. “We don’t care that you forgot about the money
purse. What we care about it is you,
and we can’t have you upset over a little thing like this.”
“Care about me?” Lakshmi stared at
Elena’s face as if trying to find the flaw, the trap, the catch. “More than a
purse full of geld?”
“Yes, of course. We can always
replace geld. We could never replace you.”
Lakshmi, looking completely
bewildered and overcome, fell back into Elena’s arms, limp. But the next
instant she had leaped up. “I still have the purse!” she cried. “I’ll get to
Dr. Meggar’s as fast as I can and we’ll wait there—or should I meet you? Where
should I go?”
Damon spoke up. “The Shi no Shi.”
Lakshmi’s eyes got round. She stared
at Damon for just an instant, and then she was bounding out the door, her
shaken voice floating behind her: “We’ll wait at his office!”
