by L. J. Smith
That was what had been ineffably precious: her faith in his love for her. Each time they had embraced had been a unique encounter; each had been a distinct and separate paradise. She had slain him with a thousand butterfly kisses; resurrected him with the swift arch of her throat. Afterward, with their souls still joined mysteriously through the gift of her blood, joy had dizzied him until he trembled when she’d held him with his cheek against the softness of her silk-clad breast. How could a creature be so yielding, so yearningly tender and yet have the fierce and questing spirit of a medieval knight?
Automatically, Stefan put one hand to his throat and touched the talisman hanging there: Elena’s lapis ring, long abandoned, and—even longer abandoned—the apricot ribbon that had once bound her hair.
He realized suddenly that he had his eyes tightly shut in sheer emotional pain. He opened them while trying to keep his jaw and chin stiff, afraid that his mouth would begin to tremble
He had just decided on how to settle the desperate question of how to kiss Elena without actually kissing her, when the door opened. Stefan instinctively tried to freeze in place the person entering and got a withering look from Damon
“Done pawing her?” Damon asked, after deliberately turning away and making a show of not watching.
“Yes,” Stefan said emptily. He’d thought of kissing his fingers and then pressing them—gently—to Elena’s lips, but of course he couldn’t do anything of the kind while Damon was here.
“I don’t suppose,” Damon said dourly, “that you used any of the time I was gone in re-Influencing them—or even her?”
Stefan was startled into staring at his brother. He answered the sentiment beneath the question.
“How can you be jealous of me?” he breathed. “I have nothing, and you have everything.”
Damon had found a wall to lounge against, while examining Bonnie with narrowed eyes. “Oh, yes? Let me tell you about this everything I have. Do you know about salmon, little brother? No, I’m not crazy—I remain an entire millimeter away from insanity. Just shut up and listen.”
Stefan shut up. He wondered how many girls Damon had got to while he himself had been sentimentalizing over Elena, and whether his older brother had even taken the basic precaution of walking upstairs a floor to keep Elena’s immediate neighbors from getting suspicious.
“Salmon,” Damon said, with every indication of being fascinated, “are curious creatures. They’re born in rivers, but early on they swim out to sea and there in the ocean they grow up—if they’re not eaten first. But then one day when they’re mature and ready to be mommy and daddy salmon, they just turn around and swim back to the rivers to spawn. And the thing is that they usually manage to find—with eerie precision, yes?—not just the river, but the actual spawning ground where they were born.”
“And the bit of this that every kindergartner doesn’t know is?”
“They home, salmon do. Just like pigeons. And so do your friends. Your coterie is homing. Bonnie’s not just trancing; she’s getting flashes of who I really am—and how I’m different from you. I think she can see auras. It was pure dumb luck that I was starving and didn’t have an aura when she took a good look at me a little while ago. In fact, earlier, while she was sleepwalking—well, never mind that. But she’s definitely being uncanny.”
Stefan was shocked. He’d known that things were going wrong tonight; of course; that was why he’d left his tree and come to investigate the chaos he’d sensed around Elena. But Bonnie shouldn’t be regaining her witch powers with anything like the speed Damon had described.
“What do you mean ‘while she was sleepwalking?’ Where did she go?”
“To her morning class, I believe—and I said, never mind about that. Elena’s even worse than Bonnie. She more or less called me out on not being human before we went to bed. I didn’t have enough Power to Influence her—and before you ask why, it’s because I couldn’t leave her to feed, right?—until I burned life energy and even then what did she do? She apparently had an inspired dream—in somnis veritas—in which she decided that I somehow made her missing blood disappear.”
“But you didn’t!”
“Which was just as well, because Bonnie was able to sense the truth about that, too. Meanwhile, Meredith is going crazy for lack of kata to do—”
“Of who?”
“Her aikido and judo exercises—although I think for judo you need another person to practice with. Plus, probably half a dozen other martial arts forms that I don’t know the names of. Anyway, she’s going loony trying to make sense of the other loons. And Matt can’t remember a single reason to actually trust me, which puts him more than a millimeter on the wrong side of sanity. He’s started just making random remarks about crazy things.”
Stefan didn’t ask about Caroline. Caroline knew the truth about herself, in any case. Caroline would look after Caroline.
“And why is this all happening?” Damon continued relentlessly. “Because you didn’t give them enough of a reality to believe in. You took away their identities, but you didn’t give them anything new to identify with. Also possibly because you relied on a neuro-virus rather than doing all the work by hand.”
“I didn’t have time—” Stefan began, but then he stopped and shook his head. “I couldn’t stand to make time,” he said slowly. “I didn’t want to see them—watch their eyes—while I was taking their memories away.”
“Well, they all have their eyes shut now,” Damon said, with a grim shadow of his most glorious smile. “And you and I are going to finish what you started. But first, since you’ve been holding them all frozen for this long, you’re going to go out and find yourself a nice girl and settle down for about a quarter of an hour.”
It took Stefan several seconds to interpret this. By the time he was finished he was barely even angry anymore. Exasperated, however: yes.
“I know this is difficult for you to understand,” he told Damon. “And I can explain it to you, but I can’t comprehend it for you. Not feeding on humans is more than just a quirk. It is an ethical decision I made half a millennium ago. Not feeding on unconscious, un-consenting donors is a choice that I would still hold to if I were dying—”
“Blah, blah, blah, yes, and in your spare time you cast out devilled ham and walk on watercress.” Damon yawned like the sleek and well-fed predator he was. “But you’ve been holding all of these people frozen for a long time and you need to be realistic—” He broke off.
Stefan was smiling, shaking his head. He allowed himself the luxury of several seconds of this, which was all the time Damon was prepared to give him before physically atacking.
“They’re not frozen,” he said just as Damon went from utter relaxation to a bundle of coiled potential energy. “They’re asleep. It’s nighttime, and they’re not at a hospital in the middle of a huge crisis, and I haven’t been alarming them by meddling with their memories. I just put them to sleep on their feet.”
Damon’s muscles uncoiled slowly, like a cobra flaring out its hood—a position which kept it from striking. He still radiated menace, but at least the physical threat was over.
“Well, you’re going to have to meddle now,” Damon said. “What have you got?”
Stefan let his full aura loose around him, undiminished since he’d caught the twelve-point red-brown buck. He hadn’t needed to use Power to spy on Elena and her friends; they’d been projecting so loudly that he’d worried the forest werewolves might decide to investigate.
Damon raised his eyebrows a fraction. Stefan knew that he didn’t entirely believe that such Power could come from an animal, but there was no question that it was enough. Stefan reined it in to forestall Damon’s otherwise inevitable demonstration of how his own newly-acquired store of Power was greater.
“All right,” Damon said. “We get to work. We need them to understand that there are no such things as auras; that I have no supernatural powers; that I am above suspicion. Besides which, Matt needs to have a dozen
memories of why he trusts me, and Meredith needs to know that she’s a fitness nut. You see? For all that you’ve taken, we give a little back to each of them.”
Stefan thought that it all sounded depressingly like foul play. But who was he to judge? Damon was right: Elena and Bonnie were on the brink of madness already. And they . . .
“And they need the most work of all,” Damon said, without apologizing for hijacking Stefan’s thoughts. “Bonnie needs to stop obsessing over any of her witch powers that may appear within the next few days. She has to be convinced she’s not going insane. And finally,” he muttered half under his breath, “she has to give up the idea that she’s keeping a big white dog for a pet.”
Stefan was too intently focused on his own thoughts to ask questions. He was gazing at Elena; at the pulse that beat in her soft, slim throat. He felt ill at the notion of invading her mind again.
“And . . . Elena?” he got out.
“Elena needs to be more logical and less intuitive. She needs to forget whatever she dreamed tonight, and to know I had nothing to do with her blood loss. She needs to remember—with specific incidents—some good days spent with me as her boyfriend. She also has to accept that I’m sleeping on her bed, and that she has no objection to me moving in. She has to know that although she may not be keeping to the letter of her word to her Aunt Judith, she’s still keeping to the spirit. That’s all.”
“Oh, that’s all, is it? And you imagine that I’m going to persuade her of that little list?”
Damon flashed him a chilling smile. “No, I’ll do it, if you prefer. I’m already taking care of Bonnie. You may work on Matt and Meredith.”
* * *
The new Influencing was done, although it had required both Stefan’s effort and Damon’s assistance to fine-tune Elena’s fond “memories” of days she and Damon had spent together as the seasons had turned.
Stefan had at last gone back to Dyer Wood, tired and with only a quarter of the aura he’d had when he arrived. Damon privately predicted that he would be hunting white-tailed deer in this new forest before dawn.
All the humans but Elena had departed, befuddled by sleep, to their own rooms.
In the sweet darkness of the last hours of night, Damon settled down in bed. He was holding the newly-Influenced Elena’s hand, was bathed in the warm radiance of Elena’s aura. He put up wards about the perimeter of Soto hall, to ensure that if anyone who didn’t have business in the dormitory was sniffing around the entryway, windows, or exits of the building they would trip an eldritch wire and he Damon, would be wakened out of the soundest sleep.
Then he settled his head on the pillow. In just minutes, he had fallen asleep.
Damon dreamed.
* * *
He was paralyzed and covered with ash: ash and tiny droplets of Power. However, the Power didn’t seem to be enough to allow him movement except in one hand, and that hand was weak; its movements restricted.
Damon slept and woke and slept again. Even with the huge stake no longer pushing him into both intolerable agony and true extinction, the wooden fibers that had spread from his circulatory system to his nerve and muscle cells were trying to make his body a seedbed for a new great Tree. The droplets of Power that slowly soaked into his skin only sufficed to keep the fibers from accomplishing their purpose. Perhaps in time enough drops would accumulate to kill the wooden fibers off completely, but Damon was somehow certain that even this would not allow him to get up and walk around freely. He would need . . . some kind of help from outside to drag him back from the shadowy world of death that was all he could perceive around him. Some sort of, ah, jump-start.
Meanwhile, he was bored. The shadowy world of near-death was incredibly dull. Lying and clenching his left hand into a fist over and over, Damon tried to keep himself from watching events in his life parade over the inner movie screen of his mind’s eye. He felt that introspection right now would only lead to him slipping into depression and a darkness from which there was no return.
Eventually, he struck on the idea to ask the Power to do something different. He had been wondering what was happening with Elena and Bonnie and Stefan and Sage. Were they even alive?
To his astonishment, when he thought about them, it seemed that he could see them. He could see the gold of Elena’s hair. If he concentrated, he could even see out of her lapis lazuli eyes, and hear what was going on in that convoluted mind of hers.
Elena was grieving.
It wasn’t as if the Celestial Court hadn’t done all that it had promised. Fell’s Church was restored. There wasn’t a possessed girl or a malach in sight. Houses which had been burned to the ground by children acting under evil influences were whole again—and nobody remembered a damned thing about the holocaust which had swept through the town.
On top of which, Elena had been given a second chance to live her life as an ordinary human. She ought to have been ecstatic over that.
But she couldn’t do more than summon up a quivering, watery smile.
Damon was dead. He was gone; his soul diffused into nothingness. Vampires didn’t go to the Dark Dimension when they died. They certainly didn’t go to the Celestial Court. They just . . . went out.
She would never see him again.
The first thing she did on the day she woke up and realized all this was to call Bonnie’s mobile. When no one answered she called Bonnie’s mother, who told her that Bonnie was home, but sick in bed.
Elena knew what kind of sickness it was. It was grief and guilt and fear. Bonnie held herself responsible for what had happened to Damon.
“Just give her the phone for one moment,” she said. And when Bonnie was listening, she said quickly, “I’m going to Mrs. Flowers’s house. I want to know what Mama and Grandmama have to say about Damon’s soul.”
Bonnie said in a whisper that was hoarse and choked with repressed emotion, “Take me, too! Please?”
When Elena picked her up, Bonnie’s small face was piteous, marred with hours of weeping in the night. Elena blinked back her own tears as she drove to Mrs. Flowers’ house. Together, they had raised their hands to knock at the door, and together they had started as the door opened before they could touch it.
“Mrs. Flowers,” Elena began, only to be met by a quick and cheerful voice saying,
“Tea? It’s peppermint and lemongrass. Good for enhancing psychic abilities. And I imagine we’ll need plenty of those today.”
“Mrs. Flowers, we’ve come—”
“Yes, yes. I know. What else could it be? Bonnie, I’ve got a cold rosewater compress for your eyes. Just hold it on while you drink your tea.”
The tea cleared Elena’s sinuses and her brain both. “Isn’t Stefan up yet?” she asked, feeling a little ripple of alarm. Normally, Stefan would have come downstairs at the sound of her car approaching the house, even if he couldn’t make out her aura from a distance any longer.
“Up and gone before dawn,” Mrs. Flowers said succinctly. “He went to—well, what used to be the Old Wood.”
“Hunting?”
“I wasn’t able to ask him, dear. I wouldn’t fret over it, though. Sometimes young male creatures just have to be out on their own. When they’ve experienced a loss . . .” Mrs. Flowers let the sentence trail off discreetly.
Elena drank the last of her tea, her mind whirling. She was trying to figure out what it would take for Stefan to stay in the Old Wood after hunting, knowing all the time that she and Bonnie would be devastated with grief today.
Devastated . . . but not prostrated.
Stefan wasn’t stupid. He’d know what Elena would do today. This morning. As soon as she woke up. And he probably knew that she’d bring Bonnie with her.
He was giving her space; grieving alone so that she could speak to Mrs. Flowers without embarrassment.
“So . . . why have we come this morning?” she asked the white-haired woman carefully.
“To find out what I’ve been trying to find out since late last night. Whethe
r a certain poor vampire’s soul is drifting through the æther, or reincarnated, or if it has . . . simply disappeared.”
Elena’s heart sank. “None of those possibilities sound like very good ones.”
“Well, we shall see, we shall see. I’ve already spoken to dear Mama about this and she said, ‘Let the young witch try her hand at dowsing with a crystal pendulum.’”
Bonnie took the rosewater compress off her face. Her eyes were much less swollen, Elena noted. “I thought dowsing was something you did with a stick to find water,” she said, still almost whispering.
“It can be—though most people are fooling themselves with that stick. It twists when tiny muscular movements tell it to. However, there is another kind of dowsing. You use a quartz crystal over a map . . . and this can be quite effective, whether you are looking for a lost object or for your heart’s desire.”
Elena spotted the flaw. “But, Mrs. Flowers, we don’t have a map of the Dark Dimension. I mean, that’s what we would need, isn’t it? Souls that don’t go to the Celestial Court usually wind up there, don’t they?”
“Yes, my dear—although very wicked souls go much, much farther down, I’m sorry to say. However, I don’t believe that we need to worry about that possibility with Damon.”
“But a map—”
“I’m afraid that my artistic skills leave something to be desired, but I’ve been working on something since the wee hours of the morning,” Mrs. Flowers said complacently.
On the half of the kitchen table that was empty of tea cups sat a rolled-up scroll of what looked like paper. Bonnie and Elena reached it from opposite directions at the same time. Elena held her breath as together they carefully unrolled what turned out to be thin, creamy-colored vellum.
