by L. J. Smith
And then, in heartbreaking tones:
Dream of me now and then . . . nothing is ever really forgotten . . .
Stefan Salvatore stared down at Elena Gilbert, boneless in his arms, exactly like a beautiful white bird shot from the sky. He made no effort to slash his throat. He knew it was useless. It was useless even to call her name, although he found himself doing that, over and over, with mind and voice.
Elena did not, could not respond.
Fragments of pointless, pathetically cliché thoughts floated through Stefan’s head. Please, let this not be happening . . . I never meant any harm . . . Elena wanted it so much . . . she was so happy . . . I would never hurt her!
Yet he was swollen with Power, filled with a dangerously high percentage of the bloodstream of the young woman he loved. The enormous energy of the Power sickened him. Used as he was to the bare-sustenance stimulation of animal blood, Stefan found that Elena’s donation brought every sense, every emotion into appalling clarity.
Moreover, the unique flavor of Elena’s blood still filled his mouth each time he swallowed. That was unbearable.
Frantic, Stefan tried to dissipate some of his Power into the atmosphere, but he simply had too much. He was going to be sick. He wanted to die.
Then—all at once—he sensed something that made everything else completely irrelevant. Through his increased Power, he suddenly detected what he had imagined to be impossible.
A heartbeat.
Elena still had a pulse: intermittent and hideously faint, but clear in his mind. Her heart was contracting feebly, still fighting for her. She was even trying to breathe, although the movement of her lungs was almost imperceptible even to him.
Without a thought, Stefan began to use his Power to aid Elena’s laboring organs. He helped them to do their job more efficiently. It didn’t bring any of Elena’s aura back, but it did keep oxygen flowing to her brain.
Wait, a small voice inside him suddenly counseled. Think! There are two ways you might save her!
For one instant Stefan sat perfectly still. He could see two futures equally clearly before him. In the first, he did what he had done in his nightmare and opened an artery for Elena to drink. His blood would be potent in her nearly exsanguinated body, and she would die and change into a vampire instantly and forever.
In the second, he did something different. He kept Elena’s heart and lungs working until he could get her to a hospital set up to give immediate transfusions. The small Dalcrest College clinic was out of the question. That meant he had to get Elena to Mercy Havenwick Hospital in Campbell, ten miles away.
In that scenario, Elena might come out of this as a living, breathing human girl, not as some heartbreakingly innocent undead thing.
It took only a moment for Stefan to decide. The only ethical choice was to try to save her as a human.
From that instant, his movements were swift, precise, and almost dispassionate. He enhanced the workings of Elena’s heart and lungs so that she was breathing shallowly and her pulse remained steady. Then he stood and lifted her body in one motion, absently touching a finger to the markings on her throat. If she was to be an ordinary human, she could not afford to be the center of a debate about vampires. The little wounds healed at his touch. He flung the door open and ran down the hallway with the long, easy strides of a predator. He was lucky; he had encounters with only three groups of open-mouthed students on his way to the parking lot. Without pausing, he Influenced them all to have seen nothing of him carrying a beautiful dead girl.
In moments he had Elena in his black Porsche Panamera Turbo Executive. He broke just about every traffic law he had ever heard of in driving to the hospital, and collected an entourage of two police cars. That wasn’t important. He could outrun them in this particular car. His reflexes were so much faster than the officers who were driving that he could lose them entirely if he wished.
He didn’t wish. He didn’t give a damn. He was going as quickly as he safely could already. And he was thinking desperately.
How could this have happened? If Elena lived, how could he explain to her? He had warned her when she had first discovered that he was a vampire that he would harm her through sheer unthinking force. Back then, Elena had been no more afraid than she’d been tonight. She had come to him in all gentleness, and had defeated the raging beast that he could feel inside his head.
After that, though, he’d done things to that beast within himself. He had chained it—or at least he thought he had. He had set up a system of checks and balances that were supposed to cut in and awaken his conscious mind if he stayed too long at Elena’s throat.
How, then, had it happened? How? How could he have brought Elena to this hideous state? She was his world, his heaven on earth. She was all he wanted of heaven, and all he could ever have. Damon’s coma had not been death, and Stefan remained grimly convinced that vampires were, in fact, damned to simply lose their souls when they died.
How could he have fallen so far into hell, then, that he had almost killed the one human creature he adored?
How could he be certain it wouldn’t happen again?
Stefan realized that he was gripping the steering wheel almost hard enough to break it. He tried to ease up pressure, but it seemed that he needed to cling to something, and that something could not be Elena.
If human transfusions succeeded in saving her life . . . how could he ever dare to touch her again?
Stefan’s throat ached. His eyes felt dry and hot. He was remembering a plan he had made back when both he and Elena were going to Robert E. Lee High School, from the days when he had just emphasized to Elena how dangerous he would be as a boyfriend. The plan had been beautiful in its simplicity.
He had decided back then that if he ever actually became a threat to Elena that he would do what he had early sworn to her he would never do, and severely Influence her mind.
He would Influence her to forget him entirely and turn back to her ex-boyfriend Matt. Matt still loved her; Matt would always love her. And Matt was a Virginia gentleman in his blood and bones. He would be strong enough to protect Elena from outside dangers, and he would never have to fight his own impulses, as Stefan did when he wanted to hold her tightly and yet not crush her.
God, he had been naïve back then, Stefan realized. That had been before he realized that Damon was in Fell’s Church, and that he had already staked his own claim on Elena. It had been before Katherine, before Klaus, before the malach had appeared in the Old Woods, before the twin fox-spirits had imprisoned Stefan in the Dark Dimension. It had been before Stefan had realized that the ley lines which crisscrossed the haunted ground of Elena’s hometown were broadcasting a beacon to attract poisonous creatures from hallway around the world.
Any one of those creatures had been savage enough to have ploughed right through Matt without even noticing him.
Matt couldn’t keep Elena safe, either. Who was strong enough to protect her from monsters? Stefan asked himself.
No one who wasn’t a monster already.
A street sign brought him out of his daze of automatic driving. Havenwick Drive. He made a sharp right turn at the light, noticing that he’d picked up another police cruiser. The three wailing cars followed him to the entrance to the emergency room—the emergency department, as doctors called it.
He parked in the space marked Ambulance Only and ran around to open the passenger door, where Elena had slumped down over her seatbelt.
“GET AWAY FROM THE CAR! DO IT NOW! Kneel on the ground with your hands on your head!” shouted a deep, authoritative female voice from one of the cruisers that had screeched to a stop behind him. He cast a tendril of Influence at its occupants, at the same time shouting, “This girl is dying! She needs help now!”
He lifted Elena and turned toward the emergency department doors. Two male voices bellowed for him to stop, and he sent out more tendrils, calming the nervous officers, replacing their fear and suspicion with trust and the desire to help.
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All the commotion had attracted startled workers from inside the hospital. Two men ran out piloting a mobile stretcher, shouting at Stefan to place Elena on it.
Once he did, the two men turned, running back through the waiting room toward the inner sanctum. But Stefan couldn’t follow them inside; this hospital was a place human people lived and slept.
He called desperately: “Can I come with you?”
“Yeah, come on!” one of the men shouted before the automatic doors closed, and with this invitation Stefan was able to enter the hospital. He Influenced anyone who could possibly have gotten a look at him, astonished by his ability to control multiple tendrils of Power at once. He blurred himself in human minds, leaving a faceless impression of dark hair and medium-tall stature.
He also planted the unyielding idea that whoever he was, he was allowed to be beside Elena; he knew that otherwise he’d be piloted away somewhere to answer questions and wait for results.
The commotion around Elena increased as she was taken into an emergency department bay and put on an examining table.
A group of people gathered around her as a man with close-cropped red hair and a clipboard asked Stefan, “What’s her name? What’s her relationship to you?”
“She’s Elena Gilbert. She’s a freshman at Dalcrest College, and she’s my girlfriend.”
Now a tall doctor with a streak of gray in her hair was looking at Elena’s mouth and throat, examining them with a very bright penlight, listening to Elena’s lungs. Stefan could pick thoughts out of the doctor’s mind; among them chest x-ray and intubation. Stefan gently but relentlessly wiped these thoughts away. Elena would gain nothing from a test she didn’t need or from being intubated.
Blood, he thought to the doctor. She needs blood.
“How old is she?” the red-haired man was demanding. “Who are her emergency contacts?”
“She’s eighteen. Her emergency contact would be her Aunt Judith.” Stefan telepathically sent the rest of the information directly into the questioner’s mind and allowed him to write down the name and address. But he also added an unspoken imperative. No one would call the contact until Stefan himself gave the order to do so. He tacked a speck of Influence right onto the form itself, causing the information to blur, just as he was still keeping his face a blur in the eyes of all the medical personnel around him. He wasn’t exactly sure why he was doing all this, but he went with his intuition that it was necessary.
“Elena? Elena, can you hear me?” called a slender, brown-skinned woman, also in a white coat. “Elena, can you open your eyes?”
Elena didn’t respond.
Blood, Stefan thought again, reduced to pleading. Just please give her blood!
Questions were still being fired at him. “What happened to her? Has she ever passed out before?”
“I don’t know what happened to her,” Stefan lied, and forced belief into the minds of any hearers.
The tall doctor said, in a voice of controlled urgency: “Get her hooked up now!”
“What’s her general health like?” the redhead demanded at the same time.
“She—she’s always been healthy. Tonight—I just walked into her dorm room—she was waiting for me—I was supposed to meet her there. But her door was ajar and when I went inside I saw her lying on the floor, dead out. I grabbed her and headed this way.”
The tall doctor was saying, “Get two large bore IVs in her! I want two liters normal saline wide open! And let’s get her labs: blood type and cross, CBC, CMP, coags, UA, UDS, and a pregnancy test.”
Stefan opened his mouth to say that Elena wasn’t pregnant, but the redhead was saying, “You didn’t call nine-one-one?”
“I thought she might be dead! I wasn’t waiting an extra second!”
Now they were putting very large IV needles into the crooks of both Elena’s elbows. Stefan felt his eyes fill with tears as they hung two bags of clear fluid over IV poles, their contents dripping through tubes into Elena’s arms. Elena hated needles. She should be screaming in fury—but she might never make a sound again.
Because of him. Because he had lost control; because he was a monster.
“Is she pregnant?” the red-haired man asked sharply.
“No!” Stefan said, shocked and angered—and surprised at himself for both reactions, since they were doing a pregnancy test anyway. “She is definitely not pregnant!”
By this time Elena had been hooked up to machines that blinked and beeped and displayed numbers. Her clothes had disappeared; she was wearing a hospital gown.
As everyone seemed to focus on the displays of the machines, a moment of silence descended.
Someone, somewhere said, “Mother of God.” And then the hubbub came back. “Pressure’s only forty over thirty!” “Pulses are very weak—thready—” “Extremities are cold and clammy!” “Extremely poor cap refill—” “But there’s not a cut or bruise on her anywhere!” “And not a bloodstain, either—”
Stefan scanned the graying doctor’s mind. Need to get fluids into her right now, the woman was thinking. She’s crashing!
Yes, yes, Stefan thought. Elena needed fluids; needed blood specifically, but maybe saline solution would help. The red-haired man had disappeared, freeing up Stefan’s mental resources, but a new doctor had entered the small room, and Stefan tensed as he glanced at the stranger’s mind.
He was the trauma surgeon. He looked harmless, conferring quietly with the graying ED physician, but his job was to “open Elena up and look for leaks inside” and of all things Stefan did not want that. Elena wasn’t leaking anywhere inside, and if this man operated on her he would kill her.
Suddenly words dragged him out of his brooding haze.
“—if we do that we can at least rule out ectopic pregnancy,” the trauma surgeon was saying to the tall doctor.
“I agree,” the woman said. “Let’s get a pelvic ultrasound on this girl.”
No, no, no! Stefan thought. Elena didn’t need the test. She needed blood. Just blood. Why couldn’t they see that?
At that moment the slender, brown-skinned doctor said, “Her labs are back! Her H and H is 4 and 14!”
Hemoglobin and hematocrit, Stefan’s mind translated. Blood values at last—but so low! If not for his constant attention she would have been a corpse ten minutes ago.
The tall doctor sucked in her breath and said, “Call the blood blank; we need to activate an MTP right now.”
Stefan, just on the point of Influencing the doctor again, felt an almost painful wave of relief flood over him. A massive transfusion protocol. Blood for Elena at last.
Or not exactly blood, he realized, as he rifled through the tall doctor’s mind. Six units each of packed red blood cells, fresh frozen plasma, and random donor platelets.
But, he thought, when the doctors saw that Elena was hanging onto her progress as they pumped blood products into her they would keep giving her more.
For the first time, trembling inside with the fragility of the hope, Stefan allowed himself to believe that Elena might survive.
He wanted to kiss the tall graying doctor and the slender, brown-skinned doctor. He even wanted to kiss the mahogany cheek of the trauma surgeon, who had refrained from opening Elena up and killing her. But more than anything, with an anguish that he had to dampen to endure, he wanted to see Elena wake up.
It was only then, as the chance that Elena’s body might live suddenly shot upward, that Stefan began to worry about other things. Like exactly what was going to happen when Elena did awaken. Like what the monster who had killed could do to save her in the future.
Actually, in his soul, he already knew the answers.
* * *
Elena had been so happy. She was still happy, although her connection to Stefan had changed, diminished. It didn’t matter. She could remember everything that had happened after Stefan had enfolded her in his arms as if it were happening to her now.
In only moments, she had been in that hazy, euphoric
state where it seemed as if Stefan’s soul and hers were melting together. She had kissed him passionately and then arched her head to bare her throat.
But now it wasn’t about passion, Elena was thinking, knowing that Stefan could hear her thoughts and rejoicing in self-revelation. Good chemistry—the sea-storm and violet sparks of mad attraction—was only a part of it. The other part was the timeless, unquestioning knowledge that Stefan was hers and she was his, and that this had ever been so since the first light had broken through the darkness of the universe, and that it would still be so when the last light in the universe quietly faded.
When the last evensong was played by the last of the star-winds, Stefan would still be hers, and would still be himself. A shelter to her, a home to return to; a gentle and strong and nurturing demon lover.
Words weren’t enough to convey what she felt for her eternal beloved. Kisses weren’t enough. Even bodies wouldn’t be enough, Elena suspected, although they had not yet made this experiment. There was only one way to share herself completely with Stefan, and that was the blood.
Stefan, as always, had been initially reluctant to take more than a token sip of blood. Elena’s tender-hearted vampire didn’t want to again begin the cycle that would end with them trying to keep Elena balanced precariously on the knife’s edge between life and undeath.
Could Stefan justify doing that for a few minutes of pleasure?
A few minutes of pleasure? Or to seal our souls’ immortal bond? Elena sent to him telepathically, managing to put a world of irony into the thought. It was so much easier to communicate this way than with clumsy lips. She added, Come on, Stefan, let’s not be hypocrites.
Stefan was not a hypocrite. He seemed to hesitate another instant and then Elena felt more blood being drawn through the two delicate puncture wounds in her throat. She felt her entire soul go with it.
This was the place where she and Stefan ceased to become separate beings, where they melted together—and where Elena experienced the wildest and sweetest delight. It was as if she had come upon a part of herself that she had forgotten, and that in reclaiming it, she was suddenly twice as much as she had been.
