by L. J. Smith
“All right,” Aunt Judith said reluctantly, as she and Robert turned to leave. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”
In minutes Elena was receiving the genteel hug of the white-haired woman. “Thank you so much for coming. I wish I’d known earlier that you were waiting.”
“Well, I got in a nice nap while everyone else was bustling around,” Mrs. Flowers said. “I’m delighted that you’ve made such a spectacular recovery, my dear.”
“I’m just . . . trying not to think about it, really,” Elena said, wishing that the chilly ache in her arm where the IV went in would subside. “I don’t see what the point is, since the doctors themselves can’t figure it out.”
“That’s a good idea, to just ignore it,” Dr. Alpert said from behind Mrs. Flowers. “Don’t worry over anything that you can help.” She ran her fingers through short iron-gray hair before hugging Elena carefully. “Call me any time you like.”
“I will,” Elena promised, touched. She smiled at the two women: Mrs. Flowers, fragile and pink-cheeked; and Dr. Alpert, sturdy with skin the color of mocha. “Thank you both.”
When they left, a nurse came in to take her vital signs. After which Damon appeared, just in time to see Elena regarding her cocoa dolefully. It was lukewarm.
“No problem,” Damon said, taking the cup. “A quick nuke in the microwave and you’ll never know the difference. I’ll even skim the skin off it. You’ll feel better after you drink it.”
Damon was right, too. The cocoa warmed everything but the arm where the IV went in. Elena was doing her best to dissociate herself from the entire arm—to pretend it didn’t belong to her—when Damon put his finger to his lips and then drew the hipflask out of his pocket.
“Trust me?” he whispered.
“Eternally.”
“Then try a sip of this. Don’t worry; it’s not alcoholic. It tastes like grape juice.”
It tasted a tiny bit like grape juice, a little bit like champagne, and a lot like something bubbly and sweet and delicious—and very familiar, although Elena couldn’t put her finger on when she’d tasted it before.
“Feel better?” Damon gently touched the arm with the IV. Suddenly, amazingly, soothing warmth was permeating every inch of the limb.
“Oh, yes! Much better!”
“Good. Then I’m going to scoot up as close to the bed as I can get, and then maybe we can see if we can’t get to sleep.” Elena watched him take off his black jacket and hang it on a hook on the wall, feeling as if the sight ought to make her giggle. It must be what’s in that flask, she thought woozily. How many times have I seen him take his jacket off? And when the answer “once” floated into her mind from somewhere she gave up and laughed out loud.
“I’m amusing, eh?”
“You’re just gorgeous. And I’m in a hospital and I could sing . . .”
“Better not; they’ll try to analyze the Black Magic.”
“The which?”
“What you just had a sip of.”
“Oh. Of course.” Black Magic was the perfect name for it. That was what it tasted like: magic. How exciting.
When Damon moved his chair up close to the hospital bed and leaned in so that they could intertwine fingers, she felt even more excited, but very sleepy, too.
“Won’t the nurses get upset if they catch you sleeping here, though?”
“Nah,” Damon said. “They’ll see I’m just part of your ensemble.”
Elena snorted. “Kiss,” she murmured drowsily, and instead of saying “Kiss” back, Damon got up and kissed her lightly on the lips.
Lightning flash. Suddenly, Elena was thinking of something else besides sleeping. Her lips tingled promisingly.
“Sleep,” Damon said then in a whisper and before Elena could think of a sensible rejoinder, she was thinking nonsense, and then she was dreaming.
* * *
Damon felt Elena’s body go pliant, heard her breathing become softly regular, and then relaxed himself.
Thank badness he hadn’t been obliged to ingest any of that coffee or cocoa—he had a strong stomach, and he could eat if necessary, but Black Magic was the only drink that vampires were really able to enjoy besides sweet, dynamic, crimson blood. Damon turned his head slightly to view the packed red cells that were going into Elena’s IV along with the other products. He was glad he’d brought the Black Magic, but he was going to need to feed sometime today and it was best to get it over with while none of Elena’s friends and family were around. Nurses came in regularly to monitor Elena’s vital signs. Damon decided that the next one with an interesting aura would suddenly become a donor.
Now, then: what else needed thinking about? Bonnie. Something fairly desperate was wrong with Bonnie. Damn it! Who was interfering with Damon’s sweet-singing little redbird? An enemy, obviously, and one who knew how to take advantage of a power vacuum fast, so a spy or someone who employed spies.
Damon had to find the culprit, the person who had slipped into the area of the hospital and Influenced or otherwise affected Bonnie. And when he found them . . . ! A faint smile flickered across Damon’s face, or at least something which involved baring his teeth.
He would make such an example of the bastard responsible that news of it would filter down to the gutters of the Dark Dimension. When he envisioned how young and slight and vulnerable Bonnie was just now and then mused on the pure evil of whoever had invaded her mind, he went hot and cold by turns, and phrases like “boiling in crude oil” skittered through his thoughts.
But Bonnie wasn’t the only thing keeping him awake. Elena was, too. Elena! He was preternaturally aware of every inch of Elena’s being. He was suffused in Elena’s aura; his skin was tingling with exultation at her touch. He could feel the delicious warmth of the hand he held, sustaining him. Childishness? Bliss.
Elena loved him, and with none of the guilt or fear that she had felt when she had kissed him before this. None of the guilt, because Stefan was not constantly prowling at the back of her mind. None of the fear, because Stefan hadn’t already set the stage by telling her how much of a villain Damon was.
Still, Damon would give a good deal to have a few choice words with Stefan right this minute. His little brother had set him up, plain and simple. He had said nothing about taking all memory of the supernatural away from Elena et al. He hadn’t even mentioned that he was convincing them, every one, that vampires, witches, and werewolves were creatures of fantasy.
Bonnie was now no longer a witch in her own mind, and therefore couldn’t raise her psychic defenses. Of course that might change, since Stefan couldn’t take Bonnie’s powers away from her. Meredith no longer realized that she had been secretly raised to be a hunter-slayer—and Damon would bet anything that Stefan had stolen her ironwood fighting stave from her room, along with anything else that might spark a memory.
He wondered about Caroline. He strongly doubted that Stefan would be so cruel as to take the knowledge that the girl was a werewolf away from her. If he had, the next time she began to sprout a pelt and tail, she would have screaming hysterics. More likely, he had convinced her that none of her acquaintances were supernatural—but had he crippled her ability to sense auras? Maybe. He’d been in a desperate mood.
Oh, what did it matter? Damon was going to be with Elena, and that was what was important. A whole host of “firsts” were ahead of him and Elena. They hadn’t even had their first proper kiss. She would wear his promise ring, and some evening in the near future, when she was particularly brave and ready for the knowledge, he would explain to her just what he truly was.
Then he wouldn’t need to keep pretending to be human. Once Elena knew, he could tell the others. They could make new memories of him as a vampire . . . not just as Stefan’s wicked brother, but as whatever he chose to be.
Damon smiled faintly. Maybe I’ll tell them that I have a wicked brother. That will mess things up nicely for St. Stefan.
Damon let his head rest on the hospital bed, which gave h
im a charming view of Elena’s right ear and her streaming sunlight-colored hair. Ears, he decided, could be quite deliciously kicky.
Absentmindedly, Damon set wards around the room in all directions—above and below, as well as around—and then he added a tripwire for the arrival of the next nurse. Then he shut his eyes and gave himself over to appreciation of the beauty of Elena’s complex and mysterious aura.
In minutes he was asleep.
* * *
Damon dreamed. He dreamed of being dead.
And he dreamed of all the little mistakes, the blunders he’d made, that had added up to the colossal error of getting him killed.
He dreamed that he and his little brother were taking Elena and Bonnie to the Nether World: the uncharted realm as far beneath the Dark Dimension as the Dark Dimension lay beneath the earth.
That had probably been the first mistake. Taking two humans—even humans with high psychic potential—to the Nether World was a bad idea; it demanded too much of fragile human minds and bodies.
After a nerve-shredding journey, they had reached their goal: the moon that was home to the largest magical star ball in the world.
Star balls were spherical containers. One the size of an orange could hold the Power of an Original vampire or demi-goddess/witch inside it. But, because they held such power, they also tended to be protected. Viciously, vigilantly protected.
And yet Damon had erred again: not communicating with his troops. He hadn’t explained this clearly enough to the human girls. Stefan took the forces that would be ranged against them as a matter of course, but Damon ought to have drawn a map of the danger for Elena and Bonnie.
They had found the star ball. It was enormous, too big for Damon’s arms to encircle, and shining with dazzling Power. It was lodged in the first fork of the Great Tree . . . the Tree whose canopy-like branches covered almost the entire surface of this small moon. Encircling the Tree’s great trunk was a space where the ground was different from what they had been walking on.
And here came the really serious blunder. Damon should have, in no uncertain terms, told Elena and Bonnie to keep back from this strange soil. At this most crucial time, he’d failed to function as a leader: he hadn’t given the single order necessary to protect his troops.
Instead, he and Stefan—half-blinded by the coruscating brilliance of the star ball—had begun automatically analyzing the desolate circle of sand: sending psychic probes against it, trying to evaluate what it was meant to do, and how the Tree intended to defend itself from any intruder that set foot on it.
They only stopped as Bonnie had leaped on top of a thick root overlooking the soil.
Because Damon had brought Bonnie to this place, Bonnie was suddenly in deadly danger without knowing it.
Because Damon hadn’t told her otherwise, all Bonnie saw was harmless sparkling sand—and a trunk to be climbed.
Because Damon hadn’t simply ordered her to keep still, all Bonnie saw was a chance to get the star ball and save her town before time ran out.
And now, since no one was near enough to reach Bonnie and physically stop her, she launched herself off the root with a laughing wave.
Too late, Damon had cried, No, you little fool! Also too late was Elena’s lightning-quick grab for Bonnie’s ankle.
Damon had no time to think. He could only act—or else see laughing Bonnie killed in too many ways for him to review at the moment.
It was then that he counted his final, fatal error, which was still a source of utter bewilderment to him. Because without a moment’s consideration he had leaped out onto the pale, sparkling circle and caught Bonnie’s descending body before she could land. He had then flung her as hard as he could away from the Tree.
He’d gathered himself for a desperate leap outside the circle again, but instead he felt the descending branch knock him flat. It was moving much faster than he could, and it was sharp. Damon had felt it slam into his chest and punch through his ribs, breaking them, before it staked him neatly just to the left of his heart, and went on to smash through the ribs in the back of his body.
As if it were not satisfied with this, fibers of woody threads began to swarm along the lines of his circulatory system, faster and faster with every passing second. The tree was destroying his internal organs with its hair-thin creepers. It was headed for his brain.
It hurt. It . . . hurt . . . so . . .
Wait.
Like a drop of water falling on his face, something brought Damon’s present consciousness into his dream.
Nurse alert.
* * *
Stefan was finishing with the dorm rooms. It was a good thing that he’d plucked the information as to where the fighting stave was from Meredith’s head, because she’d hidden it quite cleverly, resting it on top of a curtain rod in the room she and Bonnie shared. From below, it was completely concealed by the little top-ruffle of the off-white curtains Bonnie’s mother had given them to cover their blinds.
He was glad, too, that he’d double-checked Bonnie for memories of pictures taken. Bonnie had a secret cache of Damon photos on her laptop. Mostly they were taken when his back was turned, but few of them included Elena and a couple featured Stefan as well.
“Sorry, Bonnie,” he said as he deleted them all, permanently, tearing apart the atoms which bound the photos and the links to them together. “But since he’s a shocking flirt, I’m sure he’ll keep on paying attention to you.”
Meredith’s laptop and desktop were clean. Stefan searched for Bonnie’s flowered diary, but he couldn’t find it and Bonnie herself hadn’t known what had happened to it. Finally he was forced to give up simply because time was running out. Maybe the diary was in her parents’ house back in Fell’s Church.
He knocked on Caroline Forbes’s door. It was several minutes between her call: “I’m coming,” and the moment when the door opened.
“Stefan! But—Bonnie just called and said that Elena had woken up. What are you doing here?”
“Just gathering a few things for her,” Stefan lied. He gently enfolded Caroline in coils of Influence, adding to her entranced mind the notion that that her body felt well and strong.
Caroline looked as if she had swallowed a watermelon. Her faded-bronze arms and legs were still thin, but hard with muscle, her face was very little changed, but her stomach was massively swollen. This made it even more absurd for her to have accused
Matt of being the father; impregnating her less than two months ago.
Oh, well, Stefan thought. The Celestial Council had fixed that so it never happened, either. Caroline was officially the cast-off girlfriend of the conspicuously absent Tyler Smallwood.
And sometime soon—no one quite knew how long it took werewolf babies to be born when the mother had been a human at the time of their conception—Caroline would have twins.
“Caroline,” Stefan said, “do you know where Bonnie keeps her diary—a blank book with little flowers on it? She thought she’d brought it with her, but I can’t find it.”
“What? No.” Caroline frowned as Stefan slipped by her—he’d been inside before when Meredith, Elena and Bonnie and Matt had decorated the room for Caroline as a surprise. “Why would Elena want Bonnie’s diary? The purple one you’re holding is her latest.”
“I know,” Stefan said. He gently lay another loop of Influence around Caroline, making her anxious to help him. “Can you tell me, please, if you or Bonnie or Meredith or Elena have photos of me anywhere?”
“Photos of you? What are you talking about?”
Stefan pulled the tendrils of Influence tighter, reflecting that it was harder to get some people to be helpful than others.
“Well—I know that Bonnie keeps some photos on her laptop that are supposed to be secret from Damon,” Caroline admitted. “You might be in some of those—but only by accident. Everybody but Matt knows where little Bonnie’s heart is.”
“Don’t try to play them off against each other,” Stefan said in neutral tones
and without bothering to explain. “Are there any other places where pictures of me might be? Or anything written about me—besides diaries?”
“No. I don’t think so,” Caroline said. She was regarding him with an odd expression. “Hey—just before you came in, Bonnie called. She said Elena was doing fine, but that the reason she was so sick was that she’d lost a lot of blood. And she kept talking about how worried Damon was. She never even mentioned you. So . . .”
Her green eyes narrowed in suspicion. Stefan said “So . . . what?” He had some odd idea that he had to listen to her before he Influenced her to forget that there were such things as vampires. He waited, absently tinkering with the neuro-virus, already altered specifically for her to allow belief in werewolves.
“So . . . Damon did it, didn’t he? He finally lost control and drank so much blood while they were messing around behind your back that she ended up in the hospital. And now nobody’s talking to him—except Bonnie, of course. And you . . . you’re going to dump her, aren’t you? Elena, I mean.” Caroline’s face was set in lines of shock, but there was an unmistakable gleam of satisfaction in her eyes.
Shock swept like the chill of a morgue over Stefan. It was as if he’d asked a student how to get from Dyer to Fell’s Church and been told to start digging. What seemed like an easy question if you had half an hour and a car—and the sense to know that the shortest distance between two points on a relatively flat surface was, for all practical purposes a straight line—became in Caroline’s mind a labyrinth of dark fantasy and scandal.
And you really believe anyone thinks in nice clean lines? a Damon-like little voice in his mind asked him. Because—
news flash!—Damon and Elena did exactly what Caroline just suggested and Elena ended up spending a week or so in bed while you were locked up in prison in the Dark Dimension.
Right—while they were desperately trying to get me out of prison, Stefan’s own mind answered back. But in any case, it wasn’t Elena’s fault. Caroline could just guess that Damon forced Elena, but she’d rather have it be Elena’s fault. Why? Why do some girls gloat over the disgrace of their sisters; why do they want to tear down instead of build up?
