Some part of Bonnie understood that she was so deeply in shock that every thought was abnormal. But she couldn’t feel that in her gut. There she was, grimly hefting her bit of splintered wood, where a wiser head would have simply realized that she was going to be severely mauled and probably die even if she got in one or two blows.
The white dog whimpered again, a pleading, puppy-like sound. And suddenly, astonishingly, Bonnie felt a flame of outrage sear through her. These animals were undoubtedly cruel enough to kill a smaller animal who was terrified. They were hateful and wrong, and bad, bad dogs! She was going to hit them hard before they dragged her down.
As the two animals reached her Bonnie gritted her teeth and braced for the attack. She felt the white dog’s hot breath on her calves; she sensed the bad dogs poising themselves to leap, and—
“DOWN!”
The shout came from behind her. Bonnie choked. She froze with wide-stretched eyes, afraid to glance over her shoulder; afraid to turn her back on the wild dogs.
She watched what happened, half-wondering if it was somehow another dream. The brindled dogs, who had already started to leap, acted as if they had run into something solid in the night air. Their long legs folded beneath them as they appeared to bounce off an invisible barrier, and they landed on the pathway more or less in a “down” position.
Should I smack them? I think maybe they need to be smacked, Bonnie thought. She could see the frustrated yellow gleam of their wicked eyes.
But their ears were flat now, and their tails were tucked under. They looked angry, but they also looked beaten. They almost seemed to be afraid to move, as well, and Bonnie couldn’t bring herself to hit animals that seemed glued in place.
Slowly, she lowered her arms, and at the same time realized that they were quivering with unreleased tension. She watched as her trembling hands let go of the branch and it hit the concrete.
“And just what were you going to do with that, redbird?”
It was Damon’s voice. Bonnie turned around without a thought for the bad d
ogs. Damon himself was standing on the pathway. He was smiling at her.
“I don’t know exactly what I was going to do,” Bonnie said, feeling self-conscious, but unable to help smiling shakily back. “I guess—whatever I could.”
“But weren’t you scared?”
“I was scared to death—too scared not to do something. The big white dog was even more scared than I was and I had to try to use that stick. I guess I was going to jam the splintery end into the bad dogs’ noses.”
“The bad—? Ah. Hm,” Damon said, taking a moment to look over the feral dogs sprawled and cowering on the concrete.
Bonnie looked, too. The animals’ eyes were fairly glowing with fire, and their hair was bristled up all over their backs. But even as Bonnie stared, they seemed to cower away from her, almost as if they heard some angry voice that she couldn’t make out.
Damon turned back to her. “You know what, redbird? I think that you’ve been very brave tonight. You were going to try to fight those . . . bad dogs . . . with only a pointed stick. And you didn’t even scream out loud.”
“Well, I was screaming inloud plenty,” Bonnie confided, pleased with the new word she had discovered. “And I never was so glad to see—or hear—anyone as when you came!” Suddenly and quite spontaneously, she threw her arms around him.
Damon squeezed her tightly for a moment and then quickly rubbed her back, as if trying to warm her. “You’re all frozen, little redbird,” he said, his voice worried. “You can’t fly like this; you’ll ice up your feathers.”
Bonnie giggled because he sounded so serious. She looked up at him—meaning to make some silly comment about needing a swig of antifreeze; she remembered that hipflask of his from the hospital—when suddenly everything in the world stopped.
Damon was looking down at her with an expression she had never seen before. At least, she’d never seen it directed toward her before. His dark eyes seemed to be filled with stars, just like the brilliant stars that blazed overhead in the moonless sky.
He looked almost puzzled, as if he was wondering over her, trying to make out whether she was mostly funny or mostly . . . something else. Something that made the breath catch in Bonnie’s throat.
He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her, but he did it absent-mindedly, all the time looking down at her intently. Bonnie shivered once as she felt the warm leather encasing her—warm from Damon’s body heat. The jacket actually seemed to generate warmth that radiated through Bonnie all the way down to her chilly toes.
But this fact passed through her mind only vaguely, because right now Bonnie was thinking with her heart. She felt spellbound, wrapped not just in warmth but in dizzy lightness, as if she were floating. And nothing mattered except Damon’s closeness and the wonderful way he was looking at her.
“You’re a contradictory little thing,” he murmured, almost as if he were talking to himself. “You say that you’re terrified—and I believe you—but when you’ve got something that’s more frightened than you are to protect, you try to fight off certain death with a splintered stick.”
He smiled faintly, just one corner of his mouth quirking up, and Bonnie realize with a thrill that it was a genuine smile, not the flashy one he put on for all sorts of reasons. This was just for her, and his eyes had gone soft and velvety for her, too.
Bonnie knew that her own lips were parted in astonishment, her breath coming lightly and quickly. She had never realized . . . but then she’d never really allowed herself to imagine this. It was all like some magical dream.
“You know,” he said, very slowly and softly, as if he were puzzling out each word, “there are times when I think I’ve had enough of adventure, little redbird. When I just want to . . . come home. But . . . where is home, really? I wonder about that. Don’t you think sometimes that it’s nice to just relax . . . on your nest?”
A worry was nagging at Bonnie, trying to be born, but she pushed it away. She did her best to answer Damon’s question. “I suppose so,” she managed at last, hearing the quiver in her own soft voice. “I . . . I think . . .”