Four: Why Are You So Cruel?

She had not lied earlier about the wool. It really did make her skin irritable. There was no ointment in the world to cure her itches. Bonnie slipped a hand surreptitiously behind her nape and adjusted the buttons of the blue cashmere dress.

The man called 'Nik' (with a k, like Vik, she reminded herself, for he had introduced himself after their altercation) had hailed her down for "supper".

"You're practically malnourished. No witch can perform good magic on an empty stomach."

She hadn't argued with that. At this point, she was far too tired, even though she had barely woken from sleep. It must be a nightmare, all of it. She was kidnapped by practisers of the occult - the crazy, blood-thirsty kind. They probably thought she was a magical 'Negro', a woman whose skin bespoke of mysterious powers.

Ugh.

They …they would let her go when they discovered she was disappointingly mundane, wouldn't they?

Or would they get angry with her, angry that she had led them on, angry that they had been promised a "witch" and instead got an average, unspectacular young woman.

Bonnie had felt like this before. Young men at El Fey always thought black girls would "put out" quickly if you stuck a five dollar bill in their uniform, sometimes even less. White girls usually went for twenty dollars or more, depending on the girl's "spirit" (what she was willing to do). But it wasn't worth spending a dime more for an exotic jejune that was just waiting for you to save her from the drudgery of her night shift. Black girls wanted to be rescued and loved, the way you love a lame stray cat and bring it home for a day or two, then push it back on the streets.

So, of course lots of those young men got angry when Bonnie Bennett pushed back the five dollar bill in their clenched fists.

'Nik', though, he seemed to have more than clenched fists…

Bonnie stopped at the double paneled doors. She could see shapes and shadows moving through the glass mosaic. She wanted to turn back and lock herself up in her room, but the doors were flung open by a blond woman with an insouciant smile and lynx eyes.

"Why, do join us, darling," she said, pulling Bonnie's arm with considerable strength.

Bonnie seized up at the touch. This was the sister. She remembered her clearly. She remembered her snappy manner at El Fey, remembered her glacial looks, her mouth on her wrists, her tongue on her skin…

Bonnie blushed, having no idea what to say to this impressive apparition. She was beautiful and mean, in the heartless way of a Daisy Bunchanan, but where Daisy had been marked with a drop of tragedy, the blond woman dragging her forward was only marked by a magnetic, irresistible sensuality. She was wearing a red dress, but it was nothing like Bonnie had seen before. It was cut very low, both in the front and the back, and the fabric folded and glided down her legs like water. She wore long diamond earrings that almost touched her shoulders. Her grip was not kind. And her lips bore two indentations, where gleaming fangs might have rested on a different occasion, on a different night…

Her red mouth goes well with the red dress.

Bonnie did not know where that thought came from. She tried to draw her hand away, unsuccessfully.

The dining room was magnificent. Cyril Briggs might have called it decadent and even disgusting. Another solid proof that black folks should deride the white man, instead of emulating him. She wasn't so sure. She'd dreamed of palaces as a child, she'd walked through crystal towers where sunlight shone rainbows. She'd seen those palaces crumble in the face of reality. And she'd wondered if her true self was somewhere in that ethereal world. She didn't think so. It wasn't the blinding luxury she was after. She wanted something mythical, out of time, ma…

No. I don't want magic.

Two chandeliers swung from the ceiling. Bonnie noticed they were not lit electrically. There was a socket by the door, but the chandeliers were brimming with candles. The tablecloth was snow-white and the food which had been laid out meticulously looked plentiful, enough to serve her whole street perhaps. She barely had time to notice the large portraits staring down at them from the walls before she was shoved into a seat unceremoniously by the blond sister.

Nik was sitting at the front of the table, and he was speaking in hushed tones with a dashing young man Bonnie presumed to be Stefan. And next to him…

Bonnie gave a start.

"Caroline!"

She had almost not recognized her friend. The girl's careful bob had become a shock of sunset hair, as if someone had pushed Caroline's fingers inside the socket she'd seen by the door. Her make-up was also very different. There were dark smears on her eyelids, gleaming black and bronze. Her mouth was very pink and pale. She looked lovely, but frightful and quite desperate.

"Caroline, are you all right?"

Her friend looked at her faintly and smiled. "Hi, Bon. Do you want some champagne?"

"No, I don't want any –"

Caroline lunged for the bottle in the middle of the table. "Here, let me pour it for you."

It was then that Stefan and Nik stopped talking.

"Now, now, little doll, wait for the servers. You must learn better manners," her gold-haired captor spoke with disdain.

Caroline blushed deeply - which made a very strange contrast with her ghostly face - and retrieved her hand.

"She's not a little doll, stop treating her like she can't hear you," Bonnie protested, trying to move away a tray of what looked like honeyed lobsters in order to reach her friend.

"Speaking of dolls," the lynx-eyed blonde interjected with a devious smile, "I hear you are quite the number underneath those mousy clothes. Well, you ought to be. If a girl like you is not half pretty, then she doesn't have much purpose, does she?"

Bonnie opened her mouth in shock. "I don't –"

Nik made a disapproving sound from the head of the table. "I thought we agreed that we only talk nudity after coffee and dessert."

Bonnie choked on her own saliva. He was making fun. She tried to hide her burning cheeks. He had seen her, well, almost in her birthing suit. And he had told his sister. How awful. She wanted to sink under the table.

"Don't fret, witchling," Nik assured her, inspecting a silver fork at length. "Your gamine body does not interest me. I am a man of character, in my own way."

"I'm not a witch–" Bonnie started angrily, but she was swiftly interrupted by a legion of servers in dinner suits and tails, marching behind her.

She turned in her chair, wondering where they had suddenly emerged from. They hadn't come through the double doors. The dining room was immense, indeed. Was there a secret passage in a corner somewhere? She'd read about servants' passages in great houses. Did that passage possibly lead to freedom?

She tried to catch the eye of one of the servers, but they were completely engrossed in their tasks and did not spare her a glance. They were cutting the meat, filling up the glasses, breaking the lobster shells. All in a timely fashion.

Maybe they couldn't really see her. Bonnie noticed their eyes were glazed, unfocused. She wondered if they were under the same spell as Caroline.

She stretched out her hand and pulled on a server's jacket. The man wrenched his body away with a grimace.

"He must sense you're a witch," Nik commented gleefully.

Bonnie wrinkled her nose. "Have they been drugged?"

"That's one way of putting it," the blond sister replied, arching her back in the chair and lifting her flute, waiting to be served.

"You can't force people to work for you," Bonnie said.

Nik cocked his head to the side. "Is there any other way?"

"Yes. There is. You can pay the workers, give them good wages, let them rest and…" she trailed off stupidly. The whole table was watching her with amusement, like she was the entertainment for the evening. Even Caroline looked embarrassed.

Here she was, sounding off her slightly socialist opinions as if she was a debutante at a society ball and she wanted to shock the rich snobs. Well, maybe she did.

"Sustenance and money. Those are the conditions you propose?" Nik inquired, almost amiably, carving into the veal with relish.

"Well…there are other ways…"

"Mm. And yet, people are forced to depend on money. They are forced to live on sustenance. Everything, sadly, implies a contract. So, you see, I needn't force them. They are already subjugated."

"Unlike you?" Bonnie fired back, getting hot under the collar.

"Well, yes. I am carving this meat and I will consume it simply because it suits my fancy. I don't need it to survive. I hardly need money either," he said, waving his knife around the room.

"Just because you inherited a fortune from your father –" Bonnie tried again.

His knife clattered on the porcelain plate.

"You shall not speak about my father."

Bonnie sensed she had touched a nerve. Good. She felt a small flame of victory. But it quickly flickered and waned when the beautiful sister put her hand on her forearm.

"Heed his words, little witch. My brother can get very nasty about family," she said, her eyes glinting with pleasure. She wanted Bonnie not to heed. She wanted a scandal.

"Now, now, Rebekah. I am most patient with you, aren't I?"

"Yes…most patient," she agreed sweetly, but Bonnie could see the stymied resentment behind her smile.

"What my brother actually meant," she continued charmingly, "is that we do not need money or food because we are vampires."

Bonnie felt her stomach drop. It was not the word itself, but the devil-may-care tone of her voice. It was as if she'd called the sky blue, or the sun yellow.

"So, you see, your little Marxist notions don't apply to us. We're above it, we're not even in the same realm really," Rebekah continued gleefully.

Stefan drew his chair back peevishly and pulled Caroline up with him.

"Come, Caroline. This dinner party's turning stale."

"And why should you go, Stefan?" Rebekah demanded, her voice slightly higher than before. "Have I offended you? It was not to me who turned this inbred into one of us."

Caroline chewed on her lip. She hung limply on Stefan's arm. Bonnie hated how much she did look like a doll.

"I'm not an inbred," Caroline spoke softly.

"What?" Rebekah chuckled. "She speaks?"

"I'm not an inbred. Cousin Lou was just something Ma considered on a whim… he works for a tool-and-die, you see, and he gets good money for the fixes, and he might run the place someday because the boss likes him, but we would've never married because I wanted to live in the city…and I'm not inbred! You're awful! You're awful, you're all awful! I hate everything!" she finished in a paroxysm of feeling, throwing her champagne glass in Rebekah's face.

Bonnie watched in slow-motion as the blond beauty rose from her chair, grim and terrifying in her rage.

"HOW DARE YOU?"

Stefan tried to shield her, but Rebekah was too fast. She had Caroline pinned to the floor before anyone could do or say anything.

Bonnie rose with a gasp, letting her napkin drop.

"Let her go!"

"I am going to relish killing you," Rebekah said, hand wrapped around Caroline's throat.

Stefan tried to intervene and separate them, but he was suddenly blocked by Nik, who threw him across the room with such force that the vampire did not have the strength to rise.

"Why are you doing this? Let her go, please! Stop her!" Bonnie pleaded, trying to run past Nik.

Her captor stepped in front of her.

"You can save Caroline. But only if you use magic. Otherwise, my sister will simply have to answer the insult."

Bonnie gaped. "You know I can't do that! I don't know any magic! It's not real!"

Rebekah laughed behind them. "I am going to enjoy tearing this hussy from limb to limb. And then you can finally stop thinking that the little Negro is anything but a good feed, Nik."

Bonnie felt her heart thud in her chest. She felt angry, she felt lost, she felt overwhelmed by a desire to hurt...to hurt the beautiful woman and wipe her smirk clean, replace it with a scowl of anguish.

Caroline cried out from underneath the vampire's hold. "B-Bonnie! Bon! Run! Get – get – out!"

It was her, it was her old friend; for once her eyes were shining truly. It was her brave Caroline, telling to her go, to leave her behind.

Bonnie cried out, "I won't leave you!"

She closed her eyes and imagined Rebekah being thrown off her friend the same way Nik had thrown Stefan across the room.

Her pulse became erratic, her breathing was cut short, she felt as if she were the one being attacked, and all the energy seemed to drain from her skin. She could see it, a ball of white mist, charging towards the woman in the lurid red dress –

And then –

And then –

Darkness.

Bonnie blinked.

She blinked again. It was still dark.

She looked around disoriented. And then she felt his grip on her shoulder. Nik chuckled.

"Well. I suppose this is a start."

"Bloody hell!" Rebekah whined, beating her fist against the floor, "she really is a witch!"

What had she done? Had she saved Caroline? Had she done something heroic?

No…

It appears she had managed to extinguish all the candles from the chandelier.

Bonnie looked up at the black ceiling. Her eyes were slowly getting adjusted to the white shadows, the little whorls of light that inevitably followed complete darkness. She was used to such blackness, she had stared at it almost weekly when she'd retrieved bottles from El Fey's cellar. But this was different.

This was her.

She had done that. She had made the fire go out.

Caroline coughed loudly as Rebekah rolled away from her prey. "I am still owed an apology, and preferably a corpse too!"

Well. I suppose this is a start.

Klaus drew the looping petals of an orchid on the man's back. The blood trailed down murkily, disregarding his artistic attempts.

He had kept his voice even, he'd sounded almost unimpressed. Of course, Rebekah had ruined his good manners with her screeching. But at least she would not pester him anymore about the legitimacy of his choice.

The puny little thing had extinguished his chandeliers.

He rolled Alfonso off of him. His personal valet loved being drunk from, but he always seemed to fall asleep right after. He would chide him for it later. But right now, he was in a good mood.

A very good mood indeed.

I shall make you do wonders, witchling.

There was only one small cloud shadowing his pleasure, a twinge really. The only one who called him "Nik" was his sister, the only one he allowed. So why had he told the witch his name was Nik?

It must have been a momentary fancy.

But she had been sitting on the edge of the bed, half-naked, almost crying, and he had told her that she had better scream louder if she intended to be heard.

And she had not screamed. Bonnie had looked him square in the face and she had said, "Why are you like this? Why are you so cruel?"

He had laughed in good humor. "In time, you will appreciate this cruelty."

She had shaken her head obstinately. "I've had too much of it already."

And he realized, quite suddenly, she was not talking of that moment in particular. She was talking about her life. He almost thought about her past, almost.

And then he'd said, "We haven't been properly introduced."

Late update, but I'm trying to take advantage of good mental vibes. Thanks a lot for your reviews, I didn't think anyone would still be reading this story, it means a lot to me!