by L. J. Smith
“Please—please come inside,” Ethan chanted mechanically. He looked dazed, unable to take his eyes off Damon. Damon knew what he was seeing: a lithe and elegant young man dressed in black jeans and black jacket over a black shirt, with an air of esoteric power. The compact young man had black hair, straight and soft and fine, and eyes of endless and immeasurable darkness, unbroken by a single star.
The automatic doors to the emergency lobby slid open. Damon immediately stepped forward. Ethan stayed where he was, rooted to the ground. He was taller than Damon by half a head, which didn’t earn him any merit points in Damon’s personal register.
“And now,” Damon said pleasantly, just loud enough for the suddenly-pale young man to hear him, “since you’ve helped me out, you’re going to get your reward, see? Cos that’s how it works. What will it be? Let’s spin the mystical roulette wheel of fortune and find out, shall we, Ethan? And . . . you have won . . . a punch in the nose!”
His fist lashed out and made devastating contact with the middle of Ethan’s face. The auburn-haired young man went over backward, both hands clamped over twin geysers of red that spurted between his fingers. He moaned, an animal sound.
“Oh, and by the way,” Damon added, “Jacob knows all about you and Mia. I should be very careful not to make him angry from now on, got that?”
Ethan, eyes showing white all around, nodded fractionally, causing a ruby Old Faithful to erupt from his face again.
Damon left him. Kenzy had provided enough nibbles for the evening, but it always distressed him to see perfectly good rich red blood going to waste.
Since he had stepped inside, Damon had been holding himself blurred—almost invisible—to the hospital staff. It wasn’t as flashy as keeping a whole roomful of humans immobile, as Stefan had, but just as useful. He paused by Jacob, who hadn’t even noticed that his designated driver was gone.
Jacob, he said soundlessly. Jacob, an obvious fan of Orwell’s Big Brother, jumped up and stared, horrified, into the television set.
Jacob, Damon repeated, Mia is no good for you. Forget her and move on. Isn’t there a nice but shy girl who always sits in some corner of Ethan’s parties?
“What?” Jacob whispered to the TV. “You mean like—Abby?”
I mean exactly like Abby. Give Abby a try and you’ll find a galaxy inside her. But drop Mia; she’s two-timing you with Ethan.
With that, Damon strode across the waiting room and through the far doors, following Stefan’s trail into the emergency department and then up to the sixth floor. There he dropped the blurring shield.
The elevator doors slid back and Damon stepped out. He was facing another waiting room . . . and a gaggle of humans, all either leaking tears or stoically grinding teeth. Damon recognized Elena’s Aunt Judith and saw little Margaret rubbing her eyes.
And then, all at once, a thistledown-slender figure was coming rapidly at him, and a heart-shaped face surrounded with strawberry curls was turned up toward his.
“Oh, Damon, there you are!” Bonnie cried. “Did they have a lot of questions?”
Damon hesitated, realizing that he had no idea what she was talking about. He turned his telepathy reception higher, but Bonnie was already speaking again.
“The police,” she clarified. Her large brown eyes were full of tears and light. “Were they mean to you? Did they think you had something to do with it all?”
Mean to me? thought Damon. Good gods.
Bonnie was looking as if she would burst into sobs if he didn’t answer.
“Of course not,” he said at last. “They weren’t—um—mean in the least. I believe they’ve gone now.” He had watched the cruisers glide away and disperse.
Damon was just about to go for a barracuda smile regarding the absent police officers, when a small explosion went off at the level of his chest and slim arms clutched at him desperately. He looked down, alarmed and surprised.
It was Bonnie who had exploded. She was keening. More, she had hold of him very, very tightly indeed. Damon tried to remember another time when she’d reacted this way but came up blank.
He forgot about the barracuda smile. He realized that everyone in the room was moving—slowly but inevitably—toward him. It would have been disconcerting if it hadn’t been for the timid, pained look on all their faces.
“What?” he said. He wished just fleetingly that he could say, “Where the hell is Stefan?” and then expect to get overemotional but reasonably thorough information from his brother, like in the old days of twenty minutes ago.
“What’s happened?” he tried again. And then, in sheer panic: “Elena—?”
“No, no, son,” said Robert Gilbert-Maxwell, Elena’s uncle by marriage. He put a hand on Damon’s shoulder.
Ye gods and little fishes, Damon thought, trying not to flinch as claustrophobia kicked in. They’re going to surround me as if I were a spare queen bee and smother me! I’ll be swarmed to death!
But Aunt Judith, leaving a trail of tissues in her wake, stopped in front of him without touching him. “Elena just keeps getting better and better,” she said, and blew her nose. “It’s like a miracle. The doctors can’t figure it out at all!”
“Oh, good,” Damon said. His ribs were beginning to hurt and he was sure he could feel his black silk shirt getting wet, but he couldn’t seem to find a way to make Bonnie let go of him. “I think I’ll go see her now—Elena, that is,” he added to the room in general. He wanted to gauge reactions.
Sympathetic smiles everywhere. Margaret peeked out from behind a pair of legs with a face like a flower. But: “A new group of doctors has just gone in,” said Dr. Alpert. “And they’ve promised to alert us if Elena regains consciousness.”
“She’s still unconscious?” Damon asked, not so much because he was surprised, but because it was clearly what everyone expected him to say.
“Yes, but her blood pressure has stabilized—at least that was their last report,” Meredith said. She was standing disturbingly close to Damon, closer than he could ever remember her standing before. But then she put her hands on Bonnie’s shoulders and somehow accomplished what Damon had not been able to do. She got the sobbing girl to loosen her grip.
“Now, now,” Damon heard her murmuring. “Everything is going to be all right. You shouldn’t make Damon worry like that.”
Damon frowned in the privacy of his own mind. There was something wrong with the way Meredith was treating Bonnie. Not condescendingly, not cruelly, but with a sort of lighthearted dismissal of Bonnie’s emotional state that struck him as distinctly odd. After all, when a witch got that upset, she often dropped into spontaneous trance.
All Bonnie was saying, though, was: “I’m sorry . . . I’m an idiot . . . I’m just so sorry.”
Better keep an eye on your little redbird, a snarky voice whispered in Damon’s mind. Maybe this crisis has sent her into some sort of ultimate meltdown.
Maybe it’s sent them all into meltdown, was all Damon could think to say back as Matt Honeycutt gave him a medium-heavy punch on the biceps. Usually Matt had better coordination and judgment of force—and a strike toward the jaw would be far more in character.
“You’re holding up really well,” Matt said, looking directly at Damon with eyes that were true blue, several shades lighter and less complex than Elena’s. “Good job, bud. You’re taking it unbelievably well.”
Bud? Bud? I have fallen down the rabbit hole and taken all these human creatures with me, Damon thought, knowing he looked harried by now and not giving Tinker Bell’s damn. Matt is complimenting me, he thought, and, I do believe, it’s for not bursting into tears like Bonnie.
And I’m just standing here and letting them do as they like.
At that moment he saw the figure of sanity and it was shaped like a little white-haired lady drinking a cup of steaming herbal tea. Damon forged his way through the crowd to her and muttered, “What’s going on?” He added nonverbally, And please don’t try to B.S. me because I have had that up to he
re. He pointed at the large spot on his chest where the silk was still wet with Bonnie’s tears.
“Why, Damon,” Mrs. Flowers said in her most fluttery little-old-lady tones. “I’m sure I don’t know a thing that’s wrong, now that Elena is doing so well. Why don’t you let me make you a nice cup of tea? It’s raspberry—quite a lovely red, I think.”
Damon lost it. He began to make a sweeping motion that would have ended by dashing the landlady’s cup of tea to the floor. But partway through he had to alter his hand’s course and absorb most of the kinetic energy into himself—ouch! He ended up smacking a fist into his open palm.
And it was all because someone with the voice of medical authority had just cried from across the room: “The doctors say she’s awake!”
Damon whirled. The people in the waiting room parted before him like water-lilies before the prow of a rowboat. He walked straight up to the nurse who had just spoken and said, “I need to see her. I need to see Elena, right now.”
No one contested his right to see Elena first, although Damon had forgotten to lace his words with heavy menace. The nurse didn’t even look surprised; he just nodded and hefted a file in his right hand.
“That’s good,” he said. “We may be able to clear some things up with the doctors. Come with me.”
Damon forced himself not to steal a backward glance at the roomful of people—most of whom ordinarily barely tolerated him—but he couldn’t shut his ears to the soft calls of good wishes. He couldn’t bother about the Waiting Room Weirdness any longer, though. All he could think of was how much he needed to see Elena. Somehow, when he was able to speak to Elena, everything would make sense.
He followed the nurse into the first lighted ICU room and found, to his displeasure, that it was crowded with people taller than he was. Doctors, he supposed. He forced his way through their ranks without apologizing until he could see the bed, which was adjusted so that Elena was half-lying and half-sitting-up.
Elena!
In that first moment, while she didn’t notice him, he was able to swill down the sight of her: from cheeks that were only starting to regain their color, to an unblemished neck that was softly rounded and creamy pale. Her dark blue eyes looked very large in her face and her magnificent hair was in tangled disarray. There were entirely too many gadgets hooked to her. But she was alert—she was speaking—she was . . .
. . . seeing him.
Elena’s entire face lit up, blood rushing to her cheeks. Her eyes widened and her pupils sprang open. She made a small sound liked a choked sob of pure joy and a motion as if to get off the bed.
All the doctors, in chorus, told her sternly to lie back down. Elena gave them a rebellious sideways glance. Damon was still riveted to the spot where Elena had made eye-contact with him. He wished he could go back in time and have that moment again. He wished that he could live in it forever.
Elena, he thought. My Elena . . .
Up on the hospital roof, arguing with Stefan, he had somehow forgotten what they were arguing about. But now he remembered. It was about this girl, this ordinary human girl, who could somehow stop his heart. And it wasn’t just her outward loveliness, although Damon had to admit that her beauty and her aura were what had first drawn him in. But if poor Jacob-with-the-broken-foot did find that shy girl with a galaxy inside her, he still wouldn’t know what he was missing. Inside Elena Gilbert there were galaxies like grains of sand.
And right now Elena was smiling right at him, just for him, with a look of utter adoration which he had only ever seen directed at Stefan before. But . . . Stefan was gone now. And either Elena was incredibly fast on the rebound, or there was something . . . something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. . . .
“Now, then,” one of the doctors was saying to this radiant newly-blooming rose on the bed. “We already have a record here, but it would help if you could add to it. You were in your room, waiting for your boyfriend to visit, is that right? And then something must have happened, because when your boyfriend arrived, he found you collapsed on the floor. Do you remember if you had any symptoms before you fell down? Do you even remember falling?”
“No, I don’t,” Elena said in the tones of someone tired of answering the same question. “All I remember is waiting and then . . .” She made an unconsciously graceful gesture. “Then there were bits of a strange dream and nothing else until I woke up here, just a minute ago.”
“What sort of strange dream?” demanded a roundish middle-aged doctor with a ponytail. He looked like a hail-fellow-well-met sort, but he was far too nosy for Damon’s taste.
“Why,” Damon said, stepping closer to Elena, “should you have the right to ask about her dreams?”
“Because it might give us a clue, of course!” The round little man began to talk very fast. “You may not realize it, but this girl represents a medical conundrum. She somehow manages to lose more than two and a half liters of blood—and there’s not a scratch on her! What’s more, she has no signs of miscarriage or internal bleeding—although we really should check on that again—” He reached for the blanket that covered Elena only to find Damon abruptly in his way.
“I don’t think,” Damon said coldly, with just a hint of teeth, “that Elena wants to be examined at this particular time.”
“All right, all right!” A tall graying doctor spoke up. “Can we just confirm how she got to the hospital, then? Nobody called nine-one-one.” She looked at Elena. “How did you arrive?”
“She’s told you just now,” Damon said softly. “She does not remember.”
“No, but—well, that is the one thing I do remember,” Elena said, sounding apologetic. With everyone focusing on her she finished, with a look of pride, “I don’t know how, but I know. My boyfriend brought me here.”
“Your boyfriend who swears he found you lying on the floor of your room, clearly very ill,” a fussy-looking doctor put in, running her finger along some sort of form.
“Yes, and if he says something is so, it’s the truth. He wouldn’t lie.” Elena looked up at Damon, devotion in her eyes. She took his hand in her cool fingers. “And here he is, still watching over me. My boyfriend of almost a year, Damon Salvatore.”
* * *
An Easter Egg, Damon thought dizzily. Or at least part of his mind thought it: the other part was concentrating on the extremely pleasurable electrical connection that Elena’s fingers twined with his seemed to have set off. That may have contributed to his dizziness, he had to admit.
An Easter Egg in a neurological virus. How odd. But that’s Stefan all over.
All that acting Stefan had done on the roof, had been just that—acting—Damon realized now, feeling warm with resentment. Although Elena’s thumb stroking the side of his hand may have contributed to the warmth. He couldn’t deny it.
Still, all Stefan’s posturing had been to get Damon to come to one conclusion, and that was: Hot diggety, I’ll get to make Elena my princess of darkness and there will be no Stefan to interfere.
But that wasn’t true, was it?
Because Stefan had planted this in Elena’s mind—in everyone’s minds—Damon realized, slowed down only slightly by the feeling that if Elena kept stroking his palm with her thumb the way she was doing, he might grab her and demonstrate to the doctors exactly how she had lost so much blood in the first place.
Yes, it explained everyone’s solicitous behavior in the waiting room, Damon realized. It also explained why Elena was looking up at him with serene and irresistible joy, the gold streaks in her lapis lazuli eyes catching the light. And why she seemed willing to show him that she had a Ph.D. in palm-caressing,
Everybody thought . . . well, basically . . . that he was Stefan, just with a different name.
No. It was even worse than that. Everybody thought that he was Stefan-with-a-different-name and . . . oh, no—oh, yes . . . that he was human.
It was a bold conclusion to come to, but one that he felt was warranted. No one in the waiting room had acte
d as if he might be responsible for Elena’s illness—which Stefan had been responsible for. Matt and Meredith at least would have at least queried him directly, if they’d suspected such a thing. Instead it had been all “You’re holding up so well, Damon,” and “It’s a miracle, Damon!” No hint even that they even knew he had powers of healing that he could use to help Elena.
Even Bonnie . . . Bonnie had given no indication that she remembered calling for Damon, although his presence had comforted her greatly. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t offered to help heal Elena or said she was conferring with old Mrs. Flowers about supplementary treatments.
Good grief, she doesn’t remember she’s a witch.
Stefan had brainwashed them all.
Damon needed to sit down. He Influenced the ponytailed doctor to get him a chair from another room. He sat and let Elena play with his hand. She was serenely confident that it wasn’t possible for her to do anything less than exactly what he wanted. What Stefan would have wanted. What, if she didn’t stop doing right now, was going to force him to grab her and jump with her out of a window, carrying her off to some dark and secret lair, there to educate her about supernatural entities called vampires—that she happened to have temporarily forgotten about.
Get a grip, Damon told himself in stern voice. You’re supposed to be able to resist torture, aren’t you? Besides, you’re actually in the catbird seat now, aren’t you? Sitting pretty.
My dear little brother is going to make me act like a human, though, something primæval inside him thought, gnashing its fangs.
You’ll get used to it. At least you don’t actually have to be one of the wretched creatures of the day this time. No eating except for show, no mandatory breathing. No humiliation in the eyes of your real peers—well, maybe a little bewilderment, but nothing you can’t beat out of them. And, best of all, you just have to play the part for a few nights or however long it takes to seduce Elena and then clear everything up . . . with a simple, genuine smile.
