bonnie and damon after hours by l.j smith (the two towers ebook .txt) 📕

nothing more to gain by darkness so they might as well show their true forms.
Bonnie couldn’t help—no she really couldn’t help—but take a glance back to see what their true forms were.
They were hideous. And they were very clearly werewolves. Bonnie thought that wolves were beautiful and that some people were beautiful, but the creature you got when you combined them was hideous. Besides being lank and hairy with too-long paws in front and back, their beautiful wolf-faces were horribly combined with round human-like skulls, and eyes that faced forward, like a person’s. They stood in a kind of crouch, but Bonnie could tell with one look that they were sinewy, built for speed. For hunting. For killing.
Just at the moment though, they were still.
“How did you do that?” one demanded in a guttural voice. It was looking with its good eye at the overhead light.
The other could say nothing, although a foam of white slather bubbled around its mouth. Its long muzzle was stuck deep into the plastic cup, and although its jaw muscles had tremendous leverage going the other way, to crunch down, they were not nearly as effective in opening up. It looked a little silly with its nose in the cup, trying to snarl
and bite at the plastic, but it was still scary enough that Bonnie saw a shimmering grayness before her eyes.
Oh, no, no . . .
It was all over. She was . . .
She was going to faint.
“Take it off this way, idiot,” the guttural voice said and the first werewolf strode over to the other. He closed his front paw around the cup and pulled. It took a little time since the cup had become slippery with saliva from the first werewolf’s thumb-less pawing.
Bonnie saw the people she loved pass before twinkling grayness that was her field of vision: Mom, and her sister Mary, and Meredith and Elena of course, and Caroline—sort of, and her boyfriend Raymond, and Matt Honeycutt, who made such a cute quarterback with his blond hair, and Stefan, that gorgeous new guy who Elena was trying to get, and the boy who sat behind her this year in sociology. . .
“Too bright,” cried the werewolf who had been pretending to be nice. “Who turned on the light?” It had blue eyes, which made it even more hideous than the other. The blue eyes were too light to be right above a wolf’s snout—the wrongness of it was sickening.
“Shut up,” growled the other one. It had black claws instead of fingernails and now it tapped one of these against a metal bookshelf to produce the sound Bonnie had heard before.
Tick.
Its face was horrendous because of the wound that had cut one eye almost in half and covered it to the chest in blood.
“Go ahead and look,” it said to Bonnie in its deep slow guttural voice. “I’m already healing. You’ve done nothing but make me angry, and I promise you that was a bad mistake. You are going to die . . . slowly. You are going to beg me for death before you die.”
“Yes, yes, it’s time to start games,” said the other werewolf, sounding not quite sane in its bloodlust.
Tick . . .
“Slow.”
Both werewolves stepped toward her.
Tick . . .
Both werewolves took another step.
“Painful.”
Tick . . .
“Death.”
Although all of Bonnie’s instincts told her running was useless, she turned to run.
And instantly was caught about the waist and held immobile.
* * * * *
“Now, now,” Damon said and caught the fleeing red-haired maiden as she started to dash beyond the bookcase where he was standing,
letting his own night-adjusted eyes get used to the light. They were fine now, but it had taken a while. “There, there.”
He stepped out, still holding the girl, and then he gave everyone all round a brilliant smile, which he immediately turned off like a candle being doused with water. “Three may be a crowd,” he said to the terrified, swooning girl in his arms, “but four is enough for a round of bridge, yes?”
“You bloodsucking tick—” began the guttural-voiced werewolf, as Damon slid the fainting girl carefully into a chair, scattering some papers on the table to make sure she wouldn’t hurt her head if she did faint. Head injuries could be dangerous and might interfere with her ability to admire him.
“Now then, let me just train these two for a minute,” Damon said to the girl, adding, “Bad dog! No! Sit!” to the werewolves. He then gracefully got behind the creatures before they could move and grabbed each of them with one hand by the scruff of the neck. The next instant he was dragging them out of the door, where he settled for one quick crunch at the back of the neck for each. They turned back into their human forms after this, and disreputable, lowlife humans at that. Their odor as humans was almost as bad as their rank scent as werewolves, and that was saying a lot. Damon spat a few times, wiped his mouth, and straightened and brushed his black cashmere sweater before going back inside to see his maiden.
She was weakly trying to get up, her eyes on the bloody steel ruler on the floor.
“Now, now. There, there. Now, there,” Damon said, preventing her from getting to the ruler. “You did some very nice work with that but you don’t need it anymore. They’re in puppy heaven now. Well, puppy hell, more likely, but you don’t need to worry about them, is the point.”
The maiden, who was exceptionally dainty and pretty and had, to a vampire, the most exquisite feature of all, an exceptionally long and delicate column of a neck, was looking up at him soulfully. That was nice, that she was short. Damon didn’t care that much for tall girls because he wasn’t very tall himself. She also had—you couldn’t help notice—particularly large eyes in her small heart-shaped face, giving her the appearance of a kitten. They were clear brown eyes, with a dark ring at the outer rim of the iris, then a very light brown ring, as if light were shining through them in the middle, and then another dark ring around the pupil. Her hair was the color of a strawberry and curled softly all over her head in a way that made you think “pixie.”
Altogether, she was a lovely little ornament, with fine blue veins in naturally translucent skin.
Damon smiled at her, not bothering to hide elongated canines.
“Oooh,” the maiden gasped, taking Damon in from dark, silky hair to neatly booted feet in one heart-rending glance. “Oooooh. Gorgeous.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I meant: ooooh, you saved me!”
“Well, I helped,” Damon said with a very deep and a very false sense of modesty.
“Ooooh, they were monsters.”
“Well, they’re no danger now,” Damon said.
“Ooooooh, they were going to eat me!”
Damon wondered if he should moan before speaking the way the girl did. Maybe it was some regional dialect thing. He wanted to make her comfortable. “OOH!” he said, a bit more violently than he meant to, and the girl jerked in his arms, her brown eyes becoming enormous. “Yes, they were,” he agreed heartily.
“Oh, my God,” said the girl, forgetting to “oooh” at all. “Who are you? You wouldn’t take advantage of a helpless girl at a time like this, would you?” she added, and shut her eyes.
“Oh, well, perhaps only a little,” Damon said jovially, eyeing the lovely lavender veins in her neck.
“Ooooooooh.”
Damon stood looking helplessly down at the maiden, noticing uncomfortably that she weighed almost nothing on his arm, that her skin skill had the luster of its first baby-glow, and that altogether she seemed much more like a child than like a maiden at all.
He cleared his throat.
The brown eyes opened. They were not only unusually large but rather wide apart, imparting a childlike look to the owner.
“Yes?” she said, looking disappointed, which did nothing for Damon’s canines.
“Ah,” he said. He tried to impart some of the velvet of the night into his voice. “Um. You know what those two things were?”
“Oooooh, yes. The were oooooh werewolves.” She shuddered.
“So you get a lot of werewolves around here?”
“OooooooooooOOh! No!”
“Ah,” said Damon, who had jumped a little himself at the end of this moan. “Well. They were definitely creatures of the—” “—ooooooh, night!”
“And, ah, do you know about any other creatures of the night?”
“Ooooh, werewolves and vampires and witches and ghosts and demons and succubuses, and incubuses and bad elves and imps and, oooh, boggins and will o’wisps, and ooooooh—”
Damon leaped at the strategic moan. “Okay, take that, go back to the beginning and name the second.”
The brown eyes went wide and the pupils dilated with fear, then the girl darted quick looks around the room and toward the ceiling. “Wuh-witches?” she faltered. “I know one—knew one—that wasn’t wicked at all. She was my grannie and she knew when she was going to
die because she sent me my birthday present a whole month early and the—”
“Stop!” said Damon. The girl had a particularly melodious voice and listening to her was no great trial—it was rather like listening to a nightingale or a curlew, but he had to get his point across. “Witches was third on the list, actually. There was something before it.”
“No,” the redhead said, “Werewolves and witches and vamp—” She stopped, put a small, delicate-fingered hand over her mouth. “Vamp-pires?” she finished, with a small gulp in the middle of the word.
Damon felt instant relief. They had got somewhere! He smiled again, brilliantly.
The strawberry-haired girl looked at his smile. She looked at it very carefully. Damon was happy to have overcome the linguistic challenges and held the smile for a long time, almost a whole second.
Just as he turned the smile off, the redhead stopped examining it. Damon knew when she did, precisely, for her eyelashes fluttered in a manner her great-grandmother would have approved of, her face became white as marble, and her body went limp, sending her curly strawberry head on a crash course with the wooden floor.
It would have taken superhuman reflexes to catch her before her small body hit the ground, headfirst, but fortunately Damon had those. He snatched up the little redhaired songbird almost the instant she began to fall, catching her around her tiny waist and . . . once again they
were back to square one, with him holding her, but this time with the addition of her unconsciousness. He looked around for something to put her on and was beginning to make use of a study table when her eyelashes flickered again, she moaned softly, and then awoke.
“Oooh, it’s just you—it’s you!” she exclaimed, going from reassurance to terror in about a tenth of a second flat. She struggled feebly to get out of his arms. Since her goal would have landed her on her backside on the floor, Damon didn’t let her achieve it.
The redhead was also fumbling at her long delicate neck—a ballerina’s neck, if he’d ever seen one—perfect for Swan Lake—“Am I. . . ? Did you. . . ? Did you already. . .?” she asked him.
“Never. I’d never take advantage of a sleeping maiden.” Because I don’t care for cold, unreceptive flesh, Damon thought. The warmth, the vibrant pleasure, as well as the lifeforce of an exquisite treat like this were to be treasured, not squandered as she lay asleep.
The girl was panting in his arms now like a wounded stag, with the hounds very near. “At least—you saved me—from those monsters. They would have tortured me.”
Looking at her, at the way she clasped the tiny gold cross